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canmom · 2 years ago

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Animation Night 140: Kerberos, cont.

Hi friends welcome back to Animation Night! It’s the night where I screen animations on Twitch and sometimes you come and watch them.

Last week we shone the Animation Night beam on Hiroyuki Okiura, and I was surprised by how great his film A Letter to Momo turned out to be. The plan had been that on Tuesday I’d bring back the other film night, ‘Toku Tuesday’, in order to watch Mamoru Oshii’s Kerberos film trilogy, leading into the third entry being Hiroyuki Okiura’s film Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade. I did that, but I had to end the night early after only one film. So, it’s rolled over into Animation Night this week.

But that’s an opportunity in a way, because this gives us a chance to dig up a fascinating Oshii obscurity. More on that in a minute!

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That film we watched on Tuesday was The Red Spectacles, and it was fucking fascinating. Going into Kerberos by reputation I expected some kind of philosophical meditation on power and an alternate history setting, but this was something a lot stranger. I wrote a more detailed commentary on it here, but to my reading, this surreal film is essentially there to probe the warped fantasy of a self-important fascist who’s terrified of betrayal, when he’s much more of a traitor than any of them. However, as an introduction, it doesn’t really tell much more about the broader Kerberos story, beyond the fanaticism of the organisation’s members.

The actual event we learn about is: Kōichi, high-ranking member of the heavily armed paramilitary police organisation ‘Kerberos’, slunk away with a suit of power armour when the state dissolved the organisation. Later he came back to Japan, and was promptly killed.

It’s followed by prequel StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cop, which is a more literal film, following another Kerberos member who goes looking for Kōichi in the Phillipines. Although this is not at all animated, I am going to show it tonight regardless. We’ve shown an animated OVA on Toku Tuesday before, you can allow me one (1) live action film, as context for one of the most renowned animated films of the 90s. I think it’s worth showing what Okiura was building on when we get to his film, particularly since this film establishes even more the gruesome image of Kerberos suits in action.

About Jin-Roh, I don’t have much more to say beyond what I said last week, so here’s a slightly revised version of that.

The person chosen to be the director of Jin-Roh in Oshii’s stead ended up being 'allergic to computers’ Okiura, judged the most promising of the studio’s younger generation and eager to direct a serious drama film. Though Oshii wrote the original script, Okiura made many decisions that Oshii wouldn’t; his take on the story put a bit more emphasis on the romantic relationship, and he ambitiously decided to do a film with no CGI whatsoever at a sprawling 80,000 cels, punishingly realistic designs and understated action, and all sorts of complex technical crowd shots.

By all accounts, he succeeded. His film is heavily in an Oshii idiom: very slow and contemplative, morally ambiguous, set in the near future, about cops. Its story tells of a member of a counter-terrorism unit in the context of widespread protests. Power-armoured Kerberos are sent as ‘counter-terrorists’ to suppress the protests, which becomes a massacre as they turn their machine guns on the crowd. The story follows Kazuki Fuse, who decides not to gun a girl only for her to set off a suicide bomb, disgracing him in the eyes of his unit.

Later, wracked with guilt, he encounters a woman called Kei who claims to be the suicide bomber’s sister. Kazuki makes a connection with her, not knowing at first that she is also a bomb courier like the girl he shot, or the broader context of infighting between Kerberos and their rival Public Security that brought them together.

To spoil the ending, Kazuki becomes increasingly attracted to Kei, while dreaming feverishly about shooting her in the sewers as he was supposed to shoot the suicide bomber. He and Kei become involved with a conspiracy within Kerberos, the ‘Wolf Brigade’, which succeeds in assassinating their enemies in Public Security - but then at the end Kazuki is ordered to shoot Kei and he declares himself a ‘wolf’, dedicated himself wholly to Kerberos.

I found this rather academic video on Youtube, which talk in some detail about how the film invokes the metaphor of Little Red Riding Hood in characterising Kazuki:

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To Pause and Select’s telling, Jin-Roh is at pains to complicate the simple wolf/victim dichotomy of Little Red Riding Hood. From a ‘having faced lines of cops at a street protest’ POV, I’m not sure how that will come across really, and I think it’s possible I’ll reach some kind of divergent reading.

The background to Jin-Roh is the social movements I’ve talked about occasionally on here before. To put it briefly, Oshii (much like Oshima, and to a certain extent Miyazaki) was apparently involved the second wave Anpo protests in 1970 against renewing the treaty that allows the US to maintain bases on Japanese soil. In the 50s, the US had used Japanese infrastructure to carry out the Korean War, to significant profit of many people in Japan, and their military presence was pretty significance. The movement - popular in particular with leftist students - wanted Japan to have a more neutral role in the Cold War. The government’s efforts to push through a continuation of the treaty led to major clashes with police in the 60s; a second wave of protests in 1970, following the student riots of 68-69, were less disruptive and completely ignored by the government.

As for Oshii’s role in all this? I’m not sure; I downloaded the book Stray Dog of Anime that Wikipedia uses as a source and it’s kind of vague.

In any case, the ‘60s movement was a major failure, and the student movement fell into infighting and recrimination that later gave rise to the New Left. (This is portrayed in films like Ōshima’s Night and Fog in Japan). In the aftermath, the Japanese left took some weird turns, like Yodogō Hijacking Incident, and tragic ones, like the Asama-Sansō Incident (watch as Bryn reels off her list of ‘weird things that happened in Japan in the 70s’ again...); it otherwise became increasingly sidelined during the economic boom of the 80s. You can see the shadow of all these events in films like Akira (AN34); by the time of Jin-Roh, they were now distant history.

Okiura, born 1966, would have been way too young to have seen these protests. The protest scenes, drawn by (who else could it be?) Toshiyuki Inoue, are nevertheless striking encapsulations of the tension of a crowd facing down a police line. As Pause and Select’s video noted, the police are actually on the back foot here, cowering behind their shields under a barrage of projectiles. In the world of Jin-Roh, the conflict has escalated considerably beyond the Anpo protests, to the edge of civil war. So they decide to escalate to military levels of force.

The colour palette of Jin-Roh is very muted, greys and browns everywhere; the acting is generally kept very grounded, the proportions of the characters are only barely stylised. Very ‘Production I.G.’ in other words. That kind of approach raises the question of ‘why not do it in live action’. For someone who loves traditional animation for its own sake the look of this film is answer in itself, but you could answer that in various ways beyond simple practicality (it is difficult to draw an enormous crowd but expensive to close off a street and shoot a scene involving a large crowd and pyrotechnics). One might be that later there was a Korean live action remake of Jin-Roh and it wasn’t very good. But why? Perhaps it is that there is a certain abstracting effect of animation that turns its characters, no matter how realist they are drawn, into symbols, and this is a story that constantly compares its characters to archetypes in a fable. I might have more of an answer later.

Anyway, I mentioned another Oshii oddity, and that is Tachiguishi-Retsuden (立喰師列伝); you could kind of break down that title very literally as ‘Biographies of the Stand-up Eating Masters’, but the official English translation is Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters. If you remember those noodle bar scenes in The Red Spectacles, this expands on that concept, presenting a kind of mockumentary alternate history of Japan that focuses on various grifters who exploit these noodle bars. Bizarre concept, where the hell did that come from? It actually began in one of Oshii’s episodes of Urusei Yatsura, whose characters were adopted into the radio drama that preceded The Red Spectacles.

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Why on Animation Night? Well, the technique used is a strange blend of live action and animation, described thus:

Tachiguishi-Retsuden is a documentary-style animation film created with an innovative technique named "Superlivemation". Oshii first experimented this flat 3D technique in his 2001 live-action feature Avalon as a visual effect for explosions in Ash's game, then he developed it, the following years, in both the MiniPato short films and PlayStation Portable game. Characters have a tiny body and an oversized head which makes them look funny. They are animated like paper dolls (ペープサート人形, papsart ningyou) and are evolving in a pictures based environment in the likes of the JibJab Brothers' (Gregg and Evan Spiridellis) musical comedy cartoons, e.g. 2・0・5 Year In Review, although Mamoru Oshii stated his own work was a "serious comedy".

The Superlivemation consists of digitally processing then animating, paper puppet theater-style characters and locations based on real photographs. In Tachiguishi-Retsuden more than 30,000 photographs were processed 20 times, to produce the final composite to be animated.

The director describes his new animation film as set between "a simple animation with extremely intense information" and "a live-action movie with extremely limited information".

Avalon (TT#39) used the ‘superlivemation’ technique (which could be considered something like a variant on ‘pixilation’) for deaths in its videogame world; upon dying, a character would be replaced with a 2D composite before suffering a disintegrating effect. An entire movie shot with this technique sounds absolutely deranged, hopefully in a good way. I honestly have no idea how this one will play out; there may be a reason it’s almost unknown. But if Animation Night has one absolutely necessary element, it’s plumbing the archives for something fucked up and weird, so I’ll tell you what I make of it.

And that’s enough writing, let’s get going. With three films to get through, I’m gonna go live around now - I know it’s a lot earlier than it has been lately! I hope you feel like joining me; we’ll be watching StrayDog, Jin-Roh and then Tachiguishi-Retsuden in that order.

Hop in over at twitch.tv/canmom, mobies start in about 30 minutes (20:00 UK time)!

#animation night #mamoru oshii #kerberos #jin-roh #hiroyuki okiura

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mechanicalinertia · 2 years ago

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STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction: DeadboltDon's Silent Rift

You know how last year, I lost my mind over Most of The Way To The Moon? Reader, I thought that such perfect Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction could never be written in our fallen day and age, that the really good shit was all in the nineties and the aughts, never to return in this decade. That I would have to be a lone soldier writing this stuff. I was wrong, suffice to say.

And now, I have been proven wrong thrice. Both by this fanfiction, and then by CodyLabs' Once Upon A Midnight Launch. As I begin the process of spinning up a new, better fanfiction project, this fact fills me with boundless joy, especially because it gives me something to review that isn't old or weird or horny or Yours Truly 2032.

And it came out of nowhere, too! Only a week old as of the time of writing, and from a user who I knew liked BGC on reddit, DeadboltDon just dropped this puppy, all 50K words or so of it, on us like that. I just found it, just binge-read it, and I am going to tell you, right now, it's time for you to read it too.

Okay, so here's the setup: Megatokyo is a city whose outer districts are absolutely fucking overrun with trash. Waste from electronics, vehicles, Boomers. Even if those wastelands are postapocalyptic nightmares where only the insane and Moorlockish live, that's still a whole lot of waste, a whole lot of things that are, well... one character in this fic calls it 'ungarbage'.

The main cast are scavengers - an ex ADP-jockey, an old guy, an ex-Outrider... and Lou. Yeah. Lou. The Sexaroid we all thought died in Moonlight Rambler. Weird, huh?

Well, things start creepy, that's for sure, when the team brings in the arm off a Knight Saber hardsuit, and then decide to bring it back, because the Sabers to them are living legends, nightmares who'll happily kill them to retrieve said piece. And the Sabers do show up. Sort of. Black hardsuits with silent flechette-throwing crossbows, something that we know aren't the Sabers, can't be, but who are they, then?

Well, Lou and company wind up in ADP custody, only for the Sabers to break them out in an unhinged rampage through the upper parts of the HQ, where Jeena Malso is an absolute fucking unit, and then a horror-movie like scrabble through vaults loaded with dead Boomers coming to life. Things get... dicey. Not to spoil anything, but the people behind the black hardsuits are a) unexpected villains and b) fucking terrifying because of that. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time for the final fight, I'll say that much.

Oh, and there are references! The WKUK's Sex Robot, various types of power armor stuck in the ADP's prototype division (eg. the Kerberos Panzer Cop suit), and a bunch of quotes from an UrbEx handbook. They're welcome. They energize the fic even more than it already crackles with violent life.

I wish I had more to say about this fic, beyond how much you should go and read it right this instant. Instead, I'll say this much: I think we're in the middle of a minor paradigm shift for Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction. My own work, Cody's work, and so on. I might be the guy who keeps coming back to this fandom, maybe most people are writing one-offs, but the fact that a superfan like myself can expect quality work like this as a baseline for BGC fanfic makes me think the future's bright... especially since I know of more than a few people who are working on new fics as we speak.

I say this with the utmost love: If you have a Story Of The Knight Sabers you want to bring to the internet, don't hold back. Give us everything you've got. Now is the time to rise together, to fill up the silent rift with light and noise.

#stmpd reviews bgc fanfic #bubblegum crisis #bgc #fanfic rec #fanfiction

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