Sky Crawlers : L'Armée du ciel

It is hard to write a coherent review of The Sky Crawlers without revealing major plot twists, but I will try. I advise you to see the movie without reading too much about it beforehand so that you can enjoy and think about what happens without bias. Do stick around for the epilog after the closing credits.

The Sky Crawlers is a thought-provoking alternate history that will appeal to literate science fiction fans. Mainstream audiences will undoubtedly be bored and confused by what happens in the film. The film examines weighty themes such as the meaning of war and the nature of memories. I was reminded of the recent death of famous amnesiac "HM" while watching The Sky Crawlers, as some of the characters suffer from a similar type of memory loss. Why they suffer this loss is one of the twists that will either spark heated discussion or bewilderment afterward. Like most good science fiction, The Sky Crawlers presents somewhat ambiguous characters and ideas. It is up to the viewer to interpret the meaning.

What worked: The CGI aerial combat sequences were amazing—dizzying and spectacular, with intricately designed air vehicles that spurred the imagination. The characters' emotional depths were thoroughly mined—although not always pleasantly so. The character design and art direction were top notch—the CGI segments were almost photo-realistic, and the 2D segments were beautifully drawn and lighted, too. The Basset Hound was cute.

What didn't work: The pacing was slow—this is a psychological drama, not an action adventure—and could have benefited from some judicious editing. Although I found the transitions from CGI to 2D and back to be perfectly fine, particularly after getting into the rhythm of the film, many viewers will likely find the transitions jarring.

If your tastes run more towards Blade Runner or A Clockwork Orange, you will probably appreciate The Sky Crawlers. If your tastes lean more towards Star Wars or The Incredibles, I advise you to see something else.

The Sky Crawlers: (Sukai Kurora):7 out of 10: This is an adult anime...In fact this is a very adult anime. No there isn’t copious amounts of fan service or blood. (In fact the film is rated PG-13 primarily for smoking.) Instead Sky Crawlers has a very quiet, reserved pacing. It’s a two hour anime that feels like it clocks in at over three hours. Not boring per se but very deliberately paced with adult conversations, adult music and an overall adult tone that reminds one of Before Sunrise with occasional airborne dogfight to break up the relationship introspection.

The plot is both light (I will reveal that here) and quite heavy (I will let the movie itself surprise you with its philosophical underpinnings). On the light side is there is a special group of teenagers who are pilots that never grow old. The movie refers to them as Kildren and much is made of how they are just kids; but if you drive, fly, have sex, drink, and smoke a pack every 10 minutes of screen time your are at best a teen and in reality a young adult.

These Kildren fight in retro WW2 style aircraft against each other in an air war with no winners and no other casualties all to apparently satiate the public’s need for conflict. (Think Star Trek’s “A Taste of Armageddon”). There is a new pilot, a wingman and a couple of androgynous love interests with deep secret pasts. There is even a Red Baron character rumored to be an adult and a constant source of tension and conversation in both the dogfights and on the ground.

The Animation is simply awe inspiring. The CGI work is better than many a Hollywood blockbuster and the 2 dimensional cell shaded characters fit both the pacing and the mood of the film. The attention to detail is quite amazing overall.

Overall the film is recommended for fans of adult drama and serious anime. I do confess I did wish for longer sky battles, more realistic violence and even some fan service. It is ironic that one of the most adult anime I have ever seen suffers from a lack of adult thrills with its PG-13 rating.

"The Sky Crawlers" is directed by Mamoru Oshii, the 56-year-old genius director. He lets go of the screenplay this time and presents a fresh front by introducing a new scriptwriter, Chihiro Ito.

The most anticipated aspect of this film for fans of Hiroshi Mori, the author of the original novel, is how the director has translated the original into the medium of film. The original is like a poem where you can clearly see his vision with a lots of space in the sentences. It's also a challenge to decide on what extend the truth of the story is to be visible which was less clear in the original novel.

KillDren - Living weapons which never grew up, kept as adolescents their entire lives and created to show people a performance called a "war".

Once again, the film treats the dominant theme of the conflict between "humans" and "AI made by humans". However, the story has an appeal which is different from "Ghost In The Shell" or "Innocence".

Humans who do not know about wars; breeding, killing people, depriving family, or being full of hatred. They wish for peace, and exhausted by all the efforts which end in endless tragedy and death. The wars as a form of entertainment is a way to look directly at such concepts, and is a way to create a distance from such tragedies. The wars what make them recognise once more what they are truly happy about, by peeping at this extreme hopelessness.

Certainly, humans are greedy creatures and they expect that the safe and peaceful situation will continue and this would be fine without knowing whether they are truly happy. They still want to their further happiness because they are not satisfied with this situation. It is the moment that they realise they are actually happy, by recognising the position where they stand at the hierarchy of the society they live in and comparing it with others. It is through having wars as entertainment that people venture to create.

Meanwhile, there are girls and boys who only find their lives worth living in the sky, laughing in the sky, crying in the sky and killing other people using their right hands as Living weapons. KillDren, who love people, become puzzled with the truth, have some self confidence and sometimes are fragile. It is the same life as normal adolescent girls and boys, except they are weapons and never grow.

This is a story which tells us about what the truly important things in life are, and to see them living in our world and time.

Notes: Please watch till the end of the story even after the ending credit starts. The last scene will give you a hint to the secret of the story.

As another reviewer wrote earlier, I have little doubt that the film's mediocre rating is due to its slowness in developing the thesis that Mamoru Oshii hides behind the plot. It is a film that demands patience, so much in fact, that I find it directly to blame for the negative reviews. It is not a viewer's fault to lose interest when they have already seen more than half of a film and the fog that shrouds the plot remains as dense as it was at the beginning.

Nevertheless, with proper time, the doubts and issues that may have seemed incoherent are explained with efficiency and appeal. What initially looks inconsistent, once the viewer is given the background information, makes complete sense. The characters' erratic behavior, the anachronistic war machines, the nonsensical dialogues: it all makes sense in just a few minutes through an almost epiphany.

The film, very much in Oshii's style, raises philosophical questions revolving around existentialism and the ontology of human beings: what is the role of war in society, are our memories what make us what we are, what is the point of continuing to live day by day? All these questions are treated by the director in a plot that is unnecessarily slow, but still fascinating.

The Sky Crawlers forced me to reexamine the mindset I have when I watch an anime film. When I sit down to watch these types of works, I expect clichéd characters, fantastically absurd plots and flat thoughts that pretend to have depth. While there are plenty of exceptions, it is undeniable that many anime productions use characters and formulas as predictable as Hollywood blockbusters. The Sky Crawlers, to a prejudiced viewer like me, may at first seem like just another film in the long line of those Japanese animated features that rely more on the beauty of their art than their content. This is not the case. This is a deep and thoughtful work that, sadly, moves at a slower pace than what contemporary moviegoers are used to. I insist: the plot is spectacular and not overly complex, it is just slow.

I'll admit, it was difficult to get into the right mood to watch "Sky Crawlers." I was expecting one thing, a war film, and while there were moments of that, I found myself confronted with a world full of characters with human concerns, and a strict atmosphere that called upon the audience to pay attention to the details.

Having watched and enjoyed other films by Oshii (this one most resembling "Avalon" in tone and theme), I knew that I'd be in for something demanding and stoic, but I was also surprised by just how initially uncharismatic the two main characters were. However, as the film progressed, I found myself drawn in by their mysterious histories, and eventually deeply sympathizing with their tragedy.

To explain the nature of the pilots is to spoil the film, but rest assured, every frustration and question you have concerning the characters is answered by the end –just make sure you sit through the end of the credits! However, whether or not you are satisfied in the end is another question entirely. While the chaotic, crowd-pleasing dogfights and strikingly rendered landscapes are sure to get a rise out of any audience, the mystery of the characters themselves is initially impenetrable and unwelcoming.

On the other hand, Oshii's depiction of emotionally mature, personally tortured characters is a unique landmark in animation. While there have been other animated films concerned with serious character drama, few of them have chosen to completely eschew melodrama with the exacting discipline of this film.

The film strikes a strange balance between frenetic action scenes and serious character exploration. It won't please everyone. But if you enter "Sky Crawlers" with an open mind, you may find something exciting, brutal, and heartbreaking here.