Directors: Carl Colpaert (Based on a film by Mamoru Oshii)
Screenplay: Carl Colpaert (Based
on a film by Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano)
Cast: Katie Leigh as Angel
(voice); Tony Markes as Frank; Rainbow Dolan as Angel; Kenneth McCabe as Goose;
Kurtiss J. Tews as the Psycho Soldier; Bryan Ellenburg as the Soldier; Ian
Ruskin as Jonathan (voice); Lisa Maxwell as the Older Angel (voice); Filiz
Tully as Dr. Sarah; Mike Hickam as the Officer
Let's begin with the obvious -
how Mamoru Oshii's original version
of Angel's Egg (1985) isn't
available in the West but this notorious American reinterpretation from Roger Corman's New World Pictures is baffled me as it has for many. I don't blame
those who licensed this version mind, neither Code Red in the United States or Arrow Video in the United Kingdom, as its likely the sad case the
license for Angel's Egg is difficult
to acquire or priced too high. (If by any chance it's due to New World Pictures or Lakeshore Pictures, the later owning
this license, then someone would've grumbled about it by now, but bear in mind
anime has been notoriously pricy at times to license from Japanese companies).
In contrast, In the Aftermath was,
from the looks of things, an entirely different license as a New World Pictures creation, Lakeshore Picture owning the rights
since 2002. And honestly, whilst it's a ridiculous train wreck at many points
and inferior to the original Angel's Egg,
I'm glad we still have a 2k restoration of In
the Aftermath, even if my own idealised version would'e been as an extra to
the superior Japanese production.
As it goes New World Pictures ended up with the license for Angel's Egg, to which the likes of producer
Tom Dugan thought it was an incomprehensible
work. Angel's Egg, for those who
don't know what it is, is an experimental theatrical animation by Mamoru Oshii, cult anime/live action
director of the likes of Ghost in the
Shell (1995), in collaboration with the legendary illustrator Yoshitaka Amano, who'd become acclaimed
enough to have his work in art galleries after a career starting in anime production
in the late sixties. Oshii,
originally desiring to become a Catholic priest, clearly made Angel's Egg as a parable about
religious doubt, with what you do see in In
the Aftermath in terms of original footage enough to show it was very open
in the conclusion without ever drawing a line onto either side, the title
referencing an egg the iconic animated girl character had which either was an
angel's or had nothing inside it. The New
World Pictures version still also includes the sequence of fishermen trying
to catch shadows of giant fish which cling to their city walls, only destroying
what they try to hit with harpoons, a metaphorical sequence that, even if Oshii views the film more of a mood
piece nowadays, still has this visible message within itself.
A lot of Angel's Egg is understandably abstract, intentionally so and soaked
in a post-apocalypse built around the best representation of Amano own work and some of the best
animators on staff from the eighties anime boom. It could've, however, been
sold to an American audience by New World
Pictures, rather than making an even less comprehensible version in In The Aftermath, if you'd just sold it
to the art house crowd Roger Corman
once did with Federico Fellini and
other European films. Hell, for the visuals alone, this could've appealed to
the cult film crowd even if the original film has very little dialogue and a
lot of slow, languid scenes as it's a trippy, strange film even without the
visible existential message.
Somehow, trying to make the film
more sellable, another issue being that at seventy or so minutes Angel's Egg was seen as too short, the
people behind In the Aftermath making
something even less coherent at times just to fit their perceived parameters. To
see it to the VHS market (though it did have an Australian theatrical release),
the animation is used as an alternative world overlooking ours, actually like
the angels of It's A Wonderful Life (1946)
where the original protagonists, the white haired girl and a young male soldier,
are now siblings and with the young girl to be sent to Earth, in live action,
which is a wasteland where the ozone is poisoned and clean air is a precious
resource.
It's actually not as disastrous
as the reputation is. The infamy is how not only someone thinking this was a
good idea, not helped by the original film not being available in the West
still, but that to "make sense" Colpaert,
an apprentice to Peter Bogdanovich,
wrote a new script of utterly ridiculous (and quotable) dialogue about men
crying about a world without fish and the girl being spanked by her older
brother with asteroids as punishment for falling asleep. The project, even if I wished an
English dubbed version of Angel's Egg
was the version released rather than this misbegotten belief of trying to make
a more "sellable" version to the West, is still compelling now we
know it's an utterly perplexing creative decision, a time capsule to this
bizarre cultural reinterpretation to sell films that still happened into the
2000s, whenever Miramax got hold of
work like martial arts films for example, but is also alien to many world
cinema fans as a practice. In 2K resolution on a Blu Ray, Angel's Egg as an animated production is incredible, causing one to
weep that it is available outside Japan barring bootlegs; it is a project of
the era, a box office failure whose production was only possible due to how the
bubble economy grew in Japan during the eighties and, before the bubble burst
at the end, there was enough money going around including in the animation
industry to fund these bold projects.
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| From https://images2.static-bluray.com/reviews/14844_1.jpg |
Oshii himself, whilst he can be difficult for many, is an intellectual auteur, who even when he now claims the film is vague in meaning laced the film with too much clear symbology of his own spiritual crisis. This, as mentioned, is the only project to fully capture Yoshitaka Amano's art style too, so it is painstaking in capturing his gorgeous yet highly detailed illustration right down to the difficulty the animators would've had in just animating the movement of the clothes and hair of characters. The production team, with individuals who'd go on to the like of Akira (1988) to My Neighbour Totoro (1988), were not slouches either.
The live action isn't, even if
low budget, letting the side down however in ingenuity. I will mock the point
of even creating the film as it was, and mock the script, a really bad case of
presuming an audience couldn't catch the vibe of the original or even just
admiring the pretty pictures in spite of finding it slow, but I won't deny it's
a great example in terms of clearly having so little to work with, two
locations for sets and a few actors, and trying with some damn good ideas to
make something interesting even if the script is gleefully gibberish at point. The
two locations were chosen well, the factory in particular also used for Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), the
kind of evocative set you could find in Andrei
Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979) to a
b-movie; by all accounts, an actual closed factory, it might've been dangerous
to film there with those dust clouds onscreen looking too irradiated in
chemicals abandoned there for comfort. Cinematographer Geza Sinkovics does his hardest to help the live action sequences, but
its score composer Anthony Moore who
deserves a moment of praise. An experimental composer who has worked with the
likes of Henry Cow and Pink Floyd, he's a vital element in
improving this film, in tandem to some of the other visual tricks at hand the
person who comes close to matching the original source material in evocative
mood.
Even when the animation is
spliced into the live action, to try to make it work, there's also an eeriness
that works. The premise, an "angel" sent to save Earth from
environmental devastation is depicted by only six cast members (including lead Tony Markes), groans under trying to
rationalise an art film into a pulp b-flick, but there's a sense of the unnatural
to still appreciate because of this. The anime still has power even in this
bastardised form, and the live action is appropriately eerie when you ignore
the story.
Instead, the script, by the
director, should be appreciated for going into non-sequiturs even weirder than
the source, which was strange for its open ended ideas and the psychedelic
dialogue but, when characters actually spoke, was very precise and sombre,
building to the themes of spiritual ambiguity. Some of what is found here is
potent whilst still strange, Markes in
a gas mask playing a piano to a female doctor (Filiz Tully) he encounters, but spanking people with asteroids is
just the kind of line screaming for baffled reactions. Angel's Egg had limited dialogue, a lot of silence that was clearly
seen as unsellable considering the decision to cram voiceover to sell it, all
of which adds an unintentional absurdity. Thankfully, it wasn't dull,
pedestrian sci-fi exposition; instead, its lore that makes no sense but is
fascinating in how this is an attempt to make the original work "makes
sense" but becoming something gloriously off. The largest monologue in Angel's Egg, the young soldier
retelling the tale of Noah's Ark with the boat drifting on an ocean never
finding land, is turned into a nonsensical tale of deception where fish
floating in the air on a planet are stolen that has to be heard to be believed.
It makes no sense why this
executed plan was meant to be more marketable, but whilst I imagine an alternative
world where Angel's Egg was sold as
a more avant-garde Ingmar Bergman
movie to art film audiences, In the
Aftermath was what we got and is still rewarding for how odd it is. The
real tragedy is that, whilst it helped introduce Westerners to Angel's Egg, it never lead to Angel's Egg actually being released; New World Pictures, among their work,
also released an "Americanized" version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) as Warriors of the Wind, the original pre-Studio Ghibli film now available whilst that version has vanished,
yet nonetheless for a certain generation probably thanked for letting them
still see anime for the first time. We thankfully left this need for
alternative versions of foreign titles, but considering how extreme and
peculiar In the Aftermath is, I am
glad it's still available. That it's not an extra to the source and the only
restored version in the West of the two films is tragic, but the oddity
shouldn't be blamed for that.
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| From https://admitonefilmaddict.files.wordpress.com/2019/01 /In-the-aftermat-2.jpg?w=672&h=372&crop=1 |
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