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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Kaiba

  
 
Baroness von Lenska
00:49 / 03.05.08
I never know quite what to expect from a Masaaki Yuasa film. From early releases, trailers and the idiosyncratic animator's own descriptions, there's always some bit of insight into the mood or style of the film, but it's never quite enough to prepare you for the finished product. With Mind Game, Yuasa wove a life affirming tale of isolation, connection and the sheer overwhelming number of possibilities that life holds for anyone. It's funny, it's touching, and it's full of a raw, seething energy, a lust for life apparent from looking at any still from the movie, but it isn't something you really understand until you've felt it. Like in a dream, you know this place but the color and contour of the space around you are warped and disorientating. You're home, but you've never been here before.

Yuasa's latest project, Kaiba takes this uncanniness to an entirely new level--outright surrealism. Nothing at all in Kaiba is familiar. There are no rules, here. No borders. This is a world where your whole life can be pawned off for some extra scratch, where the poor must constantly ward off irritating if not deadly memory thieves, where the wealthy, the criminal and the lucky are granted any body, any experience they desire. Faces can be molded as easily as Silly Putty. Thoughts can be shared between multiple individuals. Dreams can invade upon the world and swallow the unwary and the unwise. Check your coats at the door, please; you don't know this place and you've never been here before. This isn't home. This is the Bad Alley you hoped you'd never have to cross.

Kaiba is fantastic. Just started airing in Japan not long ago, and the English fan subs have been trickling down through the tubes since. An official North American or European release looks iffy at this point. I'm not sure any of Yuasa's films have ever left their native homeland; Mind Game never quite jumped the shore, though for a time it was a film fest darling. Kemonozume is probably a little too weird, and a little too adult to find much of a US market. And Kaiba, well... How many ways can I say it? Kaiba's just frikkin' weird.

The Story so far for Inquiring Neurons:

Advances in technology have both freed and destroyed humanity. Odd medical techniques allow for the transference of consciousness (whole or specific memories) from one medium to another and the production of custom tailored bodies. The result of which is a society in which the wealthy live in perpetual paid for delusions in a city above memory-wiping clouds, and reality for the not so wealthy means having your consciousness stored in a tank while waiting for a suitable host body; should the tank's data capacity exceed a certain amount, your whole existence might be erased forever in an apocalyptic defrag. Into this scattered environment comes Kaiba/Warp, a cute little blond boy with a massive hole in his chest and no idea who he is or what's going on here. His only possession is a locket which holds the blurry photo of a woman he no longer recognizes.

The action takes off right from the start. Kaiba is discovered by a friendly but shady young man named Popo with a Very Large Gun, who is in turn discovered by a swarm of memory-devouring creatures. The brain gobblers attack, Mr. Big Gun fights them off, and Kaiba flitters off on an ostrich in a green space helmet. It doesn't take long for city officials to notice Kaiba's apparently illegal body, and the chase is on. Things get weird from there on in, but no matter how weird, shadowy or unsettling things get, Kaiba moves from moment to moment in a state of perpetual naivety, optimism and trustworthiness. He's just a sweet little guy lost in a dirty, scary place. It's his naivety and passiveness that really get him through all these weird experiences. Only someone with no memory, no identity, and no real knowledge of the world can safely traverse the Cognitive Dissonanceland that the world's become. Kaiba may not say much, but he's instantly likable if only for his simple, obvious innocence. How long can that innocence last in such a hostile world, I wonder? What strange turns does the future hold for little "Warp"? Will he find the woman in the locket? Who is Popo, and just what does he want from Kaiba? What is the relationship between Kaiba and Ms. Mystery (Neiro?)? Where is Neiro, and what does she mean to Kaiba? To Popo?

Anyone else watching?

Some found images from the series below. I haven't mentioned the particulars of the art style yet, largely for lack of adequate description, but needless to say, it's quite the gorgeous looking little film.







  
 
Seth
05:44 / 03.05.08
I can't be wrong in saying that this looks like all kinds of brilliant. It is on download now, as are the other series and movie that you've mentioned. Nice one!
 
 
Mug Chum
07:08 / 03.05.08
Having watched the 1st episode (the visuals just sell like that), and now downloading the rest as I type, this looks quite great.

I'm still a bit stunned actually, it's beautifully alien in the rollercoaster manner in which you're presented and put into that world (which is weirdly beautiful by itself), and in its fantastic visuals and concepts.

Looking foward to more of it.
 
 
Mysterious Transfer Student
12:57 / 03.05.08
I'd been meaning to check out this series for a little while, based on rumour but without any real knowledge of the content, and all thanks are due to Soylent Sauce for prompting me to do so. The three episodes I've just seen already make me regret that there are only nine more to go - I could watch a series like this for months.

The most striking element so far is the sharp and painful contrast between the soft, blobby, cutesy visuals and the desperately harsh, cruel, spiritually vapid and chaotic world the characters wander through... but that's already an oversimplification, as the design sense isn't merely cute, but has psychedelic unease and menace creeping in at the edges at every turn. Just about any character can have something awful befall them without notice, and so far there's absolutely no comfort or feeling of safety to be found anywhere. Yuasa's doing an excellent job of building identification and sympathy with an extremely featureless and passive protagonist.

Like El Directo I'll be certain to check out the other titles mentioned. Outstanding discovery.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
05:22 / 05.05.08
The most striking element so far is the sharp and painful contrast between the soft, blobby, cutesy visuals and the desperately harsh, cruel, spiritually vapid and chaotic world the characters wander through... but that's already an oversimplification, as the design sense isn't merely cute, but has psychedelic unease and menace creeping in at the edges at every turn. Just about any character can have something awful befall them without notice, and so far there's absolutely no comfort or feeling of safety to be found anywhere. Yuasa's doing an excellent job of building identification and sympathy with an extremely featureless and passive protagonist.

This is something I wanted to comment on, (thanks for writing it more eloquently than I could've, Transfer!) as the contrast between the cute/retro/wonder-full character and environment designs and the menacing, dark atmosphere and world that they inhabit reminds me a little of Seaguy, or to a greater extent Lewis Carroll's original Alice in Wonderland. The series is moving in a direction quite different from either of those, I think, but the basic setup of an innocent moving through this dirty, scary dreamworld is striking. Kaiba's innocence seems central, somehow; none of the other characters, not even Neiro, seem at all trustworthy or well intentioned. And strangely enough, in the first three episodes, only Kaiba's character seems to be faring anything close to well. All these shady, shifty people In the Know who are a part of various conspiracies and inner workings of the world meet untimely deaths or lives wracked with despair, while Kaiba, wholly ignorant of the world, keeps moving on in silent hope. Maybe I'm projecting, or reading too deeply, but I think that may be an intentional comment... That society has reached a point of no return where the sheer complexity of the system causes those too deeply entrenched in its designs to be crushed in the gears, and those who approach it from the perspective of a perpetual outsider can eke out a livable existence.

I think interesting things could happen when and if Kaiba regains his memories, because something tells me his former self is quite the opposite of this ragdoll innocent I've become rather fond of. Yerrrr.... Too late for spoiler tags?

And, yeah, you're right. Horrible shame it's only twelve episodes. I'll pine for more, I know I will.
 
 
Seth
19:55 / 06.05.08
I think twelve episodes is the perfect length for a series like this. You're going to want to rewatch it and make connections, because in a universe that looks like this it's next to impossible to know what anything means in order to know to what you should be paying attention. I get the feeling that once it's finished we'll all be gagging to see it again from the start, but the thought of twice as many episodes might make me want to leave that experience for longer.

I'm anticipating that for at least the first half of the series this will be like some kind of fucked up ultra-passive Quantum Leap, with Kaiba switching bodies every episode and getting embroiled in events that steamroller past him/her/it (delete according to the whim of this week's story) in self-contained stories that introduce the world and the concepts. I'm anticipating that when the arc plot properly starts tying things together (maybe at half to three quarters of the way through) we'll see those concepts being used in some extremely interesting (and confusing) ways.

At least, that's what I'm anticipating. It's rare to see a series that so thoroughly dispenses with its own instruction manual and dares you to float, so this could become just about anything.

Great show. Thanks for the heads up!
 
 
Seth
10:49 / 08.06.08
Is anyone else up to date with this? I've just seen six and seven, the latter of which had me crying my little eyes out at the end.

There seems to have been a break in production, there are no new RAWs up so Ureshii have fansubbed everything that's been shown so far. The series is getting better and better.
 
 
Mug Chum
11:20 / 08.06.08
I'm still on episode five. But yeah, it can be quite surprisingly heartbreaking at times (the mother's story and the going away of her daughter was an extraordinary punch in the gut. Even more so with the constant reminder of her - perhaps not yet ultimate - fate by having her body being always present in what's also such a lovely twist in gender identification).

And the old couple's story, so bittersweet. So lovely.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
03:22 / 22.06.08
Just finished watching number 6, am wowed and letting it all sink in. I really do wish this series were longer... More and more I think it would do finer in a longer format since, as it is, there seem to be long strings of episodes in which nothing particularly significant to the larger plot happens. Most revelations are second hand, coming from the partial tales of the others that Kaiba bumps into along hir way. I make it all the way to episode six without realizing that nothing has actually happened directly to, and involving specifically Kaiba, since the first episode.

Gonna have to rewatch this one. I think I may have had Neiro's identity mixed up, though I'm not completely positive. I'd thought that she was the little yellow aerial squid thinger that's become Kaiba's constant companion. Now it looks like it may be someone else Kaiba/Neiro knew, or some kind of homing thing to lead Kaiba to Neiro. Or away. Does the squid flitter off somewhere in Abipa? I noticed it did when Neiro went to "sleep"/recharge. I'm very surprised at the characterization... Vanilla's becoming a gradually more endearing and sympathetic character while Popo's getting more sinister and fundamentalist. Also still wondering who Cloak is and if we'll see him again. He's in a lot of the promotional art for the series, but so too are a lot of seemingly minor characters.

Totally crushed by the ending to episode six. And the ship's pleasant-voiced intercom message about ignoring the voices of the incorporeal memory-beings because they're "not real people" (too poor to even exist)? In anything else, that'd be a ham fisted sledgehammer fight. In Kaiba it is eerie and totally apt. Thirding a check for the "surprisingly moving" box, and really looking forward to number 7 now...
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
04:12 / 09.08.08
I'm quite behind on this series, but as a heads up to anyone who, like me, sort of wandered off after the long, long breaks in releases, the final episode is now out. So go forth and be Warped, ye faithful etc.
 
 
Baroness von Lenska
20:05 / 10.08.08
A few spoilers for the last episode below, but mostly vague enough to be readable if you haven't seen it yet, I think.

Just finished the final episode and even though my thoughts are still pretty scattered on it I've got to say, more than anything else: that wasn't what I was expecting. In a way it cloys both to the expectations of the usual anime crowd and el Directo's own speculations above. The narrative, and the structure (especially the Random Psychedelic Deluxe ending) seem at first to become gradually more typical-anime as it moves away from the great first half of stand alone episodes, but a lot of that's undermined by the memory-swapping-death-defying angle that promises twenty plot twists per second and delivers about twice as many.

I guess I really like the form, but the content left me aching. There's just too much left unexplored, and the answers provided are all to questions no one's been asking. I really don't mind that the world of Kaiba--the history of Lolo, Warp's strange powers, some inconsistencies with the nature of the technologies and concepts--is left as one giant blank. That is, I think, fitting for a show such as this. But a series that uses huge-strange sci-fi concepts to push character development so much just can't leave me hanging like this. Which is why it's just a little frustrating that time is spent on the aforementioned worldly mysteries, and a little less so on seeing the people who live them through.

I'm certainly impressed with the visuals and what Yuasa ultimately does with the concepts here, but I need closure! What happens to Kaiba? Neiro? HyoHyo? Popo? NuWarp? Why did Warp have Neiro's parents executed? What was their involvement with Issoudan? Were they involved with Issoudan? Here's where I'm really impressed with the show. After all of this, I'm half convinced that the whole thing takes place in the memory of a madman who believes he remembers everything that ever happened with perfect clarity, but he's totally senile. There are contradictions and gaps and smudged, blurry things you can't quite make out anymore all over the series and given the great twists of the last couple of episodes, I'm pretty sure they're intentional. It does a wonderful (if unsubtle) job at driving that point home: there's nothing we've seen (in a film or in life) we can ever be entirely sure of. We can't see, or smell or touch or hold our own sensations and relationships; they can be completely invisible to us as we grope about the underworld seeking contact and trampling over each other. To anyone who could see the invisible connections, or anyone who could remember everything with perfect clarity, life would be unbearably lonely.

If I'm impressed with the structure, I'm agape at Warp's real motivations. I hadn't expected a little blonde munchkin who, of all the characters, probably has the least lines to be such a complex, endearing, aggravating and ultimately alien character. But without doubt his motivations belong to the little lovable ragamuffin from the first few episodes, and they just steal my heart away. Since I haven't seen this interpretation anywhere else yet, I'll go ahead and throw it out there, but since the last few episodes are anything but esoteric, I'll be a little reserved in doing so:

What do you imagine a being who could see and taste and touch and hold the dreams, thoughts, memories, emotions and invisible connections of all those little scurrying, scuffling, bickering blind things below it that love and hurt and reach out for each other and die all too quickly before they're able to know real universal meaning would do? I imagine we all have different answers, and while I'm unsatisfied with some of those Yuasa provides, so was his own protagonist. I still appreciate them both for even asking.
 
  
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