Character · The Cat Returns
Muta
An enormous white cat with a criminal record, a bad temper, and no intention of explaining either of them.
In Otakana the clue reads: Enormous bad-tempered white cat
- Type
- Character
- Series
- The Cat Returns
- Letters
- 4 · Hard
Muta is introduced as a rude, vast, uncooperative cat who happens to know exactly where the Cat Bureau is. He guides Haru there, insults her on the way, and then follows her into the Cat Kingdom against his own loudly stated policy on the subject. His response to danger is to complain about it at length while dealing with it anyway.
He has previous. The Cat Kingdom remembers him under another name and a rather different reputation, involving a great deal of stolen fish, and the film enjoys holding the details back until they are funniest. He is also a returning character, since the same cat rides the trains around the neighbourhood in Whisper of the Heart, where Shizuku follows him home and names him Moon.
The Cat Returns runs on the contrast between the Baron's manners and Muta's complete absence of them. One bows. The other eats. Hiroyuki Morita directed the film in 2002 from a manga by Aoi Hiiragi, and much of its charm comes from a rescue party made up of a courteous statue, a stone crow and a cat who resents being awake.
Spelling MUTA
MUTA is four letters and two beats, mu-ta, with no doubled letters and no long vowel to lose in translation. The trap is that he answers to more than one name, since English versions call him Renaldo Moon and Whisper of the Heart calls him Moon. The game wants the short one, MUTA, which is what the Baron calls him throughout.