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Curriculum VitaeThis paper was written for EXPOS 20: Philosophical Films.
It may be tempting to write off the conclusion of Cat Soup as Tatsuo Sato taking one last chance to confuse the audience - simply a quirky end to an already bizarre plot. The 2001 animated film, not intended for a televised or cinematic run, uses experimental artistic choices and adopts an unorthodox plot structure. Cat Soup follows the journey of the anthropomorphic kitten, Nyatta, on a quest to the land of the dead in order to restore half of his sister’s soul. However, this journey only provides a loose beginning and ending to the film. Rather than relying on a strong central narrative, the direction of the story is frequently derailed by side stories and dream sequences and the film is pieced together from short, unrelated episodes, ranging from the cats enjoying a circus to narrowly avoiding being boiled alive by a sadistic android. Additionally, the characters offer no explanation for their actions or the mechanics of the world and are incongruously unperturbed by impossible events. After Nyatta completes his journey, he finally has the chance to relax and have a happy family dinner. However, when he leaves the living room to go the bathroom, his family members spontaneously disappear one by one in bursts of static. When Nyatta returns, he takes a moment to stare at the now empty living room before the film ends with the entire screen filling with white noise.
Though the ending appears to nullify the story’s already dubious stakes, it actually clarifies how to contextualize and interpret the entirety of Cat Soup and demonstrates that the film reflects an absurd view of the world. As described by Albert Camus, the absurd is not limited to the complete meaninglessness of the universe, but “is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart” (7). In his analysis, he derives three consequences from the absurd: revolt, freedom, and passion (10). Throughout the film, Nyatta works through these conclusions, living with the absurd without succumbing to the philosophical suicide it implies. However, Cat Soup departs from Camus when considering how the absurd transfers to a moral code. While Camus attempts to read morality and justice from a valueless world, Cat Soup takes a blunt view on the conclusions of the absurd. Davis, when analyzing Camus’s The Stranger and Caligula, notices a constant retreading of the tension between morality and self-actualization, “embracing and resisting murder without ever being fully able to justify one response over the over” (115). In contrast, Cat Soup makes a clear stance on the inevitability of violence. The film rejects a justifiable moral system and accepts cruelty as a byproduct of pursuing happiness in a world with no values.
Cat Soup lays the foundation for exploring the absurd by emphasizing the meaninglessness of existence through the ambivalence of the universe. Camus describes the absurd as a state of “sin without God” (14), i.e., an approach to life independent of the influence of a higher power. By applying logic without reliance on a universal meaning, the absurd arises as a confrontation of the intelligent, reasoning person against the unreasonable universe. The film captures the spirit of the absurd framework by highlighting not the absence of God, but the apathy of God. We are first introduced to God as a magician performing the opening act for a circus. He provides a variation of the standard trick of cutting up a person and reassembling the parts by brutally dissecting and reanimating his assistant. Later, he demonstrates the ability to spontaneously materialize objects, animals, and fantasy creatures. Though the character first appears to be only a circus act, his identity as God is confirmed when we see the same character destroying planets and altering the wheel of time. God is depicted as plucking a planet out of the cosmos and cutting into the mantle in order to consume the tomato soup in the planet’s core. The slicing of the crust manifests as a chasm opening up beneath Nyatta and Nyako, causing them to plummet into the cosmos. Soon after, when God accidentally drops half of his meal into the wheel of time, stylized as a large mechanical clock, he freezes, fast forwards and rewinds time in order to pull his meal out of the cogs. In doing so, he arbitrarily causes and redacts a wide variety of tragedies and catastrophes, ranging from suicides to executions to bombings. This depiction of an uncaring God is more hopeless than a nonexistent God. Though he acts on audience requests for miracles, he ultimately pays no attention to the human-level consequences of his actions. Being deemed unimportant by a greater power that is capable of performing miracles creates a stronger sense of universal contempt than being left alone in the world.
The presence of God and the erasure of the universe demonstrates the futility of the plot to the audience, but a separate chain of events also emphasizes the same message of fruitlessness for Nyatta. Even though Nyatta is very young, it becomes clear that he is aware of the inevitability of death. When an enormous flood leaves the two cats and an unnamed anthropomorphic pig floating on a raft in the middle of a global ocean, Nyatta glimpses a dead creature floating in the distance. He envisions its corpse going over a waterfall and being eaten by a nest of baby birds. Later, when the pig offers to cook fish he has collected, Nyatta recalls a moment in his childhood where he came across a dead fish on the beach. His memories establish a clear line of continuity between life and its inevitable demise. At some level, he understands that his task is absurd; he may have delayed his sister’s demise when he first retrieved her soul, but the end of her life is already a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, he persists, engaging in a revolt against an arbitrary universe.
His revolt against despair in the face of the absurd manifests as rejection of death. In the scene where God has stopped time, Nyatta comes across a woman about to commit suicide by jumping in front of a car. He reacts by pulling a frozen tear from her face and crushing it underfoot, rejecting the woman’s despair and anguish. The impact of shattering her teardrop immediately precedes the resumption of the normal flow of time, implying that his insensitivity is a prerequisite to trigger normal procession of life.
Additionally, as Nyatta stands alone in his home before the end of the film, his position mirrors that of Sisyphus as interpreted by Camus. As a mortal, Sisyphus defied the will of death and cunningly avoided divine punishment. Though he was ultimately condemned to eternal punishment, Sisyphus maximizes his pleasure in the living world by thwarting death. After laboring to save his sister only to have her and the rest of his world disappear in an instant, Nyatta does not complain but only watches wordlessly, like Sisyphus watching his boulder roll back down the hill. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” (24). His rejection of the overarching futility of his journey is matched by the happiness he indulges in throughout his bizarre adventure. Though he may witness the meaninglessness of his actions by the end of his journey, it hardly detracts from his ability to enjoy the process.
Throughout the film, it becomes clear that Nyatta retains a sense of wonder and excitement. In the circus, he cheers at the tricks performed by God. When discovering an elephant made of water in the desert, he takes the chance to jump in, playing in the water. The presentation of enjoyment in the midst of the absurd is emphasized by having Nyatta pull along his sister for the entirety of the film. In the beginning of Cat Soup, when Nyatta first attempts to rescue his sister by engaging in a tug-of-war with her soul with Jizou, the guardian of dead children, he only manages to recover half of her spirit. Nyako is left partially alive, capable of basic movements but devoid of conviction or emotion. Despite her persistent listlessness, Nyatta pulls her by the hand through all his travels. While he stares in wonder at rainfall, or colorful lights, or an enormous cake, his sister sits by silently. Her condition begs the question: with a world where happiness is available, why not enjoy life while present? Why accept death while alive? Though Camus notes that absurdity teaches that experiences are unimportant, he also asserts that being aware of experiences and enjoying them constitutes living (21). Though in the context of Cat Soup Nyako’s condition is not her decision, her passivity compared with Nyatta’s engagement suffices to illustrate the worth of experiences.
However, this interpretation of pursuing enjoyment under the umbrella of futility creates a moral dilemma. Nyatta makes the decision to act freely in an absurd world, measuring the value of his experiences without a traditional moral scale. As a result, he unashamedly engages in actions that destroy others for his own survival or entertainment. When Nyatta and Nyako first arrive at the home of the android, the seemingly friendly stranger, much like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, treats the two to a lavish dinner before he attempts to make them into soup. As part of the meal, he ties a bird to a post and, while it is still alive and struggling, sets it on fire for Nyatta’s amusement. Additionally, when the pig offers to cook fish for the group while they float at sea, Nyatta eschews the meal and instead tackles the pig to the ground, ripping apart his flesh. His actions, while unnecessary for his survival, does increase his enjoyment, as the fattier pork makes for a tastier meal. Without a moral system and no risk to himself in harming the pig, Nyatta has nothing preventing him from violence.
This selfish conclusion from the absurd diverges from Camus’s own thoughts on morality and ethics. Seeking to overcome the problematic moral implications of his theory of the absurd, Camus attempts to extend his arguments for rejection of suicide into rejection of murder. He claims that as refusing to commit suicide implicitly acknowledges the value of life to the self, it follows that others, who also must value life, should not be killed (Davis 113). As Davis explains, this does little to consolidate a moral system, instead raising a contradiction with the premise of the absurd as it relies on the universal extension of a personal experience to the experience of others. This is orthogonal to the position that moral consistency does not exist, opening Camus to criticism of inconsistency by attempting to unite the incompatible concepts of morality and absurdity (Davis 108). Davis describes Camus as being aware of the conflict between his various stances, frequently pitting an appeal to morality against a rejection of unquestioned ethics, such as the conflict between Cherea and Caligula in Caligula. Due to the unresolved opposition in his ideas, Davis claims Camus leaves readers in an “intellectual deadlock” (116).
Tatsuo Sato escapes this impasse by embracing the violence the absurd implies. However, Nyatta does not fully adopt the mindset of Caligula, whose “terrible melancholy” provides latitude for relentless execution of violence and represents Camus’s most pressing concerns about the implications of an absurd individual (Davis 116) . Instead, Nyatta, accepting of futility, bases his morality on love for his sister and the selfless goal of trying to help her. Though he has little regard for the well-being of characters outside of his family, he does not become focused solely on the annihilation of others as a means of actualization. Even with no inherent obligation to do so, Nyatta chooses a value system that at least partly draws on traditionally virtuous behavior. As a result, Cat Soup is a more hopeful execution of the absurd when applied to behavior, creating a path that avoids catastrophe by accepting a middle ground between ethical good and pure violence. Admittedly, the stance of Cat Soup is more tenuous than the universal ideals of companionship and decency that Camus attempts to formulate, but it provides a possible model for a reasonable existence under the umbrella of the absurd without his contradictions.
The absurd optimism presented by Cat Soup echoes the producers’ approach to creating the film. In production, the team largely eschewed a greater moral meaning, mainly working to take whatever steps necessary to evoke the correct tone. In Tatsuo Sato’s commentary of the film, he qualifies that many of the scenes were thrown together with little planning. For example, in the scene with the circus, he admits that he gave the animators very little direction in depicting a bird that had swallowed the sky, only suggesting that the scene provide the proper sense of scale and awe. Additionally, when Nyatta and Nyako narrowly avoid being cut into pieces, Sato admits confusion as to why the staff made the choice to depict the aggressor as a robot. He is unapologetic about the lack of a satisfying explanation for many events, encouraging the audience to contradict him and derive their own interpretation. At some points, he takes pride in the spontaneity of the production process. When talking about the scene where God reverses time, Sato describes the unorthodox animation strategy used by the team, explaining how being untethered to a television schedule allowed for the team to step out of animation conventions. He speaks fondly of how the land of the dead near the end of the film is depicted as a world made out of tin and oil. In his commentary, he reveals that while Yuasa, the animation director, wrote in the idea of a mechanical landscape for the finale, he himself had no explanation for the decision beyond a focus on evoking a beautiful and haunting atmosphere. Though Tatsuo Sato is silent on explaining the ending of Cat Soup, his elaboration of the team’s process behind the scenes offers some justification. After admitting that many of the scenes were created for the sake of being created, capping off the story with a proper conclusion would be unwarranted. It would betray the spirit of the directing and writing process, which only achieved excellence by being divorced from neatly fitting into a broader story arc.
The commentary on the process also clarifies that the film operates with the absurd rather than the random. Randomness would imply an artistic suicide analogous to the philosophical suicide described by Camus. If the design team despaired at the lack of direction given by Sato and noncommittally pasted together half-completed frames and scenes, then we could say the film was random. Instead, there is effort and intention behind every detail, resulting in high levels of technical excellence and creativity. Even without a concrete meaning behind the imagery, the film’s quality can be appreciated by industry professionals; Cat Soup was met with numerous animation accolades at festivals soon after its release. However, as Sato made clear in his direction toward the team, the scenes of the film were largely arbitrary and freeform. Furthermore, the structure of the film further highlights the dubious value of effort, as the disconnected plot allows for clips to be capriciously removed and shuffled. Even if the absence of a crystallized storyline allowed the team to find motivating meaning in some other aspect of the work, such as aesthetic merit, the eccentricities of the film’s production process would force them to continuously encounter the realization that their work may be futile. But despite the absence of a encompassing reason to strive, the talent behind the film continues to work, exemplifying the juxtaposition that defines in the absurd.
Cat Soup encourages the viewer to live with absurdity. The senselessness of the adventure is acknowledged throughout the film, which stresses the inevitability of tragedy and suffering. Additionally, the apathy of a recurring God-like character further opposes the idea that the characters’ fates hold any inherent meaning. Value is imparted when viewing the film’s events as absurd, to be appreciated with the full knowledge of their meaninglessness. With this perspective, rather than despair at the futility of the plot, the viewer can enjoy the experience of the film. This perspective extends to the film’s production, best exemplified in the director’s commentary on the film, which resists providing a rational explanation for the piece. Both as a process and a product, Cat Soup illustrates how to find meaning in the meaningless and value in the arbitrary.
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien, Vintage Books, 1991.
Cat Soup. Directed by Tatsuo Sato, produced by Yuji Matsukura at J.C.Staff, Starchild Records, 21 Feb. 2001. Unofficially available on YouTube, youtube.com/watch?v=XlLBX4EIlJY.
Davis, Colin. “Violence and Ethics in Camus.” The Cambridge Companion to Camus, edited by Edward J. Hughes, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 106–117. Cambridge Companions to Literature.