A man waits to kill the only creature he ever loved. The movie opens on that sentence and never flinches from it, building backward through memory to show you exactly why mercy became impossible. Bagi forces you to choose between the woman she could have been and the animal she's become, then makes you live with whichever answer destroys you.

The people of a village send Ryo out to kill a monster that has been attacking them, and rumor says the creature is a cat-woman called Bagi. While he waits for her at the watering hole she visits, Ryo recalls their history. He first met Bagi as a kitten who learned to write, and she later came back into his life while trying to discover who and what she truly is. Now she has gone wild, and as her arrival draws near, Ryo hardens his resolve to kill her. The story runs in step with real time, and this 1984 Tezuka Osamu film blends action, romance and science fiction around the crisis of gene recombination.