#223: Pale Cocoon (2006)

 

Studio: Studio Rikka

Director: Yasuhiro Yoshiura

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Yoshiura

Voice Cast: Minako Kawashima as Riko; Nakao Michiosu as Ura; Yuka Koyama as Yoko Yamaguchi

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In the far future, in this OVA short, a man named Riko is in an archive, chronicling a world that ceases to exist. Usually visual records, he finds among the archival debris one that has sound, becoming an obsession for him as he tries to figure out who the figure within it, a woman, is and what she is saying. It is effectively a short designed for me, as a former media archiver even in a volunteer position who once had to clear old celluloid film, the kind designed for recording holidays on cameras or for 16mm versions of the Disney short The Skeleton Dance (1929) to be sold on, or go through videotapes from attics and storage rooms, trying to sieve any possible historical worth to them and sending others without back to their owners, back to likely decimation or a bin. It was, even in this tiny role, a poignant one to consider what we record and can see from the past, as well as the issue that, unlike here with the digital preservation, we are still less likely now as Pale Cocoon has passed as an older anime to have dealt with preserving digital material properly. Here too in Pale Cocoon, in a time of huge environmental catastrophe, few are interested in the past barring Riko. There are few individuals working in the archive in this world, and the one he can interact with, a young woman Ura, eventually tells him she is quitting, not wanting to record and preserve the knowledge human beings destroyed themselves, forcing them down under the Earth to where archives like this are, or travel into colonies.

The animated equivalent to a short story, a character piece, there is not a lot further to say about Pale Cocoon in terms of plot, barring that, as he explores this video, Riko will finding himself exploring physical space into an environment beyond his comprehension, of the world before and abstract in itself. It also leads to the abrupt, but tonally appropriate, shift into becoming an animated music video, with a song, Aoi Tamago by Little Moa, which becomes the centre piece of the entire short. Its director/screenwriter Yasuhiro Yoshiura made his first steps in the directorial chair here with Pale Cocoon, a small but growing career with directorial work in the likes of Time of Eve (2008–2009, 2010) to Patema Inverted (2013), someone who is growing as a creator and notably one who is his own voice, as most of his directorial work is also crediting him as their creator. He is someone clearly with an interest in exploring science fiction in a heady way even with Sing a Bit of Harmony (2021), a theatrical film about a female AI in a body being tested in a high school in the future, even if that story among its plot details includes her habit of abrupt singing.

Pale Cocoon's themes are pretty up-front, of environmental disaster which is more pertinent, alongside the point of preserving history, both the importance of archiving but also its existential issues, whether such knowledge will benefit one, the notion of whether we learn from the mistakes of the past, or whether in a time when it is apparently too late, the past is merely the chains of our current imprisonment. The film, clearly using computer animation and melding it to the 2D characters, is showing the time when it was made, but that in itself is contrasted by how distinct Yasuhiro Yoshiura's short still looks, a bleak futuristic narrative matched by the tone of the story itself which is moody in the little time this has. As his beginning in directing, this does entice with the fact that, starting his career, Yasuhiro Yoshiura showed an interesting mind which I would like now to explore with the career he is building currently.