Eleven-year-old Karin is spending the summer in the country, where she makes friends with a giant talking cat. So far, so cute. But there is more to come. Her father has run up debts with gangsters who will beat him half to death. The god of poverty stalks Karin. He will take her to hell, where her deceased mother is spending eternity as a cleaning lady. Does this still sound cute? If “Ghost Cat Anzu” is meant to be a children’s film, it is the most merciless one you can imagine.
The cat demon, or Bakeneko, is a well-known character in Japanese mythology. And there are other familiar patterns in Takashi Imashiro’s manga on which this film is based: the portal to a parallel world, the mythical creatures in the forest … But the devil is in the details, for comic and adaptation handle the traditions with an astonishing degree of irreverence; humans and ghosts often behave like unmitigated louts, and the entrance to hell is through a toilet bowl. First-time director Yôko Kuno and the renowned Nobuhiro Yamashita, who has co-directed an animated film for the first time here, work with rotoscoping. The quirky, cartoon-like figures and painterly backgrounds contrast so harmoniously, the highlights are so lovingly placed that one can feel, taste, smell and grasp the sultry summer atmosphere.

The train ride is deadly boring. The landscape rushes past as a buzzing surrealist kaleidoscope of colours and Ariel and Paul pass the time by drawing their worst nightmares for each other. For Paul it is his mother swimming towards him on the open sea to drag him underwater, for Ariel it is the confrontation with a psychotic woman in the bathtub. What starts out as a game turns uncanny when fellow traveller Gilda joins them – and begins to tell them that the eeriest thing ever happened to her. She hypnotised her demented husband in his sleep. The one who answered her had been none other than God. An indignant God, a disgruntled God and finally a downright angry God, for she had absolutely refused to stop asking her sleeping husband: “Why do we exist?”
With an incredibly precise sense for the moment when the profane suddenly develops the potential for horror, Jocelyn Charles takes us on a magnificent psycho-trip. The director leaves it to the audience to determine whether to watch the 2D animation as spot-on genre entertainment or whether to take in the undertones: the hubris of humans who constantly play God and want to solve every mystery, for example. A hubris that does not remain without consequences.