#126: Lily C.A.T. (1987)

Director: Hisayuki Toriumi

Screenplay: Hisayuki Toriumi

Voice Cast: Chikao Ohtsuka as Dick Berry; Masako Katsuki as Nancy Strauch; Osamu Saka as Mike Hamilton; Yoshiko Sakakibara as Miss Caroline; Eiko Yamada as Dorothy Van Farrah /Farrah Van Dorothy; Hideyuki Tanaka as Gott Walt Coup; Hiroshi Ohtake as Dülar Delcassé; Kōzō Shioya as Guy Alcuin; Mahito Tsujimura as Dr. Harris Mead; Masako Katsuki as Nancy Stroustrup

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

[Major Spoilers]

After years of curiosity of this title, I finally come to Lily C.A.T. with disappointment to be honest. And note, this OVA feature has a handsome production team behind it, so there was hope even as a schlocky sci-fi horror film it'd have a high calibre group of names working on it. Director Hisayuki Tonuni directed the 1985 Area 88 OVA, which is still held in high regard today, and was chief co-director of crossover hit The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982), and helmed the original Gatchaman (1972-4) series, a man who started on Speed Racer in the sixties, by the end of his life at 2009 going between helping Mamoru Oshii develop the first ever OVA in existence, Dallos (1983), and even becoming a freelance novelist.

The studio behind this film Pierrot are veterans who've been behind huge series from Urusei Yatsura to Narato, and you have two figures by the name of Yasuomi Umetsu and Yoshitaka Ameno involved. Umetsu, future director of the notorious Kite (1998), was yet a man who even on that title was known for painstaking quality of work¹. Ameno, who has been covered before, eventually became so well regarded for his highly detailed illustration that he could live off being an actual artist for a career with work in galleries, cutting his teeth in the sixties too and in the eighties being a journeyman in anime, between working with Oshii on the truly under seen masterpiece Angel's Egg (1985) and random obscurities like Amon Saga (1986).

So why doesn't Lily C.A.T. work for me? Because it remakes Alien (1979) in a tired way even if it's well made. Ridley Scott's film is important but all the work that ripped it off has cast an unfortunate shadow over genre cinema when so many, for every good film that ripped it off in great or fun ways, just copied it lazily. Anime has done the same, to the point there's even multiple hentai based on this template²; Lily C.A.T's version begins with an international crew and plays off the idea of time distortion due to space travel, a theme explored later in Gunbuster (1988) in how for this crew, the Earth is left over twenty plus years whilst for them it'll only be months on their goal. One idea sadly underutilised is that, as per suspicions two of the crew have faked their identities, in this world this factor has encouraged criminals on the lam to go into space so time passes, leaving few to remember them.

Instead, we get another potentially fascinating plot in which, yes, there's an alien entity onboard but it has contaminated the spaceship's atmosphere and causes an alien version of Legionnaire's disease that rapidly harms a person's lungs, as the real life disease does as explained in the story, but also is connected to a being which absorbed all living matter. It does mean, as a warning even as an animated work, there is cat related violence along the way but also, designed by Yoshitaka Ameno, a really disturbing creature like John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) which is a mass of limbs and entities coexisting. As this is an eighties OVA too, not only is all this highly detailed animation, but this creature is really grotesque too.

However the problem with Lily C.A.T. is how bland it all becomes, when anime horror is moody, lurid and/or ridiculous. It is usually of interest to me even if it's terrible because it is unpredictable, entirely different from what this film does. The characters, a multinational cast, don't stand out even if a plot point is about two suspicious members of the crew; Umezu's character designs, very realistic, aren't as flamboyant as his work can be, he who is usually very realistic but also includes immense detail to them. This is neither helped by the cast not being written to stand out for what is initially a large one which could blend into each other, and since this desires to play Alien straight, it never has a surprise. The only quirk of the entire plot is also an incredibly silly one, imagining if Ash from Alien, the android who was secretly responsible for getting the alien to Earth, when played by an android cat. It doesn't succeed, and as a result, this was a huge disappointment as a film despite the calibre of staff behind it.

From https://fantasyanime.com/anime/images/lilycat/lilycat_shot20.jpg

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1) Still working too, which is great, as the character designs of Kokkoku: Moment by Moment (2018) are unmistakably his, and he's been involved as the animation director for many productions, which is a damn good figure to have on staff.

2) One could even be covered as it got a butchered British DVD release, called Alien of Darkness (1996), which envisioned Alien if the entire crew were female, tentacles and a heroine with a cute ferret.