Neo-Tokyo (Labyrinth Tales)

NEO-TOKYO is a short (50-minute) anime feature dating from 1987 that had a brief theatrical release in the U.S. around 1993 on the strength of the name value of director Katsuhiro Otomo, following his big-screen success stateside with AKIRA. This is a three-part anthology film and features pieces by Otomo and two other important anime directors, Rin Taro (DAGGER OF KAMUI, DOOMED MEGALOPOLIS) and Yoshiaki Kawajiri (WICKED CITY, NINJA SCROLL). Rintaro's piece, "Labyrinth," opens the film and is somewhat abstract in nature, with very little dialogue, as it follows the journey of an adventure-seeking child and a more cautious pet dog as they enter a parallel universe and a labyrinth of streets that eventually leads to...the next piece, Kawajiri's "Running Man," a rather conventional, if flawlessly executed, tale of a hell-bent veteran racer involved in some kind of futuristic high-risk, high-tech car race covered by an undistinguished reporter type. The pointlessness of the first two pieces is somewhat balanced by the clever and imaginative twists of Otomo's piece, "The Order to Stop Construction" (at 23 minutes, the longest of the three), which tells the tale of a clueless, single-minded company man sent alone from Japan to shut down a massive, robot-operated industrial plant smack in the middle of a remote South American jungle. The resulting collision involves several intransigent forces, including a new revolutionary government, corporate bureaucracy, an unstoppable technological juggernaught, and the aggressive natural drives of a thriving rainforest. The theme of technology-run-amuck that informs Otomo's later works, including AKIRA, MEMORIES, and ROUJIN-Z, is keenly on display here in a work that's much too short and would have benefited from a longer structure as a stand-alone feature.