Cat Soup’d or This Cannot End Well…

I have a mischievous streak.  I’m also extremely shy, so that streak usually stays hidden unless I’ve known a person for years, or if I become instantly comfortable with that person.  The way this streak manifests among people that I’m cultivating to become otaku is that I “make” them watch Cat Soup at some point.

If you haven’t seen Cat Soup, I’d recommend it with a warning: unless you have an idea what’s going on, you won’t know what’s going on.  Heck, even if you know what’s going on, it still won’t make sense.  It’s a very random movie.

Cat Soup could be summed up in the following way: it’s the journey of two kittens to retrieve the girl kitten’s soul from Death.  Alternatively it could be summed up as two kittens journeying to the grocery store to buy bean curd for Mama cat.

Basically I trick people into watching Cat Soup by giving them the technically correct summary.  Then I sit back and watch their head explode.  I do try to be somewhat nice about it by only really showing it to people once I think they’d be ready for it.  I don’t want to scare them away from anime forever.

My latest victim was a coworker who’s been chatting me up about anime and manga.  I’d lent him Cat Soup a month or two ago and he’s just now gotten around to watching it.  Every week, he’d tell me he was going to watch it, and I’d nod and think to myself, “yeah I’ll *know* when you watch it, hehehe.”

He claims that he has something worse than Cat Soup, that he’s going to dig out for me to watch.  I guess I’ll be waiting for that to see what happens.  I think I have a trump card already for that though.  My next act may just be to convince him to watch the Revolutionary Girl Utena movie.  Oh hohohoho!