August 19, 2005
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Dead Leaves & Cat Soup
DEAD LEAVES
Lili: The violence in Dead Leaves is totally gratuitous. Non-stop action/chase/shooting/explosions/dick-drilling/blood-spurting mayhem. And although aesthetically clever and innovative in a ‘how far can we push it’ (or ‘how many explosions can you take’) kind of way, there were times the screen looked like a jagged mess of fast moving shapes and I had no idea wtf was going on. With the BGs and characters in the same flat and stark color palette/style and everything happening at breakneck speed, it was often hard to see what’s really going on. Or maybe this was the idea - We are supposed have our senses assaulted.
A tip from the Director: “Get drunk first. Lower your morals and think like a grade-school student.” Yeah, it’s that kind of anime.
From this excellent review (includes more stills):
“But as visually impressive as Dead Leaves is, there’s not much else inside. It’s a thrill ride that verges on becoming a migraine headache. Students or buffs of animation will probably want to study it in more detail than that, but for the rest of us, one go-round will suffice—if even that. What’s most disheartening about it, though, is the way it’s being praised as one of the Next Big Things in animation, as if total carnal overload were the only path left to the art form..”
Eddie: Take the extreme craziness of FLCL and magnify it 10 times over, and you have Dead Leaves. But unlike FLCL there’s no light and shade; this thing runs at 300mph with no brakes. It’s quite possibly Anime’s logical conclusion; it’s highpoint and lowpoint. There’s nowhere it can go after this. The animation is so fast, that it’s like watching a strobe – or looking at the Sun. Which you can only do for so long until your retinas become charred black holes. Maybe it was the primary color palette of the characters and backgrounds that gave me a migraine, but this DVD really should come with Tylenol. As I said to Lili, watch it once, then burn the DVD. Awesome, frustrating, headache-inducing, annoying…it seems like it was made by a bunch of frat boys with superhuman drawing skills.
CAT SOUP
Eddie: And now for something completely different! Cat Soup is a surreal, gentle-paced shortish (35 min) film which shows that not everything has to be a (literal) train wreck. A little Kitten is led away, and has its soul taken by Death. The kitten’s brother takes her on a journey through the afterlife to retrieve the soul. The imagery in this is stunning and sometimes disturbing. Based on the Manga, Nekojiru Udon, the director Tatsuo Sato has put his own personal imagery onto this to create something special. As different again from anything else out there…
Lili: What a beautiful and sad film. The BGs are stunning; the character animation is subtle and moving. The Director leaves much to our imaginations how we choose to interpret the imagery in Cat Soup… and by the end of the film, I had a bunch of unanswered (story-related) questions. Here’s an interesting Buddhist interpretation which ties everything together.
Comments (7)
……? huh wtf r those kind of comics? ewww any way u dont comment me y? ples comment my site
i liked the cat soup comic up n til the 3rd photo
essahomes, check your guestbook
Cat soup looks incredible. Anytime a director can use animation to break the usual bonds of “kiddie entertainment” (not that it’s a bad thing, mind you) and elevate it into a surreal rumination on life, death and all in between is a good time to me.Plus the Mickey/Rat/BDSM imagery there kills me.
It IS pretty incredible. I was saying to Lili that while the sock ‘em style of Dead Leaves has you initially going “Wow!”, Cat Soup has stayed in my thoughts longer. The imagery, the music, the story…it all works together on the senses.
Yeah, I liked the ‘mouse in bondage’ too!
Both films are available on Netflix (in the US at least). Cat Soup will be at the top of my queue for my next round. Look fascinating, especially because of the character design. It’s almost “Hello Kitty” meets “Silly Symphonies” (the pig has a classic 30s feel) during an existential crisis.
Something about the preview I watched (dramatic music, poorly cut) made me want to watch Serial Experiments: Lain again. Perhaps it’s that palpable sense of disengaging from the real world. (Which is kind of the point of animation, isn’t it? Seeing things that couldn’t exist in reality?)
Haven’t seen Serial Experiments: Lain.
But I agree that it’s sometimes good to be reminded that an animated film should be its own reality