The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Chainsmoker Cat

Welcome to Yani's apartment. Please don't mind the smell. Yani is a catgirl with a seriously bad smoking habit. Every time she tries to quit, she becomes weak to the cravings and gives in almost instantly. Behind on her rent and unable to hold down a job, her friends and sister rally around to help her out. But when she's using her pee to put out cigarette fires, they may just have their work cut out for them.

Chainsmoker Cat is based on the manga series by Nyan Nyan Factory. The anime series is streaming on OceanVeil and Netflix on Thursdays.

Something tells me my entery here is going to be divisive. Chainsmoker Cat is nothing more than a series of vignettes strung together about Yani Neko, a catgirl with a serious smoking addiction and a disgusting apartment. She is the embodiment of, “Damn girl, you live like this?” The opening sketch involves explosive diarrhea AND a man masturbating.

It is so not my thing.

Like, I can appreciate it. There is a real transgressiveness to what a disgusting mess Yani Neko is. There's nothing cute about her filthy, smelly room and how her addiction makes it difficult to go long enough without a cigarette to even keep a job. She wanders around in unwashed, ill-fitting clothes and, when given a choice between eating and buying a pack of cigarettes, she'll always go with the latter. It doesn't feel preachy, like anti-smoking propaganda, but rather inviting us into the life of a complete disaster of an individual whose life has spiraled out of control and she can't be arsed to put in the effort to improve it. That, combined with the obsession with bodily functions, gives it an almost John Waters-esque feeling.

It's also gorgeously animated. When Yani Neko's landlord walked in on her changing, I was impressed by the realistic balance of sag and bounce to her boobs. The attention to detail around her smoking rituals border on obsessive, as is the rendering of her nasty, ash-coated bathtub. Every gesture, every expression, every line of her body, every dog turd on the sidewalk, communicates a rare level of detail and care from director Taku Kimura and his team at Bibury Animation Studio.

I hated watching it. When I paused and found I was only halfway through the episode, I groaned out loud. The vignettes were a chore. The jokes hammered home over and over how wretched Yanineko is, how bad her addiction is, and how much she harms herself through her single source of joy in life. I've never been a fan of gross-out humor; it didn't help that, as the child of a smoker myself, I could practically smell her apartment through my screen.

If it's your thing, this is a fantastic episode. My husband, sitting next to me, enjoyed it thoroughly. But if it's not, there's absolutely nothing here for you.

The girl failure is an interesting archetype because, on the one hand, I think a lot of us are drawn to characters that are a little bit messy and unkempt. It adds a realness factor to how a character presents themselves because, in actuality, people are very messy beings. Most people probably don't have their room super clean or often struggle with their jobs and are just looking for a little momentary bit of peace. The fact that this show is leaning into that archetype from the perspective of a cat girl doesn't really change the fact that seems to be one of the main selling points of the show. In fact, I'd even go so far as to say the fact that Yani, the protagonist is a cat girl, is almost superfluous because she could've just been a normal young adult woman and nothing about the show would've changed.

The problem with the girl failure archetype, especially when you make it the definitive focus for a show, is that if you go too far with displaying the incompetency of said character, or give them two prominent of a vice, then what started as endearing and relatable ends up becoming just straight up unlikable. What exactly am I supposed to be attached to with this show? Is it adult humor? Some moments got a bit of a laugh out of me but so much of this is way more juvenile than I was expecting considering that the show literally starts with a shitting and masturbation joke. Am I supposed to find this relatable as a smoker? I understand that nicotine is incredibly addictive and there's a reason why it's not highlighted in a positive light in a lot of media much anymore, but the extent that this woman has an addiction to cigarettes has far superseded comical and actually just enters really sad territory. The fact that Yani can barely take care of herself and is constantly causing problems for everybody because she can't go literally an hour without smoking is actually really sad. I'm not so much laughing as much as I am just praying that this poor woman gets an intervention before she completely ruins her life if she hasn't done so already.

Maybe the appeal of the show is that I am supposed to find this character endearing because Yani is going to recognize how shitty her life is after this first episode and make legitimate efforts to be better? I would like that if the show is willing to commit to that idea. However, the end of this first episode has me a little bit concerned because it almost teases that idea with the cancer scare dream. But considering that sweet moment on the phone with her sister gets undercut by her smoking again, I am wondering if that was more of a joke than it was a legitimate narrative direction. I think I need to watch another episode or two to get a firm understanding of what exactly the show is trying to be because if it is just a series of girl failure moments revolving around a nicotine addict, then I'm not sure I'm going to be able to really enjoy this despite the incredibly well done character animation and directing. If anything, I worry that all of the effort is going to feel wasted on this material.

Allow me to set the stage of Chainsmoker Cat by describing everything that you will be exposed to in just the cold-open of its premiere: Our titular protagonist, Yani Neko, dumps a can of old cigarette butts and tobacco juice onto her landlord's head, he sees her topless when he busts into her unit and tries to scold her, and then he then returns to his apartment to vigorously masturbate while still soaked in week-old smoker spittle. Desperate for another nicotine fix, Yani digs her last remaining cig out of a bag of soaking wet garbage, and when the putrid deathstick inevitably makes her sick to her stomach, she squats over her toilet and nearly craps herself to death. Don't worry, though, because the diarrhea exploding out of her backside is pixelated.

You know, in the name of good taste.

Chainsmoker Cat's premiere is the kind of paradoxical endurance test of utterly subterranean bad taste that makes the scores we give these previews more-or-less irrelevant. On the one hand, this is an intentionally disgusting and rancid anime that does everything it can to communicate that Yani Neko is, perhaps, the filthiest creature to ever exist. It's as if the creators of the comic and anime adaptation watched the grimiest 35mm print of John Waters' Pink Flamingos they could find and thought, “Shit, we can top that!” Interestingly, this means that Chainsmoker Cat makes for an almost perfect anti-pairing for a double-feature with Smoking Behind the Supermarket with You. Where that show played on the cinematic allure of the cigarette and the social bonding that it has facilitated throughout history, Chainsmoker Cat is a supremely effective PSA for convincing people that smoking cigarettes is the most obscene and offensive act that one can be caught indulging in—barring, perhaps, necrophilia, or admitting that you enjoy the stylings of anime by Studio GoHands.

In other words, that four-star rating I awarded this premiere has absolutely nothing to do with how much I would recommend this to an average viewer. Most folks will clock out after the umpteenth close-up on Yani's rotted teeth and poisonous stank-breath, if they didn't already throw in the towel when she fished her lost cigarettes out of a mound of freshly steaming dog turds. The Pink Flamingos comparison wasn't by accident, y'all. Chainsmoker Cat is actively promoting its protagonist as real competition to Divine as the filthiest person (or cat-person) to ever walk the Earth.

So, why am I giving this episode a positive review, even though it made me regret taking a shower before I got my writeups done for the day, since I felt like I needed another one the moment this episode ended? Well, to be honest, I simply appreciate its chutzpah. The show understands that one of the foolproof secrets to good anime comedy is to overanimate the bejeesus out of whatever dumb bullshit you are depicting on screen, and Chainsmoker Cat really does benefit from Bibury Animation's commitment to making this filth look like prestige television. There's also something oddly compelling about these vignette's of a truly deranged nicotine junkie's day-to-day antics. I swear, if you took all of the exact same footage and replaced the soundtrack with Clint Mansell's score from Requiem for a Dream, the show would become truly horrifying. Does that make it good? Does this mean any of you reading this should go out and actually watch it? I have no clue. I'll definitely stick around to see this sad cat's life fall apart, though. Isn't that what art is all about?

Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette
Puff, puff, puff and if you smoke yourself to death
Tell St. Peter at the Golden Gate
That you hate to make him wait
But you just gotta have another cigarette

Here's how to decide if you will like this anime: watch the first two minutes and fifteen seconds of the first episode. In it, you'll see a can of cigarette butts and vile-ass tobacco water dumped all over a guy's bald head, watch that same ugly, middle-aged man frustratedly jack off, and despair as a catgirl has explosive diarrhea—all in graphic detail. Then, ask yourself: did I laugh at any of that? If you did, then this show is likely for you.

This is very much an anime for those who like raunchy humor. But more than that, I have a feeling that this is one of those comedies that will appeal to both sides of the smoking spectrum—i.e., smokers and non-smokers. Smokers will see Yani's obsession to get her next nicotine fix as relatable. They may know people just like her—or even have been her at some point in their lives. At the same time, non-smokers will get a laugh at the craziness from the outside looking in—happy that they are not/never have been in any of these situations.

Of course, Yani is the extreme outlier of the smoker spectrum—every crazy smoker stereotype rolled into one. She can't hold down even a part time job (and only tries so that she can afford her next pack of cigarettes) and the idea of going a whole day without smoking is beyond her ability to conceive much less do. Heck, even general cleaning and self-care are an impossibility for this cat girl.

But the core to her character—the joke behind every joke this episode (smoker related or not)—is the fact that she sees herself as the victim in everything. Everything is happening to her. None of it is her fault. She's a terribly selfish creature and can't see—refuses to see—that she is the problem. And even in the rare moments where reality slaps her in the face hard enough to get a reaction, any revelations are gone the moment the next cigarette hits her lips.

And that, my friends, is what we call comedy.