00:00A cat and a mouse, who've been chasing each other since 1940,
00:04just got dropped into a full-blown Chinese mythology epic,
00:07complete with banished gods, demon rat armies, and a cat gargoyle love interest.
00:12Somewhere in the middle of all that,
00:14the actual stars of the movie basically become side characters in their own story.
00:20This is Tom and Jerry, Forbidden Compass.
00:24And it might be the strangest swing this franchise has ever taken.
00:29What's going on, everyone? Welcome back!
00:32If you're new here, this is where we dig into what's actually happening in new releases,
00:37hits and misses alike.
00:39So, if a franchise you grew up with just tried something wild,
00:43we're the channel that'll actually walk you through it.
00:48Today, we're covering Tom and Jerry, Forbidden Compass,
00:51the first fully computer animated film in the franchise's history.
00:56Let's get into it.
00:57The setup starts familiar enough.
01:00Tom's working as a night security guard at a museum packed with ancient Chinese artifacts.
01:06And Jerry, predictably, sneaks in anyway.
01:09A chase breaks out, chaos ensues,
01:12and an errant fire extinguisher sets off a mysterious ancient compass on display.
01:19One that's apparently been sealed away specifically because it's too dangerous to use.
01:25Naturally, that's exactly the button these two accidentally press.
01:29And it blasts them straight into Golden City,
01:33a fantastical realm modeled after China's Forbidden City,
01:37and steeped in Chinese mythology.
01:40And that's basically where the Tom and Jerry part of Tom and Jerry, Forbidden Compass,
01:45quietly ends.
01:47In Golden City, Tom and Jerry run into Phoenix Master,
01:51a god who lost this exact compass and got banished to Earth alongside his sidekick.
01:56Lil Feeny, by the Celestial Master,
01:59on a 300-year deadline to either retrieve it or achieve total enlightenment,
02:04or the banishment becomes permanent.
02:07Their time is almost upright,
02:10as Tom and Jerry come crashing through the clouds with the compass in hand,
02:14which makes the two of them instant, extremely high-value targets.
02:19The locals of Golden City, including a pair of animated roof decoration spirits
02:24named Sunny and Xander,
02:26mistake Tom for some kind of divine messenger
02:28because he's the one holding the compass,
02:31complete with a handful of scenes that play almost like a tourism board advertisement
02:35for the city itself.
02:37Things get further complicated when Tom falls hard for Jade,
02:41a feline gargoyle serving as one of the city's protectors,
02:44giving the famously girlfriend-less Tomcat
02:46an actual romantic subplot for what reviewers have pointed out
02:50is basically the first time in the character's 80-year history.
02:54Jerry, meanwhile, starts feeling pushed aside and ignored
02:58while Tom gets treated like royalty.
03:01And in a genuinely interesting swerve for this franchise,
03:05he ends up throwing in with the film's villain,
03:07a steampunk demon called Mega Rat,
03:10who's got a long-standing grudge against Phoenix Master
03:13and wants the compass's power entirely for himself.
03:17From there, it becomes a tangle of competing agendas.
03:22Phoenix Master and Feeny scheme to trick Tom out of the compass.
03:26Mega Rat builds his case with Jerry by playing on his resentment at being overlooked,
03:31and an entire cast of new, original Golden City characters gets thrown into the mix,
03:36including a mysterious figure called Devil Tom,
03:40whose exact role in the story reviewers describe without fully explaining.
03:44All of it pulls the story in directions that have surprisingly little to do with the classic cat.
03:51And Mouse Rivalry, the franchise built its whole identity on.
03:56The film also introduces a young Mega Rat character alongside the main villain,
04:01suggesting some kind of legacy or backstory to the character that,
04:05like a lot of the Golden City mythology packed into this film,
04:09mostly goes unexplained to newcomers walking in,
04:12expecting a straightforward cat-and-mouse cartoon.
04:16Even the reviews that went into this one hopeful have pointed out the same thing.
04:21Once that portal opens into Golden City,
04:25the actual Tom and Jerry slapstick you came for
04:28mostly takes a back seat for the rest of the runtime.
04:32More than one critic has drawn a direct comparison to recent Chinese animated hits like N'Zha,
04:39pointing out that Forbidden Compass borrows heavily from that same well of mythological spectacle
04:45without ever quite figuring out how two 80-year-old American cartoon characters
04:49are actually supposed to fit inside it.
04:53That's really the central complaint running through nearly every review of this film,
04:57and there have been a lot of them.
05:00On Rotten Tomatoes,
05:02Forbidden Compass is sitting at a rough 20% from critics,
05:06with Metacritic landing at a 38 out of 100,
05:10squarely in generally unfavorable territory.
05:13The Guardian's review described the experience as
05:16an overwhelming barrage of bright colors and noise.
05:21The Irish Times argued the title characters end up as little more than supporting players in their own movie,
05:28completely overshadowed by the flood of new Golden City characters introduced around them.
05:34And BBC critic Mark Kermode summed up his reaction about as bluntly as a review can,
05:41comparing the whole viewing experience to being shouted at by a hyperactive child.
05:47Variety's review leaned into the sheer strangeness of the whole concept,
05:51describing the pairing of these particular characters with this particular mythology
05:56as fundamentally mismatched from the start,
05:59arguing the film never justifies why Tom and Jerry specifically needed to be the ones dropped into this story,
06:06rather than any other pair of characters entirely.
06:09That's become something of a recurring theme across the negative reviews,
06:14lest that Golden City itself is poorly realized,
06:17and more that the film never quite explains what Tom and Jerry are actually contributing to a story
06:23that seems far more interested in its own new mythology
06:27than in the cartoon legends it borrowed for box office recognition.
06:32It's worth understanding how this project actually came together,
06:36because the ambition behind it is genuinely real,
06:39even if critics feel the execution didn't land.
06:43This is the first fully computer animated feature in Tom and Jerry history,
06:48written and directed by John Gang,
06:50who revealed in June of 2025 that production had wrapped after five full years of work on the film.
06:58It was produced as a genuine U.S.-China co-production
07:02between China film company Warner Bros. Pictures and Origin Animation,
07:07with the goal of blending classic Hanna-Barbera slapstick
07:10with authentic Chinese mythology and folklore,
07:14competing for the Golden Goblet at the Shanghai International Film Festival,
07:18before its Chinese release, in August of 2025.
07:23The road to American theaters took a lot longer,
07:27and it wasn't a smooth one either.
07:29It wasn't until April of 2026 that Viva Pictures picked up North American distribution rights,
07:36under its Viva Kids label.
07:39Originally targeting September 9th,
07:42before the date got quietly bumped up by five days to September 4th.
07:47That's more than a year after Chinese audiences had already seen the film,
07:52and that kind of delayed,
07:54secondary rollout is often a signal in itself.
07:58In this case,
07:59the reception backs it up.
08:01The film has grossed a little over $5 million worldwide
08:05against what was clearly a far more ambitious five-year production.
08:10This isn't the franchise's first trip to the big screen either.
08:15Forbidden Compass follows 1992's traditionally animated
08:20Tom and Jerry, the movie,
08:22and the 2021 live-action hybrid simply titled Tom and Jerry,
08:28making this only the third theatrical outing for the characters in over 80 years of history.
08:35And by a wide margin,
08:37the most radical departure from the format audiences
08:40actually know these two four.
08:43Where the 2021 film stuck close to the classic silent slapstick formula
08:49while dropping the pair into a live-action New York hotel.
08:54Forbidden Compass
08:55abandons that template
08:57almost entirely in favor of a full mythological adventure
09:01with dialogue-heavy stretches,
09:03something genuinely unprecedented for this franchise.
09:07We should be upfront about one thing.
09:10Given how negatively this film has been received,
09:13most critics spent their reviews focused on picking apart the film's tonal problems
09:17and thin characterization
09:19rather than walking through a detailed account
09:22of exactly how the story resolves.
09:25What is consistently confirmed across reviews is the setup.
09:29The central three-way tug-of-war
09:31over the compass between Phoenix Masters Group,
09:34Mega Rats' forces,
09:36and Tom and Jerry themselves.
09:38And that the story is ultimately about
09:40whether these two rivals can set aside their bickering long enough
09:43to actually get home.
09:45Beyond that,
09:47the specifics of the third act
09:48haven't been the focus of what critics chose to write about,
09:51likely because,
09:52by their own accounts,
09:54the film had already lost their attention
09:56well before it got there.
09:58Not every reaction was purely negative,
10:01to be fair.
10:02A handful of reviews
10:04found genuine affection for Jade,
10:07the feline gargoyle protector,
10:09calling her easily the most appealing addition
10:12to the new Golden City cast
10:14and pointed out a few scattered moments
10:16like a classic Tom Grabs.
10:18Jerry,
10:19and slowly,
10:21realizes
10:21what he's holding gag
10:23that still land exactly the way old school
10:26Tom and Jerry fans would hope for.
10:29But even those more forgiving reviews
10:32tended to agree the mash-up
10:34between 80-year-old American slapstick
10:37and a full Chinese mythological epic
10:39never quite finds a cohesive rhythm,
10:42feeling less like a genuine crossover
10:45and more like two completely different movies
10:48awkwardly sharing the same runtime.
10:51The American release also came with its own
10:54English-language voice cast,
10:57layered on top of the original Chinese performances,
11:00with Eric Bowser and Ben Diskin
11:03stepping into Tom and Jerry's roles for the US dub,
11:07alongside Janice Kowei as Jade
11:09and Matthew Yang King as Phoenix Master.
11:13Bowser in particular has become something
11:16of the modern voice of the entire Looney Tunes
11:18and Hanna-Barbera catalog in recent years,
11:22which made his casting here
11:24a fairly safe,
11:25expected choice
11:27even as the rest of the film swung
11:29for something far less predictable.
11:32Sadoval
11:33The dub also brought in
11:36Roger Craig Smith and A.J. Beckles
11:38for dual roles as Feeny and Devil Tom
11:41and Mega Rat and Xander, respectively.
11:44A fairly common practice
11:46in animated dubbing
11:47where actors take on
11:48multiple smaller Golden City characters
11:51to round out the cast
11:52without ballooning the recording budget.
11:55So, here's what we want to know.
11:59Does a franchise this old and this simple,
12:03built entirely on a cat chasing a mouse,
12:06actually benefit from being dropped
12:09into a massive, mythology-heavy universe
12:12like this one?
12:12Or does that kind of ambition
12:15work against exactly what made
12:17Tom and Jerry fun in the first place?
12:21Five years of production
12:23clearly went into building
12:25Golden City and its mythology.
12:27And it's worth asking
12:28whether that effort would have paid off better,
12:31attached to an original story,
12:33instead of two characters
12:35whose whole appeal
12:36has always been simplicity.
12:39And if you've seen it,
12:40was Jade actually worth
12:42sitting through the rest of the movie for?
12:45Let us know in the comments.
12:47If you enjoyed this breakdown,
12:49go ahead and subscribe
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12:52whatever swing a franchise takes next.
12:54Drop a like if this helped you decide
12:56whether it's worth a watch,
12:57and let us know in the comments
12:59what you want us covering.
13:01We'll see you in the next one.
13:02We'll see you in the next one.
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