English Dub Review: Nyaight of the Living Cat “Everything Becomes Cat”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Sometime in the near future, a virus has spread through cats that transforms any who cuddle them into cats themselves. Kunagi, a young man with amnesia but an extensive knowledge of cats, tries to leads his new friends through the chaos and possibly find a cure.

OUR TAKE

In terms of zombie apocalypse stories, this one is definitely off to a novel start. Usually it’s just the standard issue rotting corpses that are either chillingly slow or horrifically fast, but for whatever reason, the author of this story, going by the pen name Hawkman, decided on people turning into cats. Not even cat people or different types of felines like lions or tigers, just…regular house cats. And they don’t even need to get scratched or bitten, just any physical contact completely changes a full grown person into the size and shape of a cat, making them seemingly lose all sense of identity and just becoming one with the litter horde. It is as absurd and hilarious as it is actually kind of unsettling, and we’ll probably be seeing it happen a lot over these twelve episodes, so maybe we’ll see some examples of how that transformation goes. We already see that it is a bit of a delayed reaction sometimes as one of the people at the cat cafe only starts feeling the effects near the end of the episode. So, sometimes it happens instantly, sometimes it takes a little bit of time depending on what kind of dramatic effect is needed.

Oh yeah, there was a cat cafe. The episode starts with an in media res action sequence to introduce us to the daily lives of danger and risk that the surviving human characters will have to get through, but it flashes back to when Kunagi first arrived at a cat cafe, with no memories of how he got there but somehow a ton of trivia about specific breeds of cats…even when he doesn’t know things like Russia. He’s also buff as hell and looked like he was an apocalypse survivor before this even happened, so my first guess is that he is connected to how this whole thing went down somehow, even if he isn’t aware of it yet. As for where this is all headed, well…I have no idea. I’m honestly still wrapping my head around there being a virus that turns you into a whole ass cat. The manga this is based on is still ongoing, so we’re not going to be wrapping up the story by the twelfth episode, but we’re no doubt going to be having a wild pussy ride on our way there! And if not, then this was certainly a first episode that I won’t soon forget.