THE CAT THAT WOULDN'T MOVE

A sloppy story about an obese cat that helps two people find each other and fall in love.

This app from the Netherlands (which can be read in English, German or Dutch) is apparently a digital adaptation of a previously published picture book. Dan and his young daughter Rose have a problem. Their corpulent cat is so fat he won’t budge from the sofa. The British-accented narrator explains, “Rose would come over and tickle his botty [sic] / so the cat could sit up and pee in a potty.” The gigantic cat lifts his rear end over the arm of the couch and urinates in a bowl a held by Rose (a bit much for the intended preschool audience). Dan takes the couch to a secondhand store (cat and all); the owner, Ann, becomes rich and famous due to the cat; Dan and Ann end up meeting and fall in love on the spot. Many of the rhymes are a stretch (night/cried, for example), and the story line is so precipitous, slapdash and incongruous it’s difficult to embrace, making one wonder if a lot got lost in translation (which is uncredited). Touch-activated animations are minimal and do little to nothing to drive the story. On the positive side, illustrations are crisp, and navigation is smooth, but neither asset is enough to save this app from the “skip it” pile.

A silly, hollow and ultimately unsatisfying tale.