To me, Cat Soup became a lot easier to understand after I learned more about the people who made it and with that I do not mean Satou and Yuasa. Both are brilliant creators, but in this case, they serve as designer and craftsmen, but the themes it explored and the characters it used go deeper. This OVA is based on the manga by Nekojiru. Nekojiru originally was a woman named Hashiguchi Chiyomi who was talked into creating manga by her husband, Yamano Hajime, editor of the esteemed arthouse manga magazine Garo(If you ever are on the lookout for thought provoking manga, look for something that was published in Garo. No other manga magazine had such a strong track record in terms of quality as this one). From all the information I could find about her, she was a mentally rather unstable person. Prone to extreme mood swings and an extremely blunt and rather uncaring attitude that would've felt inapropriate to most even outside of japan, she most notably of all was very dissociated from her surroundings. There were very few things she ever seemed to care for: Certain Video Games, the music of Aphex Twin and her husband pretty much were the only topics that would produce any noteworthy reaction from her. Aside from that most things, especially other people were something she could not connect with at all. Some people have theorised that she might've been on the autistic spectrum and while it seems plausible to me, we have no way of knowing. As mentioned before, around 1990 she started drawing manga, always featuring cats. Those manga would mirror her own experiences and opinions on things with herself as Nyako in the role of the protagonist(This is important: She is the older sister! We do not know anything about her actual family, but her colleage and friend of her husband Yoshiaki Yoshinaga believed that she must have had a little brother who could be Nyatta). Those manga are fascinating in a very disturbing way. Most of the time it is about this family of cats just being utter jerks to their surrounding. They insult, bully and often enough murder the people and pigs around them, for minor reasons or none at all, all of it interspersed with very nostalgic moments of familial love and occasional bouts of surrealism. Those are rather easy to explain: Nekojirou and her husband experimented with psychedelic drugs while traveling to india and those moments were just her recalling what she saw, nothing more. The overarching theme always seemed to be the large distance between the cats and the rest of the world. The cats don't understand the people around them, they don't like them and wish that they'd just disappear. The manga were incredibly successful and turned into the flagship series for the at this time already struggling Garo(experimental manga were very popular in the 60s and early 70s, but by 1990 they were already on the way out in terms of popularity; Garo stopped publishing in 2002, one year after the end of the Nekojiru Manga) so Nekojirou worked restlessly on the manga, the first anime adaption, which is very true to the source material and on lots and lots of merchandise ideas, just to keep the business alive. This went on until 1998 when she suddenly committed suicide. She certainly had her fair share of troubles, but the reasons for her suicide are nevertheless unknown. There are many rumors regarding it, but given that I couldn't find any verification for them, I choose to not repeat them here. Despite her death, Nekojiru manga went on for a while, as her husband continued to release material under the moniker of Nekojiru-Y, with the final volume releasing around the same time as the OVA. The OVA, as you mentioned is mostly original work. Some themes of the original manga Nekojiru Udon were mirrored and the circus scene was taken from a later work, but aside from that it is material made up by Yuasa. Nekojiru-Y had very little involvement in the OVA, aside from one or two talks with Yuasa. This context creates a good understanding of what Cat Soup is supposed to be: a farewell to Nekojiru and the world she lived in. Nekojiru is dead, but her other half, Nyako is still alive, as Y is still working on completing her work. In a way, both Y and Yuasa try to keep her alive in a way, but in the end it is bound to fail, as god, the one who could truly bring her back does not care at all. There is still something of a happy end, as with the final Volume of the manga and the release of the OVA itself(yes, I believe that the OVA is referencing itself!) there is a moment where everything comes together so to speak, but it is still an ending, one that's supposed to be ultimate, so Nekojiru's world gets switched of, one character after another, with the viewers access to her world being the last thing to get switched of and Nekojiru finally resting completely.
I tried to watch some of the original anime and read the manga, and I liked what I'd saw! I'd probably be tempted to make a video of I get a chance to finish it! The story of the original creators is heart breaking and one of the things that sold me was how they got the blessing of the husband (or brother?) It's been a while lol. Thank you for the comment :)
Cats have nine lives. I believe Nyaata drowns in the tub, but is still alive, eventually... nonetheless it feels like Cat Soup is better off to be something to be discussed and watched than interpreted. It very much reminds me of Paperhouse, a horror film (with 0 flashbacks but significantly more religion) that I begrudgingly watched for an English class a while back and ended up liking very much. Many thanks for continuing to film & edit together these 20-minute chronicles of videos.
I love Paperhouse. One of the best dark fantasy films to capture the feeling of a dream. Too bad it only got a vhs release in the U.S. A new blu ray release came out in the U.K.
It's good to see more analysis videos being made on it and not let it gather dust. Having read quite a few of the original comics, it made the experience more fulfilling. One can see where some of the visuals came from (like eating lumps and the circus with the great wizard), while also slowly gathering context that might just make it all a little more clear. Very enjoyable overall.
I'll be honest I kind of just picked out of a bag of suggestions at random and was so blown away. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about it, I'll for sure check out the comics!
@@jazzandhisgrowinggroup That would be cool. I think that I've seen very little of either the comics or the other animated show that adapts them beforehand myself, at least before watching the movie. The comics might be slightly hard to find, but there are actual translations of them out there. They have a darker tone that, while present in the movie, feels in the forefront in the comics themselves, so some don't enjoy them as much in comparison. Still, the short stories presented together do add up to something I found them to be special to me. Hopefully, you'll at enjoy them also, at least somewhat, if not as much.
Jazz and his growing group of Very Real friends the boys drank too much too quickly and things got out of hand. Nobody was disappointed I’m the designated “find weird shit to watch” guy and I’ve shown Masaaki Yuasa stuff to them before. Yuasa is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors and watching this for the first time was great vid man.
Something I still have a hard time figuring out are the parallels between the circus section and the rest of the film. The man in the white robes created a fish, elephant, and chair, which all appeared in later sections, but I'm not sure what symbolism there is supposed to be there. The fish was on the boat, the elephant was in the desert (I don't actually remember where the chair showed up later) and the whale that was the logo for the circus showed up when time was stopped. I can't say I've looked up a lot of reviews, but I've seen a few and none of them mention those. Do you have any thoughts as to whether there is any meaning in them?
![⭐ฮิตในTikTok!! ( มะมะมะหมูเด้ง MooDeng ) Ver. แดนซ์ ReMix BY [ ดีเจกิต รีมิกซ์ ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4noyAoMa7bQ/mqdefault.jpg)
To me, Cat Soup became a lot easier to understand after I learned more about the people who made it and with that I do not mean Satou and Yuasa. Both are brilliant creators, but in this case, they serve as designer and craftsmen, but the themes it explored and the characters it used go deeper. This OVA is based on the manga by Nekojiru. Nekojiru originally was a woman named Hashiguchi Chiyomi who was talked into creating manga by her husband, Yamano Hajime, editor of the esteemed arthouse manga magazine Garo(If you ever are on the lookout for thought provoking manga, look for something that was published in Garo. No other manga magazine had such a strong track record in terms of quality as this one).
From all the information I could find about her, she was a mentally rather unstable person. Prone to extreme mood swings and an extremely blunt and rather uncaring attitude that would've felt inapropriate to most even outside of japan, she most notably of all was very dissociated from her surroundings. There were very few things she ever seemed to care for: Certain Video Games, the music of Aphex Twin and her husband pretty much were the only topics that would produce any noteworthy reaction from her. Aside from that most things, especially other people were something she could not connect with at all. Some people have theorised that she might've been on the autistic spectrum and while it seems plausible to me, we have no way of knowing.
As mentioned before, around 1990 she started drawing manga, always featuring cats. Those manga would mirror her own experiences and opinions on things with herself as Nyako in the role of the protagonist(This is important: She is the older sister! We do not know anything about her actual family, but her colleage and friend of her husband Yoshiaki Yoshinaga believed that she must have had a little brother who could be Nyatta). Those manga are fascinating in a very disturbing way. Most of the time it is about this family of cats just being utter jerks to their surrounding. They insult, bully and often enough murder the people and pigs around them, for minor reasons or none at all, all of it interspersed with very nostalgic moments of familial love and occasional bouts of surrealism. Those are rather easy to explain: Nekojirou and her husband experimented with psychedelic drugs while traveling to india and those moments were just her recalling what she saw, nothing more. The overarching theme always seemed to be the large distance between the cats and the rest of the world. The cats don't understand the people around them, they don't like them and wish that they'd just disappear.
The manga were incredibly successful and turned into the flagship series for the at this time already struggling Garo(experimental manga were very popular in the 60s and early 70s, but by 1990 they were already on the way out in terms of popularity; Garo stopped publishing in 2002, one year after the end of the Nekojiru Manga) so Nekojirou worked restlessly on the manga, the first anime adaption, which is very true to the source material and on lots and lots of merchandise ideas, just to keep the business alive. This went on until 1998 when she suddenly committed suicide.
She certainly had her fair share of troubles, but the reasons for her suicide are nevertheless unknown. There are many rumors regarding it, but given that I couldn't find any verification for them, I choose to not repeat them here.
Despite her death, Nekojiru manga went on for a while, as her husband continued to release material under the moniker of Nekojiru-Y, with the final volume releasing around the same time as the OVA.
The OVA, as you mentioned is mostly original work. Some themes of the original manga Nekojiru Udon were mirrored and the circus scene was taken from a later work, but aside from that it is material made up by Yuasa. Nekojiru-Y had very little involvement in the OVA, aside from one or two talks with Yuasa.
This context creates a good understanding of what Cat Soup is supposed to be: a farewell to Nekojiru and the world she lived in. Nekojiru is dead, but her other half, Nyako is still alive, as Y is still working on completing her work. In a way, both Y and Yuasa try to keep her alive in a way, but in the end it is bound to fail, as god, the one who could truly bring her back does not care at all. There is still something of a happy end, as with the final Volume of the manga and the release of the OVA itself(yes, I believe that the OVA is referencing itself!) there is a moment where everything comes together so to speak, but it is still an ending, one that's supposed to be ultimate, so Nekojiru's world gets switched of, one character after another, with the viewers access to her world being the last thing to get switched of and Nekojiru finally resting completely.
I tried to watch some of the original anime and read the manga, and I liked what I'd saw! I'd probably be tempted to make a video of I get a chance to finish it!
The story of the original creators is heart breaking and one of the things that sold me was how they got the blessing of the husband (or brother?) It's been a while lol.
Thank you for the comment :)
Cats have nine lives. I believe Nyaata drowns in the tub, but is still alive, eventually... nonetheless it feels like Cat Soup is better off to be something to be discussed and watched than interpreted. It very much reminds me of Paperhouse, a horror film (with 0 flashbacks but significantly more religion) that I begrudgingly watched for an English class a while back and ended up liking very much. Many thanks for continuing to film & edit together these 20-minute chronicles of videos.
.... It was so obvious, I'll give paper house a watch! It's too much fun to stop :)
I love Paperhouse. One of the best dark fantasy films to capture the feeling of a dream. Too bad it only got a vhs release in the U.S. A new blu ray release came out in the U.K.
It's good to see more analysis videos being made on it and not let it gather dust. Having read quite a few of the original comics, it made the experience more fulfilling. One can see where some of the visuals came from (like eating lumps and the circus with the great wizard), while also slowly gathering context that might just make it all a little more clear. Very enjoyable overall.
I'll be honest I kind of just picked out of a bag of suggestions at random and was so blown away. I couldn't keep my mouth shut about it, I'll for sure check out the comics!
@@jazzandhisgrowinggroup That would be cool. I think that I've seen very little of either the comics or the other animated show that adapts them beforehand myself, at least before watching the movie.
The comics might be slightly hard to find, but there are actual translations of them out there. They have a darker tone that, while present in the movie, feels in the forefront in the comics themselves, so some don't enjoy them as much in comparison. Still, the short stories presented together do add up to something I found them to be special to me. Hopefully, you'll at enjoy them also, at least somewhat, if not as much.
Getting the boys together to watch cat soup tonight
Also nice shirt
Tell me how them boys like the dark comedy that is cat soup.
Thank you
Jazz and his growing group of Very Real friends the boys drank too much too quickly and things got out of hand. Nobody was disappointed I’m the designated “find weird shit to watch” guy and I’ve shown Masaaki Yuasa stuff to them before. Yuasa is quickly becoming one of my favorite directors and watching this for the first time was great vid man.
such an underrated channel man
Thank you very much :)
Yo dude, thanks for this video, i wouldn’t have seen cat soup if it weren’t for you. 7th time and counting :)
Glad I could introduce you lol! Enjoy a happy life together.
Something I still have a hard time figuring out are the parallels between the circus section and the rest of the film. The man in the white robes created a fish, elephant, and chair, which all appeared in later sections, but I'm not sure what symbolism there is supposed to be there. The fish was on the boat, the elephant was in the desert (I don't actually remember where the chair showed up later) and the whale that was the logo for the circus showed up when time was stopped. I can't say I've looked up a lot of reviews, but I've seen a few and none of them mention those. Do you have any thoughts as to whether there is any meaning in them?
Art discussion on twin peaks?
It's not a show I've watched on my own, but I'll give it a few seasons!
Where's the art? I only see the work of God. What click bait this video is.
You've been baited foolish boy
:)