Reviews

The plot of cat soup is simple, but easy to miss without a small summary, so here is a quick one: a young girl kitten is bed ridden with illness, close to death. Her younger brother sees a spirit take his sister`s soul with it, and he fights to take the soul back. He only gets half of it, which is enough to keep her alive, but brain dead. They set off on a journey to find a flower that will return her to normal. I made the mistake of not reading a synopsis. Because the cats all look alike at first and there`s no voice acting to help distinguish them, I didn`t recognize what was going on. One thing to note is that the brother wears a green shirt and shorts while the sister wears a peach colored shirt and a skirt that looks a lot like shorts. You`ll figure this out eventually, but it sure makes a lot more sense if you know this from the get go (I thought the sister was a brother until a text bubble corrected me).

Cat Soup is a 30 minute mind trip. The whole journey is one largely unrelated piece of insanity after another. Like a mumbling senile man, it`s hard to translate what he`s saying with syntax and logic, but you often get the feeling that you kind of understand on some deeper, yet simpler level, what he`s trying to get at. Themes like nature, gluttony, time, god, and how disgustingly sick some people can be are represented. They`re there, but there`s no way I could articulate in sentence form some message that each scene was trying to convey. The film highlights these ideas viscerally instead of providing any philosophical insights.

Cat Soup doesn`t require a whole lot of dissection to appreciate. There`s certainly room for dissection if braving the vagueness of this silent film isn`t too daunting a task. The themes are all illustrated clearly, but Cat Soup never dwells. Those who love to deconstruct every detail will have plenty of fodder here, and the rest of us will probably come away with a primal understanding of what the film is trying to convey.

It`s easier on the viewer when the metaphors are direct. When the viewer can pick out a clear and pointed message like "be good to nature" or "life is precious," provided he makes the astute observations necessary to decode the symbolism. It almost adds a layer of satisfaction. On the other hand, pointed messages can often come off as pretentious, treating the viewer like a 5 year old listening to a fairy tale with a moral. Too often is the presentation of these messages unabashedly contrived, or overt. Cat Soup`s approach to its central theme of death is decidedly more emotional, which in one sense is more complex than a simple message, but because it tries to tug more at your heart strings than your higher thought processes, it`s in a different sense, simpler, more primal. While I would love to discuss it, describing it any further will surely spoil the experience. Like looking at a painting where you can trace the painter`s brush strokes, Cat Soup lets you trace the inspirational emotions that sparked the need to make this film.