Director – Yoko Kuno, Nobuhiro Yamashita – 2024 – Japan – Cert. N/C 15+ – 97m
****
When her father leaves to sort out his loan shark debt problem, a man-sized, ghost cat is charged to look after her by her grandfather – animated fable plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March
A man, his arm in plaster, drags his daughter to the picturesque town of Iteru, self-proclaimed Town of Eternal Summer. The demeanour of down-at-heel Karin (voice: Noa Goto) couldn’t be more at odds with that sentiment. Climbing the steps to the local temple to arrive at the door of the monk’s residence, Tetsuya (voice: Munetaka Aoki) proclaims to his father his return, and the fifth grade status of his schoolgirl daughter. What’s he doing now, his father asks. “This and that,” comes the reply. His wife, the girl’s mother, died three years ago.
While Karin is outside looking at a giant statue of Buddha, a human-sized cat arrives on a motorcycle fielding mobile phone calls. Who are you?, the cat (voice: Mirai Moriyama) asks the girl. Tetsuya, meanwhile, asks his father for money to pay off a loan shark and is told never to show his face there again. He promises Karin he’ll be back by the anniversary of her mother’s death, then leaves. Her grandfather instructs Anzu, the cat, to look after Karin in the meantime.
Anzu’s story is that he lived 30 years as a cat, then became a ghost cat. He massages the pressure points of her grandfather Mr. Tsurumaki and administers a back rub. While two young boys Inoue and Hayashi eye up Karin and take her to a local café, Anzu is being pulled over by the local cops for speeding. Thus begins our introduction to small town Japanese life, with the three children fishing in the harbour.
Anzu’s existence is decidedly off-kilter. He raises a group of four football-sized birds only to abandon them a few days later, at which point they lead him through the undergrowth in scenes reminiscent of My Neighbour Totoro (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988). This takes him to a furnished cave, home of a man-sized frog spirit, who explains the birds are cheepies, or forest sprites. The group is joined by Karin.
Tensions rise to the surface in this small community: Anzu accuses Karin of abandoning her dad when, in fact, he is merely trying to resolve an impossible situation with the loan sharks. Anzu isn’t much better himself, taking Karin’s money for safe keeping and then gambling it away at the local pachinko parlour. Karin, meanwhile, has egged on Hayashi to steal Anzu’s bike.
Events get stranger still as the local God of Poverty (voice: Shingo Mizusawa), a man in a loincloth, turns up. Karin goes to Tokyo to find out what happened to her absent dad, and the God of Poverty shows her the portal into the World of the Dead – a broken down lavatory. Once there, they encounter the likes of The Great Screaming Hell, in which the shadows can be seen of people being tortured.
Exploring the corridors of what appears to be a vast hotel, she finds her dad begging for help as he hangs from the ceiling, while her mum is working as a maid cleaning rooms. They are pursued back into the real world through a traffic tunnel and along sections of urban motorway by the fearsome head God, Lord Enma.
It’s a curious piece, seemingly aimed at (Japanese) children, although some of the material is quite dark, and you wonder exactly how that audience would respond to it. (Although maybe no more so than Grimm’s Fairy Tales.) The man-sized frog recalls, at least visually, the one in the Japanese-inspired, French animated movie Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman (Pierre Foldes, 2022) while the briefly seen underworld is reminiscent of the buildings in the world occupied by spirits in Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001).
We feel for Karin, although at times she can be – understandably – somewhat callous in her attitude to her seemingly no-good dad. And, as a kid, she’s had to endure a lot, including the death of her beloved mother, something it becomes clear in the underworld sequence she hasn’t yet fully got over, worked out in her encounter with her dead mother and the pair’s second separation, where the meaning of her mother’s departure begins to fully sink in.
Anzu, far from a perfect substitute parent given what happens to Karin’s money that’s in his care, is a likeable, supernatural rogue who, despite making some bad mistakes and getting some pretty significant things wrong some of the time, really does have Karin’s best interests at heart once he’s taken on the job of looking after her.
The tale meanders around quite a bit, and yet at no point does it fail to hold the attention. It’s a strange and strangely affecting fable. Even if Anzu himself looks a little like Totoro on occasion, overall, this isn’t really like anything else. Overall, a unique and remarkable slice of storytelling.
Ghost Cat Anzu plays UK cinemas in the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2025 which runs from Friday, 7th February to Monday, 31st March. #JFTFP25
This year’s programme has the overall theme:
Am I Right?
Justice, Justification and Judgement in Japanese Cinema.
Trailer: