Dark Cat

Introduction:

Dark Cat is an infamously abysmal OVA well known amongst anime historians for being a load of hot garbage. I mean, you don’t just get a MAL score of (at the time of writing anyway) 3.58 by doing nothing, so this has to be something special. Well, for better or worse, it is.

Story:

The “plot” (if you can call it that) revolves around our two main leads who have the power to transform into house cats. Evil shit is going on because this “plot” demands it, the 2 leads meet back up with their old master “Jukokubo” who’s evil for the sake of evil. There’s also some romance plot going on in the background, but nothing comes of it.

The story of Dark Cat is incredibly basic, yet it sucks so much ass because of how poorly structured this “movie” is. The first 2 minutes & 52 seconds of this “movie” are nothing but padding. The movie starts with some girl randomly disappearing for no reason, now all of a sudden she’s dead (and oh boy do they make it blatantly obvious). As you could guess by the term “padding” absolutely nothing comes of this.

I mentioned there was a romantic “plot” going on in the background of the 2 brothers fighting “evil spirits” (how creative). You also might’ve catched absolutely nothing comes out of this plot. Which is to be expected, given the short length & rushed story of this “plot”.

Characters:

The characters in Dark Cat are just as nothing as the plot is. They’re all one dimensional caricatures who exist only to serve the plot. Hyoui is just “main character guy” who pulls the strings & goes around defeating the evil spirits. Rui is pretty much the younger brother person who only goes along for the ride. He does get to do some stuff admittedly, he kills one of the Hentai monsters as an example.

Hiroki is pretty much a blank slate. He does go through some “arc” (if you can call it that) about him realizing that Ami is the girl that he should’ve been interested in/attracted to because she cared about him & was his childhood friend. But Dark Cat kills Ami off by the time he realises this, making the whole endeavor pointless. Hiroki also has an incredibly grating voice as well.

Ami is the girl character of Dark Cat, the definition of a blank slate. As mentioned earlier, she’s in love with Hiroki, but nothing comes out of this. Aside from near the end, where Hiroki recognising that Ami was the girl he should’ve loved all along kills one of the Hentai monsters for some reason.

Jukakubo is the villain of Dark Cat. He’s the definition of evil for evil's sake. He never gives a reason for what he does, or why he does it. He was apparently the former master of Hyoui & Rui. But the series only mentions this once, & never lets us in on why Hyoui & Rui split away from him & went solo. Jukakubo also has a transformation near the end of the movie, but the transformation somehow makes him look WORSE & even less of a threat than he already has. Dark Cat is so abysmal that it FAILED at making a power-up sequence.

Art:

You probably guessed it by now given how negative the rest of this review was. But the artwork on display here is absolutely atrocious. The overall presentation is a bit of a blurry mess, & the line art on the hair in one particular scene gets worse & worse each time they change the frame. The series also gets lazy & forgets about detail. In the first fight scene against Jukakubo, Hyoui receives 3 slashes on his chest, in the exact next frame, there’s only 1 scratch on his chest. Then in the very same fight scene, Jukabkubo slashes Hyoui in the back, & in the very next scene the slash on his back is gone.

The animation (if you can even call it that) is ridiculously lazy. The characters rarely ever animate, they’re usually just still images being dragged across the screen, or a still image being panned across the frame in order to convey movement.’Dark Cat’s unite” also has a sword that Hyoui pulls out of his ass in first fight against Jukakubo. The slashes of course, are never animated. They just cut the screen to black & draw a slash. Sometimes, they don’t even draw the slash at all, & just cut to a still image, that’s how competent the animation team was. The only part of Dark Cat that can be considered “animation” are the Hentai monsters. But even those are just the same 2 second animation looped over & over to nauseam, they couldn’t even bother to animate the Hentai monsters well. For fucks sake Dark Cat,

Sound:

The sound is TRASH! Dark Cat is well known amongst anime historians for its ludicrously bad voice acting. The series makes use of late 90s Hentai actors to voice the characters, which makes the dialogue come off as incredibly awkward. Taking a note from Garzey’s Wing, (no, it wasn’t dubbed by the same studio) the characters speak in run-on sentences. These make the characters incredibly hard to understand & hear, the abysmal sound mixing doesn’t help there either.

Dark Cat also has the distinct “feature” of an absolutely lacking sound design. You’ll see things like tentacle demons smashing windows, no sound effects. People getting punched, no sound effects, grabbing people by the shirt, no sound effects, footsteps, no sound effects. The sound design is absolutely lacking on all fronts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an anime with sound design this lacking.

Final Thoughts/Overall:

So that’s Dark Cat. It’s absolutely abysmal. You know, MAL is a pretty generous site when you think about it. They give trash like Girls & Panzer & Zombie Desu a 7.5+. What I’m getting at here, is that you don’t just get a 3.56 (at the time of writing) by doing nothing. You have to be especially bad in order to get a rating like that. Dark Cat is just THAT BAD! I usually say in my 1/10 reviews that “there’s nothing positive here”. Well, that’s a bit of a lie. See, Green Green got me some laughs out of how lazily made it was. Kennel Tokorozawa is under 35 minutes, Girls & Panzer made me laugh for the 1st 6 episodes, & Skelter + Heaven is only 19 minutes. But this time, I actually mean it. THERE IS NOTHING POSITIVE TO SAY HERE! Dark Cat just fails on absolutely all fronts. The sound is bad, the story is abysmal, the voice acting is ATROCIOUS, literally NOTHING is good here. Dark Cat deserves to remain a buried piece of garbage that nobody should watch. Final rating is, to nobody's surprise, a 1/10.