Calling Masaaki Yuasa the new Miyazaki would sound tired, not to mention inaccurate--he's a little wilder, a little less restrained; calling him Makoto Shinkai's contemporary would be unfair--he's so much better (more subtle less sentimental) than the blockbuster director of Your Name and Weathering With You.
Kaiba opens with a boy waking up. He has a triangle of three connected circles tattooed to his belly, and a hole where his heart should be. He lies on a melted bed (Plastic? Metal?) the wall behind him blown out, the edges of the hole part melted.
Who what where how why? Kaiba (we only learn his name later) barely has time to react when a skonk--a large flying drone--pops up behind him through the wall gap and a boy with a big gun fires (At the machine? At Kaiba?); a roadrunnerlike bird springs across the screen shoving Kaiba aside, carrying him away, and the show is literally off and running.
You're as confused as the protagonist, who has lost his memories; perfect opportunity for Yuasa to sketch in details. The boy is lost in the planet Lala, a world where the rich live in a contiguous upper stratum held aloft by towering columns (literally the upper crust); the poor live in honeycombed warrens far below.
That's the basic premise; what really hits you at first glance is Yuasa's animation style, a clean childlike look that recalls everything from Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy to Rene Laloux's Fantastic Planet--Kaiba looks like Astro fitted with a mop of limegreen hair; the rescue bird has powerful ostrich legs and a single cartoon eye encased in a green bubble (the creature says nothing, expresses itself in astounding leaps and bounds); the big gun is a brass metal ball with a handle at one end a nozzle at the other, firing yolky cookie dough. Looks like something a preteen would enjoy, and if you didn't know any better you'd expect cheerful adventures and easy lessons in life and love and togetherness to follow.
Kiyoshi Yoshida's chimes-and-synthesizer score (sounding like a pipe organ with a xylophone keyboard installed in dire need of repair) suggests differently, evokes a tone Yuasa maintains for much of the series: the gauzy state between subconscious and wakefulness, with sudden detours into nightmare. The gun-fired cookie dough wraps around your body and melts you into a puddle; the puddle is green--in fact if much of the spatter throughout the series were shown in its true color (red) this would likely get an R rating. A little girl looks up sees her mother and father looking back down at her, impaled on barbed stakes.
The skonk chasing Kaiba is caught in a net and folks scramble to pry out the memory chips it collected--earlier we saw skonks dive at fleeing pedestrians, sucking content out of their skulls to be stored in those little conelike chips. In a quick review that introduces most of the succeeding episodes, Yuasa explains that technology has enabled us to record memories into chips but only the rich can afford to buy the younger stronger more beautiful bodies into which they insert themselves (shades of John Frankenheimer's Seconds and a precursor of Joss Whedon's Dollhouse); the poor sell their bodies and more pleasant life experiences to the rich for cash. Corollary to the transfer tech: one can selectively suck out bad memories and embed happy ones, improving one's mood immeasurably--Yuasa goes more into that later.
Meanwhile Kaiba has been smuggled aboard a ship by transferring his memories into the body of a large hippo; the woman who helps Kaiba, Parm, has downloaded her memories into a chip, inserted it into the boy's former body, is basically making love to herself (Kaiba watches through a peephole). The character designs promise wholesome Tezuka-like adventure but what folks forget is that Tezuka often ventured into dark territory, even with his popular Astro Boy series; this may be Yuasa's tribute to the old master, at the same time adding his own eerie mix of melancholy, deadpan humor, surreal imagery.
For a few episodes Kaiba rides the ship to different planets and different adventures: in one a pair of brothers search for their grandmother's hidden treasure; with a special viewer they access her memories--projecting a circular opening resembling a comic strip's thought balloon--and force Kaiba to climb in (Keaton's Sherlock, Jr. anyone?) to seek the treasure's location. In another a cat named Patch fashions ever evolving trends in wearable bodies (wildly different shapes and sexes; bright neon colors; deliberately introduced defects). We visit different corners of this universe Yuasa has made, where body-switching is a commercial enterprise, memory an ephemeral mutable concept, and the rich have invented a few perversities to add to an already enormous collection.
Most folks prefer this picaresque first half with its more easily digestible tales; the second half pulls everything together in an intricate ambitious scheme: the power struggle over who will rule Lala and its network of worlds, who controls the memories that are stored in chips. I think the second half indispensable to the overall work; having shown us the consequences implied in the tech, Yuasa now shows us the struggle to either correct said consequences or push the implications to their extreme yet logical conclusion.
Key to understanding what Yuasa is trying to say (skip the next six paragraphs if you haven't seen the series!) is Kaiba--not the boy hero, but a fabled monster plant sailing through space towards Lala to swallow the planet, along with the memories of all its inhabitants. Kaiba's love Neiro (who he first sees as a blurred image in a locket, later as an assassin hunting him) nicknames him 'Kaiba' because his recall is so sharp (he draws intricate murals of people and scenery from memory); the word is also Japanese for 'hippocampus,' the organ in the brain responsible for transferring short-term memories into long-term storage. Kaiba's real--or original--name is Warp, whose image can be seen constantly, in video screen and statues throughout the many planets. We learn that Warp is possessed of powers, among them a near-indestructible body; the technological genius to invent the memory chip; telekinesis; and--most impressive of all, though not at first glance--the ability to store and access the memories of everyone who has ever lived, a kind of racial hippocampus.
Which suggests a number of things--Kaiba is both hero and villain, being the tyrant and inventor who established this social order; he's also the innocent hero wandering through space, witnessing the suffering his regime has created in a loli (short for Lolita) girl's borrowed body. Losing his memories and status has forced him to view the world from a different vantage; not just memories though, but which version of a memory--at one point Neiro seeks to kill Warp because her recollection has been altered to include Warp killing her parents. She ends up trying to save him because he's become (thanks to her) Kaiba, or as she puts it "my Kaiba"--the possessive determiner suggesting she has as good a case as any of the several power figures seeking to win Warp's support. Or at least she asserts that she does, and who's to say she's wrong?
The established order, for one. Memory in Yuasa's expanded universe is power, and as we come to realize it's what keeps Warp supreme ruler in heaven (not sure of the actual Japanese but in subtitles the upper strata is often referred to as 'heaven'). Memories in the form of chips are a valued currency, pleasant often sexual memories traded like prized DVDs; memories are often what's left of a loved one who has lost his or her body not only due to sickness or age but poverty (can't afford the extra mouth to feed, or sold the body for cash). And memories contain information scientific, political, personal that can lift economies, pull down regimes, break a man's heart.
Memory here is incarnated at least three ways: the artificial intelligence that rules in heaven while the real Warp goes missing--the computer tries but does a slipshod job, constantly making mistaken diagnoses (fussing over fake Warp's mental state), missing important details (a fugitive Neiro), leaving itself vulnerable to attack (rebel Popo burning away a handful of memory chips). Warp's memory is more impressive, housing the equivalent of every chip in the AI's vast storage banks in his limegreen skull, which is indestructible to boot (the only hint of vulnerability being the gaping hole in his chest). More impressive yet is the interstellar Kaiba which seeks memory, is a predator of memory, has swallowed not just racial memories but entire planets on its way to swallow Lala.
The established order makes a strong case and yet--amnesiac Warp meets Neiro and becomes the kinder Kaiba; Sheriff Vanilla falls for comely Chroniko (actually Kaiba in a girl's body) but ends up sacrificing both his and Chroniko's body for Kaiba's survival; Kaiba as Warp defeats the all-engulfing Kaiba monster by surrendering to the latter his most valued power, his memories. In a key scene, Neiro is offered the chance to take back her unaltered memories but refuses, the implication: yes memories have value have power, but more powerful still is a strong sense of self, an ideal passionately pursued (freedom, democracy, love, take your pick), a will that persists despite physical circumstance or technological intervention--a soul, for want of a better term.
Yuasa works against the sentiment the pathos the exquisite melancholy, his pitilessness giving the pathos an edge, the pathos giving his pitilessness emotional force. His narrative structure reflects Kaiba's own evolving sense of self, from wide-eyed innocent to cynical omniscience--once our hero has most of his memories back he knows enough to attempt to seize control; once he knows everything (Neiro supplying a crucial bit of missing memory) he knows better than to risk total annihilation.
Yuasa especially in the first episode offers precious little dialogue; only in the later more complexly interlinked episodes does exposition play a more prominent role. Yet he articulates his themes effectively, not so much in what the characters say (their words devoted mostly to explanation, either of plot or of their own usually selfish motives) as what they do (significantly the most heroic characters--the small helicoptering Hyo Hyo (Kaiba's constant companion), or the leapfrogging Paru (Kaiba's rescue bird)--do not talk at all, and are constantly in purpose-driven motion).
The animation looks minimalist but Yuasa manages to include breathtakingly realized sequences--Kaiba's escape on galloping Paru for one, modeled I suspect on a similar sequence in Miyazaki's Nausicaa (the princess on her clawfoot); later, when Kaiba confronts Warp, their memories rages desires manifest as gargantuan figures around them (a serrated sword as big as a 747; a skyscraper-sized impalement spear; the towering figure of Kaiba's mother, bearing a tankard of purpled poison)--an idea I suspect Yuasa borrowed from Stanislaw Lem's Solaris.
His most eloquent effects however involve the simplest images: Kaiba gingerly touching the edges of the hole in his chest (he feels no pain, which makes the moment even more disturbing); a patch of flowers hidden along a cliffside; Neiro upside-down and plunging, securing a locket with a blurred photo of her round Kaiba's neck, claiming him as her own--odd choice (the blur only adds to the photo's mystery), but Yoshida's music, Mamiko Noto's voice acting, Yuasa's writing and direction have worked hard all series long to arrive at this moment.
Preferring the first half or the whole or getting yourself lost in the narrative's complex twists it doesn't really matter--one can simply sit back and enjoy the series' haunting imagery, the startling disconnect between bright toonlike characters and their dark dangerous world, to the accompaniment of Yoshida's unearthly melody. Yuasa is arguably one of the most inventive of the next generation of animators to follow Miyazaki, Takahata, Oshii, Kon, and this arguably one of his best works.
First published on Businessworld, 2.28.20
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