‘Kevin’ review: Jason Schwartzman leads an all-star voice cast in Amazon’s ultimate unevenly funny animated pet movie

When Kevin (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), the star of a new Amazon animated series KevinHe suffers from a bad breakup, and does what any young man in the big city would do.

He moves out of his old place, makes new friends and new interests, and explores his former neighborhood with new eyes. He takes time alone to think about what he really wants from a relationship or from life. He thinks about new potential life partners, and eventually courts one of them. Sometimes, unfortunately, he backs out of contact with his ex.

What makes Kevin’s journey most unexpected is that he’s not a cardigan-wearing banker or a tattooed barista, but a tuxedo cat; His split is not with a lover, but with his human companions. Feline evolution is enough to do Kevincreated by Joe Fingert and Aubrey Plaza, feels like a new twist on break comedy. If it sometimes reaches its full potential for humor and heart, it eventually finds enough warmth to be worth enjoying.

Undoubtedly, a large segment of the target audience Kevin Just read this plot description and get ready to react in the same way Seth (Gil Ozeri), an animal shelter director, typically reacts to an owner who dares to give up his cat: “Giving up a furry companion is the ultimate no-no!” He shouts. “You belong in The Hague, you idiot!” So rest assured that this is not an abandonment story by Sarah MacLachlan.

Instead, it’s Kevin who leaves when the couple who own him announce they’re separating, deciding he’d rather take his chances himself than follow Dana (Plaza) to her new home. since Kevin It is set in a world that lies somewhere in between The secret life of pets and BoJack Horseman In a group of anthropomorphic creatures—the animals communicate in English with humans and sit next to them at the bar or on the train, but don’t seem to rent apartments or, for the most part, have steady jobs—Dana has little choice but to let him go and hope he’ll want to come back one day.

After a disastrous evening in Central Park, where squirrels in the trees mock the house cat’s unsuitability for life in the “wild,” Kevin makes his way to Seth’s Furrever Friends shelter in Astoria, Queens. There, he makes a new home among a motley crew that also includes a domineering Persian named Armando (an excellent John Waters); A stupid and sick cat named Judy (Aparna Nancherla); Bossy Shih Tzu Seth (hilariously mean Amy Sedaris); and Cupcake (Whoopi Goldberg), a feral cat with a side hustle who streams on an OnlyFans website and sells her vomit on the dark web. (How to navigate the banking system and what you need the money for in the first place are not questions Kevin Really gets the answer. It’s best not to think about practical matters too much.)

Especially at the beginning of its appearance Kevin It is hit or miss as a means of humor. Some of the jokes, like the bit about the duck’s corkscrew penis, feel like a series trying too hard to announce that it’s not your little sister’s animal cartoon. Others, like an old line about cats being puzzled as to why people always scoop up garbage, don’t make sense in a world where cats have opposable thumbs and speak a human language. At least one subplot, involving a horsey Broadway star named Patti LuPone who is voiced by Patti LuPone, sounds like at least one subplot. BoJack Horseman Ostracize. There are a lot of funny one-liners that just kind of sit there, neither offensive enough to elicit groans nor clever enough to coax a laugh.

But as the series finds its groove through its eight-hour half-hour – and perhaps as I become more accustomed to its off-kilter humor – the ratio of successes to failures improves. Kevin It ultimately falls into the beloved rhythms of New York break comedy friends or Seinfeld or more recently, AdultsAlthough at a much higher level of absurdity. The series is most surprising and delightful when it surrenders to complete silliness, as with the C-plot in which a colony of ants crowns Judy as the new queen, or in another in which Kevin meets Rat Pizza – a sentient pizza slice who drags a dead rat and bitterly laments how poorly it is treated compared to its celebrity counterpart.

Eventually, somewhere amidst all the tokenized Gen Z kittens and incestuous feline romances, something a little more serious begins to emerge. There’s a real sweetness to the way the characters relate to each other, whether it’s when Armando reminds Judy to hold on to the right house forever rather than allow herself to be adopted by a narcissistic child of her own who only sees her as support for her art, or in Cupcake pushing Armando to come to terms with a past heartbreak involving a previous owner.

Kevin’s meandering quest to figure out what he wants from his next human mate (or if he actually wants another human mate at all) will feel relatable to anyone who has come out of a long-term relationship unsure of who they might be out of – if they actually loved Halloween, or the band Pavement, or the show Say yes to the dressOr they assumed they did it because their partner did it.

But also integral to his quest is the more pet-specific recognition that although we may take them in, feed them and link our contact addresses to their microchips, our animal companions have their own internal designs, desires and needs that may or may not match our own. Kevinwhich press materials indicate is based on a real cat and a real breakup, becomes a tender love letter to the unknowability of creatures who have condescended to let us participate in their lives. Speaking as a proud cat lady, I can’t think of anything nicer to say about Plaza and Wengert than this: They seem like absolutely wonderful pet owners.