The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Cat's Eye

The three Kisugi sisters - Hitomi, Rui, and Ai - run a café called Cat's Eye. The same sisters lead a double life as a trio of highly skilled art thieves, leaving cards with a name 'Cat's Eye' at the scene of the crime. They steal works of art (mostly paintings) as clues that belong to their long missing father, Heinz, a famous painter and art collector during the Nazi's reign. They hope that by stealing his works, Heinz will contact them. Toshi, the police officer investigating this case, is Hitomi's fiancé. He also swears to capture and bring down the Cat's Eye Gang.

Cat's Eye is based on the manga series by Tsukasa Hōjō. The anime series is streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Fridays.

I have never read a single bit of the original Cat's Eye manga or watched any of its anime adaptation. I do know that the series is considered a classic by many. In an era where companies are starting to go back and give these older anime a glow-up treatment, I was anticipating something to captivate me along the same lines as Urutsei Yatsura or the Ranma 1/2 reboot. Unfortunately, comparing the first episode of those shows to the first episode of this show doesn't seem fair, as this first episode is several shades of bland. The setup is dated, although I can appreciate the appeal that this series probably held for audiences closer to the time it was released. However, it doesn't really leave much to be desired or even to the imagination.

The music is absolutely a banger. I can close my eyes and listen to the soundtrack for days, and I won't deny that I miss these types of retro designs, which are not typical of many modern-day shows. But the events that transpired throughout the course of this episode are really, really dull. This is a situation where the show's premise was probably enough to carry an entire episode. Nowadays, I need something a little more creative, which is a shame because you can do some really creative and inventive things with the classic cat-and-mouse dynamic. I have recently been watching a lot of Detective Conan and Kaito Kid, but nothing is going on in Cat's Eye aside from a lot of smokescreens.

They're fairly typical setups that are easy to spot from a mile away, such as when two members of the crew disguised themselves as museum workers to steal the painting. It was also very easy to tell that they were going to fabricate a situation to ensure the officer stayed on the case because they genuinely care about him, even though they are constantly gaslighting him. I am curious as to why the gang is stealing all of these items, but it's a very mild curiosity. I hope future episodes offer a bit more, because that curiosity alone won't be enough to get me invested in what's going on.

Whoa, they made an anime out of Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood's novel about girlhood friendships and the formation of identity? Wild choice, but I love that book, and I'm all for making anime from more diverse sources. I can't help but feel like something will be lost without Atwood's evocative prose, but…

Oh. You mean Cat's Eye as in the 1980s manga by Tsukasa Hōjō, creator of City Hunter, about three cat burglar sisters. Okay, that's cool. I'm not disappointed. Not disappointed at all…

It's all good though, because Cat's Eye is one of those series I've always planned to check out but never did. The concept of three sisters, small business owners by day and cat burglars by night – how else are you going to keep an independently-run café going in this economy, eyyyy – promises to be lighthearted at worst. I'm much more drawn to Hojo's realistically proportioned bodies than to those of standard anime women, and the art I've seen gives me the impression of athleticism and sexy, yet pragmatic, skintight outfits for burglary.

But was this really the best way to experience it for the first time? I have no basis for comparison, so I'm not really sure, but something tells me that if the original were this mid, the series wouldn't have the reputation it does. LIDEN FILMS has put together a typically mediocre effort, with animation and storyboarding that fail to really push the story forward, but only occasionally hold it back. It has that kind of flatness that mediocre modern digital animation often carries, with two-dimensional characters not quite blending into 3D-modeled backgrounds. Easily the best part of the production on the technical end is Yūki Hayashi's musical score; the heist sequences have his typical soaring strings, but the slice-of-life scenes have a quirky '80s vibe that pays tribute to the era of the original.

The heists were overall unexciting as well; cramming three into one episode meant there was little time for the buildup needed to make them work. A good heist is like a magic trick, setting up the audience's expectations and then striking a balance between meeting and subverting them. The simple pleasure of seeing how burglars circumvent the traps and elaborate security systems meant to catch them has been stripped away. The middle and final heists of the episode had some clever misdirection, but if that's the only trick up this version's sleeve, it's going to get dull fast.

The real treasure here is the characters. I instantly wanted to know more about the Kisugi sisters; how did they end up in this lifestyle? Their personalities are more or less what you'd expect, with the calm eldest, fiery middle, and cute youngest, but the snappy, relatively understated dialogue keeps them feeling like people instead of mere archetypes. The police squad charged with capturing them, centered around the hapless Toshio Utsumi, looks to be made up of weirdos that I really hope we get to learn more about.

But... I don't think I'm going to watch more, at least not of this version. Not when the beloved original is readily available on services I'm already subscribed to.

Cat's Eye, like its sibling series City Hunter, was an anime just before my time. I know of it, am aware of the basic plot, and might even be able to identify a screenshot of it, but have nonetheless never seen even a single episode. In other words, I am firmly in one of the two groups this anime is aimed at: interested newbies (rather than hardcore fans of the 1980s anime or manga).

That said, this first episode left me a little less than impressed. Tell me if you've heard this one before. We have a team of thieves, stealing un-stealable treasures while they are chased by a largely competent cop who is nonetheless outsmarted by the thieves again and again, and with whom the thieves have a complicated, almost friendly, relationship. This is basically the plot to Lupin the Third (which was already a powerhouse by the time Cat's Eye was written). Given the similarities, it's up to Cat's Eye to put its own twist on the story. Unfortunately, the difference is rather skin deep. The three thieves are women—sisters to be exact… and that's it.

The real failure of this premiere is that it never tells us our antiheroes' motivation. Why do they steal art and jewels? Why do they run a cafe as a cover? Why do they keep a dangerous relationship with the detective, using their secret identities? None of this is mentioned. How can we root for Cat's Eye if we don't know why they're doing what they do? And to add insult to injury, the episode even ends using their motivation as a cliffhanger to get you to come back next week by ending things in a room full of treasures with a mysterious man.

So while the burglary scenes were fun enough, I don't feel any connection to the group of thieves or the haplessly single detective chasing them. Maybe I'll give Cat's Eye another chance in the future, but for now, I don't see myself tuning in next week.