Rent-a-neko
Let’s hope “Cesare deve morire” will be the next one. After all, having seen “Me and Orson Welles” I am even more interested in the play itself. Coming back to the topic, though, sometimes it’s just nice to watch something with almost no purpose but to heal.
Healing films are what I call these slow-paced fairytales in which nothing really happens. It’s basically a dream in which we would like to live, the kind that you never see except in Japanese culture. They are the perfect escapist movies to make you forget about the woes of everyday life, a subgroup of slice of life films. But while slice of life can be funny or tragic or even fairly realistic, these healing films never are. Subtle elements of humor may be present (such as the car/cat rental dream Sayoko has) but it is a very small element at best. To me, a healing film well done gives me the feeling that one should look at life in a different way and enjoy its pointless, beautiful details – that is how powerful they can be.
The whole purpose of “Rent-a-neko” is to look at cute cats doing cute things and see the protagonist walk through life in a lovely but somewhat airheaded manner. Needless to say that, compliant with the way slice of life material always is, nothing ever changes. Sayoko may continue living like that forever and in the particular universe this film is playing, it’s probably alright that way. She may feel loneliness and even grief over the death of her grandmother, but in the film we see that she is dealing with it in a positive manner thanks to the multitude of cats. I think that the structure of the film is quite nice and thoughtful with its repetitions and slight variations every time; They are evocative of the structure of poems yet creative in their own right.
The film makes me feel so glad that I have a little cat of my own to cuddle with. He doesn’t actually like to cuddle that much, but most times, he’d purr when he is being held and burying your head into his soft fur feels almost as healing as the movie. A film like that is definitely not for anyone (and you really have to be a cat lover), but it was definitely the right thing for me. It also makes me want to read “Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou”.
PS. Did you know that I really like cats with super fat tails, like Maru? Rodion has a skinny tail which greatly contributes to his elegant looks, but there is something nice about these very thick furry tails. Maybe it’s because they are cute?
Okay. WHY HAVEN’T I WATCHED THIS YET?! *___* I even remember being totally gay for the movie description last year, when Pixy posted it, but somehow I didn’t manage to follow my instincts in these past 12 months.
It has been rather hard to find until recently quite a few possibilities popped up. Now it’s also fully on Youtube, but with terrible subtitles (they are Google-translated from Spanish or something?) It definitely helped that most of the original dialogue was rather easy to understand, ahaha.
This movie = best cat movie ever… In fact, there aren’t very many great movies out there anyways.
I can only reiterate my recommendation, hunt it down!