#278: Cybervenus FeiFei (2001)

Studio: Blue Moon Studio

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

In my obsession with digging up obscurities, I finally close off the trilogy of three Virtual Idol releases which got DVD releases in the United Kingdom. They exist in an unconventional place in terms of anime, as CGI productions connected to Pony Canyon, a publisher huge in the Japanese music industry with involvement other pop culture industries like anime, but as DVD directed collections of segments which were released in the boom period of British DVD distribution when the format was new. This film in its trailers promised a fourth, which feels like it was falling back into the idea of the sexy virtual female idols of the other titles I have covered, but the three we got were Yuki Terai - Secrets (2000), Virtual Stars (2002), and Cybervenus FeiFei, which focuses on a Chinese woman who was created through motion capturing the movements of real actress. It feels like, from the three we got, this was the most ambitious in terms of ideas and artistic presentation, making the fact this was not the final one somewhat strange. Virtual Stars was really falling back into the idea of sex appeal of their virtual starlets, whilst this feels more like it should be the conclusion, where Blue Moon Studio wanted to figure out where they could go with this production concept they had, as FeiFei becomes significantly more existential in tone than appealing to a cute idol who can appear in music videos.

Like the others, this is a collection of shorts, beginning with Doll, where FeiFei initially is wandering through giant cogs. Ahead of time, I find the computer effects here compelling, beautifully obsolete, especially in mind that there is a clear care to make FeiFei as realistic as possible, as will be seen in the later shorts, even if prioritized over overtly detailed locations. As a result, she is a proto-virtual idol in the truest sense of pushing the realism to a quality you can admire, but aside from actual live action footage being used later on, the journey through mazes in this first short is very abstract in comparison to the person wandering them. Add the ambient techno the scores the segment as she finds feminine robots and a transparent monolith, and it is brain candy for Millennials. RGB takes this further by looking like the cool Dreamcast game we never got, FeiFei cybersurfing a spiral environment in pure white void which wandered out of the videogame Rez (2001). Even the spoken word fuzz rock that scores this segment feels like something Sega would commission whilst she is riding a metallic shark in a green sea of fish. Arguably the best thing about this entire project, as here, is how work like this can have a pretense of a plot but also be purely dreamlogic as FeiFei’s birth, as this short is meant to represent, includes all the following but also requires her gaining colour pigmentation for his body beyond grey.

These shorts all have poetic introductions to them, suggesting Blue Moon Studio were more earnest in their work with this one in terms of meaning. Voice, as FeiFei travels through a room in its own existence and learns to speak, also brings in the touch distinct to this collection of animations, blending live action with FeiFei interacting with the real world. The soundtracks are a smorgasbord of the era – whale sounds, nu jazz, ambient lounge and dub music, sometimes in the same short as with Real, focusing on more live action as FeiFei sees the world through the pieces of recorded footage, and is interacting with a real actress who can talk to her through a laptop. These shorts build a narrative over these segments, unlike the others in the series, where she is slowly growing into a real person fully immersed in our world, which also makes understanding the dialogue more a concern. “Dream and reality are the same” is spoken at one point, and whilst we are seeing the limits of the animation at times, we see something very ambitious in spite of this. By Messenger, we are definitely seeing a more New Age tone to the project too, Messenger emphasizing this as an experiment in a character as a radio host, or waiting in-between her recordings of messages from listeners.  We have moved from random zombies being fought off by a sexy dancer in Virtual Stars or music videos to more perfected movements for speaking dialogue or communicating her messages of love in turntablism.

Labyrinth is the most ambitious of them all for being seventeen minutes long. Splicing our lead into real footage of Rome, they do have to fudge around her presence around real people in the streets, like a ghost no one sees, but even in painstakingly animating her operating a phone booth, the short is trying for a more ambitious short film with emphasis on mood. It begins attempting a plot of FeiFei trying to find a man she cares for living in Italy, only for reality to start to bleed and distort in digital code, all with knowledge eventually he has disappeared. As she travels around Rome, witnessing masks with her face on them in store windows or with the walls closing in on her, it is cool to see Blue Moon Studio suddenly take the project series to this point, feeling like the last thematically in their ambition in spite of the true chronology of the releases. After FeiFei goes to a church the short becomes more abstract, a mood piece where she is transported to a tropical island, eventually to her painting herself on the moon on grassy field. It might be seen as a cop-out, but in mind that this entire product feels like the right mix of old CGI, dream logic and these moments of expanding the production with ambition, I would let Labyrinth have a pass if it was entirely just obsolete CGI being used in imaginative ways by this studio, only to also admire that they were wanting to push their interest in terms of artistry too. Sadly, this entire series of works are as obscure as you could get, and in mind that we even got DVD releases of these in the United Kingdom, I ponder whether any of this, from the films themselves to the making of documentary material also included, are even properly preserved. Finally closing the trilogy off they are a compelling dead end in the history of Japanese animation, though it is clear to see that we would have not gotten a Cybervenus FeiFei even if the project continued into the 2010s. When Virtual Stars was released, the production realized the sex appeal sold more, so even if they were able to prosper, this more esoteric tone would have likely been ditched soon after anyway.