Darker Than Black

A few years back...well, at the dawn of the new millenium, anyways, it was possible to look at Japanese anime as the ground under which a new way of storytelling might grow. Certainly a new style was sprouting there, what with shows like COWBOY BEBOP, NEON GENESIS EVANGELIAN, VISION OF ESCAFLOWNE, REVOLUTIONARY GIRL UTENA, FOOLY COOLY and THE BIG O. But we are nearly ten years away from that profusion of narrative innovation, and the world of postmodern storytelling is looking bleak as can be. New anime series are leaping up with regularity, but none are filling the void left by these turn-of-the-millenium wonders.

These now older shows provided fertile ground for new innovations in narrative. For one thing, none of them quite stuck in what appeared to be their respective genres. COWBOY BEBOP is a perfect example; it was a space opera of sorts, but it drew inspiration from beatnik culture, 70s kung fu films, yakuza movies and Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass. Rather than the exploratory fervor of Star Trek, BEBOP's space odyssey had a self-annihilating fatalist drive towards extinction. The show ends quietly, rather than with a bang. Most of the supporting characters have simply wandered off by the end, and rather than an our way of life being obliterated, a la AKIRA, one man meets the destiny he has sought hard to arrange. The stakes are small - or, more accurately, they are personal.
BEBOP may be the smallest-scale story of these large, 26+ episode series - although UTENA, for all its harping about an "absolute destiny apocalypse," ends with one girl missing from a school - our hero, albeit, but a small event in the scope of the universe around us. Those shows that sought to end things with a bigger bang did so in surprising new ways. No doomsday timer in FOOLY COOLY; rather, a building that looks like a giant iron is made to begin "ironing" a town full of eccentrics by a giant robot hand. "Well," says one on-looker to the havoc; "it always looked like an iron." Meanwhile, THE BIG O ends with a wild stripping-away of everything that seemed real about the show. In the end a giant robot is walking across the world turning it into a soundstage, and lights are falling from the heavens. Rather more metaphorical than AKIRA ever managed, with its explosions inside an Olympic stadium.

Contemporary anime has taken some cues from the successful turn-of-the-century shows, but now the tables seem to be turning. While the older product seemed prime to replace live action movies as a fount of new storytelling modes, modern anime seems to want to emulate old genres and styles more slavishly. The animation is definitely more sophisticated than it was in 2000; but the storytelling has taken a back seat.

DARKER THAN BLACK, a new series from Studio Bones (they animated the similarly ambitious and problematic WOLF'S RAIN a while ago), displays all of the virtues and problems of modern anime. It has intriguing elements that seem to spring from the late-90s, adventurous anime, but it tries to wrap them up like a Dirty Harry sequel - convincing us that all will be right in the world, and that things will return to equilibrium (note that the original DIRTY HARRY has the cop throwing away his badge in despair - yet the sequels saw fit for him to fish the badge out of the drink and put it on again like nothing happened). Many of the plots are very clever and passionate, but the story goes for AKIRA-like bombast at its finish, and relinquishes its most impressive assets: namely, modest, meticulous character detail.

Like almost every adult-oriented anime ever, DARKER THAN BLACK begins in the wake of an apocalypse. Two gates have mysteriously appeared on the globe: a "Heaven Gate" in South America and a "Hell Gate" in Tokyo, Japan. Behind the gates, parts of cities are obliterated wastelands, fatal to humans. Shortly after the appearance of the gates, a new species of humanoids began to appear all over the world. They looked and acted basically like humans, but these new people, called "Contractors," had special powers they could employ, for which they payed a high price.

The series excels here. The contractors have fantastic powers, which are explicated with beautiful animation and clever storytelling. And their penance for these powers is more fascinating than the powers themselves. A teleporter must arrange stones in order on a tabletop after each teleportation. A man who can turn liquids to stone has to smoke a cigarette (which he hates) after every time he employs the power. His partner, an MI-6 agent who looks like a new-future version of Coffy, has to drink a beer - which she simply loves - after every time she manipulates the weather.

These contractors are a secret and secretive group. After normal humans see their powers, they erase those humans' memories of the encounter. However, the contractors aren't united for any common goal. Able to suppress most human emotion, they work mostly as assassins; wetworks agents for the CIA, for MI-6, for terrorists, or for one of the mysterious "syndicates" - secret societies to rival Fantomas and Irma Vep's Vampires. One such syndicate employs a sinister contractor known as "The Black Reaper," an acrobatic character in a harlequin mask and black coat, who electrocutes with a touch. He is sort of our main character in the series, and he works against the grain, killing contractors without remorse but trying to save humans caught up in the contractors' criminal underworld.

The "Black Reaper" is a young Chinese immigrant named Li Shengshun. In the beginning of the story he stumbles onto one of the show's clever deviancies from convention: he moves into a student apartment building filled with international students. While he barely interacts with these people, other members of the cast build rapport with these neighbors. Indeed, part of the problem with the series as a whole is that it takes all of 26 episodes for Li Shengshun to warm up to any of the other characters. At that point they are all laying their lives on the line in a very confused and dispiriting "end-of-the-world" scenario that rolls back all of the series innovations to expose a very conservative core.

The primary strength of the show is character. We come to know and genuinely care about many of the members of the supporting cast, from a blusterous private eye named Kurosawa Gai and his cosplay-clothed young assistant (the show's main comic relief) to a talking cat with a rich, sonorous voice and a head that can connect to computer interfaces. The characters who we wait on most are Li Shengshun and his medium, a seemingly blind goth-garbed girl named Lin. These two crack their veneers so slowly that the wait almost isn't worth it, and in the meantime we come to identify closely with the police officer who is pursuing Li, the human liason between Li and his syndicate, the talking cat, the police officer's three assistants, the owner of a noodle shop and his daughter, and the various contractors we meet along the way.

The series is composed of a series of 2-episode story arcs, many of which focus on other characters besides Li. One of the most effective deals with Lin's past before she became the practically inert medium for Li's intelligence-gathering. Lin, it turns out, was a European child studying piano with a melancholy music professor. The professor secretly loved Lin's mother, and when Lin's father died in a plane crash, the mother tried to make a romantic connection with the professor. Lin entered the room right at that moment, and tragedy resulted. Now the professor has arrived in Tokyo, looking for Lin. Meanwhile, two contractors have been dispatched to remove Lin from Li's team, and Li races to stop them. The contractors in this episode are a fascinating pair - the best, in fact, in the series. One appears to be an opera singer, and the other looks like a Charles-Dickens-vagabond. The mismatched pair spend most of their two episodes driving a car cross-country to find Lin, and they engage in some very droll conversations that play out like the talk between Sam Jackson and John Travolta in PULP FICTION. By the end of this tirade of blankface conversation, we know enough about these two contractors that their deaths at The Black Reapers hands at the end of the episodes genuinely hurts. This gentle buildup of character is the primary success of the show, and in many cases characters remain in the show and turn up again and again until near the end. And this brings us to that end, and to the horrible failing of the show.

After we've built this network of engrossing characters, and watched them play out their lives in various small, dramatic set pieces, the series comes together in the last three episodes and plunges head-first into a doomsday scenario. The scenario itself couldn't be more convoluted; suffice to say, it involves the government of Japan overrun by syndicate goons and crazy professors who plan to aim a laser cannon at the hellgate and refract its energy through a translucent "meteor shard" in order to eradicate all the contractors in the world in one fell swoop. Could this really happen, wonders the very appealing police officer who has been tracking Li Shengshun. "We've done tests," insists one of the cackling scientists. Really? I thought to myself, my primitive bullshit detector finally flagging, how could they have done that? Next I found myself wondering why the conspirators would be telling the police officer any of their plan. Everything she has done in the show has been upright and unquestionably humane. Did they actually believe she would join them in a secret cabal? But this is only one of the strands of plot in the show that gets squeezed and bent out of shape to accommodate the doomsday scenario of the last few episodes. In the final minutes of the show we learn that Li Shengshun has never been a contractor at all. Really? I thought to myself, primitive bullshit detector hitting the wall. Then how did he do all that cool electrocuting and swinging around on ziplines? Yes, the nominal hero swings everywhere on ziplines. He's like real-world Spiderman in that regard. It is one of the coolest things about the show. Note to anime writers: build a show entirely comprised of zipline action sequences. Maybe a hit? We shall see.

Simply put, a conservative compulsion on the part of the producers or writers or director just torpedoes this show. Most of the episode arcs are quite compelling, and one feels both a drive to know more and a real reticence to leave the proceedings for some "better world" at the end of the apocalypse rainbow. Li Shengshun's past is quite compelling, but it is never exposited in a satisfactory way. We see him involved in a massive contractor battle in South America, which we are told leads to an incredible explosion that decimates most of Brazil. Then in the final episode we actually see scenes of that battle. We tense, hoping for revelation, but the scenes are handled so cryptically that nothing is made clear. We are given to understand that after the events of this battle, Li Shengshun has somehow carried his sister in his own body, without being aware - he has spent the entire series searching for his sister. I would have liked some more practical information here. What the hell actually happened? How could he be unaware that he was harboring his sister's psyche, and that the contractor-like powers he possessed actually belonged to his sister? You want to stop the series here and rewind it and tell it again, the way one can intervene in a lucid dream. Wouldn't it have been more in keeping with the wonderful, small scope of the series if Li Shengshun's sister simply disappeared somewhere real and plausible? Couldn't his actual search for his sister be metaphor enough, without making it a completely metaphorical search for the sister inside his own psyche? Psychological realism has been the lynchpin of the show up until this point - we care for the characters simply because we can identify with them and believe in them. This pseudo-Freudian breakdown of the show's dramatic crux harkens back to an earlier era of Gundam-style shows where people learn that the real key to defeating the impending apocalypse lies in believing in themselves and unlocking blocked parts of their psyches through introspection and teamwork. Frankly, this crap was always happening in 80s anime, and one part of the ending to NEON GENESIS EVANGELIAN that felt alarmingly right was the parody of this self-realization; in EVANGELIAN, this psychological breakthrough means nothing; the physical threats in the show have all been defeated two episodes prior, and the unlocking of the hero's buried ability to think positively about himself is pointless even more than it is rendundant - and this is given special irony (as a parody of all those more complacent, cookie-cutter plots of previous shows) in that the hero didn't win the day with this new positive self-image, but rather, with his recessive, negative self-image of before.

I have another axe to grind, in that above the limits of other film and television anime has often been the source of genuinely-felt vicarious romantic feelings: one aches for romance between Roger and Dorothy in THE BIG O, just as one shirks at every awkward sexual feint or parry in Fooly Cooly. And where in most modern film is there a more fully explicated romance than in the manic early-2000s anime HIS AND HER CIRCUMSTANCES, in which a teenage couple goes through every permutation of a romance, from shy crush to mature relationship evolving past pure compulsion and dependency, before the final credits roll? DARKER THAN BLACK builds a tense pre-romantic interplay between Li Shengshun and the cop who is chasing him. By the end of the show, the cop knows Li Shengshun so well that she is able to identify him as the "Black Reaper" on a grainy video image. The romantic tension draws toward the hot and the heavy...but it never gets there. In the end the cop and the killer, the heroine and the hero, never meet. Conservative convention bows its head and drools all over the story. The cop and the killer can never be together. I would have liked, just for this once, for the story to play out in a less gone-over vein. The cop is just as much in danger from her superiors at the end of the story as Li Shengshun is - and incidentally it is suggested that their employers are in fact the very same people. Why couldn't they just lay their cards on the table with each other and try to make things work together? Maybe in South America, or what's left of it? I was reminded of the end of David Cronenberg's EASTERN PROMISES, where Naomi Watts and Viggo Mortensen reveal their attraction to each other, but remain in their cloistered worlds, separate from one another. Why couldn't they have given love a chance? I wondered. Then the story might have become truly and naturally dangerous. It's not as if people don't generally take chances on dangerous relationships in real life. DARKER THAN BLACK stands in just the same sphere as EASTERN PROMISES; filled with promise that never delivers. And, like EASTERN PROMISES, which is also full of spies and double-agents, DARKER THAN BLACK plays its cards so close to its chest that when the world is blowing up at the end of the story, you long for people to just throw down with important confessions and revelations. The end is nigh! Why couldn't they start telling each other how they felt? Or, if they were never going to do it anyway, why bring the pot to such a boil?

Part of me longs for the impossible here, of course. I want the romance, the danger, the confessions of true feelings...without the end-of-the-world scenario. The show that mixes that off-kilter cocktail will be one for the ages. As it is, DARKER THAN BLACK is beautiful, controlled, well-explicated...until the ending, where it jettisons all its slow-building momentum and swaps out its intimate, well-balanced plot in exchange for AKIRA's exploding stadiums. It's time for anime writers to turn back the clock and take a good look at 1999, when something new was possible.