Director: Hiroyuki Okiura
Screenplay: Mamoru Oshii
Voice Cast: Eri Sendai as Nanami
Agawa; Kenji Nakagawa as Isao Aniya; Kousei Hirota as Bunmei Muroto; Ryuichi
Horibe as Shiroh Tatsumi; Yukihiro Yoshida as Hajime Handa
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles
Despite the weight of his name, a lot of Mamoru Oshii as a creator is obscurer then you would think in what most know him for. Ghost in the Shell (1995) is a significant anime film, not just for him, but by itself, it really does not contain all of the man. Few may have known he started in comedy, only growing as his work for the Urusei Yatsura franchise has been more freely available in the West, and coming back in an unexpected moment of revenge with Vladlove (2020-1), his first animated television series for decades. That he left animation, for live action films, for large periods of time is another obscurer and divisive section of his career - I hold a film like Avalon (2001) as a hidden gem, but it is a divisive area especially for fans. And, tying into this, there is the entirety of his multimedia creation the Kerberos Saga, to which Jin-Roh is probably the most well known piece of, but is written by Oshii and directed by Hiroyuki Okiura.
The Kerberos Saga feels like the world of post-Japanese culture in the sixties and seventies, of political protests and even the left wing terrorist group the Japanese Red Army, if it has extended to an extreme. The actual world building is even bleaker in how this is set in an alternative timeline when Germany won World War II, and yet the atomic bombs and post-war Japan of reality still took place with Japan finding itself at the place where the government has created a separate counter-terrorist group called Kerberos Panzer Corps. They are, as the iconic image of the entire franchise, figures as ferocious and morally dubious in their appearance as they are also seen in Jin-Roh, with their startling full body armour with red eyes, able to withstand explosions just by them, with mini-guns as standard weaponry.
The Kerberos Saga, despite its dystopia world being one you could sell, has become to Mamoru Oshii what the unfinished manga Phoenix (1955-86) was for Osamu Tezuka, what the Byston Well world is to Gundam creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, Oshii's personal obsession and "life's work" not as well regarded by the world as their best. Phoenix was simply one of many titles from the Godfather of manga, whose Astroboy alone became an institution, Tomino's Byston Well projects, because of titles like Garzey's Wing (1996) for the straight to video anime market, is divisive as much as Gundam became a legendary franchise. The Kerberos Saga is lesser known as Oshii took some frankly unconventional directions with this world, Jin-Roh as a theatrical animated film the most well known of a project which has existed in comic books, radio plays, films and even action figures and garage kits based on this dystopia.
Oshii himself adapted the world of his into low budget live action films like Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops (1991). Oshii made the live action The Red Spectacles (1987), a film I admire, but is a surreal adventure in the dystopia set around a missing woman. Oshii, to really emphasis the weird tangents you get as much as he himself is a very serious philosophical one too, the true dichotomy of the man who nearly became a Catholic priest only to become an anime/live action director, is how the one detail Jin-Roh never covers is the "Tachigui", stand up noodle shops from Japan. A reoccurring aspect of the world, in other sources, were how the Tachigui are illegal in the Kerberos world, becoming underground as is depicted in countless pieces of its own saga and characters, such as in a segment of The Red Spectacles, and being the subject of an entire experimental animated film from Oshii called Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters (2006).
Jin-Roh itself, baring one moment of a drunken salary man inadvertently catching a police officer's attention, is completely sombre. It is a bleak animated film, set in this alternative world dystopia, where even if it is based on fiction and lies, the one semblance of humanity is the concept of love, compromised by the cruelty of the world itself. Here our lead is Kazuki Fuse, a Kerberos member demoted back to training after an encounter with a "Red Riding Hood". The script continually refers to this fairy tale, in an alternative, in which the Red Riding Hoods are young women, in connection to real life cases of members of the public assisting terrorist groups, who transport bombs in bags for members to use against the police during riots. One is caught by Fuse and his squad, detonating herself, and Fuse's hesitance, a flicker of humanity, leaves him with nightmares and remorse expounded when a woman claiming to be her sister enters his life and love begins to bloom.
Even if it becomes a conspiracy, of those wishing to curb the Kerberos' power and the "Wolf Brigade", diehard members, this love between Fuse and the young woman Kei Amemiya is the closest thing to something meaningful even if this is a bleak film in resolution. The humanity to be found here contrasts Oshii's reputation for philosophising, especially as a very simple narrative drama is nestled within a conundrum which reflects back on his deeper thoughts. Even with context of this multimedia narrative's full back-story, the film seen by its own is one aware that its apparent heroes, the Kerberos Panzer Corps, whilst seen as ordinary people struggling through training here are still members of a military force whose basic firearms, a mini-gun, cut through people like tissue paper, and are a literal iron fist. That even their enemies, whilst in full context left wing figure fighting a fascistic world, are still locked in a war where innocent bystanders die, this is not a morally black and white world as a result. Even Fuse himself is dualistic, the soldier and the human being, as he is paired to Red Riding Hood as the wolf who devours her.
Anymore detail would not really explain what has to be seen and felt. From Production I.G., with realistic character designs from Tetsuya Nishio, this looks beautiful in its depressed urban environments. The music by composer/cellist Hajime Mizoguchi is touching and it is a film slowly paced, with moments of violence not comfortable at all to experience even if an action film in parts. Reoccurring haunting of the first Red Riding Hood, or nightmares of shooting down Kei, or his breathe of actual wolves mauling her, are a trauma Fuse has, which have a horror mood to them. The film's tone is, again, bleak and that is worth emphasising, as returning to Jin-Roh I was levelled by its virtues. Director Hiroyuki Okiura, with Mamoru Oshii and the production team all succeeded. Even if this still emphasised Mamoru Oshii as an auteur, the screenwriter and his voice still present, not only does it show the more complex nature of him as a creator, but you have seen everyone contributed their voices and turning Jin-Roh into an unsung gem as a result.
