Raunchy Animated Animal Adventure Is Garfield Gone Horribly Wrong 

By Robert Scucci
| Published 19 seconds ago

Growing up, we all had that friend who learned all the forbidden four-letter words and decided they would devote their entire personality to working them into conversation as frequently as possible. I was in grade school when South Park burst onto the scene, and I distinctly remember hearing people swear for the sake of swearing because they thought it was cool, not realizing that sometimes a well-placed f-bomb is way more effective than dropping one every other word. I’m guilty of this, but I grew out of it fast. Some people never grow out of it, which brings me to 2016’s Bad Cat, a Turkish adult animated comedy currently marketed as a Tubi Original that plays like a cross between Garfield and Seth MacFarlane’s Ted.

Here’s the thing, though: I almost turned this movie off within 10 minutes because of how profane it was. Not because I’m easily offended by profanity, but because after a certain point, you learn that people mostly swear because they never bothered to expand their vocabulary. But you have to be patient with Bad Cat for reasons that quickly become apparent. The animals in the film simply do not know any better, and the profanity is so embedded into their personalities that you barely even register that they’re swearing after living with these scrappy creatures for a half hour.

An Exercise In Constant Escalation

Bad Cat follows Shero (Uğur Yücel), a hard-drinking, chain-smoking cat who spends his days hanging around with Riza (Güven Kıraç), a rat, and Rifki (Gökçe Özyol), a seagull, while generally being a menace to everybody around him. Shero is foulmouthed, extremely horny, selfish, and always looking for his next drink, but his already messy life gets significantly worse when his latest attempt to hook up with a female cat goes horribly wrong and her owner, a cartoonist (Okan Yalabık), decides he wants revenge after getting thrown out of a window and splitting his head wide open.

After getting hit with a defibrillator in the ambulance, he comes back as a rage-filled zombie, hellbent on terrorizing our foul-mouthed feline friend and his friends.

Things get even more complicated when Taco (Demet Evgar), a young kitten claiming to be Shero’s son, shows up looking for his dad. Shero isn’t exactly father material, but Taco sticks around while Shero gets thrown out of his home, falls for an Angora named Misscat (Demet Evgar, again), and tries to stay one step ahead of the increasingly unhinged cartoonist coming after him.

Think Ted meets Garfield, except everybody talks like a bunch of street animals who learned every dirty word in the English language and immediately decided to use all of them, like your friends in third grade who got removed from the classroom almost immediately after they discovered South Park and Beavis & Butt-Head.

Give It A Chance Before You Give Up

Like I said, the sheer amount of profanity in Bad Cat was off-putting until I realized what was going on here. Shero comes off as a total jerk until you learn that he and his equally foul-mouthed friends are simply products of their environment, which, speaking from an animation standpoint, is so enthralling to look at.

The city streets are full of life and chaos, boasting the kind of aesthetic that comes from the comic that preceded it. Using the most recent Garfield Movie (2024) as the most apt comparison, Bad Cat’s attention to detail is mesmerizing. Every single nook and cranny of the city is exploding with personality and motion that is so frenetic it’s almost dizzying.

Bad Cat is not for the faint of heart. If there’s ever a movie you need to watch out for if you have kids and the Tubi app on your television, it’s this one. It looks like a kids movie, but brother, it ain’t one. This is the movie you watch with your partner after the kids go down because you’ve been biting your tongue all day while trying to set a good example in your household. 

Going into this movie blind, I hated it at first, but when I fully realized what it was trying to do, I had to give credit where it was due. I also need to watch what I say around my family for the next few days because this movie really makes me want to channel the kind of vulgarity my friends and I would get in trouble for exploring during recess when we were in grade school.

As of this writing, Bad Cat is streaming for free on Tubi.