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I'm sitting here about to do the whole Consciousness Stream deal for Cat Soup, and the thought occurs that the timing might not be so good for this. My cat Lucifer died yesterday and I'm about to watch something which, according to this here blurb, involves a cat's soul being stolen, and is based on a manga series whose creator killed herself under mysterious circumstances. Aside from her, the name most associated with this for most people would be the director, Guy Who Did Nadesico. Not for me though. The reason I rented this one is that the screenplay was written by Masaaki Yuasa. The craziest man in the field of animation.
Now, I'm going to go off on a bit of a sidetrack before we get started here because Masaaki Yuasa has created two series so far that would be total gold mines for this section, had I not already watched them before I started the habit of taking down realtime notes on what I'm watching. First came Kemonozume, which, ultimately, is a take on the whole Romeo and Juliet notion, except that Romeo is a member of an ancient order dedicated to fighting giant hideous shape shifting people eating monsters that regenerate if you don't lop both their arms off (with bowel control and fidelity issues), and Juliet is one of said monsters. More importantly, each episode has a unique but always ultra-sketchy art style, and it's just generally very surreal.
Then he went and made Kaiba. Kaiba is a really honestly wonderful show that I'm trying to get everyone I know to watch with no success at all. The art style is some sort of crazy amalgamation of Astro Boy, The Little Prince, and The Point, in a very much not at all real-world setting where the technology for mind swapping, memory alteration, and creating custom designed bodies are all quite commonplace. Everyone I try to force into watching it gets about 5 minutes into the first episode, screams "WTF!" at me about 10 times in a row, and vows never again to look upon it. So yeah, that's Masaaki Yuasa. And now for our feature presentation.
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These opening credits so were not meant to have english credits overlaid on them like this. Childlike scrawling text does not work with nice clean overlays. Anyway, here's the actual opening scene, which is all you ever really see of this. A cat who, for brevity's sake, we'll call Kit, is playing with a toy car in a bathtub, and almost drowns. Meanwhile, cicadas! Here's another cat lying in bed, presumably quite sick, who we'll call Kat. The wind blows all mysterious-like. Anyway, Kit gets out of the bathroom, attempts to interact with his parents who are too busy being boring and drunk respectively, then sees some mysterious weirdo dragging Kat away. He pursues. Some background NPCs make some really really weird squeaky noises by way of conversation. Kit goes over and pulls the plug on one, causing her to deflate.
Anyway, pursuit is made, Mysterious Weirdo is so totally a Buddhist God, but I can't tell which... no wait that's Jizou! I know Jizou! He makes it suck less for kids in Baby Hell! Anyway, Kit confronts him, he sucks Kat's soul out in a very Kaiba-esque way really. Meanwhile, Mom returns to find Kit nearly drowning in the bathtub, as this was apparently an astral projection, and Kat is evidently dead. Kit crams her deflated astral-body into her mouth, causing her to wake up, but presumably as something of a brain-dead zombie.
Then they go to the circus! We don't have any actual dialog in this movie, so the circus performers, actual humans for a change speak in sped up distorted VCR sound noises. This circus has an interesting variation on the sawing a woman in half magic trick wherein Gandalf dices up a girl on a table with a giant buzz-saw, whirlwinds the bloody corpse hunks around for a while, then crams'em back together. Next, audiences make requests for various objects, which Gandalf materializes out of his own warbly warpy speech bubbles. Did I mention this movie is really surreal? Anyway, the next act is for a big dragon containing the sky to come in breath psychadellia around the room. Partway through this though, a storm cloud gathers inside the dragon, it ruptures, and the whole bigtop floods, along with the surrounding countryside.
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Kit, zombo-Kat, and a pig manage to escape by tiny neat looking boat, as does a robotic butterfly. It starts raining again, in very weird fashion, with water droplets being cohesive enough to suggest everyone were the size of insects. After the rain lets up, Kit takes a dump off the side of the boat which is immediately eaten by fish. The next morning a vaguely defined naked woman pregnant with two kittens floats over the edge of the world, fortunately, she's caught by a pteradactyl... who takes her home to feed to her starving kids. They immediately poop her out, their droppings descending to earth to give rise to a 12 Kingdoms style Baby Tree, bearing the two unborn kittens.
We now cut back to Kit, who is rather horrified to see Piggy has caught the fish that he inadvertently fed earlier. That's just gross when immediately presented to you like that. So anyway, he strips Piggy, and he is immediately demarked with a pork butchering diagram. Kit runs his finger along him to slice him open, extracts the loin (yoink!) and fries it up. The three have a nice meal, although Piggy's kinda creeped out by his autocannibalism. Then one of he fish gets up and starts running as a bunch of samurai out of nowhere appear and slice all the meat off him into a delicious sashimi platter. Skeletonized fish then dives into the water and has this wonderful dream sequence sort of thing about it raining feces into the ocean before washing up on shore and having a little cat boy pluck out and eat its eye, to the disproval of his mother. Looks just like Kit actually, but I'm going to assume otherwise for now.
Meanwhile, in space, god lifts up the flooded world, allowing it to properly drain, leaving out characters on a boat in the middle of the desert. They ride inside Piggy's now partly hollowed out body cavity like some sort of freaky back pocket of flesh and Kit smacks him over the head to urge him onward. Piggy passes out, and really, Kit's just bashing his brains out now. Kat starts helping. Piggy bites off Kit's hand after a while of this, prompting him to speech bubble "my arm came off." They head to a local specialist to sew it back on, then proceed with wandering through the desert.
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Eventually they come to a haunted house whose owner looks, well, Kemonozume-ish. He has a lot of weird stuff like a screeching bird monster with fancy jewelry and high heels, and freaky paintings. Kat so looks like a zombie by the way. Mr. Kemonozume entertains his guests by torturing a bird tied to the middle of a table as it flies around, eventually setting it on fire, which Kit actually seems to dig, and then serving it, as the fire has cooked it. It's like Bene Hana! He then makes an awesome gingerbread house for them, gets a nice warm bath ready, and for the second of these in a row, does the whole cannibal soup deal. Hence the title I suppose. Anyway, while they're in there taking a bath with some carrots, he wanders off and returns wearing fetish gear and wielding A Giant Pair of Scissors! Oh and like, Mickey Mouse's gimpsuit's mask. Kit avoids his attack, and yanks off the top of his head via top not revealing his cool transparent top robobrain. He then takes the Giant Pair of Scissors! and severs his limbs before throwing the top on the pot, grabbing Kat, and fleeing the scene.
Digging around in the sand, they find the thing from The Abyss, which forms itself into a giant water elephant they play with and have a drink from the side of for a while before riding it away. It keeps evaporating so they need to stop and find a new one a few times. Eventually, their luck runs out, but they reach the edge of the desert, finding an ocean bestrided by crazy long-legged cranes. Underwater, someone cuts open a green spherical rock full of blood. Kit and Kat walk around through a surreal landscape turning into giant spires behind them., which eventually fully melts away, dumping them onto a giant wave frozen in time, taking on a solid glassy nature. Kit climbs around on it, and eventually finds an albino humpback whale surfacing. He then climbs up to the top of a plume of foam, abandoning Kat for the moment, finding inside, a creepy distorted house with crying girl fleeing for her life. He pries off her tear and smashes it, thus restarting the flow of time. Everyone hyper-ages to death for a bit, then god yanks the handle of the gears of time into reverse, yielding a long awesome montage of various things flowing backwards, which, again, has very much of a Kemonozume look to it all. Things include car crashes, evolution, people's whole lives, hostage executions, a meteor wiping out all life on earth, and dropping half that blood rock into the gears of time and causing all this mess. Yum yum, green rock blood soup is delicious!
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So... back on the boat now that time's rewound a good ways, Kit and Kat travel through a swamp full of cool clockwork robots. Kit picks a flower for Kat, which... revives her from her zombie status. Meanwhile God (who, come to think of it, looks just like Gandalf, they're probably the same guy) sits down at a dinner table with a nice helping plate of the earth on it, as Kit buys some bean curd at the local market on the way home. Great, now I have that song from My Name Is Bruce! stuck in my head. Guan-you, Guan-me, Guan-di... Guan-di is his name! Anyway, they go home, have dinner, watch TV, Dad is suddenly blinked out of existence like a TV being turned off, followed by mom, the TV's image, and Kat. Kit comes running in just after this and is now alone in his house. The TV effect then shuts off the entire world, and movie in fact, leaving a field a static. This is then replaced with the end credits.
The end credits feature a sepiatone depiction of the fish eye eating kid and his family, as a music box plays. It keeps winding down though, and requires cranking up, which also stops and rewinds the visual in the side, and the credits themselves. Eventually it gets properly cranked up and finishes though.
OK, now, going through the special features here, we have an interview with the director, containing a line I think we all need to hear at this point. "Making 'Cat Soup,' it was a challenge to see how much of an eccentric movie we could make without using drugs." So the answer to the obvious question is no. The original manga artist, by all accounts, was totally tripping at the time, but the people making the, well, short film (this was only 33 minutes here) were just trying to make it as weird as possible while sober. He also gives full credit for all the weirdness to Masaaki Yuasa, justifying my tangent. Seriously though, go watch Kaiba!
