Cartoon Vault: Tom & Jerry the Movie

Post 23 looks at Tom & Jerry the Movie.

Tom & Jerry shouldn't need a plot but this movie has one sadly; during a series of unfortunate events Tom & Jerry are left homeless when their owners move away and the house gets demolished. After coming across a sort of orphan named Robyn, they decide to help her find her missing father, however she's under lock and key at the hands of her Aunt Figg and her lawyer who wants to claim the inheritence off her father who is declared missing in action.
When it's discovered that Robyn's father is alive Robyn finally succeeds in escaping along with Tom & Jerry who escaped from the pound after being put there by Figg.
After escaping again from a washed up entertainer, Robyn finally makes it back to her original home only to escape a fire that engulfs the home but is saved by her father at the end.
So perils and escapes abound in this film along with far too many musical numbers and Tom & Jerry having full vocals. This is not what I expected from a Tom & Jerry Movie, in fact for a film called Tom & Jerry the Movie it has very little Tom & Jerry in it and that brings up an issue plaguing the franchise since the end of Chuck Jones Era.
From the end of that era Tom & Jerry have suffered from the pain of too much dialogue and acting as the secondary characters to an episode character, even before the old era my least favorite episodes were always ones with too much dialogue either from Spike, the duckling, Tuffy or a human owner. What made Tom & Jerry so brilliant was that the actions and expressions were doing all the talking, even episodes that don't focus on Tom & Jerry's fight but simply looks at slice of life like Mouse in Manhattan which focussed on Jerry touring Manhattan yet his expressions told us more about the story than dialogue ever could. It's not that the cast are devoid of dialogue, it's cleverly mentioned by Jerry that the only reason he didn't speak before was "There wasn't anything I wanted to say that I thought you'd understand" which fair play to the writers actually works in context.
As for the movie characters they all suck, I feel I'm learning a little too much about them especially in some of the weirder songs such as Aunt Figg's villian song or Captain Kiddie's song about his past. Also I don't think Robyn is a strong enough character to really hold a movie together about Tom & Jerry, granted they've been with other speaking characters before but Robyn is very much the typical orphan character with no more than one dimension and it makes even less sense for Tom & Jerry to talk to her when it's clear that no other humans can hear them.
So overall it's not the best experience to have the Tom & Jerry label on it; if it were a different franchise it would have some credit to it but as it does have the Tom & Jerry label it's nothing special just very awkward.

End