My review was written in August 1982 after a Greenwich VIllage screening.
"I am a Cat" is a 1975 period comedy helmed by one of the world's greatest directors, Kon Ichikawa ("The Burmese Harp", "Fires on the Plain", etc.). Lacking the dramatic power and style of his brilliant earlier work, "Cat" is merely an amusing commercial vehicle geared towards local Japanese audiences. Its U. S. chances rest mainly on the talented shoulders of leads Tatsuya Nakadai ("Kagemusha") and Yoko Shimada ("Shogun").
Overly talky tale concerns a teacher Kushami (played by Nakadai behind a thick moustache, with an always-quizzical expression), pondering the meaning of life in discussions with his cynical friends, while students at the academy next door bother him with noise and stray baseballs hit into his house. Much of the action concern the romantic entanglements of his relatives, including a beautiful niece Yukie (an idealized vision of loveliness and innocence personified by Yoko Shimada).
As international-class entertainment, "Cat" fails to qualify due to its claustrophobic, studio-bound staging and uneasy mixture of satirical, thoughtful humor with sight-gags and out-and-out vulgarity. Other than some awkwardly "illustrated" flashbacks, the film is conversational in the extreme, lacking the action and physicality of Ichikawa's better work.
Gimmick of having Kushami's pet grey cat observe the human foibles around him is underutilized, with a few wide angle, first-person shots to represent the cat's point-of-view augmented by a lameduck voiceover narration of the cat's thoughts near the end of the film. Anthropomorphic concept is workable, as in Lou Breslow's classic DIck Powell (as a reincarnated dog) picture "You Never Can Tell" of 1951, but it doesn't play here.
Tech credits are okay, though "switched-on" musical score overuses material such as the too-familiar Bach Toccata & Fugue. Main interest to see Nakadai and Shimada, even on an off-day assignment.