“A guy with a TV for a head and a girl with a panda-like mark on her face find themselves naked on Earth with no recollection of how they got there. After attempting to violently acquire food and clothes, they get arrested and sent to the Lunar prison Dead Leaves… and things get weirder from there.”–Dead Leaves synopsis from the listicle “15 Bizarre Anime That Make You Wonder ‘Wtf Did I Just Watch?’

DIRECTED BY: Hiroyuki Imaishi

FEATURING: Voices of Takako Honda, Kappei Yamaguchi; Amanda Winn-Lee, Jason Lee (English dub)

PLOT: Pandy, a woman with mismatched eyes, and Retro, a man with a television for a head, awaken naked with no memories and immediately go on a crime spree. Quickly arrested, they are sent to Dead Leaves, a prison housed on what remained of the crumbling moon, where they have sex and then arrange a prison break. Pandy grows pregnant and comes to term in a day, and faces a giant caterpillar monster with the help of her precocious newborn son.

BACKGROUND:

• The directorial debut of Hiroyuki Imaishi, who had worked as an artist on many animes, including the TV version of “Neon Genesis Evangelion” and it’s bizarre theatrical incarnation.
• Released as an OVA (original video animation, a common direct-to-video release strategy in Japan).
• Dead Leaves was made with the American and European secondary markets in mind. The English dub was made contemporaneously with the Japanese version.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Dead Leaves‘ images, while carefully painted, streak by almost too fast for the eye to register, leaving an impression of havoc rather than focusing on particular images. Since the main characters—especially monitor-faced Retro—appear most often, it’s their faces that stick most in the memory.

THREE WEIRD THINGS: TV-headed Retro-reprobate; penis drill; inexplicable psychedelic caterpillar

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Dead Leaves moves so fast and makes so little sense that it’s the equivalent of putting an ultraviolent manga in a high-speed blender and trying to read it while the pieces swirl around. The plot is nearly incomprehensible, but somehow involves mutant clones and a psychedelic caterpillar. Weird? Hell yes. Recommended? Well, definitely not to epileptics. Even for older folks with a healthy neurobiology, the breakneck pacing is as likely to induce a headache as an adrenaline rush. It’s definitely one-of-a-kind, though, and as an experiment in compressing as much berserk and illogical anime flavor as possible into as short a running time as possible, it’s worth a look.

Short clip from Dead Leaves

COMMENTS: Although the director advised the audience at Dead Continue reading 285. DEAD LEAVES (2003) →