#205: Violence Voyager (2018)

 

Director: Ujicha

Screenplay: Ujicha

Voice Cast: Aoi Yûki as Bobby; Shigeo Takahashi as Akkun/Yakkun; Naoki Tanaka as George; Nao Hanai as Kyoko; Daisuke Ono as Takaaki; Hitoshi Matsumoto as the Narrator; Tomorowo Taguchi as Koike; Saki Fujita as Yoshiko/Sayaka

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

There was a chimpanzee in the toilet!

For most, without context of Ujicha's previous film The Burning Buddha Man (2013), Violence Voyager would be a shock to witness. Available not from anime distributors, as in the United Kingdom through Third Window Pictures on Blu-Ray with the older film in 2021, this exists in a curious place as, not traditionally "anime", Ujicha creates very idiosyncratic work entirely based on the concept of "geki-mation", paper puppet stop motion. If my view of Violence Voyager somehow tones down some of the bafflement, that is only because I have been baptised in this weirdness for a longer time, due to having seen The Burning Buddha Man and witnessed how proudly bizarre the narratives of these films are too.

There is a perverse streak of a fairy tale here, despite not being suitable for children in the slightest, in which an American boy in Japan called Bobby and his friend Akkun, with his odd grilled marked forehead, do not heed the warning of the wise old man, called Old Man Lucky-Monkey, to not go up the mountain. On said mountain, they encounter a rundown and homemade amusement park called Violence Voyager in the middle of nowhere. Not realising even the name, let alone as a rundown amusement part, is something to avoid, they encounter a place which is a mock alien invasion game with killer robots, played as a water tag game where you have a variety of water pistols (replica rifles to tiny dolphin ones) to shoot robot models. Things already go south when they find a girl there who says she has not been allowed to leave. This is a film I had anticipated seeing, but I will warn viewers has pretty extreme content even if the film is done with paper cut-outs. Even if they does not look realistic in Ujicha's design, and is as much goofy and perverse on purpose as it is disturbing, Violence Voyager has some material you would not be able to get away with in live action like this.

That this passed suitable for fifteen year olds in Britain is something to admire if even for me, as a progressive individual, is dumbfounding, as a British viewer who has seen a form of progressiveness appear over the years as much as contradictions still appear within the British Board of Film Classification. They are much more lax with animation, where you can get away with content that would have gotten a higher rating in animation unless you touch on certain topics¹. And trust me, as a horror narrative, Violence Voyager is a twisted little tale involving children, even if grotesque caricatures in some cases, being killed off or, if still alive or useful, being transmogrified into monsters, with corpses mutilated and fed to a figure that was once the dead son of the amusement park's creator.

Taking his influence from Kazuo Umezu's manga Cat-Eyed Boy, specifically a 1976 television adaptation which used paper puppetry too, Ujicha has no qualms with exaggerating his content, befitting a man who named himself after his birth place's green tea. More so as, for gristly effect, he uses real liquids to depict blood and other fluids, especially as transmogrification causes one's digestive system to change. He even uses real fire and firecracker explosions for the final with Chekov's lighter. You could only get away with half of this only in this paper cut-out form, and with some of it, even being paper does not hide the queasy effect, as a certain horrifying bird-mother feeding organism, which feeds the resurrected son with a spiny flesh tube, was icky even for me.

This is, however, a film involving special underwear as a plot point, as Bobby will literally change due to the trauma of this scenario, so Ujicha has a sense of humour. Like The Burning Buddha Man, the plot is depicted seriously but everything is openly bizarre. Naturally as a result of this attitude, this is the kind of one-offs which both had bodily fluid gags, and goes as far as include a troupe from fairy tales (from around the world) of Bobby's kindness to animals leading to them helping him later on, even if here it is his pet cat, a chimpanzee the old wise man keeps, and a bat (as in an actual fairy tale) he showed empathy for. Sometimes anime is bizarre out of accident or the id, combined (as with manga) of being forced to both produce something quickly and has to bring in an audience. There are exceptions, and in the few productions I have seen, Ujicha feels sincerely in touch with these bizarre premises and their idiosyncrasies despite being, as seen in interviews when he steps from behind the camera, an ordinary guy who study design in university². Knowing his work is entirely done by himself (baring sound design, voice acting and music) emphasises this, his id freely flexed in a context, which is twisted and eyebrow rising, but tempered with a whimsy.

It is an achievement, something painstakingly made, the paper cut-out models having to be designed and drawn, cut out and even moved even in their limited form with hands being seen on camera. Baring what they are when you initially start watching the film, this feels like a handsome production which does not show a limitation from its sources, instead a unique form of animation with a deliberate artifice. So much so, I do not want to elaborate on more. Those with the stomach for this are going to experience something truly unique. Call it cult, but that should not be used to dismiss its artistic qualities, because this is still an exceptional production I was grateful to finally experience.

 

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1) Elfen Lied (2004), in the earlier days of DVD, was another example and that was both extremely violent and with grim subject matter. Nowadays you have to be far more violent even that Violence Voyager, or have certain explicit content, including anime's bad habit of sexualising teenagers, to get the eighteen certificate and even censorship nowadays.

2) Third Window Picture's 2021 Blu Ray has a short self-made interview with him which really helped grow an appreciation for a slightly awkward younger guy just painstakingly doing his work. Even when the distributor asked what he would want with a larger budget, he would still want to move the puppets himself even if he could have appreciated others to help design the backgrounds for work, which is a clear sign of someone passionate for his craft.