Andrew Osmond considers one of the best violent series and how its director showed that anime is so much more than violence.
In my previous column, I touched on how anime used to be seen as strange in Anglophone territories, and often still is. Much of that is down to anime’s frequent violent content, from Akira to Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle.
I don’t have any catch-all answer to “Why was anime allowed to be so violent?” However, you could reverse that and ask why Hollywood animation wasn’t allowed to be violent for so long, except for knockabout with funny animals. I could point to the impact of Disney, or perhaps the backlash in America over another kind of “cartoon,” the American horror comic, in the 1940s and ‘50s.
True, Japan had its own backlash over violent and explicit comics in the 1990s (described in Frederik L. Schodt’s book “Dreamland Japan”). That may have curtailed some excesses, but by then much of the darkness and violence of anime and manga was baked in, immovable.
In another previous column, I argued that the line between kids’ and adult manga and anime has been blurred in Japan since at least the 1950s - around the same time American comics were being forced to be “child-appropriate.” But perhaps more importantly, many of the anime that were first sold as anime in Britain and America were deliberately marketed as violent, not-for-kids fare, to distinguish them from “regular” cartoons. For instance, Andy Frain of Britain’s Manga Entertainment marketed anime like punk rock, and I’ve written a column on that too.
Many of the anime exported in the ‘90s weren’t for TV or cinema. They were direct-to-video productions, often referred to as “OVAs” (“Original Video Animations”) or “OAVS” (Original Animated Videos). They’d been around in Japan since 1983, a decade before Disney’s The Return of Jafar. The Japanese OVA were typically compact, one-off films or miniseries of two or three episodes – attractive to foreign distributors in the ‘90s, when anime were sold on tapes with limited space. Many OVAs were made for mature viewers, with outrageously violent content. For older fans, I need only mention Genocyber, Violence Jack or Legend of the Overfiend.
Such titles largely defined anime’s image in America and Britain for a decade. The video below shows a dance interlude from Madonna’s live “Drowned World” concert in 200l. Many of the clips are from forgotten anime exploitation OAVs of the time – but also from a 1997 film now widely seen as a classic, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, since reissued in American and British cinemas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLRU03v4Edo
*** age appropriate content can only be viewed on YouTube
The legacy of “ultraviolent” anime was displayed in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1 in 2003. Tarantino’s film had an extended animated sequence showing the dark childhood of one of the characters, animated by the Production I.G studio (Ghost in the Shell). The loose-drawn brutality of the opening fight was by Shinya Ohira, who recently drew the twisted figures in a burning Tokyo in Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron.
As you may have heard, Kill Bill is returning. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair will be released in American cinemas on December 5; it’s a 247-minute extended version of both original Kill Bill films. In particular, this edition will have 7 ½ minutes of additional animation – the new animation was completed by 2009, again by Production I.G, but it’s never been available before.
Sunao Katabuchi
However, the violent anime I’ll focus on this time wasn’t made for the video market – at least, most of it wasn’t. The first 24 episodes of Black Lagoon were screened on Japanese television in 2006, with another five-part story for video, from 2010 to 2011. All the episodes are now on Crunchyroll.
Black Lagoon is excellent on its own terms, but it’s a particularly notable case-study considering its writer-director’s CV. He’s someone I’ve already discussed in this column – Sunao Katabuchi, who’d go on to direct the epic war drama In This Corner of the World (released 2016, with a much-extended version in 2019).
In striking contrast to Tarantino, Katabuchi is not generally linked with screen violence. Rather, he’s spent much of his career, before and after Black Lagoon, working on very different kinds of anime. Indeed, if you want to rebut old stereotypes of anime, Katabuchi’s career makes an excellent case study.
He often worked on family anime as a young artist. In the 1980s he was hired by Hayao Miyazaki to write for the anthropomorphic Sherlock Hound series. He also storyboarded a couple of episodes of the anime Pollyanna. In the 1990s, he had storyboarding stints on several anime versions of foreign properties: Daddy Long-Legs and Little Women. He went on to direct a 1996 anime series of Lassie (really).
Even more notably, Katabuchi was meant to direct Ghibli’s 1989 film Kiki’s Delivery Service, before Miyazaki took over. There are rival stories about what happened. According to an Animation Obsessive article, it was the film’s investors who demanded that Miyazaki direct the film. The Art of Kiki’s Delivery Service book, though, suggests Miyazaki had only meant to be the film’s producer; however, he rewrote Kiki’s screenplay to the point that only he could direct it.
Anime fans may think of the later case of Mamoru Hosoda, who was tapped to direct Ghibi’s 2004 Howl’s Moving Castle, before Hosoda’s version was rejected and Miyazaki stepped in again. But whereas Hosoda’s experience was painful – he never worked for Ghibli again, finding fame at other studios with films like Summer Wars and Belle – Katabuchi’s demotion was far more amicable. He remained Kiki’s Assistant Director, leading a research team to Sweden for the film, as well as to Zagreb, Croatia, London, and Paris.
All the anime in the last two paragraphs had little attention or exposure in America and Britain though the 1990s. For many pundits, anime meant violence. Tellingly, when Disney released Kiki to American video in 1998 – the first Ghibli title it handled – it was terrified of the “anime” label, as contemporary news reports show (more here). “Disney officials are skirting the term as if it were radioactive,” commented the New York Times.
Princess Arete
Having missed his directing debut with Kiki, Katabuchi instead helmed the children’s fantasy Princess Arete in 2001. It’s about a little girl who’s too clever to be a passive princess, imprisoned by a selfish wizard who’s himself trapped by his obsessions. The film’s backstory is fascinating; it was based on a British feminist fairy tale, The Clever Princess by Diana Coles.
The book had become a huge success when it was translated in Japan. I wrote about the book elsewhere, interviewing Coles, while Animation Obsessive chronicled the film’s production. As of writing, the film’s unavailable in America, though there’s a British home edition from Anime Limited.
Princess Arete was clearly a passion project for Katabuchi. I confess, though, that I personally found the film a huge let-down, despite pleasant picture-book compositions and good details in the animation. “There’s a chronic lack of momentum,” I complained in a magazine review, “with many scenes and characters in the first half proving extremely peripheral to the story. This would be understandable in a long TV serial, but the dawdling is maddening in a film.”
I acknowledged the slow pacing reflected deeper themes of spiritual stasis and unchanging weariness, “but it doesn’t stop Arete from being terribly boring… Several characters are interesting in principle, but there’s so little chemistry between them that Arete is a fairy story starved of storytelling.”
I added that while, “The film mocks the ‘prince saves princess’ story traditions, Shrek nailed them the same year [2001]. Of course, Arete has a more elegant sensibility than the raucous Shrek, but other refined cartoon films made such fairy tales better. Try France’s The King and the Mockingbird, which influenced Miyazaki, or The Last Unicorn, which was drawn but not produced in Japan.”
All of that aside, though, Princess Arete would seem to be on the furthest side of anime imaginable from the mayhem of stereotypical violent anime, such as Akira, Genocyber or Kill Bill.
Black Lagoon
It would seem utterly bizarre that Katabuchi would follow up Princess Arete by directing the lurid Black Lagoon. But when I interviewed Katabuchi in 2017, he suggested all his works were connected. “(Princess Arete) is a story of a girl who tried to believe in her own self-worth. I wanted to be like her; I wished that I were successful. Yet when we look to the future, we realize that it is not necessary to achieve the perfect future we believed in for everyone. When I thought about that, I thought I had to create a film where criminals had no other choice than a life of crime, like (the situation) in Black Lagoon.”
Animated by the Madhouse studio, Black Lagoon is based on a manga by Rei Hiroe which began in 2002, though the script adaptation is credited entirely to Katabuchi. Like almost all manga, Hiroe’s original strip was monochrome. “Just as a result of adding color (in the anime version), it becomes remarkably bloody,” said Katabuchi in one interview. He added that the show’s animation producer, Ryoichiro Matsuo, was told (perhaps by the production committee) to highlight the gore. “Even more so than the parts I worked on, the parts he worked on even smelled bloody.”
It’s arguable that Black Lagoon follows the tradition of earlier anime including Lupin the Third and Shinichiro Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop. They’re all crime shows featuring motley teams and thrill-seeking women in the midst of mayhem. But Black Lagoon is the really hardboiled one, blood-drenched and 18-rated. It’s not aged; it’s still splendidly well-mounted and written and still punches through windows. Impeccably made and frighteningly smart, it deals with human issues under its swagger and cynicism.
Lagoon is the name of a four-person merc outfit, operating out of the coastal Thai city Roanapur. Much later in the show, we learn the city was literally created by the Japanese army in World War II – that’s imperialism for you. Lagoon are supposedly delivery boys in their torpedo boat, ferrying whatever goods their clients need: a Nazi painting, a cartel hostage. In practice they’re continually caught up in the shoot-outs and all-out war that consumes Roanapur and reaches beyond – one of the best storylines brings the carnage to central Tokyo.
Of the Lagoon team, one has a habit of getting far too involved in deadly situations. That’s Rock, our viewpoint. At first, he’s an anonymous Tokyo salaryman who’s kidnapped by Lagoon for complicated reasons, while his company cuts him loose to die. Rock’s reaction when his fate sinks in? He hurls a gun into the sea like a raging child and starts kicking the boat’s torpedo tube. He only calms down when he’s punched in the face.
Much of the punching comes from Lagoon’s female member, Revy. She’s a sister to Bebop’s Faye and Lupin’s Fujiko, an action girl looking for a good time, on her terms. Instead of seduction or gambling, Revy gets off on killing; give her a gun in each hand, and goons bearing down on her, and you can’t keep count of the corpses. At first, she seems a simple psycho. But in an early episode, when Rock challenges her over robbing corpses, she scornfully explains exactly why the only things that matter are money and guns. Then she says she’ll kill him if he moralizes again. It’s a grimly beautiful scene, set in sullen shadow, but with a mellow guitar counterpoint. Think Mamoru Oshii meets John Milius.
By now, Rock has joined the Lagoon team, except that the anime’s framing as a team show is a false front. The other Lagoon members are great foils: they’re technician Benny and leader Dutch, both wise pragmatists who clear out of the way whenever Revy faces off with the show’s large roster of rival fighting women. But the focus is far more on Rock and Revy’s acquaintanceship, plus such vivid recurring characters such as Balalaika, who’s the proudly scarred queen of Roanapur’s Russian Mafia, committing bloody murder without raising her voice. After overseeing one of the ghastliest acts in the series, she sits quietly at a fountain and admits she’s getting old.
Other memorable characters figure in the individual stories. Unlike Lupin and Bebop, most of Black Lagoon consists of extended multi-part adventures, giving depth to such characters as a schoolgirl who reads French existentialism to cope with her crime-family duties. Then there are the infamous Vampire Twins, the child stars of Lagoon’s most nakedly horrific arc. Merrily interchangeable, swapping genders and identities with their clothes, the cherubs have the gusto of Heath Ledger’s Joker and a make it stop backstory from A Serbian Film, though Lagoon predates both.
A more humorous story arc unites assorted crazies for the mother of all shoot-outs; it’s like Ben Wheatley’s 2016 British film Free Fire, only far more fun. Like Bebop, Lagoon slides effortlessly between grit and farce – even if you’ve not seen it, you may have heard of the soldier-maid woman Roberta who fights so much like the Terminator that the mercs joke about it even while running for their lives. Black Lagoon’s staff, though, had a British reference in mind; they nicknamed Roberta, “The Evil Mary Poppins.”
But what truly distinguishes Black Lagoon is its high-grade writing. This is a show that finds sympathy for a U-Boat captain fleeing Hitler’s Germany in a flashback subplot that was wholly invented by Katabuchi. Or it can devote an episode to Rock growing as a character, standing up to Revy while we cheer… and then in the very next episode, Rock blithely goes along with child-trafficking while the script, like Revy, refuses to moralize.
There are few clangers – the worst is in the final storyline which has American soldiers acting in impossible ways (though from Black Lagoon’s viewpoint, the Americans are as much sympathetic enemies as the German U-Boat captain). But Lagoon achieves so much. I mentioned the scene with Revy’s shadowed “screw morals” monologue. But there’s also a later scene to bookend it, where she meets little kids playing cops and robbers. What follows is chilling but humane, as Revy shows how violence isn’t cool, kids. It’s Lagoon at its masterful best.
Beyond Black Lagoon
As mentioned earlier, Black Lagoon was mostly screened in 2006, though its final episodes went to video in 2010-11. In the intervening years, Katabuchi directed a film that would foreshadow his later trajectory – Mai Mai Miracle, released to cinemas in 2009. Here’s the Japanese trailer:
The film is available on Blu-ray in both America (from Right Stuf) and Britain (from Anime Limited). As the trailer suggests, it’s an intensely detailed portrait of Japan’s history, like Katabuchi’s later In This Corner of the World. However, while that film is a war story, Mai Mai Miracle depicts children in 1955, young enough to have not known war - though the girl protagonist is deeply fascinated with her country’s history.
In the same interview that I quoted earlier, Katabuchi told me, “I thought that as I could describe a criminal lifestyle (in Black Lagoon), I could also describe the real life of children. With this in mind I made Mai Mai Miracle, wondering what I could tell them. Mai Mai Miracle was set in Yamaguchi prefecture in the 1950s. I was born in the '60s and it was easy to imagine this, following my childhood memories.”
I’ve described Mai Mai Miracle in more detail here, and summarized its production background here. Reviewing it in another magazine, I wrote, “For all of its sophistication, Mai Mai Miracle has the delight and spontaneity of Totoro. It’s the most charming anime film for a decade or more” – despite involving, I noted, at least four character deaths. I found some faults with the film, but they mattered little. “The last half-hour has some silly bits of melodrama, and some very forced efforts to connect the plot-strands, though the payoff for the three main girls is wonderful. As, indeed, is what this film achieves. Quibbles be damned; this gets full marks!”
After directing the last episodes of Black Lagoon, Katabuchi’s next director credit was In This Corner of the World in 2016, about a young woman with artistic gifts living near Hiroshima in World War II. I covered that film in one of my first columns, and Katabuchi discussed it extensively when I interviewed him. As of writing, he’s still working on his new Japanese historical film, The Mourning Children, about 10th-century Kyoto during a plague. It began development in 2017; as of writing, a release date hasn’t been announced, but here’s the latest trailer.
But I can’t help noting that Black Lagoon is still continuing sporadically in manga form, still drawn by Rei Hiroe. For more than a decade, Katabuchi has been absorbed in the richness and tragedy of Japanese history. But if he ever wanted a break, then Roanapur is waiting.
