Japanese movies about cats and their human companions are by now an established local genre — or rather a feel-good-movie sub-genre since nearly all try to leave the audience with warm smiles and lowered blood pressures. This has proven to be a reliable box office strategy: The owners of Japan's nearly 10 million cats never tire of films that show felines in a cute, positive light.
"The Island of Cats," Mitsuaki Iwago's screen adaptation of the hit manga by the single-named Nekomaki, is also in this line, though Iwago, a veteran animal photographer making his first feature as a director, shoots the cats on the film's fictional island as he might lions on the African veldt.
That is, with an eye both sensitive and sympathetic, distanced and objective. His cats may be adorable, but they are not manga characters or ersatz humans. Iwago instead observes them in the act of being their natural selves in a kind of cat paradise with few cars and ample fish at the island's small harbor.