Eternity and ephemerality are frequently taken to be worlds apart, but they each belie a wistful attitude toward the enterprise of life. In Ghost Cat Anzu, a deceptively whimsical animated feature about the travails of one eleven-year-old girl, the quotidian and the immutable appear on par with each other, coalescing for the most part in a sleepy coastal town where “eternal summer” — as the town, Iketeru, is known in Japanese — reigns, free from the breakneck tedium of modern life. Seeking respite in its shade are Tetsuya (Munetaka Aoki), a deadbeat widower on the run from some vicious loan sharks, and his young daughter Karin (Noa Gotô), who longs for the company of her departed mother and loathes her father’s careless and irresponsible absences. When they take up lodging at her grandfather’s temple, Tetsuya bails, stating he’ll be back in time for his wife’s death anniversary and entrusting Karin into his father’s care, who in turn delegates this responsibility to a fat, bipedal, and talking cat named Anzu (Mirai Moriyama).
Adapted from Takashi Imashiro’s eponymous 2000s manga, Ghost Cat Anzu is a strange and quietly infectious work, cribbed from the fantastical blueprints of its source material’s contemporaries — in particular, those by Studio Ghibli — but infused with a sense of offbeat immediacy. Karin and Anzu are of very different wavelengths, even if their shared solitude is what keeps them grudgingly in each other’s orbit: Anzu was found during a storm and adopted as a pet, but never died and seemingly learned how to speak along the way, whereas Karin’s fear of displacement, not least by the cruel and unknown workings of adults, curdles into resentment and a desire to outgrow the idyllic illusions of her young age. The duo, for most of the film’s runtime, are left to their devices, sketched out in brief slice-of-life vignettes. As Anzu juggles various odd jobs, including that of a home chiropractor, and tends to an embarrassing pachinko vice, Karin fraternizes with two local boys and the various woodland spirits with whom her feline friend also consorts. For our companions, the summer days proffer not only space for reflection and reminiscence, but also an avenue to dwell on the vividness of this halcyon make-believe world.
This vividness serves as Ghost Cat Anzu’s keenest strength, even if its narrative brushstrokes sometimes lack the requisite detail to uncover more by way of Karin and Anzu’s cutesy, if also unlikely, friendship. It’s a bond that co-directors Yôko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita take as given but which marries the cat’s lackadaisical zenness with his human charge’s feisty spirit somewhat belatedly in the film’s third half when Karin embarks on an impulsive trip to Tokyo to seek out Tetsuya. Much more of the spirit world is then revealed, in an unlikely showdown between Anzu and some demonic figures as all hell literally breaks loose. With live-action footage (courtesy presumably of Yamashita) forming the basis of the film’s rotoscope animation (credits to Kuno), a rare fluidity in performance and affect enriches the verisimilitude of its worldbuilding to our own, capturing less a picture-perfect sensibility of emotion and more the infectious, uproarious, even slightly annoying lived reality of two souls who try their best to belong. This realism punctures the film’s ephemeral compendium of childhood recollections, discoveries, and anxieties, and in so doing rediscovers its everlasting magic: as a gentle lens trained on the harsher truths of the world.
DIRECTOR: Yôko Kuno & Nobuhiro Yamashita; CAST: Morai Moriyama, Noa Goto; DISTRIBUTOR: GKIDS; IN THEATERS: November 15; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 34 min.
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