ICE

I must confess, up until now my main experience of animation has been at the skilled hands of Uncle Walt and Matt Groening! So with great intrigue I sat down to take in the graphic delights of an animated movie that has done the rounds at world film festivals to rave reviews. I am talking about the apocalyptic tale, PROJECT ICE, from director Makato Koboyashi.

When I learned that Koboyashi’s main inspiration for his yarn about human extinction derived from stories he had read about a Beijing sperm bank reporting an 80% reduction in male sperm counts, I readied myself to face mankind’s bleak fate.

The movie is divided into 3 sections, Yesterday, Today, No Future. But as I was to find out with this cartoon from Japan, it was all the structure PROJECT ICE allowed the viewer!

The year is 2012 and the planet is devoid of men. It appears only the fairer of the species remain due to a space station re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere and the resulting radiation wiping out the males.

The females on planet Earth are then involved in a disastrous squabble over territory whereby there are now only 20,000 or so survivors in Tokyo. They are then divided further by a group who basically say "we’re all fucked anyway - let’s party!" and the opposing group who wish to use science, in particular the mysterious ICE, to regenerate the human race.

So what is ICE exactly?? Well, it seems the substance, ICE, when inserted in a woman’s womb will produce a crawling baby after a ludicrously short gestation period of around 5 minutes. Simple huh? Well, no not really! You see one of the side effects of this impregnation is that the subject then becomes encapsulated in a huge block of ICE. The main hindrance with this is if ANYTHING touches this freezing block, it transmutes into a grotesque beast with tentacles that endeavours to spear anything in the surrounding area with lethal spikes.

The characters involved in this bizarre tale are Yuki, Lisalagi, Hitomi Landshnektand Giula. I really would love to enlighten you as to their plight but I was simply too confused a lot of the time as to what the hell was going on!!! For example, when Yuki just about escapes a nuclear blast from one of the transmuted fiends, she feeds some giant Pterodactyls canned crab meat and they all turn into trees. This in turn then gives a portion of the planets inhabitants somewhere to hide... (Damn that Tony Blair and his banning of Psilocybin magic mushrooms back in 2005!)

In the 103 minutes there a bit of gore, lots of explosions and a couple of uncomfortable sexual references toward Yuki, who is obviously a minor.

I have to say, my hope that PROJECT ICE would unlock the door to allow yet another genre jostle for position amongst my already heaving collection of DVD’s remained unfounded. I couldn’t help feel that the concept had great potential only to be let down by a severely overly bizarre execution.

There is an awful lot of dialogue, so even if you did possess a tab or two of LSD to help get your head around the peculiar and nonsensical plot, it’s doubtful you would actually be able to read the subtitles! Some of it was beautifully scripted but all too often the translation was simply reduced to absurdity.

Following on from this point, the ICE GOES GLOBAL skit in the Extras section revealed a very telling fact. The voices for the main characters were provided by 4 members of a Japanese pop Group (all female naturally) by the name of AKB48. This crew currently hold the Guinness Book of records of being the world’s largest pop group. ‘Jap Pop’ has never really been my thing so it did little to stimulate any interest apart from when my mind wandered and I imagined Girls Aloud, Spice Girls, Westlife , Boyzone and the rest of them all being trapped in a block of ice before being subject to a nuclear attack. Would make a great movie?

The extra’s on the disc also provides a very interesting interview with the director who talks about his fears for humanity’s future. He touches on conspiracy theories such as Fluoride in the water supply and GM foods but in fairness, when you look back at Japanese science fiction such as Godzilla and Spectreman , they all were concerned with polluting the environment.

To sum up, I wish to stress I am NOT averse to weirdness in horror movies. Fulci was the master of using a dose of ambiguity to blur the narrative. It served to not patronise the audience and in doing so, let their imagination fill in the blanks. But this came across being weird for the sake of being weird while trying to promote a positive message to our doomed Earthly race.

I would like to give Anime another chance in time, but PROJECT ICE just didn’t do it for me. But for now, I wonder if I fed Cheryl Cole some tinned crab meat whether or not she would turn into a singer??? Sorry enough...

Review by Marc Lissenburg