SPOTLIGHT: Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

It could be that Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (人狼, 1999) is one of the most underrated anime offerings of all – a situation no one into the more adult leanings of the medium should ascribe to since there’s tons of action and sizable armaments involved.

Kiddie stuff this most certainly is not, and with equally big gun anime production houses Production I.G and Bandai Visual working together here (along with one Mamoru Oshii), there was never any real doubt about the grown-up nature of this material or the quality of the animation.

Down in Australia there’s a very nice edition available through the cool cats at Madman Entertainment.

Add to the guns and action a tall, dark, silent-type protagonist, a mysterious terrorist organization femme fatale, government-condoned death squads, post-modern German WW2 helmets, gasmasks, full-on body armour, and – hidden amidst all this – some overt references to the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale.

Penned by Mamoru Oshii (Ghost In The Shell, Sky Crawlers), as part of his Kerberos saga, the alternate reality late ‘50s story underpins Oshii’s earlier live-action film Stray Dog (1991) – a movie which starred actor Yoshikatsu Fujiki, and who here returns to voice our hero Kazuki Fuse.

Fujiki also starred in Oshii’s more recent live-action movie Assault Girls (2009), and his presence is all the more reason that you should watch the movie in the original Japanese dub (with English subtitles) rather than opting for the easy-listening local lingo.


The depth of talent involved in the production is something guaranteed to rock the socks off any anime admirer.

Kenji Kamiyama (later the director of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) worked as sequence/animation director, the character designs (based on director Hiroyuki Okiura’s originals) were embellished on by Tetsuya Nishio (a key animator on Millennium Actress and FLCL) and the superb music is composed by Hajime Mizoguchi – one of Japan’s leading musicians in the ‘80s, and Yoko Kanno’s ex-hubbie; Kanno herself moonlights as the pianist here.

Many people are still waiting for the director, Okiura, to helm his next movie.

He was just 33 when Jin-Roh was released, yet while he’s also worked on key animation and character designs for Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Blood: The Last Vampire, Patlabor 2, Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence and Magnetic Rose, the shame is that the man hasn’t offered up another movie in over a decade.

When that does happen I probably won't be the first to report on it – there are rumours afoot – but in the meantime back-tracking to his 1999 singular classic is well worth the ride.

“Jin-Roh is one of the most stunning movies I’ve ever experienced, period,” says independent film-maker Toshiaki Yamashite. “Each time I watch it I walk away with more. It’s a work of genius.”

Amidst all the angst and bullets it’s a typical Oshii-style yarn: mind-boggling and ultimately mind-blowing stuff, with Fuse himself striking a note as anime’s most elusive male lead.




Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
© 1999 Mamoru Oshii / BANDAI VISUAL / Production I.G All Rights Reserved

Toshiro Mifune: Sexy Beast 三船 敏郎

1984 might’ve been the year that the Macintosh was introduced, Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture, and Australia swapped national anthems (finally ditching ‘God Save the Queen’), but it was also the year that a major Japanese magazine conducted a national poll; when the results were in the actor Toshiro Mifune, at age 64, was declared the winner of the ‘Most-Japanese Man’ competition – singled out from all Japanese males, past and present, over the nation’s known history.

This is no minor feat when you fathom that the Japanese trace their recorded history back two millennia.

Mifune was prolific in the acting industry long before attempting English language roles in Steven Spielberg’s 1941 or the TV miniseries Shogun.

His filmography at imdb.com tips the 180 mark, over a hundred of which were produced prior to his turn as Lee Marvin’s violent Man Friday in Hell in the Pacific (1968); the list stretches from his first film in 1947 through to the his death at age 77, fifty years later.

It’s no accident that Akira Kurosawa, the writer/director with whom Mifune did his superior work, orchestrated most of these Japanese films. By the time the rest of the world cottoned on to the actor, he and Kurosawa were estranged, having made their last film together in 1965 after a partnership that lasted almost two decades.


There’s his well-meaning rookie cop, eerily akin to a young Gregory Peck, who loses his gun on public transport in Stray Dog (1949); the brash samurai charlatan in Seven Samurai (1954); his hyperactive, paranoid dynamo in the Macbeth-as-jidaigeki-drama, Throne of Blood (1957); a bespectacled salaryman with the slow-burning vendetta in The Bad Sleep Well (1960); the ailing yakuza gangster in Drunken Angel in 1948.

Over the 98-minute course of Drunken Angel (this is one of Kurosawa’s shorter tales) the actor is by turns brutal and suave; at other moments there’s a scary vitality to his agitated, hollowed out face-of-impending-doom performance – in particular the show-stopping manic turn he makes in a drunken dance hall.

While the film stock may have dated, the style and performance here most certainly hasn’t.

Perhaps the most memorable and famous of Mifune's roles is the blasé, mysterious stranger in Yojimbo (1961) and its sequel Sanjuro the following year – himself the role model for both Clint Eastwood’s and Bruce Willis’ Man with No Name characters in A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.


The stand-out collaboration is debatable, but if you want to angle things in Mifune’s corner, toward the movie in which he rattles bones most as the sexy beast/enfant terrible of old-school Japanese cinema, you’re going to have to settle on 1958, when the actor was 38 and at the height of his stagecraft.

Star Wars aficionados interested in finding out the source material for Episode IV are duty-bound to investigate a B&W movie made that year by Kurosawa in the widescreen TohoScope format, starring Mifune, and originally released in Japan in December – because The Hidden Fortress has most of the key elements of a plot used 19 years later when the first Star Wars movie was released.

But in truth it’s Toshiro Mifune, above and beyond the superior script and direction, who shines.

Cast in the principle role of General Rokurota Makabe, the actor’s turn here sparked the whole ‘sexy thing’ reference in the somewhat dubious headline for this article – and without doubt contributed to his man’s man award in 1984.

As a samurai, General Makabe is perhaps the scariest, most fearless and honourable man alive – as well as one of the more charismatic and inspiring. He’s got that rousing leader quality, the sort Russell Crowe delivered in Gladiator, Edward James Olmos brandishes on Battlestar Galactica, and King Hal throws about in the pages of Shakespeare’s Henry V.

It’s also the kind you just didn’t get at all from Orlando Bloom in Kingdom Of Heaven.

Think effortlessly debonair, man-of-action panache, and gravelly speeches that’d embolden even an inert, pen-pushing sloth like myself to pull myself to my knees, yell a bit, shake a blunt spear about in the air, and cheerfully follow both his magnetic persona and/or twinkling eyes into battle – at least some of the way, before diving for cover.


You just know that Makabe is like Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, and he’ll never actually cop an injury at all. The guy wears serious bravery on his sleeve, and acts like it’s a regular wristwatch.

Most of all, though, while the steely scowl and the gruff baritone are the hallmarks of any encounter with Mifune in the reels of The Hidden Fortress, there’s also a barely repressed machismo that hovers there as he strokes his chin in thought, seemingly not amused or divorced from the events that transpire around him – then throws back his head with riotous laughter, more than a little bit mad.

Each facet is a thrilling moment that keeps your eyes glued on this fascinating, sexy beast of a man and his scene-chewing performance.

Here's just a taste of Mifune & Kurosawa combined.

MIFUNE in 'DRUNKEN ANGEL':



'HIDDEN FORTRESS' SNEAK PREVIEW:




This story is also online at the Aussie online Filmink site, as they're publishing a 4,000-word (hardly) epic ramble I hacked together to coincide with the Akira Kurosawa centennial-since-his-birth in their May 2010 issue.

All images and clips © Toho.