Night of the Living Cat will soon hit the screens as an anime series in July, with at least one huge name attached: Takashi Miike, on board as the “Chief Director.” You may know Miike from the live-action films of Ichi the Killer and other manga. I’ll always remember him for 1999’s Audition, a horror film that demonstrated there’s nothing more terrifying than a piece of wire and a lovely woman crooning, “Kiri, kiri, kiri.” So what depraved property has Miike taken on now?
There are probably episodes of Hello Kitty that are more horrifying than Night of the Living Cat. Let’s give it its due. It’s an amusing idea that could make a funny one-shot manga – say twenty or thirty pages long, or a ninety-second fake trailer. But I’m perplexed about how on earth this series has somehow sustained six tankobon volumes and counting in Japan, as well as the new anime.
It’s a riff on the Zombie Apocalypse. (Points to the title for acknowledging 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, the film that created the genre.) This time, the world’s not overwhelmed by zombies, but by cats. In the first scene, our heroes are fleeing felines when one of them stumbles and the cats are on him. There’s a great panel where you see them all over the luckless, screaming guy, and it’s plainly referencing the ”Choke on ’em!” moment in 1985’s Day of the Dead. You know you want to look it up.
Only in the manga, the cats rub themselves cozily against their victim, and he turns into a cat himself. That’s it. That’s the joke. There are smaller jokes too, the main one being that, at least in book one, Absolutely No Cats Are Harmed in this story. Some pissy kitties get wet, and there’s one utterly shocking scene where a cat is picked up when it doesn’t want to be picked up in a cat café. Luckily the book’s hero absolutely loves cats, and he lifts the fool who did this off his feet for a lesson of ”See how you’d feel!”
Said hero is a hunk called Gideon, who turns up on the rainy streets one day with no memories, though we’re handily told there was a mysterious explosion at a cat food factory a few days before. He’s taken in by the kind owners of a cat café – the important one is Kaoru, an elegantly beautiful but super-tough schoolgirl. Many people have a rapport with cats, but Gideon has such empathy with them that I’m surprised they’re not piloting mecha together. In particular, Gideon’s brain is a library of info on cats and their natures, making him a handy walking info dump.
And then the apocalypse happens. Gideon and Kaoru go on the run. Some people show up for a bit, but this title doesn’t have much interest in character. Even when there’s a Base Under Siege scenario, with people taking shelter in a supermarket, there are none of the claustrophobic character clashes which were why Bases Under Siege were invented.
It’s a story that takes a notoriously gory genre, strips out all that gore, and leaves us with the world drenched in an army of mewing cats that turn people into other cats. I’m not saying it couldn’t work. There’ve been good cartoon films that de-gorified horror tropes with funny characters and farcical situations, like ParaNorman and the Wallace and Gromit werewolf spoof.
But the manga’s wit already feels spread thin, and this is only the first volume. There are a few decent jokes that I won’t spoil, but you may predict some of them, and they’re not character-driven as they should be for this to work. It’s all very, “Yes, and…?” The main amusement it gave me was in reminding me of a super-schlocky 1970s British horror novel – The Cats by Nick Sharman, where an army of killer moggies eviscerates London. As I remember, it was funnier than this.
Living Cat’s art is much better than the manga deserves. It’s much more heavily shaded than most manga, and there’s no doubt that the artist takes great joy in drawing cats, then more cats, then a ton more cats, darting or wriggling across the frame, as if this was a “real” apocalypse rather than a spoof. The lead characters are drawn as cool, but so generic they get boring quickly. There are also awkward moments. When Gideon lifts the cat-bothering miscreant in the cat café, there are some seriously weird bodily proportions. When we finally see some human crowds, it’s obvious the artist is way less interested in individuating them than in doing the cats justice.
There are some decent action frames, including a display of Gideon’s acrobatic prowess that deserves quality treatment in the anime version. Still, for all the skill on display, the whole affair feels inescapably lame. It’s summed up in the name the translation gives to the feline inferno. Come on, we all know what English word is screaming to be used.
And the book goes for… the catlamity. Catlamity? Are you kitten me?
