Rated: Unclassified (18+)
Written and Directed by: Ujicha
Produced by: Yoshimoto Kogyo, Reo Anzai / Kimitsugu Ueno
Executive Producer: Hidesuke Kataoka
Music by: Jean-Paul Takahashi
Theme Song “Violence Voyager” by Boby (Aoi Yuki)
English Voice Director: Strathford Hamilton
Production: Hiroshi Fujiwara
Key Cast: Aoi Yûki, Naoki Tanaka, Saki Fujita, Shigeo Takahashi.
‘That one extra bit of summer fun was going to take Bobby through hell.’
Violence Voyager had its Australian Premiere at the recent MIFF – I thought it would be a good idea to review something different for upcoming Halloween. And yes, Violence Voyager is certainly something a bit different.
Set-up like a childhood adventure story, Bobby (the foreign American kid) tells his sick mother he’s going out to find flowers for her empty valse sitting on the windowsill. But really, he’s going to the mountain with his best buddy, his blood brother (sporting stitched cuts on their hands to prove it) Akkun – who also, strangely has what looks like scars on his forehead.
Added to the childlike voice-overs and the adventure aspect that includes Bobby’s cat, Derrick who tags along, the whole film is painted cardboard cut-outs with static facial expressions, the movement made by hand like kids playing with a shadowbox filled with toys.
But when the trio, Bobby, Akkun and Derrick-the-cat find a run-down Fun Park, the film becomes a nightmarish hell where kids never escape: they either become modified with all their nerve endings on the outside and their eyes pulled out of their sockets and placed on horizontal sides of their now square face, or they get dissolved to become food for half-robot hybrid human monsters under the command of park-owner but really scientist, Dr Binobo and daughter and navigator, Siori.
There’s a deceiving simplistic feel about this film, the voice-over slow and deliberate, the timing of the dialogue giving the most affect.
But there’s plenty of splattered blood and vomit and naked kids hung like hocks – the theme horrific and the images of those cardboard cut-outs bizarre.
Definitely not one for the kids to watch this Halloween. I wouldn’t classify Violence Voyager as ‘Family’.
Yet, for all its horror, the film was palatable because I was always delighted to see another clever technique giving texture to this bizarre tale like blue vapour rising around the cardboard Dr. Binobo making him look evil, a rising shadow over the cardboard Bobby to depict a pending doom and the kids armed with a super-soaker and dolphin water pistol squirting real water onto those monster robots giving the scene another dimension like those pop-up books I read in primary school.
And that juxtaposition lent another layer to the bizarreness of this simply, horrifically clever film.
With a bat, monkey and cat on your team, you can’t lose – well you can still become a deformed robot, humanoid monster, but in the world of Violence Voyager, that’s a win.