As is often the way with bowdlerised cinema adaptations of long-running anime series, the two-part version of Penguindrum – which originally occupied 24 episodes in 2011 – drops us into a tombola of characters and timelines of screaming import for the initiated, but which are overwhelming for newcomers. It’s a shame because wading through the almost four-and-a-half hours here reveals a rich, ambitious work with frequently ravishing animation that, better paced, might have insinuated, not hectored, its way into our affections.
Teenager Himari (voiced by Miho Arakawa) collapses and dies on an aquarium visit, and she is revived thanks to the magical penguin hat she bought in the souvenir shop – it links her lifeforce to a rubber-clad dominatrix spirit in another dimension. In return for keeping her alive, it demands that Himari’s brothers, Shoma (Ryōhei Kimura) and Kanba (Subaru Kimura), retrieve a powerful totem, the Penguindrum; they assume it to be the secret diary hoarded by schoolgirl Ringo, whose entries appear to predict people’s destinies. As she is planning to use it to seduce her teacher Tabuki, however, Ringo isn’t about to hand it over.
Chopped up every five minutes with flashbacks to the siblings’ childhood, where Shoma and Kanba already seem to have been earmarked in some kind of cosmic library for great things – as well as Himari transporting us to her own nether-realm by yelling “Survival tactic!” – it makes as much sense as Bez on a three-day bender. But things do eventually cohere: the broadly comic first part (that is, if Ringo trying to rape Tabuki is your idea of comedy) gives way to a darker second, when the brooding Kanba resorts to collaborating with their parents’ nihilist terrorist cult in order to to save Himari. Well done if you gleaned that this is a reference to the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo subway attack.
Director Kunihiko Ikuhara, best known for the seminal Sailor Moon, obviously has metaphysical matters on his mind; the flitting between realms and empathetic regard for characters’ inner worlds is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. He backs it up with a startling panoply of visual registers, from hyper-real segments to Satoshi Kon-esque surrealism and abstraction, to cherubic figurework in the childhood episodes. All this madness seems to be saying that extremism is rooted in a misplaced nostalgia for innocence. But probably best to go back to the original series for the full statement.
• Re:cycle of the Penguindrum is screening on 20 May in cinemas.
