Review of A Whisker Away

Oh, A Whisker Away. How I wish I liked you more than I do. When I first heard about this movie, I thought it'd be right up my alley, and it had a great staff behind it. Directed by Junichi Sato, who worked on many beloved anime such as Aria, Princess Tutu, and a few seasons of Sailor Moon, with screenplay by Mari Okada, a soundtrack by one of my favorite composers, Mina Kubota, and animated by a studio that's been really making a name for itself lately, Studio Colorido. It was originally going to get a theatrical release in Japan, but the COVID-19 pandemicput a stop to that idea, so the creators decided to slap it onto Netflix, which proved to be a great idea for those who were looking forward to seeing it early, me being one of them. So when it finally appeared on Netflix, I wasted no time sitting down to watch it, especially after I finished Her Blue Sky. Unfortunately, if the rating wasn't any indication, I am sorely, sorely disappointed. Not Ni no Kuni level disappointed, but this movie really could have been so much better.

So what's the story? A young girl, Miyo Sasaki, nicknamed Muge by her classmates, is about as weird as one can get. She has a huge crush on a boy, Kento Hinode, and does all she can to pursue him, from making butt-contact with him to shouting love poetic to him as loud as she can for all to hear, even jumping out windows to defend him from bullies. People think she's just an overly energetic girl who's obsessed with him, but she's actually very insecure. Her biological mother walked out on her, and after her parents divorced, she's having trouble reconciling the fact that her father married a new woman, even though her new stepmother is nice and wants to get to know her better. She wishes she could be anybody except herself. During a summer festival, she finds a mysterious vendor who sells her a mask that can turn her into a cat. Muge jumps at the chance, seeing it as a way to be with Hinode. After a while, she starts to wish she could stay a cat forever...but when her transformation threatens to become permanent thanks to her own actions, she and her friends need to find a way to get things back to normal.

I'll get the positives out of the way here, because...well, in all honesty, there's very few of them: For one, the animation is sumptuous. There's a reason Studio Colorido has been making a name for itself, and their animation for this movie is wonderful. Every movement is carefully animated, smooth as butter but full of life, and little details and nuances here and there tell a lot about a character's personality, such as how Muge's shirt is untucked and how messy her hair is, indicating that she herself is a messy person without outright saying such. Now, the only other thing I know that Colorido has worked on is the Pokemon web series, Twilight Wings, and while that's a very different entity from this movie, it also has great animation fitting for the fantasy setting it takes place in. The movie also has a great use of metaphors, showing Muge viewing anybody who's not people she's close to or familiar with as faceless scarecrows, showing that she doesn't have much interest in interacting with her peers as human beings. The music is also really nice as well, bubbly and fittingly treacly for a tween love story movie like this. It's a shame that Mina Kubota, the person who made the music for this movie, is so criminally underrated, because she's made a lot of good soundtracks for various anime, most of which I really love. I hope she gets more work down the line, because she deserves more love and appreciation than she gets.

Unfortunately, this is where my praises for the movie end (Except for one thing that I'll get to in a bit). Now, when I watch, read, or play something, I never go into it wanting to hate it. Sometimes I think something will turn out either bad or mediocre but wind up being really good or absolutely amazing. Of course, having high expectations can also lead to disappointment when something you try out turns out to not be as good as you think it might be. First off: The writing is all over the place. It tries to seem like a mix between a cute, treacly love story between two teenagers and a whimsical fantasy involving masks that turn humans into cats and vice versa, but there's more focus on the former over the latter, to the point where a mysterious cat island is introduced in the final third of the film, and is only used as a backdrop for an epic climax. It's jarring to randomly introduce new elements so late into a movie, especially taking into account their short run-time, because it just feels like the creators just slapped it onto the movie without trying to really balance it with everything else it set up. So as a result, the final third of the movie feels half-baked because of the clumsy writing. Other times, it introduces a variety of subplots that never really get much resolution, petering out before the movie's even half-finished.

And the clumsy writing isn't limited to just the story and the setting, either. The characters, unfortunately, all suffer from being extremely bland and milquetoast, and we as viewers aren't given much reason to really care about them. The main character, Muge, is more dynamic in her personality, but she comes with her own baggage as well, and not in a good way. See, the movie is trying to present her as a lovestruck girl who deliberately acts quirky and overly energetic to hide her tumultuous home life, and she thinks getting with her crush, a boy named Hinode, will be the solution to her problems. However, the thing is, Muge's actions towards Hinode involve stuff like jumping at him with her butt, shouting romantic poetic at him loud enough for everyone to hear, refusing to take no for an answer even when he makes it clear he doesn't want anything to do with her, and continually invading his personal space and boundaries, both in human and cat form. The movie tries to depict Muge's behavior as being cute and sweet, if annoying, but in reality, it reads as being highly disturbing, and Muge would be considered a budding stalker or engaging in sexual harassment. Even when Hinode tells her off, she never feels any guilt or remorse for her own actions, nor does she see the error of her ways and leave him alone like he asked her to. Instead, she continues to pursue him and is more concerned about her own pain, nor does she ever take the time to realize that, hey, maybe she was wrong to constantly go after him the way she did and maybe it'd be better to just leave him alone. Without spoiling anything, Muge's behavior does unchallenged and she even gets rewarded for her creepy behavior at the end of the movie. The main character, if written well or with the right amount of development, can easily make or break a movie, but in this case, I really couldn't bring myself to like Muge, even with the movie's attempts to make her more sympathetic than she really is. To see what I mean, imagine if the genders were reversed. If a boy was doing all of these things to a girl, he would no doubt be in the wrong and his actions would be considered creepy at best and predatory at worst. I mean, if someone, boy or girl, was doing what Muge does to Hinode to me, I'm pretty sure my parents would call the school and make them take action against the kid. Plus, it'd be pretty horrifying to find out that a cat you took in is secretly a human in disguise trying to seduce you by rubbing their butt against your face.

Also, the least interesting character is the Mask Seller cat. He's pretty much a non-entity as a character and a stereotypical evil bad guy who just wants to steal people's life spans and change them into something they're not (and in the dub he's played by Keith Silverstein, who's garnered a decent repertoire for doing villainous characters) so he himself can live longer. Oh, and the movie can never seem to decide whether they want him to be strong and overpowered or weak and pathetic enough to have his butt handed to him by everyone he sees. However, there is one character who manages to be a bright light in this cast of uninteresting or poorly written characters: Kaoru, Muge's stepmother. It's rare for stepmothers to be portrayed in a positive light in fiction, especially as being better parents than biological parents (You can thank Cinderella for that one). Muge's real mother walked out on her, divorced her father, and tried to make Muge live with her even though her daughter is still reeling from feeling abandoned and doesn't even consider how everything she did affected her daughter, something Kaoru calls her out on. In contrast, Kaoru tries to get to know Muge on a deeper level, be there for her, and be a part of her life, even if the two of them struggle with it due to the complicated situation they find themselves in. There's a scene where Muge's biological mother comes to their house after Muge runs away, and the former accuses Kaoru of causing her so much distress, refusing to acknowledge her own part in it, and the two get into a slap fight. Not gonna lie, I cheered when Kaoru slapped her back and called her out on her hypocrisy. Best scene in the entire movie, right there. But again, Kaoru's subplot doesn't get much resolution or time devoted to it, as does everything else in the movie that doesn't involve Muge and Hinode.

I really don't want to hate this movie. I really don't. I'm sure that if I saw this as a kid, I probably would have adored it. But I can't blind myself to its flaws, and A Whisker Away would have been so much better if it had more polished writing, actually tried to acknowledge how disturbing Muge's behavior is towards Hinode, and actually have her grow as a person. Bottom line, it's fairly cute and harmless as a surface level movie that you can probably let your older kids watch, but if you're looking for something with more substance and less clumsily written, give this one a miss.