Serdar | Genji Press

Trinity Blood begins with a fantastic idea: If vampires are creatures that feed on humans, what kind of creatures feed on vampires? It then spends as much time and energy as possible doing absolutely nothing with this concept. Instead, it gives us a story that’s so fractured, aimless and uninteresting it’s like reading notes prepared for another, better treatment of the subject. But it sure looks pretty, and if that’s all you care about, that’s about all you’re going to get. It’s a résumé for its design team.

The series opens several hundred years into the future, after a war has devastated most of the planet (although they’ve done a mighty nice job of rebuilding everything in European Gothic). Society is split into two mutually hostile camps: the vampires, who style themselves the “Methuselas”; and humanity, or “Terrans”, whose sole form of social organization at this point appears to be the Catholic Church. There is a lot of technology left over from the old days, most of it in the form of plot devices — like a satellite that can incinerate a building from orbit, or computers that seem to exist for no other reason than to be hacked and overridden.

Some movies are about plots and characters and stories, and some movies are about images and sounds and feelings. Rampo Noir starts in the second category — it’s a deliriously beautiful movie — but gradually backs into the first. It does not, however, make the mistake of explaining so much about itself that it ends up in the same category as Silent Hill, where we got so much explanation that everything else became moot. And it also stars Tadanobu Asano, easily my favorite Japanese actor of the moment, making himself as inscrutable and fascinating to watch as only he can.

The name “Edogawa Rampo” means nothing to most Westerners, but in Japan it’s the name Edgar Allan Poe, Nipponified (try saying it out loud) and adopted by author Hirai Taro as his pseudonym. Rampo claimed Poe as a major literary influence, along with Maurice Leblanc and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and wrote dozens of stories and novels in that vein. Like almost every successful author, his works have been adapted to film — Shinya Tsukamoto’s Gemini (which this movie resembles in many ways), The Watcher in the Attic, The Boy Detectives, Blind Beast (and Teruo Ishii’s Blind Beast vs. Killer Dwarf) were all adapted from his work.

If Trinity Blood was an example of an anime where they took a great idea and wasted it, Shinobi is the live-action version of the same sort of mistake. It is a period ninja-fantasy adventure with a game cast, based on a bestselling novel, and my god is it ever boring as hell. Sorry, gang, but that’s the way it is. The movie is all promise and no payoff.

I gave the movie a chance, honest. I let Shinobi unspool for two hours without feeling it strike a single neuron, without a single surprise that I hadn’t seen coming miles off, and when it was done I could not remember a single image, a single line of dialogue, a single scene that had held my interest in more than the most fleeting way. How is it that Japan can use the samurai / period-adventure genre to produce some of the most compelling, visually striking and all-around inventive films — Gojoe, or Takeshi Kitano’s Zatôichi — but then turn around and come up with a complete wet dog of a picture like this? Probably because Gojoe and Zatôichi were the products of artists with vision, and Shinobi is a piece of made-to-order piffle.

Otogi-Zoshi is a great and bold experiment that works — a story that spans hundreds of years of history, that freely ties together drama, mythology and fantasy into a unified whole, and above all is grand fun to watch. It’s the complete antithesis of stuff like Trinity Blood, where they took one good idea and didn’t do a thing with it; here, they have almost more ideas than they know what to do with, but they make them all serve the story. It’s also yet another remarkable piece of work by VAP — the production company who gave us Berserk — and Production I.G., the animation studio that gave us Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Blood: the Last Vampire, and many other shows that are staples of anime at its very best.

Otogi-zoshi (御伽草子) means a book of fairy tales, and with a title like that I expected something along the lines of the outstanding Requiem from the Darkness: a series of self-contained stories that tie into Japanese myth and legend. Instead, there are two large and broadly integrated plots, both of which draw on extant folklore and history for inspiration. The first half of the series transpires in the medieval Heian era (cf. Gojoe, Portrait of Hell, Onmyoji I/II); the second half, in the modern day — albeit with contemporary editions of all of the same characters. At first the two halves seem to share nothing other than the shared-cast gimmick, but over time they grow closer together and complement each other quite thoroughly. I’ve seen vague variations on the same stunt before, but Otogi-Zoshi works entirely on its own merits, both in part and in whole.