Since premiering at Cannes earlier this year, Yōko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s “Ghost Cat Anzu” has often been likened to Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” and it’s easy to appreciate why. For one thing, anime films begin with a young girl — in this case, a purple-haired 11-year-old named Karin — becoming separated from their parents at a pivotal moment in their lives, only to wander into a wild (but pointedly matter-of-fact) fantasy world full of spirits who see her as something between a novelty and a nuisance.
In “Ghost Cat Anzu,” however, that world is still very much our own, and the heroine’s coming-of-age isn’t contingent upon finding her way back from the underworld so much as it’s contingent upon her finding some beauty in the strangeness of our brief time above ground (although Karin does have to find her way back from the underworld at one point, a journey that involves traveling through a toilet bowl in Tokyo). “Ghost Cat Anzu” may be much sillier and less substantial than “Spirited Away,” but this warm little weirdo of a charmer eventually builds into something that squeezes your ribs like a hug, as it blazes a scattered and unhurried path towards its own acceptance of the fact that life is for the living.
At the start of the movie it definitely seems like the dead are having all the fun. Karin (Noa Gotō) and her deadbeat dad Tetsuya (Munetaka Aoki) sure don’t have much reason to smile when they arrive in the sleepy coastal hamlet of Iketeru (“The Town of Eternal Summer!”), where Karin’s grandfather lives at a local shrine. Tetsuya’s plan is to borrow some money from his old man so that he can pay off the loan sharks he owes back in Tokyo, but Oshō (Keiichi Suzuki) isn’t exactly flush with cash, so Tetsuya decides to leave his daughter in the sticks until he can settle his debts.
A rare spot of good news for poor Karin, who hoped to spend the summer with her cram school crush back in Tokyo: Oshō may be a widower just like his son, but that doesn’t mean he lives alone. On the contrary, he shares his home with the seemingly immortal stray cat he found in a cardboard box some 37 years ago.
At some point along the way it became clear that Anzu (Mirai Moriyama) was from another realm (probably around the time he started walking upright and speaking Japanese), but Oshō seems to have taken that discovery in stride, and none of the other people in Iketeru appear to be startled by the sight of a giant feline speeding across town on a motorbike as he cackles at the top of his lungs; Anzu even appears to have a semi-profitable side business as a masseur.
Karin is similarly unfazed by her grandpa’s unusual “pet,” and that feeling remains mutual throughout the first stretch of a film whose story tends to slink around in circles like a restless feline. Karin is used to being alone, and while she entertains the lovesick obsession of Iketeru’s two cutest punks (a pair of little kids who proudly “defy society”), she spends most of her time sobbing in her room or waiting at the empty train station in the hopes that her dad might show up. For his part, Anzu is consumed with all of his usual cat business, which includes reluctantly fostering a family of adorable baby quails, indulging in his pachinko addiction, and tricking the God of Poverty — a gap-toothed old man in a loincloth — to leave a local guy in peace.
It will be a long while before Shinji Imaoka’s script — adapted from Takashi Imashiro’s manga — bothers to arrange these various episodes into a focused plot. Imaoka’s first priority is to arrange his characters into a loose-knit community of the damned (i.e. a humanoid mushroom creature, a monster-sized frog, Anzu’s brood of impossibly cute bird sprites), which doesn’t really start to take shape until Karin crashes a ghost party at Oshō’s house.
It will be an even longer while before our heroine’s undead posse is called to any kind of action, making it all too easy to imagine a version of this movie in which Karin runs away to her mother’s grave in Tokyo at the end of the first act rather than at the start of the third. And yet if “Ghost Cat Anzu” doesn’t really click into gear until its frantic home stretch, which stitches together a wonderful trio of sequences that finally allow the film to capitalize on its irreverent world-building, the spirited final moments of this story are only so rewarding because of the texture that Kuno and Yamashita have woven into the rest of its telling.
That texture is naturally inextricable from the tools of the film’s construction. While “Ghost Cat Anzu” bears all the visual hallmarks of a typical anime (e.g. bright colors, exaggerated features, eyes the size of hockey pucks), even the non-human characters move with a rumpled naturalism that blurs the line between reality and the spirit realm. The explanation for that is simple: The animation is partially rotoscoped atop live-action footage the directors shot of their cast, the audio of which has been used to make the film’s raw and riveting Japanese dub.
It can be hard to decipher why even the story’s most ridiculous scenes are infused with a strange naturalism, and why the edge in Karin’s voice cuts like a well-sharpened knife when she yells at Anzu about her grief, but you don’t need to understand the secret of the movie’s technique to appreciate its palpable effect on a story about how natural it is to live with the dead. That shrugged-off approach to the presentness of the great beyond — that vaguely “After Life”-adjacent sense that being dead is just another job — unlocks a marvelously unremarkable underworld ruled by a bureaucratic oni who can’t seem to keep spirits and people in the realms where they belong; one scene finds a mortal bobbing back and forth across the divide as they get tortured within an inch of their life, a gag so good that it’s tempting to wish the whole film took place in Hell.
“Ghost Cat Anzu” can be much too casual for its own good, but there’s a special power in the scope of its imagination, and in how that imagination is drawn in the service of a world that’s somehow both limiting and infinite at all once — as plain and endlessly possible as the one we know so well. We’ll all have plenty of time to be dead one day, this movie insists, but life is for the living, and even for a poor and grieving young girl like Karin it’s simply too magical to waste.
Grade: B
GKIDS will release “Ghost Cat Anzu” in theaters on Friday, November 15.
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