Luck

The big problem here: the viewer can never quite shake off the feeling that he's watching a knockoff Pixar piece. It’s a through line that conveys a sense that every detail of this work is just a little off. For instance, it’s a tiny bit weird that a movie that rather consciously adopts certain touches of very modern life—not just cell phones and other tech, but even certain characters displaying the execrable habit of wearing excessive numbers of earrings—also uses a forty-plus-year-old song as its key piece of soundtrack. Yeah, I get that it fits lyrically, but still. And many of the characters (trinketed and otherwise) are just a little bit off in their depicted forms; you have to believe that the artists on the Disney side of the street would have gotten them just right, down to the tiniest character-defining details. And, perhaps most crucially, the story seems to be a little too complicated; there are too many machinations to work through to get the audience to follow along with the plot; too many actions require too much explanation. So the whole production gives off something of a secondhand vibe throughout, like the merchandise you get cheap at the discount store rather than the name brands at your usual market. Add to all that the fact that casting is not a strength here—no one among the principals gives a standout performance—and it’s really only the prominence of a cat in the story that lifts the thing even up to MEOW status (and that character actually shows very little in the way of catness; his felinity is mostly a plot convenience). Overall, I suppose this is an object lesson that the animation genre, despite being highly developed and mass produced for decades now, still is not so easy to get fully right. Maybe you can have on your side the luck of having a major studio or tech company to back your project...but you’d better bring an awful lot of skill to the show, too. Don’t just rely on fortune, in all that word's meanings.