09.01
Art anime. Love it or hate it, its here to stay. For every mainstream populist director like Goro Taniguchi or Mamoru Hosoda; there’s an Akiyuki Shinbo, Kenji Nakamura, or Makoto Shinkai making plotless, often pointless, tripe hidden under some nifty, if rather infrequent, animation (then again… Shinkai’s stuff is barely animated isn’t it?). Occasionally you get a genius like Satoshi Kon who was able to stand in both fields at once, but he’s dead now so the world is one less brilliant man and stuck with a bunch of idiot hipsters. I mean art anime was fine and dandy back in the 80s and 90s when it was just Oshii and Anno trolling everybody but now its just getting tiresome. This brings us to the subject of this article: Masaaki Yuaasa and his short film “Kick-Heart”.
Ladies and gentlemen... Deviantart The Anime.
Yuaasa is best known as of late for the tv series Tatami Galaxy, where all the characters are in monochrome against flat primary colored backgrounds. However, “Kick-Heart” is a return to his old style of distorted ugly overweight people drawn with harsh pen lines (think Madoka if they were grown up and not moe) and weird fish eye lens shots as seen in such great anime as “Mind Game” and Kemonozumi… which are still unlicensed because they’re nightmare fuel. Basically if you’ve seen the “Vomiting Point” episode of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, then you’ll know that this is the guy they were taking the piss on that week. As you can see from the pictures here, the look of the film is pretty damn fugly (especially when blown up to 1080p and blu-ray), with its jagged line work and felt-tip pen aesthetic. I’m not sure how it appeals to some people (yes Yuaasa has a surpringly vocal fanbase here in the states), especially considering this was financed entirely by… wait for it… Kickstarter!
Gotta keep the customer satisfied!
I have a love/hate relationship with Kickstarter. While there are many worthy causes that have been successfully crowdsourced (case in point Little Witch Academia), when something like “Kick-Heart” comes along you gotta wonder what was the point? The plot is one of those old boxer needs to win one more fight to help the orphans type of stories they’ve been kicking around since the 1950s. Its the tale of one Romeo Maki, AKA Masked Man M, a down on his luck masked wrestler who has no eyes apparently (they’re hidden behind a censor bar throughout most of the film), who is coaxed into a big match with the champ Lady S (whom he has become smitten with) for 50 Grand that he can use to save the local nunnery. Ultimately he loses (or the fight is rigged, it matters not), Lady S turns out to be a moonlighting nun (a twist they spoiled in the kickstarter page for this) who spends the money on the orphanage anyway, and then the film just ends. If this sounds familiar, it should be, it was also the plot of that legendary classic of the golden age of Hollywood… “Nacho Libre”.
Your 30 bucks at work.
This is all told in a structure of weirdly animated wrestling match → interlude → weirdly animated wrestling match → epilogue. As for the love story angle that the press release people played up? Well the film doesn’t really develop it that much, pulling the plug abruptly at the 12 minute mark as if Yuaasa and Production IG ran out of their precious gaijin cash. When your crux is basically a punchline for a joke then that’s simply bad storytelling. In the end “Kick-Heart” feels less like a interesting experiment in style and exectution, and instead like something destined to play in endless rotation at various Spike and Mike Sick and Twisted festivals around the country. Hell if you cut out the opening and closing titles, you could easily mistaken “Kick-Heart” for a National Film Board of Canada short, except those didn’t make me feel like I wanted to vomit in the end.
Only Toonami!
Ultimately “Kick-Heart” will probably be regarded as an experiment that didn’t quite work. It definitely blazed a trail for future production companies like Trigger to go to the people to fund stuff but the final product was far less the sum of its parts. I’m surprised Toonami decided to run it though (even if, allegedly, they didn’t watch it first), and it was a gutsy move for them considering it doesn’t really fit the format all that well. That being said, the general reaction I’ve been seeing of cold bafflement is completely understandable. Which brings up the question… what kind of hypocritcal douchenozzle would blow a wad of cash on this crap?
Pfft. Figures.