Elizabeth Rhein-Cat Soup-Student's Choosing

I thought that since I did not write my paper on this film, I should at least write a blog about it. Cat Soup is an anime film about two cats, Nyaako and Nyatta, who venture into a bizarre world where basically nothing makes sense. When a critic has described the film as “hello kitty on acid,” he was not far from the truth. Even so, there still seems to be some interesting symbols and themes used through out the film. It begins with Nyaako, the younger of the two cats, playing with a toy boat in a small pool until he clumsily falls too far forward headfirst into the pool. It is unknown here whether Nyaako is saved from death or whether he drowns. Even so, Nyaako is later seen with a very sick Nyatta who witnesses her soul leaving her body. Nyaako follows Nyatta’s soul and discovers that it has come to the god of death in the form of an elephant. Nyaako refuses to let his sister go so easily and fights with the god, ripping Nyatta’s soul in half. Just from describing the first five minutes of the film, it is obvious that no one should view it critically, but rather just sit back and let things happen. The rest of the film is Nyaako searching for a certain flower that will bring back Nyatta from the dead. Even though I was not really sure how most of the scenes fit together, I noticed that a recurring theme was death. At one point there’s a fish who has been sliced up by samurai and in his last minutes of life, it shows him at an in between stage where everything is calm and he is swimming happily. It seems that maybe both Nyatta and Nyaako are in an in between state of life and death, making it possible for such crazy and unusual scenes to mesh with each other. There’s also another scene where a man who supposedly represents God is eating a planet but drops it into these massive gears of time. To retrieve it, he has to make time go forward as well as backwards, and the images that come with his actions are very powerful. He shows images of people right before and after their deaths. Cat Soup is a very interesting film where it seems that someone can probably form a different opinion and interpretation of it than everyone else.