She and Her Cat

Directed and Written by Makoto Shinkai

Kirsten found this purely by chance. Someone had posted it on their blog. It was like a beautiful poem and we fell in love with it right away.

There’s an abandoned cat. In the middle of a rainfall, a young woman finds the cat and adopts him. The cat falls in love with her, sees her as his “adult” lover. And even though he has a summer romance with a spoiled cat named Mimi, he still stays true and loyal to She. Poor Mimi.

Kirsten: People talk about unconditional love but I think that’s a red herring. Isn’t what we really want is for someone to see and admire our very essence? To love what we are above all things? To only see and love our essential being?

And that’s the way the cat loves. He doesn’t understand the human world, the world outside of himself. For him, there’s only this woman who cares for him, the essence of who she is — he doesn’t even have a name for her. The woman is just She, the essence of love.

The film is sometimes called Their Standing Points. Love is like that, isn’t it? We love where the two of us stand, the intersection of our lives held whole by the gravity of mutual compassion.

Author Notes:

Found this great interview with Shinkai about how he works.

“She and Her Cat” is an excerpt from So Easy To Love, available at Amazon, iBookStore, Kobo, B&N, etc.