The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii: Fantasy, Technology and Politics

If there's any director who deserves his own biography its Mamoru Oshii. A lot of directors make their mark by having a visual style, but Oshii seems to be one of the few that actually has his own language. A fact that stood out in sharp relief when I watched "Innocence." There is a distinctive voice to his work that will probably become more accepted and understood by future generations. In the meantime, this handy book, "Cinema of Mamoru Oshii" is a comprehensive probe behind the symbolic language that underscores all of Oshii's films. A perfect example of how well this book disects Oshii's cinematic language is the description of how the characters in his films rarely make eye contact. They are frequently facing away from each other. This was overtly done in the end of Innocence when Motoko's body is facing in the same direction as Batou, but actual eye contact is still avoided as Batou's placement is a few feet past Motoko's. It was almost as if Oshii was saying, "this is as close as these two will get." An interview excerpt in this book confirmed that this design of placement was to exude a sense of lonliness in the characters -- an attribute that shows also in the way Oshii directs the dialog of his characters.The chapters are conviently segregated by film, and so you journey through Oshii's body of work in chronological order. This allows the reader to pick up on symbolic patterns that migrate from film to film, while also seeing how Oshii's seems to broaden his understanding of his own voice with each film.The downside to this book is that language is, at times, pretentious as it tries too hard to be academic. The author writes in the same voice as all books on "high-art", using expensive jargon that might alienate those readers who are looking for something of a more casual read. Not that this book needed to be "dumbed down" but that the same intelligble assesments could have been done in a writing style that is more accessible. Having said that, I understand why the author chose to write in this tone as her objective seems to be placing Oshii's work in the eye of Western Academians who would otherwise not take the anime style seriously.I think this is a definite buy for those who fans of Oshii's work and want to receive a critical perspective that wouldn't otherwise be found on the web.

As the author of the other book in English about Oshii (which came out two years before this one), I was initially looking forward to reading "Cinema of Mamoru Oshii." However, there were a number of passages in the book that gave me pause. For example, here are our respective introductions to the OVA "Twilight Q 2":"The Twilight Q OVA series was originally intended to highlight thestories and talents of up-and-coming anime directors through a seriesof unconnected, imaginative short stories, but the project lasted onlytwo episodes. The title of the series can be read as an homage to twoinfluential television shows: The Twilight Zone and Ultra Q, amid-1960s' series that can be described as a cross between a Japaneseversion of The Outer Limits-style science fiction and a Toho monsterfilm. Although the anime series was in color, the allusion to these twoblack and white television programs is indicative of the sense of noirand mystery aimed for in Twilight Q."The first episode of Twilight Q was directed by Tomomi Mochizuki, whowould go on to direct the first Kimagure Orange Road film (1988) andStudio Ghibli's Ocean Waves (Umi ga Kikoeru, 1993), and featuredcharacter designs by Akemi Takada (who later did the character designsfor Patlabor.) Released in February of 1987, this episode involves agirl who finds a mysterious camera on a beach that contains pictures ofher with a man she has never met. Eventually the girl finds herselftraveling forward and backward in time, leading to a rather open-endedconclusion. Oshii's "sequel," released in August of 1987, treats theidea of reality as similarly plastic, although the ending is far moresatisfactory. The second episode of Twilight Q garnered more attentiondue to Oshii's involvement but the series did not ultimately catch onwith the anime-buying public.""...The experiences of the detective in the film are drawn from thelife of Oshii's father, who was a frequently-out-of-work privatedetective..."from  Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii  by Brian Ruh, p. 61-62"Initially designed to provide an arena wherein budding directors couldexhibit their skills through a collection of unrelated narratives, theproject did not develop beyond its second installment. The title echoestwo popular black-and-white television programs of the 1960s, TheTwilight Zone and Ultra Q, with wich it shares a penchant for the noirand for grotesque distortion.""The first episode was directed by Tomomi Mochizuki (Kimagure OrangeRoad, 1988 and Ocean Waves, 1993) and revolves around the character ofa girl who finds a camera on the beach which turns out to containimages of herself in the company of a stranger, and the startsjourneying back and forth in time. The episode written and directed byOshii elaborated Mochizuki's conception of time as a markedly elacticdimension, concurrently bringing into play generic and graphic motifscharacteristic of classic science-fiction cinema and literature, aswell as autobiographical elements. The portrayal of the film'sdetective, in particular, is based largely on Oshii's memories of hisfather as a frequently unemployed private investigator."from "The Cinema of Mamoru Oshii" by Dani Cavallaro, p. 83Draw your own conclusions.

Why pay $15 more than "Stray Dog of Anime" for only a difference of 16 pages?