Shinkai is a big name now.
A decade and a half ago, his animation work was clinically pure, assembling characters with a youthful exuberance and emotional resilience unheard of in the then fast-approaching age of digital cartooning. She and Her Cat was a black-and-white short film that offered viewers tender, sly commentary on human frailty and the quicksand-like environs of one's crumbling mental health.
SHE AND HER CAT, the manga, years later, regards with a sideways smile those same tender, sly moments of feeling faithlessness when pressed against the odds. Narrated by an abandoned kitten, Chobi, the manga sheds light on a socially distraught twentysomething whose capacity to engage the outside world shivers and shrivels with each passing season. Chobi is not a particularly smart, exciting, or daring cat . . . but he is kind. And kindness warms the ache of a broken heart and soothes the scars of social agony like nothing else.
Miyu needs kindness to survive. Her job is endlessly exhausting. Her personal life is empty. Her family is grating. There really isn't much out there for Miyu, and because she feels the pressure to amount to something (and soon), it's becoming harder and harder for her to wake up every morning and feel like she's capable of anything. Miyu, in short, is depressed.
Thank the cosmos for kitties.
In SHE AND HER CAT, Chobi guides readers through Miyu's frustrations, mostly anecdotally but almost always savvy and on point. He cannot always articulate his observations of her most amusing, human tendencies, as with the fact that Miyu loves to cook ("The meals she eats always seem to be delicious."), but Chobi's animal instincts are fairly resolute ("I do not comprehend her sadness. But when she caresses me without expression, it's probably when something's troubling her.").
Chobi is a sensitive cat. As when his owner disconsolately stays up all night typing a report, twice . . . When his owner returns home after meeting a college friend, sadder than when she left . . . When his owner avoids answering her cell phone, because it's probably her mother calling for the millionth time to talk about marriage . . . . Chobi nuzzles Miyu's hand, purrs, and ponders ("I'm the only one who sees that she is always kinder than anyone else, that she's lovelier than anyone else, that she lives more earnestly than anyone else.").
This manga is a story about one woman's conflicting emotional crises and the constant wearing down of her means to successfully conquer them, day by day, hour by hour.
This is also a story about her cat, and how the cat saves her from herself . . . little by little, day by day, hour by hour.
Chobi is not a particularly smart, exciting, or daring cat . . . but he is kind.