June reviews: Spriggan
-more like sprigGUN amirite fellas?
Spriggan is the kind of anime that could only have been made in the 90s, a lavishly animated and brilliantly directed adaptation of a niche manga most people have never even heard of, it is the culmination of everything great about the industry at the time.
Yu Ominae, on the surface a regular 17-year-old high schooler, is in fact a spriggan, a top operative of an international organization called ARCAN, whose duty it is to secure and safeguard the artifacts of highly advanced lost civilization, however, when an attempt made on Yu's life results in the death of a classmate, he become's embroiled in a plot to steal ARCAN's latest archeological find: Noah's Ark
Spriggan is not necessarily light on story, events DO happen that drive the story along, and it does contain some mildly entertaining political intrigue, but it is certainly not the movie's main focus.
That honor, instead, goes to the film's visuals, released in late 1998, the film stands at the peak of what could be visually accomplished in the industry at the time, from the recoil of a gun to the way cloth moves when a character jumps, everything is rendered with a level of detail that can only be described as gratuitous.
Just as impressive are the backgrounds, from Yu's classroom to the streets of Istanbul, the world of Spriggan feels, as cliched as it may sound, lived in, which does wonders to enhance the Film's stellar sense of atmosphere, no wonder then, that the director, Hirotsugu Kawasaki, had worked on Akira, another film renowned for its background design, just ten years prior as a key animator.
Something about Spriggan makes me kinda melancholy, for being a story about ancient relics and distant pasts, it is, in itself, a relic of a bygone era, one of a different industry more willing to take risks and experiment instead of just running with proven concepts, perhaps all we can do is remember the past and hope the world becomes a bit more as it once was
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