For October, I intend
to follow what many other film fans/bloggers/podcasters have done and watch 31
films for all 31 days of the month to celebrate Halloween, writing short
reviews of them as soon as possible after the viewings. Realising the lack of
experience I have to partake in attempting this, I decided to ‘train’ for it. This
review was more successful in that it was planned and completed the day after
viewing the film. It may be a little messier and stream of conscious in nature,
but it was great to write it especially when the film reviewed has changed for
me on this viewing of it after probably a year or more. If there are any technical mistakes about the film in this let me know and they will be corrected.
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| From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/aa/The_Sky_Crawlers_Cover.jpg |
Set in an alternative world of
conflict, this anime film by Mamoru Oshii (director of Ghost In the Shell (1995), Patlabor I and II (1989 and 1993), and
the criminally unavailable Angel’s Egg
(1985)) portrays a war involving modernised bi-planes and perpetually
teenage pilots known as Kildren, who cannot age and take to the skies to fight
the opposite side in dogfights. Enter Yūichi
Kannami (Ryō Kase), a transfer pilot who becomes obsessed by the absence of
another pilot who existed at his new base before him, leading him to his higher
up Suito Kusanagi (Rinko Kikuchi, who Western film fans may know from her performances
in films like Babel (2006) and Rian
Johnson's The Brothers Bloom (2008)),
a female Kildren who has seen the aerial battlefield far more than the others
and has gained personal baggage more complex than her perpetually tween
appearance shows. Dogfights take place, but like his most famous film Ghost in the Shell, Oshii is a cerebral
filmmaker who concentrates on long, moderately paced scenes that allow you to
ponder the themes and complex ideas. Fittingly, without seeing more than a
sliver of his work myself, his personal history is as complex. Originally
destined to become a Catholic minister, his crisis of faith channelled into the
minimalist post apocalypse film Angel’s
Egg, he started as a well regarded director of comedies before Ghost in the Shell solidified and
engulf the rest of his career as a serious minded director who scrutinised
grand themes, as evidenced by the fact that I have not seen any of his
‘funnies’ from his early period and that they are not available in the UK to
see.
The mystery of the plot is
blatantly spoken aloud by a character at the end, probably too much information
on my part but something that needs to be said first time viewers, is obvious
if you actually think about it, and is flimsy as the main draw of the film on a
second or multiple viewing when the clues are as vague as water is wet. The concern for Oshii and
screenwriter Chihiro Itō, based on a novel by Hiroshi Mori, is the unending
dirge of the present the Kildren have to go through and how it is a metaphor
about war. Stuck in a never ending conflict which they may die in, facing by an
enemy which includes a mysterious pilot called the Teacher who decimates anyone
who crosses him, and stuck in bodies that never age, the Kildren are unable to
do anything else except fight to the death in the skies and casually past their
times between said mission, their youth masking the minds of adults who have
nothing else. They are puppets in a war that may have no real purpose to it,
and in one scene, they and their whole base is gawked at by tourists as if it’s
all a game. That they are teenagers is contrasted by the fact that they drink,
smoke, and have open sexual relationships with each other and sex workers,
their child bodies somewhat of a sick joke when they have seen more of the
world through conflict then the physically adult people around them. In one of
the only comedic moments in the film are seen two Kildren on ride-on aeroplanes
you would find outside supermarkets to occupy toddlers and small children, the
contrast perfectly summing their situation in its ridiculousness. This is
personified by Kusanagi, a young teenage girl who, with her guarded demeanour
and constant smoking, has lived longer than the others and has both become wise
from it and psychologically scarred. With actress Rinko Kikuchi twisting her voice
between a young girl’s and an adult’s depending on how scenes play out, she is
a battle hardened women, late 30s or early 40s, who would be promoted to giving
the pilots their orders rather than fight in the planes, stuck inside the skin
of a teenager between twelve and fifteen, not taking into account the sides of
her that are revealed in the plot.
It’s a blatant war analogy, but in contrast to
Ghost in the Shell’s constant pontifications
between its sci-fi action sequences, this has the ideas expressed through the
characters’ mindsets and sequences of complete silence bar a few lines of
dialogue and plot expedition that, rather push a conventional narrative film
forward, lines down further bread crumbs for viewers to consider the ideas more.
It will not be for someone in a mindset for action the night they put it into
their DVD player, far from the ‘beer and curry’ anime that Manga Entertainment,
who released the film in the UK, once pushed that were about guns, explosions,
and for the period when they pushed anime as ‘adult’, bloody violence and sex. The
combat scenes are elaborate in the short amount of time they take of the film,
and can be quite bloody in brief moments, but their mix and exhilaration and
chaos are needed to depict the endless war that the Kildren are faced with and
are done well in idea. The story itself cannot help me but think of my minuscule knowledge of Japanese history in World War II and the American
Occupation afterwards, and how the painful stagnation and endless violence
the populous must have felt can be compared to the mood of The Sky Crawlers. With its mix of languages, settings and the
bi-planes however I cannot help as well but think of the Battle of Britain, as
an Englishman taught it in college history, in which British planes like the
Spitfire fought the German Luftwaffe in the same war for air dominance,
especially the massive aerial campaign that takes place in the centre of the
film and introduces another female character, pilot Midori Mitsuya (Chiaki
Kuriyama, who will be known by many for Kill
Bill Volume 1 (2003) and Battle
Royale (2000)), who becomes the horrified spectator of the Kildren’s
existence. I also think of World War I, bloody battles between countries in the
centre of Europe where hundreds of soldiers on both sides died in the trenches
only for little progression to take place except one’s trench capturing a small
piece of land forward or retreating back by a few yards.
It took another viewing of the film,
but it does show that Oshii, despite the apparent flack he has taken for the
pretentiousness of his later work, which I’ve yet to see, is still able to take obvious ideas but give
immense depth to them, helped here by a good script and quality animation. Only
the fact that the dogfight sequences are CGI is a potential issue. It was
amazing, after seeing much older hand drawn anime recently, how it has changed
now digital software is used. You do not need to know about the technical
aspects of animation to see this, and can be shown to you if you take a film
like The Sky Crawlers made after the
introduction of digital assisted animation in the late 1990s and hand drawn
animation from before it. Some shows and films are still hand drawn in Japan
but they are rare, and while the dogfights work in their content, their CGI
nature against the rest of the film does detract technically from them. Oshii was
unable to find animators who could hand animate aerial combat sequences, which
has been openly discussed in additional materials for the film, leading him to
having to use computers. It’s disconcerting for the anime industry to know
this, but thankful despite the technical flaw of this, they still work
regardless and are still a small piece of a superior animated film, one which
seems criminally forgotten despite not being that old. One fears the dogfights
tricked people into thinking this would be another action film, or that it
would be another Ghost in the Shell,
when in fact it’s an interesting gem who has to be watched in its own
considered pace. Like the character Kusanagi, she is a methodically paced film
who shows moments of combat when needed but sits back to ruminate the damage
done around her.
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