Cat Soup Analysis

The OVA Where Cute Cats go to Hell

After stumbling on the Cat Soup OVA completely by chance, I was expecting it to be something that was just kinda weird and would give me something to think about for the day.  Instead I think it rewired my brain chemistry.  But that’s okay, because it’s not every day you come across a piece of media with no definitive meaning.  There are repeated ideas and patterns throughout this thirty minute short, but when I looked at the comments it was a mix of people saying they didn’t understand the OVA or people who had their own theories, many of which were hugely different.  The uploader of the version I watched interpreted it as a depiction of the racism that Koreans and Chinese people face in Japan, and others in the comments looked for a more literal meaning, such as the theory of Nyatta drowning and then guiding his sister to the afterlife.  And I think that’s really special.  I tend to love surrealist works because they force you to really engage with them to figure them out, and there isn’t a right or wrong answer.  It’s fun to talk about differing interpretations with other people who’ve seen it, so I’d encourage anyone who has watched Cat Soup to share their interpretations or theories in the comments as well.  For now, I’d like to throw in my two cents.

First, I’m going to go through the events of the movie and talk about the symbolism that crops up.

Cat Soup opens with a shot at the bottom of the pool, and soon Nyatta enters the frame with a toy truck.  He puts it in the water to play with it, and then gets stuck and is unable to get out.  In this scene he is crossing a threshold, which is the water, and though he tries to go back, he can’t.  The next scene depicts Nyako, his sister, suffering from an illness, being able to do nothing but sleep.  She dies, and is taken away by a Jizō, which put simply is the Japanese interpretation of a Buddhist figure that is most known for guiding children through the afterlife.  However, Nyatta exits the pool and tries to follow the Jizō to take his sister’s soul back, but ends up splitting it in half, so when he returns the half of Nyako’s soul to her body, she is only a shell of a person.

There continues to be a lot of imagery of things being cut apart throughout the movie, which I believe is meant to parallel the fragmentation of Nyako’s soul.  There’s the circus act where the woman is cut apart into many pieces before a wizard magics her back together, which foreshadows Nyatta eventually being able to restore Nyako’s soul.  The circus sequence ends with a bird spitting up dazzling stars while being pumped with water, and it eventually bursts, flooding the whole world.  Due to the movie’s use of Buddhist figures, I believe it is not too far-fetched to take this as another religious reference, specifically the biblical flood.  Another repeated idea throughout the OVA is godlike figures changing the world in radical ways with no regard for the mortals living in it, such as the figure that rewinds and fast forwards time and the one that is seen eating the Earth near the end of the movie.  The biblical flood is used as a symbol of cleansing and rebirth, fitting in the context of Nyako’s situation.  With the two of them on the boat along with the pig, they could be seen as spiritually pure due to their childlike innocence.  This is a reflection of Nyako’s blank slate, as all she can do with half of her soul is walk around, drink, and eat for the most part.  She has not yet reached the constructive part of her rebirth, and the flood represents the destruction of her identity due to her split soul.  Nyatta takes the place of Noah within this metaphor, as he is responsible for the reconstruction of her soul, as Noah was responsible for the reconstruction of the human race.

More imagery of cutting up people is displayed when Nyatta steals a chunk of meat from the pig and cooks it, feeding it to both Nyako and the pig.  In this instance he is taking more from the pig than he is giving back, and he continues to do so when they all reach the desert.  The pig is noticeably more deflated, as he’s lost so much meat that his skin no longer fits him.  Nyatta hits him with a stick to form bumps on his head and cut them off for food, and the pig dies from this torment.  Nyatta then repeatedly beats the dead pig’s body as Nyako slowly and mindlessly mirrors the action.  Before the pig dies, he bites off Nyatta’s hand, reversing the dynamic of being eaten and becoming the one that consumes in his last moments.  This moment feels like a loss of innocence for Nyatta.  While Nyako did die, he refused to accept this reality, and tried to bring her back to life.  Now for the first time he bleeds, when before he was not disturbed by the sight of blood at all, possibly not understanding what it is.  He feels the pain he was previously inflicting and unaware of, and has to have his hand stitched back on.  After this Nyatta and Nyako go to a strange man’s home and eat there.  He burns a bird alive in front of them before serving it to them.  They eat and he gives them a house made of waffles for dessert, possibly a nod to Hansel and Gretel.  This reference would fit due to the neglect of Nyatta and Nyako’s parents, as they’re both seen ignoring Nyatta when he almost drowns and tries to get their attention afterward, and in the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel are abandoned by the parents due to their inability to care for them due to being unable to get enough food.  The scene where the man is eating with the cat siblings almost feels familial in nature despite the uneasy atmosphere of the whole thing.  Perhaps it reflects a nostalgia the cat siblings hold for their childhoods, as they are remembering the parents they left behind.  But when the man tries to cook them, they are thrust back into their harsh reality; their parents are gone and were possibly neglectful towards them.  Notably, Nyatta has been put into water (in this case soup broth) and is in danger of death due to an adult figure, just as he was when he got stuck in the pool while unsupervised.  They escape when the man returns to eat them while wearing bondage gear (???) and Nyakka cuts him up and puts him in the soup, returning the imagery of bodies being taken apart.  This demonstrates that Nyakka understands the threat of being eaten, and has come to understand what death is.

Nyatta and Nyako are back in the desert after escaping, and while looking for water they find an elephant made of water.  They drink from it, with Nyatta being playful in this regard and swimming around in the elephant while Nyako suckles the water from it.  But the heat begins to dry up the elephant, so Nyatta digs up more water to keep it alive.  At this point he has stopped only taking, he took half of Nyako’s soul from the Jizō, he took meat from the pig, he took food from the strange man, and is now giving back equal amounts of water to the elephant to make the relationship mutual rather than one-sided.  But he is only able to sustain the elephant for a short time, as there isn’t enough water in the desert.  This may be another element of foreshadowing for the end of the movie, when he restores Nyako’s soul but can only live an idyllic family life again for a short time before everyone around him vanishes.  When the water elephant dies, all Nyatta and Nyako can do is sit in shock before the desert is ripped away from under their feet, and they land on an ocean frozen by time.  In this moment, Nyatta has to confront death directly, and by extension the death of his sister.  The water elephant is another form of water, the threshold he crossed when he had to accept his sister’s death.  And now that threshold itself has been destroyed and cemented, the frozen ocean representing the frozen moment in time when he realized Nyako hadn’t overcome her illness.  Reality, depicted by Father Time or God or whatever you believe the white-robed figure to be, forces him to leave this moment and accept mortality.  Time fast forwards, aging Nyakka and Nyato and allowing them to greet death right before they are taken, and then time is reversed, bringing them back to infancy.  This allows Nyakka to become aware of the limits of his life, he has already aged past the time he was a baby, and cannot return to it, and nothing will stop his aging.  It is significant that this happens right before Nyakka and Nyato are returned to the ocean on the boat, and Nyakka finds the flower that he can use to restore Nyato’s soul.  Personally I don’t read this in a literal sense of him bringing her back to life, but in a metaphorical sense of the acceptance of death.  When Nyato is restored, she goes from the empty shell to being herself again, becoming more than a body that Nyakka has to take care of and carry with him.  When Nyato only has half her soul, she is a figure representing grief, the presence of her body but lack of her personality is a constant reminder of the person Nyakka has lost.  He carries her with him, trying to salvage the sister he once had, but only feels his grief.  Once he accepts her death, he can remember her for who she was as a person, and her death no longer burdens him.

The last scene of the movie juxtaposes Nyatta and Nyako having a peaceful dinner with their parents while a deity prepares to eat the earth.  Once the deity eats the earth, Nyatta goes to the bathroom and his family blips away.  He returns to find that they have disappeared, and he blips out of existence as well as the television displays static.  The television is the last object shown in the movie before it abruptly ends.  Despite Nyakka being able to accept Nyako’s death, that doesn’t change the fact that it’s inescapable.

What does this all mean though?

I think all the symbolism ultimately builds to the idea of Nyakka having to accept his sister’s death, and by extension his mortality.  He is trying to take her back, and can only bring back a piece of her, but keeps himself out of this process.  He takes from others, like the pig, with no concept of giving back or sharing until his hand is taken from him when the pig bites it off.  By being able to give back from those he takes, like the water elephant, he is leaving himself vulnerable.  It takes him effort to let go of his sister’s death and accept what has happened, so he must expend effort to reckon with the mortality of others around him.  He goes from beating up the pig without a second thought, even after it dies, to trying desperately to keep the water elephant alive.  Through his trying to maintain life, he is forced to understand mortality in a more deep, empathetic way, which allows him to ultimately accept his own.  It’s a scary reality, and one that by the end of the movie comes for him as well.  But his understanding of death is the very thing that allows him to emerge from the grief of Nyato’s death with a more mature understanding of the world around him.

Why does this matter?

The Cat Soup OVA was released in 2001, three years after the death of Chiyomi Hashiguchi, who was the Mangaka of the Cat Soup manga and official anime.  The manga and original anime were a dark comedy series, so the Cat Soup OVA does not seem to be another direct adaptation of the source material.  I was originally going to go into some detail about reading the Cat Soup OVA as a tribute, but honestly it didn’t quite sit right with me.  Maybe it is, but maybe it isn’t, and I feel assuming one way or another is presumptuous at best, and insensitive at worst.  At the end of the day, I do find there to be meaning and importance to the subject matter that I personally believe the OVA is trying to tackle, and would rather use this last note to appreciate not only Chiyomi Hashiguchi herself, but also the creators of the OVA for creating such an incredible work of art.