Red Garden, Volume 1 - Ain't It Cool News

"thoroughly unconventional… an involving story successfully told from a distinctive perspective"

Anime Preview: Red Garden
Volume 1
To Be Released by ADV Films Sep 18, 2007

Red Garden is a thoroughly unconventional horror anime. Employing live action techniques to establish a stalking threat rather than just unnerving notions and cutaways to carnage differentiate it from most anime horror. A supernatural Breakfast Club meets Suicide Squad group of teenage girls faced with mortal danger in a modern New York that oscillates between dark and dirty and glitzy art deco emphases, is unmistakably a one-time high concept for anime.

Especially when the studio produces works for older audiences, Red Garden's creators at Gonzo receive grief in many circles (including this column) for providing series that are not what one would hope for. Speed Grapher was neither a sophisticated attack on society or an edgy, salacious exercise in exploitation. It promised Hunter S Thompson and delivered local OP ED. Samurai 7 promised a high budget sci-fi retelling of Kurosawa's lauded epic, and it delivered on some well animated fights and even half an episode from Hisashi Mori, but it was never as exciting as the demo reel. However, the studio deserves some credit for not adding to the overpopulated pool of cute girls stories in which the cast engages in male-defined drama or ironic situations. And, the willingness at least try and potentially come up short is likewise worthy of some respect.

In Red Garden's case, the series is not a painful under performer, and not work that suggests false expectations. It is also not a commanding argument for the vibrancy of anime. While there is an involving story successfully told from a distinctive perspective, it doesn't offer something to hold up as an example of what can be accomplished in anime. In an ideal world, the baseline for anime would feature Red Garden's degree of attention to characters and direction.

The setting, the scenario, and unvarnished presentation of its characters position Red Garden as a bridge between anime and genre film. In June 2006 Japanese anime news site MoonPhase indicated that the animation studio Gonzo and Solty Rei director Yoshimasa Hiraike would be adapting Dario Argento's Suspiria. There may be no connection between Red Garden and that suggested project. When Red Garden aired in October of that year, the director was storyboard artist and Millennium Actress producer Kou Matsuo. There were murders and mysterious deaths around a school, but parallels to Argento's plot are superficial at best. However, the bleeding giallo colors and the brutality of the violence do hint at a tie.

As when colors bleed through the anime's lens, Red Garden is innovative without rewriting the rules. Gonzo's texture mapped Gankutsuou comes to mind upon seeing the series' opening credits, in which kaleidoscopic floral patterns and strands of pearls fill silhouettes, but the most significant cross-over between the works is writer/planner Tomohiro Yamashita. As stark as some of the visual effects are, including a corpse that is one of anime's most distressing simply due to how dead flesh is rendered in CGI, the series distinguishes itself in its nuanced character design and direction.

Red Garden commences with men in black spiriting a quartet of unconscious teenagers into the girls' own homes. The four, Kate Ashley, the intense daughter of a wealthy family and recent inductee into the school's Grace social policing cadre, Rachel Benning, a fashion and party minded queen bee, Claire Forrest an independent hard-case and Rose Sheedy, a timid, oldest child, did not socialize in the same clique. They did all attend the same upper crust high school on New York's Roosevelt Island, and staggering into school the next day, they learn that their mutual friend Lise Harriette Meyer was found dead. As night sets again, each of the four follow a flock of phantom butterflies to one remote location. As they try to piece together the holes in their memory from the previous night, a woman and a man dressed in black walk up and inform them that the pair will be the girls' new "teachers." First, the woman shocks them by insisting that the four all died on the previous night, then coldly commands them to kill newly approaching man with their bare hands. Almost in response, the intruder lets out a wolf's growl and charges the group.

The standpoint of the action feels uncomfortably close to a violent crime in progress. Like a tense horror movie, or a survival horror video game, it trades in lack of power and abilitiy. In a dark, urban environment, boxed in by parked cars and chain link fences, the protagonists hide and the anime captures the stalking movement of the threat. Not only is adversary limited to two modes: searching or rushing, when the point of engagement is reached, the anime is keenly aware of concrete, physical difficultly in pulling the attacker off a victim or scaling a fence. It's not Little Red Riding Hood and the gender of the protagonists hasn't been much of the issue in these confrontations. The tone is more of the overwhelming experience of being in the position to be prey.

As one would expect, the girls manifest some degree of supernatural powers, but the series does not shift from horror to flashy action. The confrontations remain messy. Adversaries try to claw and bite, and dealing with that animalistic assault, the protagonists are neither trained nor natural fighters. They demonstrate bad instincts, and even when they attempt a theoretically effective approach, they fumble in their inexperience.

After seeing the brush with death presented by the fight, the protagonists' trauma is perfectly apparent as they are told that not only do they have to survive these fights, they have to engage in the battles or their new lease on life will be forfeit. With its kill or die conundrum evoking Battle Royale, the tension of the characters waiting to see if they must fight again is acutely painful drama. The "I must not run away" routine becomes sharply serious, and accepting the panic and self pity of the characters under this duress seems natural. From the perspective of a detached observer, the uneasiness is compounded by an uncertainty regarding the agenda being forwarded and by some suggestion of a reason to be uncomfortable with snuffing the growling adversaries.

Four episodes in, the series has been diligent in reaching the developments that a critical observer might expect. The dire business has taken its toll on the characters, and as might be suspected, it has strained their social statuses and their relationships with the people around them. At the same time, it is gratifying to see the characters edge towards a more proactive stance.

The series is not perfectly conceived for an American audience. When it tries to appropriate a Seinfeld routine, presumably for New York texture, the line lands with an amazingly inelegant thud. When an episode emphasizes its emotional conclusion by having a character break into Broadway song, a narrative curb has been skipped and that break in presentation becomes laughable. Not only is it at odds with what the established expectation, the built up association between song and parody, both in anime and in the wider body of pop media, does the interlude no favors. Not every episode in the volume concludes with song, but when it becomes expected, and more of the cast, including more hard-nosed elements join in, the disparity between what Red Garden seems like it should be, and what it temporarily becomes momentarily turns into comedy. Red Garden's willingness to try different storytelling models is one of the series' assets, but in the case of adopting Broadway song, it's an unintentional joke.

Red Garden's design team, whether it is Fujijun and Kumi Ishi's (Rozen Maiden) character design or Masatoshi Kai's (Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Howl's Moving Castle, Jin-Roh, Millennium Actress) art direction, goes to great lengths to capture the particular nature of the people and places. This is especially noticable in the faces of the characters, which have a wide diversity, and are conspicuous for attention to all features. In particular, this is seen in the noses. To some degree, it is just noticeable due to unusual the attention, but in many cases, characters have rather large noses.

This is a situation where maybe a cigar is a cigar, and maybe a preponderance of large nosed characters is conciously playing into a physical stereotype of westerners. The later case is suggested by the fact that the anime seems to be motivated to capture the look of particular people, as opposed to something like Nobuteru Yuki's work on Escaflowne where large noses are omnipresent and it simply seems to be global embellishment. In either case, the design characteristics are a significant factor in the anime. Those who distain unconventional approaches to character design will have a problem with this aspect of Red Garden, and by the same token, those who are intrigued by animation that is not in lock step, will find it a point of attraction.

The New York angle to Red Garden is certainly distinctive, but this is not a gimmicky anime. The attraction is the attention to the place and the personality as well as its implementation of traditions of horror through anime. As such it is not as sensational as something like Higurashi/When They Cry and not violently surrealist in the way of Requiem from the Darkness. The appeal is a bit subtler, and in theory, fans of international and historic horror movies would find it a worth while curiosity. In practice, fans of anime work that is tailor to the tastes of anime fans may find the series a bit iffy, and facing the immense list of entertainment choices that are available, the horror movie fans probably will not find the anime at all.

Posted on Tuesday, September 04, 2007 (Archive on Thursday, October 04, 2007)