Summary
A throwback to an old-school method of animation evokes childhood adventure – although very few of our youthful exploits contained the body horror of a giant meat sack feeding tube.
There are some films that just defy explanation. It makes it awfully hard to write 500 words about them. Writer/director/animator/editor Ujicha certainly didn’t have this particular predicament in mind when he crafted VIOLENCE VOYAGER (バイオレンス・ボイジャー). We say crafted because he employs a “gekimation” style, a moving manga that incorporates hand-painted cardboard cutouts in a way that we’ve not commonly seen since 1970s classic like Cat Eyed Boy. Ujicha’s latest film is, to put it mildly, unique.
In fact, the film’s promotional art defines the film by what it isn’t: “This is not animation” is proudly displayed along the base of the one-sheet. The story, like the animation style, is simplicity itself. All-American boy Bobby, living in Japan with his father, discovers a secret mountain path best friend Akkun. Despite the warnings of a raving old man with a monkey, they follow it until they reach a strange amusement park called Violence Voyager. Soon they find other children in the park, and are attack by robot-like humanoids. It only gets weirder from there.
If you were giving an elevator pitch for VIOLENCE VOYAGER, it would be something like “the Hardy boys meets Doctor Moreau by way of Tetsuo.” Three years in the making, Ujicha uses a similar technique to his previous underground hit Burning Buddha Man (2013). That means painstaking hand-painted characters, all slightly abnormally proportioned, moving around like some kind of puppet show against static backgrounds. Occasionally, the filmmaker will employ actual splashes of water or bubbles of faux blood on his characters. The whole thing makes for a truly stupefying sensation.
The back half of the film will separate those with paper thin skin from the folks with corrugated cardboard veins. The children are attacked with acid spray guns, fed to a meat-sack known as “Mother” while their naked bodies are casually hung up on meat hooks. It’s fair to say that chaos reigns at this point, although it’s probably par for the course if you’re a fan of the works of Yoshihiro Nishimura (Meatball Machine Kodoku).
Ujicha doubles-down on the weirdness of it all by book-ending his tale with a weirdly stirring moment as an unseen narrator eggs Bobby on through his final challenge. VIOLENCE VOYAGER is not to be taken seriously, of course, but the talent behind its creation is about as serious as you can get. We may never look at another Golden Book in the same way again.
2018 | Japan | DIRECTOR: Ujicha | WRITERS: Ujicha | CAST: Daisuke Ono, Naoki Tanaka, Aoi Yuki | DISTRIBUTOR: Free Stone Productions Co., Ltd., Japan Cuts (US) | RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 20 July 2018 (Japan Cuts)
