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Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

Andrew Heskins — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:00:29 +0000

Little Red Riding Hood retold as a psychological thriller from the director of Ghost In The Shell and Patlabor – but just who exactly is the wolf?

That’s the thing with Anime. You think you know exactly what to expect, all the clichés, expect that so often not what you get. Take Jin-Roh, for instance, easily not what you’d imagine from an Anime – a psychological thriller that has more in common with Vertigo than Akira…

In a time of political unrest Kazuki Fuse is a member of special armed police force unit who becomes traumatised when a young girl bomber, a ‘riding hood’, blows herself up in front of him.

By chance he meets her sister, and begins to fall for her. But while his superiors argue over the future of his special force unit, all is not as it seems. Can a wolf ever be a man? And just who here has the big teeth?

A follow up to Jigoku no banken: akai megane (The Red Spectacles) and Jigoku no banken: kerubersu (Stray Dogs), both written and directed by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost In The Shell, Ghost In The Shell 2), Jin-Roh returns to the focus of those stories, the paramilitary police force, for one last script by Oshii.

Oshii obviously draws on memories of the political riots in Japan of the late sixties that would have taken place while he was a teenager, like so many of his contemporaries, yet here decides not to elaborate on the motivations of the terrorists, who appear to come from normal backgrounds. Instead he centres on those of the special force, and both those who want to keep and lose the unit within the force itself. Indeed, this parallels much of his work, from Ghost In The Shell through Patlabor. And it’s all wrapped up in a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.

It has the intelligence you’d expect from Oshii’s work, but the behind-the-scenes discussions won’t suit all viewers, particularly those expecting more Manga-esque action. Instead the blossoming romance has the resonance of some of Hitchcock’s work, such as Vertigo. You become aware that all is not as it seems, a game is being played, but not who holds that cards. It’s tremendously effective, without the need for excessive violence or sexual content.

Long-time Oshii collaborator Hiroyuki Okiura gains one of his few credits as director, but it’s hard not to see the guiding hand of Oshii all over this production. Lushly animated with a soft focus effect much as Hitchcock used on his leading ladies, and with a soundtrack to match, this beautiful film is well worth a viewing. Particularly if Anime is not usually your bag.

My Neighbour Totoro

Andrew Heskins — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 15:30:08 +0000

One of Studio Ghibli’s first films, director Hayao Miyazaki creates a beautiful film to be enjoyed by children and adults alike…

It’s no coincidence that Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbour Totoro debuted in the same year as the genre-defining Akira. Katsuhiro Otomo’s adaptation of his own gargantuan graphic novel set the pace and themes for what followed in Anime, and broke the artform around the world. Yet that same year, in one of the earliest outings from the newly created Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki set out his own manifesto for what he felt should be the themes for films. ‘Non-confrontational’, family orientated, in every sense a world away from what we all expected at the time from Japanese animation… perhaps that’s why it took us so long to catch on?

When two girls, Satsuki and her younger sister Mei move out into the country with their father to be closer to their bedridden mother, they soon find mysterious spirits inhabit the forest next to their new home. Known as ‘Totoro’, they soon embark on several adventures together, helping both to take their minds off their mother illness, and ultimately deal with it.

Ahem, and that’s it really!

It’s all pretty wholesome fun, a simple tale beautifully told. There are no cheap ‘looping backgrounds’ or Anime style frozen montages. Instead the painstaking detail with which Miyazaki’s recreate this rural area outside of Tokyo is only too obvious. In fact, this sort of quality of animation hadn’t seen since Disney’s Snow White or Pinocchio. The gentle pace of both animation and story is a complete contrast to the extreme nature of most Anime.

(Recently in an article about the family feud surrounding the release of Tales From Earthsea between Hayao Miyazaki and his son Goro, Kaleem Aftab, a witer for The Independent, over simplified the difference between Manga and Anime, suggesting that the themes of Anime were more violent than those in printed Manga, or comic book form. Of course, Manga itself could be more violent than anything ever brought to the screen in Anime, but the point he makes about Miyazaki’s films is valid – they deliberately defy everything Japanese animation had become best known for.)

The films themes echo the later Spirited Away, as the bizarre world these creatures inhabit happens around us all the time, we just don’t see it. If it lacks the menace of that film, there does at the core seem some implied threat from this world – the large Totoro with it’s large – sharp claws, but perhaps that’s an adult watching with an adults preconceptions. Children don’t have that.

My Neighbour Totoro is an amazing piece of work to be enjoyed by children and adults alike!

Spirited Away

Andrew Heskins — Wed, 01 Dec 2004 10:15:30 +0000

A beautiful, bizarre and completely compelling masterpiece, Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar winning follow up to Princess Mononoke is a wonderfully dark fairy tale for all ages…

The winner of Best Animated Feature for 2002 literally Spirited Away the Oscar from the competition this year. That those competitors included such sugar coated, insipid and uninspiring works as Lilo & Stitch, Treasure Planet and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron undermines what a triumph of animated film this is, perhaps the most deserving Oscar since Fantasia received an Honorary award in 1940.

This category – only in its second year – seems bound to be overrun with banal childrens films while foreign language animations, particularly Japanese, are excluded. The categories only purpose seems to be to acknowledge the amount of labour and money Hollywood pours into these ventures. Yet the company you’d most readily associate with such films nowadays, Disney, were responsible for the release of Spirited Away, dubbed but – uncharacteristically for them – uncut. Well, let’s not forget just how innovative they were 60 years ago…

The story begins when, while making their way to a new home, a stop to investigate what appears to be a theme park unwittingly traps Chihiro and her family in a strange nether world. The location of a bathhouse for gods and spirits. Her parents transformed into pigs, and under threat of being gobbled up herself, to escape back to our world Chihiro must leave the timid scared girl behind and become a strong, independent young woman. But first she needs a job!

On her journey she befriends a variety of bizarre characters, many of whom help and more often hinder. Haku, an older boy who also takes the form of a dragon – enchanted into the service of Yubaba, with her giant baby, who runs the bathhouse. Kamaji, the spider like engineer who keeps the bathhouse boilers going with the help of animated soot balls. (Kept in order under the threat of being turned back in to soot.) The Stink Spirit, who turns out to be a polluted River Spirit. And then there’s No Face, who desperately wants to please Chihiro and be loved in return, but only succeeds in causing havoc.

Writer/director (and much more besides) Hayao Miyazaki takes us beyond the looking glass of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, and into a world that seems to have more in common with the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The intricate coexistence of hundreds of surreal creatures in a world that sometimes echoes our own, only to subvert them. A coexistence that seems beyond man, as Miyazaki subtilely warns (as he did with Princess Mononoke) of our need to look after our environment.

But the lesson Miyazaki really want to show us is there is no good and evil. No black and white. All the inhabitants, however harsh their actions, have a motivation for them more complex than that. Hence Chihiro’s journey ultimately is one of survival, and not judging other for their difference.

Though billed as such this is no childrens film. It’s content might even scare some younger viewers. It’s a beautiful, ground breaking work of animation that can be enjoyed all ages. Yet another example of Japanese Anime that shows just how powerful a medium Animation can be.

Perhaps it’s for that reason that Spirited Away is one of several films Disney are releasing from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli. Following the release of Princess Mononoke a couple of years ago (under Miramax), they will also include Castle in the Sky and Kiki’s Delivery Service. Could this be a move by Disney to claim a piece of the largest and most innovative animation pie in the world? Particularly when the majority of their output is so hackneyed and cliched, constantly retreading old successes (Re: Jungle Book, Dumbo, Peter Pan etc).

Miyazaki stipulated that Disney could only release his films complete, with an English language dub true to the original. A move that at least ensures that in return his films get access to the wider audience they so richly deserve, and the dual language facilities of DVDs even allow them to be seen in their original glory. But lets face it, if it was really about giving a film like this a larger audience why give it such a limited cinematic release?

Just compare the endless promotion for Lilo & Stitch with that for Spirited Away (when it finally gets released in the UK in October) and make your own mind up who has really had the last laugh.

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Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

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