A young ambitious cat named Danny comes to Hollywood from Kokomo with a song in his heart, dancing moves in his feet and the dream of becoming a movie star. When he gets there, he disapointingly learns that animals are relugated to minor roles in movies. With his friends, including a discouraged female dancer turned secretary named Sawyer, he sets out to change that situation. However, Darla Dimple, the child star of Mammoth Pictures, is also out to ensure that the gang will never get that chance and become a threat to her career. While it earned a favourable response from critics and audiences, the film was a box office flop thanks, in large part, to it’s minimal marketing. The film later earned a fanbase through home video and television airings. —The Forbidden Douchebag
The animation on Darla and Max was laugh-out-loud hysterical. Films like "Cats Don't Dance" is why I love animation and am so attracted to the medium: you can use it to do everything you can do with real actors, but also expand on it and make something wonderful. This is the kind of film I want to make when I get older, a wildly animated comedy that revels in the fact that it's fantasy and can't be done with people.
They had so much potential to be a great animation studio and keep making great movies like this and The Iron Giant, if only the idiots who marketed the movies had any idea what they were doing!
Superior animated feature rivals the best of Disney's better known cartoon spectacles. The story and characters may be simplistic, but the animation is superb - original and imaginatively designed - and there's some fun voice performances and lively songs by Randy Newman. A commercial failure when it was released, this one definitely deserves a cult following.