Shout! Factory
What’s that? You’re looking for a charming and slightly bizarre animated movie about a young girl abandoned by her deadbeat, gambling dad that now has to live with her grandfather in an old Sousei-Ji Temple with a 5-foot tall Ghost Cat that walks on two legs, uses a cell phone, and rides a moped?
Oh, and this precocious girl has lost her mom at a young age? And if at all possible, for this particular movie, you would like it to include Yokai, Oni, and Enma, The King of the Dead?
Well, have I got the movie for you. Look no further than Ghost Cat Anzu.
The new animated film distributed from Shin-Ei Animation, the Studio that brought us Doraemon and Crayon Shin-Chan, and the award winning, French animation studio Miyu Productions has everything you could want. And more!
Ghost Cat Anzu is the directorial debut of Crayon Shin-chan animator and character designer, Yoko Kuno. She and live action director Nobuhiro Yamashita have collaborated to give Ghost Cat Anzu a unique style and look.
Yamashita first shot almost the entire film as live-action, on location, then handed that finished film over to Kuno and her team to animate via rotoscoping, the technique of drawing over the live action film stills to create the final animation. They also added a few original animated scenes like the final car chase and a few other scenes that could not be shot live action during the animation process to complete the film. This gives the film a really cool otherworldly look.
The movement of the characters feel more like the 70’s and 80’s animated style of American animator Ralph Bakshi (Lord of the Rings, Fire & Ice) but with a Japanese animation style. The final effect is really atypical of the traditional hand animated style of anime and gives Ghost Cat Anzu a striking aesthetic more common to American or European animation than anime.
While I immediately picked up on the difference it did not detract overall from my enjoyment of the film. I will admit I found it slightly distracting at first while my brain tried to process what was different about the look of this film and it did take a few minutes to identify the difference.
However, once I did and as the movie progressed I became more invested in the story; it just became a part of the quirkiness of the film in its entirety.
Speaking of story, the story of Ghost Cat Anzu is not your traditional family fare.
The movie centers around Kirin, an 11 year old girl, who has lost her mom. Her father is in debt to some dangerous loan sharks in Tokyo. Kirin and her father head to the country to visit her grandfather who lives in the old Sousei-Ji Temple on the outskirts of a rural town. There Kirin’s dad leaves her so he can settle his outstanding gambling debts one way or another.
Kirin meanwhile meets the temple’s Ghost Cat, Anzu. Think middle-aged, odd-job man, but as a fat, orange tabby cat with a flip cell phone hanging on a string around his neck. He walks on two legs and also travels to and from the town to the temple on his moped. At one point we see he is a masseuse, working on the back of a local man. Totally normal.
Kirin and Anzu butt heads constantly over everything.
Her father and grandfather tasked Anzu with watching over Kirin to try and keep her out of trouble, but trouble is her middle name. Kirin is still grieving over the loss of her mom. She is also very angry at her father for abandoning her in the middle of nowhere. Where both she and Anzu hit it off is in their shared love of loafing about and getting into trouble. They join up with two local boys to fish and get into trouble.
Throughout the story Kirin also meets yokai, and other various forest spirits.
When one particular spirit, The God of Poverty, a spirit of bad luck, attaches itself to Kirin, Anzu makes a deal with him to take them to the Kingdom of the Dead so that Kirin can see her mom. That goes about as well as you might think it would and literally all hell breaks loose when Kirin does something rash. The angered Oni and other Demons enter our world, culminating in a crazy showdown in their small town’s festival.
If this story sounds a little all over the place that is because it is. Ghost Cat Anzu does suffer a bit from a very uneven story and a little bit of wonky pacing. I think it is a pitfall of adapting a manga that consists of many short stories into a single cohesive film. Things just sort of come out of nowhere and other things don’t truly resolve to my liking.
That’s not to say I didn’t like it. I did. I found this film very charming and fun. I am all about the fantastical and the wondrous; especially in animated films. I mean, really, that is where animation and anime, in particular, shines.
Give me giant talking, hole-digging frogs, bearded naked mushroom headed spirits, multicolored crazy, multi-eyed demons, and a King of Hell that completely reminded me of Giancarlo Esposito if he were a giant pink headed ruler of the underworld.
This is what I watch animation for.
Overall, I really liked this movie and thought it did a wonderful job of showcasing a very cool animation style with a very unique story.
They balanced the emotional roller coaster that Kirin was experiencing throughout the film with the goofy situational ridiculousness of the creatures she kept coming in contact with.
Not just the 5 foot talking moped riding cat that was basically acting as her surrogate father either.
This film is part Spirited Away, part Takeshi Miike’s Great Yoki War, part Chinese Ghost Story, and part My Neighbor Totoro mixed in a blender and served with a generous salt circle.
Extras include teasers and trailers.
A quick final thought: I thought it was extremely telling about Kirin’s skewed mental state, and how we as a viewer are supposed to be watching this film, that when she is sucked into the Kingdom of the Underworld through an out-of-order toilet in a funerary columbarium, the thing that freaks her out the most is that Anzu turns back into a normal, non-talking, house cat in this reality.
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