Mardock Scramble: The First Compression

Short and sweet: Story - Very interesting, but suffered from pacing issues. It moved wayyy too fast and didn't explain what was going on--or why--very well. Then again, some people may like this kind of vagueness that puts the jobs of interpretation and filling in the gaps on the viewer. If they had tacked an extra 20-30 minutes onto it, they could've SLOWED THE HELL DOWN and taken their time. Art - Incredible, clean, and beautiful, except I'm not a fan of the grain layering they used over the duration of the film. It was different, but not my taste. Watching iton an HD-TV greatly reduces its gravity, so I recommend that. Sound - Great sound effects, excellent voice acting (both English and Japanese). But there wasn't a lot of music--and when there was, it didn't stand out very much. Their take on "Amazing Grace" at the end sounded really nice, but wasn't appropriate whatsoever for the mood of the ending. Characters - The two mains were very well-written and interesting. Balot's backstory was painted very vividly. Her actions are very appropriate for what she's been through. Oeufcocque has an intriguingly quirky personality, which is interesting to see when watching them interact. The rest of the characters, however, are sadly boring and underdeveloped--even Dr. Easter and Shell (the villain). Hopefully this changes over the course of the next two films. All in all, it's definitely a fun watch worthy of multiple viewings both for enjoyment, and to help yourself understand the story. It's graphic and brutally honest, depicting the world as it truly is. Choice scenes of a nude Balot that would normally be taken as fanservice simply cannot be seen as such--given the situations in which they occur: her being used by men. Looking forward to the next installment. Too bad it was so short. *Be advised: The sex scenes and nudity are censored in R1 DVD release, and a few scenes were inexplicably removed. Just a word of warning if you're looking to buy the North American version.

This install­ment of Mar­dock Scramble is the first in what’s planned to be a 3-part series. In it, a teen­age pros­ti­tute is killed by the man who took care of her, but she’s brought back to life by some magical sci­ence to try get revenge on her killers. She’s given a robotic body, lots of skin tight cloth­ing and a highly intel­li­gent golden mouse who can trans­form into whatever he wants, nor­mally a gun of some sort. It’s hard to talk about Mar­dock Scramble without giv­ing out some plot set­ting spoil­ers. People might say that descrip­tions of the plot aren’t spoil­ers at all, but it doesseem a shame to hurt one of the few things this movie actu­ally does very well. The expos­i­tion, often a clunky and tedi­ous part of a movie, was revealed in a gradual course of exchanges between the female lead, Balot, and her mouse sidekick, Eufcoque. Asides from reveal­ing how the world works and what the extents of Balot’s and Eufcoque’s powers are, it also builds up the rela­tion­ship between the two in one of the most strangely charm­ing duos I’ve ever seen. Balot doesn’t exactly think straight, hardly sur­pris­ing given her past, and abuses her powers for vari­ous reas­ons. Eufcoque doesn’t think like a human, see­ing as he’s a mouse and everything, but his mind works off a logic that hauls in Balot and builds a trust between the two. Using the other as a spring­board for fur­ther explor­a­tion, the movie excels in the exchanges between the two that make up about half of the movie. I did say that this was one of the things that it actu­ally did well, which implies that the movie per­formed less favour­able in other areas. This movie has a lot of grand ideas about how great it is and how it’s explor­ing themes of depres­sion and sexual desires, but most of it is done in such awful fash­ion that parts of the movie come out as unin­ten­tional humour. There’s a group of under­ground sur­geons towards the end of the movie with a taste for attach­ing parts of human bod­ies to them­selves. One guy has eyes all over his body, which was prob­ably sup­posed to be intim­id­at­ing but really just looked stu­pid. There was another guy with breasts sewn all over his body like that ghost from the Fat Stock­ing epis­ode of Panty and Stock­ing. The rest all equally looked like char­ac­ters Apo­ca­lypse Zero. As for the dis­turb­ingly lit­eral nick­name of their leader, Pussy­hands, the less said the better. These char­ac­ters were prob­ably sup­posed to sym­bol­ise humans liv­ing out their sexual fantas­ies, but like much of the rest of the fore­shad­ow­ing and imagery, it mainly res­ul­ted with scenes in vari­ous degrees of clunky or stu­pid. A bunch of the char­ac­ters are given names related to eggs, such as Boiled and Shell, prob­ably meant to sym­bol­ise birth of a new life or whatever, but that was rather eye-roll indu­cing, like call­ing the viol­ent vil­lain in your show Vicious or some­thing. There were some more stand­ard prob­lems, such as lots of cryptic con­ver­sa­tions that failed to grab the interest, or over­bear­ing level of mad­ness they gave char­ac­ters that didn’t fit well into the story. Oh, and play­ing Amaz­ing Grace as your end­ing song was pretty eye-rolling too. Not all of the sym­bol­ism failed, to be fair, the rela­tion­ship between Balot and Eufcoque being the best example. Heck, any­thing good about this movie came about when it was just those two together. The best scene in the movie was one where Balot asked Eufcoque to love her, with the golden mouse’s stuttered retort being that he wasn’t cap­able of lov­ing as a mouse and that “I can’t just turn into a male human in order to love you”. The scene, asides from reveal­ing a slightly messed up side to Balot’s mind, also shook Eufcoque and revealed we wasn’t quite as assured and logic­ally per­fect as earlier scenes had you believe. (As an aside, I kept expect­ing Balot to turn Eufcoque into a dildo. That wasn’t just a dirty mind at play in a highly sexu­al­ised anime. Balot kept going on about how she just wanted someone to love her, with the only way she knew love in her depraved life was through sex, but Eufcoque kept point­ing out that he was just a ves­sel that was incap­able of love and that he was just a tool to pre­tend she was being loved. See where I’m going with this? Con­trast this to our good friend Mr.Pussyhands, who quite lit­er­ally has sex with his hand. I would not be that sur­prised if Eufcoque becomes mas­turb­a­tion aid at some point in the later movies) Again, this movie only ever good when it was just inter­ac­tions between the main char­ac­ter and her mouse sidekick, the rest of the movie being dumb, some­times pain­fully so. Thank­fully a lot of the movie was just inter­ac­tions between the main two, which is enough to keep my interest to watch the later install­ments. But it’s not enough for me to recom­mend it either.

"I wish I was dead." Spoken by 15-year old prostitute Rune Balot, these are the first words that set the dispirited tone of the anime movie trilogy Mardock Scramble. The story is set in Mardock City, a cyberpunk world where the skyline is filled with skyscrapers, cars glide on fluorescent green roads, and everything sparkles like champagne. It's a stunning place to look at, but it’s also a savage place where cruelty and crime are often left unpunished. Homicide has become so rampant that the government has authorized a controversial procedure to resurrect victims from the dead to help track down and testify against theirassailants. This is one of the several unusual, and perhaps implausible, concepts in Mardock Scramble, but it's presented with such conviction that it’s not too difficult to get caught up in the moment and suspend disbelief. The central plot-line, which is essentially about Rune’s revenge, is likely just a catalyst for weightier themes. There are some fantastical action sequences, but the series tends to be more of a character study than a typical action-adventure. The conversations are philosophical, covering a wide range of topics such as the nature of memories and regret, free will, finding a purpose in life, and rebirth. There’s a lot of hidden symbolism to keep your mind busy if you choose to look for it—such as the egg references that frequently appear. The doctor who performs the resurrection procedure is named Dr. Easter; "scramble" is, of course, one of the ways in which eggs are cooked; and there's a yellow shapeshifting mouse named “Oeufcoque”, which is French for “soft-boiled egg.” What all these egg references mean, I’m not sure. Mardock Scramble has a consistently abrasive aesthetic. The art is usually shrouded in shadows and textured by noise that must've been hell for the video encoders to deal with. GoHands doesn't appear to have cut any corners or expenses with the animation, which, especially in the action sequences, looks painstakingly detailed. And an electronic and ambient music soundtrack rounds everything off. If you like science-fiction fantasy with a psychological twist, strong and stylish animation, and don't mind scenes with graphic violence, mental and physical abuse, and nudity, you should definitely check out Mardock Scramble. If you haven't read the synopsis yet, don't. The less you know going in, the more surprised you’ll be. Just sit back and get pounced by it.

Clarity is important to a movie's effectiveness. While it is true that clarity is always important in storytelling, a movie does well to keep that in mind even more, as there is much less time than usual to tell a story. With that in mind, as an introduction to a trilogy, Mardock Scramble: The First Compression does a wishy-washy job. The main issue with The First Compression's execution is its confusing way of expressing itself. The first section of the movie consists of a vague and confusing sequence of related events. Many intense and provocative things are shown during this, but their relevance and, at amore basic level, what exactly is happening in them is all left unexplained. It seems there was an attempt to let the visuals do the talking here, but it doesn't work very well because absolutely nothing about the setting or characters was explicitly stated and the viewer is left scratching their heads until the sequence ends and the main character, Balot, wakes up in a tank to begin the next segment of the movie. Once that is all over, though, things so relatively smoothly. The doctor, Dr. Easter, and Balot's companion for the rest of the movie, Oeufcoque, are quickly introduced. They are also utilized well in the sense that their conversations with Balot allow the viewer a more broad sense of the setting and the mechanics of Mardock Scramble's world. Unfortunately, while exposition was clearly part of the intent behind Dr. Easter and Oeufcoque's words, they fell victim to the movie's habit of keeping things too vague to be able to say everything portrayed in the movie made sense. This is a good thing in that their conversations were kept natural, but also a problem since there were no other chances given throughout the movie to expand upon the various political and technological developments that drive the movie's plot as a whole, making it all feel quite shallow. While Dr. Easter's character is used mostly for storytelling utility and plot advancement, Oeufcoque stands as an anomaly among the characters, as he is interesting and unique. His development very much mirrors Balot's, as they are together through most of the movie and a majority of the dialogue is focused on them. However, unlike Balot, who's characterization begins fairly interesting and soon falls to melodrama and inconsistency, Oeufcoque begins the movie as the logical sidekick character and slowly reveals moments of real emotion and expression. He keeps the other characters in check and brings the tone of the movie to a more believable standard whenever he is allowed to have an influence on it. If there is anything this movie did well, it was Oeufcoque and in a related way his relationship with Balot. Unfortunately, after some Balot-related plot developments are over, the movie decides to change atmosphere completely and enters a much worse territory than it was in before. Expanding upon its awkward focus on sexual desire, several incredibly undeveloped throwaway characters with a vague and uninteresting motivation are introduced seemingly for the sole purpose of giving Balot a reason to become a completely different character, presumably in an attempt to have her appear more complex. This was a mistake. The action scenes are boring and unimpressive, clearly given less thought than the rest of the movie was. The character designs are unintentionally hilarious and impossible to take seriously. This all results in a boring and unimportant final segment where Balot is shown fighting various enemies, leaving plenty of room for overdramatized scenes and a complete and intentional ignorance of the characterization that has happened thus far, culminating in a predictable cliffhanger for the second movie. It really is too bad that Mardock Scramble: The First Compression was unable to stay consistent or find its identity in this movie, as it is very pretty and does take place in an interesting world in its own right, but not there's simply not much to be said after finishing it except for "well, what was all that for, anyway?"

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