Since premiering at Cannes earlier this yr, Yōko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita’s “Ghost Cat Anzu” has usually been likened to Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” and it’s straightforward to understand why. For one factor, anime movies start with a younger woman — on this case, a purple-haired 11-year-old named Karin — turning into separated from their mother and father at a pivotal second of their lives, solely to wander right into a wild (however pointedly matter-of-fact) fantasy world filled with spirits who see her as one thing between a novelty and a nuisance.
In “Ghost Cat Anzu,” nevertheless, that world remains to be very a lot our personal, and the heroine’s coming-of-age isn’t contingent upon discovering her means again from the underworld a lot because it’s contingent upon her discovering some magnificence within the strangeness of our temporary time above floor (though Karin does have to seek out her means again from the underworld at one level, a journey that includes touring by a bathroom bowl in Tokyo). “Ghost Cat Anzu” could also be a lot sillier and fewer substantial than “Spirited Away,” however this heat little weirdo of a charmer finally builds into one thing that squeezes your ribs like a hug, because it blazes a scattered and unhurried path in direction of its personal acceptance of the truth that life is for the dwelling.
In the beginning of the film it positively looks as if the useless are having all of the enjoyable. Karin (Noa Gotō) and her deadbeat dad Tetsuya (Munetaka Aoki) positive don’t have a lot cause to smile once they arrive within the sleepy coastal hamlet of Iketeru (“The City of Everlasting Summer season!”), the place Karin’s grandfather lives at a neighborhood shrine. Tetsuya’s plan is to borrow some cash from his previous man in order that he can repay the mortgage sharks he owes again in Tokyo, however Oshō (Keiichi Suzuki) isn’t precisely flush with money, so Tetsuya decides to depart his daughter within the sticks till he can settle his money owed.
A uncommon spot of fine information for poor Karin, who hoped to spend the summer time along with her cram college crush again in Tokyo: Oshō could also be a widower identical to his son, however that doesn’t imply he lives alone. Quite the opposite, he shares his house with the seemingly immortal stray cat he present in a cardboard field some 37 years in the past.
Sooner or later alongside the best way it turned clear that Anzu (Mirai Moriyama) was from one other realm (in all probability across the time he began strolling upright and talking Japanese), however Oshō appears to have taken that discovery in stride, and not one of the different folks in Iketeru look like startled by the sight of an enormous feline dashing throughout city on a motorcycle as he cackles on the prime of his lungs; Anzu even seems to have a semi-profitable facet enterprise as a masseur.
Karin is equally unfazed by her grandpa’s uncommon “pet,” and that feeling stays mutual all through the primary stretch of a movie whose story tends to slink round in circles like a stressed feline. Karin is used to being alone, and whereas she entertains the lovesick obsession of Iketeru’s two cutest punks (a pair of little youngsters who proudly “defy society”), she spends most of her time sobbing in her room or ready on the empty practice station within the hopes that her dad would possibly present up. For his half, Anzu is consumed with all of his ordinary cat enterprise, which incorporates reluctantly fostering a household of cute child quails, indulging in his pachinko habit, and tricking the God of Poverty — a gap-toothed previous man in a loincloth — to depart a neighborhood man in peace.
Will probably be a protracted whereas earlier than Shinji Imaoka’s script — tailored from Takashi Imashiro’s manga — bothers to rearrange these numerous episodes right into a targeted plot. Imaoka’s first precedence is to rearrange his characters right into a loose-knit group of the damned (i.e. a humanoid mushroom creature, a monster-sized frog, Anzu’s brood of impossibly cute chicken sprites), which doesn’t actually begin to take form till Karin crashes a ghost social gathering at Oshō’s home.
Will probably be an excellent longer whereas earlier than our heroine’s undead posse is known as to any form of motion, making all of it too straightforward to think about a model of this film during which Karin runs away to her mom’s grave in Tokyo on the finish of the primary act quite than initially of the third. And but if “Ghost Cat Anzu” doesn’t actually click on into gear till its frantic house stretch, which stitches collectively a beautiful trio of sequences that lastly enable the movie to capitalize on its irreverent world-building, the spirited last moments of this story are solely so rewarding due to the feel that Kuno and Yamashita have woven into the remainder of its telling.
That texture is of course inextricable from the instruments of the movie’s building. Whereas “Ghost Cat Anzu” bears all of the visible hallmarks of a typical anime (e.g. vivid colours, exaggerated options, eyes the scale of hockey pucks), even the non-human characters transfer with a rumpled naturalism that blurs the road between actuality and the spirit realm. The reason for that’s easy: The animation is partially rotoscoped atop live-action footage the administrators shot of their solid, the audio of which has been used to make the movie’s uncooked and riveting Japanese dub.
It may be laborious to decipher why even the story’s most ridiculous scenes are infused with a wierd naturalism, and why the sting in Karin’s voice cuts like a well-sharpened knife when she yells at Anzu about her grief, however you don’t want to grasp the key of the film’s method to understand its palpable impact on a narrative about how pure it’s to reside with the useless. That shrugged-off strategy to the presentness of the nice past — that vaguely “After Life”-adjacent sense that being useless is simply one other job — unlocks a marvelously unremarkable underworld dominated by a bureaucratic oni who can’t appear to maintain spirits and folks within the realms the place they belong; one scene finds a mortal bobbing backwards and forwards throughout the divide as they get tortured inside an inch of their life, a gag so good that it’s tempting to want the entire movie occurred in Hell.
“Ghost Cat Anzu” might be a lot too informal for its personal good, however there’s a particular energy within the scope of its creativeness, and in how that creativeness is drawn within the service of a world that’s one way or the other each limiting and infinite in any respect as soon as — as plain and endlessly attainable because the one we all know so nicely. We’ll all have loads of time to be useless in the future, this film insists, however life is for the dwelling, and even for a poor and grieving younger woman like Karin it’s just too magical to waste.
Grade: B
GKIDS will launch “Ghost Cat Anzu” in theaters on Friday, November 15.
Need to keep updated on IndieWire’s movie evaluations and important ideas? Subscribe right here to our newly launched e-newsletter, In Assessment by David Ehrlich, during which our Chief Movie Critic and Head Opinions Editor rounds up the perfect new evaluations and streaming picks together with some unique musings — all solely out there to subscribers.