This unconventional and delightfully wacky anime conjures a rotoscoped dream world as a grief-stricken girl befriends a giant bipedal cat spirit.

Karin’s widowed dad Tetsuya has left her at the Sousei-ji temple, where her monk grandfather lives. Tetsuya owes ¥1 million to some ruthless loan sharks and has promised to return by the anniversary of her mother’s death. Furious and dejected, Karin finds a sympathetic ear in Anzu: a farting, Hawaiian-shirt-rocking, six-foot-tall ghost cat who walks on his hind legs, uses a flip phone and tootles around town on a moped, working as a masseur. These unlikely buddies set off to find Karin’s hapless dad, but instead, the God of Poverty offers to reunite Karin with her mum – if she’s willing to flush herself down a toilet to hell.

Based on Takashi Imashiro’s manga, co-directed by Yōko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita (Linda Linda Linda, MIFF 2006), and premiering at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, this anime might recall Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away but experiments more radically with tone and medium. Shot with real-time person tracking and motion capture, and sound-recorded live on location, the film was then rotoscoped to melt the real world into Japan’s fantastical kami realm. The matter-of-fact way Karin rolls with her badass new friend invites audiences to embrace the weirdness.

“Distinctive in its deceptively abrasive tone and in the wildly out-there swerves of its story … This ghost cat has claws.” – Screen Daily