Posted in: Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh, Movies, TV | Tagged: anime, entertainment, japan, tv, yatterman

Yatterman Night, A Dark Sequel For The Times – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

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Adi Tantmedh writes,

I've had Yatterman on the brain lately.

No, it's not a disease. Yet. It's a popular anime series from the 1970s that just got a sequel, Yatterman Night.

The original Yatterman was a goofy kid's superhero anime from 1977 about a teenage hero and his girlfriend who go up against the Dorombo Gang, a band of thieves racing to find the mythical Skull Stone and steal gold. It has a slapstick "Roadrunner vs. Wile E. Coyote" feel to it in the way the villains built new crazy mechs and weapons only to be foiled by the heroes and their own mechs every week, And every episode pretty much ended with a mushroom cloud erupting in the background while the heroes laughed. The show was made in the darkest period of the 1970s and sought to reassure its child audience as part of Japanese pop culture's own domestication of nuclear power at a time when the idea of Armageddon was on everyone mind. It said you could still dance and laugh even if an atomic cloud explodes in the background. Japanese pop culture has always had a weirdly direct relationship with the zeitgeist, more than any other country's.

The show is considered a classic and an institution in Japan, and in 2009, the studio released a big budget (for Japan) live action movie version directed by none other than Takeshi MIike. Even though it was a for-hire gig, Miike publicly stated that he loved the show and the movie turned out to be one of his more personal. While replicating the goofy comedy and camp of the original anime, Miike dug deep in the second half of the movie to find some poignant subtexts in the endless the fight between Yatterman and the Dorombo Gang.

Miike had the slinky comedy femme fatale Doronjo realise her own romantic feelings for the hero, turning the central relation of the series into a love triangle as the hero, his girlfriend and the villainess engage in an endless dance of flirtation and foreplay. Miike had the hero become aware he was caught between the chaste teen romance of his girlfriend and partner, and the messier, more adult sexuality of Doronjo. Made at the same time as The Wachowski's Speed Racer movie, Miike's Yatterman was the deeper, more satisfying deconstruction of a classic anime series that didn't break the original version's charm or appeal. You can find it on US DVD if you want to see it, and I recommend it.

There was a 2008 anime series that was a remake of the original anime series, a trip in nostalgia, the studio reasserting Yatterman's presence in the public consciousness. It pretty much replicated the tone and feel of the original 1977 series and that was that.

This year's Yatterman Night, however, turns the original show on its head. It hinges on one idea: What if the good guy was actually evil and the villains were the real heroes?

The show is a kind of meta postmodernist sequel, set generations after the original series where there's a Yatter Kingdom where Yatterman and the good people live, and the descendents of the Dorombo Gang have been exiled to live outside its walls. Leopard, the happy young heroine, is a descendent of Doronjo and her friends are the descended from Doronjo's bumbling henchmen Tonzura and Boyacki. Leopard grows up on stories of Yatterman's heroism and has a child's grasp of right and wrong, good and evil. Her idyllic childhood is shattered when her mother becomes ill. Leopard and her friends try to enter the Yatter Kingdom to get medical help for her mother, but Yatterman sentries shoot at them and nearly kill them. Faced with the revelation that the Yatter Kingdom is corrupt and Yatterman may not be a hero after all, Leopard refuses to let this stand.

After her mother's death, Leopard decides to become the new Doronjo, enlisting her guardians into becoming the new Tonzura and Boyacki and off they go, creating giant machines and mech to batter the Yatter Kingdom's Yatterman robots, with their every effort seemingly doomed to failure.

At the heart of Yatterman Night is a young girl's grief over the death of her mother. There's a core of sadness running through the series, a theme of abandoned children, class warfare and social outsiders avenging injustices committed on the weak. It's important to consider the subtexts at play given the timing of the series. The Yatter Kingdom is thought to be a utopia but turns out to be oppressive and corrupt, its heroic figurehead Yatterman reduced to a massive army of murderous Dalek-like robots. I can't help but see an allusion to the current Japanese government with its far-right policies curbing press freedoms and basic rights, its sabre-rattling as it pushes for further militarisation, its overt corruption and flagrant incompetence.

The heroine and her friends become a lone rebellion against an oppressive regime in an unself-conscious act of class warfare as she seeks to invade the Yatter Kingdom to give the head honcho a piece of her mind. With all that darkness driving the story. It's still told in bright colours and breezy slapstick comedy – because otherwise its tragedy would be unbearable – as seen from the point of view of its 10-year-old heroine, who sees the sadness and despair around her but insists on pushing onward as only optimistic children can. And the show is still squarely aimed at children and all ages. No American kids' show would ever dare go this dark. This kind of darker, postmodern revision of an older story has been common in the US after The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, but it's interesting to see how the Japanese do it.

Yatterman Night is getting a lot of buzz now among anime fans in the West, so it must be hitting its mark. Just goes to show that Japan is not the only place where people notice how dark the world is right now.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcI9wAQaVO0[/youtube]

Yatterman Night is now streaming on Funimation.com and Hulu.

Yattah! at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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