raoul duke
12-02-2001, 03:40 AM
Has anybody heard about this or seen it? It's playing at my local rep theatre (as is From Dusk Till Dawn and Evil Dead) late this month and the description in their schedual sounds really groovy:
"Hong Kong action flicks aside, the most substained cult-movie enthusiasm of the past two decades has been for Japanese animation. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is a superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.
Conceived by Mamoru Oshii, director of the voluptuously moody Ghost in the Shell, and directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, Jin-Roh presents a vaguely futuristic version of the 1950's. Here, Japan has been subjected to nuclear attack, defeated in World War II, and occupied by a foreign conqueror. The victors in this particular alternative universe, are the Nazis. The implications of this switch are fascinating. Jin-Roh posits a mythology in which innocent-looking, uniformed schoolgirls known as "red riding hoods" serve as couriers for the guerilla army. One such riding hood is chased by the fiery goggle-eyes of the state Wolf Brigade through the streets and into sewers to be corned by an elite cop named Fuse. Paralyzed perhpas by the spectacle of her big eyes and bare knees, Fuse can'ts bring himself to shoot her; she then blows herself up, knocking half the Tokyo power grid.
The shell shocked policeman remains obsessed with the self-immolating schoolgirl. Visitng the martyr's crypt, Fuse meets teenaged Kei, who tells him she's the dead girl's older sister. Given this veriginous development, the morose pair are soon keeping company in an emptied-out, haunted Tokyo. Amid the intimations of conspiracy and a civil war within the security police, the couple hide out in the Shinjuku districted-then return to the underworld sewers, the ultimated landscape of trauma. (This must be the only cartoon in history with an homages to Andrzej Wajda's bruising partisan drama Kanal). Jin-Roh is set largely at night, and though the moon is always full, the palette is never less than somber. The gray, sooty city looks like a cross between postwar Tokyo and a brick-walled concentration camp. People seem to fit through the city like shadows-or rather like shadows that cast shadows.
Like Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh is characterized by its sustained melancholy and considerable visual fluidity. Rain falls, light bounces, reflections reflect. Like the righteous outlaws of '60s movies, characters die in a hail of bullets and spasms of spurting blood. It's an evocative anachronism."
Does that not sound cool?
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Oh God. Did you eat all this acid?
"Hong Kong action flicks aside, the most substained cult-movie enthusiasm of the past two decades has been for Japanese animation. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade is a superbly crafted science-fiction fairy tale that's both Grimm and grim.
Conceived by Mamoru Oshii, director of the voluptuously moody Ghost in the Shell, and directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, Jin-Roh presents a vaguely futuristic version of the 1950's. Here, Japan has been subjected to nuclear attack, defeated in World War II, and occupied by a foreign conqueror. The victors in this particular alternative universe, are the Nazis. The implications of this switch are fascinating. Jin-Roh posits a mythology in which innocent-looking, uniformed schoolgirls known as "red riding hoods" serve as couriers for the guerilla army. One such riding hood is chased by the fiery goggle-eyes of the state Wolf Brigade through the streets and into sewers to be corned by an elite cop named Fuse. Paralyzed perhpas by the spectacle of her big eyes and bare knees, Fuse can'ts bring himself to shoot her; she then blows herself up, knocking half the Tokyo power grid.
The shell shocked policeman remains obsessed with the self-immolating schoolgirl. Visitng the martyr's crypt, Fuse meets teenaged Kei, who tells him she's the dead girl's older sister. Given this veriginous development, the morose pair are soon keeping company in an emptied-out, haunted Tokyo. Amid the intimations of conspiracy and a civil war within the security police, the couple hide out in the Shinjuku districted-then return to the underworld sewers, the ultimated landscape of trauma. (This must be the only cartoon in history with an homages to Andrzej Wajda's bruising partisan drama Kanal). Jin-Roh is set largely at night, and though the moon is always full, the palette is never less than somber. The gray, sooty city looks like a cross between postwar Tokyo and a brick-walled concentration camp. People seem to fit through the city like shadows-or rather like shadows that cast shadows.
Like Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh is characterized by its sustained melancholy and considerable visual fluidity. Rain falls, light bounces, reflections reflect. Like the righteous outlaws of '60s movies, characters die in a hail of bullets and spasms of spurting blood. It's an evocative anachronism."
Does that not sound cool?
------------------
Oh God. Did you eat all this acid?