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Director: Yoshiaki Kawajiri
Screenplay: Akinori Endo
Based on an Original
Idea
Voice Cast: Hiroya Ishimaru (as Shunsuke Sengoku);
Kaneto Shiozawa (as Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa); Tesshô Genda (as
Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru); Emi Shinohara (as Remi Masuda); Kyousei
Tsukui (as Versus); Mitsuko Horie (as Kyōko "Okyō" Jōnouchi); Norio
Wakamoto (as Juzo Hasegawa)
Viewed in Japanese
with English Subtitles
With this, Yoshiaki Kawajiri debuts on this blog, a director who had immense
cult fame in the West when works like Ninja
Scroll (1993) were released through companies like Manga Entertainment, a household name to the point he's been hired
on many US-Japanese co-productions such as
The Animatrix (2003) to Highlander:
The Search For Vengeance (2007). Unfortunately after 2008, though he works
on productions frequently, he's never been back in the director's seat and a
proposed sequel to Ninja Scroll is
merely a half-whispered rumour baring a 2012 teaser trailer. The sight of his
most well known protagonist fighting a female assassin who fights with razor
sharp origami cranes, riding a giant one, amongst other colourful faces causes
anime fans like myself to pine from his absence. Quite a few of the blog
entries so far have lamented the death of straight-of-video animation from
decades before, and it feels like he was a casualty of it. The drastic shift in
audience and marketable preferences has also more than likely caused problems -
whilst there are potential exceptions in his CV like Birdy The Mighty (1996), he was obsessed with adults, usually tough
and cocky men, in something very ultraviolent works which veered sometimes into
the transgressive and body horror related. Violent anime and anime which breaks
from the conventions of cute schoolgirls are still being made, but not as
frequently, and unfortunately this means something like Cyber City Oedo 808 feels like a creation from another time period.
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Cyber City Oedo is set in another dystopian city, Oedo (Tokyo),
thus enforcing how much anime staff were obsessed at one point, and still are,
with seeing the worse in their futures, were crime is rife and only a tougher,
unpredictable choice of law enforcement is required. It isn't just an obvious
metaphor now watching so many sci-fi anime like this but an entire spectrum
feeding off cyberpunk or at least the notion that everything with be noir-like
and blue hued in the future to match blog entry #7) Twilight of the Dark Master (1997). Riffing on Japanese history
where the anti-heroes all have jitte, a weapon Edo period police had as a
symbol of their position, it's been decided to reduce multiple life sentences
for certain criminals if they're willing to repay for their crimes through
catching other criminals. An explosive neck collar operated by their boss'
lighter à la Battle Royale (2000) is
the insurance policy in case any of them decide to try and con the superiors.
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Split into three parts, each
episode specifically follows one individual character. There's the cocky Shunsuke
Sengoku - pompadour, red coat, gets years onto his sentence because he doesn't follow
orders - a template character for Kawajiri
that especially predates Jubei in Ninja
Scroll. Rikiya "Goggles" Gabimaru - orange mohawk, slightly
older, a cyber hacker - a character you don't see in lead roles in anime
anymore. And Merrill "Benten" Yanagawa - originally a female
character design changed to a male bishonen, with long red nails and feminine
features, giant white hair, pursuant to white suits - who follows the archetype
of the quiet and wise individual who also uses monofilament wire straight from
the short story Johnny Mnemonic. The
plots for the three episodes are very basic, very action orientated with a lot
of various tones and genre tropes mashed together. The first follows an act of cyber
terrorism on a space scraper, a sky scraper so high its top pierces the
atmosphere into outer space, by someone presumed to be already dead. The second
follows a corrupt military project involving psychic test subjects in armoured
suits, as problematic an idea for police enforcement as an ED-209 would if the
test of targeting Goggles succeeds or not. The finale one deals with vampires,
not the last time Kawajiri mixes them
with sci-fi, as he'd make Vampire Hunter
D: Bloodlust (2000), and the beginning on the blog of the strange obsession
anime has with vampires being from outer space or being in science fiction
settings.
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A lot of whether Kawajiri appeals to you or not depends if you can accept the
inherent absurdity of his work even when he's deathly serious. Many of his
creations adaptations, are about men fighting other men with henchmen with
elaborate physical differences or weapons, from a man with a bee hive growing
out of his back or the various body horror content of Wicked City (1987). The
stack has to be put up against the lead, and for Kawajiri this includes setting
off a series of strange and colourful antagonists against them. Almost every Kawajiri protagonist,
including all three here, have to be impaled in the gut by a villain, and many
have to a moment where they overcome a task battered and almost dead. Here,
during a search of a cryogenic storage area for the terminally ill in an outer
orbit space station, when there's a possibility of a vampire terrorising the
Earth below killing black-market biological researchers, a character cannot
just fight guards here but cybernetic, laser breathing sabre tooth tigers which
come out from a few of the containers. The spacescraper, who's gyroscope would
have to be physically impractical to keep it in balance, is not just being
hacked to get at one person, but is part of a plan involving both having
hostages in an escalator, including a young female employee with a crush on Sengoku,
but also activating a satellite cannon to hit the building itself if need be. Cyber
City Oedo's advantage if you can accept this is that this pulp sensibility
means that there's an entertaining unpredictability and creativity to the
content. Kawajiri's work can be very
episodic or divided by different obstacles to defeat with a simple plot to
follow, so instead it's how the stories play out that's the concern with him..
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In this context, this seriousness
to the material alongside both an unintentional and intentional absurdity is
what makes Cyber City Oedo entertaining.
The characters, all three protagonists, are stoic or have a tendency to make
sarcastic jokes, which doesn't come off as bland due to the exaggerated
character designs and how they're all depicted. This particular entry also has
the scene stealing side character of Versus, a mobile robot used in the police
service to help the anti-heroes, a box on wheels that unintentionally retorts
to comments with sarcasm just by pointing out the illogical comments the humans make. The episodes like many of Kawajiri's films and other project are
colourful in the side characters and minor bystanders they have, from a blonde
mulleted, one white paint leg wearing female assassin to a skeleton connected
to a computer still able to terrorise people.
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| From http://torfilm.ru/i/s2/07/8/27/96a17b7ecc855e7792f4693a61d74394.jpg |
I cannot comment on a Kawajiri production without mentioning
his character designs, which are incredibly recognisable to the point a certain
anime fan, if you put a screenshot of his work in front of them, may instantly
recognise its his work. Even when he's not the character designer in the
credits, even a production like Highlander:
The Search of Vengeance takes a page from his character design style.
Prominent facial features, realism in the character designs even for the most
exaggerated and fantastical, a loving care for body shape and physical
appearance. It's not a surprise that Takeshi
Koike, the director of Redline
(2009), is his protégée as the obsession over character design is also
there. Koike also took the influence
of immaculate animation design in general as what cannot also be argued against
is that his mentor's work, including Cyber
City Oedo, was also exceptionally well animated and good looking. The
dystopia here is animated with such loving detail by Madhouse that one wonders if a loving obsession with futuristic
turmoil is visible in such anime. This is far from the grimiest depiction,
actually quite bright and poppy at points comapred to the bleakness of A.D. Police Files (1990), but but
especially with the final episode you have moments of Kawajiri's baroque sensibilities, suddenly the finale turning into
gothic sci-fi with a cryogenic mortuary that's elaborately sculpted and a mood
to the work in general that singles him out as being unique.
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Even with a grimmer film like Ninja Scroll, in terms of gore and
shocking content, there is this balance between humour to seriousness that
populates Kawajiri's work, but here
in particularly it works immensely, helped especially as all three protagonists
appear in all three episodes with merely who gets central attention changing. Hopefully
Cyber City Oedo will get a
reappraisal one day, as it manages to pack a lot of invention into itself even
if its stories are very predictable in what happens. That's not the point of
it, and instead one finds entertainment in the fact that, no, I wasn't lying
about the cybernetic, laser breathing sabre tooth tigers and they were depicted
in all their ridiculous glory amongst other things in this specific anime.
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