A Whisker Away

I watched A Whisker Away while on the train. Also known as "Wanting to Cry, I Pretend to Be a Cat," it's an anime film that has a very Studio Ghibli feel to it. 

Miyo is an outwardly extremely cheerful girl with a crush on her classmate Hinode, though her seriously effusive interactions with him make the quiet Hinode uncomfortable. But the truth is more complicated. Inside, Miyo is unhappy and confused, torn between her mother and her stepmother and feeling like she has to wear a mask in front of both of them. And studious Hinode wants nothing more than to continue the family's pottery business -- he doesn't want to be a lawyer or a doctor or whatever it is his mom wants. He comforts himself with the love of Taro, a small white cat.

But the cat is actually Miyo, who has a cat mask from a trickster Mask Seller. No one, of course, knows that it is her, though Hinode is often confused when she says something that he's not sure why/how she would know. 

Things come to a head when she tries to confess her feelings to Hinode and two bullies humiliate her and Hinode tries to save face by saying he hates her. Distraught, she dashes away, and her human face falls off to become a mask that the Mask Seller says he will give to a cat who wants to be human and she will soon become just a cat.

Everyone thinks at first that she has run away and Hinode (who doesn't hate her, but has, reasonably enough, been very confused by her) and Miyo's best friend search for her. Then Miyo reappears -- but it isn't Miyo. It's the stepmother's cat with the face of Miyo, as she wants to live longer to be with her human owner. The cat, not used to being human, does some strange things that Miyo would never do, which confuses her friends.

Meanwhile, Miyo follows the Mask Seller into a secret cat world to try and get her face back. Ultimately, the cat who has Miyo's face realises that her human is desperate to have cat-her back (and that being human isn't quite what she expected) and she confesses to Hinode what happened and that Taro is Miyo. She takes Hinode to the cat world, where she gets him a mask so he can see what's there and he becomes half-cat (probably because he had no desire to be a cat, so it only half works?). With the help of some disgruntled former humans that the Mask Seller had cheated out of their human lifespans, the group rescues Miyo / she rescues them and they return to the human world. 

It's all very sweet and charming, though I suppose I should admit I have a quibble that it takes a lot of outside (adult) intervention for Miyo and Hinode to succeed, so in some ways, their character journeys feel a bit flat. It's not a huge disappointment, though. They were brave -- perhaps bravest when they confessed their feelings to each other. Or, in the wrap up montage at the end where Miyo is working to reconcile/understand her family and Hinode tells his mother he wants to be a potter like his grandad. 

The cat world in particular is enchanting and very interesting and visually stunning. The whole film is well done. I definitely did enjoy it, though I also think I probably wouldn't watch it again. Part of that might be that Miyo, especially in the beginning of the film, was SO over the top that you're, like, GIRL what are you doing? You seem like a crazy person. That settles down or becomes more understandable after a bit, but the first ten to twenty minutes of it she was so unrelentingly WTF that you're taken aback. At any rate, a good film and I would recommend it to people.