Hello everyone,
The short film that I chose to watch was called “She And Her Cat.” It follows the story of a Japanese woman who adopts a male cat. The cat soon falls in love with her, and later on, in the story rejects the affection of a female cat that he later meets.
Toward the end of the story, the woman receives a phone call that causes her a great deal of distress. She starts to cry intensely and falls into a depression. The cat can’t do anything but comforts her. As time goes on, she eventually recovers and the show ends in a happy tone.
This short gives me “slice of life” vibes. There is no overarching conflict, just something that appears randomly and isn’t foreshadowed at all in the short, just like what can commonly happen in real life.
The short invoked feelings of nostalgia in me, as it reminded me of the cats I had in my childhood home. A lot of the things the cat said invoked feelings of romance and longing, which makes perfect sense given the tone and setup for the relationship between the cat and his owner.
The narrative structure that I found reminds me greatly of the kind found in the previously mentioned slice-of-life genre. It’s really just two people (or one person and a cat in this case) going about their lives and dealing with life’s mundane problems as they are handed to them. This makes the plot more relatable, but it comes at the cost of making the stakes much lower.
– Gibson