A Whisker Away: I Wish It Was Perfect
A bit of disclaimer as I never put out film reviews on English: I’m currently on my last year at film school, so my thoughts are based on experiences of making & watching films and theory that surrounds it.
This is not 100% a review for A Whisker Away as there’s a lot of spoilers within. This might suit better as a critic, about my thoughts on the film, what I liked, and what could’ve done better.
Last month, I’ve been watching lots of Ghibli’s film including Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, The Cat Returns, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, From Up on Poppy Hill, The Wind Rises, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, and When Marnie Was There. Those films shatter my thoughts about cheesy anime that I used to watch when I was a kid. Anime with lots of descriptive (or expositional) voice over, and harsh rules within the film world. When I first share my early thoughts on A Whisker Away, my friend told me not to compare them with the works of Makoto Shinkai (Your Name, Weathering With You), yet I never saw his films before. Other anime that I watched recently is Paprika by Satoshi Kon, it’s great, I suppose it’s the opposite of Hayao Miyazaki as it introduces much gore and not a very subtle storyline. These films are kind of the benchmark of what I know about Japanese anime films.
Let’s get back talking about A Whisker Away.
I loved it when Netflix try to fund a film production outside the US or UK. It shows that Netflix cares not just the business and its highest user country (it’s the US if you’re curious). When Netflix produces a film, they are not only funding it but developing it, bringing one country’s style of storytelling into the world. But, I think that A Whisker Away is missing something, I don’t even know what that is but it’s missing something.
What I love about A Whisker Away:
It’s a film that renders cats–how they behave, how they stretch their body, how they react to people–very accurately. As you might guess, I’m a cat person. Sadly, it doesn’t represent a lot of cat varieties. I don’t expect that the cats to be rendered as great detail as Toy Story 4’s cat, this style of cat is cute and acceptable.
Moving on, I loved the visuals. As some people only talk about the subtle colors that the film use, I saw another thing: the lighting. They did a great job of rendering sun flares and reflection/glows on a certain surface. They did an okay job on mixing 2D animation (the characters, certain on-set property) with 3D animation (the set, surroundings). I know that it’s hard making 3D animation to match with 2D animation and another way around, but I’m glad that they didn’t use excessive 3D animation for creating sets and locations. Also, there’s something that I don’t like about the visuals that I put later on.
I loved the story structure, it’s a bit predictable at the end, but as a film student, I don’t care if the story is predictable or not. I appreciate the writer for bravely introducing how depressed Muge (or Miyo) is and her first encounter with the Mask Seller in the first 3 minutes. It feels like this film has gotten away from those cheesy anime trademarks where it’s expositional narration will last for over 10 or 15 minutes from the start and starting to look like regular western films. I appreciate how they treated the last part of the story. If this is a Ghibli film, it just cuts out when they got out of the cat’s realm (or the invisible tree). Rather, they chose to show how it ends for them while the credit rolls. I only wished that they put up a longer ending sequence. While Kinako is just a side character, but her character’s arc is interesting enough. The character’s backstory of Hinode and Muge is well crafted, the choice about what the writers hide and show from certain character is somewhat not bad. Although there are still some things that bother me.
In my 4th year being a film student, I can’t enjoy watching films anymore. I only watched A Whisker Away one time, yet I found that they (whether the director or the writers) subtly includes the philosophy of identity through the story. When we talk about identity, what comes through my head is the identity of gender, knowing who you are in terms of sexuality and talking about coming out. It became the trend in the film industry since 2017 with films like Call Me By Your Name, Moonlight, and Love Simon. On A Whiskers Away, the philosophy of identity is a bit vague for me, on one side it’s talking about love-relationship, whether Muge wants to be loved by Hinode as Muge herself or Taro–the cat, on the other side it’s talking about self-centered or maybe self-political, whether to show or express your inner self to the world or just showing the self that the world wants to see.
What could’ve done better:
First of all, let’s talk about how the story was delivered. There are a lot of ways to deliver a narrative, the big category might be sound and visual, but when we look closer, there’s descriptive, exposition, action, and sign (actually there is a lot more but I want to focus on these). The film shows that they use exposition and descriptive style of delivering a narrative a lot, one thing that bothers me is that they use narration or voice over from a character to tell the audience about their feeling. For me, that’s wasting the film medium. The film medium itself provides visual and sound not as two separate things, you won’t just get the auditory perception, you will experience both visual and auditory perception. Therefore, going back to the narrative, the information given to the audience must fulfill both perceptions.
One of my lecturer, Yosep Anggi Noen, whose also a director of The Science of Fictions that got premiered at 72nd Locarno International Film Festival, said on one of his tweets: “Don’t treat the audience as they know nothing and think that we know everything. Rather, they already knew something and our artworks give them another bit of ‘something’ to them”.
That made me think that A Whisker Away treated us like we knew nothing about Tori and Hinode. When Tori first introduced to us, it flashes a bit of Muge’s face, which I think is too expositional to the audience. After Hinode said that Tori has the sun scent and Muge also has the same scent, without showing that little flash of Muge’s face, the audience will figure out later on that Taro is actually Muge. Why it will work? Because on the scene where Hinode actually realized that Taro is Muge, it was crafted so well, that I think it would be very interesting if the audience is put at Hinode’s knowledge of Taro and Muge at the first place.
I mention ‘sign’ earlier when I talk about narration. I might explain what a sign is for those who don’t know. There is a discourse called semiotics on film theory which concept has been developed over time by Saussure, Pierce, and even Barthes. Semiotics is a concept which studies signs and symbols, and its’ interpretation. A sign can be referred to as a code, a trivia hidden in plain sight. A sign might evolve into a symbol, which represents a certain code to show its’ answer in the future. For example, Muge might try and catch a moving reflection of light the same way Taro might do, this might imply that Muge has the same behavior as Taro and might be interpreted as Muge likes cats, or even Muge is Taro.
Okay, I hope you understand my explanation about the sign. Moving on.
They use a relatively small amount of signs in the story. One sign that you might remember is the time when Hinode is sharing his lunch with Muge, at that time Muge was climbing the rooftop fence and jumping down as if she’s a cat, as Hinode noticed too. I think this film can use many more signs than this that eventually might make the film more interesting.
At first, I thought the film will be magical, with orchestral music or some sort. My expectation gets fulfilled during the first 50 minutes, and it drifts apart with fast-paced teenage band songs. It was like watching a cheesy film where actually the film is full of magic–by the visuals and the story, Hinode was full of elegance, the term ‘cheesy’ itself doesn’t even fit with the film.
Here comes the part where I wish I don’t let myself go off too much.
Let me start with a definition. Worldbuilding is a process of crafting a fictional world usually on narrative to make it believable to the audience. There are some elements to consider in worldbuilding: character/species, language, government/rules, customs/tradition, even the history of the fictional world itself. A few weeks ago, I found a video on Youtube that explained a concept I don’t know: soft worldbuilding and hard worldbuilding. You can watch it here, it’s interesting.
For me, the worldbuilding on A Whisker Away is somewhat forced, we as the audience are expected to grasp the rules about humans turning to cats and how the ‘masks’ works as shown throughout the film. I suppose that A Whisker Away fell into the hard worldbuilding category, but what I saw is that hard worldbuilding can be achieved if you have a long narrative, just like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings did. It’s not that bad, but it’s forced to the audience, making it look bad. One solution that I can think of for A Whisker Away is using soft worldbuilding. In short, soft worldbuilding is where the world is open-ended, you might be having questions about the world that created, but there’s actually no answer for them, it’s up to your interpretation.
Well, should I watch this film?
Yes. Although the worldbuilding is forced and the film could be explored more, the premise and story structure are interesting.
I would like to give a 7/10 rating, but seeing forced worldbuilding that creates the domino effect to the story and all, sorry, it’s a 5/10 from me.
