 |
| From http://altairandvega.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/kumashock.png |
Director: Kunihiko Ikuhara
Screenplay: Kunihiko Ikuhara and Takayo
Ikami
Voice Cast: Miho Arakawa (as
Ginko Yurishiro); Nozomi Yamane (as Kureha Tsubaki); Yoshiko Ikuta (as Ruru
Yurigazaki); Ami Koshimizu (as Konomi Yurikawa); Aoi Yūki (as Mitsuko
Yurizono); Aya Endo (as Reia Tsubaki); Junichi Suwabe (as Life Sexy); Kazutomi
Yamamoto (as Life Beauty); Kikuko Inoue (as Yuri-Ka Hakonaka); Mariya Ise (as
Eriko Oniyama); Mitsuki Saiga (as Life Cool);
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Ironically my love of Kunihiko
Ikuhara as an anime director who can qualify as an auteur Ironically, this
love is entirely just from Mawaru
Penguindrum (2011) and now Yurikama Arashi, Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997) and his contributions to the Sailor Moon franchise, which he is the
most beloved for in general, difficult to access in the United Kingdom. Without
the weight of his work in either, the former his own fully formed break out
including the series and 1999 feature film, it's a love of his work growing
naturally through how he pushes the bar higher in television anime higher than
many.
It's blatantly pro-homophile in
theme, a moral fairytale where Ikuhara is
openly explicit in wanting to tackle negative portraits of lesbianism in
Japanese culture within a fairytale where bears have become sentient and eat
human beings, causing a wall to have to be erected between the two species. The
catch is that, unlike other fairytales, there are no male princes or that many
men either, every human onscreen female set within an all female school, and
almost every bear female too. (Even with the few male bear characters as well,
only two of than are actually voiced by male actors as well). This is also a
world very much like Beauty and the Beast where, with protagonist Kureha in the
middle, most of the human girls around her are part of a mob mentality called
the Invisible Storm, a group who ostracise and punish "non-invisible"
girls who have individuality out of the herd. The bears themselves, even those
wanting to merely devour Kureha, are far more complicated, disguised as humans
and having their own emotion strifes to deal with. Two of them, Ginko and Ruru,
are in fact at the school for more moral and meaningful reason, Ginko connected
to Kureha with Ruru there to help her whilst openly admitting her love for her
fellow bear.
Its exceptionally obvious in
message, a fairytale that the creator openly indulges in the tropes of
including fairytales within fairytales, but how this message is shown is done
with so much open imaginative and metaphorical tropes to a stunning extent that
it gets away with the obviousness easily. Bizarrely, the other tale that Yurikama evokes the most for me is Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, her 1979 short
story compilation, and especially Neil
Jordan's 1984 film adaptation The
Company of Wolves, imaging the beast people (werewolves and here girl
bears) being representations of people freed from the puritanical confines of
society and sexuality. They at least are
far more complex and fascinating against the faceless normals, their plot
strands having more emotional affect when Ikuhara
plays a scene fully seriously. How Ikuhara
adapts this idea is completely his own, a cute and fluffy tone even when
he's dealing with serious subject matter, managing to even make the scenes of
bears eating characters completely gore-less and still perversely cute. Considering
he managed to tackled even more serious subject in Mawaru Penguindrum, (affectively a metaphor on the long lasting
effect of the 1995 Sarin gas attacks on
the Tokyo subways a decade and more after), with success, so he's fully able
here in this intentional small scale narrative to play up the cuteness and
eccentric humour without any problems in the tone and still playing the drama
seriously when vitally necessary.
Openly drawing on obvious
symbolism (fairytale castles, bear princesses, the sexual and cultural
symbolism of lilies etc.) and a director with a knack for combining it with the
modern with incredible ease (as is seen in how, even next to other current day
anime, he's so good at using technology like mobile phones here to drive the
narrative along), he's able to make the story work because the style takes the
blatant and gives it a sumptuous beauty. Not only is the show beautiful to look
at but he has no qualms with the show taking on a fully dream-like tone for
scenes. Even if the characters stay on template in animation, the bear girls in
beast form are literal anthropomorphic bears with more cartoonish movements,
compared to the penguins in Mawaru
who can play out slapstick and absurity whilst still, miraculously, fitting
into tragic scenes too. The world around them is just as capable of distorting
instead to represent psychological and fantastical states, of stairways into
jury courts between worlds and goals to happiness, not to mention the creator's
penchant for just openly weird humour - thus never imagining a scene such as a
snowy war terrain covered in the bodies of cute bears on the ground with
rifles, but having such a scene on display. That he repeats symbols and motifs
constantly helps in this, allowing it to all start to interconnect. This
animated playfulness goes to the music as well, standard J-pop for this type of
anime show but actually good music, legitimately affecting for scenes but also,
with its frank Sapphic and beast imagery in the lyrics, having a subversive
side to its candy coated electronic beats.
 |
| From http://www.bostonbastardbrigade.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/ 01/yuri-kuma.mp4_snapshot_00.48_2014.12.25_09.45.41.jpg |
The subversive side is very much also why Yurikama Arashi succeeds. Even if its moral point of tolerance is as subtle as a sledgehammer, the really progressive aspect of the series is its completely relaxed attitude to sexuality and how upfront it is in depicting it. Without explicitly drawing characters in appearance, it gets away with artistic but explicit nudity without qualm, and the sexuality is so prominent, including gratuitous symbolism involving flowers and honey, that its even in the opening credit animation for the first episode. Its constant and gladly viewed through both humour, fantasies played for laughs that the characters themselves have for others, to seriously in romantic moments. The frankness is startling, whilst not "explicit" or even ecchi softcore, celebrating lesbianism the depiction of lesbianism casual to a form that's beyond progressive but amazing. Even within the Invisible Storm, relationships between women, between friends, between classmates, even between teacher and student, are numerous, in terms of romance, jealousy, power play and entire spectrums of drama.
The almost entire lack of men in
the cast turns the world shown into an almost all-matriarchal one, going as far
with cheeky humour to have a "yuri" supermarket with magazines with
two women cuddling on the cover with the tagline of how to win a lover over
through her stomach, in the type of feminine reality where the cops and even
the soldiers in the war that took place between bears and humans being all
female. Even in terms of the bears, while there is a boy bear character
important to Ruru's back-story, the only ones with real prominence (and only
two of them audibly voiced by male actors) are the trio of bear judges, those
who live within the wall who judge the humans and bears alike, allowing them to
eat girls, to become human, to be judged for their desires and grant their
wishes. Even they however, as a Greek chorus, have to step aside in the end of
the series and let the female characters conclude their tales.
After a long wait from Mawaru Penguindrum, waiting for a new Kunihiko Ikuhara project is an event for
me as much as it is waiting for either Hiroyuki
Imaishi or Masaaki Yuasa, which
shows how he's stood out so much from the crowd as a one-off auteur whose work
has mainly consisted, like the other two mentioned, in television. It's one
thing to be like a Mamoru Oshii or
the late Satoshi Kon, careers mainly
been built from theatrical films, but having an auteurist style mainly from
anime television is a unique cap to wear in itself. In all three cases, the
execution and tangents they add to well worn stories is why they succeed as
they do, all three idiosyncratic in their styles even when other directors and
writers create individual episodes within the projects. All three naturally as
well appeal to my love for the surreal and openly fantastical out of animation
even when they tackle serious subject matter. If Imaishi is hyperactive, and Yuasa
is eccentric and philosophical, Ikuhara is
a flamboyant pop surrealist who's sincere even when proudly camp at points, Yurikama a pretty story whose theme is
aptly described in its English title translation as 'Lily Bear Storm', a blast
of eroticism and fairytale whose ending is both sad but also triumphant,
carrying you alongside fully.
 |
| From https://rayoutblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/ykadesire.jpg |
No comments:
Post a Comment