| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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| Science-Fiction |
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| Horror |
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| Fantasy |
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MALICE@DOLL
Rating: 
Japan. 2001.
Director – Keitaro Motonaga, Screenplay – Chiaki J. Konaka, Producers – Tsutomu Kuno, Katsuaki Takemoto & Naruhito Yamazaki, Photography – Keisuke Arai, Music – Y-Project, CGI Animation – Visual Science Laboratory Inc (Supervisor – Masaru Yoshioka), Character Design – Shinobu Nishioka, Visual Concept Design – Yasuhiro Moriki. Production Company – GAGA Communications/Soeishinsha Inc.
Plot: It is in the future where the robots are all that remains after humanity has destroyed itself. Malice@doll is one such robot, having originally been constructed for use as a sex doll. She tires of living among the other dolls who all do the same thing every day. But then she sees an apparition of a young girl. The girl leads her to an unknown part of the complex where a tentacled creature snatches her. Afterwards she finds that she has been transformed into a human girl. As she tries to understand what has happened to her, she is rejected by all the other robots who no longer recognize her. But then she finds that by kissing the other machines, she is able to transform them into living organisms as well. She eagerly goes about kissing them, seeing that in transforming them she is bringing them happiness, while they in turn kiss others. But as the transformations spread, she starts to see that that the organic forms she has created are really something quite grotesque.
Malice@doll is a fascinating anime. It was first released in three OVA (Original Video Animation) episodes – a Japanese phenomenon where animation is often released directly to video in short episodes – and later repackaged as a feature film. It is certainly a unique and original experiment. The film was designed for computer animation, but has been made in a way that is quite different to most computer animation. The camera, for example, is static throughout and does not make use of the 3D fluidity that most CG animated films do. It is also a film made on a much lower budget than other CG films and as a result feels more like the graphics for a computer game compared to say the equivalent work conducted by Pixar and the almost photographic hyperrealism of the same year’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001). It is you could perhaps say B-budget CG animation. This is clearly evident in many places – the frame frequently remains still, while there is usually only one moving element within in at a time. But this is something that the film also uses to its advantage to create a peculiarly unreal dream-like mood.
The film certainly has a wild and interesting plot. In the interview accompanying the dvd, screenwriter Chiaki J. Konaka says that he was inspired by the Claymation shorts of Jan Svankmajer. Konaka lists a profusion of sources – everything from Alice in Wonderland (1865) to Blade Runner (1982) and vampire movies. If anything the film tends to play out like a perverse Cyberpunk take on Pinocchio (1940), or maybe a version of The Stepford Wives (1974) conducted in reverse – and with H.R. Giger thrown into the mix.
One quite liked Konaka’s play of ideas. The film has a dreamily slow pace – at the outset it could be something that plays as a standard Cyberpunk anime, but then it slowly opens out into something quite astonishing. It is a film where one genuinely has no idea where it is going at all. The various organically-transformed robots are quite grotesque creations – the film has a real queasy foreboding as one waits to see each new creature it brings out. There’s also quite a perverse undertow to the film – we see flashbacks to Malice’s use as an S&M sub and vignettes of the various non-humanoid creatures engaging in sexual and fetishistic activity, even rape of one another.
Eventually one realizes that Malice@doll is really another variant on hentai cinema – see films like The Legend of the Overfiend (1989) and Wicked City (1991), which regularly feature quite a high degree of bizarre demonic and tentacular creatures forcibly having their way with human women – although this is hentai that has been updated to the era of CGI animation and given an sf rationale. (The initial creature’s probing of Malice’s nether regions with a tentacle is amusingly logically justified as the means whereby it transforms her).
As much anime does, the film ends on a transcendental apotheosis that is quite beautiful – even if perhaps it is one where the film leaves explanations for what is going on, and for that matter the agency behind the initial transformation, unexplained. Nevertheless the result is a peculiarly dreamy fairytale that is both quite haunting and imaginatively grotesque.
Buy this film from ArtsMagic.co.uk or ArtsMagicdvd.com
Copyright Richard Scheib 2004
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