§ Overview
One day, a virus spread that, for some reason, turns people into cats. If a cat is infected, it only needs to touch and lick a person to turn it into a cat.
The remaining humans are trying to fight back, and this includes Kunagi and Kaoru.
§ Notes
1. 'Nyaight of the Living Cat' is a parody of zombie movies. The clue is in the name, a wordplay on the film franchise, 'Night of the Living Dead.'
2. Despite expressing my dislike for it, I would have to commend the producers for coming up with something out of the ordinary.
3. Let's talk about the studio and the staff:
⚫ The studio is OLM, formerly known as Oriental Light & Magic. It's a big studio whose first entry is Wedding Peace. It animates Pokémon and other children's shows. Its recent projects include The Apothecary Diaries, Komi Can't Communicate, Odd Taxi, and Welcome to the Outcast's Restaurant!
⚫ Miike Takashi is the chief director, and I haven't seen his two other works where he served as director.
The other director, Kamitani Tomohiro, served as key animator for Episode 1 of Cheer for You, an anime I didn't like; he was also animation director for the Fruits of Grisaia, whose animation is fairly average.
Overall, the animation is serviceable.
⚫ If there's anything about this anime I can offer high praise, it's the OP and ED as well as the OST.
The OP, 'Cat City' by The Yellow Monkey, offers a catchy rock song with cute lyrics.
The ED, 'Matatabi' by Wanima, is another good rock song. This time, the lyrics are bleak, as is the tone of the song.
Both OP and ED have lyrics that are relevant to the story.
The background musick by Endou Kouji provides the necessary tension.
⚫ The anime's character design by Maki Takao is arguably better than the usual slops. I'm not attached to them, but I can see how they are different to the usual.
4. Let's talk about what I dislike about this.
⚫ I love cats, and watching this is extremely uncomfortable. Again, YMMV. The anime is effective at this horror despite no gore and despite being infused with comedy.
⚫ The narrator interrupts the action with cat trivia. If you're interested in such, you won't mind. But to be honest, scenes feel slower because of that, as I am not that interested in knowing these.
⚫ Another aspect that slows down the pacing is how every human is fawning at how cute the cats are, thereby again slowing the pace of the scenes. It's fine because of the comedy, but if you just want to finish the episode, you might get turned off by these.
⚫ The surviving humans are shown to be battling cats with water guns and other stuff. They are not trying to kill cats but merely stop them.
There are probably a number of reasons why they do these. 1) They love cats, so it would pain them to kill them. 2) These cats were formerly humans. I can imagine them returning to their human form down the road once they reverse-engineer the virus. 3) Perhaps government censorship for gore.
I can't say I dislike this per se, but it makes dealing with cats much more difficult than they already are.
⚫ Much of the episodes show them trying to survive. It's a shame that Season 1 doesn't deal with our characters trying to get to the bottom of this pandemic and how to reverse it.
§ Conclusion
By marking it as 'not recommended,' I'm not saying that you would have a bad time with it. Give it a chance. But as far as I'm concerned, watching this anime is such an ordeal, not because the show sucks, but because of the subject matter — cats as a proxy to zombies.
NOTA BENE: A grade of 3 out of 10 means that I did not enjoy watching this anime despite being either well-regarded or at least popular, or perhaps I happened to rank them below my 4's but above my 2's.
My enjoyment spectrum lies from 4 to 10. If I have scored an anime below 4, I actively dislike it.
