Big tobacco is making moves in anime this year. Whereas Crunchyroll’s Smoking Behind The Supermarket With Youhas cornered the market on unproblematic age-gap slow-burn romance, released in smoke-break-length, piecemeal premiere episodes for maximum nicotine mise-en-scène, Chainsmoker Cat is taking a page out of Chainsaw Man’s playbook with its anime opening to get folks on board with its wacky premise: An unexpected dose of absolute cinema
Anime openings are a big deal. Even if an adaptation has the mandate from heaven to be amazing, anime openings are an important hurdle for shows to clear. In the same way Netflix shows must have an action sequence within the opening moments of a show for viewer retention, it’s an anime opening’s job to encapsulate a show’s vibe long before viewers give a show the ol’ three-episode test to see if you want to commit to it or banish it to your backlog
Back in 2022, Chainsaw Man turned heads when MAPPA’s anime premiered and revealed its opening theme at the start of its second episode. It’s a narrative with a fairly convoluted premise, so to get folks on board, Chainsaw Man leaned into creator Tatsuki Fujimoto’s cinephile inclinations by referencing a bunch of movies, which the folks at IGN were kind enough to list out in a video
So, what’s Chainsmoker’s Cat, the most as-advertised-on-the-tin anime about a smoking catgirl, to do to get word-of-mouth circulating online? Why, pull a Chainsaw Man and reference cinema with iconic and superfluous smoking scenes in Western movies and shows, of course. Trainspotting, Chinatown, Breaking Bad, hell, even Fallen Angels and A Better Tomorrow made the cut for this OP
While the jingley keys of a movie referencing anime OP are hard not to snap your fingers at, behind all the beautifully realized animation that Bibury Animation Studios put into the show lies an obvious question: Is the show worth watching? Hmm.
Well, the opening moments show the anthropomorphic catgirl Yani dumping her tar juice on her landlord, only for him to storm into her apartment, see her changing, evacuate the premises, and jerk off to the peek he got of her sideboob. After which, Yani spots a long cigarette at the bottom of a trash bag in her “damn bitch, you live like this apartment” and smokes it despite the mysterious liquid on the cigarette, leading to her violently shitting on her toilet cowgirl style. It’s one of those kinds of anime I regret turning on while eating breakfast. And this is only the first of what looks to be a herd of smoking catgirls the show has yet to introduce.
These gifs are gonna hit transfem circles like cocaine in the 80s. https://t.co/aye6Y6pC9r
That’s not to say the show doesn’t impart sage wisdom here and there. Key among them is that removing the first five cigarettes from a fresh pack leaves enough space to fit your lighter inside the box. Beyond that, you’ve got a gross-out comedy where its titular catgirl is a complete menace to her town in the most It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia season one ways possible as she careens from one odd job to another to make enough money for rent and not scare her friends and family away at the disgusting way she lives. Regardless, its opening is cool enough to have tricked me into watching it, and I look forward to what side of the fence Yani lands on as the new anime social media AVI.
Now that’s what I call a good slow burn romance
AftermathIsaiah Colbert
