TOPHER HEALY investigates the treats on display as part of Madman’s REEL ANIME 2010 festival of Japanese animation.

With the recent passing of visionary director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Paprika), anime enthusiasts will be on the lookout for alternative sources of mind-bending stories and visuals. As if in answer, Madman’s selection for their 2010 Reel Anime theatrical program is heavy on tripped-out imagery and psychodrama. There are no full 3D examples this year (like Appleseed: Ex Machina or Vexille), but each of the 2D films incorporates some 3D CGI in what seems a common shift for Japanese animation. That isn’t to say the works aren’t eye-poppingly gorgeous and worthy of big-screen treatment – they are – and each one will provide a different kind of buzz for viewers.

Depending on your tastes, the film with most crossover potential this year is Summer Wars, directed by Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time). An odd mix of family drama and virtual reality sci-fi, a young maths genius (Kenji) is enlisted to pose as a schoolmate’s boyfriend when she (Natsuki) returns to the family home for her grandmother’s birthday. Kenji also does back-end coding for a giant virtual world called Oz (essentially the Internet, except everyone has cool avatars), which looks like a towering Superflat creation by Takashi Murakami. While Kenji immerses himself in Natsuki’s colourful extended family, a rogue AI is loosed in Oz and begins to cause havoc with real world infrastructure, essentially bringing Japan to a standstill. Kenji and Natsuki’s family then find themselves on the frontline of a virtual battle with the AI, a conflict that threatens to crossover into the real world. Beautifully animated and with real charm to the family scenes, it’s the closest you’ll get to a Ghibli-type film in this year’s selection.

Definitely for fans only is Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance, the second of the feature-length re-imaginings of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series. Cramming an extended storyline into 100-odd-minute chunks, the compressed angst, violence and psychosexual nuttiness can be exhausting. Protagonist Shinji Ikari is still a miserable teenage sap, trapped in an Oedipal triangle with his heartless father and what might be a clone of his mother, while the mysterious Angels attack an already devastated earth with only Evangelions to combat them. Featuring more CGI Angels this time, plus a weirdly superfluous new Eva pilot, Mari Illustrious Makinami (who only seems to exist to sell more moe figures), 2.0 is filled with epic battles, tsunamis of blood, groan-inducing fan service and a few genuine moments of insight. It’s like the inside of a teenage boy’s head writ large, explosions one minute, titillation the next, interspersed with hints of complexity beneath the surface. The story makes no sense at all, but then it never did, so you’d have to class this a successful remake.

Another anime for hyperactive teen boys, Redline is a sci-fi racing film with visual flair and fantastic alien character designs. Like the crazier end of ’80s and ’90s Japanese Original Video Animation (OVA), it’s all about thrills and bizarre characters, with quiffed racer JP entering his hyper-souped up Trans Am in the galaxy’s biggest illegal race. Like Cannonball Run in space (local authorities want to shut the race down, except in this case they have planet-smashing weaponry), it’s fast, silly fun with off-the-wall race sequences and a constant upping of the bonkers scale until the abrupt, hilariously cute ending. At one point a gargantuan bioweapon called “Funky Boy” is unleashed, which should give you an idea of what to expect.

Still in a sci-fi vein, albeit with a horror edge is King Of Thorn, loosely based on Sleeping Beauty. After the world is struck by a virus, which turns victims to stone, a mysterious corporation sets up a suspended animation experiment, putting 160 people to sleep to wait out the epidemic. Schoolgirl Kasumi is forced to leave her twin sister behind when selected for the experiment, taking place at a remote castle in Scotland. When she and the other subjects awake, they find the castle covered in giant thorned vines and overrun with vicious monsters. Rapidly whittled to a small group, Kasumi and the survivors attempt to find out how long they’ve been asleep and what has happened to the world. As with Summer Wars, this is a lovingly animated film with genuinely thrilling moments, but like the manga on which it’s based, a final act twist exposes a plot so convoluted that some of the story impact is lost. For the most part it’s an absorbing ride, and the fearsome Demonsaurs that hunt the survivors are class-A monsters. Fun despite the so-so ending.

The REEL ANIME 2010 program screens at Dendy Portside from Thursday Sep 2 – Wednesday Sep 15. See www.madman.com.au/reelanime and www.dendy.com.au.

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