Dir. Koichi Ohata
Note that the version of the five
part original video animation (OVA) I saw was with an English dub. Dubs for anime,
unlike Italian genre films from the seventies, can drastically effect the
actual work. Liberties were clearly taken with
GenoCyber's script even without seeing a version with the original
Japanese language track, and like a lot of reasons why dubs are notorious, it
is mostly poor. It's not without flaws - it befits the first episode - but I
would want to find the original version. Be ready, if watching the English dub
version, for ridiculous acting performances and "fifteening", a
controversial practice of English company
Manga
Entertainment, from their older days of existence, of adding swearing to
the scripts to help boost the age ratings when the anime they sold was being
certificated by the British film censors. I will have to deal with the dub in
this review, but my greater concern is what
GenoCyber is as a
notorious anime.
Controversial, ultraviolent, and
just a mess. GenoCyber is a mess
finally seeing it, hearing of it like the many bogymen, infamous works, in
anime's history for all these years, but actually viewing GenoCyber is more complicated than this. Its twisted, and for a
lack of a better term, fucked up, but having to actually watch it is a drastically
different experience than something merely infamous. The first part - the work
splits into three stories between Part 1 (A
New Life Form), Part 2 and 3 (Vajranoid
Attack & Global War), and Part 4 and 5 (Legend of the City of the Grand Ark I & II) - definitely shows
everything that made the anime infamous. Nihilistic, complete hatred for
humanity, horrifying images of dismemberment and mass death, body horror taking
advantage of sci-fi tropes' most gruesome potential, and the episode was made
with barely a budget. Barely a
budget. Events abruptly happen with no pace. Live action inserts were used. The
animation looks aesthetically foul and scuzzy in a horrifically compelling way.
And it does fascinate. In a world where nearly every nation plans to unite into
one peaceful, global utopia, a corporation sticks out as a potential threat in
its self ostracization from everyone else. Taking advantage of a scientist's
discovery of "mind shadows", latent psychic abilities he could unlock
through a machine he made called the Mandala, (yes, there are clear Buddhist
and Eastern spiritual symbolism here), they have human beings, as young as
children, as potential weapons. Very much like Akira (1988), potentially dangerous psychics. Two of them are the
twin daughters of the original scientist. One, Diana, is one the side of the
corrupt scientist in control of the knowledge, left from birth with a
completely crippled body which leaves her as a head supported in an android frame.
The other Elaine, on the loose in the city of future Hong Kong, is physically
healthy but with the mind of a savage animal, befriend a young boy. The
corporation ran by the scientist wants Elaine back, employing android mercenaries,
his pack of masked psychotic minions, and her own sisters after her and to
silence anyone in the way. But not only is Elaine a very dangerous psychic, but
when the two sisters are together, they could become one and become the titular
GeonCyber, a horrifying demonic creature that could wipe out anything and everything.
The first episode is a complete
car crash of gore, disturbing images of viscera and exposed intestines, wrapped
in such a misanthropic work in its message. But its compelling. Body horror
with no self censorship. Actually missed by myself in the later episodes
greatly, the director went further to make the gore disgusting by using images
of actual wet clay being smashed for icky effect. Its only done twice or so
from what I registered, but its an incredibly lurid effect that should have
been used in the later episodes, the kind of reckless idea, on such a cheap
production, that lifts it up from just being trash but something legitimately
interesting. It has nihilism that actually feels like it's from the bowels of
the creators', the director and co-writer Shô
Aikawa, guts than that a cynical liberals going for a cheap pop,
discomforting but driven by a narrative where two mangled young women come
together, and their collected rage collects to created a being on the scale of Cthulhu.
Koichi Ohata is already controversial
for his creation MD Geist (1986), to
some one of the worst anime ever made, along with its sequel, but a best seller
in the US. Aikawa is incredibly
twisted in just the few works he penned I've seen. He's managed, of all things,
to become the scriptwriter for some of the Full
Metal Alchemist franchise, an incredibly popular work with a large, mostly
young audience, but the man also wrote the scripts for a lot of the Urotsukidoji series and Violence Jack (1986-1990), the former
the most controversial work in anime in the West, the later only really known
for its drastically censored English dub version, and from I've read and heard,
probably for the better for your stomachs. His filmography has a lot of
notoriously bad, ultraviolent or scuzzy work, but Aikawa has a sense of body horror, and surprising potent ideas of
the manipulation of the body and political ideas that managed to get into even Full Metal Alchemist. It's not
surprising that GenoCYber ended up
as it did with just him, let alone with his co-writer and director. It's no way
near the most disturbing anime in existence, when Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) exists, but
even if I am desensitised from a lot of this sort of thing, and frankly view it
as merely animation on a cell not reality, it still leaves a gaping, nagging
wound in your memory whether you see merit in it or not. With how this part
ends, there was no real need for any other episodes. It could have stood up as
one single, forty or minute piece of disturbing anime. It's a mess in quality
control, but it its memorable and potent in what is seen. The only other work
of the director I've seen before this was the TV series Burst Angel (2004), which was legitimately poor, all the most
generic tropes, even in designing the female character designs meant to be
lusted over, of current anime. That was the kind of anime that is truly bad.
This episode, from the same director, is something uniquely itself even in its
screwed up existence.
But more episodes were made.
Parts 2 and 3 probably have some importance though. Part 2 contains the most controversial
moment in the whole work where, in the first scene, the first actual scene,
young kids are chain gunned into gristly, fully detailed body parts. Its tasteless,
its shocking, never done in any other anime I've seen yet, but doesn't compare
to the kind content in the rest of this story arc or in the first episode. It's
no way near as disturbing for me, in a story where a prototype android
eventually goes out of control and literally melds with the whole of a naval
warship, as just having a character, seeing the atrocity around her, suddenly
throw up in revulsion in detail. What really disturbs in the whole of GenoCyber, what really makes it justify
its reputation, is the mood and ideas rather than the gristly results. Shô Aikawa's writing, when it's not garbage,
is far more disturbing in what he implies with full detail or not. His work is
very Cronenbergian even when he's in a completely different genre like with Hades Project Zeorymer (1988-1990), an
anime which shows a legitimate best with how, for its flaws, the ideas and
where he goes with them are truly compelling in a startling way. This story arc
is still an worthy inclusion for this. How our hero - Elaine and Diane one
single being who are rescued by the warship and set off the android when it see
them as a threat - is actually a monster who can destroy everything. That no
one is sin free, or those who are good people will be killed, even children, or
go insane. That this series, for all its disgusting gore designed to only shock
and its shonky look, still forces the viewer to think of the consequences of man's
brutality. That its use of body horror, in visuals and the concepts, is immensely
imaginative, and downright disgusting and disturbing because of the ideas
behind them, especially with part 3. These two episodes do deserve to exist,
because while weaker they still fit the tone of the first one and are just as
interesting.
Which causes me to ask - what happened with parts 4 and 5, and
why were they even made? Suddenly you are forced to watch legitimately awful
pieces of anime. A drastic shift takes place. The GenoCyber has completely decimated
all human populations in the world and is now gone, leaving all the clichés of
anime of this era to repopulate the scorched planet in their tired flourishing.
A utopian city exists which is actually a dictatorship, the writing suddenly
losing all its distinct nihilism in favour of a generic tone without any real
bite, where there's the corrupt rich, and the rebels in a terrorist group and a
religious cult. Suddenly you're forced with two new protagonists, a young man
and a woman, moving to the city and making their way barely as a knife throwing
act and through street based mysticism. We're supposed to sympathise with them
because she's blind and they're a couple about to be crushed by the evil city,
not because they're of any interest. At this point, I cannot ignore the English
dub. It was poor in areas before this arc and the added swearing was unnecessary,
but some of it actually fit the tone. Here the dialogue readings, ignoring the
tedious plot, are atrocious, with the voice actor for the main male protagonist
performing some of the worst line delivery I have ever had to endure
legitimately in a long while. It's up there with some of the worse I've ever
encountered actually, clearly playing the character as everything people say
about Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) at one
point. This is why anime viewers like myself, let alone fans, eventually
switched to Japanese dialogue with subtitles completely unless it wasn't
available for certain releases or the English dub was actually exceptional. The
entirety of this story arc, even though it's from the original manga the anime
was adapting, is abysmal, a huge blot on the whole work. The blind woman
encounters Diane through her mind, or an alternative world, befriends children
living with the underground rebels, as you do in anime at this time, and
eventually the obvious happens when GenoCyber awakes. You rise the memory of
this arc from your mind and, if the whole work ever gets a DVD re-release, the
only reason you would ever see this again is to check the disc(s) work.
Suddenly it's not the original anime of the first few episodes but a completely
different work, written by someone with no real grasp of what corruption means
and merely using it as an excuse to bash the upper class and real life society
in a cheap way to come up with a dystopia narrative. One, as in all the live
action films that do it as well, that would put people off actually questioning
their society and leaders because its trivialised to such an extent and because
they don't want to suddenly become the characters in a crappy GenoCyber story arc. OVAs at this time
in the nineties were also notorious for how abrupt their productions could be -
anime works suddenly ending on a cliffhanger with no sequels ever to finish them,
or with wildly different tonal shifts like here. Sometimes it's part of my
fascination with these nineties anime, but here it's painful.
Altogether, anyone with a strong
stomach should attempt viewing Part 1 of the work. It's not a series to watch
on a loop, too bitter, too misanthropic in tone to digest except occasionally.
Its indefensible, but it doesn't feel like a mere mindless piece of anime ultra
violence that the whole medium was lumped into by newspaper tabloids. Parts 2
and 3 are also worthwhile, but if it was possible to remove Parts 4 and 5 from
existence I would do such a task. It has to be beared in mind that this has
content that would even startle people used to animated gore and depravity, but
it's a creation of individuals with throats full of bile for humanity rather
than making cynical jabs, for attracting peoples' simpleminded views of
anti-humanity and selling product by using such naive views on corrupt society.
As perfectly put by an anime reviewer, it's the equivalent of punk rock,
shambolic in production, offensive but with vitriol and energy you wish was there
more often.
.jpg)
