Alessandro Carloni says his experience as an immigrant helped him and co-director Erica Rivinoja shape a Cat in the Hat film that respects the story’s place in American culture while reaching beyond a US audience. The animated film, made for Warner Bros., is due in cinemas on November 5.
Carloni told ANSA in Los Angeles that he first read Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book as a teenager, after his father gave it to him when he was 14 or 15 and beginning to study English seriously. His father has since died, making the chance to work on the character especially moving, he said.
The director, born in Bologna in 1978 and raised in Urbino, said Dr. Seuss’s beginner books helped him learn English. He described writing a film based on one of those stories in English as a full-circle moment.
Carloni and Rivinoja sought to preserve the book’s significance while making the humor work for viewers beyond the United States. He said his background helped him distinguish jokes that would travel across cultures from those that would be difficult to translate.
The film follows two siblings adjusting to a move and the challenge of starting over. Their belongings introduce their different feelings about the change: the younger child loves the ocean and dreams of becoming a pilot, while his sister misses the friends and life she left behind. Their mother is portrayed as the practical adult keeping the family together, with tax forms, bills and other paperwork packed among her things.
The Cat turns the boxes into gateways to a fantasy adventure. Rather than sending the children to a distant magical world, the film takes them inside the boxes and into a journey shaped by memory, nostalgia and the past. Carloni described the story as a reflection on what makes a place home: where people come from, where they hope to go, what they have left behind, or where the people they love are. In the end, he said, home is in the present.
Carloni’s animation career has taken him across Europe and to Hollywood, where he joined DreamWorks in 2002 and worked on projects including Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. He co-directed Kung Fu Panda 3 with Jennifer Yuh Nelson in 2016.
Sources: ANSA Cultura.