Solgaleo

Akif Pirinçci, the Turkish-German novelist born in Istanbul in 1959 and raised in Germany from age nine, published Felidae through Goldmann Verlag in 1989 as a hardboiled detective novel narrated by a domestic cat. The book sold approximately 4 million copies in Germany alone across its first decade in print and spawned six sequels through 2012. Michael Schaack's 1994 animated film adaptation, produced at Trickompany in Hamburg with co-financing from Senator Film and a production budget of approximately 10 million Deutsche Mark (then a record for a German animated feature), was pitched explicitly at an adult audience and rated 12 by the FSK on initial release. Bluebeard, the one-eyed scarred neighbourhood tomcat who partners with the newcomer Francis to investigate the throat-cutting murders, was voiced by Mario Adorf in the original German release. Adorf, born in 1930 and a major figure in postwar German and Italian cinema across films including Volker Schlöndorff's The Tin Drum (1979), was an unexpected choice for animated voice work; he brought a heavy Rhineland accent to the part that the film does not soften. The picture's graphic content (a sex scene between Francis and the cat Felicitas, multiple on-screen throat-slashings, hallucinatory dream sequences featuring piled cat corpses) made it one of the very few European animated features of the 1990s to receive an over-12 rating from any national board. The score was composed by Anne Dudley, the British keyboardist who had cofounded Art of Noise; Felidae sits between her Buddha of Suburbia (1993) and her Academy Award-winning The Full Monty (1997) work. The film grossed approximately 6 million Deutsche Mark in German theatrical release, recovering roughly 60 percent of its budget; it underperformed commercially but acquired a sustained cult reputation. A 1995 PC adventure game based on the property was released by Trickompany and Software 2000. Adorf continued working through his 90s; he received the German Film Award honorary prize in 2024.