Ghost Cat Anzu: a freewheeling anime adventure

• Reviewed from the 2024 Tokyo International Film Festival

It feels easy and perhaps reductive to draw a line between the countryside fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki and Ghost Cat Anzu. Many examples of modern animation carry Ghibli in their DNA, but this film from co-directors Yamashita Nobuhiro and Kuno Yoko is so much more than a pastiche. 

Written by Imaoka Shinji and based on a manga of the same name by Imashiro Takashi, it’s a film of two halves. It begins as a sleepy hangout movie before evolving into a madcap adventure as Yamashita and Kuno move the antics from rural Japan to Tokyo to the bowels of hell. Before all that insanity, the story follows 11-year-old girl Karin in the wake of her mother’s death. Her father drops her off at a temple in the countryside, leaving her there with her grandfather as he tries to settle a loan shark debt. It’s here Karin meets the gigantic, rotund cat Anzu, a ‘bakeneko’ (a supernatural creature from Japanese myth) who walks around and conducts himself like a strangely ordinary thirtysomething. Imaoka’s loose and freewheeling script is disarming – one minute Anzu might feel like a regular Joe, the next he’ll be communicating with the spirits of the dead. We watch the big feline as he gambles and does various odd jobs and it becomes clear Anzu struggles for money just the same as Karin’s dad, whom she sees reflected in the personality of the big cat, a chance to repair that relationship by proxy.   

The film comfortably jumps between tones, its fantastical conceit existing within a sleepy, slice-of-life countryside setting. Ghost Cat Anzu’s many transformations are reflected in its rotoscoped animation, which uses a live-action shoot as reference for the movements of spirits and people alike. The approach still leaves plenty of room for spontaneity in its tactile drawings which use a heavily stylised, comic strip style – amusingly sparse but full of colour.  

The anime’s constant zigzagging will no doubt feel like inconsistency to some. Anzu is Kuno’s first feature as a director, and Yamashita’s first animated film, and there’s an infectious joy in seeing the directors explore new territory. It’s at once a quietly funny depiction of small-town ennui, a sensitive observation of a frayed paternal relationship and a whirlwind adventure across multiple planes of existence.