#145: The Island of Giant Insects (2020)

Director: Takeo Takahashi and Naoyuki Tatsuwa

Screenplay: Shigeru Morita

Based on the manga by Yasutaka Fujimi and Shu Hirose

Voice Cast: M.A.O as Mutsumi Oribe; Chiaki Takahashi as Mirei Jinno/Misuzu Jinno ; Marina Inoue as Inaho Enoki; Misato Fukuen as Ayumi Matsuoka; Momo Asakura as Mami Miura; Rika Tachibana as Chitose Naruse; Takuya Eguchi as Kazuhiko Kai; Wataru Komada as Atsushi Kamijō; Yurika Kubo as Ai Inō

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Immediately into the 2020s, we have ended up with this curiosity, which is still having its history written and is still managing to soldier on. The Island of Giant Insects has also been a production that has benefitted from the Kickstarter era, which does mean that unlike years before, there is a target audience who have been waiting for this over the time. The title, adaptive from a manga, is a throwback to old school OVA or at least the idea, as this is not remotely like those late eighties and nineties titles but firmly in the era where shows like High School DXD (2012) get sequel after sequel, the not-quite-porn sold on nudity.

From the first trailer it was obvious, in this tale of students stuck on a literal island of giant insects, the main selling point was the transgression of nubile female characters being molested by the likes of giant bees and grubs. Does it say something bad against others and me that we even watched this? I admit a fascinating with the perverse, but by this point, there is a very different nature to "adult" anime in the 2010s from decades earlier, where whilst the older titles can be far more problematic (like Violence Jack), there is something significantly more insidious with a lot of the OVA level work of today, which is more tame in some areas but questionable, as well as a sense they are being manufactured to a target audience knowingly rather than some of the madness you got in older work.

Initially the film existed as a 2019 release short, not a short film but twenty minutes in the middle of the finale feature length work, knee deep into the hell hole of giant butterflies who suck people dry and other content that appears in the final work, just to provide a taster. The film itself is also not the entire work, merely early chapters of the manga, following a group of stereotypes from a manipulative older girl who uses her physical allure to a macho jock, the movie taking a fifties American b-movie but adding a lot more animated nudity and greater nastiness. There are nicer characters in the fold, the heroine Mutsumi Oribe luckily an insect enthusiast who is really of use on an island like this, to the point that whilst others like those above are stupid enough to try to continually get her killed, one male character immediately comes sympathetic because early on he realises her importance and listens to her.

The inherent issue with The Island of Giant Insects is that it is a paradox, between being very scuzzy but also in a very generic way. That sentence might raise some questions, but I am a defender of ero-guro-nonsense and all the deviations in Japanese pop culture, which proves an issue as Giant Insects is both just lurid for the sake of lurid, but not as shocking as it thinks it is and pretty average, not exactly more than trashy and not standing out in creativity. I think, in honesty having seen images, that even if the manga was not great it might be a superior version as that has more of the perverse surrealism that I appreciate even in this type of work. Especially if you check pages of it online, the art style is more distant and the content is stranger in a ghoulish way. The author in particularly really likes insects bursting out of peoples' face, none of which you find in the adaptation but is at least more memorable.

Said insects, as well as being cheesy CGI figures, are not used with interest either. It says a lot that I can just refer to the franchise Earth Defence Force, one of the few video games I have played as an adult, which are cheesy b-movie games which are not the best in graphics and content (at least in the one I have played), but made up for it by having hordes of ants onscreen even if they were also cheesy computer effects. In terms of the premise, the creatures in this are barely used to their fullest, especially in light of all the strange and unique traits of the insect kingdom has, all in spite of there at least being one person or a few involved providing some entomology research. One exception, the one good scene in this entire project, is the horrifying and real life concept of the Leucochloridium, that of a parasitic worm that invades snails' eyestalks, imitate those organs, and mind control that poor host to be out in the open to be eaten by passing birds, all with the intention that the worms breed in the birds' stomachs.  Naturally imagining this happening to one unfortunate human character, as it does here with additional gibbering, is the one single moment Giant Insects ever gets around to the kind of gross, weird and wonderful side of Japanese horror that the likes of Junji Ito or many an ero-guro creation does. If only this had happened more in the story.

Clearly of more interest is nudity, as this film does not hide it, even finding an excuse for all the female cast to bathe nude after a giant tick incident. The odd thing about the production though is that the twenty minute piece was uncensored, whilst the feature length version censors some sex, and almost completely censors the violence, obscuring it off-screen or in black. It could sound more progressive, as someone who has always found it problematic violence was more acceptable than sex, but it comes to the point how this is not like the old lurid titles at all. Say what you want about old titles that painstakingly drew the most grotesque detail in gore and organs, but a lot of OVAs nowadays are tie-ins to existing titles and usually an excuse for more nudity only. The censorship also does not mean these works cannot get away with some problematic content and tones even for me.

None of these characters are particularly memorable, another title with insanely generic female character designs which is always the worse sign, with even the ero-guro aspects deeply problematic for myself. The only sexuality that is nothing to do with the grotesque aspects is not a lot. The evil manipulative woman is not exactly feminist, and the curious lesbian subplot about a timid idol singer who is secretly manipulative too, taking advantage of the female track star in the group being likely gay, is jarring both in that one of the two is not probably a good character either and that it never goes anywhere. There are also the unsavoury moments. It is one thing to have the erotic-grotesque aspect of female nudity against insects, but that should not be the only thing, for the sake of both gender politics and true transgression. Then there is the scene where the evil female character and the jock go full evil, to which a certain piece of dialogue about gagging another female character with something below the belt is completely implying what that suggests, only to thankfully not happen.

It is strange to think that, for all the problematic content, a work like The Legend of the Overfiend (censored or otherwise) can be more defensible for pieces of it than this, but there is always something more problematic for me about anime which follows the rules dictated, i.e. censoring nudity for television, but still sells the uncensored releases and still gets away with some gross content in the censored broadcast. Likewise, a title here that had no excuse being censored, thus not experiencing a full version of the premise promised, which also has questionable content really comes off as hypocritical and far more a concern than a fully offensive work which people are warned about. A scene like lingering on a female character wetting herself in fear in detail just before a butterfly gets her, as seen here, is something which feels a lot grosser to witness than any titillation or gore you could throw at myself.

The production itself is also incredibly bland, and not in the cheap and compelling type. Even the music is terrible metal guitar licks which are off-putting for a metal fan like myself, egregiously cheap when I have heard solidly put together music even in incredible cheap anime. There is even a sequence which is an extreme form of padding, just of the lead character walking down an endless corridor with this music playing, and of nothing more which is pretty offensive in how pointless it is. The real baffling nature of all this is that this has managed to soldier on. As a b-movie premise, I can think of many other ways this could have been made, imagined versions which is better, but this managed to get a feature length cut and has been acquiring funds for an English dub. A complete lack of memorability is found here, but with the aspects there that leaves one feeling dirty rather than provoked. It is strange as well that, due to the unforeseen circumstances about COVID-19, which has effected everything including production of entertainment industries like anime, The Island of Giant Insects could be by accident one of the most prominent titles we know of from the year. That is maddening and baffling at the same time.