This year’s Animation is Film Festival saw the premieres of several films. Notable among them was Ghost Cat Anzu.
In Ghost Cat Anzu, we are introduced to an eleven-year old girl named Karin as she begins a stay with her grandfather, a monk in a small town. She is forced to stay there after her deadbeat dad fails to get the money he owes to some dangerous loansharks from his dad, and runs off to search for other greener pastures. She doesn’t seem particularly shocked by this, and it’s not hard to imagine that this is only the latest in a long string of disappointments she’s experienced with him since the loss of her mother.
Jaded and angry in the way that children get when they have no reliable adults in their lives, Karin’s manipulative facade of charming pitifulness begins to crack with her encounter of Anzu–a human-sized cat who has all the insouciance and good-natured vices of an old man. After her grandfather puts Anzu in charge of her, they both begin to change with the novelty of having to depend on, and be dependable for, each other.
The plot elements of a deceased mother and an absent father are no more new to the field of anime than they are to any commonly told tale of childhood, but this treatment boasts a number of new approaches to them. Karin herself does not easily fit a Cinderella stereotype as her outward facade of obedience and dutifulness occasionally breaks apart and manifests acts of micro-aggression.
But while Karin may be the protagonist, it is Anzu, the indolent ghost cat, who is the film's centerpiece. Sometimes caretaking for the elderly of the village by serving as a masseuse, sometimes irresponsibly gambling away all his earnings at pachinko, his cute appearance, as with Karin, lies in contradiction with his realistically human mannerisms. Part of what lends realism to all the characters no doubt lies in the fact that the whole movie was rotoscoped– originally filmed in live-action directed by Nobuhiro Yamashita, and then redrawn and animated under co-director Yoko Kuno.
Unlike most ghost stories, no one seems particularly alarmed or surprised at Anzu. His origin is somewhat reductively related by Karin’s grandfather as having been a stray cat that they took in and who just never died, becoming a yokai, or ghost, after thirty years. Although possessing some of the fickle nature you might expect from a cat, Anzu proves surprisingly supportive of Karin, even accompanying her on a bizarre trip to the city to find her father and the Underworld to find her mother. While clearly not the best model of good conscience or judgment, Anzu proves himself dedicated to being there for Karin and helping her get over her tragic losses–comfort a person might take from an actual cat, yokai or not.
DIRECTOR: Yôko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita
CAST: Morai Moriyama, Noa Goto
DISTRIBUTOR: GKIDS