Baron: The Cat Baron was thus ready even when the immediate impetus for a film had been taken away, and not wanting to reject a good story when it fell into his lap, Miyazaki elected to turn the property into a short direct-to-video project, to serve as a testing ground for Ghibli's younger generation of animators. For as soon as he'd heard the word 'cats', Miyazaki knew that he wanted to build a story around the mysterious Baron from the older movie, the wonderful doll found in a marvelous antique shop who played such a strong role in the fantasy world created by Whisper's protagonist through her writing. That commission went absolutely nowhere, but by the time it crapped out, Miyazaki had already ordered a manga from Hiiragi Aoi, the author of the source material for Whisper of the Heart.

Not unlike the studio's earlier Porco Rosso, it was born as a commissioned project, when a theme park approached Ghibli about making a 20-minute cartoon about cats. There is only one exception to this rule in 17 features released across 24 years, though calling 2002's The Cat Returns a sequel to 1995's Whisper of the Heart is only marginally accurate far wiser to call it a 'spin-off', featuring only a couple of characters who appear in both, and a fantastic, swashbuckling tone that is not remotely similar to Whisper's laid-back realism.Īt any rate, The Cat Returns was not even supposed to be a theatrical feature. Studio Ghibli, as a rule, doesn't do sequels this is a core value stated outright by company leader Miyazaki Hayao, who has categorically refused to follow-up on any of his own stories, and the rest of the company's artists has seemed content to follow suit (one must wonder what Miyazaki's buddy John Lasseter thinks about this eminently reasonable position, and if it gives him a twinge of guilt as he sits in on the Cars 2 marketing meetings).

Movies like the cat returns