verything seems to be going wrong for Haru (Hathaway), a lanky 17-year-old with a confidence problem. She oversleeps, she's perpetually late and disorganized, she's clumsy and, most of all, she's defeated and self-pitying. Even her best friend is teasingly dismissive. Then one day Haru sees a cat that's about to be run over by a truck, and she snatches it out of harm's way. Much to her surprise, the cat stands up, dusts itself off and politely thanks her before running away. Later that night, she gets a further surprise when the King of Cats (Curry) shows up with his retinue to thank her for saving his son, Prince Lune, and to promise her a great reward.
However, a cat's idea of a great reward is a backyard full of cattails and a locker full of live mice, and Haru, who has trouble adjusting to the reality of the situation, openly admits that she's not enjoying her prizes. So the king's servant (Richter) instead offers her Prince Lune's paw in marriage. Though she tries to turn him down, Haru quickly finds that he won't take no for an answer. But a helpful voice advises her to seek out the Cat Bureau, where she enlists the help of the Baron Humbert von Gikkingen (Elwes), a dapper cat statue with style and a soul.
Fans of Japan's Studio Ghibli, the animation house behind Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, among others, may remember the Baron from a previous animated film, 1995's Whisper of the Heart. In that movie—which was primarily about a low-key childhood romance—the Baron was an ornament rather than a character. But in 2002, first-time director Hiroyuki Morita brought him to life for Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns, an animated fable that Disney Home Entertainment is releasing on DVD in the United States alongside two other classic Ghibli films, Hayao Miyazaki's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Porco Rosso.
Good instead of great
Compared to epics like Nausicaä and Mononoke, The Cat Returns is a pretty minor Ghibli project; it's only 75 minutes long, and it keeps its stakes low and its spirits high. It's closer to a lightweight kids' comedy than most of Ghibli's movies: Once the Baron's friends Muta (a fat, irascible white cat, another Whisper of the Heart character, now voiced by Peter Boyle) and Toto (another statue with a soul, a crow voiced by Elliott Gould) get involved in the story, it's almost nonstop banter and slapstick. The conflict leads to fun things, but it seems like standard anime fare, the usual story where a weak-willed, wishy-washy protagonist gets in trouble simply by not knowing how to say "no" and mean it.
Some parts of the movie do recapitulate past Ghibli wonders: When the Cat King first arrives with his entourage, the nighttime parade of lantern-bearing cats wobbling along on their back legs recalls similar eerie spirit gatherings from Pom Poko and Spirited Away, while the climactic ending touches on Miyazaki's usual fascination with flight. Other segments seem to have been borrowed wholesale from Jim Henson's Labyrinth, or from traditional cat-related fairy tales. The Cat Returns is never dull or insincere: It's a lively and wondrous fairy tale, full of surprises and terrific animation. But it's more frantic than soulful, and it doesn't live up to Ghibli's best.
As with its last batch of Ghibli releases, Disney is packaging each of these three films as a comparatively pricey double-disc set, though the extra disc in each case contains nothing but storyboards, and the other extras are very minimal. It's an annoying trick, but in a way, it's understandable; they can afford to charge a premium for Studio Ghibli movies, because serious animation fans are going to want to own every one. Even a minor Ghibli movie is an event, and Cat Returns is no exception: Depth aside, it's lovely film.
It's odd, but pleasantly different, to see a Ghibli movie about a girl who isn't driven or focused to an extreme degree. Haru is surprisingly mercurial, in a low-key way; she keeps wondering if maybe being married to a cat and living in the Cat Kingdom would be better than her ordinary life. She's kind of an Alice in Wonderland figure, except that she periodically decides that the madness is better than her mundane life.
— Tasha
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Also in this issue:
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
and
Porco Rosso
