Angel’s Egg, a 1985 film from director Mamoru Oshii of Ghost in the Shell fame, is currently screening in limited runs with a 4K remaster, and I was lucky enough to catch it at my local arthouse. It’s stunning. A beautifully rendered monochrome world with only two living beings within it, the film is one that resists most attempts to interpret its metaphors, with Oshii himself admitting that there are parts of it that he does not understand. As such, it feels like a long, strange dream, full of images that feel pregnant with symbolism but too ephemeral to achieve any truly coherent exegesis.
In a waterlogged and abandoned city, an unnamed girl protects a large egg, while she forages for canned food and collects jugs of water. A giant machine rolls through the town, and an unnamed man bearing a cross-shaped weapon clambers down from it. They resemble one another, both being porcelain pale with platinum hair, but the girl flees from the man initially, and when he asks her for her name, it’s unclear if she fears him, can’t remember her name, or if she perhaps never even had one in the first place. The man briefly steals the egg and then returns it to her, retelling the story of Noah’s Ark but changing the ending so that the dove never returned, and that everyone on the ark simply forgot about their pasts. This leads the girl to take the man to a sort of sanctuary where she has been bringing her collected jugs of water, numbering in the thousands, and placed them all around the fossilized skeleton of an angel. The man, who has said that the only way to know what is inside of an egg is to break it, does so one night while the girl sleeps, and her screams the following morning when she discovers the bits of shell are heartbreaking. She runs and falls into the churning sea, where she drowns.
That’s a very rough sketch of what barely constitutes the “plot” of the film. This isn’t a story so much as it is a series of surreal images strung together as flimsily as the sluggish narrative of a dream in which you’re exploring a seemingly endless, empty city beneath a gray sky. (These are positive qualities that the film possesses despite “flimsy” and “sluggish” having derogatory connotations.) None of it really seems to mean much of anything. My favorite images from the film are completely tertiary to the above synopsis. The city seems to be filled with statues of fishermen, which the girl is startled by and avoids the presence of. Later, the city suddenly becomes filled with shadows of giant fish, silhouettes cast upon the streets and the sides of buildings, and the fishermen spring into action in an attempt to catch them, firing harpoons into the road and through streetlamps and into windows and empty houses. When I was still trying to understand the film and not simply experience it, I thought of them as automatons from the derelict city’s ancient past, left running in order to catch fish which had been hunted to death. That didn’t at all explain where the shadows came from, and now I see the sequence as two different kinds of ghosts, memories of two extinct parties that are both now long gone, physical husks that hunt long-dead prey, and the shadows of the flesh long since transcended. Is that accurate? Does any of it mean anything? I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t really matter.
Angel’s Egg is filled with Biblical imagery, with occasional glimpses of what appears to be the (or an) actual ark, sitting on a cliff as rain falls. Noah’s Ark is thematically central, and the film’s final image implies that all of what we have seen transpire occurred on the upturned hull of a giant ark-style vessel. The man’s use of a weapon in the shape of a cross is likewise open to many interpretations, but I remain convinced that attempting to puzzle all of that out is utterly the wrong way to engage with the film. There’s a giant mechanical sun that’s also an eyeball, and it’s covered in statues. What does it mean? Who cares? Enjoy the ride.
At the beginning of the recent Merchant Ivory discussion episode of the main podcast, most of the crew expressed great admiration for the recent Netflix original KPop Demon Hunters, and I must now add my own voice to that chorus. I resisted for as long as I could, but after the overwhelming number of Halloween costumes I saw and heard about this year, I was finally curious enough to give it a shot, and it’s quite cute.
HUNTR/X is an all-girl K-pop trio who also happen to be demon slayers, with their musical talent being an integral part of their spirit-busting arsenal. For generations, different trios of women have spent their lives fighting the infernal forces while also building and reinforcing the “Hanmoon,” a kind of psychic forcefield that keeps the armies of evil from entering our world. The most recent incarnation is set to complete/permanently reinforce the Hanmoon, visually represented by it turning golden, which will permanently sever the demon ruler Gwi-Ma (Lee Byung-hun) and his minions from our realm and prevent his influence from spreading. HUNTR/X’s lead singer is Rumi (Arden Cho!), an orphan whose mother was a demon hunter/musical idol and who was raised by her mother’s bandmate/co-slayer Celine (Yunjin Kim). Rounding out the trio are Mira, the snarky dancer who is the black sheep of her wealthy family, and Zoey, a Korean-American lyricist and rapper from Burbank; both were also trained by Celine in demon slaying/pop idol branding.
In the underworld, Gwi-Ma accepts the proposal of an underling named Jinu (Ahn Hyo-seop) to think outside the box and, instead of sending wave after wave of minions against HUNTR/X, interfere with the psychic power that they get from their fans to weaken the Hanmoon instead. To that end, Juni appears in our realm, accompanied by four other disguised demons, as the newest boy band, Saja. Like any perfectly crafted group of that genre, each member is designed to appeal to a certain demographic: there’s the innocent and adorable Baby Saja; the pink-haired pretty boy Romance Saja; the aptly named Mystery Saja whose hair obscures almost his entire face; and Abby, whose personality is … having abs (he’s my favorite). Just as HUNTR/X is poised to release their new single, “Golden,” which will solidify their idol status and let them turn the Hanmoon gold, Saja immediately starts to overtake HUNTR/X in popularity, undermining the power needed to complete the ritual. Worse still, unbeknownst to her bandmates, Rumi is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her “patterns,” the telltale markings that betray her heritage as the child of a demon and a hunter, which Celine has forced her to keep hidden for her entire life. Jinu notices this in their first fight, and with a budding potential romance between them, now she has two secrets to keep. And she’s losing her voice!
KPop Demon Hunters has been an enormous success, and is currently sitting at the top of Netflix’s most viewed original film list. It’s easy to see why; this is an easily-digestible animated musical with a distinctive style and catchy music. It’s clearly for children but is a bit of a throwback among kiddoe media in that it understands that its target demographic is not going to be its only audience, and thus makes the effort to include humor that appeals to the whole family, not just its smallest members who need to be babysat by a screen for 90 minutes. Other than this summer’s Freakier Friday (which was also PG), I’m hard pressed to remember the last time a movie that was made for a primarily young audience bothered to create something that older siblings and parents might enjoy, rather than merely tolerate. This kind of pop music has never really been my thing, I’m afraid, and I don’t really see that changing; the film’s Big Song “Golden” recently played at my gym and I would not have known it from any of the other pop music that passes by me in the stream if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. That’s not a mark against the film at all, just an observation that I’m a tertiary demographic here, and the music was consistently good throughout, even if my comparatively elderly ears couldn’t quite discern what I was hearing some of the time. (I first heard the lyric “Now I’m shinin’ like I’m born to be” as “Now I’m shining like a butterbean,” which I knew could not be correct but got stuck in my head.) Even more than that, I really appreciated that the film allowed itself to go a little hard on the violence and horror elements, and this is a movie that I could see being an effective introduction to the thrill of cinematic fright for a younger audience, of the kind that I was fortunate enough to benefit from.
An urban fantasy musical is a great idea, and I can’t imagine a better execution of it than this film, especially in its ineffable lightheartedness that manages to keep the film in the family-friendly realm despite some of the more challenging subject matter. As someone with no expertise in this genre, my two main points of comparison are admittedly very Western™, but I kept thinking of Josie and the Pussycats and Buffy. The similarities between HUNTR/X and the Pussycats are mostly visual, with them being a musical trio whose lounging around in their Avengers-style penthouse mirrors the royal treatment that the ‘Cats get in their film. When it comes to Buffy, I can’t help but think about that first season storyline—Buffy/Rumi falls for a much older demon with a soul (Angel/Jinu) and has to keep this from her excitable, borderline autistic-coded (Willow/Zoey) and snarky (Xander/Mira, although Mira is way cooler) friends, all while keeping secrets from her mother/mentor. There’s also the sixth season, where a resurrected Buffy fears that she’s “come back wrong” and is now part demon, and she covertly starts seeing Spike while keeping both her relationship and her condition from her friends. If you’re starting to worry that I’m going to say something negative about this, fret not; a comparison to Buffy is a high honor in my home, and I loved seeing the echoes. I was also delighted to hear Arden Cho’s voice, as I’ve been a fan of hers since her Teen Wolf days and I’m excited for the career possibilities that this success will bring her.
I didn’t touch much on the themes of the piece, but suffice it to say that they’re a bit deeper than the standard fare. It’s not a recent trend for animated and otherwise child-oriented film to be about self-acceptance, but even something like the recent Nimona (which I quite liked) has a tendency to have a slight twinge of the performative, while the complexities of self-identity and prejudices are handled with a little more nuance here. The exhilarating action sequences and the peppy music break the film up so much that it feels like you’re at a concert even when the film is giving you something to chew on, narratively, and I appreciate that. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s not a bad choice for a fun movie night.
Last year, legendary animator Don Hertzfeldt self-distributed a traveling roadshow release for his latest short film ME in a double-feature package with his 2012 masterpiece It’s Such a Beautiful Day. Encouraged by the expediency of that release after decades of struggling to get his work into wide distribution, Hertzfeldt has now put together a new roadshow collection of weirdo experiments in animation, reportedly as a theatrical-only release. With this year’s Animation Mixtape, Hertzfeldt has collected a chaotic assemblage of animated outsider art that he personally finds amusing, ranging in decade of production from the 1980s to the 2020s, in medium from stop-motion to computer graphics, and in runtime from a few seconds to 18 minutes. The individual shorts don’t speak to each other except in how they might inform or reflect Hertzfeldt’s own artistic sensibilities. Maks Rzontkowki’s “Martyr’s Guidebook” is a dispirited diary entry from our current digital wasteland, rendered in video game ones & zeroes. Mark Baker’s “The Hill Farm” is a self-amused relic of hippie slacker sentiments from decades in the past, illustrated in traditional pencil sketches. Jesse Moynihan’s “Jesus 2” is a prophetic vision of our singularity hell future, regurgitated from the psychedelic fantasia of Adventure Time-era children’s cartoons. The other ten or so shorts fall somewhere between those aesthetic & temporal markers, each with their own distinct tones & styles. The only discernible reason they’ve been grouped together is because Don Hertzfeldt likes them and wants to use his cinephile-approved name brand to offer them wider public attention.
Beyond his curational oversight of this mixtape project, Hertzfeldt contributed two short wraparound segments to bookend the program, hosted by the little whooping “My anus is bleeding!” cloud puffs from his infamous Rejected cartoons. Between their fits of inane “Whoo!” and “Yayyy!” cheerleading, the little cloud puffs explain that the main purpose of the project is make money for the filmmakers involved, confessing that they are all broke and desperate. Our whooping hosts then warn that because of lack of funding for this kind of work, portions of the program had to be created with generative A.I. technology in order to cut corners. Hertzfeldt then proceeds to flippantly mock the A.I. slop that’s threatening to put this kind of personal, handmade animation out of business, transforming his beloved bleeding-anus puffballs into machine-like A.I. monstrosities that continually shapeshift and puke their digital guts out in an aggressively meaningless display. Given these bookends’ open hostility towards A.I. as a substitute for personable, handcrafted art, it’s likely that they were animated by Hertzfeldt and not created using the very plagiarism engines he intended to mock. I hope so, anyway. In either case, these brief anti-A.I. segments are useful as a contrast to the genuinely imaginative work Hertzfeldt highlights in the mixtape playlist, effectively issued as a threat illustrating what the state of art will soon become if actual, real-life artists can no longer afford to make a living. Even the trippy Takeshi Murata short “Larry”—in which infinite computer renderings of a dog dunking a basketball devolve into digital slop—has a more personable quality to it than its generative A.I. equivalents.
Hertzfeldt credibly names generative A.I. as the biggest threat to these artists’ livelihood, but I found another throughline in the shorts’ credits to be just as alarming. Almost every film in this mixtape includes a title card acknowledging funding from national arts foundations like the National Film Board of Canada and the Polish Film Institute. While A.I.-addicted corporations are working to replace artists with computer programs in the private sphere, The Man is also working to eliminate that kind of public funding for the arts in order to shave a few measly bucks off of governments’ ledgers. The inevitable result of that financial restriction is that most modern animation is a computer-generated corporate product — an opportunity for brazenly lazy celebrities like Chris Pratt to collect easy paychecks voicing talking animals and famous video game characters. Besides the better-funded anime from Japan’s robust filmmaking industry, there are only occasional gems like the recent slacker comedy Boys Go to Jupiter that make it past animators’ personal YouTube & Vimeo accounts into proper theaters. The only venue I can think of where animation this diversely, playfully daring is exhibited in public is at local film festivals like NOFF, which will be programming ten or so animated shorts later this month. As Hertzfeldt acknowledges in the press notes for this year’s Animation Mixtape, however, “While over 10,000 short films are made every year by filmmakers at various stages of their career, only a fraction make it into film festivals and are able to be seen in a classic theatrical setting.” He decided to increase that fraction as best he could with this limited-release roadshow, which is admirable considering how little support these animators are getting from other established institutions.
Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?
I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed.
The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him.
Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess.
Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either.
I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.
It’s been three decades since Toy Story diverted the animation industry towards computer animation instead of traditional hand-drawn & stop-motion techniques, and the world is mostly worse off for it. The CG animation era has largely been dispiriting, typified more by soulless corporate dreck like Bee Movie, Shrek, and The Secret Lives of Pets than more relatively artful corporate products like Across the Spider-Verse. It feels like the entire battlefield has been surrendered to lazy IP cash-ins so celebrities like Chris Pratt can collect easy voice-acting paychecks. I haven’t seen much genuine, personal art in the medium outside a few short films in festival showcases. The new debut feature from outsider 3D animator Julian Glander is a welcome glimpse of how that might change as the tools of the trade become more widely accessible outside the corporate offices of Disney & Pixar. Admittedly, Boys Go to Jupiter indulges in the same lazy celebrity voice-acting traditions of lesser, more expensive CG animated films, but this time the voice cast happens to be overpopulated with hip, talented people: Jeaneane Garofalo, Julio Torres, Cole Escola, Elsie Fisher, Joe Pera, Chris Fleming, Demi Adejuyigbe, Sarah Squirm, and the list goes on. It’s also got a distinct visual style, an understated tone, righteous politics, and an authentic sense of genuine humanity — all things that are difficult to find in the average computer-animated feature. It’s a vision of a better world, even if it’s one that satirizes the corporate hell world we currently live in.
In essence, Boys Go to Jupiter is cozy slacker art. It follows the daily toils of food-delivery-app worker Billy 5000 as he spends every waking minute scheming to earn the $5,000 fortune of his namesake. He scoots around his bumhole Florida town on a Segway, cramming in as many deliveries a day as he can to exploit a financial loophole in his delivery app before the bigwigs at Grubster catch onto the grift. Most of his interactions with fellow disaffected Floridians are exceedingly low-key, as he casually bumps into acquaintances like his dirtbag friends, his religious nut neighbor, an overly dedicated hotdog salesman, and his fellow Grubster drones while scooting from doorstep to doorstep. His coming-of-age Bummer Summer lifestyle is only effectively interrupted by the intrusion of two supernatural forces: an E.T.-type alien creature invading from beneath the Earth’s surface and a potential love interest who works at her mother’s science lab developing impossible varieties of semi-magical fruits. It turns out that even these fantastical players are weighed down by the daily mundanities of labor, however, as the older girl he crushes on struggles to accept her fate as her mother’s successor and the underground E.T. creature is revealed to belong to a family of social media food bloggers who have to transmit Grubster take-out reviews to their followers back home to justify their vacation on the surface. Many pointless hangouts and improvised junk food jingles ensue, with all of Billy 5000’s many trivialities revolving around one simple truth: having a job sucks.
The rounded edges, overemphasized light-sources, and blown-out haze of Glander’s visual style belong to the kind of 3D art renderings you’d only expect to see in indie comics and homemade videogames. Specifically, it plays like a D.I.Y. videogame set in Steven Universe‘s Beach City, so much so that I’m amazed it’s screening in neighborhood arthouses like Zeitgeist and not personal Steam Deck consoles. Whether Glander effectively applies that softly psychedelic visual aesthetic to anything especially unique or useful is up for debate. I didn’t find it had anything new to observe about gig-economy exploitation that wasn’t more successfully satirized in fellow low-budget sci-fi whatsit Lapsis, but it’s relatable & satisfying enough as a slacker comedy that its political effectiveness is a moot point. All I know is that I liked the way it looked, its laidback novelty songs soothed my addled brain, and I laughed every time Billy 5000 concluded a Grubster delivery with the fictional company’s signature slogan, “Have a Grubby day!” I know a lot of people had their faith in computer-animated outsider art restored by last year’s feline adventure flick Flow, but I couldn’t feel that future promise of the medium myself until I “went to Jupiter” (i.e. ate some junk food and sang silly songs on the beach) with the boys.
Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him.
This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces.
The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out.
The Tragedy of Man is one of the most triumphant pieces of art that I have ever seen. Functionally eternal in scope, limitless in imagination, and infinitely evolving and revolving, it’s no wonder that the 160-minute film took 23 years to complete. It’s lavish in the extreme, inventive in ways that I hadn’t even imagined that an animated film (or any film) could be, and is a fantastically layered text that could take half a dozen viewings to even get the full breadth and scope of it. Even for a film this long, it’s even more dense than you’re imagining, as the spoken dialogue comes at you quickly and at a pace that verges on relentless (and which is occasionally full of thous and thees). This is unsurprising if one considers that it’s based on an 1861 play by Hungarian aristocrat and author Imre Madách, which was itself based on a previous work of his, a dramatic poem that was about four thousand words long. It’s a tale as old as time, as it opens on a celestial scene in which Lucifer argues with God about creation, citing himself as the primeval spirit of negation, the shadow that must exist because of his Creator’s light. He claims that humanity will aspire to become gods themselves in time, and God gives Lucifer his share of the world, which takes the form of the twin trees of Knowledge and Immortality.
You know how this story goes, and once the Fall occurs, Adam takes his first step into the apostasy of apotheosis by deciding that he will live on his own strength. As he and Eve find themselves living in a cave, he is never without Lucifer by his side, in various canine forms, man’s (false) best friend. Eventually, Adam demands that Lucifer follow through on the promised infinite Knowledge that he should have obtained from eating the fruit of temptation, so Lucifer does so by taking Adam on a spiritual journey that encompasses vast swaths of human history as Adam finds himself filling the role of various men of import throughout time. First is ancient Egypt, where Adam quantum leaps into Pharaoh Djoser in 2650 BC, where Eve takes the role of the wife of a slave who dies under the pharaoh’s demanding construction plans, with whom Djoser/Adam then falls in love, leading him to decide to abolish slavery. Lucifer, here appearing as Anubis in all of his dog-headed glory, tells him that history will still be a tapestry full of people enslaving one another, and that despite being as like a god as a man could be for that time, sand and time will reduce it all to nothing, and his proclamations of equality will change little, if anything. This will be the recurring theme of each of the time frames that Lucifer shows to Adam: mankind is on an eternal sinusoidal curve, and every time some kind of progress is made, it is inevitably corrupted because humans are savages at heart.
What I haven’t mentioned yet is that the above opening captures almost half a dozen different aesthetic art styles within those first plot developments. Lucifer and God’s conversation plays out in nebulous, colorful cosmos that represent all of existence and God’s permeation of every aspect of it, with Lucifer as a pure negative space within all of that firmament, like a silhouette animation. After the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve suddenly have hyperrealistic features, with everything being animated in a way that’s reminiscent of illustrated children’s books about cavemen. They’re honestly ugly to look at, and it works as an externalization of their fall from beings of perfected flesh to mortal meat. Much of the Egyptian segment is made up of flatly rendered images that evoke the stiff body language of hieroglyphic figures, but at other times it shows both the labor below and Djoser/Adam gazing upon it. And so, the art changes between (and within) different time periods, usually choosing and sticking to a color palette for each segment but not to one specific style. When Adam becomes Militiades in Greece during the 5th century BCE, the animation style takes on the appearance of the images emblazoned on Grecian pottery, and when he finds himself in first century Rome, gladiators battle it out in moving mosaics. The film never stops to let you catch your breath, and by the two-hour mark I was leaning forward in my seat in eager anticipation, metaphorically headlong.
Eventually, Adam’s journey catches up to the life and times of Christ, and he (and Eve) reconnect with God through him, embracing his message of love and fraternity, but they then watch in disappointed horror as Adam, in the form of Crusader Tancred, watches as the message that seemed poised to save mankind from itself falls into sectarian violence and strategy, with a debate between two branches of Christianity in the midst of a schism morphing into the shapes of the churches that they represent, which bash against each other until nothing is left but blood and bricks. With Adam then embodying Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century (in a style of mostly monochromatic moving woodprints), it seems like scientific and rational progress will be the thing which leads humanity out of the darkness, only for Adam to then find himself in the stead of French Revolutionary figure Georges Danton, who is initially lauded for his anti-aristocratic stance but who finds himself executed when the mob considers him insufficiently radical. Adam finds himself wishing for a world in which society is organized along principles for the common good, and then he gets to see what that future will (or might) look like, in which all that remains of nature are the genetically modified beasts and flora and in which nations have been completely abolished. Of course, the end of nations has not meant the end of the state, as he learns quickly when he bears witness to a woman being severely punished when she refuses to hand her son over to the state for education and assignment to employment when he comes of age (he can’t be more than ten). Further in the future still, Adam is a giant floating in the void just beyond earth’s atmosphere, where machines arrive and replace his organic parts with mechanical ones that turn him into a humanoid spaceship, before he returns to see man’s end, in a distant ice age in which all that remains of Adam’s progeny are savages, but Lucifer argues that despite their bestial mutations, they are no different from humans of any other era, as people never fundamentally change.
In all of these situations, Lucifer always brings Adam to the end of an age of progress, showing or implying the inevitable backward swing of the pendulum that (we hope) always bends in an arc toward justice. It’s arguable that this can’t be helped; he is, after all, the embodiment of shadow and obfuscation, and so there’s no purpose in showing Adam how democracy is born when he can instead reveal how it dies. That role falls to Eve, who likewise appears in every segment to be the voice of reason and hope for the future to counterpose the fatalistic nihilism that Lucifer is sowing into her husband’s mind. She’s the widowed slave whose love of Djoser ends slavery (at least for a time), both a guillotined aristocrat and a pro-Terror prostitute in Revolutionary France, the faithful wife of Militiades and the unfaithful wife of Kepler, and she is the woman who refuses to allow the state to essentially kidnap her child in the materialist future. The film’s a little trite and old fashioned in the way that it treats gender, as Adam (and therefore men) is always the historic actor while Eve (and thus women) exists to pull him back from the edge of the abyss, over and over again, but given that the source material predates the Transcontinental Railroad, it’s understandable.
I can’t stress enough just what an amazing technical achievement this is. There are images from this that will stick with me forever. I can’t stop seeing the people of France dissolve into a great wave of red and blue that bears Danton/Adam aloft upon itself, or the shadow of the guillotine that is cast across his face. As the 20th century’s present comes into view, the endless gears of existence grind on, first as soldiers fall within the teeth of the cogs of the machine, followed by various pop culture figures as they replace the gods of eras past, and it feels like it could go on for the rest of time. And then it does. For all of its overt religiosity, there’s no denying that this is a monumental work of inarguable artistic relevance. At just under three hours, it’ll be a little while before I dig into it again, but I hope that it opens up for me even more when I find my way back to it again.
Way back in the ancient pop culture landscape of 2018, there was some excitement & novelty to be found in a one-off experiment like Batman Ninja. Sure, every other major film in production was a superhero picture and, sure, the Caped Crusader was in roughly 30% of them, but it was still a welcome break in format to see the genre reimagined in a unique context – freed from the laborious narrative responsibilities of a “shared cinematic universe.” The first Batman Ninja film was an over-the-top indulgence in redesigning famous Batman villains within an alternate-universe anime aesthetic. Its newly released sequel does the same for members of The Justice League, but all the excitement & novelty has been dulled by a constant flood of multiversal storytelling over the years since. Every superhero picture is an alternate-dimension reimagining of familiar superhero archetypes now, and so Batman Ninja vs Yakuza League serves no real purpose beyond being an easy gateway into appreciating the visual delights of anime artistry for previously uninitiated 12-year-olds. Still, it’s cute.
Yakuza League‘s boldest creative gamble is in its assumption that its audience remembers any plot details or running jokes from the previous Batman Ninja outing. The story picks up at the exact moment when the last movie ended, with Batman & Robin returning to modern Gotham from their time-travel adventure in feudal Japan. It seems there are some lingering space-time anomalies resulting from that adventure, mainly that the island of Japan has disappeared from global maps and relocated to the sky above Gotham. The now sky-bound nation’s alternate history has been ruled by infinite yakuza gangs, leading to a “Yakuzageddon” event that threatens to tear Gotham down if the Bat Family cannot fix the corrupted “multiverse frequency” in time. The anomaly initially manifests in a “yakuza hurricane,” raining countless gangster intruders into Gotham like so many Agents Smith from Matrix sequels past. The situation escalates when Batman & Robin fly to the floating Japan in the sky to restore order in the now crime-ridden country, only to discover that the alternate-universe anime equivalents of fellow Justice League members are the biggest, cruelest gangsters of all. Many loud, silly fights ensue as they struggle to restore Justice League values into the Yakuza League variants, with only Wonder Woman working as their ally on the inside.
The major saving grace of Yakuza League is that DC has once again given Japanese animators free rein to reimagine their most iconic characters in an anime context (with Junpei Mizusaki & Shinji Takagi sharing directorial credit). They have as much fun with that freedom as possible, taking for-their-own-sake detours into 80s Saturday morning cartoon parody, Lady Snowblood-inspired karaoke video art, and pop-up book illustrations that help expand the artistic project beyond its most obvious boundaries. By the time Batman climbs into yet another mech suit to fight the Yakuza League equivalent of Superman, however, the “Batman, except it’s anime” aesthetic can’t help but feel a little rote. If you’ve already seen Batman Ninja, you’ve already seen everything Yakuza League has to offer – give or take scenes of The Flash sharing lightning powers & sartorial choices with Mortal Kombat‘s Raiden. If you’ve seen any superhero movie in the 2020s, you’ve also already seen the genre collapse in on itself with this style of “What if?” alternate-universe reimagining, which is starting to feel like an admission that there’s nothing exciting or novel left to mine from this material. It’s all just different flavor packets added to the same basic gruel.
A.I. tech bros’ latest attack on the basic dignity of everyday life targeted Studio Ghibli of all things, proving that absolutely nothing is sacred to these ghouls. There’s a recent software upgrade to the Plagiarism Generator technology that was advertised in the form of “Ghiblifying” pre-existing images with digital filters that adapt them to the visual style of the legendary animation studio. Nevermind the blatant copyright infringement that amalgamates already underpaid artists’ work into digital-age corporate slop. Nevermind that the studio’s broad cultural association with Hayao Miyazaki—and Hayao Miyazaki only—disregards the work of fellow directors & animators under that brand who have their own distinct style. The most insulting insinuation about the “Ghiblified” A.I. image trend is that it reduces decades of finely crafted animation to a few vague visual signifiers that could be summed up in a single word: “Cute.” Like the A.I.-generated Wes Anderson videos before it, this recent dispatch from Tech Bro Hell makes Studio Ghibli’s work look simpler, safer, and more twee than it is in practice, mining its surface aesthetics without engaging with the substance beneath. It’s just as empty & lazy as it is profane.
What would these “Ghiblified” A.I. images look like, for instance, if they pulled their visual cues from Isao Takahata’s work instead of Miyazaki’s? Would it capture the full span of life’s tenderness, cruelty, warmth, and pain, as gorgeously illustrated in The Tale of Princess Kaguya, or would it reduce the immensity of that film’s beauty to a few strokes of an algorithmic color-pencil? Would it convey the collectivist environmentalism of Pom Poko‘s radical politics, or just automatically equip all figures pictured with comically large scrotums? The real gotcha example, of course, is what an A.I. “Ghiblified” photo implicates about a film as devastating as Takahata’s WWII drama Grave of the Fireflies. I’m not sure how valuable the cutesy surface aesthetics of the studio’s character designs are in the context of a story about children starving to death during the societal disruption of war. In-film, the contrast between the characters’ classic anime cuteness (which Roger Ebert summarized as “enormous eyes, childlike bodies, and features of great plasticity”) and the real-life atrocities those characters suffer makes for horrific emotional impact, perfectly illustrating the inhuman evil of war. Using those visual signifiers out of context to cutesy-up your beach vacation photos is incredibly crass, then, if you take more than a half-second to think about it.
The biggest emotional gut punch of Grave of the Fireflies arrives in the first couple minutes, before you even get to know the children at the center. We’re introduced to our coming-of-age protagonist Seita in his dying minute, actively starving to death in a train station while passersby treat him as an inconvenient obstacle during their daily commute. When he passes, he leaves his body behind to reunite with the spirit of his even younger sister, Setsuko, who has apparently been waiting for him to join her in a firefly-lit afterlife. Both children’s fates are succinctly & poetically spelled out in this one quiet moment, so all the audience can do when the timeline dials back to 1945 is slowly watch it happen with no way to stop it. Seita & Setsuko are orphaned in the final days of WWII by firebombing raids and Naval attacks that leave both their parents dead. They live in a world sandwiched between mass graves below and falling ash from above, but they can at least depend on each other for community. Seita takes on housing & feeding his sister as his sole responsibility, dodging any pressure to join the war effort that would distract from her survival. As the opening warns, he fails, but he does manage to leave her with some joyous memories along the way despite the pain & indignity of starving to death, unhoused. It’s incredibly tough to watch.
Grave of the Fireflies indulges in all the usual youth-nostalgia and hand-drawn natural wonder that typifies Studio Ghibli’s broader approach to 2D animation, but it’s mostly in service of making the emotional tolls of war weigh as heavily on the heart as possible. It turns out that even when gorgeously animated, war is Hell. Worse than Hell, maybe. The most insidious images I saw during last week’s A.I. Ghibli Fest were from the official Twitter account of the Israeli army, cutesifying their real-time, real-world bombing & starvation of Palestinian children en masse as if they regard Grave of the Fireflies as an aspirational roadmap rather than a dire warning of past evils that should not be repeated. Of course, most people using the Ghiblified A.I. generators have much cuter, gentler works from the studio in mind, like My Neighbor Totoro (presuming they have any direct familiarity with the studio at all, beyond walking past advertisements for routine repertory screenings at the local AMC). When Grave of the Fireflies was first released in Japan, it was paired with Totoro on a double bill that confused & traumatized unsuspecting children who weren’t prepared for such a heavy night out. That late-80s programming choice underestimated the full scope of what Studio Ghibli offers as a movie studio that produces daring, emotionally complex art decades before the A.I. C.H.U.D.s repeated the same mistake. They’re not in the game to sell twee digital filters and stuffed commemorative plushies; Grave of the Fireflies is alone proof of that.
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