Jinsei is a curious film all around. It’s animated, and it’s the first film by Ryuya Suzuki, who wrote, directed, drew the film, edited and also composed the score. The story the film tells is a jumble that starts in about 1995 and goes into the future, to 2095, and the narrator, voiced by the rap artist Ace Cool, tells the audience of another quirk.
He says, “My mother called my name at her last moment. In hindsight, it was the last time when I was called by that name. You will have several names until you die. ... This is the story of my life.”
In other words, for the length of the movie, the lead character goes by a series of changing names.
Jinsei, which means "life" in Japanese, starts with this young boy. He’s traumatized by his mother’s death in a car crash, so much that he stops speaking. He’s bullied in school, but he makes friends with another outcast kid named Kin, who wears a shock of bleached blond hair. Eventually, the two get into the pop music world where things do not go well, even into the future where the film makes its often confusing way.
But — and this is a big “but” — Ryuya Suzuki has made a visually brilliant picture. Much of it is in grayscale. Suzuki draws only essential shapes, simple curves, rectangles. Buildings and rooms are shown straight on and symmetrical. Characters tend to look directly ahead and they don’t move much. To indicate that a car is going somewhere, street light posts recede methodically into the background, nothing else. In a taxi, with a driver in front and two passengers in the back seat, only the cabbie’s eyes move.
The two boys go to a ballet -- “Swan Lake” – which Suzuki shows as a line of dancers unmoving except for their hands at their sides, flapping rhythmically. Sometimes the only movement in an image is feet bouncing or cheeks puffing in and out.
So there are comic moments in the film, but as the picture progresses, it also presents tougher images and events.
A middle-aged couple stand on their apartment balcony while the husband aims his shotgun at a man standing by a car on the street. The promoter for the music group the boys join looks like Michael Corleone’s scary hitman and bodyguard in The Godfather, Part II, with steely eyes that promise malice and greed.
Yet, this restrained minimalism grows profoundly expressive.
Jinsei comes as a kind of visual poetry. There’s no smooth, Hollywood-like continuity, no real sense of cause and effect, of one thing leading to another. Viewers have to fill in the gaps between the often starkly blank and blunt images.
Suzuki’s drawings alone project little affect, but through his editing, his joining of images, the result is a movie full of deep feeling for these characters and the world they inhabit.
The surface of that world can be unhappy. Characters look trapped in their blandly brutal rectangles. The overall feel of Jinsei is of a forlorn world wracked by unnamed dangers, and characters hamstrung by their inability to move.
As its story heads all the way to 2095, there’s destruction, soldiers in camouflage, robots and harsh sounds. Human characters are unable to control or fix this hard-edged setting. But again, details of story have far less power than these simple, haunting images that bring your imagination into a reckoning with the world we’ve created.
