A Whisker Away.
Genres: comedy, supernatural, drama, romance.
Directed by: Satou Junichi (directed the Aria series, Princess Tutu, and many others, mostly kids shows).
Studio: Colorido (Penguin highway and Burn the Witch, not many popular works overall).
The movie was released in June 2020, you can watch it on Netflix.
Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu (aka A Whisker Away) is a love story about Muge (a teenage girl too cheerful she almost comes off as a maniac) who falls in love with Hinode (a typical bland anime teenage boy), it's a one-sided love but Muge is not afraid of flirting with her love interest and voicing her true feelings, even though he keeps ignoring her all the time.
Muge and Hinode's interactions are cute at times and cringe inducing at others, but the movie adds a certain twist that makes things more interesting, where Muge gains the ability to transform into a cat, a cat that Hinode seems to like, unaware that it is actually Muge.
The first two thirds of the movie are about each of the two characters struggling with family problems, and Muge keeps having this talking cat (who gave her the power to transform) appearing in front of her trying to convince her to give up her human form and just live the rest of her life as a cat.
Now this is a cool premise, Muge can't cope well with her own problems so she turns into a cat as a way to escape from them, you'd expect the third act to take this issue seriously and focus on teaching her and Hinode a lesson, well, it kinda does that, but it comes with a big tonal shift.
The third act begins with things escalating quickly and leading to the main conflict, and then suddenly something bizarre happens, it feels like they took a completely different movie and slapped it on top of this one, the movie felt like a shoujo anime with some supernatural elements up to this point, and now it's a Ghibli fantasy with talking cats and giant trees, also a bunch of new characters were introduced at once only so they can have the cliche' of appearing out of nowhere to save the main characters at the end, everything was rushed and felt out of place.
The main antagonist is just a one-dimensional bad guy and has absolutely no reason to do the bad things that he does, he felt like more of a plot device than an actual character, honestly you could remove him from the movie and make it so Muge's transformation was more of a curse than a deal, and nothing would've changed.
Speaking of, the way Muge overcomes the main conflict was underwhelming, the whole idea of the talking cat trying to convince her to give up her human form felt like a similar scenario to "making a deal with the devil", wherein you know if she agrees to it it'll be her own fault, so she has to redeem herself and fix things on her own, but the writers don't have the guts to do that, instead she's just forced into the situation and in the end she gets saved by others without doing anything herself.
The music choice felt odd at times, some scenes looked like they should've been more serious, but the music gave them a lighter tone, I usually like it when this happens (as I don't like forced drama), but when the final act feels like a Disney movie, and the movie having been more serious before, it's hard to take things seriously anymore or care about what happens to the characters.
I'd elaborate more, but I'm not a music expert, so make of that what you will.
The art is pretty good, everything from the backgrounds and colors to the way the cats are drawn, this is the first time in anime when people look at a cat and express how cute it looks, and it actually looks realistically cute and not just like every other cat in the movie, it also adds more reason why Hinode was so fond of Muge's cat form.
The animation is also pretty good, every time Muge jumps around and does reckless things you can feel the weight behind her movements, although this is something most quality animated movies have nowadays, it's more apparent here because of how energetic the main character is.
Despite me making fun of Muge earlier, I find her very likeable, romance anime writers need to take notes and make more fun and cheerful characters like her, to be honest I didn't care much about the rest of the cast (especially not Hinode), but it's fine because Muge managed to carry the whole movie on her own.
Overall this is a fun movie, I give it 7/10 (which is a pretty high rating in my book), honestly I could've given it a lower rating since I'm more bothered by the issues I talked about, but I didn't want to be too harsh on this movie, because I know if you manage your expectations you can enjoy it for what it is.
Thank you for reading, I hope this was helpful and your feedback is appreciated, have a good day.