Movies: Karas: The Prophecy

Eventually they get on with the damn story, although it’s scarcely worth the trouble. The police have a small (very small) division to deal with supernatural events, which consists of one guy and his new and somewhat bewildered younger partner, who bop from one supernatural crime scene to the next and don’t tell us anything that would make us care much. After twenty minutes of this, I was bewildered; after forty minutes, I was hopelessly lost. Eventually there are enough explanations that we can follow the plot in a kind of dogged, okay-fine-whatever sort of way, but by that time any native interested in the story has been completely smothered.

Of course, the film looks fantastic. Like many recent feature-length animated productions, it’s a fusion of cel / hand-drawn animation and CGI, and it succeeds spectacularly at making the movie’s world come to life. Some of the individual set-pieces are glorious enough that they work as stand-alones, like a car chase in a tunnel. But the movie as a whole is so busy trying to be an exercise in utterly wretched excess, even in the smallest moments, that it eventually becomes unwatchable. Here’s the irony: If they had abandoned ANY pretense of a story and just made it into a visual thrill ride along the lines of Versus (and even Versus had a story that was halfway coherent), it might have worked better, because then I wouldn’t have gotten my hopes up in vain.

Karas was the 40th anniversary production of Tatsunoko, an animation studio with a long and illustrious career. Nostalgia buffs may remember they were the ones responsible for Speed Racer, the Gatchaman / G-Force / Battle of the Planets series, the original Casshan (from which the live-action Casshern was derived after a great many changes), Tekkaman Blade, and of course the Macross sagas. After 40 years in the business, they should have picked something a little more enjoyable for their birthday party: Karas has none of their charm or cheer, and doesn’t even make much sense on a basic narrative level. Characters depart, arrive or show up as dictated by the whims of the plot; explanations of events are delivered like grocery lists, and are about as compelling; motives are never explained or have no connection to anything coherent. What is the sense in spending what must have been ungodly amounts of money on the animation production, when the script was probably scribbled on the back of a soggy bar napkin?

I will repeat something I have said many times before, because the more movies I watch the more true it becomes. A movie where virtually anything happens is just as uninteresting as a movie where nothing much at all happens. There are no ground rules, no expectations of what will and won’t happen or why, so we’re just looking at noise and movement, which after a while becoming uniformly unengaging. If you were playing poker in a casino where the rules changed every fifteen minutes and you weren’t even allowed to find out what they were, wouldn’t you want your money back? To that end, Karas is the kind of movie you put on a big-screen TV over a bar, with the sound down — or maybe turned off completely. It’s not as if you’ll miss much.