Western Animation / The Cat Piano

Our hero, hard at work.

So you’ve heard of every instrument but?
Torn from your history books is this pianola,
This harpsichord of harm.
The cruellest instrument to spawn from man’s grey cerebral soup.
The Cat Piano.

— Excerpt from the poem recited throughout the short.

The Cat Piano is a 2009 Australian animated short film (running about eight minutes) about a New York-style city inhabited by anthropomorphic cats. The narration, written by Eddie White in the style of 1950s beat poetry and read by Nick Cave, describes the plight of a lonely writer who falls in love with a beautiful singer. The mass abduction of all the singing cats and the resulting mass hysteria causes the town to fall apart. After struggling with despair, the writer sets out to rescue his beloved.

It can be watched in its entirety here.

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Tropes:

• The '50s: The aesthetic is largely derived from Film Noir and stars a Beatnik cat.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: The poem does this occasionally with lines such as, "parlours paraded purring glamorous songstresses", and at one point, the poet describes the cat piano as a "harpsichord of harm."
• Always Night: Or perhaps this is because of the blue tone...
• Art Shift: The cats suddenly stop being anthropomorphic when they attack the mad human in the lighthouse.
• Bag of Kidnapping: The piano player is seen carrying one over his shoulder after the poet realizes that his love interest has become the human's final victim.
• Beatnik: Apart from the narration being recited as an epic beat poem, the city itself is also populated with them. Some cats can be seen wearing berets, playing the bongos, dancing to jazz music and the like. The narrator may be one as well, though his appearance is a bit more laid-back. Also, a rather prominent cat is sporting a beret, square-framed glasses, and sweater during several shots in the climax.
• Big Beautiful Woman: One such she-cat can be seen briefly near the beginning as a background character in a dancing crowd.
• Bilingual Bonus: During the verse where the poet narrates the torment of the imprisoned cats, the word "cat piano" is recited four times in German, French, Japanese and Chinese as a sort of Madness Mantra.
• Book Ends: The protagonist is sitting alone at a window working at a typewriter. At the end of the movie, he is seen sitting at the same spot as he finishes his story... and starts courting the female cat singer.
• The Chanteuse: Le Chat Blanc, the beautiful white-furred singer and the protagonist's object of affection.
• Cargo Envy: While watching Le Chat Blanc perform, the protagonist narrates this:
  "Blind with love at first sight, touched by the taste of her sound, I longed to be the microphone she cradled near her breast."
• Cast of Snowflakes: Even background characters have unique designs
• Cat Concerto: This anthropomorphic variation has them as 1950s lounge singers and beat poets.
• Catapult Nightmare: The protagonist wakes up in a cold sweat after he has a night terror of the human about to drive a sharp nail towards Le Chat Blanc.
• City with No Name: The city which the poet sings its praises to in the beginning has no name.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: A human drives nails into cats' tails to make them scream.
• Colour-Coded Emotions: While played straight with the protagonist, who is colored blue to symbolize his loneliness and calm nature until the end, every cat colored blue is seen partying and playing music. Then played straight with everyone after a string of kidnappings sends the musical city into a depression.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Dark shades of "night" blue represent the cats and their city, while an ominous red wash colors the human and his lighthouse.
• Damsel in Distress: The female white cat singer is kidnapped by a human for him to use in his cat piano.
• Disney Villain Death: "...[the human] stumbled, fell through the window screaming into the indigo waters below."
• Driven to Suicide: At one point, the protagonist mimics the act of shooting himself. "Snap."
• Earn Your Happy Ending: At the end of the movie, all the cats have been rescued from the piano, the mad human is dead, the city is happily playing music again, and the protagonist is seen courting the female cat singer he fell in love with in the beginning.
• Empathic Environment: The kidnappings and ban on music are accompanied by a shift in the seasons from summer to winter.
• Everything Is an Instrument: As the title hints.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: The narrator has these as part of his design.
• Expy: According to the production blog, they owe a little something to the character Blacksad, for the cat poet's design. If you squint, you can see a bit of the resemblance there. Especially when you see him smoking a cigarette and could come off as a skinnier version of said character—minus the fur color and the detective part.
• Film Noir: 95% pure Film Noir.
• Funny Animal: Everyone but the human piano player.
• Furry Confusion: Drawings of non-anthro cats appear in the diagram of the cat piano.
• Furry Female Mane: In effect for the most part, but also inverted a few times.
• Furry Lens: Possibly an inverted example. When the cat mob storms the lighthouse and discover the imprisoned citizens inside the titular piano, the cats are non-anthropomorphic. The mob also become non-anthropomorphic (as in, go feral) when they pounce and claw at the mad human till he falls to his doom. As with everything so far, it's mostly symbolic.
  • This was even lampshaded much earlier when the narrator mentions "foot-prints from human shoes" despite the fact that every cat is a Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal, shoes and all.
• Furry Reminder: So much so, that some cats literally revert to their feral forms when they attack the human pianist to pounce, scratch, and bite him. Before that, some cats are seen scaling the walls of the lighthouse rather than take the spiral staircase.
  • It's very fast, but when the city bans music for everyone's safety, you can see a cat grab a regular-looking songbird and shove it in their mouth.
• Gratuitous French: A poster advertising the female cat singer bills her as "Le Chat Blanc", French for "The White Cat".
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The lighthouse, which is the highest and most noticeable of buildings in the entire city, stands isolated on a small island in the bight and serves the mad human as a hideout. At first, when the kidnappings start, the light goes out, and when the piano starts playing, a red light goes on instead. This is when the poet takes action and storms the lighthouse with a mob of citizens. Nevertheless, the trope is justified as the tower is heavily symbolical rather than anything else.
• Heroic BSoD: After the female cat singer disappears, the narrator enters a brutal one, and the city similarly enters a collective state of combined gloom, terror, and paranoia, with all music being banned and violent fights breaking out in the streets.
  The city in unrest. Fights broke out in its sleep.
  I couldn’t dream anymore. There was a hole in my heart and everything fell out of it.
• Humans Are Bastards: The mad human pianist who is the main villain of the film.
• Instrument of Murder: The aforementioned Cat Piano, a horrible piece of work that drives a sharp nail into a cat's tail to make it scream in pain whenever a key is pressed.
• Kill It with Fire: After killing the human and freeing the imprisoned singers, the cats incinerate the piano with Molotov cocktails.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The mad human pianist who had been kidnapping and torturing cat musicians to make his music is attacked by those same cats and sent falling to his death.
• Lean and Mean: The cat pianist is tall and spindly, befitting of a wicked man.
• Lightning Reveal: Before the climax, a flash of lightning reveals the human's face, who for the most part is always portrayed in Sinister Silhouette. Eek!◊
• Love at First Note: The female cat singer had a voice so beautiful that it made "all the angels of eternity sound tone deaf", which was one of the reasons why the protagonist falls in love with her.
• Loves the Sound of Screaming: The human who created the cat piano, a gigantic machine designed to drive nails into cats' tails to make them scream. Delightful.
• Mature Animal Story: It clues you in immediately with panning shots of the poet's ashtray and empty liquor bottles strewn across his apartment that this is gonna be a gritty tale.
• Meaningful Background Event: One scene had the narrator poetically telling "There was a hole in my heart and everything fell out of it...", while the background animation features another cat getting messily stabbed in the heart during a brawl.
• Mundanger: Even if you're a cat musician, getting yourself kidnapped by some random stranger without warning while not knowing what'll happen to you is a very real fear.
• Nameless Narrative: The poet narrating the story is never named.
• Narrative Poem: He is recording the events, and he narrates the whole thing as he types it.
• No Music Allowed: After numerous cat singers are mysteriously kidnapped, including Le Chat Blanc, the city bans all music and musical instruments to protect everyone. The ban is lifted after the singers are rescued from the mad human keeping them in his cat piano.
• No Name Given: No one in the short is given a name. The white female cat singer is seen on a poster that calls her "Le Chat Blanc", although that's almost certainly her stage name and not her real one.
• Noodle People: Skinnier cats are drawn this way, most especially the narrating poet.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: Made of cats.
• Private Eye Monologue: Averted. Although this is a Film Noir, the narrator is neither a private detective nor does he narrate in an appropriate "Private Eye" manner. He narrates an epic beat poem.
• Produce Pelting: A variation. To illustrate tensions in the city running high during the kidnappings, the cat in the turban seen at the beginning is later shown fleeing from an off-screen crowd hurling glass bottles at him.
• Properly Paranoid: The cat city starts banning music and destroying musical instruments after many cat musicians are kidnapped by the mad human piano player, leaving everyone fearful of becoming the next target.
  "All music forbidden, keep your lullabies hidden. And your A and E minors off the street after dark."
• Pun: When the city starts to ban playing music in public due to the string of kidnappings, a shot of a mother cat pulling her child away from the window is overlaid with the line "All music forbidden, keep your lullabies hidden, and your A and E minors off the street after dark."
• Reclusive Artist: In-Universe. The poet is implied to be a solitary cat though he momentarily averts this when he rallies a mob to rescue the imprisoned cats and defeat the human in the lighthouse. Afterwards, the poet invokes at the end of his poem that he'd rather go back to his solitary lifestyle with one exception that he and the cat singer he fell in love with are now seeing each other.
  "And I in anonymity as I had been long before this soliloquy, could sit and listen from afar."
• Red Filter of Doom: In the climax of course. The fact it's justified by the lighthouse is anyone's guess.
• Rescue Romance: Presumably, after the white feline songstress is rescued from the lighthouse courtesy of the writer gathering a mob to confront the catnapper, she falls in love with him as evidenced by her gently caressing his chin in his apartment at the end of the film.
• Shout-Out:
  • A bar in the city serves milk instead of alcohol, possibly a reference to A Clockwork Orange.
  • The Nice Guy who saves the fascinating singer from a sadistic sociopath shows clear references to Blue Velvet.
• Sinister Silhouettes: The human villain is always portrayed as an ominous shadow.
• Slasher Smile: The human. A Lightning Reveal shows him grinning maniacally towards the camera when the cats finally see him.
• Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: The female singer is pure white with green eyes and glows visibly in the blue-toned atmosphere.
• Smoking Is Cool: The poet definitely makes it look that way. Then there's this one line which goes, "smoky hookahs and smoking hookers."
• Splash of Color: Everything is blue-toned, but several things stand out by being colored a vivid red, including the lighthouse where the mad human pianist is keeping the cats, the blood dripping from a cat's heart after he's stabbed in the chest, a cricket being squished under someone's shoe to represent the city banning all music, and the narrator's hallucination of a giant trail of piano keys that leads to the kidnapper, holding his love interest in a cage. The coloring switches entirely to a Red Filter of Doom when the cats storm the lighthouse.
  • Le Chat Blanc is the only cat in the entire film with actual color, being given white fur and striking green eyes.
• Stealth Pun: The Cat Piano is an instrument of torture.
• Stock Animal Diet: During the opening shots of the city, a neon sign can be seen that reads "The Milk Bar". Quite an appropriate choice for a city full of anthropomorphic cats.
• Stock Audio Clip: A specific sound clip of yowling cats is heard twice in the short—once when the poet is reading the book about the cat piano, and again when the mob ascends the tower and finds the mad pianist among the horde of imprisoned cats.
• Title Drop: Twice.
  • When the poet becomes suspicious of the nature of the cats' disappearances, he recites the verse quoted on the top page.
  • And then after the human is killed, the cats are rescued, and the city comes to life once more:
  "The Cat Piano, now a healed over wound. And this ode its fading scar."
• Token Human: Humans apparently exist in this universe, considering the identity of the kidnapper is indeed a human.
  "Police study the clues.
  Foot-prints from human shoes."
• Too Dumb to Live: The female cat singer goes out alone at night, during a time when a mysterious kidnapper is known to be snatching cat singers off the streets. Predictably, she gets kidnapped.
• Took a Level in Badass: The poet is mostly a lonesome cat that keeps to himself, but when Le Chat Blanc is kidnapped and has a nightmare of her being terrorized by the kidnapper, he leads a mob to storm the lighthouse, kill the human, save the prisoners, and finally, burn the cat piano to ashes.
• Torches and Pitchforks: The mob of angered cat citizens that is led by the writer to the lighthouse. This is, however, notably done without torches or pitchforks to keep the gritty atmosphere. Instead, the cats pounce at the mad human and claw him violently before he manages to fall out a window to his death.
• Torture Technician: Well, what else would you call a man who creates a piano designed to produce the sounds of hundreds of live screaming cats?
• Visual Pun: Its beatnik styling as well as the feline cast brings to mind the term, hepcat; referring to jazz aficionados, especially within the beatnik subculture.
  "Hip cats that went ‘Scat!’"
• Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: The cat poet's reaction when he finds a book detailing the creation of the cat piano.

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