The most depressingly beautiful airplane anime

Director Mamoru Oshii has pushed the envelope once again with his newest film, "The Sky Crawlers."

The movie is a complex, but stunning film about teenagers trapped in a world of aerial combat.

The movie opens up at a snail's pace, with isolated, depressed male pilots known as Kildren, with no other amusement other than eating at the meat pie diner and having sex in the mansion with other women.

In their planes, they fight enemy planes from a country known only as the Loutan. However, most of their existence is a boring world, in which they never grow old. All they know is that they are children, who could never possibly gain access into the adult world. The only threat to their existence is the unknown airplane above the clouds, known only as “The Teacher.”

Perhaps it’s a somewhat excessive visual representation of the life of Japanese otaku, young men who trap themselves in their home, fearful of the criticism from the adults in the faceless corporate world. The characters have the most depressing and nonchalant dialogue ever heard in an anime. However, director Mamoru Oshii makes it all work.

The film is a deadpan “Catch-22”-styled story, in which the main character, Yuichi, is trying to figure out exactly who he is. He's only heard rumors that his love interest, Suito Kusanagi, shot her previous boyfriend in the head. Although Yuichi has hardly any memory of his past, he offers his girlfriend a new hope for change in their depressing life as Kildren.

Admittedly, the aerial dogfight in the end of the film is an impossibly excessive and violent end. However, given that the concept of the film is out of this world in the first place, it all works beautifully. Although some anime fans might find the film boring at first, “The Sky Crawlers” has plenty of earth-shaking emotional sequences, in which Kusanagi desperately plays with a gun in her hand on a particularly depressing night out.

This is one of the best anime films I have ever seen, filled with some spectacular dogfights with surreal imagery. But although there is plenty of action, the dogfights pale in comparison to the heartbreaking emotions throughout the film. While American audiences may be easily turned off, this is a true masterpiece by Mamoru Oshii.

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DVD Review: Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex

This is old news by now, but the complete collection of "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Season One" was rereleased in a cheaper box set in October of last year. Unlike the previous DVD of merely the Laughing Man story arc, this set features all the complete episodes.

And if anyone hasn't seen "Ghost in the Shell" before, it's a dizzy spectacle of robot military action, deep philosophizing and complex dialogue.

The main character, Motoko Kusanagi, is the operations leader of the secret special ops group named Section 9. They specialize in policing all forms of heavy-duty cyber crime, such as drug and organ smuggling.

However, this is very dangerous work. Some of these groups deal in heavy-duty machine guns, and some of them possess cybernetic body parts. Thus, almost all the members of Section 9 have complete cyborg bodies. Well, all of them except for the former police investigator, Togusa. He's flesh and blood, but he possesses cybernetic gizmos in his body.

The cyborg bodies allow all the Section 9 members the ability to communicate wirelessly without moving their lips. Their eyes are equipped with night vision. And they all can read bar code data for information. They also have spider tanks called Tachikomas.

Although the machinery and cyber-punk technology alone makes this one of the coolest anime series, there is also a much more complex storyline which starts in episode four. Togusa gets a tip from a former coworker at the police department about Interceptors, optical implants which allow hackers to see video through other people's eyes. Togusa discovers his first shocking conspiracy--that police are illegally installing Interceptors in all their officers to find the Laughing Man, a professional hacker.

However, the hacker is also a professional muckraker. Although he doesn't show his face too often, the Laughing Man is also trying to lead Section 9 to uncover a hideous plot involving corporate blackmailing on the scale of billions of yen.

It's a complex anime to say the least. "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" is an epic masterpiece, involving government conspiracies and military warfare. It almost suffers from too much fancy shmancy dialogue about hacking, Internet communications and existential conversations. However it all holds together to make an awesome first season that is hard to beat.

The series is now available for $40 in stores. If anyone hasn't seen any "Ghost in the Shell" anime, they have to check out the movie. "Ghost in the Shell" is deservedly one of the best action anime around, even if Motoko tends to show a little too much skin.

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