#30: Salaryman Kintaro (2001)

From http://www.anime-planet.com/images/
anime/covers/salaryman-kintaro-1363.jpg

Director: Tomoharu Katsumata

Screenplay: Chikako Kobayashi and Sukehiro Tomita

Based on a manga by Hiroshi Motomiya

Voice Cast: Taisei Miyamoto (as Yajima Kintaro); Atsuko Tanaka (as Suenaga Misuzu); Masako Katsuki (as Sakurai Kyoko); Ryoka Yuzuki (as Suenaga Mimi); Katsuhisa Houki (as Kaminaga Hiroshi); Kiyoshi Kawakubo (as Tomokazu Morinosuke)

Synopsis: The Yamato Construction Company business hires a new salary man named Yajima Kintaro. To the horror of the staff and upper management, the man known as Kintaro hired by the company's elderly owner is the former leader of a giant motorcycle gang who doesn't act like other salary man - he's liable t talk back at those who he feels are unhonourable even in senior positions and likely to get into fights if need be. Yet this behaviour also starts to become a well of inspiration from those around him, rebellion and the desire to become better employees taking place; even romantic longing from women is to found alongside the allies in fellow employees, seniors and even yakuza. The widowed father of a young son, Kintaro is noble, brave and gladly goes out of his way to help those in need, his reckless powder keg personality likely to scrape against corrupt management and those who do backstage dealings in the world of Japanese construction industry.

Salaryman Kintaro is amongst the oddest anime I've covered in terms of actually being able to see it. It's very normal even by the stereotypes of anime, a melodramatic drama set in contemporary Japan about the least expected salaryman possible wanting an ordinary working life. Having seen it it's the the kind of anime that rarely gets released in the United Kingdom and feels like what anime actually is for Japanese viewers who aren't obsessive otaku - mainstream programming like an anime soap opera, not likely to be viewed at two in the morning like shows that get popular amongst Western anime fans are. Inexplicable all twenty episodes were released in the UK by the late DVD company Arts Magic in the early days of DVD alongside obscurer Takashi Miike films, who would direct a live action film based on Salaryman Kintaro, allowing me to see the absurdly sincere, coincidence heavy tale of a Mary Sue figure set around the world of the Japanese construction industry.

From http://i37.tinypic.com/9tigl4.png

Based on a manga that was also adapted into live action television later, Salaryman Kintaro is a pure masculine fantasy of what the perfect salary man should be rather than necessarily the reality of the Japanese workplace. This immediately brings out a charm in the show even if it feels like a retroactive throwback to older gender politics where men were men, Kintaro the opposite of someone who has to bow to others and is grinded down by his work, the nostalgic notion for other characters of when they were younger and more passionate before the work broke them common in the dialogue. A former punk who saves a company manager and asks to be hired as a thank you, Kintaro represents to an extreme the perfect male who will rescue toddlers from a burning nursery and stand out to corrupt upper management, so perfect in his humanity that his only flaws are his recklessness and habit of trying to fist fight people to defend goodness.

From http://i37.tinypic.com/2wmjnky.png

Soap opera is the operative word as the world of Salaryman Kintaro from the outside, if you cannot engage with its sincerely, can be ridiculous. Almost every person that encounters Kintaro eventually becomes his ally. Members of his former motorbike gang, from yakuza to a member who after a significant event decided he wanted to become a transgender woman, spot him out in the crowd and those who meet him either fall in love with him if they're women, such as a rich widowed heiress who becomes one of his main guides, or if they're male develop crushes like his fellow office workers do. Characters at points even bemoan how Kintaro is able to weave himself into people's lives with such complexity, letting the series have some sense of knowingness to its absurdities. The levels of how many lives Kintaro gets involved with get to the point of bizarre coincidences, such as a woman he helps when she is molested on a train turning out to be the fiancée of a yakuza working with a senior underworld chief who looks to Kintaro with admiration, or Kintaro saving the son of someone who is on the side of a corrupt company. How convoluted these descriptions sound is enough to show how elaborate the ties are between Kintaro, the magnet for everything else, and everyone around him to the point of the hyper fantastical.

From http://okanime.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/protectedimage.jpg

The fact that it's all set around the Japanese construction industry does add an oddness to the show's tone; for every real concern such as striking workers at a underground tunnel project, or fantastical ones such as the amount of times Kintaro has to dodge moving vehicles including a train, it's all set around white collar business at its most mundane. Even when employees attempt to oust their corrupt boss by hacking into the finances, that early plot event is dealt with through whether people are sitting or standing up in a senior staff meeting with elaborate speeches to cover the fact. While the show heightens the world of the construction industry with fighting, yakuza being hired to take out Kintaro and others being threatened, the mundanity of the world is not that far away. Adding to this is that it's an ordinary looking show, probably the most rudimentary anime in visual look I've reviewed on the site, not bad technically like at least one I've covered so far but matter of fact where one should expect a lot of speed lines and coloured backgrounds to show a character being shocked for dramatic reasons. That it's clearly hand drawn is a nice aspect but with its simple, bright colours its neither an elaborate feast for the eyes, depicting the ordinary world and concerned that the visuals prop up the drama.

From http://www.wakuwakuotaku.com/wp-content/
uploads/2015/07/salaryman-kintaro-2015-02.jpg

If there's any virtue to the series it's that it has a charisma because of its clichés. There's probably too many characters causing way too many plot threads to exist. The show also has an odd tonal attitude - for the most part it would be suitable for children to see baring the moments of actual female nudity and sexual references, scenes surprisingly upfront in lieu of the pleasant tone. Then, beyond the innuendo, there's moments that are exceptionally grim for a show like this to tackle like rape in a couple of episodes. It also gets surprisingly dark at points especially as it gets to the end which is as much why I've kept the old box set for so long. Some of the attempts are utterly absurd, such as when Kintaro helps the woman molested on the train find her perpetrator, with a prolonged bicycle pursuit and crying of manly tears in forgiveness, but others are more interesting. Despite Kintaro being the perfect, reckless hero eventually he can't just punch people out to win. This could come off as a conservative cop-out, as the ending may feel abrupt at only twenty episodes, but the idea that eventually Kintaro is revealed to be too reckless and needs to learn more subtle ways of becoming a better person does stand out with interest, suddenly such a mundane oddity developing some complexity. It could be seen as the reality, that such a salaryman could never exist even outside of Japan in business, too reckless and too good for a working man position, but on this viewing it proved to be interesting. There's also the fact that for all its absurdities I eventually caved in again and liked the show as I have before. Ultimately the reason the show retains anything of worth if that, altogether, there's a personality that I can't help but like in spite of its more chintzy aspects.

From http://film.thedigitalfix.com/protectedimage.php
?image=MattShingleton/kintaroone01.jpg

#29: Requiem From The Darkness (2003)

From https://flawfinder.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/requiem.jpg

Director: Hideki Tonokatsu

Screenplay: Hiroshi Takahashi, Sadayuki Murai, Yoshinaga Fujioka and Yuu Kanbara

Based on the short story anthology The Wicked and the Damned: A Hundred Tales of Karma by Natsuhiko Kyogoku

Voice Cast: Toshihiko Seki (as Momosuke Yamaoka); Ryusei Nakao (as Mataichi); Sanae Kobayashi (as Ogin); Norio Wakamoto (as Nagamimi)

Synopsis: In Edo era Japan aspiring writer Momosuke (Seki), who write children's riddles and desires to write a collection of hundred ghost stories, meets a trip of supernatural figures called the Ongyou in his travels. The trickster and leader Mataichi (Nakao), a diminutive priest who uses powers of illusion to distort reality; the puppeteer Ogin (Kobayashi), a voluptuous and beautiful young woman who uses a doll and disguises to create figures of memory; and the shape shifter Nagamimi (Wakamoto), a giant man who can reshape himself into others and is able to communicate with animals. Forcing individuals to confess their sins and punishing them, usually fatal, Momosuke finds himself stuff between normalcy and their circle of the supernatural influence as the dark machinations of the trio travel from place to place.

From http://images.myreviewer.co.uk/fullsize/0000154267.jpg

Like with how fairytales even with their predictable conclusions are so much more rewarding in their flexible storytelling and creating imaginative moments, ghost stories let alone horror tales have the same ability where mood and the journey to their endings are important to them and their ultimate reward. Requiem From The Darkness is an episodic series of grim adult stories wrapped around a sympathetic face, Momosuke, in his interactions with three supernatural beings called the Ongyou, the stories peeling back their interesting supernatural introductions and showing how human beings are significantly more evil than anything already dead. As a warning even to fans of serious adult horror stories, Requiem From The Darkness despite having a lot of its content implied shows no qualms with dealing with taboo subject matter which is going to put some off, let alone the fact that when its shown the gore is strong and graphic. The result is macabre to an extreme particularly against the structure of the show, an intentionally repetitive one where a set-up is created with characters introduced for an episode, the supernatural trio of Mataichi, Ogin and Nagamimi torment a guilty party with psychedelic or haunting imagery until they confess to their crime and are punished. Structurally it's not that dissimilar to a British teatime murder drama where its set-up to when a person confesses to a crime, whether they're revealed to be the guilty party at the beginning of the episode or its kept secret, the only difference being that this is significantly more gruesome with ghostly severed heads, cannibalism and atrocity prints being recreated, all set in a setting with wandering samurai and peasant villages.

From http://images.myreviewer.co.uk/fullsize/0000178259.jpg

The aesthetic style of Requiem From The Darkness is what factors into the show standing out from this style of ghost story. Barring one or two details already dated after ten years - CGI sea effects for example - it possesses an incredibly distinct visual palette that's both beautiful and morbid. The look is comparable to a Japanese art scroll where the ink has melted and the image has become distorted - a historical period found in Japanese chambara (samurai) films but with the supernatural afterlife already effecting the environments with its darkened colour palette and obsession with the run-down and the decayed. Baring some of the main characters and background figures, depicted realistically, most of the cast onscreen is grossly exaggerated and alien, from Nagamimi's stilt legs and lack of eyes to the publisher who Momosuke works for being the size of Jimmy Cricket from Pinocchio (1940), a figure continually cranky due to Momosuke's laziness as a writer. Even a realistic character is Ogin, the pin-up figure shown in nude poses in the end credits alongside giant centipedes and death, has a gothic tone to her in her facial expressions and dress, the Edo period exaggerated to an extreme whilst not losing the historical tone. It's not only the bloody and visceral content which startles but the surreal touches which distort the world's reality, the small details such as the samurai who patrol the streets, and who aren't important characters for an episode, having wooden logs for heads like they were training dummies for trainee samurai or how houses take on the shapes and sizes comparable to German Expressionist design in films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). It's a Japanese form of Expressionism on hand in the show to match its bleak content, of mothers being forced to have their daughters taken away to become geishas or bandits terrorising the locals, where everything is unsettled. The fact that the exact period the show is set in is the transition from Edo period to the Meiji period in Japanese history, where significantly the isolationist policy from other countries for the country would weaken, is a good piece of information to know of as the show has the sense of being a world full of chaos just hidden under the normalcy.

From http://images.myreviewer.co.uk/fullsize/0000223034.jpg

The only disappointment with the series revisiting it, when it's a great little chiller that crawls under the skin, is that its only thirteen episodes long, the last two episodes finishing with a sub-plot where Ongyou start to question the authority figure the trio works for. This would've benefited from having double the amount of episodes if the structure was carefully sculpted and the episodic stories were all interesting, ten or more stories of the gristly and corrupt nature of humanity which would've been incredibly watchable and helped add to the characterisation. It would've also helped with the threadbare continuous plot hidden within the series, of both Momosuke questioning the trio and his romantic longings for Ogin, the additional episodes if done right likely to have helped fleshed out these barely touched upon plot threads. As it stands, Requiem From The Darkness thankfully merely leaves you wanting for more, the abruptness to how its end far from a detraction but a wish that it had lasted for a few more episodes.

From http://www.zupimages.net/up/14/52/72jr.png