Berserk: Egg of the King

ベルセルク覇王の卵 Toshiyuki Kubooka, 2012

ReelAnime 4/4

I was saving Berserk for last. Right off the bat, I had a gut feeling it would be the one I would enjoy the least. It just looked like a mindless medieval battle movie adapted from a mindless medieval battle manga/anime. It seems to me like Berserk has never really been as popular as it is in Japan, I had never really heard of it, except through the music of Susumu Hirasawa, who provided soundtracks for the anime series (his sounds are amazing and body of work staggering, check him out), and I rarely get into anime series anyway because they usually tend to drag on a bit for me. At least this Berserk movie would be bearable because they will condense it into film length and drop all the filler right?

The film is set an unspecified kingdom/land, but a blind man could see the medieval Europe inspiration. From the get go then, we have knights in shining armour on horseback, battling with swords - all the while yelling and carrying on in Japanese like it’s nobody's business. But this is no off putting anachronism; in fact, it’s kind of fascinatingly that this works. The question of believability never really enters into the equation and we are swept up into this bizarre east-meets-west alternate history. The hero of our tale is a swaggering warrior named Guts. I thought for a while that this was a joke, but no, his name is actually GUTS. He is an arrogant brawn over brains style fighter with a sword quite literally as long as he is tall (paging Dr. Freud…?). Guts appears to be working for some kind of clan/guild, but doesn’t really seem to have any strong allegiances. After his gratuitous display of power is spotted by some skilled warriors during a siege upon an enemy castle, Guts is ambushed, bested in battle and persuaded to join their crew. The leader of this group is called Griffin, a mysterious “dude looks like a lady” warrior with an equally mysterious egg necklace. It is from this McGuffin that our film takes its name and not much else.

I didn’t really understand just what all these warriors are actually doing. They are battling each other, but the reasons why are unclear. I thought maybe Griffin and his gang were a bunch of bandits, fighting the powers that be, but this theory was quickly dashed with a scene in which Griffin meets with the king and cracks onto his incredibly clichéd “I detest violence” princess daughter. From what I gather though, Griffin ropes Guts into his team so as to remove him as an obstacle from his quest to seize the throne. Over time, Guts is played by his friend, as he begins to learn of Griffin’s true nature. The film only runs for about an hour and twenty minutes, so just when the plot started not only thickening but taking some twists and turns, and I really found myself getting interested in the story, it was over! By that stage I was quite surprised at myself to think that I would have happily sat through another hour and a half of this blood and swords bonanza. Gutted. 

I think this fast and furious duration is what detracted from the film a little. It almost felt like it wasn’t intended for the cinema. The aforementioned Susumu Hirasawa only gets a few minutes of opening credits theme song, and the cheesy “tune in next time” style trailer add to make this film more of a glorified TV episode. Of course, the battle scenes won’t have the same effect on the small screen, but 80 minutes? At least give me a double bill! Some of the animation also didn’t work for me. The film makes extensive use of CGI animation, and it really sticks out like a sore thumb. Many of the figures clunk around the screen like bobble-headed polygons from a 90s computer game cut-scene. It also feels like the CGI director and the drawn-animation director went for a “you do one scene, I’ll do the next” approach. The difference between the two is striking, giving the film a completely uneven visual feel.  

I’ll be honest; the film contains a lot of macho-bullshit. Women are relegated to supporting roles (classic dark ages, I guess), there is plenty of buckets-of-blood gore and painfully contrived attempts at human emotion. All this is layered with a thick coating of swaggering badassery, thanks mainly to Guts. I wanted more of the lone female warrior whose name escapes me, (and I’m not referring to her jarringly awkward and wholly unnecessary nude scene) she was definitely the most interesting character, maybe we‘ll be seeing her later. The film takes itself quite seriously, like it’s trying to be an animated Game of Thrones or something. But then, maybe it is more self aware than I’m giving it credit for. I mean, Japanese voice actors pronouncing names like Charlotte and Julius is pretty hilarious. I would have liked to have seen a bit more mystical junk though. Dragons, spells, that sort of thing. There was only really one battle with an evil monster, and it was a great scene. I hope that director Toshiyuki Kubooka has more in store for the sequels.

As I said, by the end of Berserk, I really was quite involved in the story. I was not expecting this at all, thinking it would be just a silly exercise in violence aimed at teenage boys. Of course, that’s exactly what it is… but the cliff-hanger that ended this movie is killing me, and I genuinely want to know what happens next! Sure, it’s mindless entertainment, and the characters and their animation have their weak spots, but it’s surprisingly well written. If the giant Warner Brothers logo that preceded the film is anything to go by, we can probably expect to see the rest of these movies in the west. And of course, as Madman was responsible for bringing us ReelAnime, they will no doubt do their damndest to bring them to Australia.

And so ends a bloody ripper ReelAnime, 4 great little movies direct from Japan. Melbournites make sure you catch WolfChildren; its stay has been extended at Cinema Nova, (where I just may see it for a third time, it’s that good) and where From up on Poppy Hill will be rejoining it later in the year.

MIFFburger #7: For Love's Sake

愛と誠 Takashi Miike, 2012

For Love’s Sake was the third and final Takashi Miike film that made the cut for MIFF 2012, and I can say that it was definitely the most outrageous. Something interesting about all three of his films selected for the festival this year is that they are all adaptations in some way. Ace Attorney was a video game adaptation, Hara Kiri was a remake, and For Love’s Sake is adapted from the 1970s manga series by Ikki Kajiwara, which has already seen a number of live action adaptations. Neither the manga nor the films have been released in the west, and had Miike not been attached to this most recent adaptation, I dare say we never would have seen this one either. And so, I went into this film not knowing anything other than what the program synopsis said, which was basically along the lines of violent, melodramatic musical. Sounds like fun to me.

Makoto (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a delinquent youth, a lone wolf constantly getting into rumbles with street gangs for no apparent reason, until a young girl named Ai (Emi Takei) takes it upon herself to reform him, also for no apparent reason (except maybe a crush). They are two kids from opposite sides of the tracks; a street kid and a private school bourgeois, and so begins their bizarre, song, dance and violence filled relationship.

This is not your conventional musical. The closest cinematic point of reference would probably be Bollywood, but even then, the musical side is much more developed and integral to the genre. The songs in For Love's Sake are employed mainly for providing theme songs for individual characters, and pretty much everyone does receive one, with the songs also functioning as welcome breaks from the film’s almost constant barrage of violence. More often than not however, the musical numbers in Love’s Sake feel a bit tacked on. Their contrived and self aware style is used mostly (and effectively) for laughs, rather than character/story development, and any chances for extravagant West Side Story style gang confrontation set pieces aren’t seized, with dance numbers consisting mostly of mostly awkward and stilted choreography. Even though we are a long way from Broadway, Miike does seem to have his own style of command over the musical genre. He leaves gaps between songs just long enough for you to forget that you’re watching a musical and then drops one on your head, and also pokes fun at musical conventions by altering the surroundings of the singing characters to destroy their presumed utopian musical environment when they, and we, are least expecting it.

Just like in Ace Attorney, Miike has done a great job of transposing cartoon characters into a live action world. The characters in For Love’s Sake are delightfully one dimensional, consumed by their individual goals and bizarre hang ups that Miike never feels obligated to explain. Characters flip out, change their ways, lose hope and start fights all at the drop of an emotional hat, again taking the musical from its origins into twisted new locations. The story is set in the 70s, but I do wish a bit more was done with the costumes (granted, most of them are school uniforms) and I still think that the colour correction, giving everything slightly a more golden look is a bit of a cheat’s way out. But the sets are unbelievable, particularly the Hanazono Trade School, a post apocalyptic wasteland overrun by gangs that looks like something out of Akira. The film’s focus on youth gangs is also very 70s. The inclusion of girl gangs and female bosses is a staple of Japanese cinema, particularly the Sukeban and Terrifying Girls High School series of exploitation films of the 70s. Outrageous antics and violence are the order of the day, with a wide range of funny gang members, each with their own gimmick or trademark, yet all who have no qualms with beating the absolute shit out of anyone, or even each other.

The film’s excessive violence is completely cartoonish in nature. Makoto takes a beating no man could withstand, yet the film makes it clear that we are in a cartoon world, removing the violence of any real consequence or weight, enabling it to work on a purely comedic and un-PC level. There’s nothing quite as refreshing as a film with a bit of girl bashing is there? 70s exploitation fun (acid face burning, girls bound and hung from the ceiling) is referenced, but never fully delivered, and the fight scenes really do get a bit boring, as does the meandering of the largely directionless characters, who are of course reunited at the end in classical musical denouement. The film is a wild pastiche of genres and conventions, and while it may not be wholly satisfying, Miike has definitely created a new and interesting postmodern riff on the classic musical.

The best thing is that, like so much of Miike’s work, the film doesn’t take itself too seriously. The characters are silly, the story is silly and the songs are silly. In fact, there may be too much silliness for the average viewer. But this movie is still good (silly) fun.

Silly.

Akira

アキラ Katsuhiro Otomo, (1988)

In Japan, anime is a multi billion dollar industry. The amount of films and TV series being produced, and those already in existence is so overwhelming it’s hard to know where to start, let alone sort the good from the bad. In Australia we receive a reasonable sized portion of this huge industry, with more and more anime films being screened and released locally, but it seems the majority remains in Japan for their domestic audiences. But every now and then, an anime film comes along that becomes an event. That takes the world by storm. That forces the world to take another look at Japanese animation and in some cases, shifts the world’s conceptions of the possibilities of animation in general.

Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira is one such film. Based on his epic manga series, Akira is an incredible vision of the future, whose place among similarly themed live-action Sci-fi works such as Blade Runner, Star Wars and The Matrix is well and truly assured. I realised this last night, when after a gap of who knows how many years, I revisited Akira at a special screening at the Astor Theatre. The story concerns a biker gang of delinquent youths who, after a run in with the government discover a secret operation researching the nurturing of psychic powers in humans through scientific experimentation, and a mysterious, messianic power named Akira

Up until now, I had only experienced Akira by way of DVD. Seeing it on the big screen for the first time was nothing short of a revelation. It was like seeing it for the first time all over again; in fact, it was better. I enjoyed it more than I ever had before. Although, I still feel I appreciate the film’s cultural importance and subsequent influence more than the film itself, as I know that there are many more die-hard fans all over the world that helped Akira receive its title of ‘cult film’. It’s the kind of movie I can watch only every now and then, purely because it’s so damn intense. From the minute the movie starts, right up until the closing credits, we are hardly given a minute to breathe and take stock, as we are thrust into the sprawling metropolis of Neo-Tokyo. A bleak city seemingly plagued by perpetual night.

The film is overflowing with visceral energy. We are subject to a near constant barrage of violence, explosions, and screaming. In addition to this, many nightmarish scenes of hallucination and mutation, in particular, the film’s now famous climax, take the film into more unsettling psychological areas, enabled and conveyed visually through the boundary pushing animation and strong unwavering direction of Otomo. Even the motorbike chases are framed and conveyed in such a dynamic style and are imbued with such a sense of weight, that they become truly exhilarating. The film’s soundtrack, performed by Geinoh Yamashirogumi, perfectly incorporates primal, driving rhythms and even traditional Japanese instruments, while twisting them into an aural feast of a futuristic soundtrack, perfectly complementing Otomo’s stunning aesthetic.

I seem to have just barely touched on the plot of the film, focusing instead on its style and direction. I think the plot is the one place this film falls a bit short, as it progresses so quickly and frantically, I personally would have preferred a bit less screaming and a bit more story background. Then again, most of the context is conveyed visually or through interesting inclusions such as the “Old town” section of Tokyo or the upcoming Olympic Games. And considering it was adapted from a 2000+ page manga, it is quite an achievement. This film is an absolute must for anyone with an interest in animation, as it remains a touchstone of the medium and Japanese cinema in general, the influence of which is still felt today both in Japan and beyond. After seeing it on the big screen I have become convinced that this is the ultimate way to experience it in all its overwhelming glory, so if you are able, seeing it at a cinema is definitely worth it.