Old School Anime Review - 'Lily C.A.T.'

If the name Lily C.A.T. sounds familiar to you, it's probably because the film made it to the number four spot on my 10 Best Horror Anime for Halloween list a few weeks ago.

I've been itching to do a review of this one for a while, so let's just get into it. Please be aware that I'm going to be discussing the plot in detail, so there will be spoilers ahead.

The Story

Far off in the future, technology has advanced to the point where deep space travel and colonization are now a reality.

A survey team is sent to check out a new planet at the behest of the SynCam Corporation. The ship picks up some sort of alien bacteria, while the crew is in cryogenic sleep. This bacteria slowly kills off the crew one by one before morphing into an alien organism, and causing even more problems.

Adding to the already problematic bacteria, there are two people on board the ship under false IDs—this point is important and I'll come back to it later on.

It sounds like a ripoff of sorts of Ridley Scott's Alien and in a way it is.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in Lily C.A.T.

Let's go into what I liked and didn't like about Lily C.A.T. shall we?

The animation is absolutely gorgeous! Light and shadow are used very effectively, and there are a couple of really tense scenes as a result. The film's soundtrack is pretty good, and there are these little moments scattered throughout that just make the film's story... better.

Unfortunately, however, the film's story is just not that interesting. It's basically an anime version of Ridley Scott's Alien, and that's the problem. It could've been more interesting, but we've already seen this plot line in a few films: a company sends out a crew, something goes wrong and basically everyone dies. Some examples that spring to mind are, of course, the Alien series and Paul W.S. Anderson's Event Horizon—which was a seriously weird film.

Adding to the uninteresting plot is a cast of largely unlikable characters. In addition to the crew of the ship, we have; Dorothy, Nancy, Hiro, Morgan, Dr Mead, Jimmy, and Dick Barry. Each have their own unique personalities which, usually, I like; in this case I can't, because the core cast of Hiro, Nancy, Dick and two members of the crew, are just badly done.

The pacing is abysmal. Some scenes just drag on and on before the next scene happens, and suddenly everything is moving at breakneck speed. Unfortunately, the film also falls into the typical cliches of horror fiction; you know who's going to die and when, and where the alien... thing... is going to appear.

There's also this weirdly shoehorned moral message about letting the justice system do its thing.

The Subplot and an Interesting Question

Okay, following on from that moral message, let's look at the film's subplot. Remember the two people with false IDs on the ship? Well, that's where this comes in.

Hiro is wanted for murder in Australia; having killed three men in an act of vengeance; Dick is a police officer who is trying to catch him. When the detective snaps the cuffs on his target, the captain of the ship basically tells him it's pointless to arrest Hiro, because there'll be nobody there to remember the crime.

Now, that doesn't make much sense until you think about the technology involved in deep space travel. The cryogenic hibernation chambers are built in such a way that you can travel for several decades in hibernation, and when you come out; you've only aged one year. So, the mission they're on now is a 40-year round trip; 20 years there and 20 years back to earth. The crew will have aged only two years—roughly—in total.

The captain of the ship talks about how he's over 240 years old, and how he was so excited by his first voyage only to come home and find that his infant son was a man older than he was. By the end of his second voyage, his family and friends were all dead and people treated him differently. This long monologue is very well-written and the captain's world-weary nature suddenly makes a lot of sense. It also brings up an interesting question: is it worth it?

You travel into space on a 40, 50, or 60-year round trip into deep space and age only a few years—presumably getting one heck of a salary along the way. The catch is that when you come back, the world is completely different and your family is either now older than you or long gone. With that in mind, is it worth the pain and suffering that you'd endure coming back to find that your family and friends are gone to go into deep space?

This is a subject that sci-fi doesn't really look into and it provides Lily C.A.T. with an interesting concept to explore: the effects of deep space exploration on a crew. Sadly, however, they don't explore it.

Final Thoughts: Not Great But Not Terrible

Overall, Lily C.A.T. is a good film if you want some dumb 80s action to watch. The film's biggest problem, for me at least, is the writing. Most of it's okay, but the character writing is just... lackluster. I mean, Nancy is one of the main characters, and we're supposed to cheer for her to survive. That would be fine except that her motivations for taking the trip leave something to be desired. The whole reason she's on the ship is to get back at the girl who 'stole' her boyfriend; the idea being to get back to earth as young as when she left, and rub it in said girl's face. Petty much?

There are things (like the music and animation) that the film has going for it, so it's not terrible but it's also not that great.

As a final note: I should warn you that if you're an animal lover, this film features what's possibly the worst animal kill in film where the alien organism eviscerates Lily—Nancy's cat. It's drawn out and painful to watch.