Alice (1988)

From http://lehu.pt/attachments/thumb600/tmdb/tt0095715
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Director: Jan Švankmajer

Screenplay: Jan Švankmajer

Based on the original story by Lewis Carroll

Cast: Kristýna Kohoutová (as Alice)

Synopsis: Bored, Alice (Kohoutová) notices that the taxidermy rabbit in the room she is in starts to move in its glass case, putting on a jacket and hat, and then dashing off with his eye continually on the pocket watch he keeps in his sawdust filled chest. The journey that takes place, following him, leads Alice on a strange trip through corridors, rooms and various outdoor environments, encountering a sock puppet caterpillar, a tea party with a Mad Hatter and March Hare, a malicious and decapitation obsessed Queen of Hearts, and various objects not found in the normal world such as nails growing out of breads and drinking ink that shrinks a person.

As a card carrying, self proclaimed surrealist, it isn't a surprise that animator/director/puppeteer Jan Švankmajer eventually adapted Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - a proto-surrealist work, Lewis Carroll's tale of a young girl named Alice is a series of absurd anecdotes, strange sights conjured in the mind, and limericks and verses where there is complete unpredictability in the world of Wonderland. Common objects are reinterpreted, puns are made and there's a logic of Wonderland's own that has entered common folklore. What's testament to Carroll's writing style is that when his work is toned down from the original text, a mainstream adaptation like the 1972 version with Peter Sellers as the March Hare is still incredibly strange to watch because of how Wonderland has to depicted in most adaptations. What's significant with Švankmajer's adaptation however - while very faithful to the text, down to little touches, barring some minor changes and pieces like the Mock Turtle segment being removed - is that it removes the tone of whimsy that is prevalent in the original story. The story's on the cusp of being mischievous, Alice quite a sarcastic if lovable and smart figure, a lot of whit in the extensive amount of dialogue and Alice's internal thoughts she has; Švankmajer strips most of the dialogue out and almost everything, including other characters' voices, is spoken by Alice herself in narration.   

From http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/wp-content/uploads/
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The other factor is that Švankmajer is paradoxically a legitimate surrealist who yet depicts his worlds through a grounded reality using everyday objects and locations. He wanted to make what he felt was a far more accurate depiction of the story, not a fairy tale as others had but a dream, and this is both why this is one of the most faithful adaptations in existence and yet it is entirely his own take at the same time. He is the most tactile filmmaker ever to exist baring Stan Brakhage and a few others; even in his last film Surviving Life (Theory and Practice) (2010), with paper cut-outs, he sculpts his films with his own hands alongside other animators and technicians, using any object he could easily have acquired from a tool shed or an antique shop and bringing their own textures and history with them into his work to create lived in, unique environments.

As a result of this, the adaptation is not the fantastical Wonderland of most adaptations, that which is usually multicoloured and require elaborate costumes and painted sets. Instead Švankmajer's Wonderland is the cellars, corridors and gardens of everyday life, dust ridden cluttered, old wooden chairs and drawers given a new life as Alice enters Wonderland not through a rabbit hole but a study desk drawer lined with rulers and drawing utensils. Every figure Alice encounters has been built by objects remoulded by Švankmajer, many of which become far more grotesque as a result; the caterpillar is an actual sock with denture teeth and big glass eyes, the white rabbit spilling sawdust from his open chest cavity, and his friends who try to get an overgrown Alice out of his home a bizarre menagerie of constructions from animal bones and googly eyes. Ordinary objects in Švankmajer's world are inherently made new and alien even when they're un-tampered with physically - scissors in bulk collection in a drawer, the rabbit's home built from wooden blocks with a rabbit hutch interior of wire fencing, Švankmajer's obsession with eating and food depicted in elaborate detail  - creating a very tactile cinematic environment.

From http://38.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcb45ou6mC1qaxxv7o1_1280.png

Technical Detail:

The animation - having spent two or so decades in his career making short films, including a take on the Carroll poem Jabberwocky (1971), before he decided to transition into making feature films - is exceptional from Švankmajer, but an important factor to his work is that not only are you sometimes asking how certain scenes were pulled off, amazed by the skill involved, but that anything obviously faked is part of the aesthetic choices. The obvious handcraft down to the animation's flaws is as much part of his films' worlds, such as the novel interpretation of Alice's constant growing and shrinking being depicted by her smaller self being a stop motion moved Victorian doll. The fragility of many of his creations, broken and remade, add to their life; that which evokes the possibilities of imagination when given only the long forgotten objects of an attic or an antique shop to work from.

Sound is also important to Švankmajer and easy to neglect with his films. The narration, thus making it easier for the English dub to exist and be added to the visuals, has an innately ghostly tone to it as well, particularly as repetition in dialogue alongside certain Wonderland behaviour is common. Sound effects in general are also as audio textual as the materials being sewn, chewed, broken or generally manipulated. Rather than the March Hare merely smearing "the best butter" on the cogs of a pocket watch, you hear the squelch of butter meeting clockwork in full detail. The awkward sounds of these stop motion creations as they come to life is neither ignored in the soundtrack, an entirely constructed world of each twitch or attempted movement of these beings is as important for an entirely constructed Wonderland; this as much as the intentionally weird moments such as a piglet going down a flight of stairs crying like a human baby are important to the film alongside its visual content.

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

Lewis Carroll's two Alice novels - Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and the neglected Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871) - are canonical works of literary abstraction and absurdity, easy to understand and originally written by Carroll to amuse the real Alice Liddell, a young girl, but majestic in how strange they are, relishing bizarre verbal pins and digressions, arguments over insignificant details and incompetence in official figures alongside a heartfelt ode to childhood imagination. There are so many adaptations - from the silent era to Disney, Hollywood adaptations to seventies porn, an anime adaptation to a BBC adaptation where the creatures of Wonderland are depicted by actors without any costumes - that it's going to be a drastically sliding and varied scale of what each one will be like in terms of abstraction.

Jan Švankmajer's Alice is likely the most abstract adaptation and will be difficult to knock off the top of the list in this area. Not only is there faithfulness to the tone of the story, but the drastic change in terms of tone that counteracts this, that which is Švankmajer's own influence, adds to its odd mood perfectly and becomes, in being extremely different, a more faithful attitude to the material. In comparison to the Quay Brothers, who idolise him, Švankmajer does not share their dreamlike mood, entirely grounded in a reality even if it's strange to witness. In contrast to Walerian Borowczyk, who touched upon the same style of animation in his early career and kept the same fixation for objects and textures in his later live action films, they took on different ideological ideals even in how they used and sculpted objects even if they were both subversives; Borowczyk makes a biscuit box in the shape of a Bible in one film, Švankmajer would animate the biscuit box into a sentient creature or have it become a trap door to a whole manner of strange occupants, whilst Borowczyk was obsessed with performances from actors in contrast to Švankmajer turning his actors, including himself in cut-out form in the prologue of his last film, into objects as much as people to manipulate.

There is also a misanthropic vibe to Švankmajer's work, fitting a surrealist whose other literary adaptations have included Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade, a more critical view of the world even next to someone like Borowczyk where anything can be twisted - like the jar of fruit jam which Alice discovers has drawing pins in it. With Alice, even though its suitable for children, it's intentionally jarring in look and tone to the innocent fantasy nature of most interpretations, where you can linger over screenshots and imagine every splinter in a chair leg or the loose threads of garments, the brittleness that undercuts the fantasy. His completely unhesitant attitude to depicting the original story's more black humoured material - the Queen of Heart's obsession with execution is made more grim because objects don't bleed when they're decapitated - adds a morbid humour even when not directly tackling obsessions like his like the repulsive, destructive nature of the act of eating.

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FwkSDroHT1g/Taxs-k2nZMI/
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Traits: Object being brought to life; Stop Motion; Decapitation and Unexpected Violence; References to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or Straight Up Adaptation of); Juxtapositions of Objects that are Strange Bedfellows; Verbal Puns; Taxidermy Animals; Animal Bones; Grotesque Depictions of Eating and Food;  

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-q9NX7Z1Zu7U/Un65IylVJ9I/
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Personal Opinion:

As someone who only read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland only a few years ago, and instantly fell in love with it and its sequel story, my growing admiration of the story means that I've also developed an obsession with any other works which directly adapt it or reference it. Already a huge fan of Švankmajer's films before this, his take has grown to be even greater knowing its source material very well, to the point it is one of his best feature films if not the best work of his alongside a short like Dimensions of Dialogue (1982). It cannot be stressed enough how it manages to be Švankmajer's own creation yet the most faithful in terms of attitude to the material, only lacking the whimsy and replacing it with a world entire built from objects and textures that drags the viewer as much into Wonderland as Alice herself. 

From https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--MG4JJHtn--/c_fill,fl_progressive,g_north,h_358,q_80,w_636/17z8tci2o56oujpg.jpg

1000 Anime Crossover: February 2016

From http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/WnAJznn6zSw/0.jpg

#18: Wanna-Be's (1986)

Director: Yasuo Hasegawa

Screenplay: Toshimichi Suzuki

Based on the manga by Toshimichi Suzuki

Voice Cast: Eriko Hara (as Miki Morita); Miki Takahashi (as Eri Kazama); Akio Nojima (as Oki Sonada); Demon Kogure (as Himself); Eiko Yamada (as Bloody Matsuki); Shozo Iizuka (as Dr. Sawada); Shuuichi Ikeda (as Tetsuma Kidou); Urara Takano (as Buster Horiguchi)

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

As premises go for a short animated work, pitting two female wrestlers against a conspiracy to inject them and others with a superhuman serum that may be of alien origins is certainly strange by anime's standards. Aside from this though, this doesn't mean that the result is abstract in the slightest, but that it belongs to a catalogue of eighties and nineties straight-to-video anime that sadly could never be made today; probably too ridiculous to be considered legitimately good but compelling and infectious in what it actually succeeds in.

For my full view, follow the link HERE.

From https://thomfiles.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/vampire-hunter-d.jpg

#19: Vampire Hunter D (1985)

Director: Toyoo Ashida

Screenplay: Yasushi Hirano

Based on the light novels by Hideyuki Kikuchi

Cast: Kaneto Shiozawa/Michael McConnohie (as D); Michie Tomizawa/Barbara Goodson (as Doris Lang); Satoko Kitô/Edie Mirman (as Lamika); Seizo Katou/Jeff Winkless (as Count Magnus Lee); Ichirô Nagai (as Left Hand); Kazuyuki Sogabe/Kerrigan Mahan (as Rei Ginsei)

Watched with English Dub

Abstract Spectrum: Fantastique/Psychotronic/Surreal

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

An anime that's grown on me - while it's the later adaptation - Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000) - that's seen as the superior take on the light novel character, the original adaptation does grow on you even when viewed with a less than stellar English dub. Atmospheric and kind appropriately horrific with some of its character and background designs, it's exactly in the same wheelhouse as Wanne-Be's baring that this does feel like a legitimate gem despite its few flaws.

For my full view, follow the link HERE.

Keyhole (2011)

From https://filmovisruba.files.wordpress
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Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles

Cast: Jason Patric (as Ulysses Pick); Isabella Rossellini (as Hyacinth); Udo Kier (as Dr. Lemke); Louis Negin (as Calypso / Camille); Brooke Palsson (as Denny); Kevin McDonald (as Ogilbe)

Synopsis: A group of gangsters lock themselves from pursuing police in the family home of their leader Ulysses Pick (Patric). Having had his gang kidnap a young man (David Wontner) and having brought with him a young woman Denny (Palsson), who is reeling from having drowned and can only hear his thoughts, Ulysses' intention is to reunite with his estranged wife Hyacinth (Rossellini), setting off with the two captives and his gang's assistance around the various rooms of the giant home to find her. Acquiring the objects of his mostly deceased children, Ulysses' home is haunted by ghosts, a secret passage guarded by a helmeted Cyclops, and his wife's dead father Calypso (Negin) chained naked to her bed post and warning Hyacinth of her husband's return. Memories start to return to Ulysses but so does the animosity of part of his gang, from Big Ed (Daniel Enright), growing to the point a bicycle powered electric chair is built in the living room waiting for him.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2011_keyhole_012.jpg

Out of his filmography, Keyhole manages to be one of Guy Maddin's more elusive films which is a pretty exceptional feat amongst the likes of Careful (1992), his two-strip colour gothic mountain film, and the ice hockey obsessed psychodrama Cowards Bend The Knees (2003), just two of many films within a career where most if not all of the films if placed in another director's filmography would stand out as being strange and fascinating. It was also his transition to digital cameras after years of using celluloid, even his archaic style influenced by silent cinema and the ectoplasmic residue of repertory cinema double bills effected by technological changes in filmmaking. He has however remained proudly weird and unconventional regardless of this fact, building from two shorts Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair (2009) with star Isabella Rossellini and Glorious (2008) and using their sketched out ideas to build Keyhole, the hybrid of gangster films and haunted house movies.

The result, strangely, passes the Quay brothers, who have their own idiosyncratic style, waving to them and passing notes to each other, the film having a taste of their work in how it's the claustrophobic interior world of the Ulysses home shot in monochrome, where each shelf and drawer is a cabinet of curiosities with each object evoking Ulysses' lost memories. It's unmistakably Maddin's work nonetheless, balanced between the poetic and the deliberately crass and strange, but it has its own unique, disquieting personality next to his previous works, where ghosts of Ulysses' sons and others such as a maid wander around the rooms, occasionally screaming, creating an omninous mood. Maddin's eccentricities appear, such as one of the gang members making the ill-advised attempt to hump one of the ghosts, but its far and away more vague and moody than his more elaborate worlds of other films. Geography for the home is vague baring an outdoor garden built in the centre of the building, a pond there where the dead are pushed into, a deliberate vagueness to the story even compared to the other Maddin films where the supernatural is evoked, the sense that one is in the afterlife feeling apparent.

From http://www.kinonews.ru/insimgs/shotimg/shotimg20072_13.jpg

Technical Detail:

The change to digital is jarring at first after many of his films being in celluloid; especially as at the time of writing this only review only The Forbidden Room (2015) has followed up this film, Maddin's worlds perfectly suited the texture of film celluloid and the loss of it is something you have to adapt to if you've seen his previous work. Thankfully he decided to make this his most textural work, cramped corridors and shots of Ulysses' eye gazing at the viewer through keyholes bringing a more internal world appropriate for a journey of a man, whose separated from his wife and had most of his children killed, searching for the harmonious family life he feels once existed.

There is a brief flash of colour, an uniquely toned hue similar to a Kenneth Anger short film from the forties called Puce Moments (1949), interconnected to his only daughter Lota (Tattiawna Jones), whose bared body draped in jewellery behind a gauze curtain haunts the mother more as her skull had been planted in the flower pot near her bed. It's all too brief to drastically change the film's tone into an entire Kodachrome soaked passage within the narrative but certainly in a film which is fragmented by various memories which clog up the house's exteriors, this brief flash of literal colour adds a distinction for the character of Ulysses' daughter and her narrative through line.

From https://thefilmstage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/KEYHOLE4.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

The tone of the film as a result of its plot being about a man searching for his memories is that of images layering on-top of each other, in cases literally as images are back projected behind actors as they act out being effected by ghostly forms from afar, usually a naked old man whipping them in the kinkiest haunted house imagery you could imagine. Maddin is still appropriately eccentric - name another film where a prized taxidermy wolverine with a cigar in its mouth called Crispy is important for the protagonist to lug around - but it feels more deliberately sombre even with its humour than the other films of his I've seen, appropriately for a film about a haunted house having the right haunted vibe.

This is particularly the case with Louis Negin as Calypso being such a towering influence on the film's tone, our ghostly and sarcastic narrator but also brazeningly showing his bared aged body onscreen with only giant chains as a costume, his graceful inflections adding to the mysterious nature of the material where apparitions of old memories - conflicts between Ulysses and Hyacinth to one of his sons appearing in the closest masturbating catatonically - flash briefly. Ulysses' accomplishes most of the trip is a male who's revealed to be his only surviving son Manners, the last to be seen in the film as a bystander to the haunted and isolated rooms, and a woman who slowly sinks into feeling water in her lungs unless Ulysses keeps forcing her to stay alert, a waif played with a distance by actress Brooke Palsson that isn't aloof but feels like she's been pulled out of the afterlife against her will. The gangsters feel like the more eccentric inclusion fitting Maddin's genre blending tendencies, most gladly helping their boss by way of interior decoration whilst others cavort with their female molls or desire to fry Ulysses for good. It's someone like Udo Kier, suddenly appearing than suddenly leaving never to be seen again, who's the most normal individual, playing a doctor whose subplot about his son dying that day, trying to clear a wasp's nest from the garage, has little effect on the narrative but feels appropriate for the film's ghostly tone.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/2011_keyhole_008.jpg

This is also Maddin's most sexually explicit and purposely provocative film giving it the distinction of being the only 18 certificate film in Guy Maddin's career from those released in the UK. Sex and kink has appeared in his films before - Coward Bends The Knees gets away with fisting as if also whimsical, and Sissy Boy Slap Party (1995) crams so many polished male buttocks in its short film length to keep one energised even if you're heterosexual - but this goes further with full frontal male and female nudity, female undergarments with crude drawings etched on the silk proudly worn by Ulysses' cheating moll, who only speaks in un-subtitled French for additional eerie effect, and by way of super imposition a man fellating a fake cock sticking out of a wall, toned down from the inspirational short Glorious which had multiple fake members of a gangster's many sons sticking out a wall. Maddin's work has always had a subconscious nature to it - oedipal nightmares next to Technicolor fantasies - so it's natural that sex comes into play; as one of the most respected figures of Canadian cinema who's given art grants to make films like this as he grows older, he decided not to mellow but thankfully become more explicit whilst keeping a tongue firmly in his cheek.

Out of his work in general, something like Cowards Bend The Knees is the most abstract of his films - the one-two punch of purposely blending autobiography into fictional stories which gladly paint himself as a pathetic geek, with no hesitation in mocking himself or even portraying Guy Maddin as a terrible human being, and the original format of peep hole cameras which played chaptered segments when it was first as an art gallery exhibit make it a more powerfully strange creation. But a lot of Keyhole by itself is immensely effecting and in a daze in its tone, giving it a considerable dreamlike style even next of most of his filmography. While he does create worlds that could only exist in cinema or in a cineaste's pineal gland, this is one film which eventually becomes more mysterious as it goes along and presents its most vague content by its ending, which even next to his other movies is utterly open to interpretation, the only person left being Manners stuck either between the past and the present, or between reality and dreams which is entirely up to the viewer to decide.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Psychotronic/Surrealist

Abstract Traits: Elderly Male Full Frontal Nudity; Locations with No Clear Geography; Dreamlike Mood; Textural Content and Fetishisation of Objects; Melding of Dissonant Film Genres; Sexual Kink; Farcical Jokes; References to Classic Mythology; Suddenly Switches to Colour; Taxidermy Animals

Personal Opinion:

One of Guy Maddin's more obscure works and a divisive entry in his career for some, it's yet a testament to his career that rather than sit on his laurels and churn work out that is repetitive he has made films which all have their own distinct personalities to them even if they link in terms of style and trademarks. While his other monochrome works like Archangel (1990) have usually whimsical tones, Keyhole is more atmospheric in a quiet, elusive way, a mood for its night setting of shadowed rooms. The illogical moments, such as Ulysses dropping his gang's guns into the incinerator in the basement without removing the bullets from them, are swallowed up in a film that feels like a mix of cinema and the Greek tale of Ulysses concocted in a dream state, his most claustrophobic and internal works whose logic is its own like his other movies, where the dead are picked out of the living after a shootout by making them stand up and rested face first against a wall. Especially in a career that's as idiosyncratic as his, it'd be easy for films like Keyhole or his more divisive work Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997) to be ignored but even films like these are very unpredictable, odd gems with their own internal logics.  

Dead Leaves (2004)

From https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ec/
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Director: Hiroyuki Imaishi

Screenplay: Takeichi Honda

(Voice) Cast: Kappei Yamaguchi (as Retro); Takako Honda (as Pandy); Yuko Mizutani (as Galactica); 666 (as Mitsuo Iwata); 777 (as Kiyoyuki Yanada); Chinko (as Nobuo Tobita)

[The following will be a tie-in with my other blog, 1000 Anime, which you find go to here.]

Synopsis: Two amnesiacs wake up naked near one another in a desert, a city behind them - one is a man with a television for a head named Retro (Yamaguchi), the other is a woman with a red patch mark around one eye named Pandy (Honda). Once they find clothes, they naturally get around to hijacking a car and terrorising the city streets shooting any cop cars that chases after them. When they're finally caught they're sent to a prison on what remains of the moon, ran by a mysterious young woman called Galactica (Mizutani) who lets two mutants, 666 (Iwata) and 777 (Yanada), run the establishment and torment of the prisoners. As more abilities are discovered by Retro and Pandy to their own surprise, and the later gains memories of a greater significance about Galactica, an eventual mass jailbreak is imminent as they and an entire horde of prisoners have to get passed the armed guards and Galactica's two henchmen.

While anime enforces the importance of an entire production crew to make a work, that doesn't mean distinct voices are non-existent. Imaishi however is a completely different individual in comparison to a Mamoru Oshii or Satoshi Kon - he's a sugar rush when he's being entertaining, as mad as a box of frogs at his strangest. One botch and his style could easily come off as tasteless without purpose or too hyperactive - when the hyper sexual tone similar in other anime just comes off as crass, and where the pop culture references cover gaping a charisma and plot vacuum - but he sets a high bar in terms of the quality of his work both in terms of the animation, unless he deliberately uses rudimentary animation for effect, and for the quality of the content of his work. He's unpredictable in an equal opportunity way, and even when the material is purposely trying to offend the viewer with bodily fluid jokes like Panty & Stockings With Garterbelt (2010), his characters are too likable and there's an incredible energy to everything I've seen within his filmography.

Dead Leaves does stick out in his career though, where it shows the trajectory he would go to in work like Gurren Lagann (2007) onwards but is still a directorial debut where his style needed to be refined. This is as much part of the trend of experimental shorts and mini-length one-offs for new talent that appeared in the late nineties to the mid-2000s, from the likes of Cat Soup (2001) to anything from Studio 4°C like Noiseman Sound Insect (1997), very artistically bold works that are in danger of being neglected in this decade unless someone decided to make them available for download on places like iTunes, anime which was made with no target demographic and are usually fascinating in the inventiveness they have.

From https://i.imgur.com/7srPCSy.jpg

Dead Leaves is a relentless, chaotic forty or so minutes, where even a series in Imaishi's future like Panty & Stocking for all its similar crude jokes and maniac fight scenes is a lot more carefully structured. The older, shorter work is actually a lot more elaborate in its narrative than the synopsis above described - quite an elaborate one in fact involving spies and the cloning of genetically modified mutants, both misshapen ones and those with superhuman abilities - but alongside its manic tone and the truncated length to work within, there's a deliberate sense that the plot is given to the viewer like a relentless barrage that flows over a viewer. Because of this, the result is as likely to catch hardcore fans of the director off-guard as it would casual viewers from how frantically paced it is.

It also has no qualms in how purposely ridiculous and tasteless it is at points. The difference is that even a work that managed to be more tasteless, Panty & Stocking, had moments of quiet and tangents that break up the pace of the material, while Dead Leaves has no qualms with bullets being wasted and characters being turned into either Swiss cheese from the bullets or exploded guts in such cartoonish manners its far from offensive.  With logic defying gun violence and ridiculous background characters, its feels influenced from videogames as most of the length is an elaborate escape, one where the fact that the plot manages to get away with a tank being acquired by the prisoners is far from something to query but establishes the tone further. Alongside this you get purposely gross or eyebrow raising material based on the basest of human anatomy, from an unexpected sex scene in a jail cell despite the two individuals wearing full body straight-jackets that look like sleeping bags to character designs for the prisoners including a man with a penis head to another with a drill penis called Chinko (Tobita) who becomes a prominent side character with the central duo. To find this stuff inappropriate is pointless when the tone is deliberately off-kilter and absurd, and Imaishi's style manages the rare skill of being able to get away with a lot and yet being so infectious that a person can find it funny even if they find the material disgusting at times or taking the cake when characters end up having to fight giant robots as in later in this anime.

From http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a380/dstead/Leaves4.jpg

Technical Detail:

As far as back here, Imaishi's work has a dynamic flash in presentation, here taking almost a cue from Western comic books in terms of the framing of scenes and the editing style. Particularly with the film's exaggerated tone, fed by its adrenalizing music score as all Imaishi anime have, this style is particularly suitable for the material even if one can find oneself disorientated by the results at points. Compared to his later work Dead Leaves certainly looks unique even compared to the later Imaishi work, a visual style and character design here that cannot help but evoke British illustrator Jamie Hewlett, the man who brought to life visually the comic book series Tank Girl and the alter-egos of Damon Albarn's Gorillaz project. It couldn't be a coincidence - Retro is a side character from Tank Girl called Tele - but it's far from a questionable practice on Imaishi's behalf with his collaborators to turn their eyes towards Western pop culture they clearly love and reference it, as it's something that he never does to the point of ripping off other material as his work rifts on its own plotlines. In fact for me Imaishi feels like one of the first anime directors to blatantly be influenced by Western pop culture to such an extent barring specific anime like FLCL (2000). He's openly influenced by Western animation particularly, clearly having fed himself on animated shows from Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon like Invader Zim (2001-2004) that people like me and many others grew up with in the nineties onward, and the kinetic nature of those programs alongside their bold visual styles have influenced him in streamlining his visuals into candy coloured fireworks.

This is more significant as, through his work with studio Gainax and his own studio Trigger afterwards, he usually has simpler character designs in his work, usually more cartoonish and even with a work like Gurren Lagann, which is the most stereotypical anime of his career, having a bold, easy to remember look to it and its characters. Unlike most anime where detail especially in character designs is of more important, limiting the amount of movement in scenes baring key ones as much as possible, Imaishi takes influence from Western animation where it's the complete opposite, reducing the amount of detail in scenes but increasing the amount of movement within them, the result of his streamlined style being a greater kinetic tone which allows him to get away with being more ridiculous and allow more fluidity in the action scenes.  

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

[Some spoiler warnings in the following paragraph]

Immediately any work which ends with the already grown up mutant baby of a character, conceived and given birth to in only a few hours, fighting another whose turned into an intergalactic, space caterpillar with Carrot Top red hair is even strange by the standards anime usually sets. Paradoxically however, while this is a work where a man with a drill penis gets shafted on the front of a motorbike intimately to be used as an improvised battering ram, it's  pretty sedate however in comparison to other work. Imaishi even in a more conventional story like his earnest, chest pumping giant robot show Gurren Lagann is liable to have entire galaxies used as projectile weapons in a final boss battle, so he's capable of anything in his stories, to which compared to his later work Dead Leaves is pretty standard and normal. Panty & Stockings may actually be weirder in fact inherently as much for its more digestible style, like Western cartoons where there are two mini-episodes which are usually set around sketches, and how it manages to be the kind of show Cartoon Network would once show on Saturday mornings perverted for adults. Dead Leaves is strange but more for its jackhammer tone as a group of strange miscreants - most designed with over personified body parts or coughing up any form of body fluid - as the only individuals you can attach to. It's certainly not in the annuals of more experimental anime like the already mentioned Cat Soup or Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg (1985), but the result does leave you exhausted in a way after all the colourful carnage is depicted that does qualify it for the Abstract List.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Psychotronic

Abstract Traits: Quick pacing; Deliberate Obscuring of Plot; Mutation and Body Horror; Emphasis on Bodily Fluids and Sexuality; Transformation into Monsters; Cartoonish Violence

From http://goshzilla.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/dead_13.jpg

Personal Opinion:

Wisely, it'll be better to view Dead Leaves only after you've watched other Imaishi work. This does feel like a bull charging through a china shop in animated form for most of its length, reckless and messy as it crashes along through its short running time. Not surprisingly Dead Leaves was a blank squib originally, only with Gurren Lagann immediately afterwards cementing Imaishi's trip to today with a string of hits and cult favourites. The work itself in lieu of his career however is incredibly watchable and inspired in terms of being such a stylish, bold looking action story. While the plot is incredibly simple, the anime is intelligent enough to not feel overstretched because of its short length, and what it does depict while incredibly silly is more than likely more artistically inspired than some anime twice or further longer than its length. It'll be interesting for me, with Kill la Kill (2013) still to see and Imaishi helping new talent in Studio Trigger on work like Inferno Cop (2012) and Ninja Slayer (2015), how his style has evolved over the decade. His last directorial work was a short part of a series of exhibition net animation pieces called Japan Animator Expo;  his entry Sex & Violence with Machspeed (2015) felt like a hybrid of Dead Leaves and Panty & Stocking which was fun but did show a concern that, far from the danger of his work being it becoming too crass or ridiculous in his work, the real danger would be for him to become predictable, precariously falling into a groove of his own clichés.

Interestingly his latest is a sci-fi comedy series which has very short episodes, Space Patrol Luluco (2016), which means we'll have to wait for him to do another full series for a while, (maybe a film one day depending if his style could transition to the theatrical structure), so this question is up in the air, but at least it means that he is able to at least juggle different lengths and tones of his work,  confidence still there that he will remain inventive and entertaining in his work. Particularly with how successful Kill la Kill is beyond anime fans, he's far from hitting a creative slump in many a person's eyes, which is great because it would be depressing if the maniac nature of Hiroyuki Imaishi's work would suddenly become absent from the anime industry.

Dogtooth (2009)

From https://garywarnett.files.wordpress.com
/2010/11/dogtoothposter.jpg

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos

Screenplay: Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou

Cast: Christos Stergioglou (as father); Michelle Valley (as mother); Angeliki Papoulia (as older daughter); Mary Tsoni (as younger daughter); Christos Passalis (as son); Anna Kalaitzidou as Christina

Synopsis: An older married couple (Stergioglou and Valley) keep their adult children - two sisters (Papoulia and Tsoni) and a son (Passalis) - in complete isolation completely cut off from the world outside. Having only lived in their world within the home and garden, the children are taught that only their father can leave by car into the dangerous outside environment beyond the gates, are provided a vocabulary each day to learn where a "phone" is a salt shaker and a "zombie" is a small, yellow flower, and that they have another brother living over the fence they cannot reach. The parents' decision to bring in a female security guard from his workplace (Kalaitzidou) to provide sexual favours for their son proves to be their undoing, bringing a corrupting influence on the older daughter.

Alongside his collaborators behind the camera (co-screenwriters and production team) and in front of it (the actors perfectly in tune to depicting the material sincerely), Yorgos Lanthimos is exceptionally talented in creating a very idiosyncratic oddness in the films I've seen, a style that can be compared to the original surrealists in France. He at least learnt the most vital rule of them, that rather than weirdness for weirdness' sake as that which fails most modern films, as can be witnesses in a work like Vernon Chatman's Final Flesh (2009), a film like Dogtooth can make a discussion about something as average as a spangled headband, and the truth in whether one could glow in the dark, become like an alien language heard in a dream. The ordinary is enough to create an odd mood in the viewer as something similar to what they see in their everyday life can become uncanny when viewed in a skewered lens.  The family depicted within this film - who have no names baring their status within the family - are like any within Europe, who deal with simple things as pick up groceries that they've ran out of and the children having to be told off for hitting each other, but the nature of how their relationships have been built are troubling.

The humour is exceptionally dark, willing to tackle a great deal of taboos within its simple premise. It evokes the case depicting in Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple (1998), a real life incident where parents kept their two young girls locked up in their home away from the outside world, causing them to develop their own worlds and communication as a result. In vast contrast however to that film's sympathetic views of the parents, Dogtooth presents normalcy of this idea within a more unsettled tone and with the further issue that the children are clearly adults. Dogtooth's strangest quality is that it managed to be nominated for the 2010 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Picture; going between depicting incest to including hardcore sex, both in a tape the parents watch after a night of intimacy and (possibly real) acts from the cast, this is very dark movie even with its humour. The innocuous nature of the family's life, almost entirely set within the home environment baring the father's workplace, offsets some of the more eyebrow raising material - videotape to the head, assault of a cat with garden shears - but as much causing other sequences to crawl under the skin further, usually by inducing shocked laughter from a viewer as it would induce revulsion and disgust. The tightrope between humour and shock is a precarious trick the film manages to pull off in the end and its fits the material more to do this, the act of adding humour causing the horror of the material to stand out more within the concept of how absurd it is. The world of the family and its structure furthers this, where punishment for bad behaviour is to be forced to keep strong mouthwash within one's mouth until the mother tells that person they can spit it out. Prizes for following their parents' strict rules and instructions - chores to lessons such as being able to last longer underwater in the pool - are the sort one gives little children such as stickers and eventually toy aeroplanes, the real life ones that cannot be ignored flying above their house adapted into their world as the toys themselves.

A blatant satire of a patriarchal family - openly making reference to the training of a dog the family have as symbolic of this, going further where the father has everyone including the mother walk on all fours and bark to protect the home from threats like viscous domesticated cats - it avoids becoming redundant in this concept by depicting both the family as grounded and ordinary as possible and by filtering this all through the humour. There is something far and away more unsettling about the family through how clinical they are rather than the tone of the film being as completely sedate as its presentation is - the structure of the movie allowing the absurdity of them to shine through whilst the family itself, with its obsession with health and medical products, comes uncomfortable close to some form of perverse inward strength of the family guiding them by not letting the outside world corrupt them. Unlike Michael Haneke, while sharing visual aesthetics with him, I don't feel like I being forced fed heavy handed concepts because the humour provided makes the material more provocative. The mirrored traits of classic surrealism also make it more potent in themes, pieces of normalcy becoming mysterious objects or acts within a new light. A phone is kept hidden in the parents' bedroom, the mother locking herself in there when she need to phone the father, turning it into a secret treasure for the children and emphasised by it being a dial-up phone on a cord, causing it to have an archaic nature to it to add to the mystery. In their world, it's perfectly natural that the mother could give birth to twins and a dog for the children, warning she will give birth the twins if the daughters don't behave better. The use of language as well is perfectly in synch to surrealist writing, where the unexpected sexual enthusiasm of licking a "keyboard" has the perverted touch of it whilst the changing of words for others evokes, for myself anyway, René Magritte's famous written words "This is not a pipe". Lanthimos' knack, with co-writers, for intentionally stiff dialogue full of normal conversational pieces being strangely emphasised is another gift to the film, one which survived the transition to English for The Lobster (2015) mainly because, unlike another non-English director who may falter, it was intentionally awkward and mannered in any language. It even manages, in an inspired twist, to absorb pop culture into an important plot point, the viewing of Jaws (1975) and Rocky (1976) being the corrupting influence on the older sister, drastically altering her language and creating a new vocabulary of her own as a result onwards.

Technical Quality:

The style of Dogtooth - sedate, minimal camera movement - is one I'm not particularly fond of in most cases. It became common in a lot of the world art films I watched made in the 2000s and grew more when the "Slow Cinema" movement developed later in that decade in the films I than saw. Unless it's pure bad luck to see a lot of the more staler examples of this aesthetic style - single, still shots; modest editing which doesn't bring attention to itself; naturalistic and even muted colour palettes - this style has unfortunately cleansed away a lot of the unique, idiosyncratic voices you'd find in world cinema decades before, more so especially as digital camera have become more common. There are of course exceptions when the style is used well, and Yorgos Lanthimos uses it as his own trademark, the stillness alongside a muted colour palette adding to the mundanely of this family's own private world. He also uses it, with the use of cuts to the next image within the same scene, to both create a greater shock from some images but also, in the prolonged deadpan nature of some moments, a bigger punch line for the humour.

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

It was an absolute guarantee that this would be added to the list, placed entirely within a world (both of Lanthimos' and the central family) that is familiar to the viewer with recognisable interactions and objects but completely alien at the same time. The other factor is that, while there is a narrative trajectory, it's a slight one completely open ended where it's the character interactions themselves and the minor details in their lives that become more important; perversely the same kind of material one can find in social realist drama but found here within intentionally abstract dialogue and behaviour. This didn't lose its teeth when it came to The Lobster either, becoming as strange with known actors as it does with the commendable cast here.

Within a narrative where the only possible escape for the children is when their juvenile dogteeth fall out, allowing them to enter the outside world as adults in a perverted form of reaching adulthood, it's as much the performances in this case that are as important for the abstract tone to work. Angeliki Papoulia particularly as the older sister stands out, as the one who becomes more rebellious and independent as the film progresses - stabbing her brother in the hand for having a toy aeroplane and later in a memorable moment dancing wildly at the parent's wedding university in a spasm against their will - but everyone has to make the world credible even if its humorous. It's funny, to emphasis to his children that the outside world is fraught with killer animals to keep them within the home, that to get a toy plane from beyond the gate the father has to get into the car and drive a few inches, pick the toy up, and then drive back into the home environment, but to make this work with some credibility the muted performances are done seriously rather than acted out as silly. The grimness of the material alongside its humour is enforced by this, adding to the weirdness of the piece, more so when the outsider Christina decides to take advantage of the children for her own desires, adding a macabre nature to the material where there is no definite good or bad person in the narrative, only individuals who act both like the viewer but also strangely. Again, when you get to Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz in The Lobster acting the same way, the strangest of the material they had is reflected both in them rather than unknowns in the roles but also the style Lanthimos has created over the films. This also adds to the transgressive nature of the material as, acting like children in adult bodies, aspects of the trio of children's' behaviour in terms of violence and sexuality become much more provocative, from the brother's almost slow witted naivety to the younger sister's instinctive curiosity; it's not that far removed from the aforementioned film The Apple, which dealt with girls in the Middle East who were less than ten years old, un-matured for children their age kept from adapting to an outside world beyond their door, transported here by the younger casts' memorable performances exactly by with more uncomfortable consequences as a result of their ages and the things they feel as stunted adults.

Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Surreal/Weird

Abstract Themes: Real Sex; Sexual Kink; Language Manipulation; Adults as Children; Violence Against Animals; Unexpected References To Pop Culture; Oppressive Suburban Environments; Incest; Restricted and Closed-In Environments

Personal Opinion:

Between this and The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos is revealing himself already to be a completely unique individual, one who could always prove to be interesting in the films he makes over the next few years. Lanthimos stands out more so out of directors I look to with interest, and could join as a personal favourite, because while it can be toe-curling and transgressive he is deliberately humorous in his work, not merely able to spice films with dark humour like a Lars von Trier would but clearly making a comedy here with Dogtooth as he is a satire. I tend to neglect comedy, not because I am a lifeless cynic but because comedy springs usually in a twisted way from some of the directors I already like; again, Lanthimos is pretty bleak with the humour in a film like Dogtooth but he's clearly entrenched in comedy as a genre more than with other directors even if some may be appalled by the jokes he is telling.

He also emphasises that Greek cinema, in what I've seen, is a place unexpected in its willingness to deal with un-naturalistic tones and styles to depict real issues in their society. For a country that has dealt with a military dictatorship and economic collapse amongst many other things, their cinema which gets acclaimed is provocative and/or willing to use anything from magic realism to pastiche to make a point. The late Theo Angelopoulos had little qualms with his dramas touching upon dream sequences or very strange imagery, whilst the late Nikos Nikolaidis was willing to be controversial in the couple of films I've managed to see of his, his Singapore Sling (1990) as blood brother of Dogtooth but one that decided to go for the same tonal interests by way of a perverse film noir parody. Lanthimos is one of a few directors within the recent decade, films I still need to see, who've desired to break from any form of modesty and politeness in the films they are making and, considering the history and social background I don't have that a person from Greece would, it would be just as interesting to see what Greeks think of these films and how a film like Dogtooth would hit them. Would it be a strange movie or would it hit harder for someone who spoke the same language?