Given Japan's adoration of all things cute, childish, and whimsical, it's reasonable to expect a Japanese animated film about a huge-eyed anthropomorphic kitten who speaks in baby-talk to be simultaneously cloying and adorable. But Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat In Space defies expectations as thoroughly as it defies conventional storytelling. The film's titular character, a curvy bipedal kitty who looks like she stepped intact out of a Betty Boop cartoon circa 1933, is a feisty 1-year-old feline who smokes, steals, swears, and boldly proclaims her intent to take control of her own destiny by leaving her home, CatEarth, for Orion. She's also the viewer's window into a dizzyingly disconnected series of images that initially seem midway between an animation test and a test of the audience's will.
Tamala 2010 does have a plot, and an impressively intricate and high-minded one at that. But finding it takes patience, as well as the endurance to sit through an hour of dreamlike, disassociated scenes in which Tamala shoplifts, flirts, travels through space, investigates a museum, spouts non sequiturs, and converses with her "human mother," a videogame-playing woman wrapped in a giant snake. These scenes are presented randomly and without affect, among seemingly unrelated sequences involving a couple of cat drag queens and an aggressive dog who fetishizes a beribboned pet mouse. And they're backed by whispery, circular techno that offers no particular reason to believe the story is going anywhere. Until a character finally lays out the film's dystopic, philosophical themes in an extended monologue, Tamala 2010 proceeds with the image-focused associative illogic of the world's longest and slowest music video.
Mostly black and white, with occasional tints, Tamala 2010 mixes stark simplicity with an appealingly groovy psychedelic advertising aesthetic, layering simple, iconic images on top of each other until the whole approaches a complexity that any one element lacks. Its iconography is stolen equally from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince," Disney's Silly Symphonies, Andy Warhol, modern anime, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, among many other seeming influences. But its tone seems like a mixture of pencil-test abstraction and the semi-directed chaos of Ralph Bakshi's rough and random urban pictures. Living under the cold and watchful double-eye symbol of the oppressive, ubiquitous megacorporation Catty & Co., Tamala and her cerebral, hapless associate Michelangelo are caught in an Orwellian nightmare, but they seem as oblivious to that as they do to the larger picture. Maybe they'll gain perspective in the projected sequels, Tamala In Orion and Tatla, and their story will gain some sorely needed momentum. Lacking that, Tamala 2010 feels like either a singularly detail-organized dream, or an exceptionally formal drug trip.