Space. The Feline... I mean Final frontier. Mankind has wondered for ages if there were other forms of life out there in the universe. We’ve wondered about their biology, their culture, but most of all, their intentions towards us. Never once have we imagined that extraterrestrial beings would be just as curious about us as we are about them... Let alone that they’d have both the technology and the initiative to do something about it.

Sixteen year old Kio Kakazu is on the way to a family function when he has a close encounter of his very own, but rather than a little green man, he meets a tall, busty catgirl named Eris who instantly turns his life upside down! It turns out Kio’s no stranger to weird acquaintances, though, as his two closest female friends also have dark secrets he’s about to discover, and with the three of them all living under his roof, Kio’s going to have to kiss his normal life goodbye.

Cat Planet Cuties was produced by AIC+, and while I usually like to look for common threads within the output of any given studio, the titles attributed to this company are all over the place in terms of quality. I guess I can boil them down to having a similarly meager budget, as I can’t think of any title of theirs that I’ve seen that looked like it was rolling in cash, but the level of budget management is incredibly inconsistent. They’ve produced shows like Kotoura-san, which looked adorable thanks to it’s simplistic aesthetic, and Strike Witches season 2, which was just as good as it’s first season at balancing different animation techniques, but Cat Planet Cuties is a different animal entirely.

As far as I can tell, this show straight up ignored every single rule about managing a tight budget. Cutting corners is a necessity, there’s no avoiding it, but it should be done sparingly, and in places where people won’t necessarily notice it. In Cat Planet Cuties, I don’t think a single shot featuring actual characters in it had any more money attached than it absolutely needed to. Movements are stiff and extremely limited, animation cycles are constant and abundantly noticeable, and there are extended shots of characters frozen like paintings while their lips flap like they’re in a two page flip book.

They use the old trick of bouncing an image up and down to create the illusion of someone walking, but they push it a step too far, sometimes having dozens of characters moving the same way all at once. Facial expressions freeze awkwardly mid-conversation, characters blink so little I almost feel compelled to pass around eye drops, and this is all done to accommodate the use of expensive visual effects throughout the series. The character designs are okay... Generic, but with slight hints of personality and a bright and vibrant color palette... But they’re not appealing enough to justify how badly they’re animated, forced to move all stiff and jerky just so the animators can have CGI robots, tanks, space ships, magic spells and water textures, thus putting the cart way before the horse.

I’d normally take budget allocation like this with a grain of salt, because it’s usually a matter of necessity, but it feels so excessive and careless here. They didn’t need as many lavish effects as they had, especially not at the cost the rest of the show had to pay. It genuinely feels like they skimped wherever possible just to save money for later, and yeah, the CG effects look pretty cool at times, but considering how it’s Anilist page shows more drops than a Skrillex album, I highly doubt very many people stuck around that long to appreciate them. Or hell, maybe they wasted even more money on the nearly half dozen ending themes this show had, none of which stuck with me afterwards.

On the other hand, the English dub is pretty damn solid. Funimation has a surprisingly good track record of putting in A+ effort on mindless booby shows, and this one is no exception. One thing I’m going to get to later is the unexpected level of nuance in the characters, and their actors did a great job portraying it. Monica Rial and Brittney Karbowski are of course brilliant, playing a couple of pretty cliched harem love interest roles, and adding depth where it was called for. Aaron Dismuke plays a pretty likeable lead, and Tia Ballard should be commended on playing a loud, cheerful, very bubbly alien catgirl without getting too annoying. All the other big names are here, playing various other catgirls and peripheral characters, cat puns are kept to a refreshing minimum, and yeah, decent dub all around.

So you know exactly what you’re getting from this anime, right? It’s an ecchi harem, but more to the point, it’s a magical girlfriend ecchi harem. It should function basically the same way To Love Ru, UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie or any other show like that would function, right? You’ve got your bland main guy, a busty babe who enters his life by accident and winds up becoming attached to him like a baby duck, several other contenders for his affection that battle it out despite him not having a recognizable interest in any of them, occasional bare breasts and a whole lot of wacky hijinks, right? Well, yes, but also kind of no. Cat Planet Cuties is a really weird show, and while it’s ultimately bound to the conventions of it’s genre, it still finds unexpected ways to surprise you.

For starters, in most shows like this, you’d have one rogue alien princess crash landing on Earth, and all other arrivals that follow are either her friends, authorities trying to collect her, interstellar assholes vying for her affections despite her only being attracted to generic protagonists, and any actual diplomacy will happen long after she’s established Earth as her new home. Cat Planet Cuties flips this premise directly on it’s head, as the title character is an ambassador, and her people are interested in making contact with us right from the start, as they just sincerely want to sample our culture and traditions. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that concept explored in anime before, but it’s pretty intriguing. They even lampoon the similarities between Earthlings and Catians right from the start, just so the vast unlikelihood of aliens being so obviously humanoid doesn’t become distracting later on.

Of course, as spellbound as the Catians are by our culture, we never find out that much about theirs unless it comes up in the plot somehow. We find out there’s been controversy over how Catian looking their service robots should be(the fact that they never call them Purr-socoms astounds me) but aside from that and a few biological details, they never really get explored. I don’t like to throw around the term ‘missed opportunities,” as it’s usually the calling card of people who were just salty an anime didn’t give them what they wanted, but it does feel pretty lopsided, and I would have loved to see what the culture of a planet full of cat people looks like. Maybe if Earth’s interest in the Catians had extended past “Religious catgirl worshipping cult,” this show could have explored some profound topics about our place in the universe.

And yeah, I know I’m a fool for expecting something profound from a ridiculous booby show with one of the cringiest names in anime history, but here’s the thing: Cat Planet Cuties spends the majority of it’s run time adding new, thoughtful twists on old harem cliches, only to consistently falter and disappoint, effectively taking one step forward and two steps back at the bare minimum.

Starting with Kio, he’s a likeable, mild mannered guy, and he actually has something of a spine, allowing him to stand up for himself where needed. Having said that, he’s still your generic harem protagonist, who has no interest in sex despite multiple girls throwing themselves at him. He has no discernable personality outside of being kind and somewhat assertive, and he actually has far less agency in the story than other characters like him would have. Like, zero agency, period. Eris, his catgirlfriend, the magical girl of the series, is actually pretty damn smart, has political experience, and is able to use deductive reasoning in several situations. Having said that, she’s still deliberately portrayed on screen as a sexual object, and she’s naive to the point that she derives her understanding of Earth culture and sexuality from Kio’s porno mags multiple times.

It’s admittedly pretty clever that they wrote off her excessive level of horniness(another unfortunate cliche) as her just literally being a cat in heat, but the fact that it’s clever doesn’t make it not pathetic, which it is. As for the other two harem leads, they have lives outside of Kio, with very clear aspirations and goals(far fetched though they might be), but they pretty much abandon them after episode 1. They have a history with Kio that gives them actual, understandable reasons to have feelings for him, unlike most harems where everything with a vag falls madly in love with their main character because potato. Having said that, they’re still your stereotypical harem cliches; A soft spoken shy girl and a loud, boisterous girl who’s constantly beating him up over misunderstandings.

Making Kio’s house into an embassy is an interesting way to justify having the harem live under one roof, having multiple characters and their bodyguards join the main characters homeroom class all at once is a funny way to lampoon the old cliche of characters being introduced in front of the class, showing a catgirl getting high on catnip is a scenario straight out of the land of satire, these things are pretty impressive on their own, but they’re also symptomatic of a show that’s throwing a LOT at the wall to see what sticks. Cat Planet Cuties deals with a variety of tones and subject matters, but they do not mix well. Don’t get me wrong, if there’s a medium where you can cross genres and mix the serious with the silly, it’s anime. A Centaur’s Life explored subjects like critical race theory and cultural differences through a silly fantasy world, and while it’s messages weren’t always entirely clear, it was able to address the fucking holocaust without missing a step. This, show, on the other hand, can’t resolve a love triangle in the middle of an epic space battle without feeling out of sorts, and sci-fi and romance are genres that were practically made for each other.

Speaking of which, remember in my Smartphone review, where I made a comparison over how similarly their romance subplots were resolved? It is so much worse here. The situations this show presents, the conflicts the cast have to deal with, the dynamic between Earthlings and Catians, everything this show does boils down to one common denominator: It’s creative, but it’s fucking stupid. There is a lot going on in this show, and almost none of it is executed well. Brazen stupidity isn’t always a bad thing, as it can lead to unique bits of content that you just couldn’t get anywhere else... A stark naked gun fight in the middle of the gorram street comes to mind... But the over-all product is a complete mess, and the final two episodes are more exhausting than exciting. I can’t say there’s nothing in this show to make it worth picking up, but it does not reward you for doing so, and the tease they made at the end for a second season can go have fun over there with live action Princess Azula.

Cat Planet Cuties is available from Funimation. The original SAVE release has shot up dramatically in value, as most of them have, but the recent Essentials release is still fairly cheap, so it’s pretty to easy to obtain. It’s also available for streaming on their website. The original light novels are not available stateside, but the manga is available from Digital Manga. An OVA episode is available on the home release, and if you’re disappointed by the sporadic fanservice of the series, well, the OVA just straight up gets every female character naked for you, so have fun with that.

Ultimately, it is a combination of stupidity, a lack of consistency and no real sense of identity that causes this series to fall short of certain other ecchi harem anime that also tried to add depth to the genre... Say what you want about This Ugly Yet Beautiful World and Nakaimo, but least they knew what they wanted to be. I can’t exactly say I’d never recommend this show to anyone, as it does have some unique elements to offer, and I wish it had been more critically and commercially successful just so a slew of better series could have salvaged them and put them to better use, but even hardcore fanservice nuts would be better off looking elsewhere. Despite it’s best efforts, as random and sporadic as they were, this ends up being a harem anime that’s too cat-astrophic to take seriously, but too weird and quirky to ignore.

I give Cat Planet Cuties a 2/10.