Tom and Jerry have won seven Academy Awards, more than any other characters in the history of theatrical animation. They have also, at various points, been reduced to some of the laziest cash-ins the medium has ever produced. Their newest big-screen outing lands somewhere in that vast gap, and it arrives in American theaters carrying a passport stamp almost nobody has noticed: this cat and this mouse are now, improbably, the stars of a Chinese blockbuster.
Made in China, Arriving Here Last
Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass opens in US theaters on September 4, and the first thing to understand about it is that this is not a Warner Bros. tentpole in the way you would assume. It is a Chinese production, a co-venture between Warner Bros. and China Film Co. animated by a Beijing studio, written and directed by Gang Zhang as his feature debut after a reported five years of work. It premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival in the summer of 2025, opened across China that August, and then rolled out to essentially every market on earth before finally reaching the United States, the characters’ actual homeland, dead last. America is the caboose on this particular train.
It is also a genuine first. Across more than eight decades of shorts, TV series, and direct-to-video features, this is the first fully computer-animated theatrical Tom and Jerry movie. The premise sends the pair careening through New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where they trip a mythical compass that flings them into an ancient, fantastical metropolis pulled from Chinese mythology. There, Jerry falls in with a scheming crime lord, Tom gets mistaken for a divine messenger, and the two eternal enemies have to do the one thing they were built never to do: cooperate, in order to get home. It runs 94 minutes, carries a PG, and grafts the characters’ hardwired slapstick onto the shape of a Chinese fantasy-adventure epic.
Why This Is Actually Interesting
Set aside whether the movie is any good for a second, because the more fascinating story is how it exists at all. Tom and Jerry are colossally popular in China, arguably more beloved there among younger audiences than in the country that made them, and Warner Bros. has increasingly treated its classic characters the way every studio now treats its library: as globally licensable assets to be co-produced wherever the audience and the money are. Handing the keys to a Chinese studio to build an original CGI feature, steeped in Chinese folklore, is the logical endpoint of that strategy. The cat and mouse are no longer just American icons. They are international IP, and this is what international IP looks like when it comes home.
The distributor tells the same story in miniature. Forbidden Compass is being released not by Warner but by Viva Kids, a specialty outfit that has carved out a niche importing internationally produced films built on legacy characters. This is the same label that brought American audiences a pair of Top Cat movies made in Mexico, another dormant Hanna-Barbera property revived abroad and shipped back. There is a whole quiet economy here, of classic Western cartoon characters being reanimated overseas on modest budgets and routed into US theaters through the side door, and Forbidden Compass is its highest-profile example yet.
Seven Oscars to This
Here is where the film-lover in me has to be honest, even about a kids’ movie. The gulf between what Tom and Jerry once were and what this represents is enormous. The originals, the 114 hand-drawn shorts William Hanna and Joseph Barbera made at MGM between 1940 and 1958, are among the finest achievements in all of American animation, wordless symphonies of timing and cruelty and impossible physical comedy that earned those seven Oscars the hard way. We recently spent real time celebrating them when Warner Archive finally gave the complete golden-era collection the definitive Blu-ray treatment it deserved, and revisiting that artistry is a reminder of just how high the bar sits.
Forbidden Compass does not appear to clear it. The reviews from the many territories that saw it long before we did have been rough, with a recurring and rather damning complaint: that in a movie called Tom and Jerry, the actual Tom and Jerry too often get shoved to the margins of their own convoluted plot. That is the deeper problem with the whole conceit. The magic of these characters was never story. It was two adversaries locked in eternal, escalating, silent warfare, a rivalry so pure it needed no dialogue and no plot to sustain it for eighty years. The moment you force them to talk, team up, and thread their way through a fantasy epic full of crime lords and prophecies, you have arguably stopped making Tom and Jerry at all and started making a generic adventure cartoon with two very famous mascots stapled to the front.
Should You Go?
None of which means your six-year-old will hate it. Small children are a forgiving and easily delighted audience, and a colorful, fast-moving, PG-rated fantasy with two familiar faces will do the job for a matinee. If you are a parent looking to fill a September afternoon, you could do worse, and the Chinese-mythology backdrop at least gives the thing a visual identity most cheap cartoon spinoffs lack.
But if you love these characters the way animation buffs love them, treat Forbidden Compass as a curiosity rather than a coronation, an intriguing artifact of the globalized IP era more interesting to think about than to watch. The good news is that the real Tom and Jerry are not going anywhere. They are sitting on a shelf in a gorgeous restored box set, seven Oscars and all, exactly as brilliant as they ever were, ready whenever you want the genuine article. Forbidden Compass opens September 4. The masterpieces are available year-round.
