It hands you a mascot-cute kitten and then quietly walks her into cosmology, and by the time you notice the tonal switch it's too late to back out. Tamala doesn't get recruited into Michelangelo's missing-persons case, she invites herself, and that single detail tells you everything about who's actually driving this movie. The hook is beautifully cold: seven cats vanish across Cat Japan at the exact same moment, arranged in an astronomical pattern, and the deeper the two of them dig, the less it looks like a crime and the more it looks like a rite. Cat Tokyo 2030 is a dystopia dressed in adorable, which is exactly why it works on people who like their sci-fi occult and unhelpful. That's also why half the room bails. If you can sit with a film that would rather unsettle you than explain itself, Tamala is your girl.

Tamala is a carefree, fickle cat in a dystopian Cat Tokyo in the year 2030. On a whim she invites herself along as her detective friend Michelangelo looks into a missing-person case. That case turns out to be one of seven disappearances that struck across Cat Japan at the very same moment one night, forming an astronomical pattern. The deeper they dig, the more the trail points to something with ancient occult roots and apocalyptic stakes, and some of its threads lead back to Tamala herself. An undercover agent of the Catty & Co. megacorporation shadows her. Is she a corporate mascot, a mythic messiah, or a cosmic menace? This offbeat science fiction film leaves that mystery at the center of its story.