スカイ•クロラ/ The Sky Crawlers

Another Production IG project from Oshii Mamoru – bringing with it the hallmarks of that partnership: beautiful visuals, main characters with blank expressions and glassy eyes and questions raised about humanity and existentialism. But all the flaws of the Ghost in the Shell properties are here – with very few of their virtues.

The plot here unravels incredibly slowly, with the audience disoriented and left to speculate. Two fighter pilots, young enough to be called children by some, go to a diner with their girls. They drink, smoke and take the girls somewhere they know they can sleep with them. But the younger, more childlike one is confused. He has just arrived on the military base, but nobody will talk about the person he’s replaced.
We soon learn that the country is at war, battles mostly waged in the air. The pilots are ‘Kildren’ (or kirudoru, ‘kill-dolls’ in the original), apparently unable to age, dying only in war – hence, perhaps, their willingness to indulge in cigarettes and alcohol. But these are not party people – that is very much emphasised. They are grim, angst-ridden youths, every day facing the possibility of death in battle, most questioning themselves, their pasts and those around them.

The main problem here is that the film is long – two hours long – and very dull. The idea is clearly that the sombre, slow-moving story will come over as mature, challenging and intellectual. But it just gives the impression of very little story to tell. The story comes from a novel, but for all that it gets spun out and for all the loose ends lead you to think there is more to be revealed than you see, it is just very thin and very predictable. We had figured out within ten minutes the twist that would come at the end – and what would happen after the credits – and the rest was just waiting to see if our expectations were to be bourn out, or if I’d just been watching too much Gunslinger Girl and Evangelion. In the end, nothing presented as a twist came as a surprise, and I disliked this for the same reason I dislike most of Chiaki J Konaka’s work.

Also, while there are two relatively normal characters near the centre of the story, they are very much secondary to the two main characters – who are always kept at arm’s length. They are strange, don’t understand themselves or one another and mostly deal with their feelings by staring.

Everything is totally beautiful – the character designs are simple but the lighting, the movement, the mise-en-scene and especially the backgrounds look amazing. The film superbly cracks the problem of how to make CG look right in traditional animation – which is not through making edges bold or cel-shading obvious, but by simply making everything else in the shot look every bit as good as the CG does. Visually, this is one of the best films anime can offer, and if you want something to show people to convince them anime isn’t all giant eyes and sparkles, this would be a good choice. But for fans of conventional storytelling, strong characterisation, a good balance between action and drama or anything that would resemble fun, look elsewhere. I would have much rather this were a 30-minute Twilight Q-style experiment.

トワイライトQ / Twilight Q

What a peculiar little piece of animation the Twilight Q OVA episodes are. I don’t know exactly when or where I got hold of these 1986 episodes, but it was at least two years ago. Very mysterious, I’m sure you’ll agree. With the title drawing immediate comparisons to The Twilight Zone, the episodes also revolve around mysterious supernatural events, and are rather unimpressively realised and unveiled. The biggest mystery about these two half-hour pieces are why they both fall under the same title at all – the only thing they share is the element of empty mysteriousness masquerading as something clever and sophisticated, and the concept of things slipping in time in ways that cannot be explained. Otherwise, they are extremely different, in art style, setting, execution, humour and characterisation – they are even animated by two entirely different studios – the first by Ajia-Do Animation Works, and the other by Studio Deen, back when the only series that had distinguished them were the second half of Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku.

Possibly the reason I originally thought to check out the OVAs was that the second was directed by Oshii Mamoru, famous for his Ghost in the Shell work, Patlabor and more recently Sky Crawlers. If anything, though, the second episode was the less engaging and intelligent one, though it was the one that took more risks, and more experimentation might have made Twilight Q truly memorable rather than a bit of ephemera connected to some big names.

The first episode revolves around a camera found by two girls on a beach. A picture of one of the girls is on the film, with a boy she has never met, and it soon transpires that the camera is still in a pre-production phase and ought not to exist yet. As the plot thickens, the camera ends up disappearing in a disappointingly lame scene, and ultimately it becomes clear there is no explanation beyond magical time warps. However, the mini-episode is at least engaging and brisk, and the inevitable final scenes give a sense of closure, at least in the story’s own terms. The art is also rather nice, extremely 80s in design but at least showing why the way characters were drawn in the 80s came about, still looking cute and appealing today – where so many 80s designs look hideous.

The second episode only really has three significant character designs – or two, depending on how you look at it – and they are meant to be comedic rather than pretty. One is a toddler drawn in more or less SD style, with a huge head about the same size as the rest of her body, enhanced by a big helmet. She lives wearing only the helmet and a t-shirt with her father, a filthy man who looks like a clichéd anime burglar or some such, and does nothing all day. Meanwhile, a private investigator is hired to look into the strange father-daughter pair from the room next door, and begins to suspect the man is also a private eye. Or perhaps one or the other doesn’t exist, or indeed, none of it does, but it is all a plot made up by a novelist to give him an escape from his own stifling life. Multiple levels of reality are toyed with, coupled with some very heavy-handed imagery featuring parallels between a koi carp, the child and aeroplanes that have been disappearing. It is full of good ideas, and certainly the multiple levels of reality make for a more engaging mystery than magically-appearing cameras from the future, but ultimately there is the same hollowness at the core, and the characters and setting are far less accessible and appealing than in the first segment, making this one by far the duller one.

I feel glad to have seen what seems a fairly significant piece of anime history, for its length, but I can’t say I hold Twilight Q in high esteem, or would care much for a repeat viewing.