By Randal C. Hill
Welsh animator Chris Jenkins spent many years with Walt Disney Pictures, helping to create numerous box-office winners. Now Jenkins is on his own, and he’s produced a British-based, family-friendly movie replete with adorable creatures and a pro-nature message.
“10 Lives” is about Beckett (voiced by Mo Gilligan), a lazy and spoiled couch-potato feline who is living out his days doing light yoga and taking — what else? — cat naps.
His animal-scientist owner Rose (Simone Ashley) dotes on Beckett. But when her lab partner Larry (Dylan Llewellyn) introduces a project proposal for a serum that can cure bee diseases, Rose and her fellow grad student then struggle to please their faculty advisor, the untrustworthy Professor Craven (Bill Nighy).
Beckett begins to wonder what has happened to all the TLC that once defined his life, and he begins to wander from his house. But when an accident in the outside world brings about his demise, he learns that he has now used up all nine of his cat lives.
Finding himself in the afterlife, Beckett manages to worm his way into 10 more lives on Earth as part of an experimental rehabilitation program for narcissistic animals. Such an endeavor promises to give him a chance to make amends by becoming a better creature—and a chance to win Rose back.
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There’s just one major catch, though: he won’t be coming back as a cat. That’s when the fun really begins, as Beckett is forced to scramble through a new set of lives, including as a fish, a rat and a cockroach, in a quest to set things right.
Jenkins’s romp of “10 Lives” will be appreciated by theatergoers who have grown weary of the generic and ultra-slick family fare that American movie studios have been offering lately.
Some elements of Chris’s script are flawed, but such imperfections somehow make the film more endearing; we come to realize that, as the charming story unfolds, today’s flash-and-dazzle technology and corporate gimmicks will never be a valid substitute for good old-fashioned natural instincts.
“10 Lives” can be enjoyed in limited release starting October 11.
