Tatsuo Sato, “Cat Soup” / “Nekojiru-so” (2003)
Here is a beautifully animated surreal short film which superficially looks like a children’s film but is clearly intended for adults: an early circus scene in which a strange magician chops up his assistant into pieces with a chainsaw and the film zooms in on body parts with meat, blood and bone marrow clearly exposed will dispel any and all lingering doubts! The style of animation is at once simple with the main characters (two cats) drawn with very charming large heads and large eyes in the style of “Hello Kitty” mascots, and other characters and some objects also very basic in appearance; yet backgrounds, buildings, various props and creatures the cats encounter have realistic details. The plot also is simple and complex: on one level, it’s a quest and on a different level it’s an investigation into faith and religious belief, the nature of God, the life cycle and death itself.
Nyatta is a boy cat whose sister Nyakko is nearly taken away by Death; he struggles in a tug-of-war for his sister’s soul with Death and both rivals come away with half her soul. Nyatta determines to retrieve the other half of Nyakko’s soul from Death so he takes her to a circus and this trip sends them on an odyssey that drops them onto a boat in a vast ocean, then into a retelling of the Hansel and Gretel fairy-tale and through a desert where they come close to dying from thirst. They meet some strange characters: a pig who allows his flesh to be cut up and eaten, a man who dresses in bondage clothes and tries to cut them up with giant scissors and a woman who sews dismembered limbs back onto bodies. The strangest character of all is God Himself who treats Earth as a giant bowl of soup (blood soup as it turns out) and runs time backwards and forwards on a creaky mechanical clock machine.
The film is worth several repeat viewings for the colourful surreal visuals alone. All animation is done with traditional hand-drawn or hand-painted methods. A water elephant tries to help the two cats in the desert but evaporates, a giant bird contains within it all the world’s clouds and weather and butterflies of metal flit through a swamp. The scene in which God loses a walnut and forces to time run backwards and forwards in order to get the nut back is a highlight that features scribbled animation in shots where humans execute other humans, a pedestrian is run over by a car and guillotines fall (or not at all in all three shots). Most memorable is a scene where the two cats wind up sitting on huge red waves, frozen in movement and resembling waves on traditional Japanese woodblock prints in detail. The colours are not very psychedelic and blatant: they can be bright but usually they are subtle and the surprises and the magic come by way of usurping viewers’ expectations about things that appear on the screen at any one time.
“Cat Soup” isn’t to be watched for its plot which is bare yet turns out vague and puzzling: the value of the film is in its strange visuals and juxtaposition of actions in bizarre sequences: to take an example, a pregnant woman falls over a waterfall, a stork saves her and feeds her to its chicks, the chicks defaecate and the poo lands in soil from which a tree grows and sheds tears with images of the woman’s babies within. This sequence has no relation at all to the cats’ quest; it exists to illustrate the random nature and cruelty of life. The later sequence in which God disrupts the chronology of the universe to search for his lost walnut suggests that such randomness and cruelty are often due to petty thinking and behaviour and lack of foresight and consideration. God Himself is a small-minded being whose main concern is where His next meal might be coming from. The very vagueness of the film and the strange sequencing of visuals and actions invite multiple interpretations of what it might be saying.
Rather than try to make sense of what the film is throwing out, viewers should relax and immerse themselves in the cats’ adventures: I consider that this is the goal of the unusual visual style and associations that appear. Huge red tsunami waves that don’t move? An elephant made entirely out of water? Mechanical butterflies? These are ingenious ploys to get you to suspend logic and rational thinking.
For those who still insist on finding something that makes sense, there is a message but it’s a very pessimistic one: we can forestall death with all the effort we can muster but it can still come at unexpected moments. Belief in God or religion is of no comfort; God is an arbitrary and capricious being. There is also the idea that if one is fated to die, then one accepts that fate. As with many films of similar nature to “Cat Soup”, dealing with universal themes, the ending may seem a depressing let-down and a nasty joke on the animators’ part.