Much as I love anime, when one thinks of arthouse, it is not where the mind first turns. Anime may have outgrown its eighties clichés of ultraviolence, big-boobed airheads getting molested by tentacles and plotlines with little more to them than good guys and bad guys have a scrap, but while modern anime is more sophisticated, little of it appeals to international arthouse crowds. Osamu Tezuka’s experiments are long in the past, and seldom revisited. Today’s anime is dominated by cutesy comedies, fantasy action series and a few shows which aim for realism. Arguably some of SHAFT’s stranger work has a heavy arthouse influence, Takahata’s work with Studio Ghibli has an artistic angle that balances Miyazaki’s populism, and some of the releases from Madhouse and Studio 4˚C have certainly been exceptional, from Mind Game to Tekkon Kinkreet, but these are recent examples, and that they stand out so much is indicative of how little they represent the immense anime industry.
But anime, especially in 2010, is getting to be as broad as cinema in general. While the minds of those who think of arthouse animation may still go first to Yuri Norstein or the Zagreb School, arthouse anime is still being made. And here is a rather unsettling, grotesquely beautiful example, directed and seemingly almost wholly realised by Yamamura Koji. A Country Doctor is a pretty direct attempt to render Franz Kakfa’s weird short story of the same name in visual terms. Thus, the hallucinogenic and Protean way the narrative weaves about and hints at political commentary comes through as a strange, scratchy and almost monochrome animation in which characters and objects swell and change and move without weight, but remain recognisable and can interact with one another, while overlaid filters shift and blend, giving a scratchy overall texture not too distant from Norstein’s work. At times the delivery seems juvenile: choral delivery of narrative in spooky, flat voices immediately brings student theatre to mind, for example. However, as a whole the mood is unsettling, iconic and grotesque and suits the strange story well.
Of course, the question of the validity of Kafka’s narrative, which quite probably means nothing at all in conventionally storytelling terms and is instead a series of emotional expressions, is a debate far too large for this page, but this anime at only 20 minutes long can bewilder, disturb and to a degree amuse without becoming tedious.
Never to be a popular hit, nor to be of much note in any history of Japanese animation, it is nonetheless an award-winning animation worthy of attention and interest. Unfortunately, at least in the West, those who would be impressed generally steer clear of anime as lowbrow, while those who adore anime are more ‘in it for the pretty’ and would be baffled and irritated by something like this. Ah well. In my view, that is their loss.
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