[Published September 16th, 2008, UnderGroundOnline (UGO)]

Even when telling a more-or-less straightforward story, Mamoru Oshii can't help but bring his own idiosyncratic style to bear. The aerial dogfights in The Sky Crawlers, the director's anime adaptation of a novel by Mori Hiroshi, are gorgeous white noise in the sense that they never progress, but revel, instead, in the incessant monotony of battle.

There are clearly defined "sides" (the ageless, genetically bred Kildren on one; a faceless force commanded by the Red Baron-esque "Teacher" on the other), yet the apparently eons-long war they're engaged in is an entirely corporate construction, a rigged philosophical game (one stemming from a media-sanctioned belief that peace is unattainable without conflict, and vice-versa) splattered across a worldwide canvas. The terrain is familiar—whenever maps are shown, it's easy to pick out the shape of a Scottish isle or the tip of a South American peninsula—but it's all pastiche, as if the continents have come full circle, crashing together, once more, into the single, inseparable landmass of prehistory.

The setting is timeless in other words, and that goes a way toward illustrating the psychological inner space of the Kildren, all of whom live in a (stunted) adolescent Neverland. They have their own behavioral codes (between battles they speak an often spaced-out Japanese; in the air, when "sky crawling," they talk in phonetic English) and seem outwardly able to adapt as the situation warrants (when a tour group comes to visit the Kildren's airfield, they put on the most frighteningly plasticine smiles—warriors as trained, populace-mollifying seals). But emotional turmoil remains and, as in Hideaki Anno's Evangelion, the Kildren have no supportive outlet for their urges and desires.

It's the price of dispassionately playing God, though Oshii never shows us the Kildren's creators or the machina from which they spring. Like the film's protagonist, Yuichi Kannami, they just appear as needed on the horizon, possessed of an unexplainable instinct to do battle. In the lulls between, residual impulses take over: sex is either fumbling or detached (as if biology and emotion are perpetually out of sync); obsessive-compulsive mannerisms come to the fore (a shock-white haired supporting character continuously folds and creases a newspaper with mathematical precision).

The Sky Crawlers mostly favors Yuichi's point-of-view, though he's as much the observed as an observer. It's to Oshii's credit that the film, from frame one, has a near-subliminal feeling of déjà vu—not so much a sense that we've been here before as of being trapped in a limitless void, a gloomy eternal present that slowly comes into focus until the subtleties of the peripheral characters' reactions to Yuichi (even the Oshii-trademark basset hound) are frighteningly clarified. The Sky Crawlers is perhaps best encapsulated by an image of Yuichi and the base commander, Suito Kusanagi, blundering their way through a front-seat fuck. Oshii ends the scene on a close-up of their hands locked together, a pistol clasped in-between—Suito's finger is on the trigger; Yuichi's thumb holds back the hammer. The gun never goes off, but the possibility (the precipice) remains.

UGO Rating

Writing: A-

Direction: A-

Performances: A-

Visual Appeal: A-

Overall: A-

Vitals

Release Date: 2008

Studio: Production I.G.

Director: Mamoru Oshii

Cast: Rinko Kikuchi, Ryo Kase, Chiaki Kuriyama, and Shosuke Tanihara

Genre: Anime

MPAA Rating: N/R