rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Director: Junichi Sato, Tomotaka and Shibayama
Year: 2020
Watched: 15/11/2025
In one word: speak
A Whisker Away (泣きたい私は猫をかぶる)
The literal meaning of the japanese title is "wanting to cry, I pretend to be a cat", and it makes so much more sense than the translation to english!! Miyo "Muge" Sasaki is a peculiar second-year junior high student who has fallen in love with her classmate Kento Hinode. Muge resolutely pursues Kento every day, but he takes no notice of her. Nevertheless, while carrying a secret she can tell no one, Muge continues to pursue Kento. Muge discovers a magic mask that allows her to transform into a cat named Tarō. The magic lets Muge get close to Kento, but eventually it may also make her unable to transform back to a human.
The clip, starting at 1:40:11, reminded me of the summers I spent at my grandparents' house in Cebolais. A small litlle town in the north of Portugal. The light, the sound, the characters' positions, and the fact that they were eating ice cream gave me the same feeling I had when I spent entire summers there. I watched the film on my way to Munich. It helped me focus on something other than the turbulence. It's a really funny way of putting things. A beautiful way of saying that we don't need to change ourselves for someone to like us. And that we should always be transparent about how we feel with the people close to us. Although that was my interpretation, the title refers to something even deeper. The story is about this girl who'd have this spontaneous personality and everyone saw her as this outgoing extrovert girl. The fact was that she didn't really have the capacity to tell others that she wasn't okay. She was actually very sad about her parents divorce. But at school you'd look at her and think that she had everything figured out in her life. Now that I think about that, it could also be a way to say that we can open up and it's okay if not everything is okay yk??