‘I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food’ Review: Walter Santucci’s Fiercely Original Punk-Rock Descent Into Despair

Walter Santucci’s surreal independent feature blends hand-drawn animation, live-action puppetry, and punk music to confront depression, religious hypocrisy, corporate exploitation, and the pressure to become marketable.

I am still looking for something I did not truly love about Walter Santucci’s absurd but profoundly truthful “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food.” It is difficult to find. This surreal, darkly comic independent feature pulls no punches, confronting deeply uncomfortable truths with such creative power and assurance that you cannot help but applaud.

Santucci has made a film about depression, disillusionment and the search for meaning without dressing any of it in false hope or easy uplift. Its world is jagged, funny, angry and spiritually exhausted, yet alive with invention. 

Blending hand-drawn animation, live-action puppetry and punk-rock music, “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” turns an irreverent meditation on despair into something as visually arresting as it is emotionally bruising.

The film centers on Human, a washed-up musician with a formidable point of view who lives amid the ruins of a burned-out church. He is fine with the arrangement. The fewer hypocrites, the better.

Santucci has made a film about depression, disillusionment and the search for meaning without dressing any of it in false hope or easy uplift. Its world is jagged, funny, angry and spiritually exhausted, yet alive with invention. 

Blending hand-drawn animation, live-action puppetry and punk-rock music, “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” turns an irreverent meditation on despair into something as visually arresting as it is emotionally bruising.

The film centers on Human, a washed-up musician with a formidable point of view who lives amid the ruins of a burned-out church. He is fine with the arrangement. The fewer hypocrites, the better.

Human’s companions are Foo and Satchmo, two outspoken, often irreverent puppets who enthusiastically challenge the bleak, nihilistic worldview that shapes his life. What follows is an all-night philosophical debate that is delicious to watch, hear and ponder—provided one listens, which is entirely different from merely hearing.

Human recounts the failures, betrayals and social pressures that brought him to the edge. He uses absurdity not as an escape from truth, but as a way of exposing the insanity behind many core beliefs. Corporate exploitation, religious hypocrisy, and the relentless demand to make oneself “marketable” are tossed around like confetti, only to land with surprising force.

Human also takes a long, searching look at “god,” lower case, and “GOD,” in quotation marks, as described in the Bible. The facts, as he sees them, do not stack up neatly against hard, cold evidence. Santucci does not cushion the argument or ask viewers to accept it politely. The film wants its audience to sit with the discomfort.

As the conversation unravels like a peeled onion, “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” moves through beautifully stylized animated flashbacks illustrating Human’s doomed relationship with his band’s lead singer. The tension sharpens when the band lands a major record deal, and Human is pushed out because he cannot fit the industry’s carefully managed public-relations image.

That rejection lands hard because Human has a heart, and the film allows it to break. His expulsion from the band triggers a powerful spiral of resentment, old-fashioned self-sabotage, and full emotional collapse. The result is a confrontation with ambition’s cost and the question of whether redemption is possible—or whether some wounds become permanent once a person is discarded.

This is where Santucci and his creative team do their strongest work. Music, animation, puppetry and live action do not compete for attention; they become a shared cinematic language. The film’s formal audacity gives shape to Human’s fractured psyche without reducing his pain to a gimmick.

The punk pedigree matters. “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” features vocals from Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. and Keith Morris of Circle Jerks, artists whose presence suits the movie’s hostility toward polished surfaces, institutional authority, and forced optimism. Their involvement adds texture to a film that understands punk not as a costume or a soundtrack cue, but as an attitude toward power.

“I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” is impossible not to respect, and even harder not to love, precisely because of its irreverent dismantling of despair. It understands that once certain truths are examined closely, they can become absurd—not because they are untrue, but because the systems built around them are.

Our world is broken, the film insists, and no effort to cover the sky with your hands will change that. Santucci does not pretend otherwise. Instead, he creates a place where rage, grief, humor, music and philosophical argument can coexist, each making the others sharper.

The film’s strange, volatile energy is its achievement. It does not ask to be liked by everyone, nor should it. It asks viewers to reckon with what they may prefer to ignore—and does so with enough wit, visual imagination and punk-rock conviction to make the reckoning exhilarating.

“IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO RESPECT—AND EVEN HARDER NOT TO LOVE.”

—Lapacazo Sandoval, AmNews Curtain Raiser

“I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food” was named Best Animated Film at the 2025 L.A. Punk Film Festival and received a nomination for Outstanding Achievement Animated Feature at the 2025 Shawna Shea Film Festival. The recognition is fitting for a film that makes animation central to both its emotional force and visual language.

Film Credits

Film: “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food”

Director: Walter Santucci

Producer: Walter Santucci

Cast: Jack Grisham, Keith Morris, Annie Cruz, Kristina Wong, Evelyn Vasquez, Tony Nittoli

Cinematographer: Randy Yap

Vocals: Jack Grisham of T.S.O.L. and Keith Morris of Circle Jerks

Official Website: https://www.evilcatland.com/cat-food

Evil Cat Land — “I’d Rather Be Turned Into Cat Food”