By [For the month of July, we will be covering the New York Asian Film Festival and the (also New York-based) Japan Cuts Film Festival, which together form one of the largest showcases of Asian cinema in the world. For our NYAFF coverage, head over here. For Japan Cuts, here.]
When I first saw Asura‘s main character (fittingly named Asura), my thoughts immediately turned to the so-called “Forbidden Experiment.” For those of you who don’t know, the forbidden experiment involves depriving children of… well, pretty much everything. The children don’t learn language or how to interact properly with others. They basically become animals. Generally speaking, though, feral children aren’t bred in labs. They are simply neglected by their parents.
Asura falls beyond the latter end of the spectrum. Rather than being simply neglected by his mother, she attempted to kill him. Everything that happened to him from that point made him into an animal. An animal that is very good at wielding an axe.
Asura (Ashura | アシュラ)
Director: Keiichi Sato
Rating: NR
Country: Japan
Two things hurt the experience of Asura for me: my younger self’s obsession with anime, and my more recent self’s obsession with videogames. Aside from the fact that it’s an animated film from Japan, it shares a lot of flaws with other, serialized anime like Dragonball Z. A lot of jokes are made about DBZ and the fact that the characters spend entire episodes powering up and over-explaining every single part of their backstory. Although Asura doesn’t have much in the way of powering up, there is far too much explanation. Even though we see how Asura gets to be the way he is, two other characters feel compelled to explain it, except neither of them knows what happened as well as the audience does, because they weren’t there and Asura certainly can’t explain anything.
This sort of unnecessary exposition is riddled throughout the film, and that makes the 75 minute runtime feel much longer. I’m say at least a quarter of the dialogue could have been cut with no impact on the story, and it would have much better pacing. When characters are explaining things, the action necessarily stops, but it’s unnecessary explanation. And when the film slows down, its visual quirks become far more apparent.
If you have played any anime-based videogame, you are familiar with cel-shading. Even if you haven’t played anime-based games, if you’re into Japanese games at all (and, if you’re reading this, you probably are), you have probably played something cel-shaded. It’s hard to explain (and unfortunately video footage seems to be scarce/nonexistence), but its used to emulate the style of a comic book in 3D space. I imagine that was the intent here, since Asura is based on a graphic novel, although I can’t say for sure that Asura was animated in the same way cel-shaded games are, but it certainly looks that way.
I spent the entire film trying to get over the way the film looked, and I never quite succeeded. Every time I thought I’d gotten a hold of it, something showed up that made me expect a button prompt to happen any moment. I felt like I was watching a videogame cutscene, especially in the second half, where the action really takes hold. I felt like I should have been holding a controller, or at the very least that I could have been, and that was enough to keep me from investing into what I was seeing.
Which is too bad, because I was seeing some pretty cool things. Asura’s journey is a strange one, and it leads through some very compelling moments. It’s the kind of story that would have been heartbreaking if I had gotten into it. Certainly the people around me were moved by it. The film deals with a lot of serious topics, and it can get pretty intense at times. There’s famine, murder, cannibalism, and despair. In fact, as I think about it, there’s basically nothing happy about the movie. Every single moment of the film is bleak and depressing, right from the first frame until the last.
But then that last frame happened, and I started to laugh. While everyone in the theater began talking about how beautiful the film was, I was in hysterics. To compliment the soul crushing finale, what was there? Some Japanese pop-rock playing over a montage of the film’s events. Instead of contemplating the story’s greater meaning, I thought back to my younger self, learning the lyrics to the song that played over the Rurouni Kenshin credits and singing along. Huh. I wish I knew what that song was called.
But even though I laughed at the credits, was put off by the visuals, and found fault with the exposition, I have to say that I liked Asura. There is definitely a good movie in there somewhere, and I caught glimpses of it, but then it was buried again, beneath aggravating design decisions which grated right up against my personal biases.
[You can see Asura at the Japan Society on Thursday, July 12 at 6:30 PM. The film is being copresented by the New York Asian Film Festival and the Japan Cuts Film Festival. You must be 18 or older to attend the screening.]