by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Noa Gotō, Mirai Moriyama, Munetaka Aoki, Miwako Ichikawa
Intro:
… when it leans into both its intentional and unintentional insanity, it’s surprisingly fun.
Ever revisit a movie or TV show from your childhood, only to realise that it is much stranger than you remember?
Beginning with the titular spirit being just another aspect of the area surrounding the Sousei-Ji temple, Ghost Cat Anzu is similar to My Neighbor Totoro, with its chill Shinto aesthetics, but ends up more like late-period Don Bluth – nonchalantly bizarre.
The animation adds to that effect, with Shin-Ei Animation (best known for Doraemon and Crayon Shin-Shan) applying rotoscoping in a way that makes half of the human characters look like bog-standard anime designs, while the other half resemble Tintin refugees. To say nothing of Anzu himself, who is equipped with only the doofiest facial expressions possible, which combined with the distressing lack of blinking on-screen is at once derp and terrifying. Like finding the happy medium between Dragon Ball Z’s Mr. Popo and the Abridged series version.
It doesn’t help that there is remarkably little muscle to the story or the characters. Ghost Cat Anzu starts in a traditionally Miyazaki way, with a young girl (Noa Gotō’s Karin) finding herself marooned in a world of spirits, and there’s pretences to do with grief and dealing with less-than-ideal parents, but little ends up being done with it. The first two-thirds meanders between its rather unremarkable supporting cast, with Anzu basically a layabout Garfield.
Scenarist Shinji Imaoka (adapting the original manga by Takashi Imashiro) is out of his element writing a family film (he’s better known for ‘pink films’ …). However, as listless and semi-pointless as Ghost Cat Anzu starts, it blazes in its third act. It’s as if the filmmakers suddenly realised that all those amazingly weird spirits and loincloth-sporting gods of poverty were available and then decided, “time to check into a literal Hotel Hell”. All that ‘80s and ‘90s-era naïve absurdity leads into the kind of chaos found in the climax to Tom and Jerry: The Movie. And we mean that as a compliment! After so much dawdling around, the appearance of a toilet portal to the underworld, demonic car chase, and real character drama, is jarring, but no less satisfying when they finally pop up.
Ghost Cat Anzu is a tough film to pin down. It’s mostly disposable, with a do-nothing story about do-nothing characters that tries and mainly fails to evoke a certain Little Bear-esque warmth and cuddliness. But when it leans into both its intentional and unintentional insanity, it’s surprisingly fun. Even during the lulls, the character designs and gloriously unsober storytelling decisions provide a lot of incredulous laughing fits. It’s so bloody strange that it’s almost worth recommending just for its sheer absurdity, not least of which because it could become nostalgia in the very near future.
