Nekojiru-sou

If the Cat Soup Manga was a dark, cruel misadventure, then the Cat Soup OVA would be a silent, sad eulogy.

Directed by Tatsuo Satō and based on the manga by Chiyomi Hashiguchi (aka Nekojiru), Cat Soup presents itself like a children’s picture book run through a nightmare printer: cute on the surface, but steeped in existential dread. There’s no dialogue, little context, and nothing conventional about its storytelling—yet it manages to express something painfully human in its silence.

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✍️ Story – 8/10

The narrative is almost dreamlike: a young cat, Nyatta, follows his sister’s half-stolen soul through a surreal and collapsing world. Along the way, they encounter ... melting time, mechanical gods, sentient sausages, and mutilated animals. It’s hard to summarize because the story doesn’t unfold—it floats.

But that’s the point. This is grief filtered through the lens of a child. The events make no logical sense, but emotionally, they’re piercing. It’s not meant to “add up.” It’s meant to ache.

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👥 Characters – 6/10

Nyatta and Nyaako aren’t deeply developed characters in a traditional sense—they’re avatars for something much bigger: innocence trying to process death. Their actions are simple, but their journey speaks volumes.

This isn’t a character-driven story in the conventional sense, but their blankness amplifies the tragedy. They don’t fight fate; they wander through it.

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🎨 Art – 9/10

The visuals are whimsical, like something from a child’s sketchbook—yet that makes the horror hit harder. The contrast between style and content is one of the film’s most powerful tools. A soft color palette carries you gently through scenes of dismemberment, decay, and despair. It’s beautiful, haunting, and unforgettable.

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🎶 Sound – 8/10

There’s almost no dialogue—just ambient noise, distorted lullabies, and an eerie, minimal score. The silence is deafening in the best way. When sound is used, it always carries weight.

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🧠 Themes – 9/10

This is where Cat Soup truly shines.

While the original manga (Nekojiru Udon) was darker and more cynical—borderline cruel in tone—the film feels like an elegy. Released after Hashiguchi’s tragic death in 1998, the adaptation seems less like a surrealist gag and more like a mourning ritual. It strips away the bitterness of the source and replaces it with something softer, but much sadder.

This isn’t “just weird for the sake of weird.” It’s about:
• Losing someone and not understanding why.
• Watching the world fade around you.
• Accepting that some answers never come.

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📌 Final Thoughts

Cat Soup is short, surreal, and emotionally dense. It won’t explain itself. It won’t comfort you. But it will linger.

More than just a curiosity or an experimental film, Cat Soup feels like the soft sob of a grieving mind. Whether you interpret it as existential horror, grief allegory, or just a sad dream, one thing’s certain: you won’t forget it.

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Recommended if you liked:
Serial Experiments Lain, Angel’s Egg, Texhnolyze, or anything that feels like crying with your eyes open.

I finished it with zero understanding of what's going on...

If you're simple-minded like me, I suggest you go and watch other people's commentary on this instead.

The message behind Nekojiru is great, revealing cruelty and emotional abuse; there are many ways to interpret the story, this is just one angle to look at it. Because there are no words, it can be very hard to figure out the intention behind each scene if you miss out on the details. For example, the orange flower on the cover is what Nyatto need to get back the other half of his sister's soul. I was not aware of ... this at all until I watched a commentary.

Pay attention to the speech bubble if you're going to watch this.

Well, it was pretty evident from the character designs and the artwork who scripted this short film. None other than the “great” Masaaki Yuasa. I use great in parenthesis, because besides Ping Pong The Animation, I tend to believe his work is a bit overrated (still good, just not great). The Tatami Galaxy, for example, was far from a masterpiece, as it reused tired anime tropes, and revealed its central philosophical thrust — to grasp onto the opportunities that lie in front of you, and stop chasing the rose-colored, “perfect” life — in the very first episode, rendering much of what came ... afterwards as trivial fluff. It was a lean 11 episodes, but, honestly speaking, it could have been six, due to its repetitive nature.

Keeping this in mind, If Tatami galaxy suffers from excessive explaining and revealing its theme(s) too forwardly, then Nekojiru-sou (Cat Soup) collapses from an antithetical reason — not having a theme at all. This is not to say there aren’t interesting ideas presented to the viewer for deeper contemplation, such as: animal cruelty, the transience of life, and the interconnectedness of all species towards collective sustainability (e.g. the cat poops, and the fish eat the poop). That all being said, however, the anime film must be recognized for what it is, and far more importantly, for what it is not. And what it is not, is a competent work with an identifiable message that resonates with the audience long after the initial viewing experience.

To put it bluntly: obscurity + random ideas (that have no association with one another) = crap!