Stream It Or Skip It: ‘A Whisker Away’ on Netflix, an Anime in Which a Girl Transforms Into a Cat to Escape Her Troubles

Holy cats — get a load of this pun: New Netflix anime film A Whisker Away is about a girl who can transform into a cat, and doing so too often threatens to whisk her away from the life she knew. Sure, our groaning is audible, but the literal translation of its Japanese title is Wanting to Cry, I Pretend to be a Cat, so the pun is clearly the lesser of two evils here. So will this fanciful fantasy whisk us away, or just leaving us wanting to cry?

A WHISKER AWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Our protagonist is Miyo (Mirai Shida). She’s a junior-high schooler with an overly exuberant spirit that some would find endearing, and others, obnoxious. At school, she’s known as “Miss Ultra Gaga and Enigmatic” — a name that surely suffers in translation — or “Muge” for short. So, yes, she’s an outcast, with one close friend, Yoji (Susumu Chiba), and a boy she not-so-secretly loves, Hinode (Natsuki Hanae). Her obsession over Hinode is enthusiastic, possibly out of control. Everyone else at school, she envisions as lifeless scarecrows shuffling through the halls. Her parents are divorced; her mother is an occasional presence in her life; she lives with her father and his girlfriend, Kaoru (Ayako Kawasumi), a warm woman who gets Miyo’s cold shoulder.

One night, she quarrels with her mother and wanders off, muttering “I hope the world ends soon” while walking over a bridge, which is troublingly nihilistic for a kid. She encounters a strange man with a wide Cheshirian grin; from him, she acquires a cat mask that changes her into a little white kitten every time she puts it on. It’s temporary, at least initially. She sneaks out every night, using her new cat-self to get close to Hinode, who appreciates the company of a purring fuzzball, because who wouldn’t, besides the allergic and total cretins?

This, of course, solves nothing and complicates everything. Her human self is still a puzzlement to Hinode, and it’s only a matter of time until her father and Kaoru realize that she’s sneaking out for long stretches of time. As a cat, she encounters the weird and possibly sinister “Mask Vendor” in his cat form, who taunts her like a villain with an ulterior motive. Hmm. Reality and whatever-the-cat-thing-is starting to blur for Miyo, who wonders if the litter box life is truly the one she wants to lead instead of her bummer of a human existence.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The movie’s languid pace and elegant animation reveals a serious Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki influence — The Cat Returns obviously, My Neighbor Totoro less so.

Performance Worth Watching: The Mask Vendor looks like Totoro if Totoro was a cat instead of, um, a grinning, snoring raccoon-bear-rabbit?

Memorable Dialogue: The Mask Seller shares an unfortunate truth about being feline: “Cats don’t need toilet paper. We clean ourselves with our tongue. It’s eco-friendly.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: A Whisker Away ambitiously tackles Miyo’s arrested development, suggesting she’s frozen at the age she was when her parents split. She clearly doesn’t want to deal with the pain of abandonment she feels from her mother, and her would-be stepmom has the unenviable task of cracking that hard, slippery nut. So Miyo escapes reality by intensely fantasizing lovey-dovey scenes featuring her and Hinode, or indulges the in-between by wandering the borough as a kitten with her consciousness inside.

The film fleshes out Hinode nicely — he yearns to be a potter like his grandfather, but his family’s workshop studio is on the brink of closing. His father isn’t around either. A kitten is a nice companion for him, and he could clearly use a friend. But he doesn’t know what to do with all the overbearingly positive attention he receives from Miyo, who likely doesn’t realize how very catlike she can be as a human — affectionate one moment, prickly the next.

So A Whisker Away is a contemplative and earnest movie dappled with melancholy, its out-there (although maybe not too far out-there for anime?) fantasy elements rendering it a more imaginative riff on the usual growing-up-is-hard-to story. Although it’s lovely to look at, the film tends to needlessly linger narratively, aiming for the tonal elegance that’s a hallmark of the better Ghibli features, but not quite hitting the mark. It does, however, address adolescent depression and awkwardness in a meaningful way, and concludes with a lovingly animated, surreal adventure into a World of Cats that wisely doesn’t try to explain the great and mysterious nature of the feline. Because trying to know the unknowable is such mighty folly.

Our Call: STREAM IT. A Whisker Away has enough thematic and visual depth and beauty to cross over from anime superfans to general audiences. Unless you’re one of those dog people.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream A Whisker Away on Netflix