Anime (pt. III)
Wicked City
Memories
Greetings and arigato gozaimasu for stopping by, my ostentatious otakus. The state of the world still feels uneasy, uncertain, unnerving, etc., but I am living in spite of it all, trying to reclaim my sense of youth in the month leading up to my 30th birthday, and at the very least, need to survive long enough to feel the weather change to Autumn (but who knows when that will be.) As always, art is my oasis during these frantic and fascistic times, and that’s often been the case for humanity, based off of last week’s salient silent film excursion. As always, I like to follow up my silent film double feature with an anime double feature, to showcase the evolutionary excellence of the medium of film, and all that we’ve proven to be capable of as creators, world-builders, and storytellers since the start of moving pictures. Similar to silent cinema, anime is not something I often gravitate toward. The snobs of both art forms are often quite rigid and intense, and I prefer not to engage too deeply, at the risk of saying the wrong thing or throwing the word “genre” around too liberally. Despite my slight aversion, though, I clearly get a curious, masochistic urge to dabble anyway, to expand my filmic palate and rebel against the stuffy, pretentious associations with these movie realms. I’ve conducted a more in-depth dive into anime in my previous double features, so I’ll spare you the history lesson and the majority of my novice-level analysis of these projects, but if you’ve clicked on this post and somehow have no idea what anime is, I will, at the very least, tell you that it is Japanese animation. In the near-century that anime has existed, though, it has obviously expanded beyond this simple definition, and has successfully broken through to markets and viewers well beyond Japan. Anime can be as wholesome as Pokémon or a Miyazaki movie, or as dark as Perfect Blue, Death Note, Attack on Titan, etc… Growing up with a sister who is obsessed with Japanese dolls, I feel like I know about all sorts of anime through osmosis, but if you were to ask a true anime nerd, I’m certain that they’d tell you I’ve barely scratched the surface—and I’m okay with that. Television anime especially is often dense and lengthy, with updates drawn out over years, barely keeping their voracious fans satiated. That’s why, if I enjoy watching any anime, it’s always in the form of feature films, which have more of a time constraint and an understanding to wrap up its story within the confines of its runtime(s.) So let’s explore two more pieces of vintage anime, both of which made lasting impacts, as far as this newb weeb can tell.
Up first is another iconic, highly-cinematic, neo-Tokyo-set action-drama-noir-gothic-horror that is almost too cool to function, this is Yoshiaki Kawajiri’s 1987 film Wicked City. Based on Black Guard, the first novel of the Wicked City series by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the film is the solo directorial debut of Yoshiaki Kawajiri, who also served as the character designer, storyboard artist, animation director, and a key animator. As with many anime that I’ve seen, Wicked City begins with some poetic narration to set the scene, and here we’re told, “Its body is armored in iron and concrete, its mind wrapped in computers and high technology—this is the city and time we’re living in. But most people ignore the unexplained and mysterious… There’s a vast and fearful world of darkness beyond our time and space, and I’m afraid I know all about it.” We’re then shown a cute little underground bar, where a man named Taki is enjoying a date with the gal he’s been seeing for the past few months. She is finally ready to go home with him, but when Taki does take her home, he awakes with her legs wrapped around his entire body, encasing him like a spider. She reveals herself to be an inhuman, arachnid-like demon with arms and legs that stretch 8 feet long and an orifice with spiky teeth, as she says through a sinister smile, “You’re of no use to me anymore” before trying to kill Taki.
He fights her off of him and the demon creature makes her escape, crawling down the side of the apartment building and into the darkness. The next day, Taki goes to his official day job as a salaryman at a tech company, with a pain in his groin and a receptionist telling him, “It looks like your playboy lifestyle has finally caught up to you.” He meets with the president of the company, and Taki’s true job is revealed. He is a member of the Black Guard: a secret agency created to protect humanity from the “Black World”, the neighboring dimension of demons that is only a wrinkle in time away. For centuries, a peace treaty between the Black World and the human world has been maintained to ensure relative harmony, with both sides of the continuum protected by their own special agents, and it is time for the peace treaty to be renewed. Several radical demon terrorists are trying to stop the re-signing of the peace treaty, so Taki has been tasked with guarding Giuseppe Mayart, a small, decrepit, 200-year-old mystic who is a signatory for the ratified treaty, and to ensure his safety, Taki has been partnered with an agent from the Black World. As Taki’s boss explains, “She’s very skilled and apparently good looking” but before Taki can spot her at the airport, he is attacked by two demons in suits. They also have giant, spiky teeth and creatively disturbing bodies that can contort and change on a whim, including wire-like tentacles that attempt to choke and rip apart Taki. Thankfully, he is saved by Makie, his new partner, who uses her laser-like demon nails to slice them into oblivion. While there are plenty of cool and creepy demon mechanics in this movie, nothing was more chic than those long, deadly, red nails. Taki thanks her for saving him, and also comments on her “otherworldly, perfect” beauty, but Makie is straight to business, and reminds Taki that they’re on a mission. After narrowly escaping another demon attack, Taki and Makie find Mr. Mayart, who is even smaller, stranger, and—you guessed it—more perverted than they expected. As they transport this important pervert to his safe house, Mr. Mayart explains how sex with a demon woman, though dangerous, is unlike any kind of human sex because the sensations of ecstasy are far greater in the demon realm. He says all of this while making eyes at Makie, who rightfully slaps him across the face. Makie and Taki try their best to keep the kooky Mr. Mayart confined in his room, but he desperately wants to party in Tokyo, pleading with them to at least take him to a massage parlor. For some, classically-anime reason, this creep is the only thing that can save the human world from the Black World, and when he goes missing, it’s up to Taki and Makie to protect non-demonic society—if their blossoming love for one another doesn’t get in the way. Wicked City, while predictably horny, was also uniquely bizarre. Some of the manifestations of demonism were cool, but a lot of it involved the same goopy, melty, hypersexualized style. Hayao Miyazaki was reportedly so impressed by Kazuo Oga’s art direction here that he hired Oga for My Neighbor Totoro, and, in general, this film has a sizable fan base—apparently an image of Taki firing a gun was used in prints for t-shirts made by Ripple Junction in the 90s. It’s kinda hard to articulate, because I was impressed by the artistry in Wicked City, but it also felt a bit… one note? My favorite kinds of anime, and films in general, are the ones that keep me guessing, and while I was drawn to some elements of this film, a lot of its narrative and visual elements felt overdone. At its best, it is a horror-action full of freaky demonic designs, slick action sequences, and the classic high-speed, neon-flecked, overexaggerated anime-adventuring that I appreciate. At its worst, it was tentacle hentai porn (redundant?) without much build-up, just classic Japanese male-gaze-ified sequences of the most empowered female character being raped and belittled and reduced to a TIRED-and-true caricature of wannabe-dominant-male fantasies. Call me a philistine, call me closed-minded, call me a Feminist killjoy bitch, but when it comes to the objectification of female bodies in Japanese animation, I feel like I’ve seen quite enough. Perhaps there was a greater message to be gleaned from this excessive exploitation, but if there was, it was lost in translation. I loved the aesthetic of Wicked City, and I didn’t mind the kind of corny writing (which I’m sure is rendered even cornier by its English dubbing), but I just found the rape-fantasy at the core of it to be highly unnecessary, and at this point in my anime education, highly derivative. It’s not like I had a ton of investment in the forced romantic subplot to this movie, but by making this undeniably strong, badass heroine into a victim halfway through just so that her mediocre every-man of a partner in demon-hunting can save her, just felt like a waste. In her book Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke, Susan J. Napier describes this film as having similar depictions of the female body as its contemporaries: objects to be “viewed, violated, tortured” while also being “awesomely powerful, almost unstoppable.” She credits the film’s more nuanced and artistic approach within this context, but cites the metamorphoses of the female Black World agents as the film’s ideas about female sexuality being limited to “an essentially conservative fantasy”, with the powerful women’s bodies being ultimately destroyed in “lengthy scenes of graphic violence.” And this is unfortunately pretty accurate. I feel betrayed whenever any kind of film invents an empowering female character only to use and abuse her in the most basic way possible, and that’s exactly what happened here. I love sexy movies, and I don’t even need the sex in movies to “mean” anything, but I ultimately found the heavy-handed horniness in this movie to be a distraction from its flimsy world-building and lack of solid lore-explaining. And I know this is an older film, but the objectification of the female form in anime is, at this point, hacky. In fact, apart from Studio Ghibli projects, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen an anime that didn’t feature a female character being hypersexualized, preyed upon, or abused—until I saw tonight’s second film.
Imagine my surprise when I turned on the next anime and I was not inundated with girlish moans and Heavy Metal-level boobage—this is the classic anime anthology from the mind of Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, the 1995 film Memories. With vignettes created by Kōji Morimoto (Magnetic Rose), Tensai Okamura (Stink Bomb), and Katsuhiro Otomo (Cannon Fodder), Memories is a groundbreaking and fascinating anime that impressed me beyond its lack of female objectification, but this detail did stand out to me. The first vignette, Magnetic Rose, transports us to the year 2092, where a scrappy crew of men aboard a deep space salvage freighter are interrupted mid-mission by distress signal coming from a gigantic space craft floating amongst a graveyard of other discarded debris. Two of the crew members board the massive ship and are greeted not with chrome and metal and wires, but with wood paneling, chandeliers, framed portraits, and other elegant details of a mansion stuck out in the middle of space. They discover that this vessel once belonged to a famous opera diva named Eva Friedel, who disappeared after the murder of her fiancé and fellow singer, Carlo. As they traverse this cavernous relic in search of whomever sent the distress signal, the two crew members begin having odd visions and memories, that appear to take on a physical presence. And if that weren’t unsettling enough, a spectre of Eva Friedel begins to glitch in and out of rooms, taunting, teasing, coaxing the men further into dangerous, deceptive dreams. The second vignette, Stink Bomb, is the most straightforward and silly of the three, as we meet a lab technician named Nobuo Tanaka who is suffering from the flu, then only makes matters worse when he takes an experimental medicine that ends up being a biological weapon. The third vignette, Cannon Fodder, is the most dystopian and avant-garde of the bunch, featuring a peculiar texture of animation that was almost reminiscent of Yellow Submarine, and a story that was instantly depressing but politically timeless. Animated to appear as one long take, Cannon Fodder catalogues the daily life of a young schoolboy; his father, who works as a lowly cannon-loader; and his mother, a munitions factory worker—all of whom reside in a dark, dirty, walled city that is perpetually at war, though we never see any evidence of who, exactly, they’re fighting. All three parts of this triptych present very unique stories within different, distinct, intricately-imagined animation styles, but the first vignette, Magnetic Rose, was the most effective and memorable to this critic. Perhaps this is because Magnetic Rose was written by Satoshi Kon, creator of Perfect Blue and Paprika, but there was actually such a well-rounded, thoroughly scary, and fascinating story here that properly delivered gothic horror—which slightly made up for the “gothic horror” that was promised in Wicked City. Memories is a stylistic and narrative marvel, and is truly unlike any anime or anthology I’ve ever seen, I just wish all of the stories had been as compelling as the first one—but I’m greedy like that! All in all, contrived pornographic elements aside, I was still impressed and entertained by tonight’s anime selections, as I often am. Well, that’s enough anime nerding for one sitting (or year) but thanks for letting me indulge in more manic mumbling about movies. Ta ta for now! ٩(＾◡＾)۶
