Today I watched Casshern. Which I deeply regret.
For those of you not immersed in Anime, giant robots, steampunk, endless pseudo-profound monologues or just piffle in general, Casshern is a Japanese movie in which 3D renders are combined with real actors running around in magic armour blowing up giant robots, bitching at mad scientist fathers, lamenting their mothers, or reciting endless pseudo-profound monologues about war and the universe. A typical scene has 1000 steampunk flying machines fill the screen, out of which drop 500,000 identical robots all of whom will be destroyed in a few minutes by one dead guy dressed in a white plastic helmet yelling, ‘Where is my mother?!’. With a rock soundtrack.
Most anime films have the barest suggestion of a plot. Casshern has not just the absence of plot but the negative of a plot. Take for example the need for the bad guys to have a headquarters. The main bad guy (who looks like a Japanese version of Ed Straker from UFO) needs only to yell, ‘Where is my mother?!’ on top of some mountain and a Nazi castle appears, complete with Dracula throne and the usual robot manufacturing plant in the basement. Why? Because we need a fighting scene with lots of Nazi robots (with spiked helmets!) and so we’ll throw one in on the lease.
No anime is complete without a thick icing of pretension slathered over the top of the infinite vagueness. Here we have the humans as some kind of Japanese/Soviet fascist state, having defeated an equally evil Nazi enemy and now in desperate need of body parts to regenerate their top commander. You see the Nazi castle was left sitting after the war and they somehow forgot to disable the robot factory er … oh never mind. Anyway the humans are ethnic cleansing mountain tribes and they are making a universal cell culture and … oh look why bother. Robots! Explosions! Mother!
OK, so I don’t like a movie. Who cares? Just move on.
But I have a worry.
Student films are often whack in some way or other… as well as the usual shadows of tripods and extras smiling at the camera, the digital realm adds its own foibles – insane colour correction (which I call IDAK*), animated titles with better acting than the shoot, the ‘old film effect’ from hell … yada yada.
For its part, unless whipped, student 3D animation can default to robots, space ships, fire effects, karate sequences, lack of plot … which I treat as baby steps towards virtual cinema. What I forget is that these can be perfect miniatures of existing feature films. As I’m prattling about character driven plot, scene outputs, continuity devices and so on they’re thinking about how big to make the rocket launchers. And they’re probably right.
If Kazuaki Kiriya handed in a three minute version of Casshern done in the classroom, I might mark it down on the basis of being hollow and incoherent. But scaled to epic proportions it obviously becomes commercially acceptable and my viewpoint is questioned. Am I wrong? Should I just show them the array tool so they can get more robots on screen? It’s a long winded version of ‘what is art?’ but the kind of question a teacher has to ask every single time they meet a counter to their opinion. Too many take refuge in a belief system. Marxist Film Theory. Pah.
But if I am there to help students make their vacuums pretty, then I feel my trade is a sorry one. Casshern encapsulates every criticism levelled by the ‘fine arts’ at the ‘digital media’ practice.
Which makes the film really suck.
*Instant Destroyer And Killer