Cat girls. The Japanese invented them.
What distinguishes Japanese “cat girls” from Western anthropomorphized/funny animals in general, is that they are drawn as human with only the animal ears and a tail. Western funny animals, including animalized humans, are drawn with full animal heads and fur (or feathers or scales, if they are bird-men or reptile-men). The first American anime fans were startled by this depiction, but quickly accepted it as a traditional Japanese cultural convention.
The first anime “cat girl” was actually a whole cartoon of “fox people”. In November 1949, director Mitsuya Seo, famous for directing the wartime propaganda animated films Momotaro’s Sea Eagles (1943) and Momotaro’s Divine Sea Warriors (1945), made the 33-minute The King’s Tail (Osama no Shippo) for Nihon Doga, a.k.a. Nihon Manga Eigasha (Japan Cartoon Film Studio). It was a variation of the tale of the Emperor’s New Clothes, about a tailless fox king in a kingdom of anthropomorphized foxes, but the foxes were drawn as humans with only fox ears and tails.
American fans became aware of cat girls during the 1980s, more from direct-to-video releases (Original Anime Videos; OAVs) than from theatrical or TV animation. Most of this animation is adapted from earlier manga. Two of the first anime cat girls were AnnaPuma and UniPuma, the mildly raunchy but very spectacular sisters in Masamune Shirow’s futuristic comedy Dominion: Tank Police. The manga was published in 1985; the first of three anime OAVs came in 1988. AnnaPuma and UniPuma were originally android love dolls that the villain Buaku enhanced with Artificial Intelligence to become his henchgirls. After Buaku disappeared, the authorities decided that the cat girls were not responsible for Buaku’s programming of them, and tried to rehabilitate them by making them members of the Tank Police, with dubious results.
Another early manga and OAV was Johji Manabe’s Outlanders, in 1985-87. Outlanders featured the aliens Princess Kahm and Battia, who looked like cute teenaged girls except that Kahm had a ram’s horns and Battia was a cat girl. Kahm deliberately destroyed Earth all by herself.
In Dragon Half, a warrior knight eloped with the dragon that he was supposed to slay. The result: their daughter Mink, who looked like a normal teenage girl with miniature dragon’s horns, wings growing out of her back, tail, and the ability to breathe fire when she lost her temper. Dragon Half was one of the first anime OAVs licensed for release in America, in 1993 by A.D. Vision. The reason is that the license was very cheap; Dragon Half was such a failure in Japan that the series was cancelled halfway through, so the American fans never found out how the hilarious story ended.
A stand-out cat girl was Pink, in the erotic (we don’t say porno) 1994-95 OAV series Dragon Pink. This was a parody of role-playing games, with the busty but innocent cat girl-slave dragged along on quests by the warrior Santa. Others with Santa included Bobo, an axe-wielding barbarian, and the elf mage Pierce. The adventures usually involved Pink getting captured, stripped nude, bound and molested, while the questers arrived late to rescue her.
Ruin Explorer was a 1995 four-video OAV series, a humorous parody of fantasy treasure-seeking stereotypes. In a world consisting of nothing but crumbling ruined cities, the young women Fam and Ihrie search for the Ultimate Power (which everyone else in that world is also after). Fam looks like a cat girl but is supposed to be a Wiccan sorceress. Ihrie, the dominant one of the pair, is a tomboyish human girl except that she is cursed to turn into a mouse whenever she tries to use magic herself. After a 1998 American release by A.D. Vision, the new distributor Maiden Japan has just (March 2013) announced that it has picked up the license and will re-release it in July. (This is a classic example of Japanese-English language confusion. The original Japanese title is Ruin Explorer, in English but singular since the Japanese language does not recognize plurals. The 1998 American release was titled Ruin Explorers, since there are two heroines. This was better English, but it caused some anime purists to object to the added ‘s’.)
The Vision of Escaflowne was a very popular 26-episode TV series in 1996. Most of its cast was human, but it did have the 13-year-old cat girl Merle, who spent most of her time being jealous of the schoolgirl protagonist from Earth, Hitomi. Older cat girls appeared later in the series.
Hyper Police featured a whole Shinjuku police force of – well, the chief was a god, and the regular cops included Batanen, a werewolf who looked human with a wolf’s ears and tail; Tommy, a funny-animal dog; Sakura, a traditional kitsune who looked like a human woman with eight fox tails, going for her ninth; and the main character, Natsuki Sasahara, whose father was human and whose mother was 2/3 cat. (???) Natsuki looked like a 17-year-old human girl with a cat’s tail and both human and cat ears. 25 TV episodes, 1997.
Outlaw Star (above) was a 26-episode TV space opera series in 1998 loosely based on Stevenson’s Treasure Island that was much better than Disney’s later Treasure Planet. The cast was human except for the comic-relief alien cat girl Aisha Clanclan, princess of the Ctarl Ctarl, who is at first a reluctant member of the human group seeking the treasure planet, but comes to enjoy their “familyhood” and embraces their quest for the journey, not its eventual end.
Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge was a 1997 4-episode OAV based upon the very popular video game that introduced the later Street Fighter concept. The supernatural families of Dimitri Maximoff, vampire, and Morrigan Aensland, succubus, are fighting for control of the Demon World. Felicia, a bakeneko or cat-demon, is one of Dimitri’s family. As a cat demon, Felicia looks like a cat girl with enhanced feline features: carnivorous teeth, cat paws/mittens, and furry clawed legs up to the thighs. She is the most sympathetic character to humans, wanting to be a pop singer in the human world. She tried to join a touring company of the musical Cats, but was rejected because her “costume” was too revealing. She was raised as a child by a Roman Catholic nun, and is confused by human religion but is generally predisposed to Catholicism.
Di Gi Charat appeared in Japan in 1998 as the ultra-cute cat girl mascot in advertising for Broccoli Inc.’s video games. The adverts were so popular that Broccoli quickly spun her off as a manga heroine, and then a 2001 TV anime series. Di Gi Charat, abbreviated Dejiko, and her tagalong friends Petit Charat (Puchiko) and Gema (for gamer), work in the Gamer video game store in Akihabra, Tokyo’s electronics district where the best video game shops are located. The 2001 TV series was so popular that there have been Di Gi Charat animated TV sequels, OAVs, a 20-minute theatrical “movie”, and of course video games. Gamers has even opened an Anime Gamers shop in Los Angeles, devoted more to Broccoli’s anime and manga books and DVDs and related merchandise (girls’ school accessories, coin purses, etc.) than to video games. The Di Gi Charat DVD cover shows Dejiko (green hair) and Puchiko (brown hair) with cat ears, and Dejiko’s rival Rab-en-rose with purple hair and rabbit ears.
Another popular Broccoli anime and video game title has been Galaxy Angel(s), a comedic s-f series about the misadventures of a squad of five ditsy all-girl interstellar policewomen, one of whom is Mint Blancmange, a blue-haired, lop-eared bunny girl (second from left, above).
Tokyo Mew Mew (above), 52 TV episodes in 2002-03, was a big hit with little girls. Five schoolgirls get the DNA of almost-extinct animals and fight alien demons out to destroy Earth’s ecology. They are Ichigo/an Iriomote cat (less than 100 still alive), Mint/blue lorikeet, Lettuce/finless porpoise, Pudding/golden lion tamarin, and Zakuro/gray wolf. When in superheroine mode, the girls are Mew Ichigo, Mew Mint, etc., with (usually) the ears and tails or other attributes of their animals. Their secret headquarters is disguised as an exclusive tea shoppe with them as the waitresses. Tokyo Mew Mew was Americanized by 4Kids Entertainment as Mew Mew Power, and heavily criticized by the fans for all the cuts of any scene showing Japanese ethnicity. There was a manga sequel in Japan, Tokyo Mew Mew a la Mode.
Phew! That’s enough cat girls for one column.
Fred Patten (1940-2018) was an internationally respected comics and animation historian. He has written about anime or comic books for publications ranging from Animation Magazine and Alter Ego to Starlog. He was a contributor to The Animated Movie Guide (2005), and is author of Watching Anime, Reading Manga (2004, Stone Bridge Press), a collection of his best essays, and Funny Animals and More (2014, Theme Park Press), based upon his early columns here on Cartoon Research. He passed away on November 12th, 2018.
Wasn’t Cat Women also an influence on this rather unusual character type?
Think i’m going to stick with pink elephants.
You occasionally had something similar in American animation, though it was usually just a throwaway bit — Bob Clampett does a cat girl that’s 100 percent human except for the ears at the start of “Tin Pan Alley Cats”, but she’s only on screen for a (memorable) three seconds, while more famously in a slightly different genre, Grim Natwick’s “dog girl” evolved into Betty Boop with only a canine ear bob less than a year into the series.
As far as I know, the Japanese fashion of animal-ears and -tails on otherwise human bodies is original. It can be traced back hundreds of years to folk tales about cats, foxes, and tanuki (raccoon dogs) that take the appearance of humans but usually forget to disguise either their tails or their ears.
J LEE wrote:
“You occasionally had something similar in American animation, though it was usually just a throwaway bit — Bob Clampett does a cat girl that’s 100 percent human except for the ears at the start of “Tin Pan Alley Cats”, but she’s only on screen for a (memorable) three seconds”
I had to remind myself of that one. Of course a lot of cats who show up in that could very well pass off for humans with cat ears/nose/tails the way they were drawn. It certainly was a very small blip on the radar surely.
FRED PATTEN wrote:
“As far as I know, the Japanese fashion of animal-ears and -tails on otherwise human bodies is original. It can be traced back hundreds of years to folk tales about cats, foxes, and tanuki (raccoon dogs) that take the appearance of humans but usually forget to disguise either their tails or their ears.”
We surely can’t forget that Fred. Japan’s lavished history with these subjects is one that deserves a good study. It’s certainly something American simply had not equivalent/analog for with how our interest and anthropomorphising animals took place.
The only thing I know about Tokyo Mew Mew is that the localized version was going to be called “Hollywood Mew Mew”, but fans of the original got the hollywoodmewmew.com domain name first and hosted a “Save Tokyo Mew Mew” site there, so a new name had to be chosen for the localized version.
And yet the new name still feels very lame and tired the way they had to come up with that at the last minute. You can’t win ’em all!
Cat girls aren’t as special to anime as you think. The entire world has been fascinated by animals for centuries to the point where they saw themselves in them and played around with what concepts they symbolize, and we kept putting animal characteristics on human figures for centuries as well!
I hope I’m not anticipating Fred’s next installment, but I thought I’d add a mention of UFO PRINCESS VALKYRIE (2002), which takes catgirls to something of a satiric extreme. In a near future when Earth is in regular contact with alien civilizations, a princess from the planet Valhalla has decided to live on Earth (I’m way oversimplifying, but…). Her maid, a catgirl, makes the best of the situation and uses a catgirl rayguy to transform a large number of the teenage Earthgirls living in the neighborhood into catgirls so she can have a catgirl army to work for her. Besides giving them cat ears and tails, the ray makes the girls willing servants at the head maid’s beck and call, and an unpaid labor force. At the time ADV released the series in the States (2006), I saw a review expressing considerable unease: the catgirl army is supposed to be funny and probably meant to satirize the very well-worn catgirl trope, but taken at face value, it’s mind control, involuntary servitude, and outright slavery.
I’ve noticed in a couple of non-fantasy series about more or less normal people in contemporary settings, GENSHIKEN and K-ON!, incidents involving characters reluctant to wear cat-ears. That is, plastic barrettes with simulated cat-ears on them. The sense I get is that they’re common for cosplay (why else would they be commercially made), but non-fan girls find them cute only to a limited degree and suspect that someone a little too eager for them to wear the things is a fanboy fetishist who is going to get his jollies seeing them with the ears on. (Never mind that in K-ON! it’s a female teacher who’s always trying to get the girls to wear odd costumes.) From the fan side, there seems to be a sense that a girl who wears cat-ears is One of Us.
I will confess that my knowledge about any anime has been very spotty after my major stroke in March 2005. All of my examples were taken from before then. There was an Urusei Yatsura episode that parodied anime’s reliance on big, multi-highlighted girls’ eyes. I had not known about UFO Princess Valkyrie; I will have to see what is available on it on the Internet.
The Internet is your friend, Fred, use it wisely!
In the name of equal time, a word for “Sherlock Hound.” In that one, comic riffs on specific Doyle stories were played out by dog-headed humans. The hero was Sherlock Hound while Watson, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson and Moriarty all kept their canonical names (and there was a title card crediting Arthur Conan Doyle. Was this an authorized adaptation?).
The majority of the non-recurring characters as well as Mr. Hudson were the canine equivalent of Cat People: humans with the same modest dog snouts and small dog ears poking out where human ears would be. But Hound and Moriarty had pointed ears and emphatically doglike heads; Watson was clearly a dark-furred Scottish terrier, and Lestrade had the face of a bulldog while his Keystone Cops and Moriarty’s two henchmen were assorted cartoony dogs.
I had the sneaking suspicion it was a budget or scheduling move to go with the more generic look after the central cast.
I was going to suggest Sherlock Hound for that fact alone.
(and there was a title card crediting Arthur Conan Doyle. Was this an authorized adaptation?).
From what I had heard, there was a bit of a hassle getting it out as work started around 1980/81 with Hayao Miyazaki supervising the direction and writing of several episodes before production stopped I suppose over a rights issue with Doyle’s estate. It wasn’t until 1984 when production resumed, though this time Miyazaki was out the door and another director took over for the remainder of the 26 episodes (6 of them are credited to Miyazaki for direction/screenplay). Usually fans would suggest watch just those 6 episodes and you get a good idea of what the show was going to be before the production switch (Japan even had LD releases of just those Miyazaki episodes alone for years).
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=ELJ7W8YJE1z_8
The show itself was a rather interesting co-production between the Japanese studio TMS (Tokyo Movie Shinsha) and the Italian broadcast RAI, with Marco & Gi Pagot having created the concept/design for the series. They would later create a feline version of the same concept in the 90’s as “Montana Jones”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0HYDVeXX50
It was “authorized” only in that RAI, the government channel in Italy, commissioned TMS to create 26 half-hour episodes of Sherlock Holmes with a cast of funny-animal dogs. TMS assigned Miyazaki to direct it, but he only finished six episodes before legal protests from the Conan Doyle estate put everything on hold. By the time that was worked out, Miyazaki had gone on to work on Nausicaa, so Great Detective Holmes/Sherlock Hound was restarted with others working from Miyazaki’s designs and notes.
On that note, there’s also Inu-Yasha.
A pal of mine reminded me you forgot “All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku”, shame on you Fred! 🙂
But did Nuku-Nuku have cat’s ears? I don’t think so. She had a tiny cat’s fang in some shots, but she was supposed to show normal human teeth normally.
Oh, I stand corrected. Thanks for clearing that up Fred!