Van Beuren cartoons are extremely variable, especially in the number of gags and whether the absurdist humour shines through enough (sometimes it does, other times it doesn't), but are strangely interesting. Although they are often poorly animated with barely existent stories and less than compelling lead characters, they are also often outstandingly scored, there can be some fun support characters and some are well-timed and amusing.
Just when one thinks that Van Beuren were stretching themselves, putting more imagination into their work and getting more ambitious, 'The Cat's Canary', while not quite back to square one, shows that quality had significantly dipped. There are certainly far worse Aesop's Fables cartoons, but 'The Cat's Canary' is hardly a representation of Van Beuren being good.
Best asset about 'The Cat's Canary' is the music score, pretty much the best thing consistently of Van Beuren's output. It is so beautifully and cleverly orchestrated, is great fun to listen to and full of lively energy, doing so well with enhancing the action.
A few neatly synchronised sound effects here and there and the visuals are not as out of sync with the audio as much as other cartoons in the series, despite being sloppy still. The backgrounds also have invention, visual quality in the Aesop's Fables series is improving.
However, although the backgrounds have improved the character designs haven't, erratic, sloppy and at best primitive the characters, especially the cat, are poorly drawn. That the story is slight would have been forgivable if it was also still engaging and made sense. Instead 'The Cat's Canary' is dull, with a couple of throwaway scenes, and so disorganised and increasingly weird,
'The Cat's Canary' is never remotely amusing, with gags being too few and the gags there are being both bland and overly strange without ever being imaginative. None of the characters engage, the birds show little personality and the cat is hard to root for and inconsistently characterised.
All in all, lacklustre. 4/10 Bethany Cox