Dead Leaves

Retro and Pandy wake on Earth naked and with no memory. They steal food, are caught, and are sent to a prison on the moon called Dead Leaves. They start a riot the moment they arrive. It runs fifty two minutes and nearly all of it is fighting. Hiroyuki Imaishi directs for Production I.G. The form matters more than the subject. The lines are thick, the framing constantly breaks, the characters change proportion from scene to scene, and the backgrounds are often a single field of colour. The narrative is deliberately impossible to follow; instead of telling a story the film generates speed. Imaishi went on to make Gurren Lagann at Gainax and then Kill la Kill at Trigger, the studio he founded. Both carry the exaggeration, velocity and scale attempted here, and Dead Leaves is regarded as the first plain statement of that style. The humour is crude and deliberately juvenile: sex jokes, toilet humour and gratuitous violence one after another. Because of its length and limited distribution it never reached a wide audience, but its influence in animation circles was large. Who it is for: viewers who like experimental animation, extremes of style and the independent anime strand of the 2000s. Who it is not for: the story cannot be followed, the characters are almost nothing, and the visual density is unbearable for some.