Deaf Crocodile’s “Cat City Collection” Blu-ray booklet review
Written by Matt Long
This booklet is included as part of Deaf Crocodile’s 2026 Blu-ray release of the “Cat City Collection,” which includes Cat City (1986) and Catcher: Cat City 2 (2007).
Professionalism and production quality
This is one of the first Deaf Crocodile releases to feature their new standard booklet format, after changing from including booklets only with deluxe editions. The change to a smaller page size and page count does result in a slight decrease in quality from nice thick matte pages to a more standard thinner page format, but because it makes booklets more accessible overall, this writer thinks it's a good trade off. The forty-eight soft-gloss pages of this booklet are very professional looking with high-resolution images portraying the films’ animation. There are some minor copy editing issues, possibly due to source material for some of them, but they don’t affect the readability.
Grade: A-
Text-to-image ratio
Deaf Crocodile’s “Cat City Collection” slipcover.
There are eighteen pages with images and forty-eight pages with text. Most pages are only one or the other. This was a very nice spread with a section dedicated to sketch art (more info in the content section), so this ratio was particularly nice in this situation, where the essays are long and the images are properly complementing the essays.
Grade: A
Content
Walter Chaw contributes an excellent essay for the first film sharing its name (Cat City). It is comprehensive in providing context along with exploring Chaw’s reaction to the film, which is the best case with these Chaw essays. The ecstatic blend of genres and pop culture references is a big part of what is explored in this essay. By being given the reins to be the only voice on the film, Chaw is able to create a comprehensive essay in his inimitable style.
The second essay, “Cat Catcher: Cat City 2” by Dan Schindel, is also a strong contribution, providing a contextualizing essay for a much more difficult film. It didn't necessarily answer all my questions, but it explores many of the themes driving this sequel 20 years after the original film and how the Hungarian cinematic world had changed. While perhaps not as strong as Chaw’s, getting somewhat lost in abstraction and perhaps having to navigate a more problematic film, I still gained some helpful information by reading it.
It’s interesting Chaw did not contribute an essay for Cat City 2 given his voice’s prevalence across the catalog.
Next are a collection of essays by writer Anna Ida Orosz, reproduced with the permission fo the National Fillm Institute Hungary - Film Archive. The relative brevity of these essays compared to the two earlier essays was appreciated, and these offered an inherently different view because of their connection to Hungary. They traverse the story of the creators through to the creation of both films and a retrospect on them, offering an excellent comprehensive review of the Cat City films.
Finally, there’s a series of character sketches. I love this kind of behind-the-scenes material and thought it added a really nice touch compared to more stills.
Grade: A
Creativity
This booklet goes above and beyond the standard booklet by including sketches of the characters to provide some additional context. The two essays are fairly standard, even if I like them, but the context is helpful for the films.
Grade: B+
Grade summary
Professional and production quality grade: A-
Text-to-image ratio grade: A
Content grade: A
Creativity grade: B+
Final thoughts
An excellent booklet that offers great value for any Cat City fans. This is a worthy part of Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-ray package.
Overall grade: A
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