“Live on until we can change something.”
A Kim sequence and a beautiful dream without end, of youth battle death and orgasm but not yours, gradually drained of color. The sensation of gender disphoria, life in the sad absence of someone else you needed who may just be yourself, a warm glow carried within you in an existence of distant functioning, inaccessible sorrow whose denial is beautiful but whose tragedy comes in the knowledge that something else is possible, or should have been. The wind rises, you must live. Following the threads of VR and sexual slavery, otakuism and pederasty (this film literally could not be made in live action because it would be creepy and inethical) explored in Avalon and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, The Sky Crawlers is Mamoru Oshii’s terminal film, not because it is to date his final directorial work in traditional animation but because every moment speaks to its own finality. Has a film this pleasant ever felt so exhausted with itself?
Frozen in an endless day of future past, an artificial historical now is maintained by a cast of unknowing actors, its sequences weighted with age, nostalgia, silence. Every moment verging on a thrill is muted, blemished, ever so slightly denied the sensation of pleasure or the satisfaction of pain. The viewer is allowed to enjoy this film but not on the terms the consumer-voyeur has been conditioned to expect. Maybe this is Oshii’s clearest articulation of the sadness and violent social hierarchy at the core of anime fandom -- a slow, gentle lilting film that feels as though it is about elder age, waning memory, a dignified fall into eternal sleep, shocked into awakeness as it is populated not by sweet old people who can gaze at the vast fields of grass but mature and reckless children, boy and girl pilots defending the glorious nation from the Enemy, killing, gaming, smoking and having perfunctory heterosex while clutching pistols. It’s a story we want to get off to but the feeling of excitement that animation is expected to provide us is completely leached from the film, every moment softly hammering at a tragedy without drama, a cinema of repetition robbing its inhabitants of the golden years of retirement they so clearly desire, so clearly deserve. Even the character designs are bereft of the attractiveness and illusion of accessing interior emotions expected in cell animation as an “organic” artform, like the dolls of Gosenzo-Sama and Innocence without their dynamic, humanizing/fetishizing articulation.
However, as a film it is not a grim exercise in joylessness because its aesthetic accumulates to realize that feeling of austere aging denied to its inhabitants, a quiet day spent in the country and drifting off to sleep, melancholic, your heart warmed by a gentle breeze. Like the extraordinary concluding chapter of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, we are immersed in life that was not lived, a being and desire unfulfilled, and yet was still experienced, still has that meaning and vividness because a living person who cannot find their soul is not soulless, there is no void but the expanse of humanity. A mirror image of Beautiful Dreamer where instead of existential dread growing out of joyous activity, beauty and purpose gradually and inevitably seeps into a space with no exit. Oddly enough, Oshii regains his paradise lost in the live action/cg hybrid films that follow, which celebrate the vulgar joys of animation, simulation and fulfilment of craving that Sky Crawlers is functionally a regretful swan song for -- Assault Girls is in a sense a perverse retelling of the same tale. Deep pessimism and the reason to live. Anime is dead, Mamoru Oshii put the medium down with dignity and brought it back to life.
[Samuel Beckett quotes redacted]