Madame Tutli-Putli

The eyes are the windows to the soul. And it’s incredible what an effect putting live-action eyes into stop-motion puppetry can accomplish. Madame Tutli-Putli, the breakthrough work from Clyde Henry Productions – commissioned as a result with the expertly-crafted puppetry short Higglety Piggelty Pop! – is unforgettable in aesthetic terms. A real labour of love, it involved not only the laborious process of stop-motion animation, but live-action actors then matching the puppets’ movements so that their eyes could be digitally mapped to the models. And what an effect it has! Not only do the puppets gain an uncanny, unsettlingly realistic quality, but they are able to show emotions in an unprecedented way. A stunning experiment, it is no surprise that this short was nominated for an Oscar in the same year as another astonishing show of hard work, My Love by Aleksandr Petrov, though the winner that year was the Peter and the Wolf Prokofiev animation.

The story is both simple and open-ended: a character we assume is the eponymous Madame Tutli-Putli boards a train with what seems like all the baggage of her life. The other occupants of her compartment are strange – men in the luggage rack watching a chessboard as the movements of the train make the moves for them, a little boy with an adult face reading a book with an unsettling title, and a famous tennis player who makes obscene gestures at her. In the night, the train is boarded and a strange gas fills the air. The last thing our protagonist glimpses is a corpse-like face shushing her as the tennis player’s organs are harvested.

What follows is entirely open to interpretation – did she simply wake to an empty train? Did she die and run to the afterlife? Is the whole thing symbolic of leaving behind a sad life to embrace an exciting new one through metamorphosis, as symbolised by a moth? It is left to the individual – and while some enjoy that depth, my honest reaction was that it was a lazy and disappointing way to end the short, and I certainly wanted more definitive answers after such a beautifully-crafted beginning.  

コゼットの肖像 / Kozetto no Shouzou / Le Portrait de Petit Cossette

Corrected to ‘Petite Cossette’ for release outside Japan, Petit Cossette was an interesting, odd little OVA from 2004, probably the prettiest – and strangest – iteration of the Gothic Lolita craze in anime that also spawned the superb Rozen Maiden and the lamentable rip-off Saint October. While the visuals of Cossette are striking and impressive, the plot is rather loose and obscure, and while perhaps that gives it a sense of being more high-minded than Rozen Maiden, it certainly doesn’t have the charm, humour or memorable characters. But then, in three OVA episodes with horror as the dominant tone, that was never really going to happen, and after all, there are plenty of examples of sweet, beautiful young girls without much in the way of personality in horror stories becoming very well-loved characters – just look at Enma Ai.

The inspiration for the story is gothic horror, in all its cliché, with the primary source most likely being The Picture of Dorian Gray. A young Japanese man finds a portrait of a beautiful little white girl in the sort of frilly pseudo-Rococo dress beloved of the Lolita street fashion movement in Japan. She speaks to him from within the portrait, and becoming obsessed, he goes to the painting at midnight, and eventually learns that little Cossette’s spirit was trapped in the portrait when she was murdered byt the artist. She must haunt it until a man comes who can bear the punishment the artist should have received – and who better than what turns out to be his 21st-century Japanese reincarnation?

There’s a lot of silliness here. The amount of psychoanalysis that could go into a film about a young single Japanese man happy to bear almost unlimited physical pain – fetishised into something pure and devotional – for a picture of a barely adolescent, idealised white girl must be immense, as well as the exploration into who finds the concept moving. The minor characters who surround Eiri are all completely two-dimensional, something that stands out sorely in an animation that aims for depth, and all the girls in his life seem to want to save him from himself and from his obsessions.

I feel almost certain this is a property slyly written to appeal to obsessive Japanese collectors and hikkikomori, and indeed it would seem to have found an audience with them. Daume also deal almost exclusively in lolicon (in ‘loli’s other sense), branching out slightly to include traps in recent years. There’s a high-minded and elegant approach to Cossette, but beneath it lurks all the hallmarks of very lowbrow anime. Personally, I liked the imagery and striking themes enough to keep a copy of the OVA for the 7 years since its release – but I can’t say I have even once felt a strong desire to rewatch it.

パーフェクトブルー / Perfect Blue

This 1997 animated film was for some reason quite heavily promoted over here five or six years ago. It’s dated in several ways, not least of which being the notion that any young idol could be clueless about the Internet, but it’s still a very powerful work, and something of a mind-fuck.

When a pop star wants to make a transition to being an actress, those responsible for tarnishing her pure image, making her act in rape scenes or do nude photoshoots, start to be picked off in grisly ways. But she herself is losing grip on reality, and unsettling cuts and disjointed scenes which may or may not be real disorient the watcher: for all the lack of subtlety in talking reflections and repeated waking-up scenes, the idea that possibly pop star Mima really is the character she was acting and the fiction is what was presented as real life is appealing.

Some impressive fast-paced animation and unflinching presentations of sex and violence rather than being gratuitous actually demand to be taken seriously, which was surprising. It was a bit unconvincing that three separate pivotal characters are quite mad, and the identity of the ultimate antagonist was, for me at least (and the friends I watched it with, since I piped up with it as soon as it occurred to me) far too obvious, but it was a striking, mature and memorable film, different from what I was expecting but surprisingly good, and quite a leap from the average anime film.

(originally written 4.1.08, before I had anything but a vague notion of who Kon Satoshi was - though I had already written about him in my impressions of Millennium Actress.)

魔法少女まどか☆マギカ / Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magika / Puella Magi Madoka☆Magika

I didn’t know quite what to expect from Madoka. I’ll admit I was cynical, and for irrational reasons: given where people were making the most noise about it, I assumed it would be the latest in a line of juvenile, schlocky, plotless and brainless anime that were beloved of many and then all but discarded when they finished, starting with Higurashi, through Angel Beats and to High School of the Dead. But that was a snap judgement, and after all, this was a Shaft anime. I love Shaft.

On the other hand, the immediate impact Madoka makes is that its legacy is part of the one Shaft production I really haven’t enjoyed watching: the character designer here was the mangaka for Hidamari Sketch, Aoki Ume, so the look of the piece reminded me instantly of that, making me wonder if this was going to be at all serious. All I had heard about Madoka was that it wasn’t your typical Mahou Shoujo series, and the opening animation made me fear that it was going to be a Moetan-ish send-up. Not so, though. It took a long time to assert itself as truly subverting the genre, even when it got dark, but ultimately it did so, and extremely well – and that opening became cleverly ironic, images of defeat rather than ideals.

The director, Shinbou Akiyuki, also helmed the original Nanoha – and thus he had credentials for directing Magical Girl anime. And not the sort that is actually aimed at young girls – such as Ojamajo Doremi – but aimed at the seinen crowd. However, since Nanoha he has gone on to direct most of Shaft’s best, including the productions steeped in irony and surreal humour like Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei and Pani Poni Dasshu, though at the very least Hidamari Sketch proved he didn’t have to go all-out with the chalkboard gags and utter bizarreness. I expected more depth and irony as a result, but it also struck me that Shinbou hadn’t really done anything requiring a strong narrative and neat ending since…well, probably Nanoha. Not even Negima?! really qualifies for that. Any doubts I had, though, were unfounded.

It took a while to convince me. The first episode was as expected, setting up the archetype to later subvert. Familiar stuff: an innocent girl has a dream about becoming a magical girl, then meets the real thing after getting caught up in an attack by a witch. The only really remarkable part was the way the witches’ reality was represented by techniques that were an extension of the collages used in Hidamari Sketch and played with in Zetsubou-Sensei: essentially, paper cutout animation of the Gilliam school, only with computer graphics making for a whole plethora of kaleidoscopic backgrounds. Striking stuff.

Things take a turn for the dark by the end of the third episode, and though it was signposted a mile away, I certainly didn’t expect it so soon. In a 12-episode series, though, it was well-timed. It was like reaching the darker parts of Nanoha in just a handful of episodes. After that the focus shifted to Madoka’s friend Sayaka, and it becomes increasingly apparent that the subversion comes from the fact that the dilemma is whether or not it’s really good in any way to become a magical girl at all. There are echoes of Bokurano in the motives of Kyubey (or should that be ‘Cubay’?), but instead of any malice or duplicity, he is pleasantly detached from everything and objectively may well be in the right – a nice touch.

Still, for a while I felt quite indifferent to Madoka, feeling it to think itself a bit cleverer than it was, not particularly liking the art and finding it all quite predictable despite the heavy themes. Mai-HiME had done much of this better. But then the tenth episode centred on a background character came along, and I begun to love the series. That episode gives her full backstory, at much greater length than I expected – indeed, long enough that you realise that the entire show is not really Madoka’s story at all, but that of this other character, who I don’t name in case it ruins a surprise. The remaining two episodes don’t seem enough to pack in any more surprises, but the final ending is cleverly bittersweet, arguably not the best solution at all, but certainly great for an aftermath and a satisfying conclusion.

There are a few things I would have liked in greater detail. It’s implied that the power of the wishes corresponds to potential, but it’s still quite vague and I would have liked to have seen more wishes than the final one be actually about the system the girls are entering into, or to give them personal power. Everything was set up carefully so that Homura never actually explains to Madoka the potential final consequence of her action, to the point it gets quite awkward at the end, and it would have been interesting to see the additional conflict if Madoka knew the final effect on the world she would cause.

Madoka set out to be different from other Magical Girl stories, but starting out just like them, continuing like only a few, and concluding in its very own style. The overall story is admirable, but the shift in focus made me love it.

エルゴプラクシー / Erugo Purakushī / Ergo Proxy

I’ve been watching a lot of anime that I consider very different from the usual crop of late, with considerably higher budgets than the average shounen action series, and much more ambitious, seinen plots. Ergo Proxy is one of these, reminding me of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for its impressive animation and futuristic setting, and Monster for its dark tone, emphasis on its characters’ psychological states and understanding that sophistication also needs a good plot, unlike, say, the dark but meandering Serial Experiments Lain.

Ergo Proxy is the story of a futuristic society, with the wasteful luxury of Brave New World and the reliance on robots of an Isaac Asimov setting – and a similar need to question the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Vincent, a bashful, ineffective young man trying to fit into this society, and Lil, the rebellious granddaughter of the ‘Administrator’, become entangled in the mystery surrounding the Proxies, mysterious and powerful beings, and the Cogito virus, which can grant robotic life-forms a consciousness – embodied by the young infected ‘Companion-type AutoReiv’ Pino, a robot designed to be the perfect little girl, who tags along for the journey. If this sounds like one of a thousand sci-fi novels/movies, that’s because it is. But it’s the presentation that makes this series stand out, and how the concept is developed.

Ergo Proxy is ambitious. It’s full of nods to philosophy (some without much meaning, like the names of the computer-council which owes a lot to Evangelion’s Magi system, some integral, like the nod to Descartes in calling the virus ‘Cogito’), art (Michaelangelo statues; a direct nod to Millais’ vision of Ophelia) and Western theology (Much talk of sin, creators, angels, free will and ‘The Rapture’), it aspires to the highbrow. It makes you concentrate, too, with disorienting storytelling that starts in the middle and then fills in the blanks, multiple levels of reality (the Proxies can invade minds) and a second half that diverges wildly from any kind of typical climax-resolution structure, for just as mysteries need to be unravelled, we have whole episodes devoted to how characters interact when they’re bored and stranded, or cleverly unsettling pastiches of cheesy game shows and a direct parody of Disney. Never predictable and very willing to take risks, it makes for intriguing viewing.

The art, too, is distinct, realistic and darkly-lit. Lil looks oddly like a Western comic book hero with her eye make-up and penchant for dark clothes. Ergo Proxy looks like something out of Noein in a more realistic style, and little Pino may act like Yotsuba, but you won’t see any expressions more exaggerated than the classic ^_^ smiley eyes. Fluid animation and some very imaginative sets make for impressive visuals. The androgynous young Dr. Daedalus (Greek mythology references present and accounted for too!) looks very nice on the screen too.

Directed, written and presented in a very novel way, with a story that isn’t too original but is unfolded with such control and branches off in such surprising directions, Ergo Proxy is well worth watching.

Gunslinger Girl (series 1)

I’ve now finished this all-too-short series, and I was very impressed. Explaining what is so good about this anime is difficult, because to summarise it is to oversimplify a complex and elegant story, and the concept sounds admittedly childish when explained – much like the title. Nonetheless, over the course of thirteen episodes, we are shown a secret wing of the Italian government that takes teenaged girls who have lost everything - through crime, disaster or personal loss - and turns them into soldiers. Many have tried to commit suicide. Others have lost all use of their limbs. The government division replaces much of their bodies, giving them superhuman strength, and wipes their memories clean: they use teenaged girls because their bodies accept these modifications more easily. The girls are then trained as elite assassins, and used on important secret missions.

All this sounds like the premise to a very cheesy, forgettable series, and when you add that these brainwashed girls are each allocated one adult male partner, and implanted with such strong feelings of devotion and such powerful protective urges that they are essentially in love with them, and it starts to sound like perverted teenaged wish fulfilment. But at the same time, this is what gives the series its impetus. You see what the writers do with this concept, and that is what makes a classic anime.

The characters are what matter here. The delicacy and innocence of Henrietta, who despite everything is still a sweet little girl who wants to be loved. The confidence and bittersweet awareness of her position that Treila shows. The sadness of watching Angelica trying to keep up with the other girls when she simply is not capable – and more than that, the human touches. The sight of four girls singing Beethoven as they watch shooting stars; the room full of teddy bears from a man who doesn’t know how to show his affection to the teenaged girl suddenly introduced into his life; the big sister figure who goes to help adults with their work just so that she can make sure there’s someone there to take her and her friends on a trip. The horrible perversity of the scenario is explored, and the lingering uncertainty as to which feelings are true and which are created creates an atmosphere of pathos, affection and pity throughout.

On one hand, I wanted much more. On the other, I knew that as it was written, more would have been a mistake. There is no plot to speak of – only individual stories, backstories and standalone episodes. If anything could have improved the series, it would have been a consistent through-storyline, but only if there were a full 26-episode season over which to tell it. As it was, the slow, elegant pacing and slice-of-very-strange-life presentation worked well. The tone would not suit a saving-the-world-from-evil plotline, but that’s not to say that there couldn’t have been an intelligent and compelling storyline. In lieu of such, however, we have a superlative prologue and introduction, but nothing more.

(originally written 10.3.05)

ぼくらの/ Bokurano

I thought I’d read the original manga before progressing past the first three or four episodes of this anime, after hearing the director disliked the source and because of my admiration for Narutaru, the mangaka’s previous work - but in the end, it was the first anime in a long while that has left me craving more and more, so I happily consumed it all.

Apart from the character designs, quite a lot is familiar from Narutaru – the serious presentation of the extreme hardships teenagers can experience, and the near-fetishising of their suffering and burgeoning sexuality; the cute and bizarre mascot-like characters that you soon start to think of as sinister, and the affection for aircraft and weaponry. But the premise is much more direct and simple. It’s one of those anime concepts that makes you roll your eyes until it’s developed in full, and realise that it can really be taken seriously.

Fifteen children start to play what they believe is a video game, controlling a giant robot to fight off enemies. But of course, it turns out to be more than that, and they soon realise that those who play are ending up dead.

If it seems like a brainless concept in the beginning, and the kids seem to be drawn straight from stock, you soon realise that there’s a lot more going on under the surface, and remember that really, the things these children are feeling can’t be so much different from what goes through young soldiers’ minds when they are going to fight in a war. The situation is grossly exaggerated, but as a medium for provoking thought about mortality, battle and self-sacrifice, it works extremely well. Like Mai-HiME, which ended up in similar territory towards the end, sometimes it makes you uncomfortable watching it, with the inevitability of the characters’ suffering, especially when you start getting attached to them, and there’s no cheesy Sunrise magical resurrection ending to fall back on here. It’s blunt, abrupt and macabre, but also absolutely fascinating.

It’s not an anime to show to newcomers. It works by taking anime fans’ expectations and subverting them. Giant robots are fighting with advanced technology, but they’re also prisons and execution chambers. There are funny cute things, but they’re just avatars for twisted minds. Kids come to heroic decisions, but it doesn’t change their fates or make them anything more or less than the cowards.

A startling and grim anime, and certainly one I’ll be eager to watch again one day. Great theme song, too.

(originally written 23/1/08)

妄想代理人/ Mousou Dairinin / Paranoia Agent

While I’d heard of the titles of Perfect Blue and Millennium Actress, it was probably only when Paranoia Agent (like the films, animated by Madhouse) began to garner attention and gain a wide Western following in 2004-2005 that I heard the name of Satoshi Kon put forward as one of anime’s premier directors. And while since then I’ve been meaning to watch the show, only earlier this year, after having seen both of those films, did I begin to watch it.

The series was released after Tokyo Godfathers, and contains traces of all three films: the realism and temperance of harshness with humour and warmth of that latter film, the pastiche and easy transition between real and fantastical worlds of Millennium Actress, and the darkness and heightened emotions of Perfect Blue. In particular, the story of three unlikely companions in a suicide club very directly echoes Tokyo Godfathers. On the other hand, it is clear that many of the ideas that go into this series are ones that fit on television far better than they would in a feature film, allowing for many radical changes in style, different points of view and stories that unfold and satisfy in twenty minutes where they might grow stale in eighty. Interestingly, some of the things that made me feel dissatisfied with Paprika are also here: while there may be more depth in presenting a world where fantasy and reality really have melded rather than offering a rational explanation, if it has the feeling of simply ‘winging it’ and not really putting any thought into how and why these paranormal events have occurred, that smacks of bad writing to me and leaves me unsatisfied. Such is the case here, although as it affects only the last few minutes of the last episode, it can pass.

For while Paranoia Agent is episodic and prides itself on stylistic changes, it is also coherent and stylistically consistent. The story revolves around the figure of ‘Shounen Batto’, translated as ‘Lil’ Slugger’ for English-language versions, which is probably a good way to translate something quite awkward to render into English without sounding like a Batman reference. A young boy on golden skates, he seems to appear to those ‘backed into a corner’ in their lives and attacks them with a bent metal baseball bat. Two very different police officers pursue the case, while more and more people fall victim to the strange and increasingly supernatural assailant. Meanwhile, the first victim, a young woman struggling to think of a new character to follow up her incredibly successful mascot dog may be key to it all…

Only a few episodes directly deal with the plot. Others may feature it obliquely, while some are almost completely distinct. Inevitably, some episodes aren’t up to the standard of others: ones about the prostitute or the runner with the tape of the Maromi anime show cannot match up to brilliant episodes like those with the fantasy world, the bullied schoolboy, the suicide club or the police inspector’s wife commanding such gravitas sitting in seiza and talking.

When the series misses, it’s good, solid seinen anime. But when it’s on form, each episode is as good as almost any animated short I’ve seen. That makes this show really something special, and it’s the kind of thing we need more of today, amidst a storm of brainless moé and revived kiddy franchises. Alas, save perhaps Kaiba and Dennou Coil, I’ve not seen anything come close since the second half of Ergo Proxy, and that was almost five years ago, now.

Satoshi Kon passed away far too early, but there’s no arguing with his accomplishments, or small but incredibly bright legacy as a director. I can only hope his stature will have an effect on the ambition of current anime directors.

Paprika

Kon Satoshi’s recent death has probably affected me more than the passing of any other director since Kubrick, and in fact probably more than that. Having become one of the three or four most prominent anime directors alive, I felt he was on the brink of international fame, and that with a few more films he might rival Miyazaki in the Western mindset and perhaps help Japanese animation to be recognised as increasingly sophisticated and adult-oriented. And then a few days ago, I was genuinely shocked to hear the news he had passed away, apparently suddenly and without warning, his latest film The Dream Machine unfinished.

Last night a final blog entry from Kon himself was disseminated around the internet and quickly translated. It stands as one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever read. He knew that he was in the advanced stages of cancer and had come to terms with his imminent death at the age of just 46. He detailed how he and his wife reacted to the news of how close he was to death, how he thought he would not be able to see his parents again but managed to recover from pneumonia for long enough to see them, and his regrets over how The Dream Machine cannot possibly be what it would have been had he lived to see it completed. Most affecting of all, at the end, he had accepted that he was about to die and closed this final epistle, this auto-eulogy, with dignity and, indeed, happiness.

Thus it was with turbulent emotions that I watched what will essentially stand as his final complete work, excluding the one-minute short he made for NHK. Apart from one last episode of Paranoia Agent I’ll watch in the coming days and that little short, watching Paprika means that I have seen everything Satoshi Kon directed, a distressingly short corpus, and rank Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress and especially Paranoia Agent as amongst the best anime I have ever seen. So it pains me to say that Paprika, for me, doesn’t match up at all.

There are many ways in which I can sing its praises: it is utterly beautiful, smoothly animated, consummately drawn and shows fantastic imagery that brings wonderment still exclusive to animated films. The voice acting is pitch-perfect, from seiyuu of great standing like Hayashibara Megumi to Kon himself in a cameo role alongside the novelist who wrote the original story. The concept, too, is fascinating, made of very similar stuff to what made Inception such a success: a machine has been invented which allows people to enter the dreams of others and explore their psyches for information, used here for psychotherapeutic reasons. Of course, the machines go missing, abused in the hands of people with nefarious agendas, and chaos ensues.

There are some appealing characters here and some stunning, memorable visuals. But the trouble is that the plot is so poor. It’s clear from early on who is going to be the self-appointed defender of dreams, and there’s really no good reason for dreams to start pouring into reality. A lot of characters, like the police inspector, are left underdeveloped even when their backstories get laid out, and the chanting of nonsense gets old very quickly.

But the real problem is comparing this with Kon’s other films. Even Perfect Blue, similarly dark and strange, had strong emotional content and a sort of appealing innocence. Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress are both heartfelt, full of affection and fondness and warmth, even if they take darker turns or face a grim reality. In Paprika everything seems to be at arm’s length. The main characters are all aloof and professional, and the protagonist even splits herself into two distinct parts. The only naïve and innocent character is soon turned mad and trundles about detached from everything for the climactic final act. And the problem with removing reality from the equation is that makes it extremely hard to find points of identification and empathy. This is Paprika’s problem, and the reason why it does not quite stand with all the rest of the great man’s finest works.

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.

Monster

Of all the anime series I’ve watched, Monster has always stood out. By far the most sophisticated and most mature series I’ve been watching, part of its charm has always been that it could easily have been a live-action series, and indeed, a Hollywood movie is supposedly in preproduction. Monster doesn’t have any magical powers or robots or psychics. If someone thinks that animation is just for kids, it’s not ultra-gory or cod-profound series you should make them watch; turn them instead to Monster, a challenging and highly original crime thriller set in the real world and the present day.

Tenma Kenzo is a highly brilliant and very successful Japanese surgeon working in Germany. One day, a little boy is brought into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head. Tenma is about to operate when he is called away, instructed to let the boy die in order to save an important investor. Believing all life is equal, no matter the pecuniary benefits, Tenma refuses, instead saving the child. The next day, the directors who he disobeyed, who have made it clear that his promising career will now stall under their influence, are found dead, and the boy has vanished.

Because of lack of evidence, Tenma is cleared, and continues working in the hospital. Many years pass, and when a series of murders make him once again the main suspect in a serial killer investigation, Tenma realises he may well have saved a monster.

That’s how the series begins, but this interesting premise is developed in several fascinating ways, touching on organised crime, the fall of the Berlin Wall, human experimentation and the possibilities of psychological manipulation. Tenma is only one of several main characters, along with the twin sister of the boy Tenma saved, a man from the same orphanage who cannot remember how to feel emotions and a machine-like detective called Runge, who is pursuing Tenma as a fugitive and habitually makes typing movements with his hand to input data into the ‘hard drive’ of his mind, one of the most striking but effective character quirks I’ve ever seen. Numerous other minor characters have their stories told, and while most do not further the plot significantly, all were at least interesting diversions.

The atmosphere of the show is unparalleled. The respect the major characters earn through their actions and simply through what they endure is remarkable. The main antagonist, Johan, barely appears, instead being a shadowy presence lurking in the background, controlling his puppets, which only makes him more fascinating (although unfortunately, by the climax, we still don’t know nearly enough to satisfy curiosity). The moral questions of who can be called a ‘monster’, how such a person can be created, and what it really means to erase your existence are all deeply compelling.

While I think the final act was a little far-fetched for all its great moments, and find it a bit daft that certain characters seem able to totally manipulate just about anyone just by finding out about their insecurities and confronting them with them until they crack, the plot was well-paced and huge in scope, and a story well worth watching, from start to end.

It was also brilliant how the characters all aged, changed in appearance depending on their circumstances, how different art styles got mixed in (especially those creepy children’s illustrations during the credits.

I’ve been watching this for so long – it’s strange, not having more to see. I’ll have to read 20th Century Boys instead!

(Originally written 16.2.06)