‘Chainsmoker Cat’ series review: This purrverse cornucopia of indignities is somehow one of the year’s very best

With a chain-smoking catgirl, a parade of dysfunctional weirdos and a frankly astonishing litany of unsavoury incidents, ‘Chainsmoker Cat’ has absolutely no business being this funny, this thoughtful or this damn good

Updated - October 01, 2026 02:24 pm IST

A still from ‘Chainsmoker Cat’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

Cute or ‘kawaii’ characters are usually designed to make affection for them feel effortless. One look is usually all it takes to think, yes, I would probably buy a mug or a plushie with this adorable little idiot on it. NyanNyanFactory’s Chainsmoker Cat, adapted by Bibury Animation Studios, commits what can only be described as an unholy act of blasphemy against that particular psychology of instant fondness.

Yanineko is the titular nicotine-addicted 21-year-old catgirl. She is broke, chronically unemployed, constitutionally allergic to responsibility, and forever rummaging through pockets, ashtrays, garbage, literal dog faeces (the less you know, the better), and whatever other dubious receptacles might yield a stray cigarette. Her apartment seems to have reached an almost terminal stage of entropy. Rotting, decomposing, fetid, putrescent, rancid, mould-ridden, foul, cursed — these are few of the many adjectives woefully inadequate to describe its horrors.

Given that terribly unpromising introduction, you may reasonably be wondering how the hell that headline is supposed to make any sense. How could something so decidedly repulsive possibly rank among the year’s best anime?

Chainsmoker Cat is not really about Yanineko or her chainsmoking exploits, at least not exclusively. She is the building’s principal agent of ruin. But the apartments around her are inhabited by an ecosystem of damaged little freaks, each with their own preferred method of making life substantially more difficult.

Yakuneko, her younger neighbour, is a recovering delinquent with a deeply questionable relationship to drugs; Hameko, or the misregistered “Easygoing Anal Angel,” is a gamer and e-girl streamer whose online persona is considerably more stable than her bladder; Kansaineko is a university student from Kansai who desperately wants to be funny despite possessing terrible comic timing; Aruko is a 24-year-old alcoholic whose body may legally be that of an adult but whose perpetual intoxication gives the impression that somebody left a primary-schooler unsupervised. There is also Mankasu, the chain-smoking human erotic-manga artist who lives among them; the well-meaning but perverted landlord who performs the thankless dual role of housekeeper and reluctant emergency-service provider; and the occasional cameo from Imoko, Yanineko’s younger sister, who has somehow been burdened with the impossible task of keeping her sister alive.

Judging by the sheer chemistry between this motley assortment of degenerates, you get the distinct impression that the voice cast must have had an absolute blast making it together; I’m almost jealous of whatever unhinged conversations were happening in those recording booths.

A still from ‘Chainsmoker Cat’ | Photo Credit: Netflix

This makes the show less a conventional slice-of-life than an anthology of people hanging around the same building and periodically wreaking havoc on their own lives in each other’s vicinity. Over 12 episodes, the plot fractures into miniature stories, jumps between characters, and introduces some bizarre new corner of the beastfolk world before promptly returning to the apartment as though none of it ever happened. The pleasures are cumulative rather than plot-dependent. We follow along, waiting to discover what fresh and previously unimaginable form of nonsense the inhabitants have managed to manufacture this week.

And dear god, the variety is astonishing. Among the season’s many absurd highlights, the characters find themselves embroiled in situations so magnificently stupid that describing them out of context makes the show sound as if it was written by a committee of sleep-deprived, substance-abusing perverts. The season keeps lurching from one deranged little calamity to another, with each new episode finding some undiscovered way for these people to humiliate themselves, endanger themselves, or attract the attention of the police. There are sequences in this anime I am almost too embarrassed to describe, if only because having to type some of them out feels like a serious indictment of whatever chain of events led me to become a critic.

A still from ‘Chainsmoker Cat’ | Photo Credit: Netflix