Jin-Roh

Despite an incomprehensibly complex back-story, this is the most interesting animation feature from Japan since Memories. Fusé, a military policeman battling subversives in the late 1950s is covertly a member of an elite force known as the Wolf Brigade; he is sent for retraining and put under surveillance after failing to shoot a girl suicide bomber. The dead girl's sister (or is she?) encounters him and subverts his macho, hyper-obedient mind-set by introducing him to the Little Red Riding Hood story. But the more he gets drawn into the story, the more he identifies with the wolf. Fine work from all the designers, animators and voice actors, but the key talent is writer Mamoru Oshii, himself a leading animation director. His concept here plays like a re-reading of Angela Carter on lupine myth - from the wolf's point of view. (Tetsuya Nishio and Toshiyuki Inoue were the key animation supervisors.