A new Tom and Jerry film, Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass, arrives in US cinemas on 4 September, but it was not made with American audiences primarily in mind. The 3D animated feature was co-produced by Warner Bros. Pictures and China's state-owned China Film Group, directed by Chinese filmmaker Zhang Gang, and originally released in China in August last year, reflecting the characters' huge and long-standing popularity across Asia.

The film sees the wordless cat-and-mouse duo tumble into a world of Chinese mythology after chaos in a museum. Tom and Jerry, created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera for MGM in 1940, ran as 161 theatrical shorts until 1957, before a cheaper Czechoslovak-animated revival in the 1960s helped spread the format internationally. Because the characters never speak, their slapstick humour translated easily across language barriers, making them television staples in Japan from 1965, the Philippines from 1966, and China from the 1980s onward, laying the groundwork for this China-led production.