I wasn't expecting this half-hour-long Japanese animated film to be viscerally terrifying and likely to cause me nightmares, but here we are. I assumed Cat Soup would be cute, based on the title and the fact that the main characters had big eyes and looked kind of endearing. Turns out the cat soup, however, is literal, because the two main characters end up in some kind of variation of hell where everyone and everything wants to dismember and/or eat you (and the cats themselves do their fair share of dismembering and eating while in this world, on their quest to, I guess, get out?), and one of the beings they encounter tries to make a genuine cat soup.
I feel bad for any children who've watched this; I hope they're doing okay. There's something so unsettling about it, and I kind of hated how it made me feel. It's genuine discomfort and it sneaks up on you; real stealthy horror, and maybe that's on me for going into it not knowing anything about it. I haven't read what anyone else has said about it, either, so maybe I'm alone in finding this hellish, or maybe that's the consensus and I should've read up on it a little beforehand.
For as nightmarish as it was, I still kind of respect how it made me feel. It has a unique atmosphere and tone, and it'll probably stick with me and/or haunt my dreams, so that's got to be worth something.
