|
 ver
the top' is an expression loosely thrown about by
film critics to describe anything a little too far
out of the ordinary in terms of violence, sexual
content or any other thematic material of a
transgressive nature. However, in the case of the
Japanese animated film "Dead Leaves,"
'over the top' doesn't even begin to cover it.
More like 'over the edge and into the never ending
abyss.' "Dead Leaves" is faster, louder
and crazier than just about anything I've ever
seen. Looking at the credits, it's easy to see
why. The director is Hiroyuki Imaishi, who was the
animation director for the brilliantly empty
"Fooly Cooly" series, so viewers should
have a pretty good idea of what they're in for. My
advice? Just have your Dramamine handy.
The film is about two bizarre
looking characters, Pandy, a girl with a pink
patch around her left eye, and Retro, a guy with a
TV set for a head. The two wake up cold, naked and
starving in an empty field outside the city with
no recollection of who or where they are. What
they do know is that they're awfully good at
causing mayhem and destruction, and wind up
leveling a good portion of the city in their
search for food, clothes and means of
transportation. Of course the cops come after
them, culminating in a highway chase that makes
all the car chases you've ever seen, combined,
pale in comparison. They get caught and are sent
to prison at the Dead Leaves facility, which
resides on what's left of the moon.
And here's where things start
to get crazy.
The prison is fashioned after
a meat packing facility, where all the inmates are
bound up in straight jackets like sausages and
wheeled around on conveyor belts between their
cells, the mess hall and the labor camp. And the
less said about the bathroom facilities the
better. Throughout all this, we get bits and
pieces of a story involving the brutal and corrupt
jail wardens, the origins of Retro and Pandy,
Pandy's pink eye, and of course her accelerated
jailhouse pregnancy. These tidbits are strung
together with scenes of extraordinary violence and
reflexively crude humor.
Just about anything you can
think of, and many things that you never would
have, happen as Pandy and Retro plot their escape.
Heck, even Pandy's unborn child gets in on the
action. It's an ear-splitting sonic assault
coupled with a cacophony of
blink-and-you'll-miss-it visual tricks that
threaten to overwhelm themselves into white noise.
The whole affair puts me in mind of the sort of
thing thought control indoctrinators would use to
cleanse the mind when re-educating the masses in
films like "A Clockwork Orange,"
"THX-1138" and "1984."
The hyper-kinetic style,
vivid color scheme and blistering pace of
"Dead Leaves" is also reminiscent of
"Liquid Television," that animated short
film series that aired on MTV back in the early
`90s. That show was a showcase for the cutting
edge in animation technology, from traditional
hand-drawn cells to full blown CGI and, for better
of worse, storytelling abstraction. The results
were usually eyeball searing collections of
astonishing and often grotesque visuals strung
over frequently incoherent storylines.
But "Liquid
Television" was fine because it only offered
shorts in 5 to 10 minute bursts, whereas
"Dead Leaves" runs a full 55 minutes,
which means that once the visual and aural noise
settles into the background, the film's empty core
becomes all too obvious. Fortunately, though, the
film ends just as abruptly as it begins, so this
central shortcoming is of little consequence to
the viewer.
Much like the films of
Japanese director Takashi Miike, "Dead
Leaves" defies being rated on any meaningful
scale, so I'll sit firmly on the fence with this
one. Loud, audacious, grotesque and deviant on
several levels, "Dead Leaves" is an
assault on the viewer's senses and sensibilities.
It's an exhilarating thrill ride that overstays
its welcome and verges on causing a migraine.
While it is a brilliant display of what is
possible with modern animation techniques, it also
calls into question the direction animation is
taking. Much like today's
Hollywood
, sensory overload is now considered an acceptable
substitute for coherent storytelling. |
