![]() ![]() ![]() Yes, it can be argued that the film is yet another homage to Alice in Wonderland‘s “naive girl trapped in a strange, strange world”, as Spirited Away also was, but it makes even more sense that the Studio would follow up their biggest success in the company’s lifetime by capitalizing on it yet again. The second half revolves around Haru having to escape from the Cat Kingdom before its denizens make her their own, and if that sounds familiar to you, it should, because that’s ostensibly the plot of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. Except here, Muta is a talking cat, and the statue of The Baron can now come to life because “Sometimes, when people create something,” The Baron explains, “And they put their heart into it, their creation comes alive with its own soul.” Yeah, it’s not that good of an explanation, but considering this takes place in a world in which the Kingdom of Cats is a thing that exists, it fits with the film’s gonzo fantasy elements fine enough. This gets the attention of the cat’s father, the Cat King, who becomes so intent on thanking Haru for saving his son that he does everything in his feline power to whisk her away to the Kingdom of Cats and have her marry his son.įearing the prospect of becoming a denizen of the Cat Kingdom, Haru gains the attention of the duo of Muta and The Baron from Whisper of the Heart. Haru think she’s done a good deed until, suddenly, the rescued cat stands on its hind legs and speaks, thanking her for saving his life. She spends her days hanging out with friends and slacking off until one day, when she saves a mysterious black cat from being run over by a careless trucker. The result is The Cat Returns, which follows a new character named Haru, a clumsy teenage girl who’s always late for class and embarrassing herself around her high school crushes. Morita, in preparation for the project, drew around 500 storyboards, and both Miyazaki and producer Toshio Suzuki were impressed enough to give the director free reign to direct a feature-length version of the story. Now the short was gonna be forty-five minutes long and released as a standalone thing directed by animator Hiroyuki Morita. Then the theme park canceled the project, for unclear reasons. The Cat Returns was originally supposed to be a twenty minute short made for a Japanese theme park, with the Studio hiring the writer of the original Whisper of the Heart manga to write the manga version of their short for cross-promotion recalling to mind how Japan Airlines commissioned Miyazaki to create a short film that ended up becoming Porco Rosso. The circumstances of the production are bizarre, to say the least, but no more bizarre than other ways in which some of these films were produced. In other words: ancillary characters that wouldn’t really carry their own movie…at least without a little shaking things up. The catch? Muta was just a fat cat that lead Whisper‘s main character Shizuku to an antique shop in the film’s opening and just wandered around for the rest of the story, while The Baron was just a miniature statue of an anthropomorphic cat who would only come to life during fantasy sequences imagined by Shizuku. The film is a spin-off of sorts of the late Yoshifumi Kondô’s Whisper of the Heart, in which the characters of Muta and The Baron, who rose in popularity after the film’s release, are given their own self-contained story in an entirely different universe. ![]() The Cat Returns, meanwhile, is all fluff, but it’s cute and enjoyable fluff at the very least.Īnd part of what makes The Cat Returns so, pardon the intentional pun, “fluffy”, is that it is the Studio’s first and perhaps only purely commercial endeavor. But those films managed to contain within them a richer subtext than its conventional narrative structures would lead on. Sure, Ghibli has produced plenty of straightfoward adventure stories, from the perfect Castle in the Sky to the magical Spirited Away. It’s a breezy, quick, light-as-a-feather fantasy adventure that coasts along its brief 75 minute running time in as inoffensive a manner as possible.īut that’s really all there is to it. That doesn’t make the film outright bad, mind you. It is also, for my money, the weakest film to come out of Studio Ghibli that I’ve seen (though keep in mind that I haven’t seen the much-reviled Tales From Earthsea yet). Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns is the second film from Studio Ghibli to not be directed by company co-founders Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. ![]()
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