On the blandest level, Dead Leaves might be seen as an animated example of Japanese-style super-warriors battling for a rare prize -- in this case a gene that gives supernatural fighting powers. But even on this level, the narrative development that Western audiences have come to expect is consistently and consciously lacking. The narrative structure is loose and episodic in the extreme, and even dialogue is brief, truncated, and systematically sidelined by the mood modulations, (and sometimes just by the loudness), of the soundtrack. In the place of narrative structure and character development Dead Leaves gives us a series of implacable uncontrollable violent shifts, a jarring chain-reaction of perceptual shocks and sudden interruptions. Unlike Japanese haiku which aims to create a moment of heightened sensitivity in which time becomes irrelevant and one connects with the heart of reality, these visual dislocations are vitalized by a noticeable anti-aesthetic which aims to keep the viewer immersed in a violent fragmented surface. This aim is achieved by the relentless breakneck speed at which images change. This anime runs at full-throttle, and its 50 minute running time feels much longer. In fact, 50 minutes of Dead Leaves is a fairly overwhelming and exhausting experience.

Dead Leaves’ anti-aesthetic is not only noticeable in the sheer physicality of its rapidly changing visuals, but equally in its often humorous focus on the sexual and the scatological, and more importantly, in the way it inverts the traditional Japanese value-system. The most prominent of these inversions is the equation of "amazing sex" with Buddhist enlightenment. In a central scene, Retro and Pandy, the films protagonists, avoid boredom in their prison cell, and answer the call of instinctual nature, by having sex. The noise of their sexual congress is mined for crude humour, but also causes the shackles and straightjackets of all the prison’s inmates to fall off. This bizarre event is as inexplicable as it is sudden and leads to the birth of a cult centered on Retro. Although Retro has no more understanding of how this liberation has come about than the other prisoners, they choose him as their leader for the simple reason that he was the one who brought it about.

If the series of visual shifts that constitute this film are almost without narrative coherence, they are not without a clear conceptual structure. The film itself is constructed as a cycle in which Retro and Pandy end at the exact point, in the exact situation, and with exactly the same lack of knowledge that they started with. This cycle is a subversion of the traditional Buddhist image of the Wheel of Life to which all human beings are bound, undergoing numerous births and rebirths, until they are liberated by spiritual awareness. Although Dead Leaves opens with Retro and Pandy asking, "Who am I", (the classic spiritual question in Buddhism), the entire film emphasizes the irrelevance of asking and answering such a question. The entire film emphasizes that Retro and Pandy, and by implication every living being, whether born by natural means of artificially-engineered, is simply caught in an eternal recurrence of violent events which are beyond both understanding and control. This emphasis is the focus of a parable, unfolded in this film’s characteristically random and frenetically dislocated style, which relates a conversation between the ants and the caterpillars. The ants ask the caterpillars why they’re always looking up at a particular tree. The caterpillars have no answer. The ants taunt them that their constant looking upwards has made them long and misshapen. But the caterpillars are destined to turn into moths. This transformation is not presented in traditional terms as a transformation from a lower level of being to a higher one, from a material level of being to a spiritual one, but simply as one step in a cycle that again turns the moths into caterpillars. The meaninglessness and ultimate destructiveness of the entire process is seen in this film’s representation of the moon, which at the film’s beginning hangs in the sky like a worm-eaten rag, and which at the film’s end is visibly more worm-eaten and decayed. This subversive representation shows the Wheel of Life as something which turns and turns but never results in the slightest increase of one’s understanding or awareness.

I wouldn’t underestimate the difficulty and the confusion that non-Japanese viewers, and perhaps even Japanese viewers, might experience in watching Dead Leaves for the first time. As a film it certainly doesn’t conform to the expectations of audiences nurtured on a narrative-centered cinematic tradition. But there is a payoff. Not only in the sheer inventiveness and virtuosity of the visual representations, but there’s also a buzz to be got simply from seeing a film that presses home its meanings despite the chaos it creates by breaking every rule that more conventional filmmakers piously insist on.

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