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FANTASIA 2025: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK (2025)

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Weirdest!

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Voices of Kana Aoi, Daisuke Kasuya, Atsuko Nakata, Sayaka, Kei Taniguchi

PLOT: A missing-persons case steers Tamala and her friend into a world of corporate nefariousness, deep-time conspiracy, and staggering cosmic implications.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: To quote Fantasia programmer Rubert Bottenberg: “The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of , , and in… a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.”

COMMENTS: Having your eyes bombarded at the end of a long day can be rather refreshing: something to wipe away the accumulated impressions, and leave your perception open to embrace the crazy world anew. This effect was indeed welcome, for as Tamala likes to say: “Another f*cking day is about to begin.” This line, delivered in a childlike, brat-girl, cutey pie kind of way, kicks off the (*deep breath*) Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in the Dark experience. An experience unlike any other I’ve witnessed on the big screen. An experience, if I may, whose existence hinges on the manifold developments of the past century and a half, and on the strange minds of the enigmatic t.o.L team.

For those unfamiliar with the Tamala phenomenon (as I was, until the screening), she was introduced to the world—at Fantasia, I believe—in 2010. Per her bio, she is “[a] young female cat, born in the Orion Constellation on the Odessa star; cute, but uses much foul language. She was genetically engineered in Cat Year 1869 to always remain a year and a half old, in order to be the immortal mascot of the mega-conglomerate CATTY & Co.” Which should give you the gist of things.

Where the gist may slip from your grasp may depend, but having missed the gist before the Tamala movie screening, I was still a happy viewer as Tamala 2030 washed over me like a wave of strange black and white purréed media. Tamala dances, Tamala curses, Tamala munches on pocky, and all the while the movie spools out impossible amounts of ambient details. Seven cities in seven different prefectures have seen simultaneous disappearances of seven different two-year-old cats. (The fact that one of them handsome spurs Tamala to join her boy-friend’s [?] investigation of the matter.) The specifics clatter on-screen at a blistering pace as Tamala, always boing-boinging in her steps, saunters fearlessly through class riots, cabalistic postal machinations, and onward to her empyrean duel amongst the stars.

t.o.L. manage the difficult hat-trick of fusing several graphic styles into a cohesive—albeit capital-“I”-Incredible—world. Tamala 2030 is a symphony of sight, walking a devilishly narrow through-line of technique where any slight variation would have catastrophically cacophonous results. Echoes of late ’90s screen-saver loops, mid-19th-century advertisement figures and fonts, flash™-y forms, and 3D-celestiality are all here, and all coexist. This film is a dizzying march through time and space, an appropriately epic-length adventure with pathos, frog-licking, reincarnation, cow spotted sports cars, intrigue, graffiti—and more than one explosion of Tamala into swarms of mini-Tamalas.

Oh yes, this will cleanse and flush your mind’s palette, and you’ll feel jumbled and pumped and ready to rock—’cause another f*cking day is about to begin.

Tamala‘s theatrical release date is uncertain, but Deaf Crocodile has acquired the physical media rights and plans to release the film in 2026.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

No other reviews were found at time of publication

Reader Recommendations

READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971)

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Reader Recommendation from James Auburn

AKA BJ Presents; B.J. Lang Presents 

Beware

“…a motion picture so haunted… it will never be shown!” – B.J. Lang Presents trailer

DIRECTED BY: Yabo Yablonsky

FEATURING: , ,

PLOT: The film takes place almost entirely on a dusty soundstage. B.J. Lang (Rooney) has kidnapped a woman he refers to as Carlotta (Luana Anders of “Easy Rider”) and has tied her to a wheelchair. Lang spends nearly 90 minutes tormenting Carlotta, screaming at her, forcing her to recite lines to an imaginary movie, and spooning baby food into her mouth, among other indignities. 

Still from the manipulator (1971)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: This acid-damaged wannabe-arthouse film has stupefied even jaded psychotronic film freaks. Every “hip” avant-garde editing gimmick in the psychedelic-era toolbox is utilized: strobe lights, fish-eye lens, solarization, freeze-frames, quick-cut frames of random images, flashbacks/flash-forwards, slow-motion/fast-motion, etc. The viewing experience feels like a 90-minute long, 104-degree-fever hallucination that makes you question your own sanity. The uncomfortably cathartic performances from its two leads seem like a blend of acting-workshop exercises and heavy existential therapy put on film. Through extended monologues, the central character explores his own inner turmoil and waxes philosophical about life and show business, and as he wallows in his own insanity, the movie itself follows suit.

 

COMMENTS: Yes, one of the most demented movies you’ve ever seen starred Mickey Rooney—and he gives a psychotic tour-de-force performance that must be seen to be disbelieved.

In the opening scene, B.J. Lang enters the soundstage, as if to begin a routine day of work, passing cobwebbed props and backdrops; he sits down, and starts talking excitedly to thin air. Lang establishes himself as either a movie director who has gone insane, or an insane man who fancies himself a movie director; it’s never quite clear which. He runs a take of an imaginary movie scene while barking orders at mannequins and a film crew that exists only in his addled head. This opening segment culminates in a nightmarish two-minute freakout sequence with Lang screaming at two nude white-bodypainted figures (his parents? sure, why not) who cruelly laugh at him, over a screeching electronic racket. Suddenly: silence. Closeup: Lang is drenched in sweat, exhausted, as are our eardrums and sensibilities. What’s your threshold for cinematic insanity? You’ll know in the first ten minutes of The Manipulator.

We then discover Carlotta, tied to the wheelchair. Evidently she’s been there against her will for some time. For a long stretch, her only line is “I’m hungry, Mr. Lang!” She repeats it, again and again, with every different inflection she can muster (Lang spoon-feeds her a few Continue reading READER RECOMMENDATION: THE MANIPULATOR (1971) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “AFRAID SO” (2003) AND THE SHORT FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT, 2001-2011

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jay Rosenblatt

FEATURING THE VOICE OF: Garrison Keillor

PLOT (“AFRAID SO”): A series of questions are proffered, each of which elicits the unspoken title as a regretful affirmative, accompanied by a visual snippet reinforcing the dreadful outcome.

COMMENTS: With the advent of VHS tapes and later DVDs, a long-running market for the distribution of educational films and documentaries on 8mm and 16mm reels dried up in an instant. Schools and other institutions suddenly had storage closets full of unneeded film reels, and most were unceremoniously tossed in the trash. This development meant little to most people, but was a vital discovery for one man in particular: filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, who rescued the unwanted footage and, for three decades, has repurposed that castoff celluloid into new forms, using images from the past to provide ironic counterpoint to the fears and anxieties of the present. We have seen this kind of resurrected montage before, most notably in “21-87”, Arthur Lipsett’s influential assemblage of rescued cutting-room-floor effluvia. (Among those who carried the torch was a very young film student named George Lucas, who drew upon Lipsett’s technique in his first work.) But where Lipsett used clips to carry the weight of delivering his message, Rosenblatt often deploys his found footage to serve a larger narrative, as subtext rather than text.

Consider the film recommended to us: “Afraid So,” unusual in Rosenblatt’s oeuvre for being an adaptation of Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s poem, which derives grim humor from the escalation of stakes, the questions it asks rising in significance from “Was the baggage rerouted?” to “Do I have to remove my clothes?” and eventually to “Is the bone broken?” Garrison Keillor’s trademark lethargic Minnesota demeanor (originally recorded for radio) is a good match for the piece, delivering a ruefully funny air of resigned doom, so it’s fair to think that visuals won’t add much to the poem’s impact. Initially, Rosenblatt seems to prove this thesis true. “Is it starting to rain?” yields drops in a puddle; “Are we out of coffee?” leads to a filling cup. But as Keillor progresses, Rosenblatt heightens the tension, choosing pictures that make the negative outcomes so much worse than what Beaumont’s words imply. “Will this go on my record?” is accompanied by footage of a man clubbing someone from behind in a public place, a crime distinct from the mere speeding ticket you might suspect. Similarly, “Will it leave a scar?” hints at a medical procedure, but Rosenblatt’s chosen clip makes it clear that the operation at hand is a mastectomy. Once we reach “Will this be in the papers?” and “Is my time up already?,” the title answer is not just worrisome, but deathly. Appropriate, then, that the only sound aside from Keillor’s voice is the piercing tri-tone of a weather alert. Yes, bad things are coming.

“Afraid So” was released on home video as part of a compilation of Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “AFRAID SO” (2003) AND THE SHORT FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT, 2001-2011 →