A horny talking feline who wants a bar mitzvah is just the start of the weirdness in the loopy yet unfunny animated feature “The Rabbi’s Cat.”
Set in Algeria in the 1930s, this French-language oddity based on a graphic novel centers on a cat (François Morel) who learns to speak after swallowing a parrot, then accompanies his master on a bizarre trans-African odyssey to find a rumored Zionist community in Ethiopia.
Lurching from religious reflection to low comedy to adventure to a sudden spasm of grisly violence and finally to an interracial love story, the movie is trying to do far too much and doesn’t do anything well. “Ambitious” isn’t the word here; “random” is more like it.