Dead Leaves

50 minutes
Japanese/English
English Subtitles
Released: 08/28/2004
Reviewed: 06/27/2006

Whenever I see something like Dead Leaves the very core of my soul blossoms, it stays for a single moment in the crystaline purity of hope, but then it immediately wilts. Somewhere deep down inside me, in my heart of hearts, I hope that Japan can replicate the feat of FLCL and actually manage to make a 'wild n' crazy' show that has a person and doesn't totally suck biscuits. I hope, I really do, but whenever it comes down to it... they never get it right. Take Abenobashi Magical Shopping Arcade, for example. That show might as well be screaming in your ear 'Hi! We wanted to copy Furi Kuri, but we couldn't figure out how and now instead we just made this crap!'

So too is it with Dead Leaves. It tries to capitalize on the success of things like FLCL and Excel Saga without realizing really what made those shows good. Well... FLCL at least, some things about the latter are probably better left unsaid.

Pandy and Retro are the unfortunate victims of nominative determinism. Pandy is so-called because she has a ring around her eye and Retro because his head is, like, an old TV or something. Consider this like the snap of a twig that alerts the hunter's prey in the forest. From this moment onward you should assume the persona of the wary gazelle as far as Dead Leaves is concerned. No matter how hard you think about it, you will not be able to find a reason why this man has a TV on his head. It's probably better not asking, as any forays into the quest for truth are going to be rudely rebuked, possibly driving you insane in the process like an eldricht horror from the pages of Lovecraft.

Pandy and Retro, who awaken (naked) under the auspices of that time-honored plot device: amnesia, decide to go on a killing spree because it feels good. Soon, despite their chic attire and formidable propensity towards violence, they are captured and blasted off in a rocket ship to a prison on the moon, a sattelite which has certainly seen better days. With the moon in the condition it's in it's seriously a surprise that the Earth hasn't collapsed under the oppresive weight of its own tides, or perhaps just been meteored into a barren husk by the constant pelting of displaced moon rocks brought in by the planet's gravity.

But really, I'm getting too deep. Nobody cares what having an exploded moon would do to the Earth, and I shouldn't expect them to. To really understand Dead Leaves's mentality then you have to sink down to its level. There is no purpose in a show like Dead Leaves, and on the surface that's okay. I would argue that many of the cartoons I watch have no purpose, or at best a dubious one. If you think there's any reason for Bubblegum Crisis 2040 to be around that doesn't involve punching the hell out of robots then you are sorrowfully mistaken. The problem is that a show with no purpose is an exceedingly hard thing to do. I would happily watch a show with an exploded moon...

You know, if it was actually woth my time to watch.

Dead Leaves is most certainly not. The only thing worth watching in this movie is how the action never stops. One the surface I want to believe that's a good thing, but once again the cruel truth of reality comes crashing in. When the action is so haphazard and sloppy I find myself wondering why I should be watching it at all. A pointless show with lots of frenetic energy is a difficult beast to wrangle, because you have to understand that slapping thirty thousand guns on the screen and firing them all at once isn't art, it's just distracting. It's a lot like putting DMX or Steven Segal in a movie and then pulling the camera in really close and making tons of fast cuts to make it look like the rapper/fat actor actually knows Kung Fu. This effect was also experienced recently in Final Fantasy: Advent Children, it is no more proficiently accomplished here.

While I can't hate Dead Leaves in the same way I hate Advent Children it's not as far away from that crap-fest as any sane piece of cinema should be. In that respect the only saving grace of this movie is that it isn't nearly as pretentious about what it does. At least Dead Leaves knows it's dumb, and it abuses that fact for all it's worth. The problem is this: knowing you're dumb is all well and good, but the next step is for its creators to figure out how to stop being dumb. There's promise in something like Dead Leaves, it's just a damn shame it's squashed like a bug right out of the gate.