Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. With the summer anime season nearly finished and my journey through Galaxy Express 999 at last complete, I’m eager to catch up on what appears to have been the strongest anime season in years. At a glance, I absolutely need to check out A Witch in Mongolia, Goodbye Lara, The Ghost in the Shell, and Sparks of Tomorrow, as well as find time for outstanding films like Cosmic Princess Kaguya, The Ribbon Hero, and The Last Blossom. Between all those, Witch Hat Atelier, and Journal With Witch, this is proving to be a pretty ludicrous year in prestige productions, and a generally heartening sign for the medium’s strength and diversity. I’ll be sure to check back in as I munch through the season’s highlights, but for now, let’s run down the week in films!
First up this week was When Worlds Collide, a ‘51 scifi feature starring Richard Derr as pilot David Randall, who is commissioned to carry top-secret documents from South Africa to the United States. These documents ultimately confirm the scientific community’s worst fears: that a rogue star is on a collision course with Earth, and only by resettling to this star’s own orbiting planet might some fragment of humanity survive. Thus our greatest minds begin a desperate and harrowing quest, as they must both build and choose who will inhabit the arc carrying humanity’s future.
As my summary indicates, When Worlds Collide effectively circles its catastrophic conclusion throughout the first act, giving us plentiful opportunities to feel a kinship with its layman protagonist. This choice perfectly situates us to consider the rest of the film’s fundamental question: when only a handful of human beings are given the chance to escape catastrophe, who decides who lives and who dies?
Solid acting across the board brings to life variable avatars of mankind’s better and worse nature, while the escalating crisis and process of building their arc pepper the film’s second half with satisfying visual and dramatic payoffs. Additionally, the film is one of the rare ‘50s scifi features whose central romance feels both necessary and convincing, in keeping with the film’s general emphasis on human characters in contrast rather than Big Ideas under staid, scientific discussion. Through this, the film actually feels more current in style than many of its contemporaries, making it a solid recommendation for anyone who’d like to sample this delightful genre, yet feels they might be put off by the general focus on boardroom discussions and less-than-convincing monster models.
I then screened The Lovers, a recent short film constructed by a talented crew of animation students. The film centers on Sara, a college student who returns to her family’s sushi restaurant after the sudden death of her father. Tasked with killing and preparing a siren for an upcoming event, she instead finds herself entranced by the creature, and desperate to escape her bloody responsibilities.
The film is a scrappy, heartfelt romance, brimming with a wealth of momentary aesthetic flourishes, as befitting the passionate product of a young and fast-developing team. At fifteen minutes in length, it doesn’t really have the time to fully explicate Sara’s familial relations, but nonetheless does an excellent job of picking out specific emotional touchstones that imply sprawling unspoken sentiments. On the other hand, the central relationship between Sara and the siren is conveyed in glorious, intimate detail, through glances and shifts in tone and electric moments of physical connection.
I frankly wish the film had time to further explore its thematic mirroring of love and consumption; that concept is largely contained to the film’s central dream sequence, leaving the connection between Sara’s fatalism regarding her own life and her surrender to the siren sadly underexplored. “I love you so much I want to consume you” is obviously a resonant concept that practically forms the foundation of vampire and werewolf narratives, and I would have welcomed more reflections on that subject (as well as the delightfully grim visual imagery accompanying them). But genuine complaints on that front would be criticizing the film for something it never really intended to be; The Lovers is a gentler story than that, focused primarily on the kindness shared by two displaced souls, and the warmth that can be found in even the coldest of places. Confidently directed and brimming with lush backgrounds, it serves as welcome testament to the skill and passion of animation’s next generation.
We then checked out Space Truckers, a ‘96 scifi adventure from B-movie maestro Stuart Gordon. Dennis Hopper stars as John Canyon, one of the last independent space truckers in an era where most commerce has been consolidated under a single mega-corporation. After accepting a shady request to transport sex dolls to Earth, Canyon and his companions soon discover they’re actually carrying a platoon of killer robots, and must fight to overcome their own bloodthirsty cargo.
Space Truckers is an unexpectedly lavish affair for Gordon, costing somewhere around $25 million and unsurprisingly bringing in perhaps five percent of that in profit. But while the world at large might not be ready for a wide-release Gordon feature, I certainly had a fine time with this scuzzy slice of scifi adventure, ornamented with convincingly well-worn sets and populated with an impressive array of character actors. Dennis Hopper and Charles Dance are clearly having the time of their lives here, chewing on scenery and wielding glowing doo-dads and generally enjoying the chance to play in a less distinguished venue than their usual features. The plot is thin and wandering and the tone often trends towards the juvenile, but if you set your expectations accordingly, you’re unlikely to be bored.
Alongside our film screenings, this week also saw me finishing off the sprawling, magnificent Galaxy Express 999. Adapted from Leiji Matsumoto’s manga into over a hundred episodes of rambling adventures, the series follows the young boy Tetsuro, who wishes to make up for his parents’ premature deaths by acquiring an ageless mechanical body. He is joined in this quest by Maetel, a mysterious woman who offers him a premium ticket on the Galaxy Express, whose rails lead to a place where such bodies are freely offered. Along the way, the pair stop at a vast number of distinctive planets, each offering strange new perils and causes for reflection on Tetsuro’s quest.
The show is steeped in an inherent sense of mystery and grandeur, expanding that central, magical image of Night on the Galactic Railroad into a wandering series of vignettes, while maintaining the fantastical unreality of a dream-ride, like those moments of being driven home as a child, half-awake as sounds blur outside and lights twinkle in the distance. Even after more than a hundred episodes, it always felt like a relief to return back to the 999, taking off into the cosmos as some new calamity wound to its end below. Even if our passengers were altered by their experiences, that comforting green booth and fumbling conductor would forever greet their return, as the universe continued in its thoughtless, impersonal way beyond the glass.
Beyond possessing such a marvelous aesthetic and tone, the show also delights in its variety of episodic narratives, as Tetsuro engages with crises ranging from wild west adventures to star crossed lovers to ecological disasters, each of which takes place on its own distinctive world. There are a variety of repeated themes and templates that crop up, but even this repetition feels like a reflection of humanity’s inescapable nature, while the overall diversity of worlds and conflicts seem like an impossible achievement on a weekly release schedule. Wandering among these tales feels like luxuriating in the endless invention of One Thousand and One Nights, an anthology that Matsumoto himself here employs for a two-part drama involving dueling bandit lords and giant man-eating birds.
Throughout all these adventures, Matsumoto’s philosophy of life is illuminated in bright colors and sharp contours: his contrasting veneration of hard work and hate of exploitation, his love of the natural world, his unerring belief in the pursuit of personal dreams, and his acceptance that it is the briefness and finality of life which gives it meaning. Tetsuro either learns or embodies these lessons through stories that more often than not end in tearful tragedy; we are frequently incapable of escaping the circumstances of our birth, capitalism and social pressure can make slaves of us all, and often our longed-for dreams are either unreachable or false idols, beautiful fantasies whose realization would only prove another prison. Death is a constant, and eternal life even worse; it takes a fair number of repeated lessons for Tetsuro to realize that eternity is something we build together, contributing in our own way before passing the torch onward.
Sometimes silly, sometimes bleak, but always evocative and interesting, Galaxy Express 999 is a bounteous treasure trove of fantastical worlds and moral fables, a show that embodies yearning with its every composition. It was with great sadness that I watched Tetsuro pull in at his final station, yet I was nonetheless thankful the show had been so generous, and mindful that an eternal 999 would run counter to the show’s most fundamental values. Watching Galaxy Express felt like experiencing a second adolescence, with the scuffed knees and solemn lessons of emerging self-awareness transposed against all the wonders of the universe. It is undoubtedly one of the great treasures of this medium, and a journey I’d recommend to all the dreamers out there.
