Review of A Whisker Away
It's a really great fantasy premise, but a really terrible execution on top of being used as a macGuffin vehicle for a terribly cringeworthy kiddy-romance. It's really rough kiddyschool SoL for much of the first half. The FMC is portrayed in such a 'child-oriented person writing little girl' way, the 'romance'(nonromance) is absurdly forced for the entire movie. She's somehow all at once just a typical idiot who's suicidal, bipolar, autistic, narcissistic, cringe butt-bumping her crush and declaring her love to him constantly despite barely knowing him only through stalking as a cat, etc. She's a lunatic with zero ability to read the room or displayany competency for the entire movie. This alone entirely robs it of any fantastical charm, somehow being all of the worst aspects of The Cat Returns cranked up to 100, (Watch that instead).
The story is just silly contrivances for the mask macGuffin, and the characters love each other in the end (despite still having almost never actually had a conversation together about anything) just because they're the MCs and she smells nice or whatever (he literally knows nothing about her except in the end that she loves him for (to paraphrase her explanation) 'being a typical guy who pet a cat' and was creepily stalking him as a cat).
The other human characters are all normal (aside from an excess of annoying bully comedic relief non-characters), like shockingly so compared to FMC. Unfortunately none of them actually have any real significance in the story. Her biomother is just as bipolar as the FMC for pointless drama trying to get the FMC in 2 brief instances (and 1 text). This went nowhere in the end, could've just had her die/never come back (and had a theme of FMC dealing with trauma of rejection rather than 'wahhh I'm such a perfect selfless person and everyone else is only thinking about what they want when they try to be nice to me!' goddamn this narcissist) rather than waste time on characters that go nowhere. (They were definitely trying for the theme of 'other's expectations force me to wear a mask to behave how they want me to be rather than how I want to be' but it more just came out as 'communicating what I want is such a pain' the FMC literally wanted to wear a mask to be a cat rather than just be herself and use her words(the opposite of the theme) to take advantage of the Halo Effect and avoid having to actually talk to her crush... The desire of the crush to do pottery, the FMC's crush and relationship with her parents, all of them resolve immediately upon communicating what they want, literally all they had to do was say what they want because these people aren't forcing them to wear masks, they're bending over backwards to try to give them what they want, the main conflict was literally 'ugh why can't they just read my mind about what I want' (but sure, 'wearing a mask is bad, be true to yourself' is close enough to that since both involve doing what you want. except one is narcissism).
The art/animation is okay, but character movements/designs and the settings are all really uninspired. It really lacks any emotional weight.
The ending was also really contrived that the antag didn't easily overpower them and it was so pointlessly drawn out with nothing happening. (They could've actually done something interesting like pull a mask off the mask salesman's face to beat him or something but no, just uninspired macGuffining).
3/10 (where 5/10 is average)