Wolf at the Door

Jin-Roh demands your attention, with mostly good results.

It looks as though Japanese animation is finally gaining a serious foothold in this country. Sure, fans have been saying that almost every year now for a while, but this year has seen more actual theatrical anime releases than ever before, especially if you count Pokémon 3 and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (or even perhaps Disney’s Atlantis, which was widely accused of extensively ripping off the anime TV series Nadia). Still to come at an art theater near you (if you’re lucky) are Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Metropolis and Escaflowne: The Movie, while Blood: The Last Vampire is still in release, and this week sees the first U.S. theatrical run of Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, which premiered earlier this year at the Long Beach Japanese Animation Festival. It may be no coincidence that anime is taking off at the same time as the films are finally beginning to evolve in more innovative ways. Long hurt by the stigma of soft-core porn for comic book geeks or kiddie trash like Pokémon (though one must admit that the success of the latter probably helped American distributors overcome a degree of xenophobia toward the format), high-profile anime is now featuring more than just schoolgirls with goddess powers fighting tentacled demons. Perfect Blue in 1999 used the medium to tell a Polanskian tale of a pop starlet losing her mind, while Princess Mononoke and Ghost in the Shell incorporated some computer animation. The recent Blood: The Last Vampire upped the ante on computer-generated visuals, but Jin-Roh actually does something more radical still: It depicts characters who actually look Japanese. Yes, strange as it may seem by our standards, Japanese cartoons generally feature blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned protagonists (imagine if Disney films had only depicted humans as Asian until now!). Traditional anime also used a kind of stylization that many find off-putting: big eyes, tiny mouth, triangular face — you know the deal if you’ve ever entered a toy store or turned on Cartoon Network in the last decade. It’s a stylization that seems to be on the way out; while the Ghost in the Shell comic used it, for instance, the movie did not. And Jin-Roh is squarely in the Ghost in the Shell mold, which isn’t surprising given that it comes from the same people — writer Mamoru Oshii conceived it as a directorial debut for his protégé Hiroyuki Okiura. Not only does it have a new level of realism, but it also uses an ostensible action film setting as a springboard for solemn contemplation on the nature of humanity, punctuated only occasionally by massive gunfire and bloodletting. It begins, as do most sci-fi animes, with the atomic bomb, as a narrator (in English, but fear not — Hiroyuki supervised the dub so closely that if you didn’t know better, you might swear it was filmed this way originally) tells us of Japan’s post–World War II struggle to pursue a policy of “aggressive economic growth.” What he doesn’t say, but what becomes clear, is that this isn’t our world; this is a Japan that was nuked and occupied by Nazi Germany. Although the Germans seem to have departed, their influence is everywhere, from casual German words inserted into the language to the Darth Vader–meets–Nazi storm trooper look of the Capital Police, an elite high-tech riot squad designed to keep order in an increasingly anarchic world of haves and have-nots. That’s the setup, but it gets more complicated. With the advent of the Capital Police, the rioters have been forced underground and are now organized into a coherent terrorist group called the Sect. Meanwhile, the regular police force coexists unhappily alongside the Capital Police, and as public opinion turns against the government, there’s talk of disbanding the elite unit for good. There’s also talk of a growing faction within the Capital Police known as the Wolf Brigade that is undermining it from the inside, but that’s not all: The Sect has been infiltrated by the government, and thus also faces an enemy within. Factor in the possibility that some of the infiltrators on either side are possibly double or triple agents, and things get quite complex very fast. Still, this stuff mainly comes into play at the beginning and end of the film. In between is a slow-blossoming love story between Kazuki Fuse (Michael Dobson), a member of the Capital Police, and Kei (Moneca Stori), a young girl who just happens to look almost exactly like a suicide bomber Fuse failed to shoot in time to stop her. The Sect, we learn, often uses young children, known as “red riding hoods,” for suicide missions precisely because it’s more difficult for soldiers to shoot them in cold blood. Fuse’s hesitation results in his being taken off active duty, and when he meets Kei at the morgue, he’s drawn to her partially to try to stop his own nightmares of the young bomber. Jin-Roh uses the story of Little Red Riding Hood in much the same way that A.I. used the story of Pinocchio — not simply as a subtext, but as an explicit point of reference that’s talked about throughout the film. As in Spielberg’s film, it’s a device that can get a little excessive — must we see Fuse standing in front of the wolf exhibit at the natural history museum so many times? — but it’s redeemed in part by the fact that the source is the original Brothers Grimm “Rotkäppchen,” which features elements many people in the West may not be familiar with. How many of you know, for instance, that the tale begins with a girl forced into clothes of iron and forbidden to see her mother until they wear out? As appropriately slow-moving as the moments between Fuse and Kei are, it’s jarring to be jolted back into the action, and to have to keep track of which allegiance each character has, and whether in fact that allegiance is a mere front for a deeper allegiance, which might of course be a double front for the original allegiance. It doesn’t help matters that several of the characters look alike. As in Tsui Hark’s Time and Tide; you know people are shooting at each other, but unless you pay really close attention, it isn’t always clear why. Still, it isn’t really the violence that’s the draw here. Jin-Roh is at heart a low-key love story and, apart from a couple of crowd scenes, could almost have been done as easily in live action. It makes as good a case as any for the use of animation as a medium for serious, mature features.