Nekojiru Gekijou (ねこぢる劇場 or Nekojiru Gekijou) is a 1999 Black Comedy anime series that ran for 27 episodes, each lasting 2 minutes in length. Based on a manga by the late Chiyomi "Nekojiru" Hashiguchi, the story follows siblings Nyatta and Nyaako, two adorable yet awful kittens, as they go to school, meet new people, and have other adventures. The kittens are racist, violent, and generally unpleasant, often enabled by their alcoholic father and depressed mother. The main draw of the series is the cute, seemingly family-friendly art style and very unwholesome storylines.
The short film Cat Soup, released two years later, is about the same characters, but is more serious and surreal.
Tropes:
- Alcoholic Parent: The kittens' father is a Black Comedy example. He is a fat, lazy slob with poor hygiene, nearly knocking others out with his disgusting breath, and mostly spends his time laying around catatonic. He rarely reacts when the kittens climb on him during play, and his wife is annoyed by his lack of interest in parenting.
- Carnivore Confusion: Pigs are sentient, wearing clothes and attending school just like the humans and cats also do. However, pigs are still slaughtered, with pork being served at the school cafeteria (where a piglet unknowingly eats some). In one episode, the kittens' father slaughters a piglet that the kittens were playing with earlier, and the family eats him. The kittens even feed some of it to the piglet's sister!
- The kittens also murder a mole woman and eat her in another episode. As her son and husband look on in horror, the husband says that they cannot intervene, because the cats are carnivores and this is in their nature.
- Comedic Sociopathy: The kittens commit murder more than once, almost always unprovoked. In the second episode, for instance, they bloody an old man's face and bash his head into a wall because he told them that violence is bad. They also like watching when others commit violence. When a little is boy is slaughtered in front of them, Nyako exclaims, "That was awesome!"
- Cute Kitten: Subverted. The kittens are adorable in appearance, and horrible in every other way.
- Fantastic Racism: Pigs are discriminated against not just by the cats, but the humans as well. In the first episode, a piglet is blatantly ignored by his human teacher when he tries to participate in class. Later, he asks if he can play with the kittens, and they bluntly tell him that he can't because he's a pig. In a different episode, the piglet tearfully asks his parents why pigs must sleep in cramped pens and eat bland feed, while the cats lead comfortable lives; the parents offer no response. Oh, and later in that episode, the kittens' mother has the piglet killed because he ate pudding with the kittens a day earlier.
- Groin Attack: Nyako kicks a fish in the crotch while Nyatta smacks him across the head with a plank after he hits them.
- Jerkass: Even ignoring their violent tendencies, the kittens are just plain rude most of the time. A Running Gag is that when offered food by others, they spit it out and will bluntly say how much they hate it. One episode has their new neighbor give them a box of sweets; the kittens hate the candy so much that they go to the woman's house, stab her dog with an umbrella, and deny any wrongdoing when she comes back to yell at them.
- Never Learned to Talk: Despite being school age, Nyatta is only capable of meowing or hissing as a real cat would up until the episode where he learns his first word... from a comedy routine on the television where the characters only lines are calling each other "stupid". And he says it very often. As Nyako and Nyatta walk around town, this goes as well as you'd expect.
- Sadist Show: None of the main characters are very sympathetic, and the punchline to each short is always either an act of violence, or someone being insulted or humiliated in some way.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Nyako and Nyatta are both toddlers, being 5 and 3 respectively, but yet engage in acts of extreme violence and cruelty on a daily basis.
