Live-Action ‘Neko Atsume’ Movie Will Explore One Man’s Crippling Loneliness and Also Cute Cats

After countless hours spent desperately trying to attract rare cats to the cozily-curated animated zen garden that lives in your iPhone, you’ll soon find respite in the form of watching a live-action human being desperately try to attract rare cats to his cozily-curated live-action zen garden on a giant theater screen. Yes, that’s right: Your adorably tedious mobile game obsession is about to become an adorably tedious film obsession with a live-action Neko Atsume movie.

Siliconera reports that Japanese studio AMG Entertainment is developing a live-action movie based on Neko Atsume. More of a casually sporadic obsession than an actual game, the wildly popular app allows users to choose a setting (zen garden, modern home, etc.) and decorate it with toys, furniture and various food items in an effort to attract myriad feline companions with names like Marshmallow, Princess and Gozer. It’s like Pokemon meets Grey Gardens.

Neko Atsume is a deceptively superficial game that offers a cutesy meta-distraction from life’s existential dilemmas — like avoiding your own loneliness by pretending to be someone who lives alone and spends all their time trying to make friends with stray cats that only occasionally love you for all your stuff.

And so the description of the live-action film, titled Neko Atsume no Ie (or House of Neko Atsume), is apt:

Meet Katsu Sakumoto (portrayed by Atsushi Ito), a best-selling author who won the newcomer’s award at a young age. Lately, Katsu has had a severe case of writer’s block, and hasn’t been able to write anything at all. In order to get a fresh new start, he moves away to quiet lands, but it doesn’t quite help out his case.

One day, while at a loss and looking at the garden from his porch, a single cat appears. Katsu makes an attempt to speak to the cat, but it simply just walks away. The thought that even cats would desert Katsu made things more depressing for the writer. However, that night, he decided to leave some cat food at the corner of the garden before going to bed. The food was gone the following morning. This brings a sudden interest in Katsu—and how the story of the young author’s “Neko Atsume” begins.

Instead of avoiding your crippling existential anxiety and “real problems” with an adorably futile game, you can watch someone else do the same thing — but like, for real, kind of, and with actual cats (probably).

The live-action Neko Atsume movie will hit theaters in Japan sometime in 2017. No word on AMG’s plans to release the film in the US, but that just gives you more time to figure out how to attract the frustratingly mercurial Lady Meow-Meow to your cottage.