Gato Fantasma Anzu it has the signature of a duo: she, Yôko Kuno, with a career especially dedicated to animation; he, Nobuhiro Yamashita, also has diverse experience with flesh-and-blood actors. Revealed at the 2024 edition of the Cannes Festival, in the Filmmakers’ Fortnight program, this is, at least, a film that, in addition to not being the result of the digital evolution that has come to mark, for example, Disney production, appears as a curious example of the recovery of an old technique (rotoscopy) which consists of drawing some characters from images previously recorded with human interpreters.
Ultimately, it makes no sense to complain about a lack of imagination, even if, at a certain point, we may wonder about the possible decomposition of that imagination into a delirious collage that seems to end in the mere display of more or less unpredictable “prodigies”.
That said, there is a “thematic” note that is worth taking into account. Thus, similar to some Japanese cinema that we are familiar with (think of the contemporary example of Hirokazu Kore-eda) we come across here a “natural” staging of the world of the dead, without borders between adults and children, appealing to a serenity with its liberating touch.