Cat Soup

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Cat Soup is a 2001 Japanese animated experimental short film that opens on a kitten drowning in a bathtub. That accidental death sets everything in motion. Nyata, the young anthropomorphic cat at the center of the story, slips beneath the water and finds himself in a space between worlds, watching his older sister Nyaako walk away hand in hand with Jizo, the psychopomp. What follows is not a conventional rescue story. It is a journey through floods, deserts, time itself breaking down, and a silence at the end that has unsettled viewers since the film's release on the 21st of February 2001. Directed by Tatsuo Sato and based on the manga by an artist known as Nekojiru, the film asks what it means to bring someone back when only half of them returns.

• 2. The Soul Divided

  ›

  Nyata grabs his sister's soul before Jizo can take it entirely. The tug-of-war splits Nyaako in two: her brother runs away with one half while the god of travelers keeps the other. Jizo then plants its half in a flower and departs. When Nyata is revived by his father and the family gathers around Nyaako's body, he approaches and releases the half-soul through her nose. She opens her eyes, but they are dull and half-open. She is, in the film's own logic, only half-alive. The siblings are then sent out by their mother to fetch fried tofu, an errand so ordinary it lands with the force of a joke. The second half of Nyaako's soul sits somewhere in the world, inside a flower, waiting to be found.

• 3. Circus, Flood, and the Pig

  ›

  On the way to buy tofu, the siblings stop at the Big Whale Circus. During the final act, a giant transparent bird containing a whole sky and clouds is accidentally burst by audience members, releasing a flood that swallows the world. Nyata and Nyaako take refuge on a sampan with a pig. What happens next is deliberately unsettling: Nyata unzips the pig to remove pieces of it, cooks those pieces, and serves them to the group including the pig itself. God, present in the film as a literal figure, lifts the world overhead to drain the floodwater down his arm. The three are left in a desert. The film never explains who the pig is or why it bites off Nyata's arm, but a woman in a patchwork cloak sews the arm back on. The siblings flee when they discover cat pieces in a sack in her house.

• 4. The Robot Man and the Elephant

  ›

  Hunger draws the cats to a house in the desert, where a man invites them inside and feeds them until they are full. Once full, the man attacks them with scissors and tries to cook them into soup. He falls into his own cauldron. Nyata discovers the man is a robot and cuts him into pieces with the same scissors. The cats escape and press on across the desert, growing dehydrated. Nyata digs and pulls out an elephant made entirely of water. The elephant travels with them and cools them off, but it eventually evaporates from the heat. The moment God accidentally stops time offers a brief respite: the frozen scenes become a playground. Father Time restores the flow, shooting it forward and backward, filling the screen with rapidly cycling events before the cats find themselves back on their boat.

• 5. The Flower and the Return

  ›

  After dusk, the boat drifts into a shallow marsh filled with tin sculptures of plants and mechanical animals. There, among the metal flowers, the siblings find the real flower holding the other half of Nyaako's soul. Nyata places it on his sister's face. She returns to normal. They go home. The final sequence begins with the whole family gathered in their house, watching television. One by one, while Nyata is in the toilet, the other family members vanish into thin air. The television program disappears too, leaving only a flashing screen. Nyata returns to an empty house. The lamppost outside goes dark. Then the film itself turns off, leaving static.

• 6. Nekojiru and the Source

  ›

  Nekojiru, the artist who created Nyata and Nyaako, was born on the 19th of January 1967. She first introduced the characters in the June 1990 issue of the monthly manga magazine Garo. The characters later appeared in a series of 27 two-minute television episodes, which aired in 1999 as a segment on TV Asahi. Nekojiru died by suicide on the 10th of May 1998, three years before the film based on her work was released. Tatsuo Sato directed the adaptation after her death, working from material she had left behind. The film carries the weight of that circumstance without advertising it: a story about losing someone and only getting half of them back, made by a director working from the imagination of someone already gone.

• 7. Awards and Distribution

  ›

  Cat Soup won an Excellence Prize in the Animation Division at the 2001 Japan Media Arts Festival. That same year it took the Best Short Film award at the 2001 Fantasia Festival. In 2003 it received the Silver Award for Animation at the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video. Central Park Media licensed the film for North America through its Software Sculptors label, and released it on DVD on the 9th of September 2003, more than two years after the original Japanese direct-to-DVD release. The gap between the Japanese and North American releases meant international audiences encountered the film in a different context, already knowing something of its reputation.