Review______________
A lot of you are probably looking at this review and wondering, "Wait... there's an Ichi anime?! As in, an
Ichi the Killer anime?!". The other lot of you not thinking that are no doubt in question as to the location of that order of burritos you ordered from the Mexican place that's owned and operated by that Chinese family who insisted on being "different". The food's not great but the prices are excellent and their menu is set up with the same convenience and pleasant colors as all the Chinese menus are...
I am of the latter, as I've had this DVD sitting on my shelf for 7 months now... and I am wondering where my fucking burritos are. I'm telling you, something's wrong, cuz Ping is NEVER this late!
So yeah, by now many of you no doubt have seen Takashi Miike's comic book Yakuza flick Ichi the Killer. Out of Miike's impressive/frightening library of head fuck cinemas, Ichi is probably the most well known here in the states. Whether rented, purchased, or just borrowed from a friend/co-worker, Ichi is one of the most readily available samples of modern Japanese movie making in the US mainstream... barring all Godzilla and anime releases of course. Out of all the people I know (okay, okay, so there's only a few... quality over quantity though!), I'd say probably 70% of them have seen the adventures of the razor booted Ichi, with another 10% having at least heard of the flick from somebody else, i.e. me or an equally disturbed acquaintance. The thing only about a fifth of these people know though is that this animated prologue, Episode 0, even exists...
Of course, since it's not readily available for rent at the local Whoreywood or Cockbuster (and Osiris forbid they should actually get over their fear of internet money transactions and join NetFux), these peeps won't bother to seek out a copy and will thus miss out on yet another video nasty member in the collective that is Japanimation. Well, if you're one of these people (and shame on you for not wanting to throw away your money on ever little import title you hear about...), then perhaps this review will be the final straw to break the back of your camel of resistance... or the final nail to close your casket of resolve and bury it firm in the grounds of "I still don't feel like buying that stupid DVD"... wait, was that supposed to be a reference to you watching the damn thing or not?
Bah, in the immortal words of the Pope during the holocaust: Fuck 'em.
Our movie/episode/OVA (written by the guy who did the screenplay for the film) begins with the final moments of the retarded assassin's duel with Kakihara (voiced here by none other than Takashi Miike!), the shark-mouthed masochist Yakuza hard-ass from the film. For those who saw the film, you all know how this ended (which is a lie since, being a Miike movie, nobody knows how it actually ended...), but from here we go where the movie didn't take us: back to Ichi's childhood. Rewinding into the past, we find Mr. Tanabe (the man who would become the titular killer's "manager") "adopting" young Hajime Shiroishi from a mental institution. The lad's been there for six years thinking on the level of a child, thanks to some kind of mental trauma he suffered when he was younger. Every day finds him doing intense physical exercises to repress his natural sexual desires, no doubt as a result of "sex is bad!" type conditioning which probably contributed to that aforementioned "mental trauma". Yeah, it sounds kinda cliche, but face it, sex and sexuality is the cause of and solution to ALL of life's problems.
The constant exercise has given young Hajime (Ichi, in case you were still wondering, duh) the body of an athlete. He also practices martial arts kicks as part of his exercises, giving him some pretty lethal looking dance moves, supposedly mimicking from televised wrestling he once saw... which is bullshit because, as we those of us who have seen it know, Japanese wrestling is all about jumping around and stabbing people in the face with various pointy things.
From here we flash back further though, to what it was that put Hajime in this state to begin with. Set the Wayback Machine™ for 7 years earlier, and a period of several weeks that would mold young Hajime Shiroishi's life into the morbid, violent piece of sculpture he has become. Back to a life of being bullied in school, harassment from your parents about the importance of grades, getting blackmailed by someone who you called your friend, being chewed out by your boss at your crappy job at the mall and being forced to listen to your parents commit acts of masochistic lust on each other in the next room with no consideration for the impressionable, already tightly wound mind on the other side of those paper thin walls. You know what I'm talking about, we've all been there... at least I hope I'm not the only one...
Amidst all the hectic mania of the life of Hajime, one day things take a bizarre hormonal turn as Haj, forced to dissect a living frog in bio class, finds himself "at full mast" in what is probably the most instrumental moment of his troubled life. It's shortly after this that Mr. Tanabe, a friend of young Hajime at the time, recommends that the lad take up a karate class to learn discipline and how to direct his potential into something healthy... or just to being the brainwashing and training that will later become necessary for his future mission to kill people for Tanabe... but I'm giving away too much of the movie already, so let us frolic along merrily back to giving away too much of the anime.
Confused and enraged by his life of hormones knocking on his zipper and both physical and mental abuse smacking his face at every turn, Haj snaps and goes for a midnight jog through the streets, screaming and crying like a lunatic. He narrowly escapes being street pizza'd by a car, only to come across a stray cat who wasn't so lucky. Our hapless protagonist tries to help the poor thing, getting his finger chewed on instead, finally snapping that last brittle twig in his brain... or is that the snapping of the cat's bones as he stomps it into paste? And, as the last vestiges of the cat's life are smooshed into the tread of Hajime's sneakers, Lil' Haj awakens...
The next morning it's psychological dysfunction all around as the students of Hajime's school arrive for another day of academia, only to discover their beloved school rabbits (I don't know, it's something Japanese schools do...) have been obliterated and gutted in the most non-PETA friendly terms. In a classroom elsewhere, alone, Hajime works hard to erase insults written on his desk by unfriendly peers. Kaneda, who has often claimed to Hajime that he's a friend, appears from nowhere to help out, dropping the rather damning nugget that he witnessed Hajime's bunny stomp dance-a-thon last night... the only thing worse than thinking somebody was you commit an otherwise unsavory deed it knowing somebody witnessed you commit an unsavory deed. Hajime learns just why this is too, as Kaneda starts to blackmail him for daily pay-offs. With his paychecks unable to keep up to Kaneda's demands though, Haj resorts to stealing from his parents. When even this corruption of Haj's few remaining morals isn't enough for Kaneda's wallet though, things get ugly.
Kan threatens to tell everyone about Haj's bunny abuse, then whacks the kid in the face when he tries to grab Kan by the arm to stop him. Hajime flips out yet again though, blood flowing from his nose like crimson tendrils and tears spraying from his eyes like a fire plug, as he introduces Kaneda's ribs and skull to the Peter Cottontail mosh. Yes, Hajime kicks the cruel Kaneda to death. Little tip for all you greedy little schoolyard "entrepreneurs" and parents of greedy little schoolyard "entrepreneurs", stop extorting money from people weaker than you immediately, because if you don't get a face full of Columbine, you'll probably gets a punctured lung full of Ichi Airwalks™.
Returning home from the murder, no sooner does Hajime walk in the door than he's confronted by his parents with accusations of his thefts. Yelled at, berated and interrogated in some kind of Spanish Inquisition (the type of which nobody expects) as to why he'd steal from his own family in these times of financial hardship, all it takes is for Haj to trip over a baseball bat to drive his frustrations to that now familiar breaking point, sending him into a Hideki Matsui rampage to Louisville! Following the parental holocaust, Hajime runs away and joins a dojo to learn that discipline and control crap Mr. Tanabe was telling him about before. Yeah, after stomping a cat, a family of rabbits, a schoolmate and your parents to death, I'd say it's past time to learn "inner peace" and you're now primed for your room at the funny farm. Besides, are the deadly arts really something that needs to be taught to a dangerous psychopath who's already lethal with his feet?! Don't even dwell on it, cuz the answer's "no" and it will still be "no" after you sit down and crunch the numbers for several hours, so just stop it.
After almost impaling his sensei with his foot of fury, Hajime catches the eye of a female member of his class. The two go for a casual stroll together, and after her assault of two street thugs turns both Haj and the little lady on, they head for a "love hotel" for the perfectly violent end to a perfectly violent evening. Though the masochistic minx pushes Hajime to unleash a flurry of Chun-Li style lightning kicks to her once pretty face, she can't get him to deliver that final, orgasmic deathblow. Instead, Haj runs from the room crying and screaming, chastising himself and swearing up and down that he's not a monster and this isn't the kind of thing he enjoys. The search for solitude ends on a nearby park bench, where the two thugs from earlier (yeah, the ones who got their asses handed to them by the Next Karate Kid) have returned with their intimidating and large friend. When they pick on Haj for being a crybaby, he insists otherwise... and by "insists otherwise", I mean he shatters their heads.
Another note for future survival of the human race: if you're ever in a public park and see a guy crying, don't make fun of him or throw your shoes at him, otherwise your lifespan will be cut down to the time it takes for him to call you a "fucker", deny he's a crybaby, then turn your face into a Picasso with his feet, after which he'll masturbate in your blood and chowderize your mutilated corpse.
Back to Hajime's new girlfriend, turns out she's an agent for Mr. Tanabe, hired to test the limits of Hajime's fragile psyche and bring out the preverted murderer inside... that's not a spelling error by-the-way, it was intentional. Anyway, mission accomplished and Mr. T now feels Haj is ready to be recruited and trained to take down the notorious Kakihara. So ends the life of professional bullseye of abuse Hajime Shiroishi and so begins the career of the perfect assassin, Ichi the Killer.
Though a particularly brutal tale, I'm somehow not the least bit surprised by Ichi's origin. It really seems like any other hard luck tale a serial killer would give you. The only thing absent is the molesting uncle or the violent ruler beatings at the hands of a parochial school penguin. The interesting questions left unanswered here though are the extent of Mr. Tanabe's influence in Hajime's life and just why it is that he seems to have picked a kid like Haj to be his future assassin. Was he a friend of the family? Was he a neighbor or school counselor? How did he know about Hajime and exactly how long has he been manipulating the events in his life? Is it possible Hajime was adopted by the Shiroishi family, who are really agents of Tanabe hired to raise and torture the boy until maturity? See, this is what happens when I don't get definite answers: my mind wanders and starts coming up with a million different scenarios to fill the gaps and before you know it I've killed a hundred people and wounded thousands more.
As far as the animation and soundtrack goes, though it wasn't any big deal break through in visual style, the animation had a rough tone to it that fit the dark mood of the story nicely. Though it wasn't as pretty as, say, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust or Spriggan, it probably wouldn't have worked as well had it been. The music also fits the tone of the animation and story, consisting of intense techno incorporating the screams and anguish of Hajime into it for that crazy, ear rattled effect. The psychological breakdowns just sound more and more like breaking glass as a result. Make sense? Didn't think so.
Thus, I deem decent marks for the presentation of the tale, mid-grade marks for the tale itself, but definite recommendations to anyone looking for a little background on the characters and events of Ichi the Killer.
