Poor kitty. But ah, how did we come to this, where humans share their homes with cats and cats try to kill their humans with giant kaiju kitty lasers?
Back in 1902, Rudyard Kipling tried to answer that in The Cat That Walked By Himself, in a collection of pourquoi stories called Just So Stories. Something about the story, which explains how man domesticated animals, must have caught Ideya Garanina’s eye, because 86 years later, she made the animated feature The Cat Who Walked By Herself http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_Who_Walked_by_Herself (original Russian: Koshka, kotoraya gulyala sama po sebe, IMDB.com entry here)
Sez Niffiwan, who translated The Cat Who Walked By Herself and provided the subtitles:
This seems to be a film that has simply slipped through the cracks… nobody seems to know anything about it. It is extremely difficult to find it on video/DVD in Russia, and pretty much impossible outside of the country. However, it’s one of the most beautifully-directed animated films I’ve ever seen, and I think it deserves more exposure – which is why I’ve created a translation.
The Cat Who Walked By Herself clocks in at 69-plus minutes, hell on Earth for the typical ADD-afflicted Netizen, so it’s not something that you can watch over your lunch break. It’s a little slow-moving (albeit not nearly as slow as the original Russian production of Solaris, which makes paint drying look like a UFC pit match), but it redeems itself with skillful, imaginative animation in many different media. You just don’t see animation like this anymore, or animation dealing with these kinds of mystical subjects or (gasp!) Kipling.
