Katy Caterpillar

Sometime in my childhood, I saw an animated film called "Katy Caterpillar" (probably on the Disney Channel, they showed a lot of really random stuff back then), but I never saw it again, though I wanted to, mostly because of the Just For Kids video previews that showed the sequel movie, "Katy and the Katerpillar Kids." Most of what I remembered was just the ending, where Katy escapes her mean sisters by knitting herself a cocoon and transforming into a butterfly, with her sisters trying to squeeze themselves into the cocoon as she flew away.

Well, like most things these days, someone put it up on youtube, so I was finally able to see it again. But in this case, I think it might have been better left as a memory. The movie follows Katy, who leaves the safety of her cherry tree because she finds it boring, but is almost instantly set upon by a pair of crows and has to be saved by The Spirit of Nature (not anthropomorphized, though, just a glowing ball of light). The Spirit of Nature sends Katy off on a quest to find her true self and be transformed, and thus Katy has a series of adventures highlighting the jerks of the forest. A busty spider teaches her to knit, though she gets out of there quickly when she learns the spider eats bugs (whether the spider intended to eat Katy is not made clear), then she is snubbed by chameleons, conscripted to work as a bee (though she did kinda walk into it), swindled by a frog, and saved by those crows again, who are prevented from eating her by the intervention of a cat chasing a mouse. She convinces the mouse to follow his dreams and visit the city, where they visit a mouse disco and save the crows from being canned in a tomato factory, and in gratitude they fly Katy and the mouse back to the forest. There, she encounters The Spirit of Nature again, and though she still doesn't know what she wants to be, she knows what she wants to do, which is fly without being a bee. That's good enough for The Spirit of Nature, so it gives Katy a book on how to become a butterfly, which she carries back to the cherry tree and reads, then knits her cocoon. I mostly remembered the ending correctly, except only one of the sisters was mean, and Katy wasn't really escaping them. But she does go back and visit the friends she made along her journey.

So yeah, it wasn't that fantastic, and I really only made it through the film to see the end, since part of my memory of it involved her learning what she needed to do from the mouse (which didn't happen) and using the button the frog sold her (which also didn't happen, as she abandons it soon after she gets it). So it ends up being a bit of a shaggy dog story, as the only thing she really uses on her journey to become a butterfly is the knitting from the spider, and that might have been written in the book. I just can't get over that, you know. A caterpillar has to learn how to become a butterfly from a book. The Spirit of Nature has a book to give her. That's one of the weirdest cop-out endings I've ever seen.

The voice acting is not the best here, nor are the songs that great, besides Katy's theme, but I'm mostly blaming this on the fact that the movie is actually from Mexico, and rewriting songs is always hit or miss.