The 11 Cats (11ぴきのねこ) and Other Tales (1976, 1980) | On The Ones (anime blog)

The 11 Cats, based on Noboru Baba’s popular 1967 picture book of the same name (translated outside Japan as Eleven Hungry Cats), was Group TAC’s second feature film. Notably, it was the studio’s very first project to credit Tsuneo Maeda as “animation kantoku” (アニメーション監督), a role he would go on to play in several of the studio’s most important projects afterwards. It is perhaps best translated as “animation supervisor”, as it was a role altogether different from the “sakuga kantoku” (作画監督) which is usually translated as “animation director” (and whose role in Japanese animation, generally speaking, is to keep the animation up to a certain standard of quality, not least by correcting other animators’ drawings so as to keep them “on-model”); according to Sugii and animator Marisuke Eguchi, the latter of whom’s earliest known on-screen credit is on this film, Maeda’s role in this capacity was essentially to serve as a technical director, overseeing the technical aspects of the animation and deciding what would be needed to actually pull off any distinctive visual concept it had. Art director Minoru Aoki’s backgrounds were notably painted on cels like the characters themselves, creating a unified flat, colorful picture-book aesthetic—the task of actually painting them was handled by cel painters at a certain young studio named SHAFT.

The original book on which the film was based was, as Jiří Brdečka would say, a literary soufflé; it simply introduces the 11 Cats as hungry strays dividing a small fish between themselves followed by their encounter with the old cat who tells them about the big fish in the lake beyond the mountains, with most of the book in turn being occupied by their attempts to catch the big fish afterwards. In expanding such a barebones affair into a compelling feature cartoon, Fujimoto relied not only on chief animator Teruto Kamiguchi to imbue the cats with the flair and personality necessary to bring them to life entertainingly, but also on the film’s brilliant voice cast—led, in a classic example of Atsumi Tashiro’s willingness as producer and audio director to try unusual things, by then-famous singer Hiromi Gō as the 11 Cats’ leader Commander Tabby—and for that matter on the gifted screenwriter Yoshitake Suzuki, who turned the story into an epic journey with plenty of laughs, some valuable lessons about the importance of friendship, a number of tears, and (as Kenji pointed out) even a few allusions to Homer’s prototypical Odyssey along the way: the lush oasis at which the cats feed on silver vine (resulting in a stellar psychedelic interlude) and find themselves unwilling to leave is strikingly reminiscent of the island of Aeaea where Circe resided and drugged Odysseus’s men (who, even after being changed back from swine, proceeded to stay for a year), the one cat tied to the mast on their raft as they scout out the big fish is similar to how Odysseus himself was tied up there so that he could hear the sirens’ song, and in that regard even the big fish’s lullaby—which in the original book had no effect on the cats beyond tricking them into thinking it was letting its guard down, albeit the crucial twist of them eventually turning the lullaby against the fish was certainly present—is turned into a deadly siren song in its own right, explicitly intended to lure the cats to sleep so that the fish can eat them all up.

Suzuki, who is largely known for his screenwriting work on various classic mecha/sci-fi anime under the pseudonym Fuyunori Gobu, was almost certainly educated enough that he knew what he was doing with these allusions to the Odyssey. He had already served as the head writer of the legendarily satiric gag comedies Goku’s Big Adventure and Fight da!! Pyuta in the late 1960s and then of Mushi Pro’s Andersen Monogatari (adapting tales by Hans Christian Andersen) in 1971, and just years earlier he had even written some segments for Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi and Manga Ijin Monogatari, so it seems obvious he had a solid grounding in history and literature. In any case, what makes these allusions fun in The 11 Cats is that, as Meizhan succinctly observed, “every piece it took from the Odyssey was warped to have the stupidest motivation and execution possible.”

Fujimoto’s own worldview, as previously delineated in his best Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi and Manga Kodomo Bunko episodes, comes through strongly in the extensive exposition that sets up the cats’ journey. The film depicts a civilized cat society not unlike that of humans, complete with all the feline villagers living in quaint towns across the land, typically wearing clothes of some kind, and essentially behaving as though they were just humans in cat costumes with their own unique societal roles to play, and in this respect the 11 Cats’ identity as free-roaming strays—who, on top of this, are naked and behave more like actual cats than the purely anthropomorphized villagers—serves to stigmatize them as outcasts; their inability to assimilate means that their only way of getting food to live is to run around town as a group—chasing mice around, foraging, taking whatever is on the ground—all of which inadvertently but regularly disrupts the established social order, causing chaos and misfortune throughout the town.

Indeed, the opening episode in the original book, in which the 11 Cats equally divide a small fish on the road between themselves, becomes the final straw in the film. Here, the fish turns out to have been accidentally dropped by the fishmonger, who had already gotten the worst of it from the cats earlier that day, while he was transporting his catch to the market. Summoned by the angry police chief, the cats are rebuked and told that strays are an inconvenience for everyone: from this point on, they must end their way of life for the benefit of society as it already exists, or be forcibly disbanded.

The old cat whom the 11 Cats meet, named Old Man Longwhiskers in the film (and voiced by Ryūji Saikachi), is himself depicted as a vagrant drunk hated by the entire town, even most of the 11 Cats themselves; only when he discusses the big fish on the other side of the mountain at their leader Commander Tabby’s request, under the pretense that capturing it would be a good way for the 11 Cats to prove themselves real cats (and not, as had been the case in the original book, out of any altruistic desire to alleviate their hunger), do they rather cynically begin paying any serious attention to him. It is here that Fujimoto’s experience as a director on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi is most plainly evident, as the old man’s knowledge regarding the big fish is expanded into an entire folktale about three cats who, like Longwhiskers and the 11 Cats, were despised by their village, and in turn set off on an adventure, with the big fish being given downright legendary status as a monster the three cats could not defeat; Fujimoto even illustrates the story using stylized, silhouetted watercolor paintings (pictured above) that look almost exactly like the artwork in the MNMB episodes he had crafted himself, effectively making the sequence a continuation of those episodes both visually and thematically. In this sense, The 11 Cats works brilliantly as a feature-length extension of both Manga Kodomo Bunko and Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi; even aside from the film’s key artists contributing significantly to both shows, it manages to adapt a classic Japanese children’s book (albeit a much more modern one than those featured in MKB) in a manner unique to its artists while expressing a fascination with folklore and mythology and how, even in the present day, they can communicate timeless themes and observations on life—and all while not taking itself too seriously, to boot.

These significant additions to the prologue—and for that matter the numerous trials the 11 Cats must overcome between their meeting with Longwhiskers and their arrival at the lake, all of which were newly-conceived by Suzuki and Fujimoto for the film, in which the cats realize that they cannot live without each other and that even the most vivid dream is only a dream until they themselves work together to make it come true—ultimately give more weight to the 11 Cats’ decision towards the end of the story, after they have defeated the big fish, to try and show the other cats what they have done instead of eating the fish immediately. In the book, the decision was made by Commander Tabby out of simple vanity; in the film, however, they are convinced to bring it back to town by one of the pluckier cats (voiced by Hiroko Maruyama) precisely as a way of showing the numerous villagers and officials who had hated them and their relationship, made fun of them, underestimated them, looked down on them and their unwavering belief that the big fish existed—not only in their own town, as a matter of fact, but also in other towns they had passed by on their journey—that they were wrong. The story, in the end, is transformed into an ode to rebellion against the misguided assumptions and hostility that society will bear against you just for being who you are, not to mention an ode to the power of camaraderie and how friends can accomplish so much more together than individually—even if the punchline is still that the 11 Cats end up eating the big fish anyways, leaving only the skeleton to carry home.

Incidentally, then-Group TAC mainstay Takao Kodama is credited for the film’s title design, which would seem to conflict with how the 11 Cats’ original author, Noboru Baba, is himself credited for the title illustrations. I would take this to mean that Kodama was responsible for the cute little scene at the very beginning of the film in which Commander Tabby seems to extend behind the fence pickets before the 11 Cats all jump out at once; the very motif of the blank screen zooming out on the Commander’s face would show up again in the 1983 closing for Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, which Kodama designed and directed with animation by Teruto Kamiguchi.

The top-billed animator on the film, besides Kamiguchi himself as chief animator, was Takamitsu Yukawa, whom Ettinger already discussed quite a bit in his primer (this was the same year, in fact, that Yukawa helped out with Taku Furukawa’s Noburō Ōfuji Award-winning film Speed). Second-billed, however, is Tsuneo Wakabayashi, who like Kamiguchi was an ex-Mushi Pro animator, and indeed the two of them had even animated together on episodes 46 and 52 of Osamu Dezaki’s seminal Ashita no Joe in 1971; Wakabayashi, along with several other ex-Mushi Pro animators involved with Joe, would continue working under Dezaki on Nobody’s Boy Remi in 1977-78, but immediately afterwards he moved over to Group TAC, animating first on some Manga Kodomo Bunko episodes and then becoming one of the regular director-animators on Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi for the entirety of its run after 1979, directing and/or animating a whopping 74 segments until the series ended in 1994, and even after that animating on Shōji Kawamori’s unsung 1996 masterpiece Spring and Chaos (produced by TAC for the centennial of Kenji Miyazawa’s birth).

Two other notable animators on the film were, as Ettinger mentioned, the ex-A Production animators Hideo Kawachi and Michishiro Yamada, both of whom worked on the film from Ajia-do (the second successor studio to A Pro); they and the studio’s two main luminaries, Osamu Kobayashi and Tsutomu Shibayama, had already begun contributing significantly to TAC’s Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi by this time, and indeed even contributed a number of segments to Manga Kodomo Bunko (Ajia-do’s first involvement as a studio). Kawachi, in particular, was perhaps one of the most interesting figures to arise from A Pro; after animating on several episodes of Tokyo Movie’s seminal sports drama Star of the Giants for the entirety of its run (1968-71), he became the legendary animator Yasuo Ōtsuka’s right-hand man, serving as the de facto animation director and lead animator of those episodes of the original Lupin III series and Samurai Giants that were animated at A Pro proper (Yamada’s earliest work as a key animator, in fact, was as part of Kawachi’s unit on the latter show), as well as animating on Isao Takahata’s two Panda! Go, Panda featurettes. He would leave A Pro after the end of Osamu Dezaki’s The Adventures of Gamba—one of the episodes he worked on, 17 (about the mice taking turns serving as leader of the group, and the only episode of the series directed by Dezaki himself to be animated at A Pro besides the first one), was Dezaki’s own personal favorite from that series—to continue working under the Takahata/Hayao Miyazaki circle on 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother and Future Boy Conan (of which Ōtsuka was once again the main animation director) at Nippon Animation, even obtaining credit as the top-billed animator on several episodes of the latter; he then joined Ajia-do, reuniting with the other ex-A Pro figures, but even then continued to have sporadic involvements with Miyazaki and Takahata, animating on Miyazaki’s Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro less than a year before The 11 Cats and even Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies in 1988. Since 1993, Kawachi has served as the chief director of the Ajia-do children’s anime Nintama Rantarō, which continues to broadcast on NHK Educational TV to this day; it holds the record of being the second longest-running TV anime of all time.

On another note, while all the animators on the film besides Kamiguchi are credited simply as “animators”, those credited from Jirō Saruyama on were almost certainly the film’s inbetweeners: not only are they noticeably listed in a separate section from the other animators, but, judging from available credits, they all seemed to devote their careers almost exclusively to inbetweening, even after 1980. Indeed, Saruyama may have already begun serving as TAC’s inbetween checker by this time, as he is specifically placed at the top of this section of the credits; he, too, was an ex-Mushi Pro animator, with inbetween credits on, among other things, the first and third Animerama films (A Thousand and One Nights in 1969 and Belladonna of Sadness in 1973).

Hitoshi Komuro’s memorable score for the film, which runs the whole gamut of folk rock from playful bluegrass-inspired ditties to mellow bossa nova-influenced laments to powerful rock ballads, was performed by a star ensemble consisting of Eiryu Kou (洪栄龍) on electric guitar, Jirō Itō (伊藤次郎) on electric bass, Shigeyuki Suzuki (鈴木茂行, strangely credited here as 鈴木茂樹 or “Shigeki” Suzuki) on drums, Yumiko Watanabe (渡辺裕美子) on piano, Takahiko Ishikawa (石川鷹彦) on acoustic guitar, Masahiro Takekawa (武川雅寛) on violin, and Kōichi Matsuda (松田幸一) on harmonica; hopefully this serves as a starting point for further research into the careers of these musicians, some of whom are quite famous in their own right.5 The poetic, often poignant and at times enigmatic songs were penned by the innovative playwright Makoto Satō (佐藤信), who had been a significant part of the underground theatre (angura) movement in the 1960s and co-founded what is now known as Black Tent Theatre (劇団黒テント) in that regard, and mostly sung by then-CBS/Sony label singer Yū Kitahara (北原裕), of whom sadly nothing else is known (this song, from 1981, comes from his only known record outside of The 11 Cats‘s soundtrack).

The 11 Cats was released by Nippon Herald on 19 July 1980, as part of a double bill with a Japanese-language version of the 1979 British family film Tarka the Otter (based on a novel by Henry Williamson); this cut of Tarka, which seems to have completely disappeared into obscurity, featured a new soundtrack by Nozomi Aoki and folk musician Kōsetsu Minami, as well as animated opening and closing sequences designed and supervised by an obscure children’s manga-ka named Bonten Yumeno (夢野凡天). The leaflet advertising the double feature included words of praise for The 11 Cats from several interesting figures, not least of whom were legendary manga-kas Osamu Tezuka and Fujio Akatsuka: Tezuka offered high praise for the film, stating, “To me this work has a scale and philosophical depth even beyond [Ernest] Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’,” while Akatsuka, true to form as the king of gag manga, quipped that “I wish I could show this to [my cat] Kikuchiyo. Please organize a Cat-Viewing Day and take the ‘price of ad-meow-ssion’.” (The original pun was nyan-jō-ryō (ニャン場料), based on replacing the first part of nyūjō-ryō (入場料) or price of admission with the Japanese onomatopoeia for meowing.)

It seems the experience of working on Manga Kodomo Bunko and The 11 Cats made Shirō Fujimoto realize that his calling in life was to actually illustrate children’s books himself, rather than simply adapt others’ stories into animation; so, with this feature film as the ultimate statement of his worldview, Fujimoto left animation altogether. Since then, he has been quite prolific as an illustrator, and he has regularly held exhibitions of his artwork (including numerous beautiful landscape paintings); it is my hope that someone will reach out to him and interview him about his animation days while he is still alive.

Given the thought and effort that was clearly put into the film, and given that it must have been popular enough on its original release for Group TAC to have adapted the second 11 Cats book a number of years later, it seems inexplicable that The 11 Cats has received no proper home video release in Japan, not even on VHS; perhaps there are rights issues with the original book’s publisher that have prevented any such releases from happening, at least for the foreseeable future. Needless to say, this handicap was just one of many that made the very idea of translating the film into English seem farfetched; but, with enough patience and effort, anything is possible…