Chi Gets In The Way
What They Say:
Chi is a sweet playful kitten, always full of energy. She gets milk from Yohei, and is relaxing at home, nice and full. As she searches around the house for something exciting, she comes across Yohei walking with a handful of rubber balls. The balls bounce everywhere as he drops them, and Yohei and Chi can’t get more excited. The day ends with Chi and the family making a great memory together.
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
I really enjoyed the last couple of episodes with the show bringing in Julie, Yohei’s cousin from the countryside. It’s a rare character added to the series and one that really shook things up – especially for Blackie. The focus on the household side of the series for an episode and then getting out to mix it up with other regular characters worked well to give us a different look at how someone like Julie deals with all the familiar and comfortable elements of Chi’s life. Chi’s life is dominated by what Chi wants, however, and we see that at the start here as she wants to play with Yohei but he has to focus on homework, making Chi quite the distraction. But a bigger distraction is inbound.
With Dad home now, he’s brought a surprise for Yohei with a radio controlled car to play with that he got at a photoshoot job. Yohei’s excitement is natural but the wary nature of Chi is delightfully accurate as she sees it as a strange and hard to fathom threat that must be dealt with. That has Yohei working to mess with Chi over it since it’s a way to tease her and push back against her – and wear her out as well. At least until Chi rides the car! The first person perspective for this is hilarious as is just watching her in general. Unfortunately, Chi’s nature has her going after more attention from Yohei later and that results in a real rift between the two as Chi ends up accidentally breaking the car, something Chi just doesn’t comprehend. Yohei’s lashing out only makes it worse and it’s one of the few times we’ve seen the two go through something like this, which lasts about half the episode.
In Summary:
Exploring hurt feelings between a little boy and his cat works better than one might think and that’s because both Chi and Yohei are very familiar to us. There’s much love to be had here but it’s also hard for a kid to understand that the cat doesn’t really understand what happened – and that Yohei himself was responsible for what happened as well. Watching as Chi tries to just go back to normal, unaware of things, is adorable, but it takes time for them to really find their way again. The whole sleeping routine thing alone cracked me up in getting to see just how comical they both are when as tired as they are here. The show goes from such high energy to such slumbering pace very fast but both offer up so many delightful scenes.
Grade: B+
Streamed By: Amazon
