Directed by Hirotsu Kawasaki
Japan, 1998, 90 mins, animation
Showing at the 46th Sydney Film Festival
The concept behind this film is similar to Akira - child soldiers engineered in secret military experiments, this time under orders from the Pentagon. Ominae Yu is number 42. He looks like Kaneda from Akira, with a similar red battle suit, but unlike the other Pentagon cyborgs, he switched sides to join Arcam, an organisation which seeks to prevent the Pentagon from stealing Noah's Ark, a huge atmosphere controller buried under Mt Ararat in Turkey. Yu's nemesis is Colonel McDougall, another kid with white hair and green and yellow eyes, who has a silver laugh and a magnetic force amplifier in his brain - which gives him massive telekinetic powers as well as uncontrollable psychic migraines that cause his body to fuse with and incorporate his environment - just like Tetsuo towards the end of Akira.
The ancient technology of Noah's Ark is an interesting concept, similar to the giant underground cavern Arnie stumbles across in Total Recall. It is alien technology, left behind by an earlier civilisation, used to create the earth's atmosphere and design its lifeforms. A machine for the gods, the Ark looks like a giant fish with arcane symbols all over it, and with a huge black obelisk sticking out of its back, not unlike the alien slabs of 2001. Of course when it falls into the wrong hands it becomes a weapon of evil, and in this sense Spriggan is a generic story. It becomes a series of pitched battles between Arcam and the covert government agency backed by the Pentagon. Each battle features the cyborg kids taking turns at massacring neat formations of unaugmented enemy soldiers, a la Stallone in Rambo. The tit for tat battles are totally one-sided, and mass destruction becomes the driving interest of the film.
The animation is more jerky than Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and oriented more around acrobatic gunfights than mystical powers, which is disappointing as it fails to capitalise on the unique advantages of animation as a medium. I believe anime works best with extreme concepts and little dialogue - supernatural actions and fantastic visuals, tied to a strong story with likeable characters. I love anime for those moments when things start going crazy and concrete slabs start crumbling and floating up into the air; then there is silence and slow motion action, similar to the footage of test explosions at Bikini Atoll and Los Alamos - buses and houses being silently shredded before bursting back into furious sound and slashes of colour. Spriggan features that terse shouting style of dialogue so often found in animation, which confuses the viewer because every conversation becomes aggressive and yet, unmotivated. The dialogue in this film is pure exposition and posturing - there is no character development. Actions are not expressive and every face is a grimace set in the silent stone of fury. There are no female characters of signficance and none of the light moments or banter usually found in anime. The characters are one dimensional and dislikable - they have no real emotional ties to each other and all they do is act tough, get beaten to a bloody pulp, and beat others to a bloody pulp. The cheesy soundtrack is also a bit over the top, and is piercingly shrill.
Although Spriggan has been worked on by key personnel from Akira, Memories and Ghost in the Shell, it is probably the worst out of the lot. Which is not to say it is a bad film, but that it is disappointing to us in the west, weaned only on premiere-league anime and dying to see more.
eugene chew
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Other Japanese films screening at the festival:
After Life
Ikinai
return to 1999 Sydney Film Festival index