In case you haven't heard, a new Batman series started up the other week. It's titled
Batman and Robin, and it's all about Batman and Robin, who're actually a
new Batman and Robin, the newness of which is emphasized by a knowing appropriation of the tone of older Batmen and Robins. I definitely liked it - a well-done, no-fuss superhero thing, which naturally meant an awful
lot of crossover-related fuss had to happen to set it up. Hey, if anyone knows that score it's writer Grant Morrison; superheroes are strange terrain in this 21st century niche era, and he knows the paths and foothills better than most.
But even among Morrison's admirers, the din surrounding this new-old project seemed to drown out another of his genre presentations, which saw its final issue released on the very same day as Batman and Robin #1. I'm talking
Seaguy: Slaves of Mickey Eye, the sequel to a 2004 miniseries titled simply
Seaguy, which was actually something of a
cause célèbre half a decade ago among online critics and pundits.
It
was an especially intense Morrison script on its own -- drawn with "don't mind the horror" cartoon glee by Cameron Stewart -- tracking a dissatisfied superhero's journey away from the uninspiring ‘thrill rides' of his comfortable superhero town and into several strange terrains, all of which seem to be monitored by the mighty succor conglomerate Mickey Eye. All the adventures of the world (and the moon) seem to fall under their domain, and poor Seaguy finds himself mind-wiped and revamped, with a new superhero sidekick, ready for more corporate-appropriate adventures exactly where he started.
But it was also difficult not to read the series in the context of Morrison's troubled relationship with Marvel, particularly surrounding the production of his top-lined continuity book
New X-Men; several of the writer's more sweeping changes were reversed almost as soon as he left, like Seaguy put back in his ‘proper' place at the end of his little frolic (although other changes, it should be said, were retained). That's probably to be expected with superhero books; but then, Seaguy is partially about
why that's to be expected, with Morrison additionally connecting that genre reading a wider metaphor for a comfort-based Western society in general, its contours of exploration and rebellion largely dictated by media and financial interests. What can I say? The guy loves superheroes, and thus where they go, goes the world.
All of that proved unappealing to much of the superhero-reading audience, despite the series' release through the well-positioned Vertigo. Sales were low (if not quite as low as Morrison's subsequent Kirby-as-Eastern-myth project Vimanarama), and arguments flared as to whether the writer's approach had lead to narrative opacity and self-absorption. Other readers didn't agree with that, myself included -- by its broadest metaphors, Seaguy is almost boomingly unsubtle, and its storytelling progression is purebred straight-arrow mythic questing -- and interest gradually built over the possibility of a sequel (indeed, a
trilogy), hints and promises erupting into full-scale anticipation. Did Morrison hold
52 hostage to secure the book's publication? Will Stewart be free to draw them?
Finally,
Slaves of Mickey Eye arrived. And then it sold worse than the first one, even factoring in the generous latitude given to Top 300 sales estimates, which in terms of pinpoint exactitude are approximately as renowned as natural family planning. Maybe things really do come around in the end; just as the older, wiser Seaguy stands ‘triumphant' at the end of the new series despite having done little to substantively revolutionize the world, or the sales charts. Better luck next time.
Interestingly (and possibly even more obscurely), a very similar work arrived just a week prior, a movie this time, from a different continent, but no less the work of an experienced, ‘challenging' personality bent on addressing the state of his art and his society. The film was 2008's
The Sky Crawlers, a new-to-R1-DVD theatrical anime from director Mamoru Oshii. Fair warning: the only way to analyze this effectively is to spoil the whole damn plot.
And just as Morrison needs no introduction to most North American comic book readers, Oshii is surely among the ‘name' directors of anime. His
Dallos was the first anime released directly to video, back in 1983, and his work on the
Urusei Yatsura and
Patlabor franchises (the latter of which he co-created) have collected a lot of renown. But it was his 1995 feature adaptation of
Ghost in the Shell that sealed his reputation in stone; it became emblematic of both the financial future of anime -- funded in part by Western money and lucrative outside of Japan -- and Oshii's own peculiarly contemplative, rhapsodic approach to genre filmmaking. As for the setting, the visuals, and those loud bursts of action - the men behind
The Matrix were taking notes.
The Sky Crawlers is very much in line with Oshii's prior works; it's a serious cartoon for serious people, loaded with pregnant pauses and long shots of people walking somewhere or looking at things, occasionally under the stark gaze of the fisheye lens. The screenplay is adapted by anime neophyte Chihiro Ito from a philosophical alternate history novel (one of a series) by Hiroshi Mori, though other crewmembers are old Oshii hands, like animation director/character designer Tetsuya Nishio (of the
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence sequel and the Oshii-written
Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade) and composer Kenji Kawai (who goes all the way back to the first Patlabor video in 1988). As usual, the animation is produced by Production I.G.; I imagine every Oshii movie project is a bonanza for highly-skilled, underused 2D key animators, since virtually everything onscreen is subtle gestures and facial expressions and a woman's posture as she walks back from a shitty frame of bowling and the flexing contours of the human hand as it flicks away a used match.
Yet the story here is a little different. The film begins with a large dogfight in the clouds; no longer content to merely drop in hot bursts of action as usual, Oshii here deliberately segregates the action scenes from the rest of the movie by rendering them in near-photorealist CGI. He also happily appropriates the Matrix-derived fast-fast-fast-slooooooow-fast-fast stylings of Zack Snyder and company, maybe out of paternal interest. Anyway, a mighty aircraft bearing what appears to be the Thundercats logo shoots everyone down, and then the credits roll as our POV drifts down though the clouds, as a different aircraft, landing on an airstrip. Young pilot Yūichi arrives at his sparsely-populated new base, although he can't quite recall where he was stationed before. Nobody will tell him what happened to the last pilot in his station, a man named Jinroh, and he finds himself strangely at odds with his superior, a high-strung woman named Kusanagi.
Instantly, bells should ring for longtime Oshii followers. "Jinroh," as mentioned above, is the title of a prior Oshii-written feature ("Jin-Roh"), and "Kusanagi" is the name of the protagonist from
Ghost in the Shell. Also stationed among the base's small crew is an aging head mechanic who goes way back with Kusanagi and frequently plays with a basset hound (Oshii symbol prime), itself heard barking in nearly every scene at base. Yūichi is given a new plane for seemingly no reason, one the mechanic assures will fit him just right for these new missions, which is necessary, since Our Man is actually a boy, a "Kildren," a person who never quite ages to adulthood, purportedly from his own strength of will. All of them are fighter pilots.
And so the fights and chats and things go on, to the great interest of the region's majority, British population. The forces at war are Rostock & Lautern, corporations named for German municipalities. All pilots speak English while flying -- and therefore in every action scene, already separated by visuals -- for no apparent reason beyond "that's how it's done." Gradually, Yūichi begins to suspect that Kusanagi murdered Jinroh, only to later discover that the two were lovers, and that Jinroh asked her to kill him. This occurs as Yūichi himself begins to fall in love with Kusanagi, whose sorry, broken-up state is eventually explained by the revelation that Yūichi in fact is Jinroh, albeit a newer version of him mind-wiped and reinserted in essentially the same role, so as not to ruin his tradition of combat success.
It's a time loop; not a literal one, but the essence of living the same life over and over, a frequent Oshii motif, dating from 1984's
Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer movie all the way up through 2004's
Innocence, featuring that other Kusanagi.
And somewhere in the sky is that Thundercats jet, better known as the Teacher: the only plane in the sky piloted by a grown adult, never shot down but easily evaded.
So, as you can see, it's easy to read
The Sky Crawlers as a metaphorical critique of anime itself: the arrested adolescence; the endless action-packed combats; the West-targeted nature of the action scenes, so flashy and advanced (and helpfully pre-dubbed!) for easier, crucial foreign monies.
Justin Savakis of Anime News Network wrote the earliest and maybe most detailed of such analyses -- amusingly boiled down on the back of the DVD case to "AN INTENSE EXPERIENCE!" -- and more will follow. Some of the technical merits of the film also bear this out, particularly Nishio's quietly impressive character designs, which seem intent on mimicking popular anime character types (the shy kid, the cocky bastard, the white-haired mystery thing) while leeching their energy until they're sad and mildly disturbing; and this a designer behind the anime incarnation of top-of-the-pops phenom
Naruto!
But as with Morrison's work, the superheroes/anime stuff is a subset of a wider, if admittedly less effective critique. There's an unmistakable
nationalistic aspect to Oshii's film, with its mostly Japanese fighters (creations) and mechanics (artists/technicians) capering for the pleasure of an almost entirely Western, Caucasian surrounding world, happy to lavish praise, but primarily
consuming. If the film's various fighter bases are anime studios -- and they very much might be; one of the wittier aspects of the film analogizes the switching and swapping of talents to military maneuvers, with everybody (a few non-Japanese Asians included, presumably Koreans) sometimes coming together for big, spectacular projects -- its pertinent that they're the only relevant ones we see, the heroes of society's relaxation at the cost of their souls. It's criticism with an aspect of self-congratulation, perhaps unwittingly so; there may be other fighters, other creatives in the movie's world, but Oshii never shows up, maybe for the sake of his other, more anime-focused points.
Further, you can easily glimpse the contours of a societal metaphor, the saga of young Japanese unwilling to grow up, which assures their own exploitation, by both the Japanese adults who manufacture their adventures and the Western onlookers and enthusiasts who, in the end, don't particularly give two shits about a bunch of Asian people without some novelty to pique them. In this way, the picture feels conflicted; it's like a call to arms, but one that strenuously leaves open the possibility of resisting the call, so long as you do it in an assertive, adult manner.
But you know what? I don't think Oshii's about missing the call. In the end, he's all for anime, and thus he's all for flying to war on your own, mad terms; like Morrison, he's often most interesting where he's most (eek!) comfortable. His new Kusanagi is revealed to be a semi-adult, with a young child of her own;
Ghost in the Shell was the Oshii picture that seemed to get to people, that arguably changed things by its own strengths. And it's revealed that the Kildren's forever immature nature can also be seen as immortality, something that terrified the square world, which put them into planes and gave them roles and they all did the same action-packed and dramatic things, over and over, forever and ever.
So Yūichi flies out to find the Teacher, the adult who's also a pilot, the truly mature and powerful art that Oshii chased since the heady days of the freedom of video, soon collapsed into muck. It's an old-fashioned suicide plunge, but not the seppuku of shame that Kusanagi could have provided; this is glorious death in battle, a real samurai's death, and the Teacher does indeed cut him down in seconds flat. And then the credits roll.
And then the movie starts again, just as it did after the
opening credits, with Our Boy arriving, although we never see his face, and the moved, inspired Kusanagi is smiling. Like the modular advancements of Seaguy, revamped again, little revolutions.
The mechanic isn't smiling, mind you. It's a female character, although it couldn't possibly be more obviously Oshii's presence in the film. She's seen it all before, and she's sick of this anime shit -- even though she still
works in it -- figuring it's all the same boring failures again. Yet the power of
The Sky Crawlers, though, is that by that point
Kusanagi can be read as Oshii too, or at least his refreshed aspect, embodied in his most influential success, ready to try again, to chase that plane, to entertain and really DO SOMETHING.
Yeah, just like with the fish guy and the X-Men. Better luck next time.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
