Kitten Witch
2016 · 9m · New Zealand
Directed by James Cunningham
Genres: animation, family, fantasy
A kitten named Freda applies for a job as a witch's familiar and must collect rare potion ingredients to pass her test.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Look, I get it—cute kitten, magical job interview, perfectly digestible family content. But there's nothing here that *breaks* the form; it's whimsy-by-formula, and I'm not interested in watching someone execute the obvious.
A sturdy entry in the contemporary animation-fable tradition, with clear lineage to stop-motion character design and the fairy-tale apprenticeship narrative; the craft is competent, the tone settled.
The genius move is treating this as a genuine *employment* story—the potion-ingredient collecting isn't magical fetch-quest busywork, it's a real audition—and that single tonal lock reframes the whole thing from saccharine into genuinely earned.
Reviews
this charming short film that blends live action with CGI animation