SoraRabbit Short Hop 003: BANANA CATS!

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm easily distracted and this results in procrastination. The Short Hop series should show you that quite well, as I usually post one of these while working on a bigger post on my main page. Ah well, that's who I am and I'm not ashamed. What you call procrastination, I call side quests.

One of my most recent side quests happened on a Sunday morning when I should have been editing screenshots for my long-overdue Kingdom Hearts posts. (Out now!) I was cruising Youtube, as I am apt to do, and came across some Crunchyroll videos about anime localization changes. This led me to look into Crunchyroll. I never subscribed to that before because I was under the impression it was all behind a subscription paywall. Nope, turns out you can sign up and watch whatever you want if you're okay with watching ads. I am perfectly fine with that, so away I went.

The first thing I wanted to watch was Yu-Gi-Oh GX… the subbed version since the dub cuts off before the end of the series. I'm a huge Yu-Gi-Oh fan but have so far only watched the first anime series. Well, starting this while I should be working was too much of a side quest, so instead I browsed the other stuff they had. I came across something that caught my eye and I was instantly lost.

No, you're not hallucinating. It's a banana cat. (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

Noting that the episodes were 3 minutes each, I didn't feel too bad about plunging into it. I immediately started watching the shorts, mesmerized. Cocoashade was in the kitchen making herself lunch (ramen, coincidentally) and kept asking me what the heck I was watching. My response was that I couldn't describe it. My challenge today is to attempt a description.

Bananya is a god-forsaken blasphemy of a life form, hybridizing cat with banana into some sort of twisted combination mammal-fruit that flies in the face of all we hold sacred and understand about life. But aside from the ethical questions of tampering in god's domain by creating such a cursed thing... it's frickin' cute as all hell.

Bananyology: The study of Bananya in the wild. (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

Yeah, I was just kidding about the blasphemy part. Bananya is straight up cuteness and fluff. It revels in cuteness with zero shame. The idea of this short anime is that there are bananas that are also cats and they have adventures. (You can’t get much more simple than that, concept-wise.) No one in the house seems to notice their home is full of mewling fruit, and the cats are shown hiding when people come near. I guess the family doesn’t eat bananas… which begs the question of why they have so many bananas on hand.

The main character, a bananya named Bananya has one goal in life, besides having fun with his friends and eating candy... he wants to be dipped in chocolate, covered with nuts, and be a sweet treat.

No... I'm not kidding this time. This is seriously a fantasy of his.

This is a really weird fetish. (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

There are actually a whole bunch of bananyas. (Pun intended.) They all have creative names like Bananyako, Tabby, Calico, and Black Bananya.

Wow. Just… wow. (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

There is a Baby Bananya that drinks banana milk… which brings up a whole slew of other questions. There’s also a Daddy Bananya, but I don’t think they’re all related. Some of them are specifically stated to be siblings, and others are in love with Bananyako romantically. There’s a love triangle going on, believe it or not. Tabby loves Bananyako, but Bananyako loves Long-Haired-Bananya, who’s only interested in himself. It’s a whole thing.

The bananyas are curious, mischievous, and they love sweets. Sometimes they exhibit cat-like behavior like sharpening their claws, chasing mice, napping in the sun, and puking hairballs on the new throw rug. Okay, that last one was never specifically shown, but it was strongly implied. (Okay, not implied so much as assumed by me.)

In the shocking season finale, Bananya accomplished his long-held dream of being coated in chocolate. He also stuffed himself into a birthday cake just as the human Mama walked into the kitchen. Is this a cliffhanger? Nah, I doubt they’ll cover this in season two.

Cuteness overload. (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

I overthink everything, so I really had to wonder about the mechanics of this world in which cat-banana hybrids exist. For one thing, is their bottom half edible banana flesh? We never see them with their peels completely off. (Would we want to? I doubt it.) I figure their bottom half are fruit, but on a couple of occasions, Bananya is shown with his tail sticking out of his bottom peel. So they at least have tails. Do bananyas grow on trees or are they live births? In one episode they showed a stray cat who was not a banana… are there also bananas that are not cats? I assume so, since when Bananya visited the grocery store, he only met two foreign bananyas. (The rest could have been napping though.) In “Episode 3- Bananya Watches TV, Nya”, there was an advertisement for a banana peeler… which would be pretty gruesome if all bananas were half cat. And continuing this dark line of thinking, I’m pretty sure if all bananas screeched when you bit into them, the existence of this species wouldn’t be such a secret.

And finally, the biggest question of all… where does banana milk come from?

A couple of details I really liked: the family is not given actual names. They’re just “the family that lives there”. Which is a very cat-like way of looking at it. Daddy Bananya is more ripe than the others and has some black spots on his banana portion. Bananya, by contrast, is younger, so has a greenish band at his tip. In the season ender, they hopped around in chocolate, with the tips of their stems leaving cat paw prints. The theme song was catchy and the short episode length made binging the season very quick.

I only watched the first season of 13 episodes for this post, but I will most definitely watch the rest of them soon. This brief anime is adorable, weird, and just plain fun. It reminds me of Gudetama with more energy. (I’ll likely post about Gudetama some day… I have gotten a request for that.)

Don’t we all? (Credit: Kyō Yatate, Akiyo Nagano. Studio: Gathering)

Thank you for reading my latest Short Hop! I’ll be back soon with more unexpected treasures. They may or may not be banana-related.