Nyaight of the Living Cat Cast Shares What They Love About the Series

Get the inside scoop from the English dub cast of Nyaight of the Living Cat on the new series, a cat-pocalypse, and their cat cafe visit.

Crunchyroll recently invited myself and a handful of other journalists to a purr-fectly themed event to celebrate the English dub of the new anime series, Nyaight of the Living Cat. The event was held at the CatCafe Lounge in Los Angeles, which was the ideal setting to talk about the show. We had an amazing time getting to know the cast – Jason Douglas (Kunagi), Maria Delilah (Kaoru), and Lew Temple (Tanishi) – and, of course, the many adorable cats that call the cafe home.

The series, which began airing in Japan on July 6th and had its English dub premiere on July 20th, is an absolutely brilliant and bonkers take on the zombie apocalypse genre. A “nyandemic” has taken over the world, where anyone who touches a cat turns into one. The result is a brave new furry world where humanity must fight its natural urge to pet cats to survive. The series is both hilarious and heartwarming, offering a look into what it means to be a cat owner, all while navigating a post-apocalyptic world.

I had the opportunity to sit down with the English dub cast to talk about the show and their experiences. The cast had great chemistry, and it was clear they were having a fantastic time working on the show. We talked about their first impressions of the series, what it’s like to record the English dub, and whether they would be able to survive a cat-pocalypse.

Nyaight of the Living Cat: A Perfect Paws-itive Match

Mama’s Geeky: Is this your first time at a Cat Cafe?

Jason Douglas: It’s my first time, for sure.

Lew Temple: I thought these only existed in anime or fantasy realm. I didn’t realize it was a real thing.

Jason Douglas: Yeah, so here we are, my first time. I love it.

Maria Delilah: This is like a dream.

Lew Temple: You’ve got a lot of friends. They’re very curious.

Maria Delilah: These cats, they’re everywhere.

Jason Douglas: Well, our show starts in a cat cafe. You know what I mean? It launches out of there, and everyone, that’s the world of these characters, so it’s ironic the way…

Lew Temple: The affinity for the feline is derived from the cafe.

The English Dub Cast on Their First Impressions of the Series

Mama’s Geeky: I started this, and as soon as the little paw comes up, and it turns into the cat, I was like, this is the best show I’ve ever seen in my entire life. What do you love about this show?

Lew Temple: The thing that you just said, I love the idea that people do have cat affection, and that it’s a place to share it, and that it also becomes the nemesis. That affection, it’s an internal enemy, because you can’t pet them.

Maria Delilah: I know. It’s so hard. You can’t touch them, because you’ll turn into a cat. I love everything about this. I love the heavy metal. It’s very punk rock. It feels like this is the end, but it’s cats, and it’s like a party. And then we’re working at a cat cafe, and we’re having the time of our lives, and then everything goes haywire and crazy. So stuff is getting furry, and it’s fun.

Jason Douglas: It would have been easy to make the cats really villainous or something, give them a harsh look.

Maria Delilah: They’re so cute.

Jason Douglas: Well, that’s the whole point of the show, is the creators have managed to create this scenario where the cats are still cats. They’re cute, and they’re lovable. And we’re also, as an audience, learning about cat ownership as we go along. There are these little interstitial interruptions from Paul Taylor, who’s the narrator. He has that line about…

Maria Delilah: It’s their fur!

Jason Douglas: It’s their fur! It’s amazing. So it’s a loving homage to cat ownership, while using kind of the zombie genre trope, if you will. And so it really hits on a lot of different levels. It’s decent. It’s really good storytelling.

Maria Delilah: It has a lot of heart. It’s really… It’s sad when you have to make sacrifices and you lose your people. Like Kaoru losing her brother, and all those other little things. But it’s cute. And they have a good team. They’re the three amigos, these guys.

Mama’s Geeky: I do feel like if it wasn’t cats, it could be scary.

Maria Delilah: Yeah. Oh, for sure. You know what I mean? But it’s like, I would want to be a cat.

Lew Temple: I do think that’s the fun of it. To your point, Jason, that the cats just come for attention and affection, but they create mayhem, and we’re aware of it. And the temptation is, for some of us, is too great.

Maria Delilah: You just want to pet them, but you can’t.

A Feline-Filled Apocalypse: Would They Survive?

Mama’s Geeky: Do you think you would fail?

Maria Delilah: I would die in five seconds. I would be a cat in five seconds. Are you kidding me? I’d be like, oh my god!

Lew Temple: I did fail. In the first act. In the first ten minutes.

Jason Douglas: I would have said I’ll be fine a few years ago. Then we adopted a cat, a rescue cat, a few years ago as a kitten. And he’s become part of the family. So, yeah, that’s tough. Because at the end of the day, it’s like, but my cat, I’ve got to keep my cat. I’ve got to preserve, but you can’t.

Lew Temple: Yeah, I would think that would be, because you would have doubts, which I think are exactly some of the issues that the characters, how could this happen? My cat is so important to me. I got him a bed for a king.

Jason Douglas: That’s right. We have cat tower. We’ve got the fancy scratching post. All things you say you’d never, you’d never. I’m not going to spend that kind of money on a pet.

Maria Delilah: But they’re so cute when you do it. They’re snuggly.

Lew Temple: They give back just as much as they get.

Mama’s Geeky: One of the things I love so much about this is the random cat facts, like the one part when they’re like, that cat’s not going to fit through that hole. And it’s like, actually…

Maria Delilah: He’s like liquid.

Mama’s Geeky: It’s so fun. But I also think a lot of people might get like more interested and excited in cats. Do you guys agree?

Lew Temple: No doubt about it.

Maria Delilah: Yeah, I feel like this could have a really great opportunity to have maybe more people want to adopt a cat or a kitten and maybe want to go and come to a cat cafe and maybe want to work at one. I think that would be probably what they’re going to take from that.

Lew Temple: Even people who maybe have a little aversion, like a small allergy. They might take a risk. Like our friend Setsumi. She’s still game for being part of it, and then she’s using her allergy as a warning signal for us. Oh, my gosh. Her eyes are getting watery. We better run. Better keep moving.

Maria Delilah: She’s like our cat detector.

Jason Douglas: I feel like cats are a recurring motif in anime. If you watch a lot of anime, you’re going to see cats and you’re going to see cats really well rendered. It almost feels like in Japanese culture, or at least as far as the creators of manga and anime, they have a real sense of the feline and how cats behave. These cats in the show, they actually look and behave very naturally like a cat would. I think the affection for the cats, I think you can’t help but, as an audience member, love these cats in the same way that these characters do.

Lew Temple: Also, I think, too, there’s an acceptance. My character, he’s kind of an alpha male. He’s very gruff. He’s buff. He’s got a 12-pack, man. A very anime 12-pack. You can tell he spends a lot of time in the gym, but also a lot of time at the cat cafe. And he’s not really ashamed about that. And he’s okay finding his feline side. I think that gives permission to an audience to go, yeah, I like cats, too. I’m a cat guy. I’m not just a cat lady. I’m a cat guy. There you go. So I think there’s something to be said. Cats are for everyone. But they’re dangerous. They’re changing the world. It’s a cat-astrophe.

Maria Delilah: It’s becoming a brave new world. A brave, furry new world.

Mama’s Geeky: I feel like I would just give up. I’ll be like, I’ll be a cat.

Maria Delilah: I would be a cat. I’d be so happy.

Lew Temple: One of the characters did.

Jason Douglas: There is resonation. I mean, we know what happens right off the bat with your character. And obviously it’s great that we have so much of your character in flashback. Because he’s such an essential part of the show. Not just him, but also your character’s brother. We lose him as well.

Maria Delilah: We lose him. That was really sad. That was hard to record.

Lew Temple: And your character’s pretty cool and suave, but also you’re cool with cats.

Maria Delilah: He’s so great, his character. He listens to everything I say. I’m always yelling at him. And I feel bad when I’m in there. I’m going, oh my God, I’m shouting like, get in the car, it’s time to go!

Jason Douglas: Yeah. Kunagi’s interesting. Because he doesn’t. Something happened to Kunagi. He doesn’t have a memory of his life before being found in an alley.

Maria Delilah: I rescued him like a cat.

Jason Douglas: At one point he says, somebody says like, who are you? And he’s like, I don’t know. I just love cats. And then he speculates like he might have been a cat expert in the special forces, like CIA.

Bringing the Characters to Life: The Dubbing Process

Mama’s Geeky: Well, you mentioned that that scene was hard to record. Was there something in your personal life that you tapped into?

Maria Delilah: I lost my dad in 2022. And so I went in there and I did it all in one take. That one I was. And I was nervous to do that because that’s my first anime scream I ever had to do. So I was like, let’s do it last, so I don’t blow out my voice because I didn’t know how I was going to do it. And then it turned out it was the easiest thing. We did the whole thing in one take. The throwing me over the shoulder, the screaming, and the whole. The whole thing. One take. I was like, did we get it? I was out of breath and I was like, oh, we got it? Great.

Mama’s Geeky: So when you guys record the English dub, the animation is already done, so how much does that help you when you’re recording? Because I know a lot of times with voice acting, you’ll just get concept art to look at.

Jason Douglas: When you have the when you have the animation done like we do for most of the anime, really, it’s great to see that it kind of provides the contours for what the character is going to be. Obviously, you also have access to hearing what the Japanese voice actor did previously, although we’re not doing impressions of those actors. But we still have the same visual material to work with. So it’s useful in that regard. You can see where the character is supposed to be emotionally. Whereas when we do prelay animation, which we when we don’t have that, the benefit there is that you just get to create that character from the ground up and then they animate sometimes around what the performance that you’ve given. So there’s pros and cons to both.

Maria Delilah: It’s really funny is when I go into my sessions, I don’t get to hear it in the J, which is the Japanese version, I get to hear them already do their parts. So it’s fun for me when I go in there and I get to hear them. So it makes you get more into their sense. It’s a lonely job. We’re alone in the booth. We have our script. We know what we have to do. And we’re just looking at them and trying to figure out what they’re going through, through their facial expressions or eyebrows, the mouth. You can kind of figure it out. But it’s nice to always go in there, and I can hear him screaming, Lew is screaming, and then Kunagi is just crying about his love for cats, and I have to be like, calm down, get it together. Every time. It’s really funny.

Lew Temple: I like the visual, too, because it reminds me that this is fun. It should be viewed as fun. It’s a fun show. The graphics are fun. They’re upbeat and occasionally ridiculous and I can chuckle and go, oh, yeah, this is fun. It’s got to be fun for me or it won’t be fun for the audience.

Maria Delilah: And you can hear how much fun we’re having. Everyone’s going all out. It’s hilarious. We’re always sprinting. We do a lot of running.

Lew Temple: We’re not getting nearly enough carbs for all the running that we’re doing at the Cat Cafe. Although the French toast.

Jason Douglas: Lew has great work in episode three. It’s this whole reveal of a little bit of his backstory. And you get to eat some French toast.

Maria Delilah: It has a little paw-shaped syrup. It’s cute. It’s an indulgent moment.

Mama’s Geeky: Did you eat real French toast while you were recording?

Lew Temple: In my mind. In my imagination.

Nyaight of the Living Cat is streaming only on Crunchyroll. New episodes, subbed and dubbed, premiere on Sundays.

About Nyaight of the Living Cat

Run! The adorable cats are here. In 20XX, the world is dominated by cats. A virus which turns anyone who touches a cat into a cat has spread into a worldwide nyandemic. Cats rub against people, turning them into cats. Can humanity fight their urge to pet cats to survive in this cat-ridden world?

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