Join WhatsApp Channel
Join Telegram ChannelThe perfect antidote to the exhausting animated and programmatic epics of the big studios. Vote Anzu!
He arrives without warning, without magic, without any mystery. All the better, by the way: Anzu, a stray cat turned ghost cat (in Japan, they call it a bakeneko : a “transformed cat”) from a monastery, has grown up to be far from a Totoro filled with wisdom. Dumbphone around his neck, perched on a scooter that he drives without a license, he alternates between odd jobs (physiotherapist, fisherman) and small scams while his life goal is to down beer in front of the pachinko machines with the village kids or with his friends. yokai (Japanese spirits)… The film substitutes a brighter and more colorful visual, a little misleading, to the fiercely angry pencil drawing of Takashi Imashiro's original manga, to better sell us the general plot (a kid, abandoned by her slacker dad, tries to find her dead mother).
We prefer to spend time with this big rude Anzu, even when the film ends with a third act that is more programmatic than delirious, where we travel to hell (no less) facing yakuza demons straight out of a Kinji Fukasaku film. We could spend hours with him doing nothing – which the film does wonderfully well, by subscribing to the great stories of slacker pirates of odes to effort and self-improvement. You do as you wish, but we prefer a thousand times to have Anzu as patronus than all the new Emotions that Pixar could give us. Anzu now lives in our heads, and without paying rent.
Of Yôko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita. Animation. Duration 1h34. Released on August 21, 2024