User Reviews

On today's Cartoon Brew site, Amid Amidi introduced a couple of animated shorts that animator Yasuji Mori was involved in. Why is this Japanese film artist being showcased now? Well, among his protégé was Hayao Miyazaki whose current project, Ponyo, is out right now here in America. The shorts Amid introduced were this one, under the English title Kitty's Graffiti, and another one with the same characters except in color and with Japanese dialogue called Koneko no studio-Kitty's Studio which has no IMDb listing. Koneko no rakugaki concerns the title character drawing on a blank wall which is witnessed by a couple of mice and a bear-apparently the house's owner-who makes Kitty paint over the drawings. But not before the mice have their own fun as they ride the drawn train and takes the cat with them as they keep drawing themselves into more adventures. Quite charming this animated short and pretty entertaining all the way. The other short takes awhile to find its bearings since the beginning finds the cat and the mice working with a primitive camera and set before we go to a large studio with many modern techniques but even more chaos. Not everything there makes sense but it's still fun to see how animator Mori (or whomever the director was) trying to make it all come together. Perhaps some English subtitles might have helped in this case since YouTube didn't provide any. Still, Koneko no studio is worth a look. Ratings: Koneko no rakugaki-********. Koneko no studio-******.