Milo

The Adventures of Milo and Otis is a curious object: a full-length feature film, released in Japan in 1986 as Koneko Monogatari, starring an orange tabby kitten and a pug, with no human characters on screen and a single narrator supplying every voice. It was an enormous success, becoming one of the highest-grossing Japanese films of its year, and the international version released three years later with Dudley Moore narrating introduced it to a generation of children in the English-speaking world.

The plot is simple and episodic. Milo the kitten drifts away from the farm in a wooden box, Otis the pug goes after him, and the two make their way through rivers, forests, snowfields and a good deal of jeopardy before finding their way home. Shot over four years by the naturalist and director Masanori Hata, it is beautifully photographed, and its combination of very small animals in very large landscapes accounts for most of its lasting appeal.

It has also been the subject of sustained controversy. Allegations circulated for years — never definitively proven, and firmly denied by the production — that animals were harmed during filming, and the film has been used repeatedly as a case study in arguments about animal welfare standards in the industry. The Japanese authorities investigated and no charges followed. The film carries no American Humane Association certification, which was not standard practice for Japanese productions of the period, and this absence has been read by critics as damning and by defenders as a technicality. Anyone watching it today should probably know that the argument exists.

What is not in dispute is the influence. Milo established that an animal-led narrative could sustain a feature film without anthropomorphic animation or human co-stars, and the format was widely imitated through the 1990s in films like Homeward Bound. For a great many people who saw it as children, an orange kitten in a wooden box floating down a river is one of the earliest cinematic images they can remember.

Milo was played by a series of tabby kittens over the four-year shoot, since a kitten does not stay a kitten for long — a practical necessity that gives the film's central character a slightly shifting appearance if you look closely.