Episode 172: Cat Crimes

Rank & Vile

On this episode, we talk about the fantastically upsetting 1994 German animated cat movie, FELIDAE!

To read the full transcript, go to https://rankandvile.captivate.fm/episode/episode-172-cat-crimes

Transcript:

Ryan 0:05

[Theme Song] Hey guys, welcome to Rank and Vile, the podcast where we are ranking every single movie ever made from best to worst. And this is Ryan

Quincy 0:43

And this is Quincy.

Ryan 0:44

How's it going Quincy? How's your week going?

Quincy 0:46

It's been going good. My lovely girlfriend gave me Junji Ito's Cat Diary for Christmas. So I've been while you're reading Yon & Mu.

Ryan 0:55

Oh my god, tell me about it.

Quincy 0:57

This is maybe one of the Junji Ito is pretty beloved and rightfully so he's incredibly talented. Um, and this comic is especially mean it's very difficult to be to know who Junji Ito is and not see this comic. But it exceeds the hype. It is incredible.

Ryan 1:18

So this is the one with the cats who apparently he was like, he's like a lifelong cat lover in his normal life.

Quincy 1:27

What's interesting is he says, actually, I prefer dogs.

Ryan 1:31

Really?

Quincy 1:32

Yeah. But it's like my my S.O. wanted a cat. So I was like, Yeah, sure. But what's great is he writes and draws this nonfiction comic like he does. He paces a horror comic where he's like, the gnawing dread of getting this cat is his lady's like, Hey, remember that cat at my parents house? He's like, Oh, yeah, that's a that's an okay cat. And he's like, actually kind of in, you know, to the audience. He's like, actually, it kind of freaks me out because he's really intense. He's like, well, he's gonna come move in with us. And he's like, what? That curse is coming to my home? And he does not draw his girlfriend with pupils. She's just totally like, wide eyed the whole time.

Ryan 2:24

Holy shit. I this is honestly I feel like if anybody can sort of engage with and understand the innate horror of cats, it has to be Junji Ito?

Quincy 2:33

Yeah, it's also besides just being terrifying. He includes actual there's actual photos included of both Yon and Mu, and the lightness. Because Yon has like a weird skull pattern on his back and you're like, there's no fucking way that that cat can actually have a skull in spots. And that motherfucker does.

Ryan 3:02

Yeah, that's exactly it like honestly. Junji Ito he's one of those people that if you tried explaining his work to somebody who'd never seen a Junji Ito comic before, like, there's something ineffable that you kind of can't totally translate.

Quincy 3:16

Yeah, there's something about the way that he draws faces that is, especially faces and teeth, I think are some things that he's very good at drawing very unsettling renditions of.

Ryan 3:33

Yeah, well, he's also like, a really great, like, sort of intro to guro. Like, yeah, I mean, because especially with guro I think it's that you know what it is, you're, you're like a normal, nice kid. And then you have like a dirtbag classmate or something, or you fall down a hole on the internet. And they're like, Hey, what do you know about guro and you're like, by, like, Sailor Moon. And they're like, sure, this is like that, but way more guts and then they just, like, give you the worst things in the world. And I feel like as an adult, I can appreciate the shit out of how much of Junji Ito like so many of the like, the scenarios and the things in his work are immediately familiar to you on some level, like the comic of like, about people like climbing into holes in the wall and then emerging as like sausage meat on the other side. Like, there are certain things that you get obsessed with and you're like, this is my hole, it was made for me! You follow it down as far as you can.

Quincy 4:25

But did you know that there's now a midori challenge on Tick Tock?

Ryan 4:31

What is that where you'd like the alcoholic drink like green Midori.

Quincy 4:34

No like the movie we watched about incest and circus freaks licking eyeballs?

Ryan 4:41

Oh, you mean the most upsetting anime of all time? Yeah.

Quincy 4:44

Yeah, the most upsetting anime of all time is now a tik tok challenge. Where do you watch it and post your reaction?

Ryan 4:52

Holy shit. We watch that entire thing for this podcast.

Quincy 4:56

I'm weirdly tickled pink that this is a thing that The Kids are into these days,

Ryan 5:02

You know, God bless

Quincy 5:03

Especially because I've also gone on sticker app and custom made some Shojo Tsubaki stickers recently, because I can't be happy, I guess.

Ryan 5:17

Yeah, it's just fundamentally Not gonna happen. Honestly. I love I love that the internet because, you know, you sort of worry with like, hard to find stuff like Midori, where it's like, oh man, upsetting things that might ruin somebody's childhood, like, you know, where are they going to get those now we had those when we were kids. The Internet actually makes it way more widely available. And I think that's beautiful.

Quincy 5:35

Yeah, yeah. We just had to rely on Saturday anime on the sci fi channel, but now they just have YouTube.

Ryan 5:43

Yeah that's exactly. Honestly here.

Quincy 5:45

Which is where found this movie.

Ryan 5:46

I mean yeah. Although, yeah. Okay, so, holy shit. So the movie we're doing for this week, which is our 500th movie on our list that we have now done and not ranked yet, because that's at the end of the episode, but

Quincy 6:00

I'd also like to talk about how we could have done so many more movies. And yet, you and I learned the existence of this movie this weekend. We're like, no, we're not gonna do a John Carpenter movie. We're gonna do this son of a bitch.

Ryan 6:14

I was actually that this is what it is at the outset. Because on our last episode, at the very end, we realized like, Oh, shit, that was our 499th Movie, what are we going to do? And my impulse was to like to go big time where I'm like, let's do one of the heavy hitters like we've never done the original Friday the 13th we've never done like the original The Fly or any of those. And I love that this was the one we left it on

Quincy 6:41

Especially because like, I don't want to park the curtain too much. We had some really good picks for movies we could have done. I don't want to mention them because I don't want people to turn the episode off out of frustration.

Ryan 6:55

Right

Quincy 6:55

But we did have some some movies from the happy Madison canon.

Ryan 7:01

Oevre. Yeah, yeah. Several sort of spooky related Adam Sandler movies which, honestly, listen, I can watch Midori I can watch Lily cat. But you know, Little Nicky, I'm sorry. There are certain lines you don't cross. And Happy Madison is one of them.

Quincy 7:21

Spooky Buddies is one thing, but Little Nicky? Absolutely.

Ryan 7:25

Certainly not. So yeah. So Alright, so the movie we're doing for this week. It is from 1994 it is a German animated Neo noir horror mystery called Felidae. Felidae?

Quincy 7:40

Well, it's Latin. So I guess it would be Felidae.

Ryan 7:43

There we go, Felidae. Which now this came out. And I need to point this out. This movie came out the same year as the Lion King features a very different cat centric narrative. This movie was apparently so this was at the time the most expensive German movie ever made. Apparently the like millions of dollars went into this. Like this was a big deal for Germany at the time. Which sort of makes sense to me that like, I mean, because you think of the German film industry and it's like, Okay, well, what was now Okay, here's the thing. You might look at the cover of this movie, you know, you're nine years old, and you're like, oh, there's a nice font on this on this poster. There's a cute cat in front of the sun. Looking funny. This is probably a kid's movie. Oh, friends and neighbors. It is not a kid's movie.

Quincy 8:35

And I also like that they make very, they're very intentional about as the movie begins saying, This is not a kid's movie in the weird prog rock Bilbo Baggins as...

Ryan 8:52

Speaking of Bilbo Baggins, it's incredible to me that this movie is not a Ralph Bakshi production. Like this is not the same person who did Fritz the Cat or like Heavy Traffic like this is because you think of movies. Now, here's the thing at the top of the thing I need to point out this is a movie about animated cats doing animated cat stuff. And they disembowel each other and they bleed all over the place. They get their heads chopped off all manner of fucking horrors that you would associate with like a Ralph Bakshi thing. And it's just a German adult cartoon about cats.

Quincy 9:28

Yeah, I think I also need to be a grump for a while and talk about how we associate animated movies like this. Like you can either be Walt Disney or you can be Ralph Bakshi, right. But animation is not a genre.

Ryan 9:43

That's true. It's a medium.

Quincy 9:44

It's a medium. And I think we kind of fuck up when we start to talk about like, no, it's a genre and it has to do certain things. Because then you get stuff like Felidae. That's like, I'll show you, I'll show you all

Ryan 10:01

I mean Felidae honestly, for me, I saw so many of those upsetting animated movies when I was a kid, like All Dogs Go to Heaven. I feel like it prepared me for watching an upsetting animated movie. And like this is again, by no means certainly by 1994. This was by no means a new and novel thing. Like there had been adult animated movies. You know, there'd been Heavy Metal. And Fritz the Cat, like we said, like there, there have been so many up until this point that by 1994, it was not such an odd thing to have an animated movie that you should not bring your kids to.

Quincy 10:36

And what's also fascinating is this is based off of a novel, which is an adult novel with a cat protagonist.

Ryan 10:45

Now, and you know, at the top of the show, as many of our listeners might know, I'm fucking obsessed with cats. Like I'm a weird cat person. Like, if I did not live with Christina and Sara. I would 100% be a weird cat guy with like, nine cats shitting up my house. I love cats so much. And that being said, like this movie. Now, a thing that I appreciate about this movie is that I feel like this movie is down with why cats are the shit worst.

Quincy 11:15

It really does spin. At the end of the movie. You're like, No, I don't like any of the characters in this movie.

Ryan 11:24

Makes me think of when I saw Cats 2019 which, by the way, that was the last movie I saw in theaters before quarantine. So it was Cats 2019 For God's sake, but you know, like somebody tweeted after they saw Cats 2019 like, God dammit, I can't even look at my cat in the face now. And so much of this movie now. Alright, so at the top of the movie, we it's a NEO Noir. The main character of the movie is a tom cat named Francis or I guess Tom cats don't have their balls. He's a cat named Francis. And he is sort of like a Philip Marlowe Sam Spade, sort of a character

Quincy 12:03

Big balled fellow.

Ryan 12:05

Yeah. And he so he comes to this now. So he comes to this house. And He notes that it smells like toxic waste and shit. Like he gets sort of humans are very few and far between in this movie, I think.

Quincy 12:20

Yes. And yet they do talk like it would have been very easy to have like a to have like a Charlie Brown, Charlie Brown's teacher kind of thing where like, they don't understand the humans. But you actually see the few humans that are in this movie quite a bit. And they're just bungling idiots.

Ryan 12:42

Yeah, yeah. And the cats can understand the people and I think that so much of this movie is the idea. Now and I will say a thing I really like about this movie and the animation in this movie. You never see cats moving like people like the cats. Their body motions are always pure cat and I think that's really fucking cool to have maintained for the duration of a movie.

Quincy 13:03

Especially because they could have made this a ristic aristocats but with fucking. Aristocats doing the aristocrats. Yeah.

Ryan 13:16

Yeah, which is basically kind of what this movie is in places there is holy shit. There's a lot to unpack. So Francis gets trapped in this house and he quickly befriends a one eyed bastard cat named Bluebeard.

Quincy 13:28

Oh, I love Bluebeard. So much.

Ryan 13:30

Oh, man. I think of Bluebeard as being kind of the the like Roadhouse. Like he is the Sam Elliott character to Patrick Swayze's character? Where, you know, like, Francis is sort of like trying to make sense of everything. And he's like, helpless. And this guy's just like, forget about it, kid. I'm a cat with one eye and I would smoke a cigar if I could. He's just like, all over this movie. He's I think my favorite part of this movie, actually, is Bluebeard. The cat.

Quincy 13:57

Yeah, yeah. So Francis discovers almost immediately after moving into his new house, that cats are being murdered in this neighborhood.

Ryan 14:09

And not just murdered, but like...

Quincy 14:12

Vivisected?

Ryan 14:13

Yeah, yeah, like heads chopped off, guts strewn around. And it's pretty bad. Now there's another thing that I love, which is that they brief they do this a lot in the first act of the movie and then nowhere else, they refer to human beings as can openers. And that's just the most badass power move I've ever heard in my life is cats just being like Ah, that's stupid can opener didn't know what he was doing. Like it's God. It's It's perfect. And he starts to unravel this thing of like, wow, it's there's a lot of dead cats in this vicinity guys. And it's sort of a Blue Velvet thing where he starts sort of like falling through the cracks of this thing and like trying to trying to figure out what happened.

Quincy 14:53

Especially because he doesn't really it. It's that great noir trope of, I have nothing to do with This and could very easily just leave it alone and live a normal life, but I got to pick the scab, I got to figure out what's going on. And it's way deeper than he could have ever imagined. but also they're cats.

Ryan 15:14

Yeah, I mean, it's incredible. Like, I also I love that as a noir theme that like, you know what I could just have, like, you know, three Hots and a cot at this house and then never bother myself with anything else. But you know, he he he finds that a cat another thing that happens is that he starts having these dream sequences. Now the dream sequences in Felidae are incredible.

Quincy 15:38

They're the most feverish nightmares. I've seen animated in. Maybe ever. No, not ever, because I've seen Midori. But like,

Ryan 15:53

Sure, I mean, that's a high bar

Quincy 15:55

Midori... grotesque.

Ryan 15:56

Yeah. And I mean, it's on the level of sort of, like the surrealism, like, you know, you got this, the shot that I can't stop thinking about now, there. There's a narrative running through this movie involving human beings. That on the first dream that Francis has, there is a human who's back is to him and he's wearing a white lab coat and Francis is like, Hey, I'm a cat. And then the guy turns around, and it's he's got a void where a face should be it's like his face got scooped out with a melon baller.

Quincy 16:24

Yes.

Ryan 16:26

And it is fucking upsetting. And he's, you know, he puts a leash around this cat's neck and then just starts like, there's a chain attached to it. And he's just like, using this cat just like at like a like a flail, just like hitting it hitting him against the walls. It's so upsetting. They never they never really ease up on the dream sequences being upsetting, which I really appreciate.

Quincy 16:48

No, in fact, that's the that's relatively mild compared to the the eviscerated cat marionettes that Francis dreams about later

Ryan 17:00

Oh, man, it. Yeah, yeah. So he, you know, so he starts to figure out like a Lovecraft protagonist that like, Huh, something's hinky around here. And we're introduced to this other cat named Joker. Joker is a son of a bitch.

Quincy 17:16

The dirt worst,

Ryan 17:18

Just the absolute dirt worst. He's a big fucking beefy bastard cat who rolls up on Bluebeard and Francis and I want to say makes an alarming number of homophobic slurs for an animated movie.

Quincy 17:31

A whole lot

Ryan 17:32

Oh, it's a lot where he's just like he literally and this is verbatim dialogue. This cat yells to Bluebeard. I see. We've been cruising the gay scene for a change that cute little thing behind you is a juicy number and I'm like, What the fuck are we doing in this cat movie? Like, can we not and he's you know, sort of like promising the guy like, yeah, you know, we'll have a date later where I kill you. And it's like, this is 100% more homophobic threats that I'm used to an animated movie. It's a little jarring.

Quincy 18:06

Also, I love how horny on Main all the cats are? Blue. One of the first things Bluebeard says to Francis is I've had sex with more women than Henry the 8th. And by women. I mean, other cats.

Ryan 18:22

Yeah. Now that's the thing. This movie has an Ambient hornet corniness that's not actually wholesome. Like it is it's uncomfortable like these cats fuck and It's horrifying a point which they explore later on in the...

Quincy 18:37

He's also called Bluebeard and of course the legend of Bluebeard is the pirate who murders his wife on their honeymoon every night.

Ryan 18:46

Yeah, so that mixed with Henry the Eighth is he just his Bluebeard just bragging about like, I have murdered every cat I've ever slept with. I got I got them all I got them all stored in my cat kennel like it's it's a weird brag to have if your name is Bluebeard. Which by the way in German now, this is this being a German movie. Bluebeard is the English translation. I watched the English English translation ,His name is Blau Bart, which I like very much. Quincy. Wait, did you have this on blu ray like where did you Where did you find this?

Quincy 19:18

I watched the YouTube dub as