Animation is Film Review: Ghost Cat Anzu brings fun and farts, and not much else

I love a movie that can get by on just vibes. Especially sleepy summer day vibes: going fishing but nothing is biting, riding your bike to the store just to find a bit of air conditioning, causing trouble with your friends because what else is there to do? Those are the vibes in Ghost Cat Anzu, but sadly, in this case, they just aren't enough. If you're going to coast on those endless summer days, you need to make sure everything is tuned just so. Have some laughs, have some interesting character moments, have something, please anything, to grab onto. Here, I was left wanting more. 

Fifth-grader Karin finds herself dumped at a temple in a small town by her good-for-nothing dad. He swears he'll be back soon, in time to visit his late wife's grave on the anniversary of her death. But then he's gone, taking a bit of Karin's money before he goes, presumably with a bunch of plans to pay off the loan sharks who are hounding him and leaving threatening notes on his apartment door back in Tokyo. 

So begins Karin's strange summer, notably marked by the presence of the eponymous Ghost Cat Anzu: he's 37 years old, walks on two legs, talks, rides a motorcycle without a license. He speaks in cat puns and farts on command. He gives killer massages. He's an agent of chaos, and I love him. Karin is wary of him, confused by him -- why does he look like that? Why can he talk? There's not really a reason. The explanation is that he just never died, and now he does this stuff. I'm fine with it, honestly. 

What I'm not fine with is Karin's complete lack of interesting qualities. She's a character without any sort of internal life. Instead, she has only external circumstances: her absent father, her dead mom, this random anthropomorphic cat who's suddenly a part of her life. She complains and wants to run away. But that's about it. By the time she takes any sort of agency late in the story, it was too little too late for me. I was past the point of being able to care. 

I'm not even clear on what precisely the movie wanted me to care about or take away. As the credits rolled, I found myself wondering what the movie was actually about, if anything (maybe it just wanted to have some laughs?). Anything I came up with felt like a stretch: an appreciation for found family over biological family, a reproach of dismissing rural life, a call to being strong and independent whether out of necessity or choice. I think those are all too-generous readings of a movie that feels like a series of random scenes, noise and farts, signifying nothing. 

Whatever the case, at least the movie looks great. The production process involved shooting the film as a live-action movie, then using that footage as the basis for rotoscope animation. To be honest, I would've never guessed this was rotoscoped. The characters are so expressive and stretchy and "cartoon-y" that I never felt like I was seeing the live-action bones beneath, unless maybe in some odd movement here or there. I noticed the process more on the sound -- the film used the voices and sounds effects from the live-action footage, which gives it a different, rougher quality than what you might expect from animation. It took me a beat to get used to, but I didn't mind it. It was at least something to focus on when the story wasn't doing the trick. 

If nothing else, I'm grateful for all the cuteness here: baby Anzu, the "quail" wood spirits, some of the other deities who cross paths with our heroes. There's a lot I liked looking at. I just wish there were more beneath the surface that held similar appeal.