Neo-Tokyo

jpn Meikyu Monogatari, aka Manie-Manie. 1986. Movie. 49 min. Science fiction/fantasy. org Taku Mayumura (short stories). dir Rintaro, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Katsuhiro Otomo. -bc

Three directors let loose with short, personal tales that allow them to show off their arty instincts with varying degrees of abstraction and playfulness. Not the deepest of works from these men, but engaging and imaginative nonetheless.

Three unrelated segments tell three separate stories. In the first, “Labyrinth,” a girl named Sachi and her cat, Cicerone, have wild, surreal adventures, first in the rooms, hallways, and stairways of their house and then pushing through a mirror into the outside world, where they pass strange processions in a boarded-up alley and wind up following a clown into an empty circus.

In “Running Man,” a reporter covers the decline and fall of Zack Hugh, a champion road racer at the Death Circus, an indoor race-car event that promises death and fiery crashes at every race to bloodthirsty audiences in a future metropolis. After ten years as a champ, Zack’s system has been permanently damaged and is completely unable to function outside of a car. His last race promises a spectacle of unparalleled destruction.

In “The Order to Stop Construction,” a Japanese corporation sends a middle manager, Sugioka, to a construction project run by robots in the middle of the Amazon jungle after a rebel group seizes power in the region and cancels the company’s contract. The manager’s assignment is to shut the plant down, but by the time he gets there the robot in charge is so single-minded in his drive to finish the job that he sees Sugioka as an obstacle and keeps him locked in his room. As water, vegetation, and wildlife slowly seep into the works and the machines begin to break down and malfunction, the robot manager just orders the machines to work even harder. Sugioka manages to escape and tries to find a way to shut the project down himself.

The first segment, “Labyrinth,” was directed by Rintaro, who was already an established director with such major features to his name as Galaxy Express 999, Adieu Galaxy Express 999, Harmagedon, and Dagger of Kamui. Yoshiaki Kawajiri (Ninja Scroll), director of the second segment, “Running Man,” was a veteran animator but had directed only one feature at this point, Lensman. Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira), a manga artist, made his official anime directing debut with the third segment, “The Order to Stop Construction.”

Rintaro often used surreal, dreamlike elements in his work, particularly to show characters’ hallucinatory states of mind or simply subjective points of view. In the eleven-minute “Labyrinth,” he gives his wildest experimental streak full play and takes a little girl and her cat out of a set of distorted perspectives in their home environment, packed as it is with sinister clocks and pendulums and toys that come to life, and puts them in a bizarre and unsettling alley that winds on and on, full of phantom traffic and a clown that beckons them. Through it all, the cat is on the edge of a nervous breakdown, but the girl remains unfazed and seems to be enjoying it.

In the fourteen-minute “Running Man,” Kawajiri creates an insular futuristic world of a high-tech race track with no hint of a society beyond it. It’s perpetual nighttime in a place that could be indoors or out, we never know which. This is sci-fi noir, with light cast only by blazing headlights, which often loom up in compressed telephoto perspective, and the pervasive glow of neon advertising signs. Kawajiri creates two characters with the strong detail and rich bold linework that would characterize his later work and gives one of them, the driver, a set of extreme close-ups—face, bloodshot eyes, and hands coursing with bulging veins—that show what a monster the man has become in the service of his car. The only non-racing shots of him are in a dark, barely-lit garage where he sits in an open stationary car and grunts in anguish as if sitting still is a source of constant pain. The noir feel is reinforced by shadowy shots of the reporter, dressed in a trench coat, tie, and fedora, smoking a cigarette.

With “The Order to Stop Construction,” the longest segment in the film (eighteen minutes), Otomo creates the only vaguely plausible real-world setting of the three, albeit in the service of a fanciful, humorous tale. His construction plant in the middle of the jungle is a constant whirl of pointless activity as robot-piloted steam shovels, bulldozers, and metal claws move materials and pull cables and dig holes and spew endless streams of steam and waste water, all fluidly animated. The plant offers an intricately detailed backdrop of massive empty buildings and sprawling networks of pipes and vents, all slowly decaying and crumbling under the effects of the jungle’s heat, humidity, and rapid spread of vegetation. Colorful tropical birds nest in forgotten robot-built nooks and crannies, and fly overhead, demonstrating the beauty of nature, in contrast to the ongoing man-made mess furiously perpetuating itself below. The only major human character, Sugioka, is deliberately designed as a stereotypical Japanese salaryman—slight, wiry, buck-toothed, and wearing glasses, and devoted to the company come hell or high water.

Rintaro’s tale is slight and whimsical and filled with surreal touches, as if he were attempting to duplicate the avant-garde animation of other countries and other eras (think Iron Curtain Eastern Europe of the 1960s). There isn’t much of a story to it, but it is cute and playful and filled with clever references, including the way Sachi and Cicerone enter the hallucinatory outside world by way of a wall mirror, similar to Alice in Wonderland.

Kawajiri’s story is not terribly compelling either, thanks to its rather commonplace anime sci-fi theme, but he does explore his subject in a singular way. It’s the short tale of a man taking himself to his absolute limit in the service of a technology to which he has completely devoted his body and soul. Kawajiri focuses on the man’s direct experience of outdriving all competitors in a purposefully deadly race, feeling the pain and loneliness of it, and the monstrous distortion of his senses. Most of what we see is from his point of view. Very little is explained, but is rather a collection of moments, expressions, and bursts of action on the final day and night of the man’s career. We are plunged so completely into the driver’s world that we never get a look at the outside world, at the society that sanctions this activity. The only false note is the brief and strictly conventional use of a magazine reporter to serve as narrator of Zack’s story, to provide more explanation than we really need.

The greatest pleasures of this short omnibus movie are to be found in Otomo’s parable about technology run amok, a theme he would return to in Akira, Roujin Z, Steamboy, and all three segments of Memories, each of which is foreshadowed in some way or another here. As in the “Stink Bomb” segment of Memories, the main character is a Japanese company man given an assignment he is determined to carry out, even when common sense would dictate its impossibility. With machines carrying on at full blast all around him heedless of the presence of a lone human, Sugioka still blithely believes in the authority that the front office has invested in him, even as his one robot contact, the only entity with any real power in the place, sees him first as a nuisance to be tolerated and then as a hindrance to be neutralized. Sugioka’s cartoonish intransigence is funny and endearing, especially in contrast to the mad uncontrollable push of the machines around him relentlessly performing their functions, even as the waters of the Amazon seep in and obliterate their efforts. It’s Otomo’s most focused effort and one of his most enjoyable.

Mickey Yoshino provides a creative score that punches up the Otomo segment with an “industrial” piano piece that matches the pounding, futile movements of the overworked machines, recalling the clever cues by Raymond Scott that popped up in the old Warner Bros. Looney Tune cartoons of the 1940s.

Neo-Tokyo was distributed by Streamline Pictures in the U.S. and even had a theatrical release on the art-house circuit in 1992, where it played with Silent Möbius. “The Running Man” segment played on MTV’s popular Liquid Televison program of experimental animation in the early ’90s.

advisory Some of the imagery in “Running Man” is intense and nightmarish.