A few days ago, someone without taste or insight asked me why Cat City has such a special place in my heart, besides the obvious fact that the protagonist is a cat and the owner of this blog an aspiring crazy cat lady. I told him that “I could write a whole essay about it”.
I could do it.. and when I needed a topic for shitposting week, I found myself inspired to actually, unironically write about Cat City. I will leave up to your interpretation whether I’m overanalysing for meme value or if this tiny short animation about a cat really carries this much content within it.
For the uninitiated: Cat City is an animated short from 2017, created by Victoria Vincent. It is only three minutes long, so if you would like to get the most out of this blogpost, I suggest you go watch it if you haven’t already. It follows a cat that has run away from home through the journey of starting its own life. It’s a story about alienation and loneliness, about longing and regret, about the meat grinder of capitalism, about existence itself.
Cat City needs no more than 181 seconds to tell a story about the human experience and that is what I appreciate about it. It is as dense as it is entertaining, as humorous as it is serious, a story about people told from the perspective of a cat who has only ever seen it from the outside looking in, handling the question of what a cat that has access to the outside world actually does all day in the best way.
To understand where the cat is coming from, we need to put ourselves in the cat’s shoes for a start. Imagine that day in, day out, you spend your life in the same house, seeing the same person with the exception of the occasional visitor, and the only highlight of your week is the taste of a particularly hard-to-catch birb after a successful hunt during your daily walk out into the backyard garden. You live together with a human, but the human leaves home for many hours every day, while you are left only to wonder about the amazing events that must be happening for them while they are gone, so you often feel a burdensome combination of loneliness and FOMO.
Sitting by the window looking out or watching TV is your idea of a good time on a Saturday evening. Prime entertainment! But the people you see outside or on the screen seem to be having an even better time than you. Being a human seems to be pretty damn fun. They can have a variety of jobs, tasks and hobbies, they’re surrounded by tons of other people all the time, they’re swimming in money and blow it in the clubs where they always find a cutie to make out with, they go to brunch with the girls and get their nails done and play tennis. Now if that isn’t an existence to aspire to! Rolling a ball of yarn around the room has never felt so dull.
Kicking off the journey towards a brighter future, we see our cat-protagonist with a few boxes of necessities ready to run away from home, similar to how a child’s ambition to escape and start on their own is often portrayed in the media. This shows us the childish innocence that clouds this cat’s mind as it leaves. The cat has completely idealised human adult life and expects that it’s all going to be full of fun challenges and endless adventures with friends.
Why do they even still need their person? They’re just a can opener anyway, in the cat’s eyes. After many years of living in this household, the wish for autonomy, to break out on their own and discover new things and people, feels stronger than any bond they might still have with the human of the house.
With this relationship being left behind, we not only see the journey of a child that tries to see what the world has to offer long before it’s ready to handle what is to come – we see at the same time something like an unexciting marriage that has died down from daily play times to watching Love Island every evening without touching, to the point where looking at the person arouses nothing in the cat’s heart. The other people our cat-protagonist sees outside seem to be so much more vibrant, fun and fascinating. The cat wants to get to know them and enjoy the freshness of a new connection. For that, because a cat can only live in one household at a time, the cat has to leave. And at least right now, it really wants to! Adventure is waiting out there.
The cat is at the same time a naive child and an unhappy middle-aged man just going out for a bit to “buy cigarettes”. The typical mid-life crisis, it seems, is a desire to revive the inner child to escape the ever more depressing downward spiral of an unfulfilled adult existence.
Our cat-protagonist arrives at their new home, only to realise that being the owner of the kind of place that they’ve been living in with their human does unfortunately come with certain responsibilities. Landlords are a sad reality and they require that you work to provide them with that sweet, sweet cash monet every month, so that they can pay off their mortgage and their third boat.
But at this point, the cat’s motivation meter is still filled to the brim with optimism. Finally they are free from the shackles of cat life, ready to make it in the bustling world of people. They will be dependent on nothing but the life skills they have acquired through years of hunting smaller animals and smashing vases. Plenty of transferrable skills there to put on that resume.
So the cat goes to apply for a job at the nearby hair salon. The owner employs them without a second thought – one of those many transferrable skills a cat brings to the table is excellent grooming. If a cat can style itself as well as it does, why shouldn’t it be just as well able to style people? A cat’s hair somehow always seems to have the same length all over, so it makes sense that they’d be good at cutting it. Obviously.
And our cat-protagonist does turn out to be great at what they do. But this is where they are confronted with the alienation of labour under capitalism, specifically the experience of learning that “do the job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” being a pile of absolute bonk.
While doing one basic trim after another, several weeks into that same routine, sleep deprived and hungover every day thanks to anxiety and addiction to cope with the anxiety, never being able to go on a quick birb hunt when a particularly juicy one can be seen outside the window, human life starts to seem surprisingly less interesting and eventful than cat life and the comfort of being with a trusted person comes back to the forefront of the cat’s awareness. Our cat-protagonist hasn’t made a single friend, everyone seems to be completely preoccupied with their own life, so the daily visits to the bar aren’t the fun time the cat was expecting, but rather a means of drowning one’s sorrows in booze. And sorrows our protagonist has, just like many of the people that come to this bar every night.
This eventually leads the cat into a downward spiral of drinking, depression and decreased performance at work, leading to more drinking, leading to more depression and night terrors. More and more often thoughts of the cat’s person start to pop up. Maybe the cat actually.. misses her?
The cat is not ready to face this reality and fix the bruised relationship it has left behind. The cat-protagonist convinces themselves that they should remain detached and on their grindset, that the feelings of the human who is missing them at home do not matter, they are only a burden that needs to be pushed aside and ignored as successfully as possible, cool cats don’t care about anything or anyone. Telling oneself this can be a protective mechanism when one does not believe that they have anything to go back to at all. Be it because the guilt of disappearing is too unbearable, or because the human would never take the cat back after the situation it has created. We see this in the scene where we have the cat tell the personified image of guilt and longing that screams and keeps them up during the night: “hey, can you shut up?”
It does shut up for a little bit, but it is impossible to ever escape one’s true feelings and desires. Denial is not an option. The cat is sick of the world of people, working is hard but being unemployed and broke is harder, it wants its old life back and despite its very skilled emotional detachment it has finally accepted that it needs its person, like a failed midlife-man asking his wife to take him back after having cheated with the nanny and left the children behind. After having lost the job and the house, the human world has nothing left to offer our cat-protagonist, no vibrant independent lifestyle that they can tell themselves is absolutely worth all the pain and loneliness that comes with it. So the cat goes back home to live its usual cat life watching Love Island with the owner, now with a little more appreciation one might hope, and we as viewers find ourselves happy that its story has come to a good ending, even though many people might say that our protagonist maybe shouldn’t have gotten away with it all without at least a little confrontation.
“ditch people, get drunk, and just run back to them when you've had enough and need them again.” – Letterboxd reviewer Sylvia seems to have been hurt by someone like this cat before
Through this three-minute clip we have developed an attachment to this charming little cat to where we will forgive a lot of things that many of us would usually consider dick moves, which points out to us the reality that emotions can cloud our judgement when it comes to relationships. Through Cat City, we learn about people, and we learn about ourselves.
To prevent myself from writing too much, I will not go too deeply into the art style other than to point out that one reviewer accurately described it as “one of those cartoons we used to watch on Cartoon Network late at night”, which makes it oddly comforting despite being pretty depressing in some ways. At the same time as this cat feels nostalgic for its old life, we feel nostalgic for better times ourselves, which adds to the viewing experience.
In conclusion: Maybe it’s simply better to be a cat at the end of the day.
Or maybe the Letterboxd reviewer marte is correct in saying:
“does an indie short film have to have a "deeper meaning"???? is it not enough to enjoy the little cat and the funky colors???????”
But that’s not very much fun to write about.