he three-part story of La Portrait De Petite Cossette begins simply enough, with a girl's voice plaintively explaining that if only someone were to love her enough to sacrifice his life for her, she could be reborn. But immediately thereafter, things get jarring. A simple conversation between friends in a cafe appears in scattered, detached images: reflections in sunglasses, two girls looking in from the outside, a woman's lips, flowers, the sun, a salad bar, and so forth. Over all this, teenage artist Eiri Kurahashi shyly admits to some friends that he's in love, and that he's been seeing a girl for the past week. But when they question him closely, he leaves and returns to the antique shop where he works, and he lovingly chats with the object of his affections: a shining wineglass.
It seems that trapped within the expensive Venetian crystal is a beautiful young girl named Cossette, an Alice in Wonderland type with blond hair, huge blue eyes and a taste for elaborately girlish ruffled dresses. When Eiri talks to her, he seems to go away into a fantastic world, one that changes every time he visits. But he catches glimpses of horrible things in the glass as well as wonderful things—in particular, he sees a grinning young man murdering Cossette, ignoring her protestations of love and spattering her lifeblood all over the room where he kills her. The items spattered with her blood, it later comes out, are cursed and bear a grudge against Eiri, once he enters a blood pact, shares the murderer's soul and accepts his destiny on Cossette's behalf.
It all seems like a somewhat standard Japanese ghost story with a gothic twist—vengeful spirits turning on anyone who comes near, doomed lover from the present dragged unwittingly into a story from the past—but it takes an odd twist when Cossette feels guilty about using Eiri and decides she doesn't want to destroy him and rebirth herself after all. Or does she? Who is she really, and what does she really intend?
Ghost story or music video?
La Portrait De Petite Cossette is so gorgeous that sometimes it seems like director Akiyuki Shinbo is making things choppy and confusing just so he can visit as many colorful locales as possible. Certainly he uses the story's surrealism to good effect: The rules governing Cossette's world and her powers are never clear, so there's no reason why one of her encounters with Eiri shouldn't be in a lush, verdant garden, the next in a tortured landscape of scrapped machinery and floating eyeballs, and a third in a colorful fantasyscape of pink trees and blue grass. The animation style, color palette and character design all vary widely throughout the piece, heightening the sense that it's all just a terrible nightmare where nothing remains solid long and no decision or emotion ultimately matters.
But that surrealism and the constantly shifting landscapes make it difficult to follow Cossette's already-minimal story, particularly where it extends beyond Eiri and Cossette. Eiri has a number of female friends, including a would-be lover and a haunted psychic who sees death hanging over him, but it's difficult to tell them apart, especially given Shinbo's trick of cutting rapidly between environmental details during conversations, so it's hard to tell who's speaking. And the abrupt transitions make it similarly difficult to tell what's real, or meant to be taken as real, at any given moment.
A lot of Cossette just seems gratuitous, particularly the repeated crucifixions, as Eiri is messily tortured in scenes that seem borrowed from Hellraiser as much as anything else. Such sequences seem to have little bearing on what comes before and after—like any character in a nightmare, Cossette tends to be inconsistent with her story and her needs from moment to moment—and are mostly in place for the powerful symbolism. But then, the entire piece might be best seen primarily as an exercise in animation rather than storytelling. It's more like a poem or a music video than a narrative film, and viewers might do best to just let go and enjoy what they're seeing without worrying about its meaning.
More than anything, this whole piece reminded me of the final episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, with their barrage of faces, voices, words and ideas all piling on top of each other. In the same way, Cossette is hypnotic and overwhelming, but also frustrating and at times simply baffling.
— Tasha
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