“I don’t think I had a dream as a child. I just wanted to live a slow life.” - Masaaki Yuasa
There’s something intoxicating about the way Masaaki Yuasa bends reality. I mean, Cat Soup — the title alone drips with a strange, offbeat irony, begging you to ponder the possibility of boiling a cat into soup. It comes off as grotesque, but what if it wasn’t? What if the story is an eccentric recipe uniting the absurd and the tragic? A chaotic stew of life’s catastrophes bubbling below the clumsy gaze of cosmic forces; oh, and boiling cats too!
In Cat Soup, Yuasa’s signature blend of warped imagery and narrative ambiguity is in evidence. His worlds are more like lucid dreams than traditional narratives. The haunting short film lures you in with its simplicity, a story about a brother cat named Nyāta trying to recover his sister’s lost soul after abruptly dying. Nyāta quickly finds himself on a surreal journey that’s both beautiful and unsettling. Watching it is like getting transported through a kaleidoscope, where each fragment shifts with your emotions, changing the meaning and impact of every scene.
At its core, Cat Soup is a film that doesn’t spill its moral guts right away. It lets you decide whether it’s a quiet tragedy or a muted celebration of life. Nyāta’s quest to reclaim his sister’s soul could easily be seen as a bleak reflection on mortality and the fickleness of fate. But then again, its playful humor and moments of stunning visual bliss transform it into something else entirely– perhaps a reminder of the arbitrary joys of existence.
One of the film’s strengths is how it alternates between crushingly sad and oddly hopeful, utilizing the viewer's emotional state to grant its perspective. With no neat lines to separate the black from the white, a gray area clearly exists. For instance, when Nyāta loses his sister to death early in the film and retrieves only half of her soul she becomes a shell, a husk drifting through their bizarre world without any awareness. With a pessimistic lens, this could be seen as a brutal reminder that once lost, innocence can never truly be restored. But then there’s Nyāta, persistently dragging his sister along with a determination that can only be described as heroic. That persistence in the face of futility is heartwarming, a preface that love and loyalty can carry you through despite your own world being ridden with distortion.
Even as the siblings encounter the most absurd of beings and dangers—being swallowed by a pig, being prepped for stew or drowning in an endless ocean, there's still an uncanny beauty and humor in how these events are presented. Like a children’s sketchbook come to life, Yuasa’s fluid animation style teeters between innocence and horror. Like when Nyāta cuts a pig in half and Yuasa presents the scene as a cross-section of meat and organs, the effect is riddled with a toon-like style. Should I gasp? Should I giggle? It’s this kind of tonal snap that makes Cat Soup feel like such a delicacy: One small mistake and you’ll overpower the stew.
But what really defines Cat Soup is its mastery of controlling your emotional response through its pacing, sound and visuals. Yuasa and Satō are experts at creating a sense of unease, where even moments of calm feel brimming with a potential for mayhem. Like the scene where Nyāta and his sister encounter a god-like figure who turns a knob, flooding the entire world. At first you’re granted a beautiful, tranquil visual where the waves shadow over everything; an orange aurora of water icing the reset button on the universe. Yet, there’s a void rooted in it too. An understanding that this god doesn’t care what or who gets washed away. It’s inevitable and uncontrollable, a dainty decision off a whim.
These beings, powerful and indifferent, use the universe as their own personal sandbox. With a detached expression, they turn the knob that causes the flood, and just as effortlessly, they turn it off, restoring everything as if nothing happened. There’s no malice, no kindness in their actions; just children playing with building blocks, stacking them up and stomping them down. This moral ambiguity is unsettling, making it impossible to see these beings as saviors or villains– but that’s the point. In Cat Soup, higher powers are not bound by human (cat) concepts of right and wrong. They simply exist. They create, destroy and reshape the world according to a logic that they know nothing about. It’s terrifying, and there’s no comfort in the idea that the universe is ruled by beings who might erase your existence without even noticing. But it can be freeing. If the universe is governed by such chaos, then why not find your own meaning?
This sense of unpredictability extends to the very world that our main characters trek through. The landscapes feel sentient, colors bleeding into each other, shapes like a funhouse mirror, like the world is alive. It’s a place where everything is on the verge of transformation. It’s as if the environment itself is reacting to the heroine's presence. In one moment, they are sidewinding through the desert, the next, the sand is personified; in another, a circus tent blooms like a spring flower, swallowing them into a realm of disorienting oddities. Yuasa’s depiction of nature isn’t static; it’s a living, breathing figure, capable of beating the drum of its heart without warning.
The animation style gives life to this world as well. Loose and liquidy, bending and distorting. A reminder that nothing is fixed, not even the rubble beneath the characters’ feet. Everything can be undone and remade in an instant, much like Nyāta’s final act of turning a knob and seemingly erasing the entire universe. Is it Nyāta smashing the reset button? Or maybe an act of hopelessness? A playful gesture even; and when that screen goes black and the film ends, you are left with an unnerving hollow ache, like turning the lights off when you’re home alone.
But back to that bowl of soup! Like the broth, its meaning is hard to pin down; it ebbs and flows depending on how you engage with it. Whether you see it as a reminder of life’s fragility or a testament to resilience, it is a reflection of the personal journey the film takes you on, shifting with your own perspective as you follow a red string through a bizarre world.
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