The Cat Who Walked by Herself

The Cat Who Walked by Herself (Кошка, которая гуляла сама по себе) is a 1988 Soviet animated feature film directed by Ideya Garanina and made at the Soyuzmultfilm studio. It is based on Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Cat that Walked by Himself". Like the earlier Soviet animated feature Adventures of Mowgli, the film retains the dark, primal tone of Kipling's work. The production includes almost all types of animation technologies.

It is not the only Soviet screen version of this fairy tale: in 1968 the director Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya at the same studio released another animated film, "The Cat Who Walked by Himself", lasting only 20 minutes.

Plot
The film is largely based on Kipling's short story, but expands it with several digressions.

Frame story
A couple - a man and a woman - put their young child in his crib for the night and leave the room. The child starts crying, and the Cat comes into the room to keep him company. When the child grabs her tail, the Cat angrily reminds him that they agreed "a thousand years ago" that he would not do that. Upon seeing that the child doesn't remember, the Cat sighs and decides to tell him the story from the beginning. The story starts when the planet was young and life on Earth was emerging with early creatures among erupting volcanoes.

Narrative
The protagonists are the Wild Man and the Woman who is his mate.

Home video
The film is available on DVD in the collection Золотая коллекция мультфильмов 9 ("Golden Collection of Cartoons 9"), a PAL 2003 Russian release. It also includes the films Barankin, Be a Man!, Inchgirl, The Pot of Porridge, How the Cat Fought with Mice, and Wings, Legs and Tails (total running time: 142 minutes).

The film has also been released on DVD by the company Krupnyy Plan.