Year released: 2015
THE CHARGE: Not being bad, just being drawn that way.
THE EVIDENCE: I'm throwing a little bit of a change-up into the blog today, passing judgement on a recently released anime film. Don't worry. There are no Pokemon, Digimon, Dragonballs or Ben-Wa balls to be found here. In fact, today's movie is a poitical thriller with a heavy sci-fi influence, a few horror elements and an occasional burst of splatterific gore for color. So let's dive in and see what Psycho-Pass: The Movie is all about.
Psycho-Pass was originally an anime series focusing on a police unit in futuristic Japan that enforces something called the Sybil System. This system uses a wide bank of scanners to analyze the typical man-on-the-street and sends the data to a sort of neural network to decide if he displays criminal tendencies. The analysis is summarized into a number called the person's "crime coefficient" or "psycho-pass". If it's over 100, you've either committed a crime or are likely to commit one. Either way, you become a target for enforcement.
The police are equipped with special guns called Dominators that can scan and determine the psycho-pass number of the person it's pointed at. The gun then takes appropriate action, leaving any moral decisions out of the hands of the police entirely. If it's pointed at a person with a psycho-pass under 100, the gun won't fire even when the trigger is pulled. If the number is between 100 - 300, the gun paralyzes its target so he can be collected for "treatment" - usually drugs and psychotherapy. And if your number is above 300, you're considered evil beyond saving and the gun will fire a round that literally makes you explode like a big wet balloon. It's never stated in the series if the corpse is then charged with littering for leaving its guts sprayed everywhere.
Central to the Psycho-Pass story is Inspector Akane Tsunemori, a new arrival to the police force when the series begins but a seasoned veteran by the time the events of the movie take place. She's a straight-laced officer but also a bit naive about how the Sybil System works, so she effectively acts as the viewer's surrogate as the story unfolds.
Guns don't kill people. Waifus kill people.
At the time of Psycho-Pass: The Movie, Japan's system of law enforcement has proven so effective that the components to build similar systems are now being exported to other countries. But in one Southeast Asian country, rebels are fighting against the new system, some of them even going so far as to travel to Tokyo to try to sabotage the shipment of more components. When one of them is caught, the police learn that one of their former inspectors, Shinya Kogami, is aiding the rebels. Kogami has been on the run since he assassinated a serial killer without authorization from the Sybil System, and Akane hops on the next cargo transport to find him and bring him back to Japan.
When Akane arrives in the new country, she's astonished to see the Sybil System being used by a dictatorial government. And once she finds Kogami, she fully understands why he's doing what he's doing. But she's still an officer and still has a duty to bring him in. Many moral dilemmas and exploding bodies later, Akane comes face to face with the country's dictator and learns a surprising secret about the Sybil System and how far it's willing to go to enforce order, not only in Japan but worldwide.
Maybe he's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline.
Psycho-Pass: The Movie is a densely plotted feature filled with enough twists and turns in its 113 minute running time to fill an entire TV season. In fact, I kept feeling like the story would have benefited greatly by a series format. Anime series tend to run about 10 - 12 shows per season, which would have been the perfect length to let this story develop more organically and breathe a bit more. As it stands, the movie piles on the plot twists to the point of near absurdity. A 12 episode season, with one major plot twist each episode, would have been easier to stomach.
Technically, the movie looks good for the most part. Colors are vivid and the animation is generally smooth and detailed, especially in scenes where characters utilize various pieces of futuristic technology. Character animation, however, is hit and miss. Sometimes it looks great and other times, it's either awkward or clearly evident that some short cuts were taken. Some hand-to-hand fight scenes, in particular, were marred by somewhat jerky movements. Personally, I found it sometimes distracted me and took me out of the movie, but your mileage may vary.
But the biggest problem with the movie is that it makes no effort to appeal to a broad audience. Psycho-Pass: The Movie, despite having a brief theatrical run in the U.S., was specifically made for fans of Psycho-Pass: The Series. The movie frequently references events and characters that were encountered in the series, especially in its first season, and makes only an occasional token attempt to fill in the backstory for anyone who might be unfamiliar with it. As a result, Psycho-Pass: The Movie is the very definition of a niche film, appealing not to anime fans - a fairly small niche to begin with, at least here in North America - but to the even narrower sub-niche of fans of a particular anime show.
It's a shame because it's not a terrible movie, even though it gets a bit preachy towards the end. But the producers had a chance to make something accessible that could have generated more interest in the original anime series, which is a good one, and they fell on the other side of the fence instead.
THE VERDICT: For the first time, the Judge feels like any verdict here would be useless. This movie was clearly made for fans of the series. If you like the series, you'll like the film. If you've never seen the series, a significant chunk of the film will be completely lost to you.
