Born of the philosophical meanderings of
Ghost in the Shell's Mamoru Oshii and the heavily stylized logo art and original character designs of
Final Fantasy Yoshitaka Amano, as well as the talented animators at 1980s Studio DEEN, we already having the makings of a serious AAA-production quality anime.
How is it? It's... suitably odd.
First off, the least controversial thing I can say about the movie is that it looks absolutely fantastic. Still shots of the movie don't do justice to the fantastic animation which reaches and even surpasses Studio Ghibli-level work and the distinctly 80s stock anime sound effects (as you would hear in
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) really help cement the often silent soundtrack that periodically breaks into a melancholic choir. This combined with the peculiar visuals of the landscape make for a truly moody piece and very easy to get sucked in immediately.
This, however, will not last long for less patient viewers and over-skeptics like myself will eventually find the extraordinarily slow start to the movie reason enough to check your watch.
It takes a whole 24 minutes until the words are actually spoken in the movie and it's shortly after that the only fleeting indication of a plot conflict appears.
The deal is we have a weird future dystopic landscape wrought with metal carnage, giant skeletons, and a massive eyeball covered in statues descends from the sky. Nameless Man looks on as we cut to a large transparent egg in a tree as it's deformed bird-like inhabitant is about to wake.
Transitioning from our cold open we see Nameless Girl awaken and attend to a large egg which she babysits throughout the movie. She wanders the streets a while and eventually encounters the Nameless Man who follows her. When she leaves her egg to approach him, he offers her egg to her, having stolen it, and warns her to keep it safe. After refusing to disclose to him what's in the egg he persists in following her and appears to be generally protective of her, especially when strange undead-like fisherman begin running up and down the empty streets to chase down shadows of fish.
That's effectively the halfway point of the movie. I'm serious. So little is said and so little happens, it wouldn't even be fair to say I'm skipping anything, that's genuinely the entire plot of the movie so far. It's clearly evident that the emphasis was on the art style and mood and the movie really is animation porn much of the time, but sometimes the movie just pauses on a frame of animation to depict stillness and they hold it for nearly as egregiously as
Kara No Kyoukai does. That budget definitely seems to come and go in waves. At one point the movie seriously appears to sit on a fire for around a minute as nothing else happens. To be fair it could be seen as build up to the climax of the movie, but it hardly even seems that way at first.
Eventually Nameless Man explains how he doesn't remember things and tells a variation of the story of Noah's Ark, emphasizing the bird that was sent out to find land, but never returned and the Ark's inhabitants forgot they had even sent it. Nameless Girl reassures him that the bird does exist and shows him a creepy as **** skeleton of an angel, saying what hatches from the egg is to be given to her, to which he just says "that's what I thought".
...Oh really?
I'm gladly you're caught up with your own story, movie, but it'd sure be nice if you could clue the audience into the plot, eh?
Eventually eventually, Nameless Girl falls asleep, rolls away from her egg, and as promised (or rather never promised) Nameless Man takes the egg and smashes it with the metallic crucifix he carries around like a samurai.
Well thanks, dick.
Girl wakes up, finds the pieces, starts cries out in anguish.
Really startin' to feel uncomfortable.
She runs out after the man and just as she catches up to him she inexplicably falls into a ravine, drowns, her air bubbles become eggs, and the giant eye space ship rises out of the ocean with her as a new statue on it. Slowly zoom out to reveal land is vaguely potato shaped, which is definitely meaningful.
CREDITS.
...WELL THAT'S JUST SWELL AIN'T IT?
See, I was worried this would happen from the beginning of the movie. Not specifically THIS, of course, just that, after you take 24 minutes ingratiating a viewer into a world with pure sound and visuals, I kinda DON'T WANT PLOT to screw it up, ya know?
This is my thing with
Eraserhead too, if you want just a surreal experience sorta movie,
that's fine, I can appreciate that, but when you got symbolism dripping off the screen and are clearly making biblical allegories with a whole lotta "I don't remember, maybe I don't even exist" type-a-******** dialog, then I want that movie to end with some ****in' ANSWERS, NOT MORE QUESTIONS.
Apparently, Oshii had "lost his faith" in Christianity shortly before making the movie. The best I think I can safely make of that is draw a comparison between losing faith and the Nameless Man betraying Nameless Girl's trust. Perhaps his advice to "keep precious things inside you or else you'll lose them" has a parallel to Oshii exposing his beliefs to the daylight of scrutiny, and in turn, their emptiness is laid bare like how the egg is never shown to contain anything.
See, if I could sincerely believe that, I could really appreciate that scene for the metaphor it's trying to portray, right? But I'm just spitballing. It's conjecture, speculation, I don't know, and if the guy sat down and explained each individual scene to me in a manner that made sense I'm sure I'd really like the movie, but that's not happening, and the movie's not written in such a way where, like
Paranoia Agent, the biggest mysteries are relatively explained and the rest I'm compelled to puzzle over.
Because of that it's just not intellectually stimulating. There's a middle ground between handing me a list of spoilers and asking me to interpret an abstract painting without ever telling me what it was intended to convey.
All told, it's worth a watch for the animation alone.