Directing: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+

Move over, “cat ladies.” This is a documentary about Cat Daddies, and boy, does it know its target audience. If you are a cat person, you will love this movie, which is often so sweet it’s almost unbearable. Granted, I am a cat person. I am so much a sucker for this kind of thing, it’s ridiculous.

To be fair, there is an argument to be made, still, that Cat Daddies is a documentary a step above other documentary feature films that focus in one way or another on cats. This is hardly even the first “cat documentary” I have seen at the Seattle International Film Festival—do I have a problem?—from Kedi (2016), about the feline population of Istanbul, to Catwalk: Tales from the Cat Show Circuit (2018). There was something different about the focus of those other films, though, a certain distance kept between their subjects and the true depth of meaning cats can have in people’s lives.

Cat Daddies is a different . . . uh, animal. Director Mye Hoang clearly aims to subvert the stereotype of the “crazy cat lady” as an old spinster woman obsessed with cats to at the expense of her own health and hygiene. That was a cliche that was never fair to women to begin with, but the flip side of it is this idea that cats are somehow not masculine and of little interest to men. There are, of course, men who do buy into this idea. But it’s never hard to find a man who once felt that way but had his heart melted by the introduction to a cat.

There’s something to be said for the mental health benefits of taking care of a pet, including cats, which Cat Daddies briefly touches on, though it doesn’t dwell on it much. Instead, it presents visual profiles of several men around the United States with a deep love, either for cats in general, or one particular cat. There’s a fire station that adopted an orange and white stray, named him “Flame,” and even built a mini fire station for him. There’s the professional stunt double in Atlanta who fell in love with a cat before discovering it to be a Maine Coon. There’s the Brooklyn activist who captures neighborhood cats to have they spayed or neutered and then rereleases them. Most bittersweet is the homeless man with early-stage Parkinson’s Disease and a cat named Lucky who is the one thing he finds to keep living for—an effective lesson in not judging homeless people who keep dogs or cats as pets.

A few of those profiled are already enjoying some amount of internet fame. The opening scenes focus on a guy named Nathan, who uses the handle NathanTheCatLady, and who I immediately recognized as someone I have been following on TikTok for more than a year. A couple I had not yet heard of: “GoalKitty,” a cat trained to stand on its hind legs and stretch its front paws straight up into the air; and Tora the Trucker Cat, who has now traveled through 45 states. It’s too bad that accomplishment is totally lost on the cat, who attracts people from sometimes hundreds of miles away for meetups.

I have mixed feelings about Hoang’s decision to feature “celebrity cats,” their being cared for by men notwithstanding. GoalKitty in particular has been trademarked and we are treated to a display of branded merchandise. A person’s got to make a living, I get it, but this is the least compelling thing in a movie like this. Maybe Hoang is going for some measure of “star power,” but, surely she could find plenty of other far more fascinating men whose beloved cats are not simply the subjects of viral videos.

Indeed, the most interesting subject in Cat Daddies is the homeless man, David, and the NYPD cop who befriended him, with a very similar looking cat of his own. This movie uses gendered stereotypes as its hook, but it succeeds at illustrating the objectively healthy connection that can form between human beings and their pets—and particularly cats, which really aren’t always as aloof and moody as they are made out to be.

Notably, Cat Daddies is also skillfully and lovingly shot, by cinematographer Robert Bennet, giving it a far more polished and professional look than the average documentary, let alone other documentaries about cats. A lot of the imagery is quite beautiful, especially of the cats themselves in soft light and slight slow motion. It’s nearly hypnotic in how it just makes you want to reach through the screen and hug these animals—and also the people who love them. This is a move that succeeds better than most at painting moving portraits of people who are not eccentric but just earnest in their assertion that cats enrich their lives.

As such, Cat Daddies has greater potential than other similar films to be compelling even to those who are otherwise indifferent to cats, but are interested in well made films. Of course, it’s still the people who love cats who will really love this movie.

*I guess “Cat Gentlemen” wasn’t as catchy.*

Overall: B+