009-1, Volume 2 - Ain't It Cool News

"fun to watch"

"a sex and spies, kiss-kiss, bang-bang affair"

Anime Spotlight: 009-1
Volume 2
Released by ADV Films

Shotaro Ishinomori is best known as the creator of a number of the influential Ultraman-like live action tokusatsu works, including Kamen Rider and the bi-chromatic hippy robot Kikaider, as well as the anime/manga franchise Cyborg 009. Like the work of his mentor Osamu Tezuka, he introduced heavier subjects into what were children's works. Cyborg 009 famously ended with its hero sacrificing himself in a fall through the atmosphere in order to bring an end to a war provoking arms-dealer (though the character and franchise received a Sherlock Holmes style reprieve from death.) Ishinomori 's 009-1 or ku-no-ichi, a pun on kunoichi (ninja woman) isn't a younger audience title. It's a sex and spies, kiss-kiss, bang-bang affair written for an adult-male seinen audience, with the original manga running from 1967-1970 in Weekly Manga Action, home of Lone Wolf and Cub and Lupin III.

The first episode of 009-1 was a spectacle of anime meets Connery Bond era action that had to be seen to be believed: parachuting out off exploding rockets, breasts bouncing in every cut, and generally sex and violence played to stylish excess. After that, the anime settled down to some degree, but began mixing an intelligent approach to politics with the bananas retro-future super-espionage. Even if she's modest about using them, it is fun to have a heroine with breast machine guns. You don't have to be a fan of the fact that the anime utilizes both bullets AND ray guns and differentiates between them to thrill at the heroine using an Adam West-style Batmobile to cause a trailer to jack-knife in order to shake pursuers; unarmed, taking out a hit team by elbowing the first, grabbing one and using him to launch a spin kick, before cracking the held guy's neck; or an laser pistil duel against a female Terminator stand-in. As modest and well dressed as the protagonist is, the anime still indulges in scenes like a psychedelic sexual espionage indoctrination. Yes, this has been sent up by the likes of Austin Powers, but 009-1's old-school verve is still fun to watch episode after episode.

Created in 2006, the 009-1 anime had to deal with dragging a Cold War story into the terrorism age. It's a hurtle akin to digging up Bond for a new decade, or more appropriately, the Bionic Woman. Part of that process was acknowledging that we've moved well past le CarrÈ and Graham Greene. Any assertion that espionage ain't nice, cool or sexy is going to be met with a sarcastic "no really!?" As with Bourne, 009-1 is comfortable with the fact that it can't present this as a revelation. So, it is not phrased as a discussion. The anime opens with the lead killing a man who she just slept with. Later, she sleeps with a woman for information. And after that she bonds with, then lies to and kills a would-be nemesis. Yet, a star council of old men still insist that despite her skills, this is a dangerously compassionate asset.

009-1 is set in an East Germany/West Germany stand-in conflict that is entrenched in an extended Cold War. The states are different, but not necessarily morally distinct. The east harvests those born mutant abilities. The west hunts down and kills the mutants. People in the east are denied everything, People in the west live with a chasm between the have's and the have not's.

Cormac McCarthy's No Country For Old Men was published in 2005 and presented a story set in 1980 in which the shadow of the Vietnam War still informed events. No reader had to be sold on that significance. As it depicts a beautiful spy performing ugly work, 009-1 knows that history has shaded grays into the Cold War conflict. With that generally excepted, it can push into the specifics and intricacies.

In North America, 009-1 is bound to fall victim to the "looks old" syndrome, in which works that fit into or revisit a previous stage in the evolution of popular design style are dismissed. However, even if decades old fairy tales come to mind looking at the Betty Boop eyes and simple abstraction, the dissonance between the depiction and the events is represent unironically.
This design style has a direct lineage to Disney's, and as such the connotation is that at worst, in the third act Bambi's mother will die. Yet, this is not far off from the style that Osamu Tezuka employed for his haunting, morally complex manga Adolf, the story of Adolf Kamil, a Jewish boy living in Japan, and Adolf Kaufmann, a German/Japanese boy as Tezuka followed the pair through World War II and into the latter 20th century. That was published in the weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun, but even when the style was employed for children stories, Tezuka was using it to directly address subjects like Vietnam.

This is most keenly evident when the heroine is sent to address an intel courier that is passing information through a port town. She runs into a boy who looks like a classic Disney version of South Park's Pip, who has a dog that looks seconds away from talking, and a "grandpa" who might be drunk, but looks like a cartoon salty dog. Yet, it is apparent that this town is painfully, economically depressed, stripped of all industry except for its use as a military staging base. As the extent to which this boy has been used as a pawn of a compassionless scheme is reveal, the humanity of the story is acutely painful. Yet, the anime is not using the cuteness of these characters ironically, or ripping it apart. It is a tribute to the style employed by Ishinomori, and though it is not what might be expected by a modern audience, it is emotive and serious enough to convey what the story is to trying tell effectively.

Posted on Wednesday, September 05, 2007 (Archive on Friday, October 05, 2007)