Casshern DVD Review:

Disc One

Subtitled feature

Interactive scene selection

In an alternative future (or present), the Greater Asian Federation has defeated the European Union, while the war drags on against pockets of resistance. Years of chemical warfare have given rise to a new menace to the peace, of chemical disease and mutations, explains the voiceover, as it becomes the voice of Dr. Azuma, a genetic scientist whose discovery of neo-cells could reverse the trend.

Only the military take an interest in the project, setting up a secret lab. Dr. Azuma is working to save his wife from a pollution-related disease, but nothing comes of his attempts to grow body parts from neo-cells until an accident in the lab triggers the spontaneous generation of human beings. Massacred by the soldiers in an alarm, only four of these new beings escape, though revealing their superhuman strength. These Neo Sapiens declare war on the Federation, while Dr. Azuma discovers that the corpse of his son has been returned from the war-zone. In the waters of the lab, he brings Tetsuya back to life, and a government-designed suit of body armour will help him take on the Neo Sapiens and their robot army.

Few films have the visual impact of Casshern. It’s surprising too that Casshern was made for the equivalent of 6 million dollars and is the work of a first time director, Kiriya Kazuaki, previously known as a fashion photographer. The retro-futuristic world is rendered in astonishing imaginative detail, a sort of pop-fascist collage, gleaming with shades and menace. The film is less an alternative reality than a deliberately artificial, highly stylised one in keeping with the anime tradition from which the film evolves. At one point, in Casshern’s first encounter with the robot army, the film cuts between CGI and traditional animation (recalling the recent Japanese film Metropolis).

Alongside the visuals, the film’s ambitions are just as impressive; the alternative reality future has discovered an equivalent to what we know as stem cells and the dilemmas of human cloning, as well as environmentalism (in one of the film’s subtler ironies, the pollutive diseases lead to blue irises in their Japanese victims. In a future of genetic permutation, the racist/supremacist state has won a pyrrhic victory). The manga genre frequently works against a post-nuclear backdrop echoing the Second World War, but here it is the Japanese who are the winners, and it is implied, have been developing their lethal technology against their opponents. The film allows for allusions at Japanese history, as it is not always taught in their schoolbooks. There is an Orwellian subplot about a war that is an invention of the state, carried out on racist grounds, and the fight against terrorism allows Dr Azuma to carry out Mengele-like experiments on a train full of captive villagers that recalls the genocidal events of the second world war.

This film has all the cards in order to be the next Matrix. Unfortunately it doesn’t turn out to be a serious contender – our personal engagement is low, the pace never heightens, and the frequently wooden dialogue will leave many wondering where the plot had been lost some time before the end. Speechifying, or what Mr Incredible called monologuing, is shared out freely among the cast in this film. Kazuaki may disappoint on the action sequences, where the speedy pop video style fails to draw out the emotions of his characters as they fight. The hero Casshern’s ambiguous position between that of a defender of the old order and the twin of the new is never developed. By the time the credits run we don’t know or much care who has been left in charge of the world.

That said, Casshern is worth seeing, not only for fans of the manga genre, for the film’s style and inspiration, rather than what came of it. Many will be replaying the most dazzling visuals on DVD. In CGI this may be the shape of things to come.

Star Rating=**

PICTURE AND SOUND

Presented in Anamorphic widescreen, in Japanese Dolby Digital with DTS-ES Surround, the screen images are sleek and clear.

BONUS MATERIAL

Disc Two

Cast and crew interviews

This is a mixture of interviews made during the filming and press meetings at the film’s release. Characters frequently mention their familiarity with the anime and television versions of Casshern, which goes some way to explaining why the film seems to cater so little to Western tastes, as a Japanese audience would be familiar with the themes and conventions of the original. The blue screen, as we know it is green in Japan, and actors talk about their experience acting in a film designed almost entirely with it. Actors mention the difficulty of performing martial arts fight scenes with their body suites on. But this is the authentic gush-fest, in which everybody declares their affection for everybody else on the project with the possible exception of the actor who plays Dr Azuma, who gets in a mention of his days with Kurosawa. There isn’t much to hold the attention.

Deleted scenes with commentary

There are eleven deleted scenes with commentary; these are without special effects, showing you the chromakey background against which the actors do their stuff. None of the scenes shows a radical departure from the plot of the film, offering supplementary character-building scenes.

Trailers

There are two trailers, which make you wonder if the man who made these two very cool trailers is the same as the director, if the talent required for the job is different in each case.

8mm footage

There are 13 minutes of scenes cut from the film, which would have been part of its ‘real-world’ flashback sequences, a few similar ones retained in the final cut, showing the characters or children playing their younger selves in parks (apparently the same one). These characters include both humans and the Neo Sapiens in their former lives. Since these were shot to resemble home movie footage (with frequently blurred focus, shaky camera handling) it can safely be said that they don’t have visual interest, and since characterisation is the gaping hole in this film, the viewer isn’t likely to be curious enough to watch them all. The director’s commentary underlines the same point in each case, that these present idyllic contrasts to the struggles of the same characters in the film.

OVERALL

These extras aren’t going to send you back to the film to check out details you missed the first time thanks to the director’s suggestions. Everything seems to suggest that the celebration of the spirit of man that the film waves like a flag has left room for little character and plot innovation. There aren’t any outtakes, which show us other parts of the alternative reality that Kiriya has created so beautifully. The bonus features don’t tell us anything about the making of the film (at that incredible price) or the state of Japanese CGI as a competitor to the American market; I wanted to find out something about the 1973 series Casshan: Robot Hunter on which the film is based, and which the actors interviewed frequently refer to, but again nothing doing. A comparison between the two might have helped to fill in the gaps for puzzled viewers unfamiliar with the genre. A disappointment.



Dominic Gavin