#266: Le Portrait de Petit Cossette (2004)

Studio: Daume

Director: Akiyuki Simbo

Screenplay: Mayori Sekijima

Voice Cast: Marina Inoue as Cossette d'Auvergne; Mitsuki Saiga as Eiri Kurahashi; Kumiko Yokote as Hatsumi Mataki; Megumi Toyoguchi as Shouko Mataki; Rei Igarashi as Zenshinni of Shakado; Ikumi Fujiwara as Michiru Yajiri; Isao Yamagishi as Hiroshi Hakuta; Junpei Morita as Yukata Enokido; Mamiko Noto as Yuu Saiga; Masashi Ebara as Marchello Orlando; Shinnosuke Furumoto as Michio Hisamoto; Susumu Chiba as Naoki Katou; Yukari Tamura as Kaori Nishimoto

Viewed in Japanese in English Subtitles

 

Eiri Kurahashi is the lead of a one-off horror story about items, including a painting, of the daughter of a French family which is imprinted with her soul, a beautiful young woman named Cossette who he encounters first in his job at an antique store with a Venetian wine glass that starts to bring forth visions of her. Cossette was murdered by an Italian painter who became obsessed with her beauty, following the idea of how her soul or a form of her, especially after her traumatic death, has left her ghost in various items acquired and brought to Japan centuries later. This is a project, notably, from Akiyuki Simbo, is still early in his career, in context that he had already directed a lot of straight-to-video content and television series, but before he made a certain set of projects that caught on in a huge way. Undoubtedly, when work like Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011) was becoming insanely popular, people would have not ignored him, and you see here already with Le Portrait.... the style and heightened melodrama that he would bring to that production. Other titles of this period, even when of different genres, like the surreal school comedy Paniponi Dash! (2005), showed his obsession with the style of his work, but this shows him bringing forth this surrealism with the horror genre.

The story, even if split into three under forty minute episodes, works entirely in the structure of a theatrical film, where after a blood pact Kurahashi takes the poisoned soul of the painter into himself, willing to become the sacrificial guinea pig to bleed and purge each of the cursed items connected to her death. This does have a melodramatic side more common, in how it is depicted, in anime such as how he transforms into a monster when the painter's form takes over, and how attempting to purge the curse items, including the attempt by one of the women surrounding him trying to help him, leads to magical noise and energy blasts. It is also however, in premise, a story you find in gothic literature and cinema, of becoming obsessed and falling in love with someone who is beyond the grave, abstract, an obsession with this love which robs him of his connection to reality. It is a timeless tale, retold here, as a quartet of women in his ordinary life, including one who is smitten for him, are trying to help someone who has fallen in love with a ghost and the memories he inherits of her.

This is over-the-top, where someone will literally paint in their own blood for the dramatic moment, but returning to this production, even as a pure style piece this feels like a nice production for horror anime in terms of unrestrained imagination and mood. As someone who gets a kick out of the trope in anime of figure entering phantastical worlds between realities, usually an eighties and nineties trope, this is full of such scenes, a feast of the eyes even if the strains of early computer effects are occasionally seen. Giant dolls, masses of sentient floating eyes, and a place where the living and dead can co-exist, built in the image of Cossette, which is both of a Gothic landmass, with so many hundreds of lit candles inside, and has flesh walls with pieces falling off. It is a cavalcade of stylistic tropes brought together with studio Daume, who produced their own work as well as in-between animation, only to sadly not do much into the 2010s onwards. As an original premise, barring a manga tie-in between episodes, this is the kind of production which has to be praised for its attempt at creativity, including moments in the first episode bleeding time and place to depict Kurahashi's disconnect from reality that create a sense of ill-ease.

Returning to this, even with music which evokes the use of the band Kalafina for Madoka, I see a lot of the gothic and horror aesthetic that seeped into that production, a taste for the aesthetical in beauty matched with deeply macabre storytelling. In the end, adding to the curiosity and worth of this production as its own story, Le Portrait... depict torture and has sever blood loss, but is not a work of gristly death but tragedy. This is a fascinating turn as the story progresses, becoming a psychodrama about our male lead trying to deal with this love beyond his mortal reality he is embroiled in, and how it ultimately becomes about the difference between a person and their image, literally an antagonist by the end of this. It is, for its over-the-top tone, pure romantic horror drama and really stands out.