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The Cat Returns (U)

added 27 May 2005 at 14.07

Directed by Hiroyuki Morita

More lush visuals and vaguely sinister fairy tale action from the director of Spirited Away as some ditzy chick gets screwed over by cats that walk on their hind legs.

Part of the appeal of world cinema has always been the opportunity to sample the values and belief systems of a foreign culture. With Japanese animation in general - and the work of Hiroyuki Morita in particular - you don't so much sample the inexplicably alien culture of Japan as get forcibly stuffed with strangely coloured parcels of it whilst screaming for the merest shred of internal consistency.

So it's to Morita's credit that The Cat Returns is shot through with enough skilful characterisation, deft comic touches and charming set pieces to keep you hanging on to a story line that derails more times than a faulty monorail driven by an unrepentant psychopath.

Haru is a young Japanese schoolgirl whose life is in some disarray. It's never made clear exactly what's up, but she's continually late to lessons, rather unpopular at school and lives with her mother, which in Japan maybe counts as a battery of social problems. In any case, her more unusual problems begin when she rescues a cat from being run over. It turns out that this cat is the son of the king of cats, an august feline personage who's so grateful for Haru's intervention that he showers her with spectacularly inappropriate gifts - mice, catnip, big balls of string, you get the idea.

Things take a more sinister turn when the Cat King decides that these wondrous gifts are insufficient and Haru should (against all physiological good sense) become the Cat Prince's wife. With her protests falling on deaf cat ears, Haru enlists the aid of the Cat Bureau, an organisation consisting of a couple of sexually ambiguous anthropomorphic felines and a gay crow, that seems to have been set up to deal with precisely this kind of situation.

Pretty soon we're transported to the Kingdom of Cats and Morita's imagination can finally run riot amid a bewitching mish-mash of Shakespearean plot twists, Grimm's Fairy Tale imagery and C.S Lewis' cod-Christian morality. It's here that the film really shines, as moments of infantile cuteness rub shoulders with jarring shocks - Haru's seemingly inevitable fate is a stark reminder that this is no Disney movie.

A fairy tale in the grim, traditional sense, The Cat Returns' cute, lovable exterior conceals the potential for genuine nastiness, much like cats themselves.

75 minutes of truly vivid, heart stealing escapism - cat-ch it if you're feline down.

The Cat Returns is on limited release from Friday May 27

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Dave Collyer

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