Jin-Roh. Hiroyuki Okiura. 1999. 
Oh, it’s animated. This was a DVD I picked up at random in a used DVD shop some time back, and I assumed that it was a… Korean… action movie? For some reason?
But it’s an animated Japanese movie about some anarchists and the cops who hunt them down.
I really like the style of animation here. It’s more French than anything, and some of the characters have this slight insectile vibe to them that’s great.
And it moves slowly and is mostly unscored, so there’s nothing here to dislike, really. But despite all that, the storyline is just so… tentative… that I find it hard to keep concentrating on what’s going on, and instead I’m shopping for springforms on the Interwebs.
The documentary featurette on the DVD is fascinating. The writer (the Ghost in the Shell Guy) talks about how he wasn’t sure that Okiura was the right director for this movie, and that while he likes the results, perhaps he should have directed it himself. The director talks about how he was pretty sure that he didn’t want to do the movie, and set terms for the story that he thought the writer would refuse, so that he wouldn’t have to do the movie.
It’s like the anti-Hollywood documentary. I love it.
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