Animation Defenestration: The one with a cat, a robot and an alien that's animated

 

Title: Lily CAT

What Year?: 1987

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

I’m back with another installment of this feature, and it takes me to what I really meant to start with, 1980s animation. I have commented previously, especially in my review of Rock And Rule, that the 1980s tends to get overshadowed by the psychedelic weirdness of the 1960s and ‘70s. Yet, “psychedelic” animation still had the underlying predictability of a real trend (one which can in fact be traced well before 1950), and the same can be said of “adult” animation from the 1990s onward. By comparison, the ‘80s were a transitional period where experimentation was the rule more than the exception, with all the strange dead ends that go with it. And if one movie embodies all the good, bad and ugly of the decade, it’s the semi-obscure little offering under consideration here. I present Lily CAT, a vanguard of the anime invasion, and like many forerunners, it’s just weird.

Our story begins with a ship travelling through space with a crew of stock characters and grab-bag supporting roles. We learn that they have volunteered to travel on a 40-year round trip spent in suspended animation. Among them are a crusty captain now centuries old, a sympathetic medical student, a generic damsel who brought her cat along for the ride, and a tough-guy type who doesn’t seem to care whether he has a gun. The captain receives a transmission warning that there are two impostors in their midst, presumed to be criminals trying to outlive their pursuers, but nobody knows who. Meanwhile, the ship has taken on a strange alien organism that quickly begins feeding on the cast. As the creature grows, the survivors must put aside their differences to survive. But the greatest threat may be a robot sent to replace them!

Lily CAT was a Japanese animated film made by Studio Pierrot, with anime veteran Hisayuki Toriumi credited as director. The film is believed to have been based on both Alien and Aliens, with further apparent influence from the 1982 version of The Thing. The original Japanese film was reportedly 80 minutes long, while an English-language version was cut down to 67 minutes. The western/ English version was one of many “dubs” by Carl Macek for Streamline Pictures,  with voice acting by Mike Reynolds, Bob Bergen and The Ghost In The Shell’s Tom Wyner. Information on the contemporary release and distribution of either version is extremely limited at the time of this writing, though the English version has been dated to 1994. The 67-minute/ dubbed version is currently available digitally, including free streaming on several platforms. Availability of the Japanese version cannot be easily confirmed.

For my experiences, I first caught wind of this one while going through Alien knockoffs and runnerups for Space 1979 (see.. Inseminoid?). I gave it a viewing early on and came back to it several times thereafter, but never found it suitable for my purposes. Among other things, I wasn’t satisfied connection that it owed that much to Alien, outside of a shared body of concepts that could easily be traced to older sources. It got me pondering further whether Japanese sci fi and animation have a fundamentally different status than their American counterparts. There was certainly never anything like the “moral guardian” outrages that turned western animation into a ghetto. While we now know the kaiju genre ended up in a comparable kiddie-fare rut, it at least remained by all indications something the “mainstream” paid attention to. What this movie offers first and foremost is a glimpse of what might have been if it hadn’t taken hits like Star Wars and Alien for a genre to be taken seriously. The answer, it turns out, is movies that could be competent without striving to be that good.

At this point, we can go to the pros/ cons format. Most of the good points come out just in the concept work. To me personally, the most impressive element is the ship, which is a far too rare example of a vessel that looks “cool” while still making sense. Particularly noteworthy is the absence of the pseudorealistic convolutions of the Star Wars fleet. Also impressive is the development of the suspended-animation concept and its implications for individuals and society, played out particularly in a genuinely moving monologue from the captain. In this respect, the movie builds on Aliens as much as Alien, and after the many odd coincidences I have uncovered with “runnerups”, I’m willing to grant reasonable doubt whether the story was conceived independently. Finally, there is the surreal and absolutely terrifying monster, which we really only see a few times. What I find most striking is that, for all the talk about this being a knockoff, it is in fact quite distinct and to my instincts definitely Japanese in look and feel. It’s enough to make me wonder if this is another case of Japan not so much ripping off the west as taking back what was theirs in the first place.

The cons, on the other hand, inevitably entangle with the edited dub and the problematic treatment of Japanese animation in general. Of course, it’s very regrettable that the Japanese version isn’t available for comparison, and I won’t presume to judgement on its creators. At a certain point, however, a reviewer has to work with what we have, and I simply can’t convince myself that 13 more minutes would make the difference between what’s here and a masterpiece that might have been. The cracks definitely show in the story, which conspicuously draws out the cops-and-robbers subplot for no good reason only to wrap it up with pointless melodrama. (And why bring handcuffs on a starship, but not your own gun?) I find the faults even more glaring in the animation itself. As already noted, the animators are top-notch at portraying machines and creatures, but the human characters and for that matter the cat fall into “uncanny valley” territory well before there was CGI to blame. At best, they look pleasantly bland; at worst, they are awkward and unaccountably unnatural, particularly the one or two who are supposed to be neither “white” nor Asian. In light of this, I can’t avoid the suspicion that the “dub” might actually be an improvement, particularly with Reynolds’ voice work factored in.

After all that, I’m genuinely stumped for the “one scene”. I’m going with the opening, which starts with the luminous silhouette of the cat. We then jump to a view of a space station and the departing starship, which looks like nothing so much as skyscraper turned sideways. We then move to the interior, where we meet the characters, some of them interesting. The big foreshadowing is when a lady introduced as the daughter of an executive reveals that she brought her cat along. And this is a problem I keep niggling with. From what we learn later, the cat could already be a synthetic replacement, perhaps orchestrated by her family without her knowledge. But then other intervening scenes imply that the cat starts as an animal real enough to be absorbed by the creature. The real question is, why was it decided to present the cat as a central figure in the first place? Of course, we had Jonesy in Alien, but this is like retitling the movie The Cat, and it’s still a bait-and-switch for what’s really a limited element of the story. This is one thing I will allow might have made more sense in the original cut, but I’m stretching goodwill in far too many areas already.

In closing, the one thing I have left to say is that this is a movie I probably would have given a better rating if I had reviewed it sooner.  I will further concede that this is a case of putting a film to more scrutiny than it was intended to take. Even in the 1990s, most people experienced movies as a trip to the theater or a weekend video rental. Anime was subject to an even lower bar, more likely to be encountered from an airing on TV than in a home-video format you could scrutinize at leisure. With all these things factored in, I still can’t justify giving this film a better rating than ones I was already hard on, particularly Wizards. My usual caveat remains that even 1 of 4 in the ratings scale I use here is a film worth watching. But what it’s most noteworthy as is a movie that laid the way for much better things.