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Published on: 2/1/2005
Last Visited: 10/11/2007
SAVES THE DAY : a feature on Kazuaki Kiriya's 'Casshern'
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Never mind Lee Majors, Japanese director Kazuaki Kiriya is a real "six million dollar man" : that's the total budget of his eyepopping debut feature Casshern, which finally arrives in British cinemas this month after more than a year travelling around the world's film-festival circuit.
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The decision to use Jinzou Ningen Kiyashan as the basis for such a big-screen extravaganza as Casshern ("the name has absolutely no meaning," says Kiriya in a hostage-to-fortune comment if ever there was one) raised eyebrows in many expert quarters.
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But Casshern the movie was made by completely different personnel from Kiyashan the cartoon: Kiriya is a 36-year-old who would have been around five or six when the programme was first transmitted.
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Perhaps it's something to do with the similarity of techniques deployed: Casshern managed to come in at a "mere" six million dollars because Kiriya created most of the amazingly detailed and impressive backgrounds ("we didn't want anything slick") via ‘green screen' computer technology of the sort used by Conran (not to mention Graham Robertson, whose relatively little-hyped Able Edwards exceeds both Kiriya and Conran's movies both in terms of ambition and achievement).
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Speaking of The Bard, incidentally, it may surprise those who've seen Casshern to find that, according to Kiriya, the plot is "loosely based on Hamlet."Kiriya must be using "loosely" very loosely indeed, as it's very hard to discern any Elsinore angles within Casshern's sprawling convolutions - apart from the fact that Tetsuya's mother Midori (Kanako Higuchi) is a rather foxy fortysomething.
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Such carelessness is pretty much unforgiveable in a movie that presumptuously yawns beyond the two-hour mark: Kiriya made himself a sufficiently large canvas that it's not really acceptable that so much feels rushed and lackadaisical.
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