By Justin Lowe
Anime creators Mamoru Oshii and Hiroyuki Okiura leave behind the futuristic worlds of their previous projects with the animated thriller, JIN-ROH: The Wolf Brigade. The movie made its U.S. premiere in May at LA’s Japanese Anime Film Festival and boasts an impressive string of international festival appearances ahead of its theatrical release.
With a script by anime veteran Oshii, JIN-ROH is Okiura’s directorial debut, after serving as character designer and animation supervisor on 1995’s Ghost in the Shell and previously as an animator on Akira. Directed by Oshii, Ghost in the Shell is an anime classic, a dark tale of political intrigue, cyborg secret agents and cyber terrorism, while Akira established the anime “urban noir” standard back in 1988.
The comparatively low-tech JIN-ROH is set in mid-1950s Tokyo, but not the one we’re familiar with. The film re-imagines the conclusion of World War II as a Nazi victory over Japan, complete with a German atomic bomb attack. At the beginning of the film, the country is emerging from a decade of occupation as an economic powerhouse that’s deeply divided along class lines. Domestic terrorists have formed “The Sect” to further their shadowy Leftist political aims, battling in the streets and the underground sewers with local law enforcement and the elite paramilitary troops of the Capital Police.
Special Unit officer Kazuki Fuse, responding to another of the city’s frequent demonstrations, corners one of The Sect’s bomb couriers — young women known as “red riding hoods” — in a subterranean tunnel, but fails to follow orders to shoot the girl, Nanami Agawa. Before his backup can arrive, Nanami has detonated the explosives, blowing herself up and leaving behind an emotionally traumatized Fuse, who’s ordered to return to the police academy for retraining.
As Fuse attempts to unravel the mystery of Nanami’s death, he’s drawn into the intrigue of rival security agencies and the secretive world of the “Wolf Brigade,” a clandestine counterterrorist subgroup of the Special Unit police. Meanwhile, Fuse’s seemingly coincidental encounter with Kei, Nanami’s surviving sister, develops into a romantic relationship, but the net of conspiracies is quickly closing around the young lovers.
Okiura and Ghost in the Shell’s art director Hiromasa Ogura rely exclusively on cel animation in JIN-ROH, employing the same “dim look” design pioneered by Akira, which favors gritty urban locations, dark background colors and low-light or nighttime settings. Okiura’s directing style is uncharacteristically cinematic, emphasizing traditional camera movements that suit the film’s realistic setting, rather than the often-dizzying cinematography of many anime fantasy films. The director also supervised the English-language script translation, which is dubbed over the original footage fairly seamlessly.
Following an impressive opening sequence of street riots and police crackdowns, including the key scene of Fuse’s confrontation with the bomb-toting Nanami, the story quickly loses momentum when Fuse is sent back to the police academy. The promising alternate-history premise of a Nazi-occupied Japan is quickly abandoned at the beginning of the movie, as the filmmakers neglect to make an overt connection between fascism and the tyranny of the police state that emerges. The dominant plotline of interagency-rivalry among the police departments is obscure and hard to follow, neglecting the fertile territory initially set up by the terrorist attacks, while the Little Red Riding Hood story that frames the film is a further distraction, proving intrusive and extraneous, rather than adding any real resonance to the plot.
Even with all the pedigree of a successful anime film, JIN-ROH still faces stiff competition during the height of the midsummer blockbuster season with several popular sci-fi, fantasy and action movies. But for dedicated anime fans, a new release from Oshii and his protoge Okiura will always be reason enough to see their films.
JIN-ROH: The Wolf Brigade opens July 27 in the Bay Area and is unrated.
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