Lily C.A.T.From deadly shapeshifting alien bacteria and unfeeling corporate overlords using androids as their proxies to "time jumpers" exploiting hypersleep in order to escape police custody, space is a seriously dangerous place. Lily C.A.T. is a sci-fi/horror anime about a crew of interstellar explorers aboard the research vessel Saldes, representing the multi-national "Syncam" corporation, and charged with establishing a resource facility on a planet twenty years away from Earth. When the Saldes' computer identifies an extra-terrestrial life form adrift in space, it accidentally releases a catastrophic contagion into the ship in the process of retrieving it, exposing the passengers of the Saldes to a monstrous fate worse than death.
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I first saw Lily C.A.T. as a part of the Sci-Fi Channel's "3rd Annual Festival of Anime". (I never did learn what became of the first two festivals.) It was my first real exposure to animation that dealt with mature subject matter--even if it was edited for television--and broadened my horizons about what to expect from the medium. The films in the festival were all published by Streamline Pictures, and produced by anime localization pioneer, Carl Macek. At my age, I had no idea that Lily C.A.T. drew extensively from early Eighties American sci-fi/horror classics, most obviously Alien and The Thing, so it appeared far more original to me than it may have to audiences at the time. The plot of Lily C.A.T. is pulled almost straight from the former film, and is filled with graphic set pieces that evoke the latter. The Saldes is helmed by Captain Mike Hamilton, a veteran of galactic transport, who takes the representatives of Syncam to their destination, albeit while they all rest in hypersleep for just over twenty years. Just after the diverse collective enters hypersleep, an urgent message is transmitted to Hamilton, which unfortunately goes unheard for two decades. The message indicates that two of the Syncam representatives are not actually employees, and should be considered highly dangerous. But just as their identities are about to be disclosed, the message cuts out, which Hamilton and the crew presume to mean that it was tampered with post-hypersleep. For much of Lily C.A.T., this adds an element of mystery to the story, which is already dense between the threat of the extremely potent bacterial infection, which is compounded by the alien mass that materializes later from the flesh of its victims--all taking place within less than an eighty minute running time.
The crew and employees aboard the Saldes embody various tropes found in the likes of Alien, The Thing, and others. Among them is Nancy Strauch, the somewhat naive daughter of Syncam's president; she even brought her cat, Lily, with her into hypersleep. The other passengers become suspects as potential threats, and Hamilton's crew speculates as to who the mysterious deceivers could be. Other Syncam representatives include Jiro Takagi, a stoic engineering expert from the Japanese office, an investigative fellow from Australia named Dick Berry, a gun-toting good ol' boy from the home office in Florida, Morgan W. Scott, a gnomish medical doctor named Harris Mead, and others that wouldn't be out of place as stock characters in a similar genre story. Some of their dialogue even feels deliberately lifted from some of the obvious inspirations for Lily C.A.T., like Dr. Mead's commentary about the rapid metabolism of the bacteria, recalling Wilford Brimley's character from The Thing. While this could be interpreted as a criticism of Lily C.A.T. being derivative, the film instead prospers by embracing these cliches en masse, making the film feel a bit like a pair of well-worn jeans, already broken in and treading familiar territory. The employees eventually discover that not everyone is who they claim to be after Berry sneaks his way into the communication logs, leaving them torn between their anxiety about sharing their company with a potential killer and the real one lurking in the shadows of the vessel. After the first victim of the alien bacteria is discovered, Dr. Mead describes the death as being akin to suffocating from Legionnaires' disease, hinting that the invisible killer is all around them, which amps up the dread that any of them might already be infected. But killer bacteria alone apparently isn't enough of a gory spectacle for an Eighties' era sci-fi/horror anime. After the bacteria kills its prey, the corpses dissolve into a collective, amorphous ooze that hides in the ship's ventilation shafts, occasionally killing its prey outright in grisly fashion. While the crew and employees are picked off one by one by this alien force, another mysterious entity has taken control of the vessel, and begins jettisoning infected wings into space, even when it means sending members of the crew into the vacuum of space in the process, adding yet another deadly wrinkle to the expedition. Despite the copious danger, many of the characters will still take a moment to pontificate on the social and emotional tolls that come from repeat hypersleep-intensive treks into the farthest reaches of space, and even the morality of justified murder after the identity of the false Syncam representative is revealed. Lily C.A.T. closes with a final meditation on forgiveness and transformation, and what it means to leave behind your past and live on for the sake of a better future.
Recommended for: Fans of vintage Eighties sci-fi/horror anime that draws heavily on other Western genre films for plot and tone. Lily C.A.T. makes up for its lack of originality with its ambitiousness in packing a lot of story elements into its comparatively short length, and it is a standout example of the kind of mature anime that popularized the genre at that time.
The crew and employees aboard the Saldes embody various tropes found in the likes of Alien, The Thing, and others. Among them is Nancy Strauch, the somewhat naive daughter of Syncam's president; she even brought her cat, Lily, with her into hypersleep. The other passengers become suspects as potential threats, and Hamilton's crew speculates as to who the mysterious deceivers could be. Other Syncam representatives include Jiro Takagi, a stoic engineering expert from the Japanese office, an investigative fellow from Australia named Dick Berry, a gun-toting good ol' boy from the home office in Florida, Morgan W. Scott, a gnomish medical doctor named Harris Mead, and others that wouldn't be out of place as stock characters in a similar genre story. Some of their dialogue even feels deliberately lifted from some of the obvious inspirations for Lily C.A.T., like Dr. Mead's commentary about the rapid metabolism of the bacteria, recalling Wilford Brimley's character from The Thing. While this could be interpreted as a criticism of Lily C.A.T. being derivative, the film instead prospers by embracing these cliches en masse, making the film feel a bit like a pair of well-worn jeans, already broken in and treading familiar territory. The employees eventually discover that not everyone is who they claim to be after Berry sneaks his way into the communication logs, leaving them torn between their anxiety about sharing their company with a potential killer and the real one lurking in the shadows of the vessel. After the first victim of the alien bacteria is discovered, Dr. Mead describes the death as being akin to suffocating from Legionnaires' disease, hinting that the invisible killer is all around them, which amps up the dread that any of them might already be infected. But killer bacteria alone apparently isn't enough of a gory spectacle for an Eighties' era sci-fi/horror anime. After the bacteria kills its prey, the corpses dissolve into a collective, amorphous ooze that hides in the ship's ventilation shafts, occasionally killing its prey outright in grisly fashion. While the crew and employees are picked off one by one by this alien force, another mysterious entity has taken control of the vessel, and begins jettisoning infected wings into space, even when it means sending members of the crew into the vacuum of space in the process, adding yet another deadly wrinkle to the expedition. Despite the copious danger, many of the characters will still take a moment to pontificate on the social and emotional tolls that come from repeat hypersleep-intensive treks into the farthest reaches of space, and even the morality of justified murder after the identity of the false Syncam representative is revealed. Lily C.A.T. closes with a final meditation on forgiveness and transformation, and what it means to leave behind your past and live on for the sake of a better future.
Recommended for: Fans of vintage Eighties sci-fi/horror anime that draws heavily on other Western genre films for plot and tone. Lily C.A.T. makes up for its lack of originality with its ambitiousness in packing a lot of story elements into its comparatively short length, and it is a standout example of the kind of mature anime that popularized the genre at that time.