fish 8/10/17
Thoughts on “Kaiba” (2008 Masaaki Yuasa Anime)
I gained an itch to watch Kaiba after falling in love with Masaaki Yuasa, one of the world’s premier animation directors. I had earlier seen The Tatami Galaxy, Mind Game, Kick-Heart, and Ping Pong: The Animation. This is a man who has a brilliant mind, a brilliant heart, and a stretched sense of humor. Kaiba has not only convinced me of these points even more, but elevated my respect for Yuasa further than I thought was possible. Although Kaiba doesn’t have a perfect story, it is one of the most impressive anime I have seen.
In the world of Kaiba, memories can be extracted like liquids from people’s minds and placed into different bodies, or just stored for the future. The protagonist (seen above in his original body) finds himself with no memories of his own and goes out to find them. Meanwhile, we discover the economic, ethical, and social consequences of a civilization where mind, body, identity, are no longer solid concepts.
Yuasa and his studio’s greatest accomplishment with Kaiba is the incredible ground they cover with this premise. One minute we’re watching Being John Malkovich, the next might be Soylent Green, or Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. It has an incredible variety while still containing a consistent universe.
While everything we consider inherent to human life is degraded, the stories told have a surprising emotional intensity. There’s tragedy around every corner, with some episodes leaving me devastated. This tends to come as a surprise to most, given the colorful and plushy look to Kaiba’s art. When looking at these charming designs, you wouldn’t think that they would have sex, suffer from treason, or murder in cold blood.
The best comparison I can give of such stylistic-dissonance between art and story is Art Spiegelman’s holocaust-memoir Maus, which is told through anthropomorphic animals to represent different races. There are dozens of brilliant reasons Art decided to adopt the iconography of classic cartoons to tell his father’s story, but one of the most apt is that it allows him to make the drawings simpler. If he naturalistically depicted Nazis bashing children’s heads into walls or people burning alive in ovens, readers would be too shocked by the horror of the image and not think about its meaning. The video game Overgrowth also uses anthropomorphic animals for similar reasons.
I can see very similar ideas in Kaiba’s artwork. You cannot realistically depict chemicals being directly implanted to a brain through a hole in someone’s head, bodies stitched together from pieces of other bodies (as seen above), or melting someone and having their remains sucked up by a robot vacuum-cleaner without there being problems of believability or overindulgence.
Another motivation, and one common with Yuasa’s approaches to the visual design of his anime, is that keeping the designs as simple as possible makes complex animation and scenes easier. Yuasa is particularly famous for his love of shots that feature the camera moving within (or even without) linear perspective, which are difficult to pull off on a typical anime budget.
At this point I must reveal that most of the praise I give to Kaiba refer primarily to its first seven episodes, and sadly not all twelve. There are two distinct parts to Kaiba’s story. The first half are mostly world-building and self-contained narratives that prepare you for the narrative, and the second half is the full-fledged story that was being set up in the background.
You may have personal preferences over which of the two you prefer, but I found the amnesiac protagonist exploring a surreal universe and discovering the suffering of those who lack agency over their minds and bodies MUCH more invigorating than the actual story the smaller stories were building up to. Too much occurs within those final five episodes, a lot of the scope we see earlier in the series is lost, and the time-jumping to get all the necessary plot-points in is upsetting.
Maybe if Yuasa had more than 12 episodes to tell his story it would have been paced better, but the emotional peaks of its conclusion would still fail to meet the emotions brought by a girl who has to sell her memories and body to feed her family, or seeing two people falling in love despite both being in the bodies of their opposite gender.
But regardless, I am glad that Kaiba exists, and that a man of brilliance like Masaaki Yuasa is consistently given the chance to expand where narrative-anime can go. I most definitely plan to continue exploring Yuasa’s anime in the future.
