#203: Bride of Deimos (1988)

 

Director: Rintaro

Screenplay: Etsuko Ikeda

Based on the manga by Etsuko Ikeda and Yuuho Ashibe

Voice Cast: Mayumi Shō as Minako Ifu; Nachi Nozawa as Deimos; Kaneto Shiozawa as Kaname Ōba; Reiko Mutoh as Ohniwa Tōko / Tōko Ōba; Bin Shimada as Masao; Hiroshi Masuoka as Detective Imamura; Takeshi Aono as Mr. Ōba; Takeshi Kusao as Hisamatsu; Toshiko Fujita as Venus

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Bride of Deimos, a straight-to-video title that is only thirty minutes long, is an abrupt piece by itself. Like a few OVAs from this era, you have a fragment of a property never fully explained, because these were made and sold with mind to their source materials. This case is tantalising in what could have been because, with one of the original creators behind the script, this is based on a manga of the same name, released in the West at one point by Comicsone, that is a shōjo title, for a young female audience, attempting to meld a horror anthology of multiple tales with a larger narrative with central characters. This explains how oddly structured the OVA is, but sadly we never got any more of this elaborate, atmospherically morbid little taster of a premise we could have gotten a whole larger work from in a better world.

Set up with a female figure, rotting but alive, underwater, held in vines with skulls around her, she wishes to be reborn through a female body by Deimos, the Greek god of fear and terror of the name same, whose choice for bride and new form for this figure Venus is revealed to be the character of Minako, an ordinary young human woman. At first, without context, you would presume from this one-off tale, which begins and closes very conclusively, that Minako is just a character for this, with a young male friend looking into the home of a talented female orchid grower who never appears in public. In becomes obvious, however, that Minako is a bigger protagonist from a significantly larger narrative, as Deimos follows her around as a supernatural onlooker. The original manga, in synopsises, even suggests he was in an incestuous relationship with his sister, punished for this, and now is caught in a triangle with her and this mortal female in Minako, who he wishes to come to him into the underworld as his lover, for added stakes. This is where context helps, as Deimos himself, despite being a demon, is not connected to the plot at all but watches on for Minako. Over seventeen volumes, the manga followed an ongoing narrative, intertwined with one-off tales, of him wanting Minako to become his bride.

The result is a concept I have seen in anime a lot of any genre - small one-off tales with central protagonists which connects to an eventual final narrative - but in horror especially is an effectively way to structure a narrative, by having a central figure, be they a supernatural figure or one who deals with supernatural issues, even a crypt keeper entity who does step into the stories they tell as a Greek chorus. I have found my own personal brand of catnip in horror tales where a supernatural entity, who will follow through each episode with their own narrative, traverses or interjects in one-off episodes where characters just for those tales meet their varying fates. I love these type of anime, and with cases like Mononoke (2007), an artistically experimental period version, you can make this innovative as a story structure too. Bride of Deimos as a short, by itself, has enough to make one wish it had been more episodes, particularly when you factor in its director being Rintaro. Born Shigeyuki Hayashi, Rintaro worked in the beginning of the anime industry, in the later fifties when he was just seventeen, and kept going into the 2010s. He is a figure, just for seeing the beginning of the industry and continuing through its evolving decades, you can consider an institution.

He is also a curious case that, even with acclaim of a work like Metropolis (2001), he is unpredictable in how his work is. Sometimes it has been doomed - such as adapting the CLAMP manga X in a 1996 theatrical film, with only ninety minutes to finish an unfinished series - and others are divisive, but I have never found him predictable. Even the shift to Bride of Deimos, from his high budget early eighties theatrical work, to straight-to-video productions like this or Take the X-Train (1987) is fascinating to look at. In the case of also adapting a shōjo horror manga, you can tell as well you had someone with the right attitude for this short's elegant fin de siècle-like macabre, alongside the production team, just for the fact that in on a wall in a scene when someone is killed with a bow and arrow, you have Edvard Munch's Madonna replicated on the wall.

This is definitely melodrama as it is dark, as Minako's journey to locate the unseen grower of the "Blue Lady" orchid, a difficult flower to cultivate, leads to her realising her male friend has vanished, having gone ahead of her to the home, as she meets a brother and sister living there. The sister is wheelchair bound, and the brother warning her to leave. It is not a surprise where this goes but a spoiler warning is required. [Spoiler Warning] Theirs is a tragic tale of the sister's lover, a servant, being killed by the father with a bow and arrow, repeating the act and burning the corpses of others in the incinerator over the years afterwards, using the ashes to grow the orchids. [Spoilers end] It is a slight tale, but just because of the elegant and sinister atmosphere, I wish Rintaro had been able to make an extended project from this. The source material by accounts could get insanely over-the-top in its tone, which immediately fascinates to imagine where this would have gone, particularly as what we get here is an emotionally driven narrative of a doomed romance and a sibling love which has become morbid, if still perversely loving, where the horror is what happens to the corpses left in the emotions' wake.

Whilst anime is for everyone, the fact this was originally for a female audience also entices, which you see a bit in with the anime adaption itself, as enticing in imagining the ghoulishness of the original source material but seeing how this thirty minute short still contrasts a lot of anime horror from the eighties I have seen in tone. This has a distinct air of elegance and emotion mixed with the grotesque, even getting enough menace from a tiny (beautifully rendered spider) being waved about on a stick to make the viewer feel creepy. It is not horror of jump scares, not even the gore and ero-guro of other anime of this era, but something different, evoking what the likes of even Toshiki Hirano, none for making ultraviolent work, attempted to evoke with his wife and manga authoress/animator Narumi Kakinouchi with the Vampire Princess Miyu franchise for a comparison point.

The sense that the source material, vaguely felt here, is melodramatic too, with Deimos in his small part still a dashing dark eyed stranger, with his long hair and demeanour that could attract as much as scare, is a compelling tone to have next to the more lurid and hyper violent anime of the time. Again, we only have this one off short, and unfortunately, OVA releases have been something not as well preserved at times depending on the title. Even to mind that some of Rintaro's work in the theatrical medium has not been readily available over the years at all either, this is an obscure title for him in danger of being lost. This is such a shame as this, if viewed instead as a short animated film, is impressive.