The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Nyaight of the Living Cat

A virus spreads across the world, transforming all humankind into wild, slavering, furry beasts: cats, to be precise. Those few survivors who remain human take refuge in the dark corners of the earth as they fight back against the feline horde. Kunagi, a man with no memory of his past yet a deep knowledge of cats, struggles to hold on with only his wits and a will to survive. Yet the virus transmits merely through cuddles, and Kunagi finds kitties so hard to resist.

Nyaight of the Living Cat is based on the Night of the Living Cat manga series by writer Hawkman and artist Mecha-Roots. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.

I had one big question on my mind after finishing the fun (if uneven) first episode of Nyaight of the Living Cat: Can this premise sustain an entire season of anime, or would it have been better off as a series of funny shorts or online sketches? After watching Episode 2, I think we've got a decent chance of this show turning out alright, though any horror-comedy that is playing with such a ridiculous concept is bound to be hit-or-miss even in the best of cases. It's just a matter of making sure that you hit more often than you miss - or, maybe I should say, “More often than you meow-ss?”

I'm sorry, I'm just trying to get into the spirit of things. The best thing about Nyaight of the Living Cat of the living cat is that it (usually) takes its cat-astrophic a-paw-calypse deadly seriously, and I feel like I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't throw in a purrfectly cringey pun when the opportunity presented itself. In this second episode, the show essentially runs with the same formula as episode one: Our beleaguered group of survivors must outrun the menace of needy cuddle-bugs that have taken over the world, even while they lament their inability to revel in the glorious privilege of snuggling up to a horde of fuzzy felines. Instead of shotguns or baseball bats, though, they must rely on weapons like string-mouse toys and water-bottle traps. Throughout, we're provided some funny cat facts and flashbacks that introduce our cast of survivors and the lives they lived before the Nyandemic destroyed the world.

It's those survivors who will make or break whether the show works in the long run. Yes, it is inherently funny for a girl like Kaoru to scream “My brother transformed into a cat!” with deranged sincerity. Still, the characters can only live as walking joke dispensers for so long in a television series. A movie parody can get away with having a cast that exists merely to represent different stereotypes and caricatures, but a television show with a serialized story has to have some underlying foundation of an actual narrative to hold everything together for an entire season. The introduction of a character like Tsutsumi gives me hope that the show will get its characters right in the long run. As someone unlucky enough to be allergic to cats in a world that was absurdly obsessed with them before the Nyandemic even happened, she's still a fundamentally silly person to try to take seriously as a human being, but her chipper attitude and her friendship with Kaoru make her just three-dimensional enough.

Overall, Nyaight of the Living Cat continues to get the job done as an endearingly shabby, B-grade horror spoof, and just might possess enough substance to function as a decent season of television on top of that. If nothing else, the cats continue to be adorable and funny, and any cartoon that provides a weekly dose of adorable and funny cats is worth having around.

I'm a cat guy. If you went back in time to tell my twelve-year-old self this fundamental fact of my adult life, I probably would have scoffed and reiterated my plans to own an entire sled team's worth of Baltos and Air Buds by the time I turned twenty, but life has a funny way of turning out. Cats are freaking adorable creatures that deserve all of our love and respect, and anyone who dares to challenge me on that fact will get to sit through several hours of me showing off the last ten years of pictures I've saved of my three cats for their troubles. I'm telling you all of this because the basic concept of Nyaight of the Living Cat is essentially catnip for fellows like me. An old-school zombie story, except the last vestiges of mankind are running from hordes of cuddly felines instead of the shambling undead? Sign me up.

As a horror-comedy about cats, Nyaight of the Living Cat has to succeed to at least some degree in those three core pillars of focus: “Horror”, “Comedy”, and “Cats.” For the most part, I would say the show succeeds, though not necessarily on an equal level on all fronts. So far as the split between “horror” and “comedy” goes, the show very obviously leans more towards the yuks than screams of terror. The grim, apocalyptic setting and frequent use of time-worn horror tropes all exist to be subverted by the cute little kitties that are running rampant in practically every scene. This approach makes perfect sense, though I think the show might have been even funnier if it played the horror just a little more straight. Don't get me wrong, I love me a bunch of cat facts as much as the next guy, but the zany narrator's constant interruptions didn't actually make me laugh very much; they only serve to remind you that this show called Nyaight of the Living Cat is, in fact, very silly. If we cut all of that stuff out entirely and just presented the anime's story as a dead-serious tale of survival and broken humanity - except, you know, with cats being all fuzzy-wuzzy instead of zombies - I think the humor would stand out even more.

As is, the jokes we do get are pretty good, for the most part. The show makes the wise decision to lampoon cat people just as much as the cats themselves, which means there are at least two notes for the show to hit with its gags instead of one. It's funny enough to play up the cats scratching at the window for attention like a horde of monsters; what makes it funnier is that our protagonists are just so goddamned upset that they can't scritch those little triangle ears and squish all the toe-beans to their hearts' content.

The real question is how sustainable Nyaight of the Living Cats is beyond an entertaining episode or two. The show doesn't excel in the art or animation department, so I am wondering how much there will be for us to get invested in beyond some funny gags that are already threatening to grow stale before long. A lot of the premiere is devoted to showing us the “Before the Nyandemic” times that brought our surviving heroes to this place, so the anime is trying to tell some kind of story, at the very least. We'll just have to see if it ends up being enough to carry a premise that otherwise might have worked better as a series of short sketches or a one-shot.

Nyaight of the Living Cat excels in being an over-the-top B-movie parody. When it's trying to get me to care about anybody outside of the main character, it loses me a little bit because I have no reason to do so. This episode showcases more of what happened during the early days of the original pandemic, and I like that the show leans into how this was not a normal society that got overrun. Society was already incredibly obsessed with cats to the point where a lot of them just threw caution to the wind, even when things got dangerous. The cat virus spread so quickly because cats were so numerous.

That also explains why people don't use guns or heavy machinery to take out the cats before they can touch them. The scene where they refuse to run over the group of cats with the car was funny, but I feel like we're losing the parody a little bit here because the whole reason why zombie apocalypses are so scary is that you can't take down the zombies. Here, it almost feels like nobody wants to take down the cats. It feels like the explanation for this calamity was that “everyone is stupid,” which feels like it can only go so far for me.

This is why I don't care about any of the characters, because most of them are asking to die. It feels like a waste of time when a good chunk of the episode is spent on showing a character that I know for a fact will not make it to the next couple of episodes. I wouldn't spend so much time on a character that's doomed to fall. I am genuinely concerned if this is the pattern of the whole season.

It's a zombie apocalypse, but with cats... Screw it, I'm sold. There's something about comedy shows that play the absurdity of their premise completely straight. The idea that we're not just laughing at the premise, but we're also laughing at how incredibly involved everybody is acting during the silly situation. Nyaight of the Living Cat is a show that was written by classic zombie movie lovers, or at the very least, overly aware of their tropes. It's quite funny how a lot of those tropes still work when you replace the disgusting flesh-eating zombies with something simple like a common house or alley cat.

The only thing even remotely threatening about the situation is that you will immediately turn into a cat upon any form of contact. The cats are not overly aggressive. They don't even seem that much more intelligent than your average cat. But because the threshold for getting infected by this transmissible virus is so low, we have to treat every encounter with a cat like it's the most serious and hyperactive situation ever. That's where the comedy exists, and while it worked for this episode, I am a little bit worried about how well the premise can carry a whole show.

This first episode already went through a good amount of the typical zombie tropes, right down to its narrative being a mix of modern day and flashbacks to establish what happened right before the major event. I'm assuming that one of the hooks for the show will involve our main character, who seems to have amnesia outside of a detailed knowledge about cats. Maybe he's tied to the origins of this virus, or maybe his origins are just going to be another joke. It's hard to say how much he was supposed to stand out when pretty much every human character we see has an incredibly detailed and over-the-top design, but I think that's the show trying to emulate the sense of absurdism. This was a solid B movie premise, and I'm curious to see how it would be played moving forward.

So does Nyaight of the Living Cat pick up at all in its second episode? Well, the number of cat-themed pun names increases, so that's one measurable metric by which it's improved. Mewtube, Nyallywood, Nyarvel movies…I admire its commitment to the bit. Even much of the graffiti adorning the gritty backgrounds is based around cats in some way. Between that, the intermittent Cat Facts™, and the ending bonuses assuring the viewers of the effort that goes into keeping these cuddly creatures, this is becoming ever more clear as an anime created with love for these fun little furballs.

That point extends to how the main characters manage the hordes of mewing monstrosities. It'd be dark to suggest that the most effective way of taking care of the cat infestation would be exterminating them, and of course, cat-loving viewers wouldn't have any fun seeing that kind of grimness here. Similarly to how it was established in the last episode that the cats held no actual ill will toward humans and just wanted to hang out, here it's shown that the humans don't want to harm the cats at all, in keeping them at bay. So it goes that protective riot squads lay down barriers of water bottles, and some heroes like Tanishi will wreck a car straight off the road rather than drive over them. I'm a little disappointed by the water bottle bit—I was kind of hoping this would see the show go into a Cat Fact™ about that idea and why it didn't work. Aside from a spiel on running speed, this episode is actually rather light on Cat Facts™.

What this episode of Nyaight of the Living Cat does have is more robust flashback usage. It's not enough to keep going from the start of the Nyandemic, back when Tanishi was still human. The group also runs into Kaoru's school chum Tsutsumi and further flashes back to how they became friends. Spoiler: it involved a cat. There's just enough context to understand Tsutsumi's connection with Kaoru, how down-bad she is for her, and be endeared to the point that she'll presumably be missed when all feline hell breaks loose in the supermarket next episode. I'm just saying, Tsutsumi hasn't been seen post-flashback.

I don't necessarily need my horror spoofs to avoid telegraphing their beats. They're playing with tried-and-true structure after all. In theory, if there were anything else funny/scary/interesting about Nyaight of the Living Cat, I could better roll with elements like how thick it lays on the foreshadowing that Kunagi is definitely a cat who got turned into human in the reverse of the current affliction going around. But when it's got nothing else going on, I can really only sit here and amuse myself by calling these kinds of shots. Kunagi going all nunchuks-and-parkour with a cat toy is kinda cute, and the bit in the flashback with the omnipresent "Tetsuo" label for Tetsuo the cat (appropriately adorned in an adorable little cape akin to another Tetsuo!) is kinda funny. But those few and far between "kinda"s are the best Nyaight of the Living Cat can do, and all those cat puns can't carry it otherwise.

Nyaight of the Living Cat is one of those one-joke setups that's amusing enough on its face—what if a zombie apocalypse, but instead of horrible shambling corpses, people were being turned into cats?! But that also makes it one of those anime where the question is what kind of legs this premise has beyond its silly one-sentence summary. Within the opening minutes of the first episode, the audience has already witnessed a character getting unwillingly animorphed after being nuzzled by a horde of these fuzzy little monstrosities. What else can a series like this do, apart from delivering the frankly amazing portmanteau of "nyandemic"?

The answer, unfortunately, is not much else so far. The most clever point powering this purr-fectly cromulent horror parody is its acknowledgement of the cats themselves. The kitties aren't actively malicious like the walking dead; they just want to nuzzle humans, meow at them, and presumably get them to refill a dish that has food in it. And being the adorable animals they are, it's very tempting for cat-loving humans to want to pat their widdle heads and squeeze their widdle toe beans. Not being able to touch these fuzzy babies might be a more tragic aspect of this world than watching your friends and family lose their humanity, and the Nyaight of the Living Cat anime dips into that a bit with Kunagi's ignoble lamenting of the situation. I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't bother my stupid baby Asha anymore, I get it.

Other than that, it's mostly straight zombie-apocalypse survival runs supplemented by amusingly delivered cat facts. We get to see a water hose deployed for defenses in place of more typically destructive zombie-battling implements, and learn the scientific reasons cats hate water so much in the first place. And yes, it is mildly amusing to see characters checking a vehicle for cats before starting it up, same as one would in colder months, but as a life-or-death safety tactic in this case. I don't know how much that's going to sustain a show like this, especially as it's not exceptionally funny, and by its very nature, isn't scary at all either.

Even the flashback bit in the premiere's second half can't move the needle. There are some elements designed to up the long-term intrigue, like Kunagi's establishing amnesia, but it's not that intriguing. I'm more interested in why the cat cafe the characters were working at seemed to primarily serve the most burly, badass-looking guys around. Given that cute kitties are the central-slash-only appeal of this show, it's not a great look that it doesn't look great. The cats themselves are awkwardly animated CGI much of the time, with the rest of the visuals being murky, stiff, and crusty. That's even more pronounced in the little post-credits bonus scene (dispensing, what else, more cat facts). Given that this is the only thing it has to get by on, and that can be better approximated by watching cute cat videos online while The Walking Dead plays in the background, this probably isn't an anime that needs to be prioritized this season.

Nyaight of the Living Cat didn't quite hit right for me. Maybe it's because it's a play on zombie movie tropes. Maybe it's because the adorable little furball that lives in my house woke me up at 5:30 again, even though I fed her breakfast at 7:00, and I haven't had sufficient time to stop being annoyed at her. Either way, I made it through this premiere not quite stone-faced, but with little more than a weak chuckle here and there.

The extremely silly premise is perfect for the kind of comedy edutainment that made Cells at Work! a huge hit and Heaven's Design Team not a hit, but a work of underappreciated genius. It's a zombie story where people are transformed into cats! Except the horror doesn't come just from seeing loved ones becoming brainless monsters and trying to avoid the same fate; it's because cats are just soooooo cute and fluffy, and it's so sad not to be able to bury your face in their fur or squish their little toe beans. You just want to snuggle them, but instead, you must fight them off and flee. Tragic!

As the survivors fend off their cutesy-wootsy widdle menaces, the narration will occasionally drop in some fun facts about fuzzy felines. To me, these were the best part of the show – did you know most cats hate water because their fur absorbs it instead of repelling it, making them feel heavy and waterlogged? And since they're descended from desert animals, being wet makes it harder for them to regulate their body heat in extreme temperatures, so they instinctively avoid it? That's more exciting to me than watching characters I barely know lose their marbles while being pursued by kitties, or any of the weak humor that I suspect will become run-on gags.

A lackluster visual presentation further hampers the show. Nyaight of the Living Cat comes from OLM, but this hardly looks like the work of the studio behind Apothecary Diaries or Odd Taxi. It bears more resemblance to one of the weaker-looking seasons of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, with burly men and stiff animation, but duller coloring and dozens upon dozens of CGI cats. I'm not hating on the CG; it would be impractical to animate all of them by hand when it looks like the animation team is already struggling.

But hey, don't take my word as gospel – my husband laughed at the same gags in the trailer that left me unmoved in the episode. But then again, sweet little Maya only wakes me up and goes back to bed with him after I feed her.