The world’s most famous cat and mouse return to American theaters on September 4 — in a movie that wasn’t really made for Americans at all. Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass, the franchise’s first fully computer-animated feature film, is a co-production between Warner Bros. Pictures and China Film Group, China’s state-owned film company, with Origin Animation also on board. Directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Gang, the 104-minute film already opened in China on August 2, 2025, and only now makes its way to US screens.
The setup is classic Tom and Jerry with a twist: after some familiar cat-and-mouse mayhem in a museum, the pair discover a magical compass that hurls them into a fantastical world built on Chinese mythology, where they have to work together — and with new allies — to find their way home. It’s a far cry from the duo’s mostly forgotten 2021 live-action outing, and Polygon, which premiered an exclusive clip from the film, argues the Chinese pedigree makes perfect sense.
The history backs that up. Created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940 for MGM, Tom and Jerry racked up 161 theatrical shorts between 1940 and 1957 — the run fans consider the classic era. When MGM revived the series in 1961, it quietly outsourced animation to Czechoslovakia to cut costs; the 13 resulting shorts became known as the Gene Deitch era and marked the start of the characters’ journey overseas.
Once the shorts were repackaged for television in 1965, they spread fast: Japan got Tom and Jerry that same year, the Philippines followed in 1966, and China joined in the 1980s after the US normalized relations with the country in the 1970s. The secret weapon was silence. Because the leads don’t talk, the slapstick needed no dubbing and lost nothing in translation — an advantage over the more verbal Looney Tunes or Disney’s musical shorts. As Warner Bros. producer Charlene Tan put it, whether the audience is Chinese, Korean, Japanese or Indian, slapstick makes everyone laugh.
Warner Bros. acquired the characters in 2006 through a corporate merger and has increasingly courted the fans who love them most:
- The Japanese series Tom and Jerry Gokko premiered on November 11, 2022
- Singapore produced its own series of shorts, released in 2023 and usually called Tom and Jerry Singapore in the US
- Forbidden Compass is the most ambitious effort yet — a full feature rather than a run of shorts
Not everything has gone smoothly. Reviews so far haven’t been kind, and even the film’s Chinese theatrical run last August was unspectacular. But as Polygon notes, a rough outing is unlikely to dent the duo’s global standing — that cat and mouse are unstoppable.
