ねらわれた学園, a.k.a. School in The Crosshairs or even Psychic School Wars is originally a sci-fi novel (1973) by Japanese writer Taku Mayumura; in time, its popularity sparked a ton of adaptations and derivatives, including several 80's dramas and two stand-alone films. Concerning 80's Japanese movies and its vast array of material, a phenomenon must be first recognized: while the ground-breaking wave of crime/exploitation/pinku eiga of the 70's remained within commercial success, a very genuine kind of film-making appears, the so-called Kadokawa movies. With delicate camera work, stunning sensibility for color, literary themes and the emerging アイドル (aidoru; generally charismatic young actresses/singers backed and promoted by the record and film industries) featuring in them, they came to represent an entire period of Japanese cinematography, influencing subsequent work on the field. Why so many literary themes and book adaptations? Well, Kadokawa is first and foremost an editorial: by developing their own filmmaking industry they created a magical loop of profit also tangled with the music industry.
Leaving the economic aspect of Kadowaka, Toei and others, the 80's were a great time for filmmaking: not only the Japanese economic miracle was at its peak, but previously achieved techniques were put at work under fantastic, imaginative themes. New forms of music and clothing also sparked the imagination, and the formal experimentation of the 70's was maturing inside many young directors. If those trends materialized in a Japanese director, that was 大林 宣彦 [Ōbayashi Nobuhiko]. Taking almost fairy-tale, feeble themes of troubled coming-of-age youth, using experimental cinematography and romantic soundtrack, his work represents not as much his zeitgeist as a powerful personal synthesis, with such aesthetic power you easily learn to recognize his films in just a second. In fact, many of the innovative aspects of his very personal adaptation of ねらわれた学園 (1981) can be found in his masterpiece ハウス (1977) [House]. Well, it can't be overstated the fact that almost everything Nobuhiko Obayashi has directed could be labeled so, even if only in technical terms. An example: just in the decade of the 80's he directed absolute classics, filled with style and personality: 転校生 (1982) [Exchange Students] 時をかける少女 (1983) [The Girl Who Leapt Through Time] 廃市 (1984) [The Deserted City]. These still get readapted, since Obayashi in fact shaped the nostalgia of a generation.
Now, let's ride the beast. You get Yuka Mitamura (Hiroko Yakushimaru) in the leading role of a exemplar student in a quite ordinary school. Ordinary if not for the theatrical, novelesque approach of Obayashi (including hand-painted backgrounds as you see above). Daughter of a loving family, she shares classroom with Kohji, a kendō practiser, the bookworm and over-the-top odious Mitamura Arikawa, and other unruly and nameless students. Among the adults only the rogue physical education teacher Yamagata is to be trusted. It seems to be a common slice-of-life but it gets weirder. Fast. Social critique mixed with science fiction and for-teenager novellas sparks when Yuka first manifests psychic powers which allow her to manipulate time and physics in order to avoid tragedy or helping her beloved ones to achieve success. These are manifested as alterations of color palettes, collage and velocity lines, in ways so ingenious and daring they hold as funny or charming and not a mess (the common destiny of amazing pre-CGI films such as Ken Russell's Altered States, released in 1980). It's almost as a moving comic, and it does not feel the need of taking itself seriously at any moment, moreover. 
As Yuka walks home after a kendō tournament, she meets a strange man (that's an understatement), who takes her on a psychedelic ride on his car. He assures her she can in fact become more than superhuman if only reunited with him, not wasting her powers in petty cheating at sports. The next day, ''mysterious transfer student'' Takasawa joins the classroom: even if from Hokkaidō, she knows everyone by name and quickly gains control of student organizations together with an enthusiastic Arikawa. Robotic, too perfect to be true and with a strong The Body Snatchers vibe, Arikawa has in fact more psychic power than Yuka, and uses it to enforce a rigid control, almost parodic of fascism, over the school. Her grip over both director and teachers, due to her unbelievable performance at tests, ensues a period of uniformity and ruthless studying. On a less childish note, she also tries to kill students and teachers (Yamagata included) who discredit the measures, using animals, causing car crashes or manipulating their own bodies. It does not take that much for her to reveal that she comes in representation of a higher power, a topos hiding under the innocent name of Eiko School, a private tuition class; her main objective is in fact abduct as many young people as possible under the guise of a group study before finals. Parents whose children have been kidnapped simply answer ''Study should be like war'', a parodic yet in origin real aim of the ruthless Japanese educational system.
Takasawa's plans revealed, both Yuka and Kohji end up cornered by attacks disguised as misfortunes and waiting to be abducted; what very well could have been ridiculous and corny gets powerfully enhanced by Obayashi's direction, showing phantasmagoric masses of people walking the foggy night to arrive at Eiko School, and the superb acting of Hiroko Yakushimaru really enhances the result. This section of the film, meditative and subtle for a movie about teen psych warfare, does last until Kohji decides to get his kendō bokken and search for the mysterious place. If you have read until now, you may think you have an idea of the kind of place that is; well, you don't.
At this moment, shit hits the fan, pretty much. The ''zone'' happens to come from Venus, and its ruler is, of course, the mysterious man who contacts Yuka at the middle of the film. It is interesting the fact that Kohji, who is televised on the frame of an empty painting on Yuka's room, first crosses an arabic-style door; apparently that kind of architecture (with obvious psychedelic additions) was deemed striking enough to be chosen as the entry of an extraterrestrial plane. There, the kidnapped students are under the rule of both Takasawa and the cosmic person (all of them in quite the outfits). This confrontation is interesting at some level; granted, while the delivery is simple and poetic, it of course follows the common trope of alien invasion or psychic control: join us or die. Settled the simple premise, the daring aesthetic of the ''duel of feelings'' between Yuka and the man (or the Universe, as you take it) is off the charts: in fact it barely looks like a movie. As if filmed in the interior of a kaleidoscope, the effects are unreal and remember: it's 1981. Mosts of these are analog effects, crafted by superposing, scratching, altering the physical support of the film and distorting images by means of lens and optics. You even get some good lines too, as Yuka gets to resolve the psychological stress around the future she has been hiding from everyone, parents included, along the film. Does so by means of accepting the human life of the uncertain, as opposed to the rigid control of the others, too petrified by reason, control and uniformity. Of course, Obayashi is not talking about cosmic invaders, really, but about youth and adulthood: that's why this film has survived instead of being solely a bizarre sci-fi concerning aliens.
Having watched it for the second time, I realized a second important thing about ねらわれた学園. While it follows a trope one would call archetypical of the science fiction and fantasy genres (that is, that of ''lost in wonderland'': a magical realm opens in the middle of routine existence, one of the forgotten, the unconscious, the impossible that must be abolished to regain order) it actually reverses it completely. Yes, the arrival of the psychic entity alters the apparently quotidian existence of Yuka and her classmates by granting her powers and disrupting their life, but its values are in fact an over-exaggeration of the grayness and obsession with performance at the heart of the Japanese culture, and have the support of everyone around the students. So to speak, the ultra-ordinary falls out from space, and the journey of Yuka as Alice is to retain her youthfulness (that is, her humanness) and yes, expel the otherworldly realm but in order to establish the chaos of both puberty and the real characteristics of life. Not too far-fetched if one considers the many movies in which Obayashi portrays the intergenerational tension, never making it the center of the script but always in a new entertaining, beautiful, surprising way.
Nobuhiko Obayashi, born in 1938, is, as I'm writing this, still with us. Lived through the peak of the bombardment of Japan during the Pacific War, old enough as a child to carry within a vivid memory of the artillery and then the ruin, the poverty of the postwar years. Now, he's 80 years old and has stage-four lung cancer. Yet, he has been working on a final project, Hanagatami (apparently released on 2017, but lacking DVD support and therefore subtitles), and traveling to various festivals. He jokes he will probably die soon, as dreamer, inconformist and antiauthoritarian as the characters in his movies.
Comments
Post a Comment