A Whisker Away

泣きたい私は猫をかぶる (Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu)

8.2(5)

OtakuDen

7.4(303,140)

MAL Score

Ranked #2813

Popularity #524

Award Winning
Drama
Romance
Supernatural
School

Episodes: 1
Duration: 1 hr 44 min
Aired: Jun 18, 2020
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Miyo Sasaki is a lively high schooler struggling with life at home: an insecure father and a well-meaning stepmother whose efforts to reach her only push Miyo further away. Looking for an escape, Miyo fixates on her classmate Kento Hinode, expressing her feelings with an intensity that often leaves him overwhelmed.

When she can’t seem to connect with Kento as herself, Miyo finds a way to get close by taking the form of a white cat he names “Tarou.” The comfort of being by his side comes with a painful trade-off, though—what she learns while listening in as Tarou doesn’t translate into the help she wants to give him. Torn between staying near him as a cat or revealing who she really is, Miyo must decide what she’s willing to risk to be understood.

Otaku Consensus

A Whisker Away lands best as a Studio Colorido mood piece: Junichi Satou and Tomotaka Shibayama give its cat-fantasy hook enough visual charm, emotional accessibility, and brisk feature-film momentum to make the identity material stick. The strongest praise clusters around Miyo as a volatile lead, the eerie mask-seller presence, the animation, and the OST, while the recurring criticism is that the central crush can read less like romance than unchecked obsession. Its reputation matches its numbers: widely watched and warmly liked, but more divisive than its soft visual surface suggests.

Why You Should Watch

Watch A Whisker Away if you want school romance filtered through urban fantasy without the sprawl of a full TV season. It scratches the same itch as The Cat Returns’ feline dream logic and the adolescent emotional weather of a Shinkai-style teen film, but with Studio Colorido’s cleaner, brighter design language and a sharper focus on one girl’s self-erasure. The appeal is not a perfect love story; it is watching a messy, high-energy heroine collide with family discomfort, social embarrassment, and the fantasy of becoming easier to love. Viewers who like supernatural metaphors for depression, identity, and masking will get more out of it than viewers looking for a grounded romance.

Key Characters

M
Miyo Sasaki(VA: Mirai Shida)
Miyo is the film’s lightning rod: fans tend to either connect with her loud, desperate attempts to be seen or recoil from how uncomfortable those attempts become.
K
Kento Hinode(VA: Natsuki Hanae)
Kento functions less as a standard romantic reward than as a guarded classmate whose private pressures complicate the fantasy of knowing someone from a safe distance.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
Studio Colorido handles the film as a single feature rather than a serialized school romance, which gives the supernatural conceit a compressed, fairy-tale rhythm instead of an episodic courtship structure.
2
The production pairs veteran director Junichi Satou with Tomotaka Shibayama, a combination that helps explain the film’s mix of accessible teen melodrama and more uncanny fantasy imagery.
3
Youjirou Arai is credited with the original character designs, while Yumi Ikeda handled both character design and prop design, giving the human cast and the fantasy objects a unified visual language.
4
The art side is unusually heavily credited for a compact film: Yuusuke Takeda and Takamasa Masuki are both listed as art directors, with Aya Satou as assistant art director and Akihiro Nagae and Kazushige Kanehira on art design.
5
Its AniList tag profile is unusually specific: Shapeshifting at 93%, Animals at 91%, Urban Fantasy and Family Life both at 79%, and Youkai at 60%, signaling that its appeal sits between domestic drama and folklore-adjacent fantasy rather than pure romance.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The Japanese title, Nakitai Watashi wa Neko wo Kaburu, carries a stronger identity motif than the English title; it can be read around the idea of a crying self putting on a cat-like mask.
Fun fact 2: Although listed as one episode on anime databases, it is a completed feature film released on June 18, 2020 rather than a TV special or short OVA.
Fun fact 3: Its popularity outpaces its ranking: on MyAnimeList it sits at popularity #524 with over 303,000 votes, while its 7.36 score places it at rank #2813.
Fun fact 4: AniList records 3,795 favourites for the film, a notable figure for a standalone anime movie whose reputation is more mixed than cult-unanimous.
Fun fact 5: Fan discussion frequently singles out the mask seller, animation, and OST as highlights, while professional and fan reviews alike often return to the same discomfort: whether the film critiques or over-softens Miyo’s obsessive behavior.