Top Cat and Benny terrorize a violin, and New York’s eardrums, while hustling for money in the new trailer for Anima Estudios’ Top Cat Begins (Don Gato: El Inicio de la Pandilla), arriving October 9 in Mexico from Warner Bros. Pictures. No American release date or distributor is set at this time.
Explaining the origins of the slightly famous feline street gang before it landed in Hoagy’s Alley, the CGI “companion piece” to Anima’s 2011 Top Cat: The Movie is “the most ambitious project in our studio’s history and the one with the most international potential,” Anima chairman Fernando De Fuentes told Variety last year. Both are based on Hanna-Barbera’s short-lived Top Cat cartoon series, which ran for 30 episodes from 1961-1962.
As Cartoon Brew reported last year, Top Cat: The Movie was Mexico’s highest-grossing homegrown movie of 2011, earning $8.2 million from local filmgoers. That’s about the budget of Top Cat Begins, which takes place after the first meeting between Top Cat and Benny, whose adventures lead them to Panza, Espanto, Demosthenes, and Cucho, as well as the sympathetic police officer Matute, who helps the gang outwit New York mobsters.
