the first time I learned about to heart 2, or really what visual novels were at all, was from funky cat maybe. maybe it’s actually cat funky maybe, depending on how you like to read your logotypes, but the official references we can dig up call it funky cat maybe. if the compression and “posted 17 years ago” didn’t tip you off, this is one of those videos that got mirrored a lot at the dawn of streaming. shii covered it around that same time linking out to google video, which is a good clue that it ended up posted to text and imageboards where online weirdos hung out, and I myself remember downloading it from an FTP that almost certainly is gone with zero trace. it is perhaps the perfect amalgamation of all good things about 2005 online video: paranormal catgirls dancing to thriller-inspired choreography and incomprehensible english rap performed with a thick japanese accent.

the magic of early online video was often seeing realities very different from yours, things with strange foreign appeal that were spotlighted across cultures for being incomprehensibly zany, like the crude soramimis of numa numa and buffalax. many of those japanese cultural exports were, naturally, anime-related or adjacent, and cat funky maybe falls in line as it was produced by the doujin circle 感電注意, which specialized in 3DCG animation. they seem to have been aggressively active around this time, as their event schedule from 2005 shows them hopping in the span of weeks between puniket, comitia, costume cafe, and other relics like comicomi that are equally as defunct as the circle itself. their website was last captured in 2013 promoting kancolle works, which means they are at least connected in some way to the modern doujin landscape, though it’s hard not to sense they were crowded out by being unable to keep up with ever-evolving tech. more realsistic and tuned 3DCG depictions in doujin today are entirely in the ero realm, and the truly amateur works seem to be leveraging MMD with pre-packaged models and filters more often than not, so this bootstrapped approach feels pretty unseen except in limited contexts like low poly.

my personal experience with doujin 3DCG was being familiarized to the cornocupia of silly dance videos and benchmark testers that doesn’t seem reflected on a modern doujin hub like dlsite when I browse it now. tripshots, I remember, earned acclaim for self-animating all their PVs, which still seems herculean looking at what they accomplished, but their work has definitely aged out of context without anyone else taking up a similar mantle; modern producers like pinocchioP have sometimes managed to scratch this itch for me by tagging in animators. 3DCG animation, I have to think, is just difficult to fashion to an audience mostly chasing what looks technically more impressive and is instead better represented in big games or feature films. it’s clearly embedded in places that lean on hobby-grade talent like anime, but there it feels like mostly an accident and a matter of budget when 3DCG is chosen to salvage designs from a defunct social game. it’s kept my hopes measured for what the etotama folks can do with idolmaster.

there’s almost no remaining information about this circle online, made even more difficult to confirm by their name, which is entirely unsurprising for a circle this old. some trudging up of old links did reveal to me that they worked on movies commercially for some very forgotten eroge published by LOVER-SOUL. of course, I went on yahoo auctions to buy a bunch of their CDs with AVI files for mere yennies because I’m pretty curious to see which kanon and tsukihime characters will bust a move or transform into a robot or whatever else. if you ever needed proof that physical media has evergreen value, though, it’s that I was able to track down who made this silly video that I saw unattributed years ago and have a chance now to see what else they’ve actually made because of people clearing out their collections. “do it! attach the ear of a cat!” as a lyric just kindles the discovery in me.