People visit museums for all kinds of reasons — sometimes to find inspiration, other times to see something new, and sometimes to find something forgotten. Cécile Gagnier was once training to become an art restorer but now she is a docent at the Louvre, showing the Mona Lisa to dozens of schoolchildren multiple times of day. Marcel once had a sister who was enchanted by the paintings at the Louvre but she vanished as a child; now he works as a part of the night watch staring at paintings as if she hopped into one of them. Snowbébé the cat is too young to have lost anything but he’s looking for something, something inside one of the Louvre’s thousands of paintings.
The Louvre has been commissioning comic artists for several years now to create stories set in and about the museum and Taiyo Matsumoto is one of the artists they have tapped for this project (another, Jiro Taniguchi, can be spotted in a cameo doing a signing for his work Guardians of the Louvre towards the end of the volume). I’ll admit that I’ve never been overly interested in visiting the Louvre, largely because I hate having to deal with crowds at art museums in particular and the Louvre is literally one of the most-attended museums on the planet, and I can’t say that Cats at the Louvre really changed my mind about this. Matsumoto’s relatively simple story about cats and mysteries had an unsettling urge to it and I’m not talking just about the painting at the center of it, The Funeral Procession of Love (although yes, it’s also a painting in a style that I’m not particularly fond of). I’m not sure how much collaboration there is between the Louvre and the creators of these comics but I am deeply curious if Matsumoto was specifically asked to feature this painting or if he selected that element of the story on his own.
Speaking of art styles I’m not fond of, in general Matsumoto’s art style has never quite clicked with me and in Cats of the Louvre I sincerely wasn’t able to tell if the combination of the off-kilter art style and subdued pacing were intended to be a little creepy or not. The cats, who are sometimes depicted as four-legged felines but more often are depicted as the tiny humans they view themselves as, are particularly off-putting, although they are (slightly) less unnerving than the latest trailer for the Cats movie.
It is appropriate that the cats don’t have nearly as well-rounded or interesting personalities/stories as the human cast, they are cats after all, but at least half of the story is spent with them and frankly, that lack of depth just left me feeling bored. When I look at the human cast I see characters whose stories I’d like to get to know better: how Cécile went from art restoration student to docent, what other strange things Marcel has seen in the museum, or how the new guard Patrick Nasri came to be working at the Louvre.
Honestly, I expected the title Cats of the Louvre to be more symbolic, or at least deal with a story more like the real-world cats at the St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum, instead of the surreal story it was. And without a plot that tugged at my heartstrings, a setting that fascinated me, or characters I was invested in, it was simply a story that didn’t work for me.