One of the first Czech films to deal with "the cult of personality," Cassandra Cat is an allegorical fantasy about a bespectacled tabby under whose steady gaze people show their true colors, literally: habitual liars toeing the Party line turn violet, thieves, grey, etc. In a small town famous for its taxidermy museum ("No living animal looks as alive as our stuffed animals"), everyday repression cannot hold up to the disrupting stare of the magic cat. The schoolchildren, with their eyes as penetrating as the cat's, become the standard-bearers of honesty: they "draw what they see," and what they see is marvelous, as in the scene in which each child has a movie screen for a desk, on which he views his own father's betrayals. Méliès meets Minnelli when colors, music, mime, and splendid trick effects are given a diegetic context; a touch of vaudeville might be attributed to the presence of Jan Werich, of the V&W team, in a key role as narrator and magician. The film is a Chinese-box metaphor on cinema and looking, looking and knowing, knowing and acting.