Vibe
*Ghost Cat Anzu* starts as a rural hangout comedy and eventually tumbles into the underworld. Eleven-year-old Karin is left at her grandfather’s temple by an unreliable father and placed in the care of Anzu, a giant talking ghost cat who rides a moped, takes odd jobs and behaves less like a magical guardian than a lazy adult roommate. The story’s emotional center is grief—Karin wants her dead mother back—but directors Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita refuse to make the film solemn. Anzu’s practical selfishness, Karin’s anger and the matter-of-fact presence of spirits create a world where loss can coexist with pachinko, massage work and absurd errands. The movement is the movie’s secret weapon. The production filmed actors in live action first and then used those performances as the basis for hand-drawn animation, preserving casual gestures, pauses and physical comedy that conventional key-pose animation might streamline. Because Yamashita is a major live-action director and Kuno comes from animation, the collaboration feels genuinely hybrid rather than a technical stunt. The film changes shape in its second half, becoming louder and more fantastical; some critics find that structure meandering, while others see the looseness as part of its charm. Either way, the film’s personality is unmistakable: a ghost story with the behavioral texture of an offbeat Japanese live-action comedy.
Watch for
- Watch Anzu’s body rather than only his cat design. Mirai Moriyama’s physical performance survives through the animation in slouches, scratches, climbs and lazy gestures, making the supernatural character feel strangely ordinary.
- Karin’s lack of amazement around Anzu is a tonal clue. The film does not stage the spirit world as a revelation; fantasy is treated as another inconvenience inside an already unstable family situation.
- The first half deliberately spends time on errands, food, bikes and local relationships. That hangout rhythm makes the later plunge into overt supernatural adventure feel like the film itself has slipped into another register.
- Backgrounds and characters do not chase the same realism. The rotoscope-derived movement can be naturalistic while line, color and yokai design remain stylized, creating productive tension between observed behavior and cartoon form.
Production notes
The film is a Japanese-French co-production between Shin-Ei Animation and Miyu Productions, adapted from Takashi Imashiro’s manga. JFDB identifies Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita as co-directors and lists a 94-minute runtime, while festival and international sources sometimes give slightly different runtimes depending on version. The production process began with live-action filming directed by Yamashita; Kuno and the animation team then translated performances into hand-drawn animation using rotoscope-derived reference. Interviews make clear that the method was not simple tracing. Kuno discussed continually negotiating how much actor realism to preserve and how far to deform characters toward manga/anime expression. Yamashita valued the freedom gained when live-action reference did not have to become the final image: location problems, lighting restrictions and physical reality could be transformed later. The production’s French collaboration also affected background work, adding another layer to a film already crossing live-action and animation practices.
Trivia
- The film was shot in live action before being turned into animation, allowing the directors to preserve actor timing and physical behavior while still redrawing the entire visible world.
- Mirai Moriyama, who voices and physically performed Anzu for reference, is also a dancer; the directors have specifically discussed how his agility helped define the cat’s bodily comedy.
- Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita had previously explored related live-action/animation methods before the feature, giving *Ghost Cat Anzu* a production lineage rather than making rotoscoping a last-minute effect.
- The movie premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight program at Cannes, giving an unusually loose, comic anime feature significant international art-film exposure.
- The French studio contribution included background-art work, meaning the Japan-France co-production affected the finished visual environment rather than functioning only as financing or distribution.
Legacy
The film is still recent, but it has already become a notable reference in the current revival of performance-based animation. Its significance lies in collaboration: rather than an animation director simply tracing footage, a live-action filmmaker and animator divide the problem of performance and transformation between them. That makes the film especially useful alongside *The Case of Hana & Alice* and *100 Meters*, three very different answers to the question of what rotoscoping can contribute to Japanese feature animation. Critical response has been mixed on pacing but consistently attentive to the technique and tone. Sight & Sound’s discussion, Cannes coverage and director interviews all helped establish the film beyond anime-specialist circles. That crossover matters because the feature does not resemble the polished fantasy often exported as representative Japanese animation. Its loose, sometimes scruffy naturalism offers another path: characters can behave like people in an indie comedy even when one of them is an immortal cat.