Saturday 7 October 2017

Bonus #5: Uzumaki (2000)

From https://68.media.tumblr.com/2a4329bb612ea30c0552109a5515f3e1/
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Director: Higuchinsky
Screenplay: Kengo Kaji, Takao Nitta and Chika Yasuo
Based on a manga by Junji Ito
Cast: Eriko Hatsune as Kirie Goshima; Fhi Fan as Shuichi Saito; Hinako Saeki as Kyoko Sekino; Eun-Kyung Shin as Chie Marayama; Keiko Takahashi as Yukie Saito; Ren Ôsugi as Toshio Saito

Synopsis: In the small town of Kurouzu, things are becoming weirder around Kirie Goshima (Eriko Hatsune). Her childhood friend and crush Shuichi Saito (Fhi Fan) is becoming isolated and morbid, his own father (Ren Ôsugi) becoming obsessed to a disturbing level by spirals. Shuichi himself believes the town itself it cursed by the spirals, something Kirie is quick to react to with bafflement until the first death, a student falling down a spiral staircase at school, acts as a catalyst to bizarre and horrifying things. Where Shuichi's father twists down into an awful path, bodily and even follicle mutation is taking place amongst the populist and the wind's moving in spiralling gusts ominously. 

Junji Ito is a legendary figure in horror manga1. His work is also one, whilst adapted to cinema a lot, that would also be difficult to get right. Practicality in adapting their cosmic and horrifying content, with their surreal panels of bodily and physical mutation, it's going to be nigh on impossible to do some of them accurately unless animated or if  you had the kind of budgets an adaptation of his work would never get. Tomie (1987-2000) has had a lot of films, nine in fact, and that's probably because barring an anti-heroine who regenerates even from death, and can split into duplicates if chopped up into pieces, it's as much a work about the pettiness and worst in human desire as it is the physical horror. Gyo (2001-2), about undead nautical creatures like fish on robotic legs invading the land, had to be adapted into animation in 2012 but that film, which drastically altered characterisation by following a female lead instead of a male one, also showed another potential issue with Ito that, whilst he has main characters, they are bystanders to their worlds and the horrors, undercutting a safety net for viewers to experience the horrors he depicts but also jarring against the desire for narratives film productions usually want for adaptations. Uzumaki (1998-9) would be the toughest of the entire lot, his most well known work and also one whose growing level of spectacle and weirdness could only be possible with a large budget, and is also affected by the fact that until the halfway mark it's a series of separate segments which just have to have the same protagonists involved.

From http://infocult.typepad.com/.a/
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And yet Higuchinsky, a Ukrainian born Japanese music video director, took the challenge as his debut feature no less. And while it's not to its level, I'm willing to comparing the result to how experimental filmmaker and commercials director Nobuhiko Obayashi threw every technique he knew at his debut House (1977) and concocted a one-off experience. Likewise Higuchinsky throws everything he can at Uzumaki just in the first ten minutes before anything sinister fully happens. Unconventional camera shots. An obsession with sickly green lighting. Characters speaking directly to the camera for conversations with other characters. Higuchinsky manages from then on, in spite of the issues the adaptation has eventually, to actually turn this adaptation into something entirely of his own. The one glaring issue which does undercut what feels like an entirely unique film is that Uzumaki abruptly ends. With its segments in chapters - using film celluloid textures for added effect to place this all in its own hazy, hallucinated dream - the last of them is just a series of still shots of the gruesome body horror that takes place later in the manga. The problem was clearly that, due to the large scale of the events that take place in the original manga, including the town itself completely changing in form let alone anyone in it, there was no possibility on this film's particular budget in depicting it even in CGI. Unless Higuchinsky and the screenwriters, in their one major flaw, actually took advantage of this issue or rewrote the ending, than Uzumaki would've been a much more successful creation. It does technically have an ending, but it's the one thing that jars badly. When I first saw the film years ago without reading the manga, I found it an issue, and now having fallen in love with said manga it's still a shame.

From http://horror.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/
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What Higuchinsky succeeds in, having also to truncate chapters out of the original or blend them into others, is an atmosphere completely different from the source. He has scenes play with a slower, growing sense of dread that turns Uzumaki less outright weird horror but a bizarre supernatural story which grows and grows into that strange body horror as it goes along. (Not to mention, especially with certain uses of CGI, managing to evoke the Black Hole Sun music video by Soundgarden of all things). It's here, with a drastically different pace, that you also see how genius the original source material is. Whilst so much of his work can seen absurd, including the elaborate facial expressions of horror the characters have, he takes weird ideas which however touch upon primal fears. The symbol of the spiral is not that absurd as a force of evil as the notion of a symbol, even words, illicit abomination emotional or physical reactions is found in horror and even myth. Symbols were used as signifiers for greater meanings and with a spiral there's so many unnerving connotations you can think with them. Usually viewed going into the centre rather than outwards, a vortex or a black hole that's synonymous with dizziness and disorientation that one is pulled into. Seeing spirals in everything - how tap water goes down the drain, food, snail shells, springs etc. - was just ripe material for Ito to work with, emphasising this fact with a hilarious (and fake) writer's commentary imagining himself as a deranged manga creator researching the true nature of the spiral as reference material for Uzumaki, playing the genesis as a little weird horror story like the others he's written in the past and emphasising how even the simplest of things like a mere symbol is potentially frightening.

From https://wheresthejump.com/wp-content/
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This gives Higuchinsky a lot to work with in terms the material he does use - the spin of a pottery wheel, the way of a character obsessed with wanting Kirie to date him springs out to scare her like a Jack in the Box, the snails which some classmates start to mutate into - which he takes advantage of. He also has the advantage of what you can do differently in cinema compared to the page and various details you don't get in illustration, such as those who begin to become snails speaking slower as well as having wet, dripping slime dripping off them. Even when some sequences are just non sequiturs - like the entire chapter from the manga about a girl's hair becoming living curls reduced to an odd image - it all has a delirious effect of interest. The director has no qualms either, after the slow mood is breathed in for some scenes, in showing gore and gruesome effects like Ito does. He retains Ito's power of suddenly showing the freakish but done in entirely his own style. If it's sad that Uzumaki the film sadly needed more of an actual ending, that doesn't detract from the eccentric imagination that had been shown from before. The result of which is definitely memorable and is one of those rare feats, in spite of that major flaw, where a director manages to take a source material from a very idiosyncratic and unique creator, and produce an adaptation only they could've made. Something that has to be applauded even if Higuchinsky's career after has sadly never punctured the West as it should've done after this.

From https://ciscowong.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/uzumaki.jpg

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(1) Finally having his work easy to acquire in English as well in the 2010s has been a vital way of bringing more attention to Ito. Mainly the work of Viz Media but even smaller companies are releasing stuff like his biopic manga about raising cats with his wife, with material still planned to be released in  Christmas 2017. This availability and how eclectic its been beyond his major work builds up a reputation for him and shows how distinct he is as a creator in general.

Friday 6 October 2017

#49. Ghost Hunt (2006)

From https://res.cloudinary.com/sfp/image/upload/oth/FunimationStoreFront/1308232/
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Director: Rei Mano
Screenplay: Reiko Yoshida and Rika Nakase
Based on the light novel series by Fuyumi Ono
Voice Cast: Kaori Nazuka as Mai Taniyama; Yuuki Tai as Kazuya "Naru" Shibuya; Ken Narita as Koujo Lin; Kenji Hamada as Hōshō Takigawa; Kousuke Okano as Osamu Yasuhara; Masami Suzuki as Ayako Matsuzaki; Nobuhiko Okamoto as John Brown; Rie Kugimiya as Masako Hara
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: When she accidentally damages a specialist piece of technology used by a pair of paranormal investigators at her school, sixteen year old schoolgirl Mai is dragged in to help said investigators Kazuya "Naru" and his bodyguard Lin to repay the costs. Their group, first investigating her school, swells up to include an Australian Catholic priest named John Brown, a self professed Shinto shrine priestess Ayako Matsuzaki, a Buddhist monk Hōshō Takigawa and a popular TV medium around Mai's aged named Masako Hara. Mai will eventually become a full fledged member, with latent talents she didn't know she had, as this team stays in this new form to investigate sinister supernatural cases over multiple narrative storylines.

Ghost Hunt was pure catnip. In spite of being pretty conventional in plotting and tone, I confess it's impossible for me to give an un-bias review of this twenty six episode show because I was completely entertained by it. A show which surprising manages to both be fluffy, fun paranormal horror yet delves into surprisingly grisly material the further it goes along. The creation of Fuyumi Ono1, which had a manga adaptation by Shiho Inada which influenced the animated adaptation, it gladly embraces stereotypes of anime and stock tropes, managing with them to stay breezy and intriguing as it goes along. Structured with one template - the team investigate a place, are violently threatened or injured or possessed, and eventually uncover the mystery - a lot of the series is about its characters' personalities and how they both gel together emotionally and reoccurring jokes about them teasing each other. With a lead heroine in Mai whose the traditional high spirited schoolgirl but is easy to irritate, everyone in the paranormal group follows a stereotype. John the affable priest. Ayako the proud, confident woman who, despite being apparently in her early twenties, has jokes about her being "old". Hōshō, the cool and trendy Buddhist priest who you discover has left his sect in favour of joining the ordinary world. Masako the quiet, modest girl who always wear a kimono, and of course Naru, the mysterious and very young head of the organisation whose salty, almost emo personality makes him more attractive. It could've been tedious to sit through these stereotypes from other anime you've seen, but the combination works.

From http://www.basugasubakuhatsu.com/blog/
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The first reason is actually part of Ghost Hunt's most distinct and interesting personal touches, that in this world these drastically different theological and belief groups can co-operate fully. Christianity, Shintoism, Chinese mysticism in Lin, paranormal science - all of which works together without any conflict and complete cooperation between the members. It's a nice, positive message that never gets brought up explicitly, and poses a really significant issue with the supernatural in this world as it means that a Catholic or a Buddhist exorcism both work as well and depends on what's appropriate to the specific incident, suggesting some complex theological issues where all belief systems exist at the same time. Instead it's about the characters themselves who get along but have various pieces of their background drip fed to the viewer alongside certain emotional issues, such as both Mai and Masako being both infatuated with Naru and about more blunt to each other about this. That this works, without becoming generic, is the second factor in the series' favour.

From https://i1.wp.com/operationrainfall.com/wp-content/
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The tone is so affable at times its amazing especially with how the series piles on the darkness more and more as the narrative arches, usually three or four episodes, build up. For all the humour its tackling pretty gristly subject matter from the first few episodes on, with only one story openly light and humorous entirely, a one episode tale where a ghost is splashing couples with water in a park out of spite. Even the Christmas story, two episodes long and immediately after, is bleak and involves an orphanage. But it's still within the tone of just being sinister with just some threat. Of cursed schools and possessed dolls.  Then it continues to escalate with the potential of a school's worth of students being sacrificed to ward off a monstrously large hex over an entire academy. But that doesn't top when it gets to The Bloodstained Labyrinth and The Cursed House stories, the last of the series, where things get even more darker for what would be pulp horror for teenagers. Where there's blood sacrifices and characters introduced for those stories will be picked off and killed. It's actually for the series' virtue that, even when it still has the humour and sense of excitement that's from the beginning, that it just pushes up the intensity of the material instead for a sense of escalation. The only real issue for Ghost Hunt is that, whilst it has an ending, it could've easily gone on. Whether it would've succeeded is to debate, especially if it tried to bring in actual dramatic stakes for the central characters, but this is again another series where one is left for more.

From https://vignette3.wikia.nocookie.net/ghost-hunt/images/6/67/
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All the episodes are conventional television anime. Pretty okay, not as elegant in character design as the manga, but it's a series that lives up to being pure pulp. Ghost Hunt really likes to use the "To Be Continued" screen to wrench tension a lot, ending episodes with characters in peril so much for a cheap but effective shock. It's not the pinnacle of horror but I like Ghost Hunt nonetheless. It's visibly fascinated in the subject in all the religious and spiritual topics it takes tangents to explain in detail. How, whilst the heroes are pulp invisible, their stories start from creepy haunted house stories to mass murder and a whole family, one by one, being possessed with homicidal tendencies whilst never ditching the humour even in the bleakest of points. Right from an opening credit track that evokes a Theremin noise amongst its ethereal orchestral music, Ghost Hunt is openly popcorn anime with blood instead of butter on top of it I happened to enjoy.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xtnBKNtiZAk/UlgOmNJwzzI/
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(1) Fuyumi Ono by herself is a prolific fantasy and horror writer, also known for another adapted to anime called The Twelve Kingdoms (1992-present). Her husband Yukito Ayatsuji is one of the founders of Honkaku Mystery Writers Club of Japan, and whose most well known novel in English would be Another (2009), a horror tale that was adapted both into  live action and a 2012 anime adaptation [covered HERE as Entry #9]. Thus making a married couple who would be fascinating to get together to talk about their work collectively.

Tuesday 3 October 2017

#48: Mononoke (2007)


Director: Kenji Nakamura
Screenplay: Chiaki J. Konaka; Ikuko Takahashi; Manabu Ishikawa; Michiko Yokote
Voice Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as the Medicine Seller, and various others
Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

Synopsis: A series of different stories, mostly set in Edo period Japan ], following a mysterious, nameless Medicine Seller. Found wherever there is a mononoke - when a supernatural spirit (a ayakashi) is corrupted by the worst of humanity and starts to interact with the human world in violent ways - he can only be able to exorcise them with his magical sword when he finds out their shape (form), truth (truth) and reasoning (reason in the English subtitles).

A series I had always wanted to see, Mononoke was actually a spin-off from a 2006 horror anthology series Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales. Both came from the Noitamina bloc, a syndicated time space on Fuji Television which has started to broadcast more mainstream anime, or to be more technically honest anime that will appeal to stereotypical otaku more, but has always been a place syinominous with experimental animated programming and shows which strayed away from the stereotypes of modern anime. It is where Eden of the East (2009) came from or, for the perfect example, Masaaki Yuasa's The Tatami Galaxy (2010) which shows how these shows, original tales or adaptations, are idiosyncratic both in look and the storytelling they have. Ayakashi was a series of three stories told over multiple episodes. Two were adaptations, of folklore and a play, whilst the third was an original story by Mononoke director Kenji Nakamura with a co-writer for the spin-off series Michiko Yokote, the original tale introducing the world that first introduced the world to the Medicine Seller, a figure in his own series the exact definition of what Wikipedia calls an "Occult Detective" story, a sub genre where figures exist to investigate supernatural and paranormal mysteries.  

From https://i0.wp.com/www.silveremulsion.com
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The Occult Detective genre is more common than I once thought - John Constantine of DC Comics one of the most well known characters from the sub-genre, but it's a trope that especially thrives in anime and manga if you step back and see how much it's been used. Just in anime, there are works that I've seen (The Garden of Sinners (2007-2013)), to those I've yet to see (Nightwalker: The Midnight Detective (1998)). Even anime with different genre tropes brush up with this subgenre - like Chrono Crusade (2003-4) and the original 2001-2 version of Hellsing - because their set ups follow organisations that deal with strange cases even if they're more likely to use firearms than detective skills to deal the mysterious involved. All of them usually have enigmatic figures, male or female, in the centre for which everything paranormal circles around them, be they on their own and with a team behind them. It's a great trope to use as, if the character has a drama, it can be built upon from episodic tales beforehand until they fully take centre stage. If they are like in Mononoke, with the Medicine Seller an aloof and even sarcastic figure between the mortal and supernatural world, then the characters and tales that they encounter if done well are engaging by themselves but with a constant onlooker between them that can drive the narratives to their ends.

The series, from the first (two episode) tale Zashiki-warashi, immediately stands out as a beautiful production. The tale's pretty obvious in which a pregnant young woman on the run stays in a brothel with a sinister past, but the way Mononoke presents it is entirely unique. It's an exceptional looking show which appears to have been made with cut outs or even with paper used as animation cels, making the fact (as behind the scenes footage on its US DVD shows) that it's a computer animated production which layered this two dimensional look on top of computer drawn sketch lines a perfect marriage between the two styles. It argues, if used as a lecture tool, the balance between the old hand drawn era and the new digitised era perfectly, having aged without fault from 2007, and that some of the best anime of the 2000s onward made a conscious decision to marry the two sides or embrace the expressionistic. The use of colour as well is also significant in how bright and vivid a show with such morbid subject matter is, something that was lost in Western appropriation of Japanese "J-Horror" a decade back. Even with stories which had intentionally dank, dark  looks, the visual and colour palette significant with a lot of these stories in terms of aesthetic detail when with the absence of colour, used to signify details carefully.

From https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BM
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The stories tread on well worn tropes but the unconventional look through the stories, alongside the time given to them over two to three episodes, gives them new personality here. The tone for Mononoke as a result, even with realistic character designs that are rarely distorted, is openly symbolic and surreal both for style and to tackle exceptionally grim subject matter, where the titular beings known as Zashiki-warashi in the first story are connected to unborn children, symbolic imagery blatant in meaning like red ribbon but allowing material that would be gristly to actually depict to be show in a heightened, meaningful manner. Sometimes it's useful for the limitations of a TV anime production whilst presenting an utterly artistic flair, such as the final arc of the series replacing moving crowds of bystanders with mannequins in costume.

A story like Umibōzu, in which there are a group of people on a boat in the midst of a haunted area of the sea, shows how all the stories are effectively chamber pieces, supernatural detective stories where the Medicine Seller is the judge of mortal sins as he has to figure out the cause of the mononoke to cleanse them away, the auditor who usually extracts the truth from all the characters with him in each particular story. Rather than laborious plot twists, its closure to peeling away the layers of an onion and using the stories to depict human fallacies, Umibōzu particularly poignant for this as its about guilt, the masks people in any stature wear and how cleansing it actually transforms a person for the better. This could also alienate the viewers in place expecting actual monsters, the next story Noppera-bō about a woman who might've murdered her husband and his family becoming an existential drama all within her own head, but constantly in these tales they are using conventional plot structure to tackle human drama through these folk creatures. That most folklore is naturally based on human behaviour and the acts we commit, than it feels more sincere to depict them as such than the (usual) Western model of such creatures being mere monsters outside our species.

From https://i2.wp.com/www.bateszi.me/wp-content/
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Also as a result of this, openly existential and psychological tales using the wild and wonderful yōkai of Japanese folklore, the series openly embraces the strange even if it's by means of rewriting said creatures of Japanese culture for new meanings for the stories too. One thing that can never be denied is that the penchant for the strange in Japanese storytelling is embraced and is not just a "cute" thing for non-Japanese outsiders to be patronising about, but idiosyncratic creativity where the combination of the country's rich folk heritage and idiosyncratic creativity gives carte blanche for undead fish musicians and faceless mask wearing entities to wandering in story arch without needing to explain their existences to the viewers. One of my favourite stories, Nue, is openly weirder than the others, a literal chamber piece involving two dead bodies, four people including the Medicine Seller and a mystery to solve...only that its surrounded by an incense smelling competition between three of the individuals where, for one game, the answers have to be named after chapters of Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji (1021). Alongside writing the arc Umibōzu, naturally the oddest arc of the series, which includes visual clues that on future watches will immediately show the story showing its hand early, comes from one of my favourite anime screenwriters Chiaki J. Konaka who has made a career of this type of distinct writing. Both loved and notorious for his existential and abstract plotting, his goes from fan favourite Serial Experiments Lain (1998) to frustrating viewers of the second season of The Big 0 (1999-2003), a legitimate candidate for an auteur screenwriter in anime who just happens to be in a production like Mononoke where the scripts by all the screenwriters involved are all strong too.

From http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-U5TOm3k18kQ/VE7i661qIoI/
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The only issue with Mononoke is that it could've been longer. A risky proposition as the future stories might've dropped in quality, but like the best of anime series, unless they have full conclusions with finite endings, they always leave you wanting more. Mononoke offers a tantalising conclusion by jumping forward abruptly in time to the 1920s, the story Bakeneko about a group of people trapped on an underground train who may have all been responsible for a death of a young female journalist. I actually find it to be the best of all the story arcs in the series for how far more bold in style it is even against the others, with moments of legitimately gruesome horror by way of expressionistic imagery and the nihilistic tone it has for three quarters of its length. It's a great way to have ended the series but with the obvious connotations, with the Medicine Seller ageless on the train, it does leave one gasping for more episodes that will never be about the character existing in modern day Japan, standing out in his appearance but still have a cool, humorous air to him dealing with mononoke still.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/d1KXxD4ClkU/maxresdefault.jpg