The Blog of Marek Cottingham
Spoilers for the film A Whisker Away (泣きたい 私 は 猫 を かぶる)
The film A Whisker Away suffers from an interesting flaw in the writing of its ending. At a surface level the problem seems to be that its villain is one-dimensional, a sneazy cat who gives humans masks which let them turn into cats, only to subsequently take their human face and steal half of their lifespan for himself. Yet there are plenty of stories I love where the villain is engaged in a single-minded pursuit of power, wealth or immortality, so this isn’t a sufficient explanation. Rather I think that the problem lies in the authors’ attempt shallow attempt to give the ending fight an internal conflict. At the start of the final act, the main character, who has been permanently transformed into a cat seeks to recover her human face. Following a struggle with the mask seller, she finally recovers her human face. Only for us, the audience, to be told (not shown) that “deep down she still believes that living as a human will make her miserable” (as if she wasn’t miserable as a cat). Of course, the ‘solving’ of this internal conflict takes place through a big, but fairly boring boss fight with the mask seller. This use of internal conflict as a tool to prolong the external conflict, rather than for its own sake, is a the root of the film’s weak ending.
Somewhat oddly, the film resists leaning into forcing its main character to solve her internal conflict. One of her struggles is with her inability to tell the boy that she loves how she feels, or to reveal to him that she secretly transforms into the cat that he loves. Eventually he learns the truth, not from her, but from another cat who transforms in front of him. Wouldn’t it be more interesting to have Muge herself communicate the truth to him while trapped in her cat body, maybe by scratching a message into his floor boards? He already suspected that something strange was going on, he’d noticed that Muge’s injuries correlated with those of her cat form Taro and he’d noticed that Muge seemed to know things about his deepest personal worries that he’d never told her. Wouldn’t it be great to have a character moment where Muge, trapped in the body of a cat, is forced to find some way to communicate what she couldn’t say until it was too late? As opposed to being restored to her human form mainly through others fighting or taking initiative on her behalf, it would make for a more compelling narrative if Muge were forced to take agency over her own life, communicating her situation to her beloved in order to ask him for help.