Director: Ujicha
Screenplay: Reo Anzai
Voice Cast: Nao Hanai; Chisako
Hara; Moeka Haruhi; Shunsuke Hirai; Mitsuko Hoshi; Munemyôou Hozan; Yuka Iguchi;
Reijirô Katô; Ryûki Kitaoka; Tomomi Nijii; Kazuyoshi Sakai; Labor Satô; Saori
Takahashi; Minori Terada; Hiroshige Watanabe
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Named after green tea ice cream, Ujica is unique in the sense that, not
since Hiroshi Harada mostly made Midori (1992) by himself, have we seen
as with Ujica here and with Violence Voyage (2019) a figure making
a Japanese animated work by themselves as a one person band, completely outside
the confides of expectation even when the mainstream anime industry does allow
for idiosyncratic projects to occasionally appear. Ujica has also acquired a cult interest in the West entirely
outside of anime fandom entirely, Violence
Voyage having gotten a streaming premiere in the USA in late October 2019,
with The Burning Buddha Man
available in iTunes. This is
interesting as, not looking in the slightest like the stereotype of anime, he
has managed to tap into the fan base for "unconventional" Japanese
cult films, and being entirely alien to even anime in its popularity as we can
see on stream platform.
Ujica calls his style "geki-mation", set up with a live
action bookending prologue and epilogue in which a young woman, in a gothic Lolita
scenario, is handed scissors and paper by a butler to begin constructing the
world we witness. The style of animation here, with paper cut outs, draws back
to a Japanese tradition of paper puppetry. "Geki" however is a
reference to gekiga, a manga movement headed by the likes of Yoshihiro Tatsumi who wanted move away
from children's comics (like Osamu
Tezuka's early work) to work for adults, leading to the likes of Golgo 13, authors as acclaimed and
notorious as Kazuo Koike, and even Tezuka
himself going into a golden run of adult targeted comics in the seventies when
he was being challenged by those inspired by this movement creating for more
serious, sometimes more graphic and explicit work.
The distinction comes in knowledge
of how painstaking Ujica's work is,
creating this bizarre body horror action story about people fusing human beings
with Buddha statues for greater enlightenment power, the kind that would be
impossible to actually animate with the level of detail to characters and
locations this has in the current anime industry. It's also a premise which is
entirely idiosyncratic and Japanese, leading to tangents on the craft of
Buddhist statues yet re-envisioning the religion and its ideas into a violence tokusatsu
work at some point where enlightenment is a goal attained by the bad guys just
to be more powerful and strong. For the protagonist, a schoolgirl, the theft of
a Buddhist statue in her parents' shrine connected to this evil scheme also
leads to their deaths, on a journey from then on into a war, between those
melding people to stolen statues to attain forced enlightenment, and the
marginalised victims of this process who wish to stop this, assisted by her own
grandmother who has affectively been in a form of coma over many decades to
become enlightened. Said journey will lead her between virtual training and a
jaunt into the realm of the dead along the way.
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| From https://screenanarchy.com/assets_c/2013/10/TheBurningBuddhaMan -review-main-thumb-860xauto-43353.jpg |
Already this is anime at its strangest, where the creator crams in a tribute to giant robots when a team of mutant heroes meld like a Power Rangers zoid to face the villains, but his art style just enhances it further, already showing you at the beginning this is a director with his own distinct world building in just how characters look. His paper-mation, where the characters are cut out 2D figures moved just off screen, had to be drawn multiple times to be able just to have expressions and movements, elaborate to the point as already mentioned that this detail would not be possible even in the best of current animation unless one had the time and budget to pull it off, the kind of ultra large-scale production you don't find a lot in the slightest. He creates a grotesquely compelling world where even the normal characters are exaggerated, even the protagonist as a schoolgirl having bulging eyes and usually red faced in most scenes, all before he lets his imagination run wild with the melding of human, beast and statue together. Arguably the sets, also paper backdrops, are the most naturalistic of the entire production of everything drawn, making a wonderful contrast. Adding to the tone is that, when gore or an effect is required, as if taking a page from Genocyber (1994) whose first episode infamously used clay for inter-cut shots to add to the splatter, Ujica uses liquids and other things for this, be it for gore to vomit, even in one scene actual hair and water to represent someone's tears as they have to cut their hair off to become the right person to protect the Buddha statues.
Does The Burning Buddha Man have any depth? It's body horror sci-fi pulp
at heart, and in another religion, it'd be profane to have symbols like this
distorted this way, which in itself is a depth unintentionally to think about
in terms of Japanese Buddhism in relationship with modern Japan. It also fits
the genre of erotic-grotesque-nonsense perfectly; at first, it's just grotesque
in the body horror and nonsensical in the plot, the ero eventually however
appearing when mid battle heavy petting and certain types of nude religious
statues are brought in.
There is also the underlying
fascination which how much a tough, hard earned accomplishment the production
would've been, alongside the fact it was done for this particular premise of
all things. It has an errant absurdity, when the heroes push aside non violence
to kill evil minions, but there's an obvious message that forcibly trying to
acquire enlightenment even on a comic book pulp level, at the pain and mutation
of others, is wrong, your nephew rebelling when he is a carver of Buddhist
statues who takes honourable pride in his craft. All deeply silly yet told
sincerely; this in itself is the type of Japanese film I'd rather have sold to
Western cult film fans than the middling ironic wave of live action, low budget
splatter films that were made by Nikkatsu intentionally for the West from the
late 2000s. Its a theatrical film in anime, due to its circumstances, which is
utterly idiosyncratic next to most anime from the same year it was released,
and in lieu to the fact he's made a second film called Violence Voyage, Ujica has
managed to be in a position where (depending on how long his work takes to
complete per production) he's able to make these films without the pressure of
the mainstream Japanese animation industry and already have a unique voice this
early in his career. It's an acquired taste, but I have always admired the
utterly idiosyncratic and champion it.
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| From http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/wp-content/ uploads/2013/07/the-burning-buddha-man.jpg |
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