Sky Crawlers - Brief Review
Apr. 18th, 2012 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiSky Crawlers is an anime movie set in an alternate history where genetically engineered ageless "teens" fight in an aerial war/quasi-reality show to ease political tensions.
Netflix users give this film very mixed reviews. On the one hand, it is praised as a thoughtful, philosophical art film at the top end of anime quality. On the other, it is characterized as painfully slow, ultimately unsatisfying, and not actually very deep or surprising. For myself, I liked it, but I can see where both views come from. It is slow and overuses still shots, and the protagonist is bizarrely low affect (in a flat rather than interesting way). The ending is unsatisfying, one of those "it never ends" endings. But I did find it beautifully filmed, well acted, thoughtful, and somewhat subtle in character arcs if not social commentary. I most definitely enjoyed watching it.
The standout aspect of the film for me is the character of Kusanagi, one of the eternal teens (not actually especially young), who is a commanding officer and nice subversion of the vinegary-spinster-in-command trope. She is vinegary, but for rather complex and well-developed reasons. She's not intrinsically brittle and repressed so much as just very depressed, for understandable reasons, and going quietly through a major life crisis, which somewhat encapsulates the existential problems of these eternal warrior teens en masse. The unraveling of her story and how it entangles the protagonist, Kannami, is interesting and moving.
Another interesting aspect of the film is its use of language. The original Japanese soundtrack has the best English I've ever heard in an anime, and I'm not referring to the BBC newscaster (plainly English) but to the Japanese seiyuu. The group the film centers on are a Japanese squadron stationed in Europe, who speak Japanese among themselves but use English as their lingua franca. This code-switching is used to very good effect, not least to illustrate how straightjacketed and uncomfortable these people are when acting their roles for the news media.
I recommend the film to viewers who are okay with slow plots and subtle bits of character development--and who go into this film expecting quiet quality but no major, epic payoff.
Netflix users give this film very mixed reviews. On the one hand, it is praised as a thoughtful, philosophical art film at the top end of anime quality. On the other, it is characterized as painfully slow, ultimately unsatisfying, and not actually very deep or surprising. For myself, I liked it, but I can see where both views come from. It is slow and overuses still shots, and the protagonist is bizarrely low affect (in a flat rather than interesting way). The ending is unsatisfying, one of those "it never ends" endings. But I did find it beautifully filmed, well acted, thoughtful, and somewhat subtle in character arcs if not social commentary. I most definitely enjoyed watching it.
The standout aspect of the film for me is the character of Kusanagi, one of the eternal teens (not actually especially young), who is a commanding officer and nice subversion of the vinegary-spinster-in-command trope. She is vinegary, but for rather complex and well-developed reasons. She's not intrinsically brittle and repressed so much as just very depressed, for understandable reasons, and going quietly through a major life crisis, which somewhat encapsulates the existential problems of these eternal warrior teens en masse. The unraveling of her story and how it entangles the protagonist, Kannami, is interesting and moving.
Another interesting aspect of the film is its use of language. The original Japanese soundtrack has the best English I've ever heard in an anime, and I'm not referring to the BBC newscaster (plainly English) but to the Japanese seiyuu. The group the film centers on are a Japanese squadron stationed in Europe, who speak Japanese among themselves but use English as their lingua franca. This code-switching is used to very good effect, not least to illustrate how straightjacketed and uncomfortable these people are when acting their roles for the news media.
I recommend the film to viewers who are okay with slow plots and subtle bits of character development--and who go into this film expecting quiet quality but no major, epic payoff.
