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The Red Spectacles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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n his script for the 1998 anime drama Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, famed Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii revealed some of the inner workings of a corrupt, elite, heavily armed Japanese police force, a group of men who claimed symbolic kinship with wolves and followed no rules but their own. That police force (or, at least, a nascent, less developed version of it) plays a key role in two live-action films that Oshii wrote and directed earlier in his career, but set later in his timeline. The Red Spectacles and its sequel, Stray Dog: Kerberos Panzer Cops, both take place after a violent incident led the Japanese government to shut down the Kerberos squad, which sparked a series of riots as the Kerberos refused to surrender.
As 1987's The Red Spectacles begins, high-ranking Kerberos member Koichi Todome (Chiba) and two of his partners (Washio and Tanaka) escape the government forces with their high-tech protective armor suits and weaponry. They kill wave after wave of pursuers, but ultimately Koichi is pressured to abandon his wounded companions and flee the country. Three years later, he returns incognito, stepping into a nightmarish world of midnight torture trials and constant double crosses. Armed gangs in mime face paint pursue him, his old friends turn up as turncoat government agents, and a shadowy Big Brother figure (Genda) dogs his every step. In the fascistic future, even noodle-soup shops are banned, and cat images are everywhere, which Koichi finds particularly disturbing, since he self-identifies as a dog.
His old subordinate Inui (Yoshikatsu Fujiki) follows the same symbolism in the 1991 sequel Stray Dog, which is set before Koichi's return to Japan. After Koichi's escape, Inui serves his time in prison as a result of the riots, and upon his release he begins tracking Koichi, unsure whether he wants to murder the leader who abandoned him or prove his ongoing loyalty. As an associate points out, Inui is like an abandoned, feral dog, longing for his master's familiar touch but likely to bite any hand offered him in friendship. Still, when Inui makes contact with a gentle woman (Sue Eaching) who knew Koichi, they form a small pack of their own.
Two themes, two tones—but one history
The Red Spectacles and Stray Dog both star Chiba, and both center on the Kerberos (also known, with typical overstatement, as the Anti Vicious Crime Heavily Armored Mobile Special Investigation Unit, or "The Watchdogs of Hell"). Both films touch on issues of loyalty and fidelity, and both use armored-soldier images for strong dramatic effect. But they're very divergent movies. Spectacles is an absurdist fever dream, full of disjointed, highly stylized scenes in which lines like "No brothers or friends exist in a small restroom!" almost make sense. Most of the movie was filmed in stark, sepia-toned black and white, though the vivid opening battle, featuring the anime-like "Protect Gear" suits, is in color. The film jumps frenetically from surreal scene to surreal scene, returning to a form of sensible reality only in its final moments.
Stray Dog, on the other hand, is mostly as gentle as Red Spectacles is spastic. In Ghost in the Shell and two successive Patlabor spinoff features, Oshii lent the usual anime conflicts a restrained, melancholy dignity and a hushed air. Stray Dog achieves the same tone, as Inui wanders from place to place, trying to determine what he really wants and who he really is. Virtually the entire movie is a lyrical visual poem about loneliness, apart from the scenes with Chiba, who alternates spastic thrashing and grim tough-guy attitude in both movies, to appropriately comedic, weird effect in Spectacles, but to a distracting degree in Stray Dog.
Spectacles and its sequel have some technical problems (the scene-setting subtitles at the beginning are very difficult to read) and some content problems (the former is hard to follow, while the latter is slow and occasionally overextended, and both often look extremely low-budget). And it may be significant that the armor-suit scenes are consistently the most visually striking parts of either film. But both films have their rewards—Spectacles in its utterly unpredictable, surprising comedy, Stray Dog in its carefully realized emotion, and both together in their beautiful images. Fans of Oshii's anime should certainly look into these films, to see how he deals with images he has to compose instead of sketch.
These two movies are also being sold as part of a box set which includes the Stray Dog soundtrack CD, plus a third Oshii movie, the deeply strange Talking Head, which resembles Red Spectacles in its disjointed weirdness. In Talking Head, Shigeru Chiba returns yet again as a pinch-hitting anime director assigned to a project with no script or storyboards, being produced by an extremely odd crew whose members are being picked off one by one by a very creative serial killer. — Tasha
Also in this issue: Looney Tunes: Back in Action and Angel Season Two DVD
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