'Catnapped' Is Weird and Wonderful
Plus: the news in animation.
Welcome! It’s Sunday — and that means a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s what we’re doing today:
1) A peek behind Catnapped (1995), a deeply underrated anime feature.
2) The world’s animation news.
Note for those just finding us: it’s free to join the 20,000+ readers who receive our newsletter by email every Sunday:
With that, here we go!
1 – Saying something
Even if you’ve never watched it, you might know it from the ads.
Catnapped, an obscure Japanese film from 1995, arrived stateside in the early years of America’s anime boom. Its surreal, unplaceable and slightly scary commercial (included on cassettes of Sailor Moon R: The Movie) raised questions. A lot of viewers didn’t buy the film to learn the answers.
But some did. And what awaited them was one of the wildest and most unique anime features of all time. “Catnapped brims with visual imagination,” wrote one American critic who gave it a chance.1
It’s about two kids, Toriyasu and Meeko (brother and sister), whose dog Papadoll gets stolen away to another world. That world is “Banipal Witt,” a phantasmagoric place ruled by cat-people. Toriyasu and Meeko quickly become cat-people themselves, and they face off against the evil Princess Bubulina, whose touch can turn almost anything into a balloon.
The result is very weird — but very fun. Director Takashi Nakamura has called it a story about the way that fantasy strengthens people in the real world. Like he said:
Kids live in a very circumscribed time and space, longing for the future and feeling uneasy. To survive in the world they share with adults, they must be protected and given power by their imagination. The hero, Toriyasu, feels empty as he grows up as an ordinary kid. His journey into the world of imagination to get back his dog also gives him back his childhood.2
Nakamura was a core animator on Akira (1988). Today, you might know him for his own short films, like The Portrait Studio or Bubu & Bubulina. They’re far removed from his Akira days — Nakamura now favors a cartoony and often demented approach. That’s also what you find in Catnapped, his first feature (embedded below).
By the time he did Catnapped, Nakamura had proved himself as one of Japan’s best animators. It went beyond Akira — he was key on Nausicaä (1984) and many more.3 His early directorial work Nightmare, part of the 1987 Robot Carnival anthology, was really an excuse to flex his animation skill.
It was what he liked. He’d been an animator since the ‘70s, and he planned to stay one. “I never thought of becoming a director,” he said. “Even when I worked on Akira, I did not think about it much. I always preferred to be an animator crafting movement.”4
But a few things happened. For one, he wasn’t crazy about Nightmare — or the anthology it was in. “After Robot Carnival was finished, I truly realized that just making things move is not enough. The only one in it that was properly established was [Hiroyuki] Kitakubo-kun’s, wasn’t it?” said Nakamura, referring to the short right before his. He felt an intent behind that one, something more than flashy animation for the sake of flashy animation.5
Then there was Akira itself. Nakamura saw it, in a way, as his breaking point. He came out the other end wanting to do more than fulfill another artist’s vision — he wanted to bring his own creativity to his work. That happened in Peter Pan & Wendy (1989), where he designed the characters and added to the story. He was hooked.
Nakamura’s episode of The Hakkenden (1990–1991) shows his mature style starting to appear. You could call it a darker, bloodier trial run for the visual ideas of Catnapped. But there’s quite a difference in spirit. Why go from adult animation to a family film? “I wanted to make a movie for children, so I did,” Nakamura said.
His concept sketches for Catnapped are dated as early as 1992, and they reveal how far he’d drifted from Akira. This artwork is bright, circus-like, psychedelic. And the characters are simplified, pushing back against the realism of Akira with cartooniness.
Nakamura was developing his own vision, informed by his personal taste and experiences. “I have memories of the anime I watched as a child, and I can’t cross that line, or rather I don’t want to cross it. I don’t find other cel pictures appealing,” he once said about the cartoony look.
With Catnapped, Nakamura tapped into the animation he grew up on — stuff like Astro Boy or Gigantor. As he put it:
When I directed this film it reminded me of my childhood. I felt the existence of the power of the world of imagination and adventure in many animation films and books, which made me stronger at that time.
It’s essentially what happens to Toriyasu in the film. Catnapped was meant to have the same effect on viewers — children and even adults (who still “need imagination to recover their childhood,” Nakamura said).
A mission statement from the Banipal Witt Production Committee described the film as a response to a problem: most art no longer stressed “the wonder of having dreams, the joy of adventure and the importance of courageously taking on challenges.” Catnapped aimed to fill this void. Seen that way, it’s like a warped, 1990s spin on Toei Doga’s commercial features from the ‘60s.6
Commercial or not, though, Catnapped was a sort of personal project. Nakamura was its director, co-writer, original creator, character designer and animation director. He storyboarded it solo — his detailed drawings were later printed as a 421-page book.7
The project started with a half-hour screenplay by Nakamura’s co-writer, Chiaki Konaka. From there, Nakamura heavily changed the story and expanded it to its final 77-minute runtime. It became a feature film. “So I can’t say that I was very involved,” Konaka noted. He’s credited, but the writing was mostly Nakamura’s.
Basically, Nakamura was in charge of Catnapped to an almost Miyazaki-like degree. He’d admired Miyazaki’s all-encompassing vision for years, having seen it in action on Nausicaä. “Before [Nausicaä], I was only focused on the portions that I drew when I watched a screening of a title I was involved in, but I enjoyed the content so much that I forgot about my sakuga, which was simply shocking to me,” Nakamura said.
Miyazaki had made a complete film — one with something to convey. It was about more than “just making things move.” Nausicaä long remained Nakamura’s favorite Miyazaki film, and it had a deep impact on him. In 2002, he cited Akira Kurosawa and David Lynch as influences, but admitted, “If you confine the question to which animation directors I have been influenced by, it’s definitely Mr. Miyazaki.”8
Describing his own views on directing, Nakamura once said:
As an animator, simple haphazard action and the like are also fun. However, as a director, I believe your role becomes going after the emotions that are there. The director has to think about how people’s feelings can be animated, how to create a rhythm by camera blocking and what colors should be used. Directing has its appeal and fun in accurately communicating the intended emotion to the audience.
That said, like Miyazaki, Nakamura couldn’t make a feature film alone. He relied on others to make his vision for Catnapped a reality.
Take the animators, who did a lot with a little. Catnapped has eye-grabbing movement — Bubulina’s hypnosis scenes, or the famous transformation around 27 minutes in. But the team put life and fun even into shots that have only a few frames. Cartoony expressiveness is the mandate, and cliches are kept to a minimum. Triangle Staff of Serial Experiments Lain fame produced the film, with animators like Hiroyuki Okiura (Jin-Roh) and Hideki Hamasu (The Boy and the Heron, Princess Kaguya) involved.
An even more essential crewmember was art director Shinji Kimura, who painted all the backgrounds himself. He unified the look of the film.9 And there was composer Shigeaki Saegusa — whose score is as bright and imaginative as the visuals, and brings the film to life. Here’s what he wrote about the project:
Cats seem to have completely different values to humans, so we feel their whole world is a little bit strange. For example, look at the many cats in literature, like Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, or the cat Michael in Makoto Kobayashi’s comic. A cat in long boots, in Charles Perrault’s story, becomes active in the human world to prove his loyalty to his master. And in my opinion, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, is the first musical to express a real cat world, without humans. I took charge of the music for this animation thinking of all these things, and started by imagining Toriyasu and Meeko jumping round the cat world like kittens — though of course because they are really human children their actions are a bit removed from real kittens, you know! — and being helped by cats. Children will see that this is a completely different cat story to the ordinary ones, but it has some wonderful things to say. I think it’s very relaxing and enjoyable, and I hope you’ll feel the same.
Catnapped (its Japanese name literally translates as Suddenly! Catland Banipal Witt) had a limited premiere in 1995. But there wasn’t a ton of fanfare. It hit theaters again in 1998, and got a LaserDisc release through Bandai. The film drew enough notice to secure a small cult following and an American release.
That American release is rare and expensive now, though — and, even today, there’s no Japanese DVD. The best Catnapped version seems to be a French one from the late 2000s. This was never a blockbuster movie.
Nakamura did get to put out a second feature, A Tree of Palme, in 2002. It was produced by Taro Maki, who’d been on Catnapped. Maki is known for saving Satoshi Kon’s career after the failure of Perfect Blue, taking a big risk with Millennium Actress. “I really enjoyed working with Takashi Nakamura,” Maki said about Catnapped in 1996.10 Palme turned out even weirder and more alienating, though, and it wasn’t huge.
Which is all to say that Ghibli-style success proved elusive for Nakamura. He’d finally figured out what he wanted to say with his work — something that really came from him — but his vision was niche. He’s stayed committed to it anyway. Ideas that he explored in Catnapped have reappeared in his animation for decades, most clearly in Bubu & Bubulina from 2015.
This stuff is too odd for some people — like the Catnapped ad in front of Sailor Moon, it doesn’t hook everyone. But the hyper-specificity of Nakamura’s voice is also what makes it so interesting. You can tell at a glance that Catnapped is a little different. As weird as it is, it has its own identity, and something to convey.
2 – Newsbits
In America, Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki appeared in a prerecorded message for the Academy, amid the lead-up to the Oscar ceremony next Sunday.
In the week’s most unexpected news item, John Pomeroy (The Secret of NIMH) has an account on China’s Bilibili platform, where he’s drawn viral attention lately for his video on the animation of Clockie from the game Honkai: Star Rail.
British author Helen McCarthy says she’s preparing a new edition of her seminal book Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (1999). “The world changed, the profile of Studio Ghibli changed, Miyazaki has changed and I’ve changed,” she explained. “I’m like a kid at the beach. Every day is so much fun.”
For those into early American cartoons — researcher Devon Baxter has made public Fleischer’s Animated News, an internal newsletter from the 1930s.
Fans have reanimated the first part of Treasure Island (1988), the classic cartoon from Ukraine. You can see it here, and the list of participants here.
Disney released Iwájú by Kugali Media this week. The studio’s co-founder, Tolu Olowofoyeku (Nigeria), says that Jennifer Lee discovered them in 2019 — after another Kugali founder told the BBC, “We’re going to kick Disney’s ass in Africa.” It caught her eye, and she set things in motion.
In America, there’s another deep behind-the-scenes article on Across the Spider-Verse, this time focusing on its character design process.
Dragonkeeper, produced in Spain and China, just had its premiere. It’s been a journey — as reported by elDiario and El País, the film survived a change of directors, two separate lockdowns and much, much more. See the trailer here.
In Japan, there’s a really long new interview with Kazutaka Miyatake (Macross, Gundam, Yamato) about his career in mechanical design for anime.
Lastly, we wrote about Reiko Okuyama, the Japanese animation legend.
See you again soon!
That critic was Charles Solomon, writing in the Los Angeles Times (December 15, 2000).
From the magazine AnimeFX (March 1996), one of our major sources today. The statements from Nakamura and Saegusa had appeared earlier in an August 1995 issue of Kinema Junpo (#1167), which we also referenced.
Among Nakamura’s great early contributions as an animator was Otomo’s Order to Stop Construction (1986). Nakamura wasn’t just its animation director, but the key animator of a large number of its scenes, including the climactic ambush (as confirmed by Toshiyuki Inoue on Twitter).
From Nakamura’s interview in The Portrait Studio Archive, an excellent book by E-SAKUGA. We cited it several times here.
Nakamura made this remark about Robot Carnival in an interview about The Portrait Studio, archived here. (Archive links may be broken in email, but work on the website.)
The quote from the Banipal Witt Production Committee comes from the booklet to the (very) recently unearthed OST to Catnapped.
Details about the storyboard come from Triangle Staff’s old site.
From a 2002 Q&A session with Nakamura.
Maki said this in an interview with AnimeLand (July–August 1996).
Never heard of 'Catnapped!' Looks very original. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!
I thought I recognized that art style from Nightmare and Tree of Palme (an uneven film I like quite a bit). Nakamura has really great character design throughout all his features/projects. Thanks for another great dive into something off the beaten path.