The Red Spectacles

The Red Spectacles (紅い眼鏡, Akai Megane) is a 1987 Japanese surrealist science fiction neo-noir film directed by Mamoru Oshii, co-written with Kazunori Ito, and starring Shigeru Chiba and Mako Hyodo. The first film in Oshii's Kerberos Saga, but the second installment overall after its radio drama companion piece While Waiting for the Red Spectacles (which aired a month prior), the film follows Kōichi Todome, a former police detective who, after fleeing Japan following a failed rebellion by his dissolved unit, returns several years later per a promise to his colleagues, only to find Tokyo completely unrecognizable and increasingly strange and surreal.

The Red Spectacles
20-year anniversary movie poster
Directed by	Mamoru Oshii
Written by	Kazunori Itō Mamoru Oshii
Based on	Characters created by Mamoru Oshii
Produced by	Shigeharu Shiba Daisuke Hayashi
Starring	Shigeru Chiba Machiko Washio Hideyuki Tanaka
Cinematography	Yosuke Mamiya
Edited by	Seiji Morita
Music by	Kenji Kawai
Distributed by	Omnibus Promotion
Release date	February 7, 1987 (1987-02-07)
Running time	116 minutes
Country	Japan
Language	Japanese

The Red Spectacles was released on February 7, 1987. It would be followed by several works intended to explain and expand the film's universe, the most notable of them being Kerberos Panzer Cop. The film was followed by two prequels—StrayDog: Kerberos Panzer Cops in 1991, and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade in 1999—that adapted the established stories and settings from Kerberos Panzer Cop.

Plot

In the 20th century, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department loses control of crime in Tokyo and, in response, establishes the Anti Vicious Crime Heavily Armored Mobile Special Investigations Unit, nicknamed "Kerberos", a heavily-armed police tactical unit tasked with combatting crime and evil, equipped with MG 34 machine guns and "reinforcement gear", practically bulletproof powered exoskeletons that include a gas mask with distinctive red lenses. However, while Kerberos succeeds in their mission, by the 1990s their overzealous actions and fanatical hatred of evil lead to them becoming increasingly aggressive, cruel, and corrupt. When a Kerberos member beats a misdemeanor offender to death, it sparks a massive controversy that leads to the unit's disbandment. However, three elite Kerberos members—Kōichi Todome, Washio Midori, and Sōichirō Toribe—refuse to disarm, steal a Willys MB, and flee to the Port of Tokyo, where they plan to escape in a helicopter. After repelling an ambush by bounty hunters, a grievously injured Sōichirō and Midori order Todome to leave in the helicopter alone, but they make a promise that Todome will return for them.

Three years later, Todome, a fugitive from the government, returns to Tokyo, but finds the city inexplicably no longer resembles the one he left behind: the buildings have decayed at an exponential rate, and everything is strange, surreal, and nondescript. He wanders, trying to find some semblance of his past and to find Sōichirō and Midori, and along the way encounters strange and unusual characters—a mysterious young lady clad in red, hitmen led by Bunmei Muroto, and eccentric con artists called tachiguishi who swindle inexplicably-illegal stand-and-eat food stalls (tachigui) after they were deemed to violate public order and standard of decency.

In the end, it is revealed that most of the events of the film were a dying dream, as Todome was attacked and killed shortly after returning to Tokyo.

Cast

• Shigeru Chiba as Kōichi Todome
• Machiko Washio as Washio Midori
• Hideyuki Tanaka as Sōichirō Toribe
• Tessho Genda as Bunmei Muroto
• Mako Hyodo as Young Lady
• Hideyo Amamoto as Moongaze Ginji
• Offscreen actors as Hamburger Tetsu, Beefbowl Ushigoro, Medium Hot Sabu, Baked Bean Pastry Amataro, and Crepe Mami
• Ichiro Nagai as Middle-aged man in billiards, taxi driver's voice
• Yasuo Otsuka as Taxi driver
• Oikawa Hiroe as Oriental Hotel receptionist
• Fuyuki Shinada as Soba Udon cook
• Fumi Hirano as Airport announcer
• Kintaroh Sakata as Umibōzu

Production

Several of the cast members are voice actors and appeared in Urusei Yatsura, which Oshii worked on as chief director and head writer.

The Red Spectacles is probably Oshii's most literate feature work. Not only, dialogue and narrative parts are prominent over drama but the film contains a variety of philosophical concepts such as free will and determinism, mentioned through fables, like "The Magnet and the Iron Sands" and "The Ogre Saved by the Fisherman", or through classic poet-authors quotes, Shakespeare and Pushkin. The characters refers to European medieval tales and Greek mythology, such as oral versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the three-headed watchdog of Hell Cerberus.

Releases

The Red Spectacles premiered on February 7, 1987 in Japan.

On February 25, 2003, the DVD edition was made available in Japan as part of the Mamoru Oshii Cinema Trilogy anthology box set, which contained four DVDs and one soundtrack CD. On November 4 of the same year, a subtitled version of Akai megane was released in North America as both a single DVD and also as part of a US release of the box set. The US version of the trilogy box set has different box artwork and lacks the "Revisited Scene & Production" DVD of the Japanese version.

The American The Red Spectacles DVD edition was reprinted in 2004, and since then is only available in the box set which was printed three times as of 2006 and remains the only edition released outside Japan.

Reception

The A.V. Club, reviewing it as part of the 2003 DVD release with the other parts of the trilogy, called the story "alternately hilarious, bizarre, and incoherent, right up to the disappointingly conventional ending."

Blogspot user bloodandsoulsformylordarioch stated from the review article that "For all intents and purposes, “The Red Spectacles” is a serious film about serious issues, and yet it does not shy away from having Bunmei, the face of the evil Cats, burst into an impromptu mambo for seemingly no reason, or having Koichi become incapacitated by explosive diarrhea that he is unable to relieve because there is a goldfish living in the toilet. These moments appear at first to make absolutely no sense, but when given more thought, they add a great deal to the dystopian atmosphere. These sequences are horrifying; they are completely out of place, and as such, they illustrate the ignominy of life in the new Japan. Under the new regime, the city has a bad sense of humor and a bad sense of timing, and its people are unceremoniously stripped of their dignity."

External links

• Kerberos saga official website (Japanese)
• The Red Spectacles at IMDb