You may recall seeing a trailer last year for a new animated series called Cat Shit One. Well, the wait is over and the movie is finally out. The story takes place in a fictional place in a fictional world where cute little bunnies can speak, walk on two legs, and take on a village of terrorist camels (yes, the ones with the humps on their backs). The main characters are two bunnies called Packy and Botasky, who are both mercenaries working in the desert. Packy is the leader and the more confident one of the two. He is a well-rounded soldier that is skilled with rifles, pistols, knives, grenades, and pretty much any other weapon. Botasky is the more timid character who would rather wait for backup than carry out a mission alone; however, he is highly skilled with sniper rifles and can easily take out a group of terrorists from a distance. Although these two take up the bulk of the screen time, very little other information is offered about them in the movie.

The antagonists are a group of rebels that have a sort of base set up in an abandoned village in the desert. As a said earlier, they are camels so it’s actually pretty funny to see them running around on two feet and holding rifles and bazookas with their front feet. Despite their humorous appearance, they are portrayed as a deadly group that you don’t want to mess around with. In the first few minutes of the movie, the camels are seen beating up one of three hostages. When one of the other hostages tries to escape, the camels riddle him with bullets. I don’t know what the camels are fighting for, but the way they’re portrayed in the movie, they mean business.

For an action movie, Cat Shit One is above average when it comes to violence. While there isn’t a single drop of blood shown in the movie, there are plenty of guns firing and things blowing up. The movie is 22 minutes long, and of those, I would say that about 15 minutes has some weapon being used. After Packy and Botasky begin their operation, there’s only really one scene where the guns stop firing. The amount of action doesn’t help develop the story at all, but it’s great for people who like to watch bunnies and camels battle it out.

As you can probably tell from the screenshots, when the title says “The Animated Series,” it means computer animated. I thought that some things in the movie were animated really well, but other parts looked like they didn’t get as much attention during the animating stage. What I was most impressed by was the rendering of the bunnies and camels. It’s not as good as a Hollywood movie, but you can still make out individual hairs on the animals, and I loved how they got the sniffing nose movements on the bunnies perfectly. On the other hand, the vehicles and equipment didn’t seem to have as much detail to them. The guns still looked a bit like a bunch of solid blocks, and there was one scene where a truck looked like it was floating slightly above the ground.

 By itself (not including the manga), I thought Cat Shit One was an average movie, though at 22 minutes it’s more of a short film. I liked the action and the animation was decent, but there was no depth to the characters or the story. If you have a half-hour to kill, watching Cat Shit One might be a good idea, but you aren’t missing anything if you decide to pass it up.

EDIT: As some people have pointed out, this is a series and not a movie. I apologize for my mistake.

From the recent TAF 2009 (Tokyo Anime Fair 2009) comes news of a new 3D anime called “Cat Shit One – The Animated Series” based on a manga by the same title. The Cat Shit One manga was about a group of American soldiers fighting in the Vietnam war during the 1970′s. Uninteresting? well, that’s because I didn’t tell you that all of the characters are cute furry little animals. In the manga, all of the Americans were bunnies while the Vietnamese were cats, not what you would normally picture when you think of war. If anyone is interested in reading the manga, it’s also known as “Apocalypse Meow” in North America.

Although the Cat Shit One manga takes place in Vietnam, Anima (the production studio for Cat Shit One – The Animated Series) has decided to modernize the story. The animated series appears to take place somewhere in the middle east and the main characters are also mercenaries rather than American soldiers (but they’re still bunnies). The cats that were supposed to represent Vietnamese soldiers in the manga have also been replaced by not-so-cute camels which I assume are supposed to be terrorists. If you haven’t done so already, you should take a look at the trailer above. The NSFW tag is for animated violence.

I usually don’t watch war movies, but the fact that you have fluffy killer bunnies sniping camels and rescuing hostages definitely puts this series on my watch list. The series is scheduled to air at the end of the year and will be 12 episodes long.