In short: Lily C.A.T. (1987)

In the future of the 23rd century, various corporations are sending out spaceships to survey planets far from Earth for what I can only assume to be mining rights. Since there’s no faster than light space travel in this relatively gritty, blue collar future, crew and surveyors are put into some sort of water-based cryo sleep, only returning to Earth several decades in Earth time later. The ship the film takes place on, the Saldes, has made this sort of trip a couple of times now, its crew being a motley assemblage of people who have grown close via what amounts to the experience of travel in time as much as in space. The surveyors they take on board, including a guy with a flat top bringing a gun and the daughter of the mining company’s president bringing her cat Lily, are new to this sort of thing, though, and don’t know each other for the most part. So trust isn’t exactly something that’s going round, which turns out to be particularly problematic when they come out of cryo sleep and things start going particularly badly.

Apparently, while everyone else was sleeping, someone has brought on board space debris infected with a spaceship eating bacterium also deadly to humans. And there’s a some kind of monster running around too. Oh, and at least two of the passengers aren’t who they are supposed to be, either.

It’s obvious that Hisayuki Toriumi’s SF horror anime takes quite a few cues from that premier entry of its sub-genre, Alien, while also grabbing bits of The Thing and at least one cleverly adapted iconic shot out of Westworld, too. However, unlike a lot of derivative movies from the sub-genre, Lily C.A.T. has a script whose writer – also Toriumi – has thought about what makes the original work and proceeds accordingly, actually putting craftsmanship and effort into its worldbuilding, even finding space to think about what the cryo sleep based space travel must mean for the people and society using it, and generally seeming as interested in how the group of people encountering this particular murderous alien interacts as in the alien itself. Which doesn’t mean it skimps on the horror part of the SF horror – there are a couple of very effective creepy scenes, the monster design is pretty awesome, as is that of the film’s – conceptually pleasantly strange – unfriendly android.


Because this has only 70 minutes to go through its plot, and because Toriumi was a seasoned veteran of anime, the film’s handling of characters and plot is highly economical. Characters and ideas are built with deft, broad but not too broad, strokes, and the plot develops like a fine-tuned clockwork without things ever feeling too condensed. The script is pretty much a master class on how to handle this kind of material, how to be derivative without being boring, and how to pace a short-ish film well. Which is rather a lot for a relatively obscure little anime from 1987.