We’re going outside the norm for this one, because while I’ve focused on animated television shows for most of this series, this one is actually a “movie”—which is to say, it is feature length, but I otherwise don’t want to set expectations too high. While my fascination with bizarre and low-quality animation does stem from being inundated with it on TV, another crucial part was the sheer glut of content dropped unceremoniously on VHS in the eighties and nineties and indiscriminately carried everywhere videos were rented or sold. Video stores both local and chain had absolutely no problem stocking no-name lower tier oddities alongside more legitimate fare—a philosophy shared by both children’s videos and horror, as it turned out—and families such as my own had absolutely no problem renting whatever looked child-appropriate. To fill these shelves so chockablock with product that at least some of them were exchanged for cash, video distributors scoured every possible source for potential material, whether it to be selling two episodes of a TV show (which could be watched for free normally) for a disproportionate price, or in this case, dubbing foreign productions. I imagine that this is how many kids discovered anime well before they started airing a significant number of dubs on TV (I know I did, one prominent example being Serendipity the Pink Dragon, previously written about on this site), and there were a panoply of kids media from many nations also present. Much like the early days of cable television, and to some extent the current mad dash to create overstuffed streaming catalogues, this means a lot of weird or unexpected things are presented on equal footing, and regardless of the actual quality, exposing kids to things that make them go “wait, what?” can only expand their imagination enough to override the imagination-sapping effects of mindlessly staring at screens. This is a very long-winded contextual introduction to Katy Meets the Aliens (AKA Katy and the Katerpillar Kids…wait, KKK?! That’s no good!), a Mexican-Spanish animated film I watched on VHS when I was very young, and has stuck with me for decades because…well, it’s an odd one.
I imagine that watching this movie out of the blue as a kid, I had no idea that this was in fact a sequel to an earlier animated movie, Katy the Caterpillar, which was evidently very popular in its home country in 1984, and was dubbed into English around the same time. Four years later, there was a sequel (which was also written by the original’s creator, musician Silvia Roche, and once again scored by the amusingly named Nacho Mendez), put out in English by Just For Kids, the company who also dubbed and released Serendipity (and also several Gamera movies…everything just comes full circle around here, doesn’t it?) Chances are I didn’t ping on the fact that this was a sequel even when some valuable time is taken up by our titular heroine explaining the events of the previous movie, even mentioning characters who do not appear in this one (and also flashing back to a character design with several major differences from her current one, but whatever.) I never said I was a bright kid, and besides, it really doesn’t matter. It’s not like you need any crucial backstory to understand this plot, which somehow manages to contain both the utterly expected beats of a saccharine-sweet animated movie about talking animals, and a borderline Invasion of the Body Snatchers plot, which was the reason it’s managed to stick with me for so long.
In fact, the alien part of this movie is so important that it’s the first thing we are introduced to, as the infrequently-appearing narrator directs us towards one of the “millions of asteroids” between Mars and Jupiter, which houses a squad of four purple aliens named W, X, Y, and Z, who have apparently used up all their food sources, forcing them to plot a raid of other planets in order “stay alive” (come to think of it, that’s pretty close to the plot of Kronos.) This involves them sitting in front of a computer, watching live action stock footage of a rocket launch, a soccer match, and the Running of the Bulls (the latter two being a major signal that this was made in another country) and commenting on it in sub-MST3K fashion, before they then change the channel to the animated woodland creatures. Technically, the aliens are somehow watching everything that happens, and the movie will go back to them for some peanut gallery remarks, reminding us that the characters in the movie are in fact watching the exact same movie we are. This is a rather mind-bending conceit, maybe even stranger than just the idea that your Disney-riffing talking animal musical needed aliens in the first place. One of the four aliens takes their orb-shaped spaceship to that patch of woods in order to abduct animals, establishing that these things have both shape-shifting powers and teleporting eye lasers, so just add that on top of the wacky stack we’ve already established.
Oh, right, there’s a character named Katy in this as well, and maybe some Katerpillar Kids? Katy is a butterfly, and her two kids are Kiki and Koko, with the girl wearing a pink flower petal bonnet and the boy wearing a blue baseball cap with his initial on it, which I assume also comes from some local plant (I guess there’s some unique species of Mexican flora I don’t know about.) After giving a Wikipedia synopsis of the previous film, which convinces her two rowdy larval children that they want to learn to fly ASAP, she tries to get them to sleep by singing a song about enjoying your youth while you still have it, and while this could just be a wonky bit of animation, her expression in this moment is less motherly tenderness and more irritation. Of course, the kids aren’t going to actually pay attention to anything their mother says, so they head off to talk to someone who can teach them to fly, at which point we get into the traditional plot-light animated film tradition of having a parade of characters appear, do their shtick, and then, having nothing to actually contribute to the story, leave. I mean, that’s not entirely true—there’s a skunk who’s just trying to rest, and also a colony of ants whose taskmaster boss (who carries a staff with a gloved hand on the tip that can point and gesture) has an obsessive compulsive need to correctly stack their grain supplies, that both supply running gags. The caterpillars’ actual destination is a gear-wearing bat, who does appear briefly as a threat, and then never reappears. That’s in the first twenty minutes. After that, we are introduced to the characters we’re actually supposed to keep track of, including an old spinster squirrel (who goes on long tangents about the multi-species suitors she’s had since…1940? How old can squirrels get?), your standard academic-minded owl who loves math, and Katy’s absent-minded mouse friend Gilbert (who was in the previous movie) and his own son, who is clearly voiced by an adult man and is thus very humorous to listen to as he obsequiously praises his father. There’s also an antagonistic punk rock hawk, who has a musical number (probably the best one in the movie) before we even know who he is or what his purpose is. Did I mention that the alien stuff is going on while we kill time with these critters?
While watching, I recognized some of the voices (Gilbert and the hawk especially), but there were unfortunately no real closing credits for this movie (certainly a sign of a cheap exploitation house business tactics), so I had to look up some of the shaky sources online to figure out who was who. The names I dug up and can confirm are (the late) Robert Axelrod and Steve Kramer, two English dubbing stalwarts who were especially prominent on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers in the nineties, where the former notably voiced the raw meat wizard Lord Zedd. Both of them do an okay job bringing some personality into these performances at least—eighties anime/animation dubbing has a well-earned reputation for being patchy at best.
The cutesy/quirky characters and songs that rarely serve a narrative purpose are pretty common among animated family films trying desperately to imitate classic Disney (this was made at a time when even Disney was desperately trying to imitate classic Disney), as that was the only format that producers seemed to know, and for the most part Katy Meets the Aliens isn’t so much worse than things with a clearly higher budget (it’s not great animation, but it’s not always abysmal—it does have some issues being consistent with scale, though.) Still, it often feels both repetitive and arbitrary in structure—multiple times, we have the caterpillar kids wander off, the adults fret about them, and then they get back together. The hawk, as a secondary antagonist of sorts, is lightly amusing but often feels like he has no reason to be there other than as an additional source of comic relief in a film rife with it—I especially like the scene where a mob of disgruntled animals, believing him to be responsible for the rash of disappearances, beat him up and then leave, which solves nothing. The aliens, either the one on Earth with his many constantly-shifting powers or his buddies back in space (and the former’s villainy and somewhat scary final “monster” form seems oddly contrasted to the comical nature of his comrades, with their goofy, pitched-up voices), will wander back into the movie and do something, reminding you that there are aliens in this movie for some reason. Just about the only scene that at least has a whiff of tension has the caterpillars seemingly reunite with their mother, only to realize that it’s the alien in disguise, which is followed by an aerial showdown between the hawk and alien Katy, who displays an appropriate amount of menace. It does have that feeling of simply throwing elements together without much of a point—the early song about enjoying childhood rather than rushing through it, or a later song where Kiki and Koko complain about adults not believing them, could represent coherent character arcs or themes, but nothing ever really comes of them. Maybe that’s why the alien stuff stands out so much—for lack of anything else to latch on to, you instead look to the completely wackadoo elements for entertainment.
This is the kind of ephemeral object, that shouldn’t persist in any way—yet it has, and since I was able to find it uploaded to the Internet, clearly it has persisted in the minds of others as well, so it’s not just my aberrational brain chemistry at play. Katy Meets the Aliens is close enough to the well-worn style of animated film, if slightly off by a few degrees here and there, that the kids who innocuously watched it (like me) were hit even harder when it did deviate from that norm—it’s not even as surreal as other obscure kid’s movies I know about (it never quite takes the kind of abrupt tonal left turns that define them), but the effect remains the same. As a kid, I accepted it as a cartoon like any other I watched, but something about it still clearly felt off, and I didn’t have the capacity to articulate just what it was. Part of the reason why I’m now interested in examining it, and most of my Ink & Pain subjects, is because I can not only articulate that uncanny sense of wrongness, but can also see it within a cultural context, making it both more understandable but also even weirder.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 