© TV Iwate, Group TAC.

Spring and Chaos: The Life and Times of Kenji Miyazawa.
TV movie, 1996. Director: Shoji Kawamori. 57 minutes. Price & format: DVD $29.99 audio English & Japanese; subtitles Chinese, English, French, German, Korean, Spanish. Distributor: Tokyopop Anime.

Kenji Miyazawa (1896-1933) is today one of Japan's most revered authors, though he was practically unknown in his lifetime. Popular director Kawamori's tribute to him has the emotional impact of Frédéric Back's 1987 adaptation of The Man Who Planted Trees; of introducing the viewer to a man who, although generally unknown, left the world a better place for his contributions to it. "Misunderstood genius" is a simplistic summary, though if Kawamori's portrait is accurate, one can also sympathize with Miyazawa's exasperated father and associates; he was too impractical to survive in a materialistic world. The film covers Miyazawa's life during roughly his graduation as a geologist, his failure to sell his allegorical poems and fables to the commercial literary market, and his career as a teacher at a rural agricultural high school, where his rhapsodic lectures about the indivisibility of agronomy, geology, astronomy, paleontology, and all life and matter (a synthesis of Buddhist philosophy and news of scientific discoveries about atomic and molecular nature), amused his students but gave him a reputation as a fool or lunatic. Miyazawa is also shown as being deeply influenced by the slow decline and death of a beloved younger sister; alienation from an equally idealistic best friend who makes a "practical" decision to fit into Japan's growing militaristic society; and his rejection by reactionary peasants to whom he attempts to introduce modern farming practices. Kawamori presents this life story in a non-linear manner faithful to Miyazawa's constant shifting between reality and illusion: showing the characters as anthropomorphized cats (one of Miyazawa's most popular fables is The Cat Office); constant time-shifting back and forth between major events in his life; switching between art styles and animation techniques from traditional cel animation to "raw" CGI to chalk drawing (very like The Man Who Planted Trees) and others. There are brief glimpses of images in Miyazawa's imagination that Japanese viewers will recognize as characters from his best-known works like Night on the Galactic Railroad (the inspiration for Leiji Matsumoto's popular sci-fi manga and anime series, Galaxy Express 999), The Earth God and the Fox and The Twin Stars. These will be meaningless to most Americans, though Spring and Chaos is inspirational enough to encourage one to seek them out. (The Japanese title is Ihatov Genso - Kenji no Haru (Ihatov Illusions - Kenji's Springtime from Miyazawa's fantasy dreamland of Ihatov). This one-hour TV movie commissioned for the centennial of his birth, produced by Group TAC and broadcast December 14, 1996, won a Japan Culture and Art Foundation Award and the 23rd Cultural Broadcasting Foundation Award for Best TV Entertainment Program.

Vampire Princess Miyu. V.1, Unearthly Kyoto & A Banquet of Marionettes. V.2, Fragile Armor & Frozen Time.
OAV series (4 episodes), 1988-1989. Director: Toshihiro Hirano. 50 minutes each. Price & format: DVD bilingual $24.95 each. Distributor: AnimEigo.

Visual allusions to Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire are to be expected, but look for the scene in which two students in a school library discuss the advantage to vampirism of never growing older; a vampire will "live" forever. The camera flashes briefly on a book; the title is not shown but the author is Michael Ende. Ende is, of course, author of The Neverending Story. Vampire Princess Miyu was one of the first OAV productions from the Anime International Company studio; four half-hour episodes released between July 1988 and April 1989 (and one of the earliest anime releases in America, on both subtitled and dubbed videos by AnimEigo in May and June 1992). It was somewhat of a husband-wife collaboration between director Hirano and character designer & animation director Narumi Kakinouchi, who also wrote and drew the original Vampire Princess Miyu manga. (Kakinouchi specializes in vampire cartoon-art novels with heavy romantic/psychosexual overtones, which are often reviewed with terms like "elegant" and "vampire chic".) The pair avoided the problems of a low-budget production with an intriguing story that does not need animation-intensive scenes: intelligent conversations, emotional conflicts, moral dilemmas, a slow buildup of terror in shadowy, motionless settings, and clever references to the vampire classics. (Miyu, the young vampire girl, is quietly amused by the whole Dracula stereotype.)

Himiko Se, a psychic detective/spiritualist, learns that Earth is surrounded by a supernatural dimension called the Dark. The age-old barrier separating Earth from the Dark is weakening and hungry ghosts called Shinma are breaking through to prey on humanity. Miyu, a centuries-old vampire permanently frozen in mid-adolescence, has been assigned to enforce the barrier by capturing the Shinma and returning them to the Dark. This has the side-effect (incidental to Miyu; all-important to Himiko) of saving humans from being devoured by the Shinma. But Miyu herself needs human blood; although, as she points out, she does not take so much that her victims die. Himiko is tormented over whether she should aid Miyu as the lesser of two evils, or try to slay them all. Her dilemma is complicated by the psychological problems of the Shinmas' victims, which cause them to embrace their predators willingly. Aina is a sick young girl whose life is saved by massive blood transfusions, giving her the delusion that she has become a vampire. Kei Yuzuki is a "golden boy" high school senior, handsome and rich, who is bewitched by a Shinma succubus. Or is he stalking her, desperate to escape his future life which has been planned for him in rigid detail by his domineering family? Miyu herself, for all her condescension towards "mere" humans and their weaknesses, seems more envious than contemptuous of the mortal girls who will mature beyond adolescence into full womanhood.