Black Gate

Sunday, July 29, was an intriguing day. Not so much because of the first movie I planned to see, an anime called Penguin Highway about a young boy investigating the mysterious appearance of penguins in his small Japanese town. But because of the second screening, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase 2018. It’d present eight films, and having seen prior editions of the showcase, I knew how unpredictable it would be.

First, though, was Penguin Highway (ペンギン・ハイウェイ). It’s the first feature from director Hiroyasu Ishida. The script’s by Makoto Ueda, adapting a novel by Tomihiko Morimi (which is scheduled to appear soon in an English translation from Yen Press). Ueda also wrote the script for another animated adaptation of a Morimi novel, Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. This one’s quite different from that film, though.

It’s about a boy, Aoyama (voiced by Kana Kita), living in a village where penguins start to appear from no known source. Aoyama, a brilliant and scientifically-inclined child who writes down everything that happens to him in his notebooks along with all his thoughts and analyses, decides to solve the mystery of the penguins. Complicating things is his crush on a never-named adult woman (voice of Yu Aoi, who appeared in live-action in Tokyo Ghoul and Japanese Girls Never Die aka Haruko Azumi is Missing) and a classmate, Hamamoto (Megumi Han) who has a crush on Aoyama.

Penguin Highway begins by adding a bit of surrealism to everyday life, but appears unsure where to go from there. Probably the best thing in the film is its depiction of Aoyama, a charmingly arrogant fourth-grader who’s counting the days until he wins his Nobel Prize in some scientific field. He comes off as rigid and overly logical in a way that feels believable, with a self-assurance that’s refreshing and also credible given his intellect. Unfortunately, this rationality’s sometimes overplayed, notably later in the film when he tries to apply his scientific instincts to analysing love. (Are you surprised to hear that this doesn’t work?)

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The last movie I saw on Saturday, July 28, was at the Hall Theatre. It was Punk Samurai Slash Down (Panku Samurai Kirarete Soro, パンク侍、斬られて候), an adaptation of Ko Machida’s 2004 novel directed by Gakuryu Ishii and scripted by Kankuro Kodo (who also wrote Too Young To Die!). It’s a period story about a wandering samurai, Junoshin Kake (Go Ayano, also at Fantasia this year as Sato in Ajin: Demi-Human), who concocts a scheme to get himself hired as a retainer of the Kurokaze Han noble house. He kills an old man, and convinces one faction of the Kurokaze Han, led by Shuzen Oura (veteran Jun Kunimura, whose string of credits include The Wailing as well as this year’s Destiny: The Tale of Kamakura) that the dead man was an agent of a suppressed group of heretics called the Belly-Shaking cult. The cult believes that the world has been eaten by a gigantic tapeworm. The ideal is to be excreted from the tapeworm, which is brought about by shaking the belly. But the contempt for the world also has led the cult to massive rioting and cruel criminal acts in the past; the spectre of their revival is terrifying — until it turns out to be false, and Kake’s threatened with execution. Unless he can prove himself “innocent” by secretly bringing the cult into existence, which would also enhance the credibility of Oura’s political faction. He sets out to create the threat he’s warned against, and things rapidly spiral out of control.

This is a very odd movie; it doesn’t simply begin strangely, but continually increase its oddness at each point when you think you’ve begun to assimilate what it’s doing. The scale increases, as well, as the Belly-Shaker cult grows beyond all expectation and a wholly unexpected other faction emerges. Ultimately the film ends in a cosmic battle of thousands of samurai and their allies against the Belly-Shaker cult, and perhaps it’s a mark of success that the large-scale battle scene never overwhelms the satirical tone of the film but ends up supporting it. Without actually being Gilliam-like there’s a bit of a feel to the ending of a Gilliam movie, wild exuberance petering out into a knowing anti-climax.

There is a range of tones to the movie, though, and Kake is enough of a coherent character to engage an audience. Conversely, there’s a narrator (Masatoshi Nagase) telling the story in part through voice-over, providing another perspective; eventually we find out who this seemingly-omniscient narrator is, and learn he’s actually embedded in the story. Nobody’s above the fray, nobody’s out of the world of the film — even those trying to get themselves out of the world entirely. The gnostic leanings of the Belly-Shaker cult feel something out of a Philip K. Dick story, a paranoiac danger that might actually understand reality better than anyone would like. Except they’re the villains; and except that the nominal heroes aren’t heroic either, as the first thing we see Kake do is kill a man in cold blood. Ayano’s charismatic enough that we tend to forget this enough to accept him as a protagonist, but the movie doesn’t. (And this does come back to him in a telegraphed bit of poetic justice.)

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