I swear to you, this guy has issues. From She and Her Cat, and all through his later works - like Voices of a Distant Star, Beyond the Clouds or more recently 5cm per Second - there are several themes which keep returning obsessively in Shinkai's animations. Cats are certainly one such fetish, and they will once again be at the heart of his next work: a 1-minute short anime clip called Neko no Shuukai (Gathering of Cats - website).

Neko no Shuukai is to be aired soon on the Japanese public TV network NHK, as part of the third season of "Ani-Kuri 15", a collection of anime shorts by 15 of Japan's biggest anime directors and creators (and not at all a collection of 15-year old lolis doing guri-guri, as we would've hoped for). The season starts on December 10, but there's no word yet on when Shinkai's turn will come; only that the character art will be done by Takayo Nishimura, same as in 5cm, and that this should be "a little comical story". Thanks, Shinkai fan-kun.