When starting Cat Planet Cuties, I felt an odd sensation. It took me a moment to place it, but I soon realized that the feeling I was experiencing was a nervous concoction of creeping dread. Why feel fear when loading up something that seems as mindless yet harmless as Cat Planet Cuties? Well, let’s just say I’ve seen another show with a fairly similar pitch, DearS, and that the title “Cat Planet Cuties” inspired about as much confidence as “In Another World With My Smartphone”, so I was expecting this to hurt me. Expectations, however, must be modified in the face of evidence.
The show starts, incongruously enough, which what seems to be a scene from a sci-fi spy thriller as some kind of agent dons her best mecha catsuit (no actual cat traits) and raids a smuggler ship, shooting up bad guys and generally making her way through until her confrontation with the captain is interrupted by a UFO zooming past, shaking the ship and giving him the chance to trigger a detonator and blow the whole boat sky high.
I have to say, not the opening I was expecting from Cat Planet Cuties, the ecchi-harem romcom about a catgirl alien coming to earth and moving in with the (un)lucky everyman. Aside from the bizarrely out-of-genre nature of the opening, it does show one absolutely huge difference from DearS – the animation in Cat Planet Cuties is actually kind of good. It’s by no means astounding, but where DearS was cheap in the extreme, this one at least looks like some effort went into it somewhere.
We then cut to Kio, our random everyman. He is, of course, a high school student. He also wears glasses, meaning he’s probably the studious type to a fault (something a manic pixie dream catgirl could certainly change) but for today he’s meeting up with his embarrassing uncle who suggests he should enjoy his youth, get a girlfriend, and all that sort of stuff. Why, there’s even a fetching young catgirl over there he could talk to!
This is Eris, the distractingly attractive but seemingly innocently nice cat girl alien we were promised. She mostly wants to enjoy Earth, and particularly Okinawan cuisine seeing as she forgot to pack any food in her space ship. After accidentally taking a sip of beer, Kio blacks out only to wake up the next day with said catgirl in his bed more naked than not. She cures his hangover with some of her alien tech (fearing a cranial hemorrhage, apparently) and otherwise seems quite unperterbed by all the goings on, even when Kio’s redhead next door neighbor Manami and their caring teacher arrive to make wrong assumptions
A boy wakes up in bed with a strange woman, getting into trouble with his redheaded spitfire neighbor? There’s something terribly familiar about this setup…
Eris introduces her alien nature very bluntly, though, sparing us too many wacky misunderstandings. It also turns out that both Manami and the teacher are members of secret organizations with interests in the whole alien thing, though only the audience is let in on that. The former has a strong personal jealousy motivation while her organization is the CIA who basically just do what they do. The latter’s group is a secret society that wants mankind’s first contact to be with a better and more alien alien, basically lunatic militant scifi nerds (the show actually makes quite a few Star Trek references).
Later, Kio meets up with a friend, the seemingly shy and bookish and probably-interested-in-him Aoi Futaba, who proves to the audience to be a stone-cold assassin with mystical/scifi powers called Momiji (she’s the one from the opening, in fact), hired by yet another secretive group to kill Eris and, incidentally, Kio (who she rather doesn’t want to murder). Thus ends the first episode. At this point I stopped, confirmed I had the right show, confirmed it was supposed to be a comedy, and continued. I have to admit I was not expecting so much spy nonsense out of a show called Cat Planet Cuties.
All three groups strike at the same time, which ends up with Aoi saving Kio rather than killing him but the CIA tranquilizing both Kio and Eris and making off with the latter. Uncle also turns out to be some kind of spy like basically everyone else in this universe, and plans for a rescue are prepared and enacted while Manami and Aoi mope about what this mess is doing to their relationships with Kio. Kio and his uncle recruit teacher and her scifi-nut goons via blackmail while Aoi gets the idea to recruit Manami in order to bring Eris back fast and thus save the date she had planned with Kio. Between everyone involved (who all end up revealed to each other), the rescue is a smashing success, ending with Eris and a group of little cat drones (called assistroids) under her control disintegrating a platoon of tanks with silly-looking bonk hammers. Also, the US government seems to be involved with criminal dog aliens.
As Eris prepares to leave (not before she propositions/proposes to Kio, but before he can process what she said and answer) the mothership of her people arrives. They’ve read her report, and now they all want Yakiniku and such. It’s silly, but they did at least set up that Eris’s people are a stagnant society exploring the cosmos mostly to fend off ennui and discover new sensations, so interplanetary food tourism is as good an answer as any. As First Contact relations are established (a long and complex diplomatic process), Manami and Aoi move in with Kio and Eris, since his house is effectively an embassy and they’ll be protected from the powerful organizations they turned on as long as they stay there. Eris’s assistroids help make it a full house; they’re not exactly characters but they do “talk” by holding up signs like Wile E. Coyote, which can be a bit funny.
And, with our lead now living with three girls, one an alien who seems to get most of her impressions of human culture from porn, the harem comedy classics come out of the woodwork. And they go hard into it too, both with extremely heavy ecchi and with things like a conversation between Manami and Aoi that would be really heartfelt if not for the distraction of them being naked in the bath, and an action scene immediately on its heels (yet another weird secret group trying to mess with them) without giving the girls a chance to get clothes leading to, what else, Kio being bludgeoned by Manami when he comes to see what the commotion is and help his friends. Aoi is more understanding, mostly because they’re playing the very basic contrast where Manami is high-strung and active while Aoi is soft-spoken and reserved.
The next threat seems to come from a group of crazy cat(girl) enthusiasts who want to kidnap Eris and make her their deity. Eris is more busy getting into the catnip (which makes her act drunk) and being somewhat concerned with the fact she’ll soon be going into season, for which the cats expect Kio to be her partner. They also want the team to go to Tokyo on a shopping spree, which is when the cat cult strikes and has their maid agents abduct Eris and Kio.
The cult takes Eris to their heavily armed cruise ship, where their eccentric heiress leader, disguised in an Assistroid mascot costume, plays around. The girls stage a rescue, with the excuse so flimsy it’s actually funny of running into a weird eccentric director while acquiring a motorboat getting them into skimpy swimsuits. The US Government’s dog aliens are there too, planning to sink the ship and get everyone involved killed. They actually make a fair attempt, sinking the ship while the lead dog girl alien almost takes out Aoi (she has to be rescued by Kio, borrowing Eris’s super suit). On the way out, the heiress also gets a friendship speech, which lets her be an ally going forward.
The next episode is a breather, with Kio and Eris trying to help the school film club with a movie (it doesn’t go well) and Aoi and Manami working together to help each other where they’re weak – Manami tries to teach Aoi how to cook in order to win Kio’s heart while Aoi teaches Manami some of her (non-supernatural) assassin skills. However, when they’re given simulator rooms that can recreate scenes perfectly, Manami ends up facing down her personal hangups regarding Kio while interacting with the simulated version and testing the program’s knowledge.
This is actually a pretty good dynamic. Manami clearly likes Kio, but had given up thinking she was permanently in the friend zone, thus throwing her weight behind Aoi. However, on asking the simulation of Kio to tell her the full truth, it gives her a story about how he had feelings for her until he ended up believing her CIA contact was actually her boyfriend, which left him feeling dumped, leading to an uncertain present, causing her to be deeply wounded with regrets over what she spent years not actually saying and conflicted about how to move forward. But, of course, she’s reminded that this is just a simulation, based as much on what she wants to hear as what’s true, leaving her rather lost.
I have to admit, I was not expecting a show named Cat Planet Cuties to actually have emotional play and explore the persona, traumas, and regrets of one of the girls in the harem setup. They also dispense with the “Eris in Heat” plot by having her ship’s doctor administer her suppressant drugs when it’s clear she’s not doing anything but making trouble in her oversexed state.
The thing is, Manami’s introspection isn’t an out-of-nowhere scene like a lot of bad shows would have to arbitrarily “develop” a girl – we’ve known her for several episodes and it’s perfectly in line with what we’ve seen of her and how we’ve followed her, and it feels natural and effective. Further, it’s not as though it’s the only example of these characters actually getting work. Eris can be a basic manic pixie dream girl, with little in the way of actual personality or an inner world, but Manami and Aoi both get a lot of time and fill it with actual skill and effort.
And don’t get me wrong, this is while keeping the ecchi pushed way, way up. The show finds plenty of excuses to get its female characters in revealing setups or even outright naked, even when it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s not as shameful as some ecchi shows I’ve had to put up with because it’s not aggressively artificial, or really shoved in your face, but any show that decides to have a meeting of (catgirl) senior staff in a sauna holodeck just to show off more boobs clearly is going for a very particular appeal. What impresses me about this show is that they don’t stop there and keep a good core of real if light action and interpersonal drama-comedy predicated in the characters being actual unique people rather than stock clingy jealous girls. Objectively, this is a baseline of competence even if one that has been failed by many awful shows like DearS, Omamori Himari, or Koi Koi 7 and even some less terrible ones. But it’s more than I dared hope for out of Cat Planet Cuties.
Following off this, Eris and the cat cult heiress transfer into school (the latter with her battle maids at the ready), and end up joining the film club to go on a retreat with Kio. There, he asks Aoi to teach him to fight at what she was reading as a romantic moment, inadvertently triggering her issues with self-worth and fears that she’s nothing more than a weapon, leading to her breaking down in front of Eris. Eris, of course, reassures Aoi and speaks to her kindly, but not for long before a mysterious little girl points out that the dog aliens (or at least their little robots) are attacking.
The attack is fended off quickly, with the little girl helping with some mysterious talismans, which she later writes off with Clarke’s Law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”). We follow Manami and Aoi some more as they have a spat, ostensibly over their training regimen but really because Manami is still trying to play matchmaker feeling she missed her chance and Aoi is facing hangups about whether or not she deserves happiness or romance. They decide to have a war game duel over this and while they get a chance to talk part of it out, they are interrupted by a pair of assassins hired by the dogs, who try to snipe them to death, letting the pair make up by working together. Even though this largely reasserts status quo, with Aoi being bad at flirting while Manami gets frustrated at how dense Kio is, it’s a decent episode.
We step away from the interpersonal drama for a bit to do more sci-fi stuff. The oldest Assistroid, something of a minor celebrity comes to earth. But she’s not a little chibi robot, she’s a full scale android who talks like an ordinary person. Eris ends up being a little down in the dumps thinking of her visit, and when confronted explains that the current form of the assistroids is fairly recent compared to the technology as a whole, and that while it seems better for Cat/Robot relations this way, she bears a deep guilt that they were changed when it was Eris’s flesh and blood people who perpetuated bigotry and even war against the older Assistroids, who they seemed to regard as too uncannily similar to themselves. She’s of the opinion that the cats should have changed and grown into better people instead.
Eris seems to recognize her case of the cat alien version of white guilt as being basically unresolvable even as it is inevitable, but still doesn’t know how to interact with the elder assistroid, Lawry. Kio takes up showing Lawry around town, but Lawry (despite having been trapped on a derelict for most of the bad times, her master who she still wishes to honor an explorer who was bound for Earth) intuits the reason for Eris’s absence and insists that what she sees as best is moving forward in friendship and happiness, and that the burden of darker history, specifically feeling personally responsible or being made to feel personally responsible, is essentially unhealthy and counter to moving forward.
And, oddly enough, Lawry and Eris never do talk about their issues directly. Lawry lays her own past to rest, singing a rather pretty spacey-song on the world she and her master tried to reach so long ago, and departs to spend her last days (the time drawing close) in space near earth, with the final post-credits stinger showing that she’s ultimately buried at sea when she expires.
So, we just had a melancholy, emotional episode with an honest and earnest lack of resolution touching on topics like the relationship between people and technology, the ethics of AI, race, guilt, and how to relate to history. It addresses these topics with subtle tact and doesn’t try to give an insipid easy answer.
A show called Cat Planet Cuties did this. Because apparently nobody told them that with a pitch like Cat Planet Cuties (let’s face it, even if the title isn’t nearly as obvious in the original Japanese the concept still is) they didn’t have to try. And I appreciate that.
The next episode goes back a little more on brand (remembering that the show’s “on brand” is more serious and action-y than one would expect) as the final arc begins. On one side, Christmas is coming – given Japanese culture, this means that the shipping is going to heat up, with Minami pressing Aoi to make a move. We get a conversation where Aoi finally connects the feelings she long suspected Manami held with Manami’s vehemence that she acts, but the romantic side of things is interrupted when the dog aliens attack. Evidently, they hadn’t been taking so long for nothing, as they manage to storm the house and disable the visiting captain with an injection of nanomachines that lock her into a coma. They also manage to take Eris’s little ship out of the picture and largely take over the Cat mothership above; the bridge crew is safe, but unable to do anything as the ship is locked into a crash course with Earth.
The heroes get a little help from everyone to try to right the situation. Before passing out, the Captain passed her credentials to Kio, so he can force reboot the ship if he just gets there. The cult heiress can buy a rocket, of course, while Eris can use the core of her ship, which remains, to boost to the cat ship once in space. The little Clarke’s Law girl provides some charms to save the rank and file crew, and thus the stage appears to be set.
The rocket proves somewhat difficult; they have to retrofit a disarmed Russian ICBM, giving enough time for Manami and Aoi to advance their plot again and Aoi to be confronted by an old enemy who wounds her with her past as a mercenary.
The launch isn’t easy either, with the battle maids having to use alien weapons to fend off a tank division while the rocket fuels and the girls finally boil over and let their feelings be an open fight, resolved only when Eris decides that the Harem solution would be best because they’d all get to stay friends. You know what, after many shows where the weakest girl gets the “win” because she’s first or most plot magnetic, I’m kind of cool with throwing the other characters a bone this time.
Kio, somehow, has the density of a black hole and does not seem to grasp the import of the conversation.
Once they’re in space, it’s time for the dog flying saucers to attack. The girls (starting with Aoi) steal kisses and then head off in their power suits to intercept the attack. Kio makes it to the mothership, meets up with the bridge crew, and issues the restart order, only to be refused since as a human he’s apparently a hundred thousandth of a percent off from being a cat alien in the DNA check. Rather than just, oh, passing the captain’s authority to one of the bridge crew like it was passed to him, the decision is made to have some ultra-tech do a little genetic tinkering.
The girls take out the dog alien agent, causing her space fighter to crash into her orbiting base. This deorbits the base, and Manami and Aoi very nearly sacrifice themselves to make sure it doesn’t hit a populated area. At the last second, when you think Cat Planet Cuties might actually kill off its two non-cat leading ladies, Kio shows up with new ears, tail, and a ship with which to rescue his girlfriends.
In our little epilogue, Kio considers having himself tinkered back to human (much to the distress of the cat cult heiress), the cat aliens give Earth a Space Elevator as a Christmas Present, and the weird little girl with the talismans is revealed to be a catgirl herself, albeit of some kind of different stripe.
And that, basically, is the end of the series. There is an OVA, but it’s basically a plotless vehicle for extra fanservice that seems to take place in one of the time skips of the main series.
So, let’s talk about this show. First thing to address has to be the Fanservice. In an abstract sense, it’s decently well done in that it usually doesn’t manage to be obtrusive and screw with other scenes. Unlike Omamori Himari, which shoved its fanservice everywhere and got really obnoxious, Cat Planet Cuties only goes to its highest levels some of the time. Like Isuca however, that highest level does include nudity (not censored via convenient objects or shot cuts), which is going to be beyond the pale for a lot of people. So be warned if that’s not what you’re into. I think the show benefits by going “tall” rather than “wide” with its fanservice, because it does actually try to have a legitimate plot that needs to be served first, and the fanservice is fit in basically wherever was convenient to do so, like having the cat crew have their meeting in a holodeck recreation of a sauna, or not bothering to hide anything above the waist when the girls have to change clothes into their super suits in the last arc. There are also only a couple times (in a relative sense) where it feels like it’s the director’s doing, rather than the scene’s doing. I won’t say it’s all “natural” but it’s at least less forced than a lot of other shows, especially other shows that go anywhere near this heavy.
The core loop of the show is mostly a lighthearted action show: Someone kidnaps Eris or otherwise makes trouble, and a mix of secret agent girls and alien tech blows stuff up until the problem is solved. There’s a lot of gunplay, the occasional melee, and a few sci-fi gadgets for what’s markedly acceptable. However, while the show has this action backbone, more of the meat comes from the harem elements, which I think it’s fairly interesting to analyze.
Cat Planet Cuties introduces three leading ladies in the first episode. In the last episode, there are still three leading ladies interested in Kio and no more (unless you count the heiress in the literal final scene, and all she’s interested in is cat ears and tails). When you think about it, this is the absolute minimum you can have and still really consider the “harem” idea to be applicable. If only two girls were competing over a single guy, that would just be a basic love triangle, which could push a show towards Romance as a genre but wouldn’t really be worthy of “harem”.
And while some of the standard Harem tropes, like the main character being painfully dense, are in full effect, this does sort of change how the Harem is handled compared to other shows. Because Harem shows all to often have the problem (or feature) of continually introducing new girls to distract from the old ones. True, this can calm down if it runs long enough or at least slow over time, but it’s still doing something very basic: chasing novelty over depth, feeling that it can squeeze only so much out of any particular girl before she’s basically used up except as set dressing. Cat Planet Cuties, on the other hand, has its three girls to work with and knows it needs to use them. Because of that, rather than being dumped into the background, Aoi and Manami are fully studied. Their feelings mature and change over the full run, they learn things about themselves and each other, and how they relate to their situation isn’t trapped in stasis. That’s not to say it’s particularly quick moving – there are quite a few episodes where status quo largely reigns but it is at least moving with some degree of directionality and, most importantly not degrading the characters by reducing them to cruddy repeated jokes or extremely generic and archetypical versions of their personalities.
Note, though, I specify Aoi and Manami. While the show is “Cat Planet Cuties”, the writing gives the human girls a lot more time and focus. I guess the idea was that Eris is already very unique because of what she is (A cat girl alien, and probably the most conventionally attractive of the three as well) and thus doesn’t need a lot of help. However, it is something of a problem for the show that she spends most of her time not just less studied than her romantic rivals but as a typical Manic Pixie Dream Girl. For those not familiar with the term, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an archetype of stock character (almost always female) that is best typified by a few points in her plot and persona. Generally, the MPDG enters the male lead’s life and upsets the general order of things because she’s “unique” or, to put it less generously, because her role in the story is that something about her or her actions is the driving force for at least some of the plot. Often, this takes the form of the MPDG, whether pursued as a romantic interest or not, providing “life lessons” contrary to the establishment, but not always. Further, the MPDG is, of course, a dream girl – she’s idealized or “perfect” in her disruptive quirkiness, and will always be presented in a basically positive light.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is not one that describes characters that are more than one-dimensional or actually have inner worlds and thoughts or feelings beyond what’s necessary to fill their idealized disruptive plot role. It does not rightly describe good characters. You can have a quirky female kick off at least a side of the plot by crashing into and messing with some schmuck’s life and still have her be dimensional, or studied, or have more to her than her “oh so quirky” positivity. Zero Two is a weirdo who upends the life of her costar. Meiya Mitsurugi and all the strangeness about her totally warps what her the lead of her story goes through over the course of what was supposed to be normal life. Rimi even has the bubbly demeanor down pat (or so it seems) when she appears one day and everything starts to go bananas because of it. None of those characters are Manic Pixie Dream Girls, because they have uniqueness and dimension to them. Eris kind of is, depending on how you look at her.
From a certain point of view, with the exception of the Assistroid episode, Eris never really expresses much in the way of thoughts or feelings that aren’t perfunctory. It’s hard to know what she likes (beyond Kio and Okinawan cuisine) or dislikes or who she is as a person. It’s hard to imagine her holding a regular human conversation for the most part. She’s just the hot, cute, all-too-perfect cat girl alien whose “quirky and fun” stay on earth is the catalyst for everyone else in the story doing things. On the other hand, the Assistroid episode does exist, and there’s something refreshing about having an unabashedly nice “Deredere” character to counterpoint the complex and tortured Aoi and differently complex and tortured Manami.
After all, stock characters are stock because they do have their place. If Eris is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (it’s borderline), she’s one of the better used MPDGs because you can quickly understand what she represents for the story and characters around her. She’s perfectly watchable, even enjoyable in her own way because she’s genuinely kind and warm, and the time saved on actually bothering to develop Eris is used effectively in order to further Manami and Aoi.
As I mentioned in the body of the review, the dynamic with Manami and Aoi is a little unique and still fun to watch. It has a good basic tension to it where both of the characters have something they want (Kio), have barriers that prevent them from getting it (him), and have to explore and work out complicated feelings in order to move forward. And, unlike Eris, I feel like I could describe them as characters without having to lean on what they are. Who’s Manami? She’s a boisterous sometimes even violent tomboy; she means well most of the time, but she’s loud and brash and likes guns and has an easy time speaking but a harder time actually speaking her mind. Who’s Aoi? She’s a quiet and reserved young lady who’s carrying a lot of pain because of things she’s done in the past and regrets; she’s shy, has a low self-esteem, and can have trouble connecting to others, which might explain why she gravitates towards film (a solo experience) as her main interest or hobby outside of work.
Is this the “Red oni versus blue oni” dynamic? Essentially, but when you get to contrasts that generic there’s no point doing more than pointing out they’re there. The two play off each other well and I generally enjoyed the scenes where it was just them trying to work out what to do with their situation. They’re opposites in a lot of ways, but also do have some very critical similarities that help them relate to each other as friends.
Not bad for a show called “Cat Planet Cuties”, billed as a harem comedy and about a hot cat girl alien coming to Earth to live with an Average Japanese High School Student.
I don’t mean to over-praise the show. Cat Planet Cuties is, objectively, competent to average. It does what you want to do with characters, it has action that passes muster, it includes enough plot to hold the fanservice and harem games together… on every mark it does well enough, but the only mark that’s truly exceptional is in surpassing a bar set so low that planarians would have trouble limboing under it.
All that said, I do think Cat Planet Cuties earned a B-. It’s not just bog standard when it could have been awful; there are elements here that are worth watching in their own right, and those elements are the ones that are best represented in the show’s content. It has a lot of moments that work, and of the four leads two of them are actually interesting while the other two are at least inoffensive. The comedy basically works, the action basically works, and while they’re not exceptional they didn’t really need to be. It’s a mix of C and B elements, and in respect of the better bits I’ll err on the higher side of that mix. If you’re cool with the level of fanservice being served up and want a “harem comedy” with a little intelligence, a little heart, and more meat to it than would normally be anticipated, go ahead and check out Cat Planet Cuties.