English Dub Review: Nyaight of the Living Cat “Cat Rising”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Kunagi’s team are sent to retrieve a father and sons team of cat herders who haven’t reported back in.

OUR TAKE

Oh hey, Crunchyroll actually bothered to let people watch the dub for this episode! How nice of them to do that only an entire day late! Anyway, as it turns out, I was kinda right about this next phase of the show being somewhat like the movie “28 Days Later”, only I guess it was actually coincidentally like the recent “28 YEARS Later” movie, in the more tangential way that it seems the story is implying that those who were turned by the virus that makes them not human are actually able to reform their minds in some way. Or at least that seems to be what’s being implied by that oddly large eared cat at the end reading books that look like they’re for self examination. Not entirely sure what that could mean, other than the cats being a more serious threat if they can become more intelligent, or maybe that some cats will realize they are human again and try to help unaffected humans. Or…hell, maybe they’ll simply stop attacking humans and begin actually building a society for cats and by cats, while humans remain on the fringes of society but rebuild in their own way. It’s all kind of up in the air at the moment.

In any case, this episode was pretty much for pointing out Kunagi and his group are adapting in this new world while working with others to maintain what little ground mankind still has left. Having now joined up with Grandma and her compound of surviving humans, he, Kaoru, and Arata seem to have gotten used to going on missions to fight off cats or rescue survivors. After picking up some guy last episode, he gets a tour of the place to see what’s left for him to really enjoy out of life. Still, it seems that he, Kunagi, and others are just as much committed to reclaiming humanity’s spot on the top of the food chain, as well as finding a way to co-exist with cat kind, since everyone has somehow still retained their intense love for cats and not developed a trauma or fear response to the creatures who were the cause of society’s collapse and the end of everyone’s way of life. Yeah, that’s never going to not be weird to me. Heck, this whole series is never going to not be weird to me. But we’ve still got the second half to go, so let’s see how weird it can get.