I learned of _Tamala_ from Anime Year by Year's 2002 entry, which describes the work thus:
"Unbeknownst to her, she is genetically engineered to remain eternally young by the conglomerate Catty & Co., formerly the clandestine cult of Minerva, so that she can be used for advertising purposes. Even after she is killed mid-film by a pedophilic dog police officer, she remains 'immortal' with her face plastered over all of Meguro Ward, Tokyo in ads for cigarettes, matchboxes, and other consumables. One of her flings, a cat named Michelangelo (calling himself Professor Nominos later in the film), views the logographic Tamala in the same way Oedipa Maas does the muted post horn in Lot 49 and starts giving lectures on her hidden significance. To anyone who enjoys Pynchon's novels, this winding and nonsensical plotline won't be a deterrent. Tamala does a great job at capturing the essential elements of his art: conspiracy theories that go nowhere, riffing on the emptiness of semiotics (Tamala represents anything and everything to her observers a la the post horn in Lot 49), postmodern obsession with holocaust and atrocity (Tamala's only wish is to return to her home planet of Orion, origin of the massacre). Moreover, the cyclical structure common in the postmodern novel is contained in Minerva's belief that Tamala is their god Tatla: "Why can't Tamala die?" The reason is now visible. Tamala must live forever, the everlasting cycle of Destruction and Rebirth with Tamala as the centerless center - the icon of Death and Resurrection - must be retained so that Catty & Co. may continue to expand its network of conspiracy and worldwide capitalism...I also appreciated the unconventional B&W coloration and 1960's OST, and the use of Flash, far from being distracting, fits with irreverent attitude of the film's protagonist; naturally, a true punk anime shouldn't use the normal means of production. Many adaptations lazily copy the text of the original work. Tamala distinguishes itself by reproducing the spirit of Pynchon's work while grounding it in a fundamentally different context. Though the film alienated many of its viewers (the lengthy monologue towards the end is usually cited as a sticking point), I found Tamala to be a complete success thematically and an ideal example of avant garde animation."
Intrigued, I checked it out. My impression was less favorable.
I started off favorably inclined, as the artwork beckoned back towards the forgotten era of hyper-kinetic deformed black-white animation, before Disney's hegemony, and any revival gets kudos from me. The Pynchon paranoid mood also was OK with a number of creepy elements buried in the urban background (the giant robotic advertisements being a good example). Slowly, the artwork begins to wear as the sheer repetitiveness and minimalism and slow pans and static camera and unimaginative gray-scale coloring shows it's not some East Asian/Kubrickian esthetic, it's just low-budget cheapness. (I may like Flash animation well enough for short, but *92 minutes* of it?)
The paranoid mood in fiction is exhausting, and to a great extent, depends on the payoff because you're setting up a mystery: what is really going on, or is the protagonist just crazy? _Tamala_ suffers from dwelling on a topic of little interest to us: the slow decay into riots of the random city (heavily reminiscent of _Taxi Driver_'s NYC - lots of casual violence, prostitutes, etc) she wanders into. Other choices alienated me (what was the point of the mouse sex-slave?) or irritated me as much as the art (Tamala only speaks in an immature monotone, no matter what she is describing or saying). We ultimately do get the whole framework laid out, in a single gigantic infodump at the end, as AYY alludes to. Infodumps usually indicate a failure of writing, and _Tamala_'s infodump is no exception: it comes too late for me to care, and when laid out baldly like that, my reaction is more "huh?" The plot... I don't even... well, I can't say I've seen *that* in worldbuilding before, so it definitely has novelty.
The work ends abruptly after the monologue and from Wikipedia, it seems they had intended to complete the return of Tamala to Orion and come up with a real ending, but that has not happened and so (given it's an obscure work from 12 years ago now) the viewer will be perpetually in suspense as to the rest of Tamala's story. I'm willing to put up with weak entries in a series if the rest delivers, but unfortunately _Tamala_ has to be judged on its own.
So, definitely unusual, definitely avant garde and experimental, but not much of a success. I don't regret watching it but it's probably best for those who want novelty and have run through most of the usual suspects in anime.
