The Fall Anime 2025 Preview Guide - Cat's Eye

The three Kisugi sisters - Hitomi, Rui, and Ai - run a café called Cat's Eye. The same sisters lead a double life as a trio of highly skilled art thieves, leaving cards with a name 'Cat's Eye' at the scene of the crime. They steal works of art (mostly paintings) as clues that belong to their long missing father, Heinz, a famous painter and art collector during the Nazi's reign. They hope that by stealing his works, Heinz will contact them. Toshi, the police officer investigating this case, is Hitomi's fiancé. He also swears to capture and bring down the Cat's Eye Gang.

Cat's Eye is based on the manga series by Tsukasa Hōjō. The anime series is streaming on Hulu and Disney+ on Fridays.

Cat's Eye, like its sibling series City Hunter, was an anime just before my time. I know of it, am aware of the basic plot, and might even be able to identify a screenshot of it, but have nonetheless never seen even a single episode. In other words, I am firmly in one of the two groups this anime is aimed at: interested newbies (rather than hardcore fans of the 1980s anime or manga).

That said, this first episode left me a little less than impressed. Tell me if you've heard this one before. We have a team of thieves, stealing un-stealable treasures while they are chased by a largely competent cop who is nonetheless outsmarted by the thieves again and again, and with whom the thieves have a complicated, almost friendly, relationship. This is basically the plot to Lupin the Third (which was already a powerhouse by the time Cat's Eye was written). Given the similarities, it's up to Cat's Eye to put its own twist on the story. Unfortunately, the difference is rather skin deep. The three thieves are women—sisters to be exact… and that's it.

The real failure of this premiere is that it never tells us our antiheroes' motivation. Why do they steal art and jewels? Why do they run a cafe as a cover? Why do they keep a dangerous relationship with the detective, using their secret identities? None of this is mentioned. How can we root for Cat's Eye if we don't know why they're doing what they do? And to add insult to injury, the episode even ends using their motivation as a cliffhanger to get you to come back next week by ending things in a room full of treasures with a mysterious man.

So while the burglary scenes were fun enough, I don't feel any connection to the group of thieves or the haplessly single detective chasing them. Maybe I'll give Cat's Eye another chance in the future, but for now, I don't see myself tuning in next week.

While it takes until the final few seconds of the second episode, we finally learn the motivations of our three anti-heroes. The Cat's Eye sisters are all searching for their missing father—a prolific painter. They are stealing all of his works and any items from his personal art collection in the hope of finding a clue to his whereabouts. . This serves as a decent enough overarching plot for the series. It even comes with a built-in sense of tension. After all, the more they steal, the more obvious the thing connecting all the robberies will become—i.e., their father. And once you know that, the three Kisugi sisters look less like cafe owners and more like prime suspects.

But while the characters' goals are solid, this episode is not. The characters are so inconsistent that it breaks the suspension of disbelief. Take Toshio, for example. Toshio can tell that Hitomi was the child model in a painting, but can't see through her big hat and sunglasses—even when she is literally talking to him. He can't even tell it's her from behind when he almost catches her later in the episode.

Then there's Rui. She is supposed to be a flawless mastermind, but she doesn't even bother to have her team hide their hair or wear freaking masks when committing crimes. Then, for the climax, she makes this elaborate plan behind the scenes—knowing that Hitomi is going to go after the painting even though they've shot the plan down as a team because it's too risky. Yet, she adds even more risk to the plan by not informing Hitomi that she and Ai would be there as backup. What would have happened if Hitomi had been seriously hurt in the motorcycle crash? What if she hadn't run to that specific building on the wharf? Surely, working together as a team from the start would have been better than leaving so much up to chance.

On a side note, I did check out a bit of the English dub for this episode. Honestly, I was rather impressed. The main cast (the sisters and Toshio) feel a bit more mature in English—which better fits their character designs in my opinion. That said, Hitomi in English doesn't quite manage to pull off the panicked mother as well as her Japanese counterpart. It comes off sounding like someone acting like one instead of actually being one.

All in all, this second episode has left me as unimpressed as the first episode did. The Cat's Eye women feel too competent and too lucky—even when they make stupid choices. Meanwhile, Toshio is too oblivious—and his team too useless—to feel like any real threat. Likewise, the relationship between the groups is still unclear. Like, are Hitomi and Toshio dating? Do the sisters even like Toshio, or are they just using him as an unknowing mole? I don't know—and sadly, these two episodes haven't made me care enough to find out.

Whoa, they made an anime out of Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood's novel about girlhood friendships and the formation of identity? Wild choice, but I love that book, and I'm all for making anime from more diverse sources. I can't help but feel like something will be lost without Atwood's evocative prose, but…

Oh. You mean Cat's Eye as in the 1980s manga by Tsukasa Hōjō, creator of City Hunter, about three cat burglar sisters. Okay, that's cool. I'm not disappointed. Not disappointed at all…

It's all good though, because Cat's Eye is one of those series I've always planned to check out but never did. The concept of three sisters, small business owners by day and cat burglars by night – how else are you going to keep an independently-run café going in this economy, eyyyy – promises to be lighthearted at worst. I'm much more drawn to Hojo's realistically proportioned bodies than to those of standard anime women, and the art I've seen gives me the impression of athleticism and sexy, yet pragmatic, skintight outfits for burglary.

But was this really the best way to experience it for the first time? I have no basis for comparison, so I'm not really sure, but something tells me that if the original were this mid, the series wouldn't have the reputation it does. LIDEN FILMS has put together a typically mediocre effort, with animation and storyboarding that fail to really push the story forward, but only occasionally hold it back. It has that kind of flatness that mediocre modern digital animation often carries, with two-dimensional characters not quite blending into 3D-modeled backgrounds. Easily the best part of the production on the technical end is Yūki Hayashi's musical score; the heist sequences have his typical soaring strings, but the slice-of-life scenes have a quirky '80s vibe that pays tribute to the era of the original.

The heists were overall unexciting as well; cramming three into one episode meant there was little time for the buildup needed to make them work. A good heist is like a magic trick, setting up the audience's expectations and then striking a balance between meeting and subverting them. The simple pleasure of seeing how burglars circumvent the traps and elaborate security systems meant to catch them has been stripped away. The middle and final heists of the episode had some clever misdirection, but if that's the only trick up this version's sleeve, it's going to get dull fast.

The real treasure here is the characters. I instantly wanted to know more about the Kisugi sisters; how did they end up in this lifestyle? Their personalities are more or less what you'd expect, with the calm eldest, fiery middle, and cute youngest, but the snappy, relatively understated dialogue keeps them feeling like people instead of mere archetypes. The police squad charged with capturing them, centered around the hapless Toshio Utsumi, looks to be made up of weirdos that I really hope we get to learn more about.

But... I don't think I'm going to watch more, at least not of this version. Not when the beloved original is readily available on services I'm already subscribed to.

Oh, there's the motivation. I figured it was coming sooner or later, so I didn't hold it against the first episode that it didn't delve into it at the end. Turns out the three sisters are stealing their dad's paintings in hopes that he'll pay attention to them… I mean, contact them after presumably being missing for years.

Finding Dad after he went out for cigarettes one day and never came back is as fine a motivation as any, but it doesn't really match up with Cat's Eye stealing a crown at the end of the first episode. In fact, the emotional tone of the entire second episode didn't feel quite right. The sisters spot a painting in an auction catalog, and it is gradually revealed that Hitomi was the model for it. Despite Rui's insistence that it's too dangerous to try to steal, Hitomi decides to go for it anyway, ending up cornered and desperate. It's the kind of episode that would work better in the middle of a run, when we've spent more time establishing the characters, their relationships, their personalities, and what drives them.

Doing it too early, such as only in the second episode, reduces the impact. Would the plot have hit harder if we'd had a greater sense of how close Hitomi and Toshio are, and what might have happened if he caught her? Was she going off on her own, unusually foolhardy for her, because of how emotional she is over the target, or the kind of thing that she normally does? We know Rui is the brains behind the operation, but how capable is Hitomi when it comes to planning? The dub cast does a good job playing the characters as written, but the writing isn't quite what it needs to be for the emotional content to hit.

Nor did the heist create much joy. The first part was uniquely stupid, asking us to believe that the targets and a cop would fall for their fabrication of a child somehow wandering into a sealed, airtight vault. While I could buy Toshio falling for it – we already know he's an idiot, it stretches credibility that an average person would fall for it, even if the plan is designed to appeal to people's emotions. Once again, I'm only vaguely familiar with the source material; were the heists this goofy and ill-conceived?

I have never read a single bit of the original Cat's Eye manga or watched any of its anime adaptation. I do know that the series is considered a classic by many. In an era where companies are starting to go back and give these older anime a glow-up treatment, I was anticipating something to captivate me along the same lines as Urutsei Yatsura or the Ranma 1/2 reboot. Unfortunately, comparing the first episode of those shows to the first episode of this show doesn't seem fair, as this first episode is several shades of bland. The setup is dated, although I can appreciate the appeal that this series probably held for audiences closer to the time it was released. However, it doesn't really leave much to be desired or even to the imagination.

The music is absolutely a banger. I can close my eyes and listen to the soundtrack for days, and I won't deny that I miss these types of retro designs, which are not typical of many modern-day shows. But the events that transpired throughout the course of this episode are really, really dull. This is a situation where the show's premise was probably enough to carry an entire episode. Nowadays, I need something a little more creative, which is a shame because you can do some really creative and inventive things with the classic cat-and-mouse dynamic. I have recently been watching a lot of Detective Conan and Kaito Kid, but nothing is going on in Cat's Eye aside from a lot of smokescreens.

They're fairly typical setups that are easy to spot from a mile away, such as when two members of the crew disguised themselves as museum workers to steal the painting. It was also very easy to tell that they were going to fabricate a situation to ensure the officer stayed on the case because they genuinely care about him, even though they are constantly gaslighting him. I am curious as to why the gang is stealing all of these items, but it's a very mild curiosity. I hope future episodes offer a bit more, because that curiosity alone won't be enough to get me invested in what's going on.

Well, this episode definitely gave me a bit more context as to why a lot of the heists that facilitate the show's episodic nature are taking place. However, I'm not sure if that's enough to release the show from my prior complaints. While the reasons behind the heist were probably going to be the main narrative force, I was more concerned with the heists themselves not being interesting enough to keep me entertained for a full episode. The premiere episode's heist was extremely bland under the guise of being very thought-provoking—which honestly left me kind of disappointed. It's almost like the episode was pretending that there was a lot more going on than there actually was.

Episode two exacerbates this issue since the whole message of the episode is that Rui, the older sister, is always thinking multiple steps ahead. She is very much the brains of the operation so these heists wouldn't be able to be carried out if it wasn't for her. However, we don't really see that outside of the fact that she knew her sister would go against her wishes and make the reckless decisions that she herself would need to save her from. That's a really old narrative trope where someone makes a really dumb decision but it turns out that dumb decision was always part of another character's plan. I hated it in the past and I kind of still hate it now. If anything, I find myself questioning how Cat's Eye is able to get away with what they do outside of just the police being incompetent.

The whole mini-heist at the beginning of the episode regarding the vault was absolutely ridiculous. Why didn't anybody ask Ai for an ID when she said that she worked there as maintenance? Was it really that easy to trick everybody into opening a highly secured vault because there's a chance that child would get in there? What would they have done if Toshio didn't show up because it didn't look like the guy there was willing to budge on opening it until the supervisor approved? There are some shows with over the top setups that can still be entertaining despite theological leaps. Cat's Eye doesn't feel like it's that kind of show.

The dub honestly did make it easier to get through the episode because I was able to listen to the characters talk to each other instead of reading through everything. I like the casting for the main trio as they all managed to strike different levels of that femme fatale, mature woman voice. I think the one that most caught me off guard was Alejandra Reynoso because I just finished listening to her as Liko in Pokémon: Horizons. The sheer difference between that character and the one she plays here is staggering. I also give Alex Bankier a lot of credit too because he was able to make Toshio sound endearing s without it coming off as annoying, which is a difficult balancing act to achieve. Overall, it's a solid dub so far that you should definitely check out if you want to watch the show more passively in the background—which I think is going to be the route I'll be taking.