It rewires your brain in about four minutes. You start the episode registering a cast of soft-eyed pretty boys, and by the end you've fully accepted that these are cats and dogs, because they never stop acting like it. Tama still has the patch on his forehead and those yellow ears, still folds himself into a sunbeam and abandons a conversation mid-sentence because something moved. Pochi's whole personality is loyalty with anxiety attached. That's the joke and the warmth at once: the animation keeps the human bodies and the animal instincts running in parallel, so a group hangout on the block plays like puppies piling up. Eleven episodes, no stakes, no lesson, nothing to brace for. It's the show you put on when you want to be reminded that a pet's entire day is built around someone coming home.

Somewhere in an unnamed Japanese city, a flyer asking whether anyone has seen Tama, a cat with a kinked tail, keeps turning up on Third Street. Tama Okamoto is a curious cat who often wanders off from home, so his owner keeps putting up posters, but his time away lets him drop in on his furry friends around the neighborhood. In this spin-off of Tama and Friends, the dogs and cats of Third Street take human form, from Tama's best friend Pochi Yamada to the stray alley cat Nora, and spend their days hanging out, causing mischief and mostly having fun. What emerges is a gentle comedy about everyday life on Third Street.