Bedridden: Katsuhiro Otomo and Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s “Roujin Z”

By Bob Clark

When I reviewed the Pixar hit (a pair of words I’ve grown to begrudgingly accept as almost completely redundant) Up a few years back, I was taken aback by all the near-unanimous praise it was getting from the critical establishment, particularly for its opening scenes, depicting the passage of time from childhood to elderly years through the eyes of young lovers grown old in a wordless montage aiming to sum up the whole of all a lifetime’s worth of happiness and sacrifices. It wasn’t that I disagreed with their adulation of the sequence– indeed, it was one of the few things I genuinely liked about the film, especially after it fell into a rut of hand-me-down adventure escapades off in South America with an annoying boy-scout brat, the last of the do-do birds and an ancient explorer with an army of talking dogs and a zeppelin that looked as thought it were repurposed from the CGI demo-reel that is Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Instead, it was because of how little most commentators were celebrating the rest of that opening act, particularly in the imaginative way it depicted an old man’s frustrations and fatigue with the crass modern world in ways that were equally entrancing and entertaining in the best ways that animation can afford. All too often we find ourselves settling for stories and characters that seek to affect us emotionally in animation, especially American animation, and especially animation from the American studio of Pixar, while doing little to affect us cinematically. It is possible to be moved to tears and bored to death at the same time.

But that’s why the whole of Up‘s first act really impressed me in the theaters, in the way it spun a simple, endearing fable of a crotchety old man who’s grown tired of the impersonal life of the big city grown up all around his tiny little house, and decides to take flight with an improbable bevy of helium balloons, setting sail on the air in his rustic old two-bedroom home and escaping the modern world of steel and glass towers and the destructive construction workers seeking to demolish everything in their path. For those first thirty-or-so minutes, Up became a great modern-day fairy-tale of a movie, the kind of magical realism that wouldn’t be out of place in a book by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez (if he wrote in America) or the films of Frank Capra (if he had the budget to pull it off). As the house soared into the wild-blue yonder on the wings of so many multi-colored balloons, there was a hint of the same epic-scoped lucid dreaming that Bill Waterson routinely presented every Sunday in Calvin & Hobbes, with just the same kind of innocent, wide-eyed panorama of spectacular fantasy. Most of all, however, it reminded me of one of the other great works of high-concept animation depicting the trials and tribulations of the elderly in an increasingly hostile modern world, the 1991 anime cult-hit Roujin Z, a less marketable and less expensive successor to Katsuhiro Otomo’s groundbreaking Akira, but far in a way the superior work for any number of reasons.

As written by Otomo and directed by Hiroyuki Kitabuko, who had previously collaborated with him on Robot Carnival as well as helming an adaptation of Black Magic M-66 alongside Masumune Shirow and has since won acclaim for the Kenji Kamiyama scripted Blood: The Last Vampire, the film hearkens back to the over-the-top satire of the Akira-creator’s manga works back in his early days, the likes of which would later be adapted for anime in the anthology film Memories (featuring a portion scripted by the late Satoshi Kon, who makes his debut in animation in this film as an art-director and set-designer). The story is simple enough– Kiyuro Takazawa, a senile, slowly dying widower is selected by a Ministry of Public Welfare program to serve as the test-subject for a new computerized robotic medical bed designed to take care of all the needs experienced by Japan’s increasing elderly population, sometime in the early 21st century. The medical bed goes haywire and runs amok through the city, of course, as tends to happen with anything remotely robotic in Japanese sci-fi, forcing the government, the military and the bed’s corporate manufacturers to hunt it down and stop it by any means necessary, the full extent of which become more inhumane, and increasingly useless as the machine assimilates almost everything in its path.

Though Otomo did not direct the film himself, his visual stamp is clearly visible in the design of the Z-001 as it wreaks havoc through Japan and cobbles itself together out of anything that stands in its way, from small household appliances to large construction vehicles, turning itself into a cut-and-paste hodgepodge of an entire modern civilization’s experience, with a miserable old man locked inside. The presence of Kon as a designer also looks forward to the surreal juxtapositions of urban life in his own films, particularly the hallucinatory parades of his final masterpiece, Paprika. What sets Roujin Z apart from the other  dreamscapes of Kon, Otomo or any other big-name anime director for that matter is the way that everything is localized onto a single high-concept element. Everything else in the film has a straightforward, practical kind of realism to its design. Yes, there are computers doing things that should be plainly beyond the capacity for all but the most top-secret of projects from Steve Jobs’ world domination laboratories to come close to, and an extra mech that’s included seemingly for no other reason than to allow for an obligatory giant robot battle near the end. Other than those extra elements, however, it’s a rather restrained work for its type, and not just because its budget is clearly downgraded from the epic scope of Akira, and other works from the golden era of progressive anime. The fact that it’s still all achieved in painstakingly sketched hand-drawn cel animation only makes the over-the-top spectacle even more entertaining and impressive to behold, a jaw-dropping adventure by modest means.

It also helps keep the focus on character development at the forefront of the picture, which is where Roujin Z really shines. Again, what sets it apart is the ordinariness of the vast majority of its characters, especially is it pertains to the ordinariness of their general goodness, something which is altogether rare in anime and cinema in general. There is a requisite slimy corporate yuppie villain, of course, but aside from him the driving forces on all sides of the film, including the efforts to force Mr. Takazawa into the Z-001 and chase him down once the bed goes out of control, are operating out of a desire to do good. Both the young hospice nurse who fights to free Takezawa from the bed and the middle-aged Ministry official who seeks to put him into it are trying to help the old man, without any subterfuge or self-interest clouding their judgement. Yes, the young people are on the side that turns out to be right, but it’s not at the expense of the older generations– some of the brightest and most fun portions of the film, in fact, are where young Haruko teams up with the patients of an elderly home that seems to be populated almost entirely by old white-hat elite hackers. It’s there that we manage to crack much of the substance behind the film’s blending of the scientific and the spiritual (somehow an artificial-intelligence program takes on the personality of Takazawa’s late wife), but it’s also where we’re treated to some of the film’s most endearingly earnest portraiture. It’s all little more than the usual anime caricatures of winningly perverted old-age, of course (ancient masters proudly boast getting hard-ons from an expert hack), but there’s a wonderful kind of empowerment to that, even if it does amount to clowning around.

It’s that positive attitude, and the way that it mixes with the honest depictions of emptiness found at the heart of an old man’s life, that helps make the film something of an underrated classic, the kind of anime that’s almost tailor-made for rediscovery. Takezawa is only barely a real character of his own, and serves as something of an anchor for all the rest of the cast, young and old, to springboard their adventures upon, but that only makes his situation all the more real and appreciable. Roujin Z is not the story of a man at the end of his life who incongruously discovers a second wind for his twilight years, but is instead about the public debate on how to deal with a society’s elderly once they pass the point of no return. Some sides turn out right, and others wrong, but nobody lacks for compassion or good intentions thoughout (except the aforementioned yuppie, but that goes without saying). More than anything, it’s a film that expresses the value the culture it hails from places on the value of human life, especially when it nears its completion. It may not be as somber or outwardly respectful in its meditations as the works of Ozu, Kurosawa or even the recent anime Summer Wars, but it has no less heart, and that’s what counts in the end.