The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today

One day, a young woman named Saku took in a stray black cat who she later named Yukichi. However, as time went on, Yukichi grew large enough to be mistaken for a bear. Instead of being a threat though, Yukichi spends his time cooking food, doing laundry, and taking care of his owner after she comes home from hard days at work.

The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today is based on Hitsuji Yamada's The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today (Dekiru Neko wa Kyō mo Yūutsu) manga. It streams on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today started a fight between me and my husband. He disagreed with me pointing out how ugly the show looked, with its strange color palettes, two-dimensional characters poorly composited into three-dimensional environments, and extraneous use of lens flare.

“The entire office is the same shade of beige!” I shouted.

“It's intentional because work sucks! Like in Supercub!” he replied.

“Go Hands hasn't earned that kind of trust! Everything they've made has been ugly for no reason!”

“You're just getting drawn into the Twitter discourse!”

“No, this is my real opinion from watching a bunch of Go Hands premieres over the years!”

I will be forwarding the bills for my marriage counseling and eventual divorce to the studio.

Just kidding, we're fine; our marriage is too strong to be taken down by the likes of such a villain. But still, Go Hands continues to make some of the most baffling artistic choices I've seen that can really only be explained as an attempt to conceal shoddy animation work. Although it's considerably calmed down from other productions, there are times when a moving camera gives a scene an unintentionally ominous tone, like something's going to jump out of the refrigerator and attack Yuri. Most shots have an inexplicable tint to them, like when your electronic device's night-color app shifts orange or you're wearing sunglasses with purplish lenses. Why?

It has a strange defamiliarizing effect. The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today would be better served with the opposite. You don't want this series about a woman being cared for by a Maine Coon that's halfway between pet and homemaker to feel alien and ill at ease; you want it to feel cozy and comforting. Yukichi is a strange beast, but the idea is for the audience to relate to Yuri and wish they had a pet cat who would care for them. Despite the incongruous visuals, I did relate to Yuri. I don't have an office job I hate like she does, but I've definitely felt the desire to break down and throw a tantrum when anticipating a difficult day at work. Having a giant cat to bury my face in would do wonders for preparing me for the day ahead! Or even a normal-sized cat, really.

There's a real missed opportunity here. Food porn anime are in vogue lately, and there's a lot of opportunity here for Yukichi to make Yuri some really appetizing-looking food. However, the best Go Hands can do here seems to be not adding the same sickly tint to the food as everything else. The gyoza looked burned, and the madeleines were much too dark. In one scene, Yukichi is watching a cooking show… which is just a real cooking show with a filter slapped over it. Anime has perfected the art of delicious-looking food, and this is just shameful.

I've been reviewing the anime of Studio Go Hands for going on six years now; from Hand Shakers to W'z to that one anime of theirs I reviewed and completely forgot about a while back, Go Hands shows have been with me from practically the very start of my career as a critic. So, with that in mind, believe me when I say that whoever said “Time heals all wounds” is a goddamned liar since I have irrefutable scars of the damage Go Hands has done to my eyes and my soul that will never heal. Their “house style”, such as it is, is responsible for the ugliest anime ever made that wasn't named EX-ARM, and I hardly need to remind folks of the literal nausea that their needlessly chaotic CG animation and virtual camera work induced in many of its viewers, myself included.

I hope it makes sense, then, when I say that The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today is a show that I would probably like a lot, if any other animation studio on Earth made it, and I mean that as an honest compliment. On a foundational level, this is the kind of slice-of-life comedy that I can get behind. Saku is a likable and relatable gal trying to get by on that daily grind, and her dynamic with her preposterously large and somewhat anthropomorphic cat, Yukichi, is even, dare I say, “believable”? As a cat lover, I appreciated the silly jokes about weighing a cat, waking up to a giant fluffer trying to smother the life out of you, and so on. As a husband who also takes care of many domestic responsibilities like cooking, I got a kick out of bits like Yukichi spending a whole afternoon on a fancy meal that his owner won't even be able to eat because of work plans. It's a funny, wholesome, and sweet domestic sitcom with great potential.

Unfortunately, all of that potential is chained to Go Hands, a studio that remains doggedly determined to stick to its stylistic guns, no matter how many of its victi—I mean, viewers weep and beg for it to stop. I will admit that The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today is the most restrained production I've ever seen from this company, so it succeeds at being watchable in the most technical sense. Still, Go Hands' reliance on horribly composited CGI/photographic backgrounds and needlessly conspicuous camera work barely ever made sense back in the crazy, action-packed days of Hand Shakers. To apply that same approach to a mid-tempo comedy, of all things, results in an aesthetic that I can only describe as deranged. Several shots in this episode legitimately produce an eerie factor on par with a horror film, which I cannot imagine was intentional, and the drab colors and hideous rendering of Saku's workplace make it seem like her office has been designed and run by the Jigsaw Killer.

That's the saddest thing about The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today. For better or worse, it is the least-bad show I've ever seen from Go Hands. Does that mean that I recommend watching it? Good Lord, no. It just means that we can see how close this studio can come to blissful, merciful competence, only to immediately shoot itself in both feet and go tumbling down sixty stories of those ugly-ass CGI stairs that it has been torturing us with for so long.

I cannot tell you how much I wanted to love this show. I've had my fair share of very large cats (see: the late, great Big Al over there), and the story here is an almost irresistible mix of absurdly human cat and incredibly real cat. Yukichi may be taller than Saku, his human, but he's still all feline, from the way he manages her life to sitting directly on top of her in the most uncomfortable position possible, whether trying his absolute hardest to fit in something he clearly does not or lampooning the basic cat weighing method practiced by kitty parents worldwide, Yukichi is an absolute delight of a giant weirdo.

What doesn't work isn't strictly the fault of the visuals provided by Go Hands, somewhat to my surprise. It's true that it does have its moments, such as an overreliance on fish-eye lenses, as if we're seeing multiple scenes reflected in mirrors set up to let you see around corners, and the colors sometimes fade. That may be due to the contrast between Saku's home and work lives, which is understandable, if not particularly nice to look at. But the main issue is that this would have worked much better as a short or even a half-length episode. It's not that there's not enough content (there are four volumes of the manga currently available in English); it's more that the content isn't varied enough to make this consistently engaging as a half-hour episode.

The episode relies on a few gags that frankly would have been more fun if we didn't see them so many times in a short span of time. Chief among these is how Saku whines at Yukichi for more food, and he tells her no. It's an incredibly relatable thing if you have a cat – in fact, my Carmine just did it to me three times while I watched the episode and wrote this much – and seeing it with the species reversed is fun…the first time. But the show runs it into the ground, which doesn't do it any favors. That's true for Saku's snide coworker's comments about marriageability, and the less said about the painfully long commuting scene in the beginning, the better.

Still, this is the kind of show you could just put on, look up at occasionally, and have a cozy time with. If you like cats (or have any), it is worth at least checking out because when it's right, it's pretty darn good.

Go Hands, why are you like this? At least when you were only making your poorly considered originals like Hand Shakers and Scar on the Praeter, there was the flimsy justification that the studio's bizarre house style was some creative vision that wasn't understandable to anyone besides those who made it. Here? We're dealing with an adaptation of a simple, straightforward little comedy manga. There have been anime like that for decades, and we all know how to make those kinds of shows work. We know how to frame, color, pace, and deliver an animated equivalent of the cozy, low-stakes comedy that makes them work as comics.

So why in the hell was it decided to make this show's aesthetic look exactly like all those Go Hands Originals? Why does this episode open with a four-minute montage of our female lead, face blocked in shadow, commuting her way through this bizarre and unsettlingly shiny CG world? Why are there random cutaways to cars and intersections she's not encountering? Why is the entire sequence scored with the same droning, looping elevator muzak that sounds like it was downloaded from an open-source media library? Why does our heroine work in this off-putting office where all the furniture is CG and every shot is made to simulate a fish-eye lens?

Every single creative decision is just...wrong. Even when we retreat to the relatively normal apartment that Saku shares with her enormous, bipedal cat, there are details and moments that suck any sense of comfort from the jokes. Every room has a sickly yellow tinge, making the comedic scenes uncomfortable. There are inexplicable shots inside Saku's fridge that slowly zoom in on her face, as if from the perspective of some creature living inside. When Yukichi drags his drowsy human into the bathroom, it looks more like he's dragging a dead body to be thrown into a river. Through the magic of terrible direction, the show has turned an anodyne comedy into an unintentional horror film, and it would be impressive if it weren't so obviously accidental.

Even with a more competent and conventional adaptation, I don't think this show would have lit the world on fire. The main gimmick is that Yukichi is a big, humanlike cat who is more roommate than pet but still sometimes acts like a cat, and more is needed to carry even one episode. I did get a giggle out of him sitting on top of his human to wake her up but otherwise didn't get much out of what few jokes made it through the visuals intact. I also didn't like Suka, who seems to be intended as a relatable young woman in arrested development, trying to endure the working world, but mostly comes across as an annoying leech. Maybe that's supposed to be a comedic role reversal, with the cat doing all the work to feed and comfort the human, but when she started screeching about not wanting to go to work, all I wanted was for her to shut up.

I suspect some folks will hear all this and have the urge to watch it “ironically” or see if any of its baffling creative decisions will prove legitimately interesting. I certainly saw that sentiment around an equally misguided feline production called Cats (2019), and let me tell you that the shock wears off quickly. Something this poorly made, pushed forward with such confidence, eventually loses its novelty and becomes a chore to get through, and that's most certainly the case for this poor, misbegotten stray of a production.

I seriously considered just copy-pasting my impressions for The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—i.e., the other Go Hands-produced anime this season—and calling it a day. Everything I wrote about camera angles, lenses, and the visual meaning they hold for the viewer in the first five paragraphs of that article applies just as much to The Masterful Cat Is Depressed Again Today as that anime. Yet somehow, as over the top as The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses was—especially in its opening scene—nothing there holds a candle to the enraging mess that is the first 3 minutes and 47 seconds of this anime.

Ostensibly, the opening scene here is supposed to introduce us to Saku and her daily life—all while obscuring that the person getting her up and out the door is a giant cat. However, the vast majority of these 3 minutes and 47 seconds are spent showing random parts of the city—the trains passing, people walking, cars driving. And, of course, we have spinning camera shots, fish-eye lenses, and shots that shift in focus from foreground to background—not to mention the several low-angle shots and the “impossible” ones that move through solid objects.

These 3 minutes and 47 seconds are the most irate I've been at an anime in a long time. I believe my exact thoughts were, “I'm here to watch a comedy about a woman living with a giant cat, not Go Hands' poorly disguised demo reel showcasing all the ‘cool things’ they can animate.” And it just. Wouldn't. End.

Thankfully, once the episode proper begins, the self-indulgent, masturbatory directing is replaced by something far more normal and competent. Unlike The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses, it stops distracting from the story being told for the most part. And imagine my utter shock when one of these crazy camera tricks was used correctly. In the scene where the cat drags the collapsed Saku from the living room into the bathroom, the camera is at ground level like she is and is dragged with her. It's a clever shot showing her point of view in a creative way!

From then on, the only real visual oddity was the sudden use of rotoscoping for the cooking show on TV. But I suppose it'd be too much to hope for animation style consistency when Go Hands could instead shout to potential investors and clients, “Hey! Look! We do rotoscoping too!”

As for the story, it is cute and enjoyable. We get a few good bits about Saku dealing with the surreality of her situation—that no one will believe she lives with a giant cat who acts as her housewife. We also get the twist that, in their daily life, Saku acts far more like a cat than Yukichi—crying out in joy over every little thing and trying to grab food from Yukichi haphazardly. Honestly, throw out those first 3 minutes and 47 seconds, and I daresay we have a watchable anime—but that still won't stop me from deducting an entire star for that opening alone.

And hell, if you're a cat lover, you'll probably enjoy this one. It's got more than a few clever cat jokes sprinkled throughout. I hope that, now that the first episode (i.e., the one most people will watch) is out of the way, Go Hands will just calm down with their over-the-top directing BS and just focus on giving us competent directing instead. I'm not holding my breath, though.