Ghost Cat Anzu Standard Edition Blu-ray + DVD

Ghost Cat Anzu Standard Edition Blu-ray + DVD follows an unlikely guardian and a lonely girl on an adventure that reaches beyond the world of the living. Adapted from Takashi Imashiro's manga, the film pairs the everyday absurdity of a talking cat's life with Karin's longing to see her mother again.

During a thunderstorm, a temple priest discovers an abandoned kitten in a cardboard box and takes him home. Named Anzu and lovingly raised, the kitten does not grow into an ordinary cat: he begins talking and living like a person. Now 37, Anzu gets around on a moped and earns a living doing part-time massage work. His comfortable routine changes when the priest's estranged son Tetsuya returns with his eleven-year-old daughter, Karin. Another argument follows, and Tetsuya leaves again, this time without her.

Asked to look after Karin, Anzu soon discovers that her well-behaved manner around adults does not tell the whole story. Karin waits for her father to keep his promise to return for the anniversary of her mother's death, but he never appears. Unable even to visit her mother's grave, she asks Anzu for something much greater: to help her see her mother. That single wish draws them into a desperate escape involving the underworld itself.

Directors Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita combine their approaches to animation and live-action filmmaking in this Japanese-French coproduction by Shin-Ei Animation and Miyu Productions. The performers' filmed movements inform the animated characters, with Mirai Moriyama playing Anzu and Noa Goto playing Karin. Munetaka Aoki and Miwako Ichikawa join the cast, while Keiichi Suzuki provides the score and voices the priest.

Supplementary material includes trailers, teasers and commercials, short features about Pi-Pi-chan and Anzu's early life, and a comparison of live-action reference footage with the finished animation. A commentary by Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita offers another perspective on the film's production.

This two-disc set contains the 95-minute film on Blu-ray and DVD. The region-free Blu-ray provides Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio stereo and 5.1 surround tracks, a Japanese DTS stereo audio-description track, and Japanese accessibility subtitles. The included DVD is region 2.