#263: Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)

 

Studio: Madhouse

Director: Toshio Hirata

Screenplay: Yasuhiro Imagawa

Based on the manga by Matsuri Akino

Voice Cast: Masaya Onosaka as Leon Orcot; Toshihiko Seki as Count D; Hiroshi Yanaka as Mr. Hayward; Kouji Tsujitani as Robin Hendrix; Miho Yamada as Q-Chan; Miki Itō as Louise; Mitsuaki Madono as Roger Stanford; Mitsuru Miyamoto as Kelly Vincent; Narumi Hidaka as Nancy; Ryūzaburō Ōtomo as the Kirin; Satsuki Yukino as Jill; Sayuri Yoshida as Alice; Sho Hayami as Jason Grey

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), the younger buyer of a Mogwai is given a set of rules of how to take care of it, including the rule to not feed it after midnight, and if it is not followed then the seller is not accountable of the misery the results lead to. It is a perfect Western comparison to Pet Shop of Horrors, a four part anime mini-series adapted from a manga by Matsuri Akino, which follows the same idea but as morality tales.

Mortality tales are a vast part of human storytelling, and it finds itself fitting within the horror/supernatural genre very well regardless of nationality and medium. The old phrase “be careful for what you wish for” applies to many horror tales, especially with ones like Pet Shop of Horrors and its characters who may be far from innocent in the first place. Housed in Chinatown in Los Angeles is a pet store owned by the mysterious Count D, a soft spoken man with a sweet tooth and an elegant demeanour, who sells “dreams” to his customers as well as regular pets. The ‘dreams’ however bizarre creatures that require a strict contract of three rules to be signed to be allowed to own them, that cannot be broken by the client at any point. If the rules are broken, the pet store is blameless for what happens and something exceptionally gristly is bound to happen. Officer Orcot, a homicide detective, believes D is clearly behind the deaths after buying these pets, but the true nature of the customers is far more morally grey than one would immediately presume. Bear in mind that this mini-series is only four episodes long only, single stories that do not get deeper in terms of connecting plot as the manga may do.

Case in point is episode one, which sets up D as an unnatural figure who sells a grieving couple a rabbit which looks exactly as their recently passed daughter. Like many of these types of stories, inevitably, the rules will be broken, here to not feed her anything but vegetables and water, least you would get the least expected horror story with a happy conclusion. They are, however, morality tales about when people slip and make mistakes, or when their worst tendencies slip through and the unfortunate realities are revealed, such as the real Alice dying of a drug overdose and the complicity of the parents. Like some of the horror tales I have seen in anime and in manga, it is full of elaborate explanations after the events to explain them and the morals of the tales, which could be seen as off-putting for being over explanatory, but in mind to its tone as a morality tale, this makes sense. It became quite obvious with this work that this over-elaborate explaining, all from Count D himself and his philosophising, is the main meat of many of these tales alongside the gruesome conclusions involving the mystical creatures in this mini-series something in mind to how the first episode ends with a disturbing use of rabbits and how these ones reproduce.

Count D effectively becomes a one-man Greek Chorus and Crypt Keeper as well as the one who gives them the object (i.e. the pet) that causes the events to happen. The four episodes play off the conflicts of human emotions and their follies, the old chestnuts that are still great themes to tackle, but adds the additional fact that, like in many Japanese stories, the person involved may have willingly let themselves be damned. Why Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) became such a legendary horror film as it has was probably both its premise of the cursed videotape, but also its theme of the complicity of people, in how the tape came to existent and that a victim, anyone of us viewers in reality too, could let this happen to us even if we knew going in that viewing the tape could kill us after seven day. Pet Shop of Horrors plays with this concept nicely in such short a space of time. Episode two is about a mermaid which looks like the recently deceased fiancée of a man which he becomes obsessed with, whilst episode three is more bittersweet, its lead of an actor trapped by the shadow of his first success, as a beautiful lead in a sci-fi movie, less a tale of a man with sin but tragically a man giving up which involves the tale of Medusa of Greek legend.

There is levity here. Orcot is out of his depth with a man as eloquent and mysterious as Count D, and despite all the strange goings-on never questions why the mysterious pet seller has a strange magical creature, a cute mouse-bat critter, flying around him that would immediately break reality. Count D, even if it means providing the mayor with a cute penguin as a pet, also has powerful connections despite the fact, for all his demonic side, his moral code is more letting people suffer their own failings and merely providing the tools for them. It is also really apparent that there is a streak of platonic romance between the men hinted at, least a flirtation toyed with in the premise of two very different types of masculine beauty, the almost androgynous D against a rough and hard-headed cop. Even if not an ounce of romance was ever hinted at in Matsuri Akino's source manga, it feels subtextually here in their combative chemistry. It is still rich in atmosphere, with its occult leanings and also the score by Kazuhisa Yamaguchi, which is of its era but is a sumptuous mix of drum and bass with jazz. Tragically, he did not continue at all in the anime industry where his style of music would have been great for many works in this genre we would be getting in the Millennium.

If there is an issue with the mini-series in production, it is that, despite being hand drawn animation before the use of computers after the Millennium that became standard in anime production, it is not the best it could have been even for television. Despite the fact this is a Madhouse production, who are kings of great productions like Millennium Actress (2001), this feels like it could have had more flair in appearance than the snippets we do get; even for television, their full series Boogiepop Phantom (2000), whilst working with a budget, was brimming in far more style. The first episode, which I read in some form in a sample catalogue of manga, is naturally going to be superior in most exceptions on page, but the tale could have done with a bit more visual punch to add to the strength of the stories.

Episode four, the last, is the most idiosyncratic, in how it deals with the kirin, a mythological animal in East Asia of great reverence, almost-deities taken from Chinese mythology only owned by figures of great benevolent people and leaders. Here, there is the touch that, in this world, it suggests in a flashback in World War II Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, had a kirin, and here the tale is about a young congress man whose male assistant is the one really pulling the strings. This assistant wants to push him to become the great young President in the White House, despite the fact his wife Nancy wants a simpler life and he himself is falling in love with her, and even for a short tale, it stands out with its conclusion for these one tale characters, from how this issue is resolved in its own bittersweet way, a great example of how these moral tales can use horror to their advantage. The obvious disappointment is that this is only four episodes long. The manga, starting in 1995, lasted until 1998, followed by Shin Petshop of Horrors which started in 2005, during the boom of TokyoPop, the American manga distributor who licensed the series, and ended in 2012, which by that time was when the bubble for TokyoPop had long burst from their 2008 restructuring onwards, leaving a huge amount of stories (and the growing back-story of who D is and how Leon Orcot becomes closer to him) on the table. That does not even factor in that the original author returned to the world further times with Pet Shop of Horrors: Passage-Hen (2013-2017) and in 2018 with Pet Shop of Horrors: Ark Adrift. It is a shame, but by itself as a one-shot, Pet Shop of Horrors is a solid ninety minute DVD not allowed to fully form into something special. Considering this was a television broadcast rather than a straight-to-video production as I had presumed it to be makes this lack of a full thirteen episode series, let alone longer, stranger with hindsight and bittersweet as you see here four good episodes for a one-shot which would have made a great beginning to a longer production.