ead Leaves begins with two more or less humanoid characters waking up naked and without memories on the surface of Earth. One tells the other that the colorful red circle around her right eye makes her look like a panda. She points out in response that he has a retro-looking television for a head. Minutes later, they're calling each other "Pandy" and "Retro" and they're launching a mad crime spree; stealing food, clothing and a car; and killing the dozens of policemen who get in their way. "Damn, it feels good to be violent!" Retro proclaims.
But the violence comes to a sudden end as the pair are captured, convicted and sent to Dead Leaves, a bizarre prison on the moon. Sealed in shackles and full-body, cocoonlike straitjackets, the prisoners—all of whom are apparently mutant clones—hang from hooks all day, zipping around the facility at high speed, having food pumped into them and waste pumped out of them, and being killed en masse by their lackadaisical, sadistic captors.
All of which Retro and Pandy find boring. So once they're returned to a cell after their first day, they celebrate with noisy sex that inspires the whole prison, then escape their restraints, free everyone else and attempt to break out. Somewhere in the middle of a series of wild, frenetically escalating battles that cause most of the prisoners to explode into bloody goo and bouncing organs, it comes out that Pandy and Retro know the facility's layout and have clearly been there before. Pandy even has one memory left of the place, involving a children's book about caterpillars.
It also comes out that Pandy's suddenly pregnant with a fast-growing mutant baby, thanks to her liaison with Retro, and the baby seems to be due any minute. Which is presumably bad news, since Dead Leaves is actually a secret bio-organic weapons-design facility, and remnants of horrible experiments are everywhere, ready, willing and eager to attack the escapees.
A successful experiment
The Dead Leaves DVD fills out its short run time with a lot of extras involving the cast and production staff. In one piece, they talk to viewers at a premiere Q&A, spending most of their time giggling over "twirl shit" and the Dead Leaves character with a giant drill for a penis. In another, they play a drinking game called "Truth or Doubt," in which they chatter about varying masturbation techniques and the hidden penis in their animation. That preoccupation with body functions, body parts and shock value completely permeates Dead Leaves, which is sophomoric, crude and endlessly, colorfully violent, though not particularly sexually explicit.
It's also fascinatingly intense. The visuals are overwhelming bursts of vivid, high-speed action. The characters are disturbingly plastic and distorted, and they almost disappear into busy backgrounds that share space with flying words like "FAST FOOTSTEPS" and "VROOOOM." Any given frame is so colorful and crowded that it's hard to tell what's going on; few things stand out, and sometimes only the way that motion draws the eye tells viewers where they should be looking. The whole piece is a weird, hyperactive experiment, and one that often succeeds simply on sheer bravura.
Naturally, Dead Leaves is pretty incoherent. The characters are shrill, insane and random, and the story is vague and perfunctory. But it has a beginning, a middle and an end, which is more than can be said for Production I.G.'s other experimental proof-of-concept pieces, Kai Doh Maru and Blood: The Last Vampire. Dead Leaves doesn't look as smooth and visually high-concept as those pieces, but it's unconventional in other ways—the style looks more like a very softened and cartoony Aeon Flux, or something else off MTV's Liquid Television, than like any other anime. Animation fans on the lookout for something decidedly new and different will likely have a ball with Dead Leaves. They just shouldn't expect adult sensibilities to go along with the mildly adult content.
The varying translations of Dead Leaves are fairly odd—the English dub features more dialogue, more colloquialisms and a lot more attitude, while the Japanese subtitles are often cruder and more direct, though less sassy. But clips from the show that show up in the trailer and the extras are translated in even cruder (and funnier) ways, as though someone made a conscious effort to tone down the subs a bit for the American release.
— Tasha
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