Nyaight of the Living Cat – 03

Nyaight of the Living Cat doesn’t miss a trick, that’s fore sure. It leaves no stone of cat companionship unturned, and layers in endless quirks just for the sake of weirdness. Take the prime minister, who looks as sus as all the other guys in this show. I also enjoyed the fact that all of the government ministers had a cat in their ministry name. “Our weapons are useless against them” gets a new twist here – no one wants to use them. Who could pull the trigger on cats after all? There is a certain level of snark to all this, but I sense it can only come from the pen of someone who’s part of the cult themselves.

I’ve seen it postulated that Kunagi is actually a cat himself, turned into a human for some reason. And now that I’ve seen it I can’t unsee it – they do seem to be hinting at that pretty strongly. The best evidence is Tsutsumi’s nose, which is already being deployed in the canary in a cold mine sense I predicted last week. She seems to get awfully sniffly whenever she’s next to Kunagi for some reason. Maybe it’s just cat dander from working at the cafe (that french toast did look awfully good, I have to say), maybe it’s something more.

In the supermarket, the girls prepare – naturally – cat rice for dinner. Things seem to be relatively calm until a cat trips the breaker going after a rat, and in the darkness it soon becomes clear that the sanctum has been infiltrated. All the horror movie tropes get their due here, and eventually what’s now the main quartet has to flee for safety. In order to buy them some time, Kunagi employs the cucumber trick – yet another cat meme from the social media era. Yes, it does work and yes, it does work for the reason he says. And like he says no – you should never do it (no matter how much you really want to).

Hotel Inhumans – 03

Another very professional and solid episode of Hotel Inhumans. It’s the sort of show that winds up in limbo in a season like this one (or poll country), but that’s not to dismiss it. In some ways it’s a by-the-numbers construction, but it does have a hint of something unconventional in its mindset.

Whenever a series is built around making murderers sympathetic, it sets a serious challenge for itself. And it’s certainly one not all writers are up to – not by a longshot. The first serial fell back more or less on tugging at the heartstrings, making the killer the victim. With Kase, it’s more complicated. As Ikurou notes, hired killers do fall in love. Of that I’m not skeptical, and in a way that itself humanizes them. But how much difference does it make, really? Hotel Inhumans again kind of tries to have it both ways here, only showing Kase-san killing transparently bad (scamming the elderly, hooking kids on drugs) people. But he still killed them. And it seems self-evident that some of the people he killed were more morally ambiguous. Does that excuse what he did for a living?

I guess everyone can decide that for themselves. And Kase is certainly an interesting case study, as was this “dying service” the concierges offered (which I suspect we still haven’t see the last of). I’m going to be watching for now, and beyond that I can’t say – the three obvious possibilities (blog, drop, digest) are all still in play.

CITY THE ANIMATION – 03

Kind of in the same boat here, but the equation is simpler. CITY just isn’t as funny as I need it to be. Not consistently. It can be interesting when it goes conceptual, and it does deliver amusing gags. But not often enough in either case, and the really big laughs especially are too sparse. It’s just an Arawi thing I guess – Nichijou was the same for me. I like the visuals and the idea here is more interesting than Nichijou, but comedies ultimately get judged my one metric more than any other.

Two of those gags worked unabashedly for me this week. One was the guy desperately rushing over as Izumi was about to sit on the “wet paint” bench – so he could change the sign to “dry paint” (and the octopus flashback was funny too). The other was the bakery thing with the absence of tongs, with the microwaved stale bread and the ¥1200 yakisoba pan. But that’s what, two minutes out of 22? It would be easier if I actively disliked the stuff that doesn’t click comedically but I don’t – it’s just kind of a neutral feeling. And so help me, I can’t grasp why Arawi thinks the three screaming college girls (though two were at the bakery) and the middle school pair are so amusing.

See above for prospects…