To the sounds of cicadas during a Tokyo summer, 11-year-old Karin and her father Tetsuya leave the city by train to visit a countryside temple where the caretaker is the grandfather she has never met. It is a grand old property at the edge of a forest, near a sleepy little fishing village. Local spirits abound.
Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar?
Wait. Does this all sound kind of familiar?
After 40 years of Studio Ghibli creating masterpiece upon masterpiece, the animation house was sold off to Nippon TV at the end of last year due to a lack of any successors to its founders: Miyazaki-san, who seems to have retired for real this time after many false attempts, and Takahata-san, who passed away in 2018. Given that there may not be any films of significance in the spirt of the founders, I suppose the moment was ripe for a full-throated parody of their body of work.
Yôko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Ghost Cat Anzu delivers on this front. In spades.
Yôko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s Ghost Cat Anzu delivers on this front. In spades.
What Peter Jackson’s Meet The Feebles was to Jim Henson’s beloved Muppets, Ghost Cat Anzu is to My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away. The first line of dialogue here is, “I need to go poop.” Shortly thereafter, Tetsuya 'dumps' his daughter off to his adopted father, whom he has not seen in decades. Things have gone downhill for Tetsuya since the passing of his wife. He owes money all over town, and does not want Karin to see him murdered by debt collectors or big city gangsters. His clumsy plea for money immediately upsets his father, and Tetsuya is practically kicked to the curb for his insolence, leaving Karin a ward of the Temple.
During this family row, Anzu the cat shows up riding on his motor-scooter, and befriends (or rather befuddles) Karin. And us. While most of the backdrops and characters here are drawn in the Ghibli style, Anzu is drawn in a very oversimplified and rounded fashion. Like a cross between Heathcliff the cat and Curious George. Anzu sports a yellow mobile phone on a lanyard around his neck. Yes, he takes some calls.
The smooth, warm pastels are not there to be cute, rather they are there for contrast. To stand out.
The smooth, warm pastels are not there to be cute, rather they are there for contrast. To stand out.
This becomes astonishingly clear as Anzu casually pisses in the bushes. He drops farts on a whim. His laugh is bold, just a bit entitled and mean. At one point we see Anzu working as a masseuse and a personal support worker for elderly folks. That side-hustle, or narrative thread, is dropped as casually as it is introduced. Perhaps a dangling bit from the serialised comic from which the characters are based on?
Anzu basically just is. No plan. No cares. No shits to give.
This is all a bit jarring, but the film settles into a series of Totoro adventures with the forest spirits. A large frog, a larger mushroom, and a tiny old woman, stop by for visits. While they do not seem to overly like Anzu much, they do enjoy drinking and partying on the temple’s dime, with vittles from the larder. Instead of integration of the spirit world and the human world in harmony, there is a lot of freeloading and scheming going on here. Anzu manages to take some of their money and gamble it away at a nearby Pachinko parlour.
Tit for tat.
Our young heroine, Karin, is no saint either. She does a number of shitty things including tossing a bike in the river, just for spite. This again violates Miyazaki’s gentleness, and soft environmentalism. From this incident, Karin learns no lesson. She is kind of petty, and none too bright, but gets away with it nonetheless.
Other shaggy little vignettes follow with the village boys (who are in a gang of two called the “Contrarians,” because, of course they are), as well as an addled man who cannot hold down a job due to the God of Poverty (literally a skinny toothless beggar-spirit in a nappy) following him around telling anyone who cares to see, that this is his job.
Just as Ghost Cat Anzu is starting to feel like a sporadic, episodic OVA, the back half of the film eventually does coalesce into a kind of plot. Or at the very least, into a chase. Karin is down a dirty commode in a funeral parlour (the animated equivalent of Trainspotting’s worst toilet in Scotland) to visit - or rescue - her mother in the underworld. This causes a lot of chaos, and releases a number of colourful Oni-demons from their bathhouse-esque canteen/lobby into Tokyo.
Just as Ghost Cat Anzu is starting to feel like a sporadic, episodic OVA, the back half of the film eventually does coalesce into a kind of plot. Or at the very least, into a chase. Karin is down a dirty commode in a funeral parlour (the animated equivalent of Trainspotting’s worst toilet in Scotland) to visit - or rescue - her mother in the underworld. This causes a lot of chaos, and releases a number of colourful Oni-demons from their bathhouse-esque canteen/lobby into Tokyo.
I will not spoil the jaw-dropping, darkly funny climax of the film. But, rest assured, nobody learns much of anything, Karin is even mocked by her own dead mother (ouch), and Anzu gets off a few more farts.
Keiichi Suzuki, who composed the soundtrack for Takeshi Kitano’s Zatoichi, and Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers, ties things together with a non-satirical take on the typical Joe Hisaishi score. Its generic forgetableness somehow further underscores the overall satire of the film.
Ghost Cat Anzu might not work on its own, given its raggedy-assed pacing, and often mean-spirited characters. But because it feels like a distorted fun-house mirror of the Ghibli-verse, this elevates the film, if for no other reason than that it is committed to being so darn saucy about it all. It may use its own sizeable resources and collection of animation talent to spit in the face of greatness, but it does so with shit-eating grin.
Your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Review originally published during the Fantasia International Film Festival in July 2024. The film opens Friday, November, only in movie theaters, via GKids. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.