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    Anime Abandon: Lily C.A.T.

     Aug 28 2014 | more 

    Don’t worry, I’m not mad at you Lily C.A.T, just disappointed.

    • tengabro

      ‘Tis a glorious day

    • DJKennedy90 .

      …Was the revelation of the cat REALLY so noteworthy that it absolutely NEEDED to be the title of the freaking anime? Nothing about the alien? Hell, a generic title like “Shallow Breath” would at least be more fitting, given how you described most of the cast dying off like.

      And… was the anime as vague about that alien as it seems, or was Sage just really not that into it? You breathe it in, it dissolves/whatever your lungs and kills you… then it apparently reanimates the victims’ bodies and fuses them into Thing-In-Space?

      Well, regardless… at least you seemed to get some enjoyment out of it Sage. Hope the stuff you pick for your Actors Theme Month are at least good titles so you can get away from slag for at least a few weeks.

      Take care guys.

    • Jacob Richards

      YEAH! fist of the north star, city hunter, and now cobra. meaning you have reviewed 3 anime based on 3 classic 80’s weekly shonen jump manga! Now i’m counting down to the day you review Jo Jo’s Bizarre Adventure!!

    • Dror Klein

      The captain looks eerily like Gendo Ikari. And the gun totting guy who was the first to die was kind of a toned-downed Liefeld character.

    • http://filmrunner.wordpress.com/ Film Runner

      This really does just seem like Alien meets The Thing to me. The scene of talking to the ship’s computer is lifted straight from the former, as well as the company’s robot keeping an eye on them and the explosion effect for the shuttle is identical to the Nostromo’s.

      I think the trend for exposition over visual storytelling may be the result of my main problem with anime, which is that it is produced by only one culture. Other mediums like film and books have many different viewpoints and ideas from all over the world, but when only one culture makes something it falls into tradition and stagnation quickly (superhero comics have this problem too).

    • Brandon

      Pretty great review but I’d like to make a note that a multinational conglomerate using people from all it’s branches is entirely plausible.
      1.) Being fluent in Japanese (or English in the case of the dub) either through it being your native language, or you being bilingual or multilingual might be a prerequisite for the mission.
      2.) All non Japanese/English speakers were given courses before hand.
      3.) You’d be surprised how far you can get ahead in a company if you speak multiple languages, especially the one that the head office uses. And in the case of the dub being English, English is one of the most common languages in the world, only Cantonese/Mandarin beat it in sheer number of speakers and languages like Hindi and Arabic are just as wide spread, and that’s also not taking into account French, Spanish, Portuguese, the list goes on. Hell one of my co-workers at her full time work was able to negotiate an additional $5,000 extra to her yearly salary because she fluently speaks French, and up here in Canada if you can actually speak it at a level that isn’t just the rudimentary level needed to pass your mandatory high school French, and you make frequent trips to Quebec for the company, well…

      • DVS BSTrD

        In fact it would be more likely that everyone spoke English than Japanese, since it’s the second language for most first world countries.

        • Brandon

          In the case of the dub, that would be exactly it.
          And for all we know, Japan’s population, borders, etc may have gone up/expanded so there’s that for the sub.
          Again, great review but that one part really didn’t need a massive tangent for something that could be explained away with ten seconds of rational thought.

    • http://www.cherubrock.net/blog/ Moshella

      “Kneesocks,” holy crap! Perfect name for that character!

      I’ve, somehow, remembered that character ever since getting a glimpse of this anime on “Saturday Anime” on the Sci Fi Channel (back before it was “Scyfy” or “Siffy” or whatever we’re calling it now) back in like, the mid-90’s. Holy nostalgia. I don’t think I ever actually sat through this one, but would catch bits and pieces of it now and then. Years went by and sometimes I’d wonder to myself, “what was that anime set in space with the blonde chick with the weird socks?”

      Keep up the great work, sir.

    • Christian Neihart

      I was hoping Adult Swim month would come back next month, but oh well.

      We had better get a Johnny Yong Bosch episode next month.

    • Julian Morein

      The blond dude in the button shirt sounds like Uryu from Bleach, but I don’t think its the same VA…

    • Turbo Puns

      So can we expect a reference to the music video for Mathew Sweet’s song Girlfriend, in the next review since like all of it’s footage from taken from Space Adventure Cobra? Possible a cameo by a certain fellow in the shadows? Just saying it’s a good time for some Channel Awesome Synergy.

    • Michelle Travis

      Looking forward to your VA appreciation month… dare we hope that we’ll get another month later of you eviscerating your favorite VAs to hate?
      (And still looking forward to you hopefully reviewing VHD: Bloodlust in the future to see how it compares to the original (IMO, it’s far superior).)
      And before I forget, the new outro rocks.

    • http://mara999.deviantart.com/ MaraBackman

      So Cobra is up next? Niiice..! 😀

    • ANNONNY

      Did that cat just produce a fucking godzilla roar before the explosion..?

    • DVS BSTrD

      The thing that actually bothered me about the hallway shot wasn’t how it didn’t have anything going on, it was more that it was done from so far away. I really don’t mind still moments in cinema that are more about atmosphere, but there really didn’t seem to be a reason for so much of the shot to be so empty. Presentation wise there is no reason for it to be a long shot instead of a close one. A suppose the added detail would have made it harder to animate, but for me the emptiness is kind of distracting. The off center angle combined with the distance lead me to expect that someone was going to enter the shot from the bottom right to balance the shot. I wish they had added a visual justification for presenting that scene the way they did than just providing the right mood.

    • Loren Helgeson

      Wow! I haven’t seen this one in years, and I couldn’t remember the name of it. I just remember it was like a mix between Alien, Leviathan and The Thing. I liked it then, and I still do.

      Thanks for posting this, Sage.

    • Randy Williams

      so I guess benny NEVER read “the astronauts baby” then ?

    • Samantha Moreland

      Great review! Lily-CAT is by far one of my favorite 80s OVAs, even with its flaws.
      The reason the robo-cat looked exactly like Nancy’s (Kneesock’s) cat was because the company president knew Nancy was going on the trip and bringing the cat – as Nancy is the president’s daughter. I read somewhere that Lily-CAT was meant to be a “cat horror” (which is a subgenre of horror in Japan) set in space. There are little hints the entire length of the film that there are two cats on board, so personally I don’t feel quite like it was tacked on, even though it could have been done better (and in a way that doesn’t feel like Alien’s Ash if he were a cat).
      There’s also a slightly better explanation for the gun thing in the subbed version – The gravity on the ship is actually less than that of Earth. Still not really a satisfying explanation though. The ending is also a little less happy in the subbed one, as the original dialogue indicates that Hiro (sleeveless jacket guy) knows he and Nancy (Kneesocks) are already infected and will eventually die/become an alien monster because of it.
      I gotta say… the Japanese dialogue is far less cheesy. No “too old for this s–t,” no “ten dogs in Florida,” and Nancy (Kneesocks) isn’t nearly as shrill and whiny. And for some reason Hiro’s original name was Jiro.
      To cap off this tl;dr comment, Lily CAT is still far superior to similar anime space-horror attempts like Roots Search or Hell Target. And yet, even though I personally love it, I can’t bring myself to call it a classic.

    • R. Butler

      …
      Yep, there it goes. Last bits of childhood, kicking and screaming out the door… And I don’t think it’s too bad.

    • Zachary Erickson

      8:22 English is one of the most common languages and it’s kind of a universal language. People all over the world can speak it if they know it. Black Butler also started out in Japanese but it takes place in London. It’s probably in Japanese so people of Japan can understand it if they are not familiar with English. It would be quite possible for a crew like this to speak entirely English.

      Dogs can live past 20. There are some who almost live to be 30.

      • Brandon

        Future dog breeds may also be bred with longer life spans, or superior medical tech may afford them greater health care and longer life spans as a result too.

    • Richard Anderson

      I was watching a bunch of reviews on Bennet’s youtube channel. As time went on I got all the more feeling he should review L.i.l,y cat. I thought best check the website as it is more up to date on purpose. Lo and behold he recently did it.

    • Matthew Densmore

      Sage, just a little something in Tyrell’s defense:

      Replicants are androids in the same way DBZ’s Cell is technically an android. Tyrell basically took human DNA and rewrote the fuck out of the genetic code to produce replicants, and they still look human because human DNA was used as the base. Or at least that’s the way the dialogue in the movie seems to imply.

    • R. Butler

      Having rewatched several dozen AA episodes (and some other anime on the side), I think the whole “tell don’t show” motif is partially cultural – even a lot of Japanese games (ESPECIALLY freakin’ JRPGs) only tell their audience what is going on, rarely actually showing it in progress. Hell, DBZ would be less than half as long if they didn’t insist upon explaining what every stupid attack would do. There must be something present in the culture, though not being a Japanophile I couldn’t tell you what that would be – and frankly don’t give a rat’s ass.

      But it’s also likely just laziness on the part of the animators; they already have a ton of work to do, and would rather just have the VAs explain shit than draw another hundred-plus frames. Obviously this was before digital imaging became big, but sadly the practice hasn’t died out since computers took a lot of that workload off the artists and animators.