Cat Stalkers and Depression - Tooned Up #8
Welcome to the latest installment of RPC’s animation podcast, Tooned Up! This episode, Mike, Cameron, and Jacob chat about WETA’s announcement that they are entering the animation studio arena, Studio Ghibli’s first CG feature film, the recently announced Daria spinoff series called Jodie, Netflix’s cat-focused anime called A Whisker Away, and the intriguing French animated film, Marona’s Fantastic Tale.
This episode was edited by the great Kawaii Kyle, editor extraordinaire!
Timestamps:
01:10 - WETA announces new animation studio;
06:25 - Studio Ghibli’s first CG animated feature;
15:57 - Daria spinoff Jodie to premiere on Comedy Central eighteen years after the original MTV series concluded;
25:10 - A Whisker Away review and discussion;
46:02 - Marona’s Fantastic Tale review chat.
Before we conclude, I’d just like to add my two cents to the A Whisker Away discussion, since I wasn’t on the episode. Unfortunately, I can’t speak to the quality of Marona’s Fantastic Tale, since I haven’t seen it. The animation style looks really cool, though, and the story of Marona seems very profound.
Anyway, back to A Whisker Away, which indeed features one of the most fantastical concepts I’ve yet seen in anime: a girl named Miyo, who’s had a rough family life escapes her problems by literally turning into a cat after she meets a huge cat-spirit-thing called the Mask Seller. She also uses her newfound cat-ness to ingratiate herself to Hinode, the boy she has a crush on in school. Basically, as our hosts said, Miyo is a human who is also a cat who is stalking the object of her affection, a boy who clearly wants nothing to do with her for most of the story. She uses the knowledge she gains as Hinode’s cat to attempt to manipulate him into falling for her, which is pretty damn unlikable.
On the other hand, Miyo hasn’t had a great life, so the film presents her as the misunderstood outcast who hides her true feelings and finally opens up to the only person she feels understands her (other than her best friend). By attempting to make her sympathetic, I felt the film glossed over the more troubling aspects of her personality, and I found the “love story” aspects of the film to be completely weaksauce and uninteresting. Suffice it to say, this one’s a hard miss. Go watch Marona’s Fantastic Tale instead.
