Cats Been in the Bondage Gear Again

Cat Soup (a.k.a. Nekojiru-Sou) is a multiple award-winning animated short film directed past Tatsuo Sato and inspired by the work of the late manga creative person Chiyomi "Nekojiru" Hashiguchi.

It centers around a family of anthropomorphic cats, specifically ii kittens: the terminally sick Nyako and her younger brother Nyatta. After Nyako dies, Nyatta manages to reclaim half of her soul from Jizou. This brings her back to life, merely leaves her encephalon-dead. Determined to return his sister dorsum to normal, Nyatta goes on a surreal journeying through the country of the expressionless to remember the other one-half. Or something.

Nyako and Nyatta were besides the protagonists of the earlier Nekojiru Gekijou, a Black Comedy serial of shorts that were less surreal and more cynical.

Not to be confused with Neko Ramen.

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Tropes:

• Adaptation Affiliation: Takes the more than surreal and existential stories from the original Nekojiru manga, and combines them into a single Large Damn Movie.
• All In that location in the Manual: Nyatta and Nyako are only given names on the flick'southward websites.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: The Father Fourth dimension equivalent towards the stop.
• Author Appeal: Art Direction is handled by Masaaki Yuasa, who is well-known for his colorful Deranged Animation and manipulation of perspective.
• Auto Cannibalism: The Squealer ends upwards being served some of its own fat, past Nyatta.
• Black One-act: The whole serial including the OVA is this. Especially the Father Time scene. Special mention goes to an blitheness of people being executed by terrorists in reverse.
• Bloody Hilarious: Nyako gets splattered with blood at the circus.
• Carnivore Defoliation: Nyatta befriends a pig, butchers him live, and shares his meat with him.
• Cats Are Hateful: Nyatta is pretty cruel to anyone who isn't a family member.
• Cessation of Existence: Nyatta's family, the world itself, and you, all die or disappear in this fashion.
  • Subverted when time stops; Nyatta breaks off and stomps on a person's teardrop...whatsoever that'south supposed to mean.
• Circus of Fear: Nyatta and Nyako go to one merely before they commencement off on their adventures.
• Creepy Crossdresser: In the original doujinshi, Nyako was a fiddling male child whose family could but afford the girls' dress, so he had to vesture those instead. In the OVA, Nyako is a girl.
• Cute Kitten: The only real beautiful thing almost them is their advent. Otherwise they're Creepy Children.
• Dark Is Non Evil: The woman who sews Nyatta's arm back to his body also has a agglomeration of cats and true cat pieces strewn about her place of work. According to the brusk moving-picture show'south commentary, Yuasa described her every bit "nice" despite all of the grotesque imagery, and that identify was where cats in general go sewn dorsum together.
• Anomalous Serenity: "Big sister, big sis, my arm came off."
• Downer Catastrophe: After the quest is over, Nyatta's family disappears ane by ane, and so...
• Ear Cleaning: Nyatta'due south father does this to him early on in the moving picture. Seeing how Nyako just ran all night and he tries to become dorsum his sister, this scene could be considered a heartwarming moment.
  • Really, he's cleaning his ears because he found Nyatta half-drowned in the tub. While Nyatta was half-dead, he spirit-walked outside his body and noticed Jizou taking his sis'due south soul, took it back, and when his father revived him by pulling him out of the bath, he still had the soul. To add insult to injury, Nyatta's dad is so drunk he doesn't really fifty-fifty detect Nyatta is nonetheless unconscious while he does then; Nyatta just wakes up just earlier the mother runs in to denote the death of Nyako.
• Empty Beat out: Nyako earlier Nyatta finds the other part of her soul.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Technically they're pterosaurs, just close enough.
• Everything's Better with Samurai: There's a scene where Nyatta imagines samurai cut upward a fish until in that location's nothing left of it just its caput, basic, and tailfin (that information technology somehow is able to walk on). Then it swims in the water and ends upwards on the embankment... information technology'southward supposed to be symbolic.
• Eye Scream
• Fan Disservice: At one bespeak, the camera has a rather lingering view of an ass. Simply an donkey.
  • There's likewise the mansion scene, when Nyatta and Nyako are almost eaten alive by an obese man in bondage gear.
    • In the manga, Nyako gets a Panty Shot. It'due south about every bit gross as information technology sounds.
• Fantastic Racism: The Cats are racist toward the Pigs. In the picture they vanquish the pig who saved them from the flood by taking them unto his boat. In the bear witness, Nekojiru Gekijou, the Cat children are taught to be racists by their own parents.
• Free-Range Children: Nyatta, a kitten, is able to travel (with his encephalon-expressionless older sister for company) to some utterly bizarre and very dangerous places — and his parents don't seem to even notice.
• Funny Animal: In a very night and disturbing way.
• Gainax Ending: Nyatta ends up erasing all of reality by bring his sister back to life.
• M Finale: Being a Big Damn Movie that concludes with the unabridged Nekojiru universe (and its viewers) existence erased from being, the movie serves as this for the Nekojiru canon.
• God Is Evil: Subverted, since he seems to be more than blah than outright brutal. Considering how his main concern was eating a part of a planet, even messing with time and space to do so, this may non be far from the truth.
• Grotesque Cute: A story featuring two little kittens traveling through hell can't get much cuter or more grotesque than this.
• Ill Girl: Nyako.
• I'm a Humanitarian: The squealer finds it hard to resist Nyatta cooking his own mankind and eventually decides to have a piece.
• Justified Title: Nyako and Nyatta find themselves in a cauldron of h2o, making information technology cat soup.
• Permit's Meet the Meat: Nyatta and the squealer. As well Nyako and Nyatta with the human being, who feeds them before boiling them in soup.
• Mature Creature Story: Pretty much.
• Meaningful Name: Nyatta and Nyako's names outset with the Japanese onomatopoeia for a cat'southward meow.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: A agglomeration of these reside in a mechanical forest where the flower that contains the other part of Nyako'due south soul is found.
• Mind Screw: Symbolism everywhere. Whether Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory or only the Dominion of Absurd is up the viewer.
• Mythology Gag:
  • The savage treatment towards the hog is a callback to the original Nekojiru manga, where the characters were prejudiced confronting pigs for some reason.
  • The sequence where Nyatta hits the pig over the head and consumes the lumps formed from his injuries is too taken from the manga, just information technology was done to a monkey boy who served them every bit a specialty item in his family'due south restaurant.
• Nobody Poops: Averted twice, possibly symbolically. The first time leads to a visual digression on the circle of life and death.
  • A woman can exist seen taking a dump in the middle of the street before in the film.
  • Nyatta also took a dump at 1 signal.
• Ominous Music Box Tune: The ending theme, to add to the Downer Ending. Sato mentions on the commentary track that this was a recording of a existent, custom-made music box.
• OVA
• Planet Eater: God appears to do so during the time freezing sequence. He'due south first shown eating a food with red broth coming out of it, which the commentary describes as a planet. Correct before the catastrophe, he'southward about to eat a planet that looks suspiciously like Earth.
• Psychopomp: The Egyptian man who takes Nyako away in the beginning. If he's annihilation like his manga counterpart, he would have just taken her to Heaven had Nyatta not interfered.
• Reality-Breaking Paradox: An estimation of the catastrophe: by rescuing his sister from death, Nyatta broke the laws of nature and consequently erased all of existence.
• Rebus Bubble
• Rule of Cool: If the scenes aren't supposed to be symbolic, then they are this.
• Robotic Reveal: The man who tries to eat the siblings is revealed to be some sort of android when Nyatta pulls the pare of his caput off.
• Saw a Woman in Half: A pretty horrifying version, to say the least.
• Silence Is Gold: The merely audible speech is squeaky-sounding gibberish, although at that place'south a few lines that announced equally Speech Bubbles.
• Suddenly Speaking: While Nyatta is limited to saying "Nyan!" and "Baka!" in the manga and Tv series, here he says this line:
• Surreal Horror
• Tailfin Walking: In ane scene.
• Time Stands Still: Father Time does this.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Nyatta eats snails and has a Kangaroo Court in his backyard defended to killing bugs. Nyako squishes dead animals, and at one betoken kills a canis familiaris past beating it to death.
• To Hell and Back: In lodge to find Nyako's soul.
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: Nyatta doesn't find the pig's head bumps as good as his flesh.
• Widget Series
• Word Salad Title: The English title sounds like this — simply it's Exactly What It Says on the Can, at least for i scene.
  • Really, there'south another reason behind the odd title. The movie is based on the works of a comic artist with the pen proper noun "Nekojiru" ("boiled true cat stew"). Her works often had "nekojiru" in them - this movie's original championship, in fact, is "Nekojiru-sou" ("boiled cat stew grass"). "Cat Soup" is an English pun on "catsup," a spelling of "ketchup," and thus the closest the translator could get to a morbid English food-related cat pun similar to the original.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Everyone dies. Even you.

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Source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/CatSoup

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