The world's most famous cat-and-mouse feud just picked a much bigger fight. Viva Kids has released a new clip from Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass that unleashes a massive rat kaiju with a metal tail and some serious powers of destruction on a picturesque ancient city. The footage debuted as an exclusive over at Animation Magazine and has now gone up on the distributor's own channel, so you can watch the whole thing below.
This time the rodent fights back!
The English dub lineup is a good one. Eric Bauza voices Tom and Ben Diskin voices Jerry, with Janice Kawaye, Travis Willingham, Roger Craig Smith, and Robin Atkin Downes filling out the new characters the duo meet along the way. A.J. Beckles voices Mega-Rat, the villain behind that kaiju form.
Watch what happens as the supersized rodent rises out of the earth: the animation shifts from 3D CG into an inkbrush-inspired look that matches the movie's setting, which draws on ancient China. It's a striking style change. Chinese animation is on a historic run, with Ne Zha 2 becoming the highest-grossing animated film ever last year, and a Tom and Jerry movie built in China for Chinese audiences, then imported back to the US, looks to be capitalizing on that.
The story sends the duo far from home: during a chase inside a museum, Tom and Jerry find a magical object and end up transported through time. Lost in a distant era, the rivals have to do the one thing they've avoided for 85 years: work together to find a way back.
Forbidden Compass arrives in US theaters on September 4th through Viva Kids, which picked up the US rights earlier this year.
The duo has been a television fixture in China for decades, and this film was a homegrown production aimed squarely at that audience. Produced by Warner Bros. China and written and directed by Gang Zhang, the 104-minute, PG-rated film premiered in competition at the 2025 Shanghai International Film Festival and opened theatrically in China last summer. It's also the duo's first fully computer-animated theatrical feature.
Tom and Jerry have been chasing each other since 1940, when William Hanna and Joseph Barbera first put them on screen at MGM. The duo's original theatrical run produced more than 100 shorts and won seven Academy Awards, a haul most live-action franchises would kill for, and later runs from Gene Deitch and the legendary Chuck Jones kept the chase going through the 1960s.
Hanna and Barbera parlayed that success into the studio that gave us The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, and Yogi Bear, but the cat and mouse were their first hit.
Jerry is also one half of one of Hollywood's most famous live-action crossovers, having danced alongside Gene Kelly in 1945's Anchors Aweigh. Voice work has never mattered much for these two. The original shorts were nearly wordless, built entirely on slapstick timing and Scott Bradley's orchestral scores, which is exactly why the pair travel so well internationally (a cartoon that doesn't rely on dialogue plays the same in any language).
The pair have survived every format change the industry could throw at them: Saturday-morning TV, a direct-to-video run that mashed them up with everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Willy Wonka, 1992's Tom and Jerry: The Movie (the one where they famously talked, to fan outrage), and the 2021 live-action hybrid with Chloë Grace Moretz that pulled in over $130 million worldwide in the middle of a pandemic.
A mythological Chinese adventure with a kaiju battle is new territory even for a rivalry that has tried nearly everything, and the inkbrush flourish suggests a team taking real care with the animation.
September 4th isn't far off. Are you planning to catch this one on the big screen?
Sound off below!
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