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Dead Leaves
Insanity that redefines insane 
Studio: Production IG/Manga Entertainment Format: 1 OVA Released: 1/17/2004 Written by: Face 
Dead Leaves is an unsubtle exercise in esoteric filmmaking. Hiroyuki Imaishi, the director, wants us to believe that there is something significant underneath his colorful veneer, but really, there isn't. Things happen. People die. Guns are fired. Procreation occurs. None of it actually matters. The setting isn't important, the characters are useless, the only reason this movie exists is to demonstrate how fast, how insane, and how pointless a fantastically animated movie can be.
Don't get me wrong. While I might be suggesting that scribbling with a handful of crayons has the same impact as this OVA, I'm not suggesting everyone will hate it. After all, Dead Leaves is action-packed, exciting, frenetic; the pacing never takes even a second to catch its breath. Within the first five minutes alone, dozens of police officers are slaughtered, skulls are crushed, windshields are smashed, and a T.V. head-ed man along with a red-eyed woman are transported to the moon. If that strikes you as stupid, I couldn't agree more. But wait, let me explain that just a little bit. Dead Leaves is about two people. One of them is Pandy, a cold-blooded, self-possessed, femme fatale with a hatchet man's crazed agenda. The second is Retro, a man with a T.V. head and a never-ending supply of spunk and stupid. The movie opens as these two misfits awake in a barren utilitarian landscape, naked, and with no memory. Oddly, they both brush off the situation comfortably, and decide it would be a great idea to rampage a city for a pair of clothes. Before we have any idea what's going on, they kill a man, steal a car, and race through the city on a high-speed chase with an army of identical looking policemen hot on their trail. After senselessly obliterating half the police force on the planet Earth, they are captured, accused, convicted and shipped off to the moon to serve their sentence in a beyond the max of maximum-security prisons. In this prison, for the next forty-five minutes, we witness a variety of situations that ultimately amount to little more than dead bodies and empty casings. At least it's not any longer.  Dead Leaves bolts through the entire remaining duration, inexplicably recounting a mass prison uprising amidst a slew of random cartoon violence. Meanwhile, we are constantly wondering: Who are these people? How did they lose their memory? To be completely honest, none of this ends up being of consequence because the fact of the matter is, for better or worse, Dead Leaves does not care who its characters are. Everything in this movie is expendable. I don't know if that was actually the intent behind all of this madness, however the result is a story, a plot, and a cast that really are only included because they have to be. I think if Imaishi had a choice, he'd have formatted this OVA to be a fifty minute fight scene in an outer space bathroom where everyone is naked, horny, half robot, deformed, and pregnant. It would be like an orgy of pre-pubescent fantasies.
Normally, this empty, vacant, devoid, skeleton of a movie would bother me endlessly. But it doesn't--at least not that much. The continuous stream of hyperactive assaults on my senses kept me focused on the screen long enough to forget, intermittently, that I was actually watching next to nothing. I don't know what it was... it might have been the explosive bits of destruction, the rivers of blood, it might have even been the anal pump, or maybe the thirty-minute conception to death of a baby (yeah, insane). I'm not entirely sure. All that I know is, something about this incredibly bloody, crude, immature movie kept me interested long enough to sit through it and, thankfully, maintain my sanity. * * 1/2 (Below Average) Posted: Friday, October 13, 2006
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