English Dub Review: Nekopara “Welcome to La Soleil”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Welcome to a world where cats look an awful lot like female humans except for a set of cat ears atop their heads, and a tail swinging beneath their asses. Okay, take a moment to digest that. Now let’s meet a brother and sister team who own six “cats” between them. Her name is Shigure, and she lives at home with four of the cats. He’s known only as “Master” and he lives above a patisserie that he also owns and operates. Two of the cats decided to live with him. They even mailed themselves to the café in large boxes without air holes. Damn, are they lucky to be alive!

The cats all have unique hair colors and personalities. So let’s get this out of the way:

Chocola is the brunette cat. She’s a manic pixie girl with the attention span of a gnat.

Vanilla is the white-haired cat. She’s reserved and subtle; although, she seems to have a crush on or at least an infatuation for Chocola. Watch out for this one.

Azuki is the redheaded cat. She’s the oldest and most mature, but isn’t immune to the allure of shiny objects or a little roughhousing.

Coconut has long blonde hair. She is the tall, sexy, dumb one. She also has heterochromia, meaning one eye is a different color than the other.

Maple is the golden-haired cat. She’s easy-going, helpful, and the great mediator. Basically, she’s the Ringo Starr of the group.

Cinnamon has purple hair, and is just the worst. Kitty’s a nervous mess who openly talks about panties and her sexuality at work. She also has a mega-crush on Maple.

Since Chocola and Vanilla live there, after breakfast, they help open the shop and cover the first waitressing shift. On this particular day, Maple and Cinnamon take a train from the house to work the second shift. On route, we learn that cats are only allowed to travel without their masters if they wear special bells around their necks. To get those bells, cats have to pass a very difficult test. So, if you see a cat with a bell in this strange universe, odds are that cat is quite clever.

Back at the house, Azuki and Coconut get into a scuffle. It’s not very important because it’s just an expositional episode and this is little more than a showcase of their character traits. The true crux of the episode happens in the final minutes when Chocola is sent to the store to buy sauce for that evening’s tuna. On the way, she runs into a little green-haired girl wearing a kitty hat. Chocola mistakes her for a real cat, feeds her, and is still surprised when the little thing follows her home.

 

Our Take

I don’t know what to do with this show. It’s primarily designed with fetishists in mind, isn’t it? What we’ve got is a cat café—they call it a patisserie, but they’re just being fancy for fanciful sake. If you live around any major city, you’ve probably come across or at the very least have heard of cat cafés. You sit down, order a tea, or croissant, cats are all around you, and that’s about it. Except here the cats are practically humans with stunted feline brains.

At the start, I thought it was a bit. That the girls were simply dressing up as cats to go along with the café’s theme. It didn’t matter that the girls all slept together, kneaded each other’s bellies, and sometimes got into scratching fights. These are merely the actions of highly skilled method performers. One cannot truly act like a cat until they have become that cat.

But no, they are actually cat-human hybrids in a world where regular cats might not even exist—even though the café’s signage has plenty of pictures depicting “traditional” cats. Observing these girls living as cats is super uncomfortable. Even though they’re practically human in most every way, they remain subservient to their “masters” and aren’t even allowed out of the house if they’re not wearing collars and bells.

This is some real handmaiden, or even slavery, bullshit going on here. Sure, the majority of this world likely laughs off this legitimate concern because cats aren’t intelligent enough to enjoy their own autonomy. But that’s exactly how the world as a whole used to feel about actual slavery—first on the basis of class and later on race. If that’s the case, I have a real problem with the blatant subjugation of these poor women.

I can already tell this isn’t going to be a show about liberation, one in which the cats gradually discover how cruelly the world treats them. They’ll never understand certain nuances. Sure, their “masters” may treat them kindly, but they’re still keeping women as pets and forcing them to work against their will. Instead, this is going to be a simplistic program with the sole purpose of showing off the “wacky” and “adorable” antics of this pack of “cutesy” cats.

That may sound like heaven in a jar for your average fetishist, but it sounds kind of tedious to me.