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There’s quite a lot going on beneath the shiny, fun surface of this animated comedy, though some of the questions it deals with — animal mortality, the world’s fragile eco-system — might be too much for younger children to process. For older, smarter kids, it could be a gateway film, a way to turn young cinephiles onto Powell and Pressburger’s 1946 masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death, with which it shares a little DNA. It also, like the brace of Chicken Run movies, raises the subject of nature conservation in a way they will respond to, thanks to Bill Nighy’s deliciously machiavellian uber-villain and his killer horde of robot bees.

The star of the show is a stray cat played by British comedian Mo Gilligan, who also narrates the film with a Goodfellas-style voiceover. When we meet him, he’s at the end of his lives, having been abandoned by his owners,...

Co-written and directed by Christopher Jenkins (a Disney alum who counts “The Little Mermaid” and “Aladdin” among his credits), “10 Lives” makes for an entertaining and easily digestible outlier at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The computer-animated story of a cute but lazy cat — imagine Garfield but much cuddlier — who keeps coming back in different forms, “10 Lives” is hardly the first kid-focused toon to premiere in Park City. Still, it’s probably not what most people imagine when they hear the words “Sundance movie.”

First introduced in feline form, Beckett (voiced by Mo Gilligan) is adopted by a scientist named Rose (Simone Ashley) when she nearly runs him over with her car. Rose is working on a postgraduate dissertation focusing on finding ways to save the world’s bee population. Her boss, Professor Craven (Bill Nighy), tries to sabotage her project for his own nefarious reasons. Feeling jealous...