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adarkrainbow · 1 year

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Otona no Douwa: A French review (3)

OAV 4: The Battle of the Monkey and the Crab

Created by and designed by Kouichi Takada. Director of animation: Masao Suwa.

The plot:

After a long journey, a tired and hungry boy arrives in a village in the middle of nowhere. He meets a mysterious young girl that guards a tree on which is a lonely kaki. The boy climbs on the tree and eats promptly this last kaki, shocking the young girl, who retrieves one of the grains of the fruit fallen onto the ground. Now with his belly full, but still thirsty, the young traveller wanders throughout the village’s street, noticing nobody is out. When he enters a small inn and asks for water, everybody looks at him coldly and gives him a silent treatment. Understanding something is very wrong with the village, the boy tries to leave but somebody throws a rock at his head. Understanding the villagers want to do him harm, the boy escapes and reaches the exit of the village, where he meets again the young girl. He asks her why everybody is so hostile, and she says he ate the last kaki. The villagers catch the boy, and tie him to a pole, before throwing rocks at him.

Later the girl comes near him with a pair of great scissors. The wounded traveller asks him if she can at least bring him some water. The girl cuts the rope tying him - he falls on the ground and breaks his neck.

The reviewer’s opinion: For the writer of the article, this was the less liked story, due to it having a big pacing problem, and being very gratuitous in its violence, as the young boy is tortured horribly for what seems to be a minor and hardly explainable crime. In fact, if someone doesn’t know the fairytale this is based on, one will wonder why an entire village wants the death of someone who ate a fruit...

In the Japanese folktale, the characters are all animals - the story is about a crab, who finds a rice ball, and a monkey, who finds a kaki seed. The monkey, jealous of the crab’s rice ball, wants to exchange it for his grain - saying “It isn’t much now, but it will grow into a tree filled with kakis you’ll be able to eat!”. The crab accepts the exchange, but once the tree is grown, the crab understands he can’t climb on it. When the monkey returns, he easily climbs on the tree and steals the kaki. Throwing a ripe one at the crab (who was begging him to give him one), he actually kills the beast. The children of the crab, learning about this, decide to avenge their father and kill the monkey. The OAV is of course very different from the folktale, though key elements are kept - the crab is here the red-haired girl armed with great scissors, for example. The reviewer says there is nothing noticeable or exceptional about this OAV, and they think it is the weakest of the six episodes of the series.

OAV 5: Crackling Mountain

Created by Hiroshi Takaya.

The plot:

A village in the Japanese countryside has its fields constantly stolen from by a thief. This thief, a rabbit, is actually the best friend of a tanuki. The tanuki is a kind man that likes to help other people, but one day he catches the rabbit in the act. Unfortunately for the tanuki, not only is he accused of the theft, but he is also blamed for the murder of the field-owner’s wife (actually killed by the rabbit). Seeing he is condemned in advance, the tanuki has no other choice than flee the village.

As he wanders in the countryside, the tanuki encounters a young girl with a pack of wood on her back - it seems she twisted her ankle, and out of kindness he decides to take her burden. As he goes forward, he hear strange sounds behind him, crackling sounds - he soon understand that the young girl set fire to the wood he carried on his back. The maiden explains she is the daughter of the farmer whose wife was killed, and she wants to avenge her mother’s murder. The fire wounds the tanuki, who flees and arrives in a panick to the house of one of his friends. His friend, seeing the burned back of the tanuki, uses a product to soothe his pain... but mentions that he is now a searched man with a heavy bounty on his head. Understanding that his friend wants to sell him, the tanuki jumps out of the window, and running away ends up meeting the rabbit again. He pursues him all the way to a lake, and he takes a boat to go after him through the body of water... understanding too late that the rabbit digged a hole in the boat. The rabbit insults the tanuki, saying he is an idiot, but he still saves him from drowning in order to get the bounty. The tanuki, now gone completely mad, tries to strangle his former friend - but villagers arrive and save the rabbit. Convinced that the tanuki is indeed a criminal, they give him to the farmer who, to avenge his wife, beheads the tanuki and places his head at the entrance of the village.

The reviewer’s opinion: It is an interesting twist on the original folktale. As with the previous fairytale, the original story deals with animals, but unlike the previous OAV (which turns the animals into full humans), this one decides to give them human bodies with animal masks, to clearly identify their original roles in the story. However the tone and plot of the story was massively changed (even though the original was just as morbid).

The original tale goes as such: an old couple adopts a hare, and a tanuki one day comes to steal all of their food. The tanuki is captured by the couple, but he begs the old woman to set him free. She takes pity on him, but as soon as he is free he kills her, makes a stew out of her corpse, takes her shape and awaits for the return of the old man - to which he feeds his wife’s own body. The hare, who saw the entire scene, decides to avenge the death of his owner but hurting as much as he can the tanuki. He puts on fire a pile of wood the tanuki carries on his back, then pretends to heal his wounds but in truth puts hot pepper on his burns, and finally he drowns him. In the original folktale the hero is the hare, while the tanuki is a monster - and the OAV rather reverts their role. The OAV also depicts in fascinating visuals the growing madness of the tanuki: when he finally gives in to insanity as everybody persecutes him, his animal mask breaks.

OAV 6: Urashima Taro

Directed by: Soichi Masui. Design and animation: Toshiharu Sugie.

The plot:

Urashima Taro is a young fisherman who likes to spend his evenings in town with women. One night, he saves the life of an old woman called Okame, who was attacked by a group of men. To reward the fisherman, she asks him to follow her to a very special palace - he does it, but half-heartedly, due to Okame’s repulsive aspect. In the famous palace, Urashima Taro is taken to a room where young girls bring him a strange substance he has to smoke... He starts hallucinating, and surrounded by smoke and maidens, Urashima Taro cannot tell reality and imagination apart anymore.

Cut off from all reality, he spends without realizing it several years in the palace, fulfilling all of his fantasies and phantasms by sleeping with an uncountable amount of women who satisfy all of his desires in a psychedelic world. But what Urashima Taro doesn’t know is that in fact he is a prisoner, locked in the palace with other men who are all constantly dreaming and hallucinating due to the substances they are forced to smoke every day. One day, Okame takes a completely drugged Urashima to the mistress of the palace, the princess Ryuu. Still hallucinating, Urashima Taro doesn’t see the true aspect of the princess, who is a zombie covered in fish scales - he rather sees a splendid young woman, and has sex with her. Satisfied, Ryuu gifts the fisherman with a pretty little box, before sending him back to his cell.

More years pass, and Urashima Taro slowly comes to his senses. Returning to reality, he tries to flee the cursed palace. He escapes but discovers that several dozen of years have passed: his house is in ruin, and his mother died of heartbreak upon his disappearance. Hopeless, Urashima Taro opens the small box of Ryuu, which contains a tiny bit of the hallucinogenic drug of the palace. He smokes it one last time before throwing himself off a cliff.

The reviewer’s opinion: A very... unique reinterpretaton of the famous legend of Urashima Taro. The reviewer found interesting the idea of turning Taro’s exile in the princess’ palace into an imprisonment, the fisherman becoming a slave to drugs and hallucinations. The reviewer however was disappointed that the “unreal” aspect of it all wasn’t played more - because there was something to dig there. It is also the most erotic of the OAV, with very blunt and unsubtle phallic metaphors, and the hero constantly having sex with all the girls he finds - plus the psychedelic scenes can easily hurt both the eyes and the brain. It is not the best OAV of the group, but the scene between the hero and the princess Ryuu traumatized the reviewer.

CONCLUSION:

The reviewer explains that clearly these OAV are not for everybody. Someone has to enjoy sadistic horror stories to enjoy those episodes - even if the fairytale they adapt aren’t very kind themselves. Each OAV can be appreciated on its own, and they are quite unequal in term of quality - some clearly much better than others.

The reviewers thought that the three adaptations of the Grimm fairy tales are superior to the three adaptations of the Japanese folktales. The reviewer notably enjoyed deeply the two episodes done by Hiroshi Takawa (Hansel and Gretel, and Crackling Mountain). In these two OAV there is a personal style that truly sets them apart, and very harsh stories delving fully into paranoia and injustice. One last interesting thing: those OAV do not come out of nowhere, since this whole series was based on a book released in Japan. It is called “Hontou wa Kowai Sekai no Douwa” (”Really creepy fairytales from around the world”) - the book contains 38 fairytales, but all rewritten and presented in their most terrifying and disturbing aspect.

The reviewer notably leaves a link to the book’s page on Bookwalker, for those interested:

https://bookwalker.jp/dec2858a89-3672-414a-b31e-3fccd743f443/%E6%9C%AC%E5%BD%93%E3%81%AF%E6%80%96%E3%81%84%E4%B8%96%E7%95%8C%E3%81%AE%E7%AB%A5%E8%A9%B1/

#otona no douwa #japanese fairytales #anime #fairytale anime #japanese folktale #horror anime #the battle of the crab and the monkey #urashima taro #crackling mountain #hiroshi takawa

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