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| From https://media.senscritique.com/media/ 000013231740/source_big/Mayoiga.jpg |
Director: Tsutomu Mizushima
Screenplay: Mari Okada
Voice Cast: Kōdai Sakai as
Mitsumune; Ai Kakuma as Lovepon; Ayaka Shimizu as Maimai; Hiromi Igarashi as
Lion; Kaoru Sakura as Koharun; Konomi Tada as Nanko; Kosuke Miyoshi as Jack;
Taku Yashiro as Hayato; Tatsuhisa Suzuki as Valkana; Yoshiaki Hasegawa as Yura
Mikage; Yuka Aisaka as Masaki
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
[Full Spoilers Throughout]
What an odd viewing experience The Lost Village turned out to be. Who
was meant to be this show's target audience, and how did it end up like this? What
immediately stands out, and I'll not be ambivalent about giving away spoilers
or the fact The Lost Village is a
perplexing creation I've had to rewrite the review of over and over again, is that
unless this was meant
to be funny, the result is a car crash. If it is funny, there are major
flaws but it gleefully jumps on this horror premise and takes it to surreal
levels.
On paper, this takes twelve
episodes to tell the viewer not to try to bury their head in the sand or run
away from their worst fears, which is not a bad message to retell in the
slightest, but we get to this in the most prolonged and confused of ways in
execution. Even though I came into the
series fully aware of its reputation, I don't exactly know where to start,
especially when it's a horror series where out of an entire busload of cast, it's
a story where no one actually dies, which is also not necessarily a bad thing.
It is also however a premise that can be whittled down to people going to the
titular village, shouting at each other, running around, some feeling sleepy,
and some leaving like it was just a holiday in the countryside.
Probably of note is that the
director is Tsutomu Mizushima, who
has gained popular hits like Prison
School (2015) over the 2010s, but is also infamously the director of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-Chan (2005-7)
and Magical Witch Punie-chan (2006),
the most misanthropic director I have seen in terms of weirdness. Also from his
work on horror series like Another
(2012), he is someone whose take on horror anime is probably why The Lost Village's tone is as it is, a
man whose taste in extremity means subtly is lost1.
The other figure involved however
is the main screenwriter Mari Okada,
who is very significant and the titan whose now got The Lost Village in her CV. There are tragically still not many
women in prominent roles in the anime industry, but Okada is now becoming a brand name, a prolific screenwriter who has
even directed an anime herself, the theatrical film Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms (2018). Her output as a
screenwriter however is long, which means that for every work that succeeded,
even just series composition for Lupin
the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012) for example, she now has the
double edged sword of being a very busy person who works a lot and having to
juggle the quality. I can see an idiosyncratic voice is behind this, one trying
for something brave, but the project clearly got beyond everyone or, if you
view it as a comedic gem, someone got the idea to be as absurd as possible.
Immediately, even before I get to
the plot synopsis, there are excessively too many characters as we're
introduced to an entire bus of them, individuals who wish to leave society on a
mystery trip to a village that doesn't exist on the Japanese map. The Lost Village, technically in the
horror category, is also a Lord of the
Flies allegory, William Golding's novel
about a group of school children stuck on an island whose fears and prejudices
cause them to turn on each other; here, with adults and teenagers, the pressure
exerted on this bus load of figures causes them to become paranoid, openly
hysterical, and start witch hunts on certain members.
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| From https://manga.tokyo/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/05_01.jpg |
The most prominent figures to keep track of are Mitsumune, a shy young male looking to find himself, Hayato who is another male who is very defensive of Mitsumune and believes his "friend" should just follow his opinions, and Masaki who is a mysterious young woman Mitsumune likes and becomes the target of the witch hunting when her connection to the village is expanded upon. Others are stereotypes - the plump guy more interested in food, the voluptuous woman in high heels (who is bafflingly meant to be nineteen), the bespectacled former salary man whose calm attitude is exposed as hiding a neurotic desire others around among others. Then there are the misfits and oddballs, who if anything are the only really interesting thing at hand, as even if this was a comedy is a show undermined by too many bland figures you don't care for, when these eccentrics around the edges are more compelling. Two gun otaku, male and female, who are obsessed with fire arms and making replicas; a sleazy wannabe rapper whose disappearance and return just reveals more sleaze unintentionally; a middle aged grumpy bus driver whose regrets over a late daughter do stab at drama and gets puked on in the first episode; a teenage medium named Lion who says she isn't a medium and eventually buddies up with a female sleuth in the group; a guy dressed as a pirate, including eye patch, the personification of online videogame/web forum ego with delusions of grandeur, and Lovepon.
Oh Lovepon, you are the
unexpected symbolic centre of this show's issues and quirks, worthy of your
entire paragraph despite being merely a hand drawn animation voiced by Ai Kakuma. To describe The Lost Village to an outsider who
wants to know what this is like, just show clips of this female character whose
voice actress had to do her earnest to scream "Execute!" over and
over again in most if not all the episodes whilst from the get-go. A character,
in the bus, being visibly disturbed when she realises various execution
techniques just from the first episode despite no one batting an eyelid, a
terrible depiction of mental trauma which could come off as tasteless to make light
of considering her back-story is actually quite sad, her father figure a
corrupt Buddhist priest who beat her mother and tormented Lovepon until she became
fixated on causing suffering to others.
The character is so over-the-top
however that I not only feel guilty in this writing, but also will instate the "Lovepon Award for the Most Over-the-Top and
Bizarre Anime Character" after her next
time I do one of my indulgent fake award shows. Thought was put into this
character which failed in execution, to forgive the pun, thus feeling like the
apt metaphor for the whole production. Reading Crunchyroll comments on episodes of the show, where viewers cruelly
wished this fictitious character was bumped off sooner rather than later, just
added to this bugnuts and failed depiction of psychological trauma I became
obsessed in from how ridiculous it. The character even makes a joke about
"a-gore-arable" in the final episode, this the character who has her
voice actress screaming like a mad person with conviction, thus making these
type of characterisations throughout the series more curious in hindsight, like
having sympathy for a female gun otaku tormented by a hornet's nest by bullies
as a kid but still using cat puns (in the script's odd script quirks) even at serious
moments. A character like Lovepon is glorious in a bubble in a way only I could
appreciate; if someone was like this in real life, I'd want to give her a hug
and make sure she was okay out of empathy even if I might be stabbed in the
process.
This sense of oddness is
prevalent even in structure. There are very clear flaws, which even the show's
defenders should be aware of, in that the pacing over twelve episodes is a
mess. But in the middle of this is a show that has many curiosities, not
forgetting the CGI bus that can abruptly teleport and nearly run over cast
members as a memorable figure. For a show about overcoming psychological
trauma, it is literalised as monsters depicted in (somewhat jarring) computer
animation too, which changes the tone considerably after the initial one over
the first episodes. There are too many characters, so many are ignored or
barely dealt with in terms of their back stories, but the introduction of the
monsters adds further complications in how to register the series. Some saddle
the line fully between creepiness and absurdity - the lead Mitsumune traumatised
by the death of her older brother and how her mother made him the brother, as
depicted by a creepy hybrid of said brother and a plush penguin toy he had. Then
there's a literal boob - a silicon implant, but not a trauma about sex, but the
male gun otaku who had one placed in the top of his head to meet a height limit
for a military group, which is never resolved and is as ridiculous as it
sounds. Or a killer train.
It all builds to a conundrum of The Lost Village where it strives for
complexity with (unintentional?) absurdity, but undercuts itself with many
clear issues in the storytelling. I also suspect, as mentioned, the production
was rushed; the first episodes drip feed only tiny amounts of what is to take
place, merely paranoia brewing among the central group only to eventually
introduce monsters. From then on, you get various character contradictions,
things which don't make sense and people forgetting someone tried to drown them1,
which may have worked as deliberately funny if there weren't so many pointless
characters whose only jokes are stereotypes like being overweight, lazy etc. This
becomes worse when the middle and final episodes hurdle along to just
explaining the exposition and messily concluding with most of the cast left unresolved
in their stories. Hell, one episode even ends with Masaki tied to a stake,
about to confess her back-story, only for the show to abruptly cut to the end
credits, as if The Lost Village is
now toying with its audience, a potential joke which is undercut by the show
never really playing to these kinds of games before and after.
If it any good? Who knows, as it's
too unpredictable what the purpose of the series was, too many potential
theories which have made this review a mess to eventually put together. Its
compelling in a way I find it anime horror where it's unpredicatable, but it
was also an utter chore to sit through which probably a bigger damning comment.
It's definitely not worth many to see unless they, like me, wanted to see what
the fuss was all about or can appreciate the "humour"; between how
generic it was in aesthetic and production, to the convoluted plotting, this is
the kind of anime that most would forget even if it was so bad it was good,
never broadly absurd in spite of being the show where someone runs in fear from
a giant train monster. Taking as long as I did to view the series didn't help,
but this is as much the danger of skimming these titles which are stuck, like
phantoms themselves, on streaming sites which can take far more time to sit
through than marathoning episodes on second hand DVDs. Definitely there was a
lot to find amusing, especially when it racks up the absurdities by the middle
half, but even that was eventually undercut by increasingly perplexing plot and
creative choices.
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| From https://geekorner.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/mayoiga- episode-1-13-44_2016-04-02_15-32-12.jpg |
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1) He's also someone who finds
the difference between "scariness" and "funniness" not very
big, as talked of in this interview, worthy of baring in mind.
2) Which is made more bizarre
when the victim is more concerned he can see the perpetrator's bra through her
wet shirt whilst being drowned.
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