Are you tired of reading wall after wall of pretentious text?
Do you just want to know if you should watch the darn show?
Me too.
TLDR
Nekojiru Gekijou Jirujiru Original, or Cat Soup Theater, is a series of 1 minute shorts about a family of cats committing hate crimes and beating up anyone they don’t like. This show does not have good animation, art, music, plot, or characters. The voice acting is surprisingly good. Do not confuse this with the experimental film Cat Soup. Only give this a shot if you’re into brutal, dark humour.
ART AND ANIMATION - Below Average
The art is not great. The show is from 1999, and boy can you tell. The resolution is low, it uses a fullscreen aspect ratio, and I could not find a stream that wasn’t grainy. The artstyle itself is overly simplistic. There is almost no detail on any of the characters, and they don’t blink so they just stare at you with huge beady black eyes the whole time. The animation is pretty bad for a kid’s show from the 90s, which means it doesn’t hold up by today’s standards at all. However, I did find it easy to tell what was going on, so I can’t fault the show too much.
MUSIC AND SOUND - Above Average
I don’t remember hearing any music at all. If there was a soundtrack, it was not used often and was utterly unremarkable. However, I did actually like the voice acting. They captured the sound and tone of annoying kids well (although technically Nyatta doesn’t actually talk), and the side characters all had distinct voices. The voice acting is probably the strongest part of this show. The sound design is pretty horrible. Footsteps are loud and distracting, and the sounds of everyday objects sound like they were taken from a 1960s radio program.
PLOT - Terrible
This show is a slice of life and has no central plot, which is not necessarily a flaw. But every episode is almost the exact same thing and it got super repetitive super fast. The main characters will go somewhere, act like assholes, it probably leads to someone dying, rinse and repeat 27 times. It was a chore to watch this, and I considered dropping it partway through, which is actually impressive considering it’s less than half and hour long from start to finish.
CHARACTERS - Bad
The main characters are Nyako, her brother Nyatta, and their family of assholes. Nyako is a bratty teen asshole, Nyatta is an annoying asshole kid, the mom is the stereotypical asshole wife, and the dad is a drunk asshole. You may like asshole characters, you may not. I personally didn’t find them very entertaining. Most of the side characters are the unfortunate victims of the family’s antics, and most are dead by the time the episode is over. I don’t expect deep characters or character development in a show like this, and there was none.
The whole family is openly hostile against pigs because of their species. They will bully pigs, kill pigs, keep pigs in pens, not give them food, feed pigs to other pigs, etc. It was a little funny at first in a morbid way, but they kept doing the same thing over and over and it got stale. Cat Soup Theater gets really blatant with its racism (or species-ism?). Some people will find the show offensive and I can't say I blame them.
WHO SHOULD WATCH THIS
To be honest, I’m not 100% sure if this is made for kids or not. On the one hand, it looks and sounds like a kid’s show. On the other hand, there’s tons of blood, the main characters are all assholes, and there’s no good role models to counteract them. Is this supposed to be a comedy that captures the ugly side of childhood, where kids often have a tendency to say and do brutal things? I have no clue.
If you’re into brutal humour, watch this. Otherwise, there are better uses of your time.
CONCLUSION
I hated Cat Soup Theater. It utterly fails as a dark comedy. At least it was short.