Darkside Blues

The Persona Century Corporation has purchased nearly every inch of land on earth available. Dissension is not tolerated within the corporation's borders and those who oppose Persona are dealt with swiftly. Of those few places not yet under Persona's control is the free town of Kabuki-cho, also known as "The Dark Side of Tokyo". Within the town, under the leadership of a woman named Mai, is a small resistance group called Messiah. Into this world steps a man who takes the sobriquet of Kabuki-cho: Darkside. Sealed up in another dimension eighteen years ago by Persona Century, Darkside now returns to aid Messiah using his unique ... mystic power of renewal.

That description is probably the only time that you will ever see something coherent about Darkside Blues plot. The whole film's plot just moves from one thing to another without much of a proper transition, and without much of an explanation or reason either. And yet, strangely enough, I don't feel like it's too much of a detriment to the movie.

Darkside Blues has this weird dream like quality to it, much like a David Lynch film, and that extends to most of it's plot. Much like things happening in a dream, the plot, along with characters and their actions, either appear or happen with little to no logic, sometimes to completely disappear. For example, the titular character, Darkside, is introduced by horse and carriage, coming through a painting from another dimension. Yes, it's that kind of anime.

Sure, there is some explanation as to what's going, as few and far between as it is, but it's more about fitting with the mood of the whole thing rather than everything making sense. Everything that happens fits with the tone and mood that the movie is clearly going for, and nothing about the plot is outright incomprehensible, even if it's plot feels a bit muddled and a lot less polished than a David Lynch film.

With the plot so disjointed, I actually went back and read the manga to see if they had left anything out or had maybe changed something about the plot to fit into the budget. Well, I can definitely say that the anime is pretty accurate to the manga sans a few minor details, so it being like this is intentional.

The original manga was written by Hideyuki Kikuchi, who also wrote the Vampire Hunter D and Wicked City series, and his writing style does come across to some degree in Darkside Blues in that, like those other works, Darkside Blues has a similar moody tone and is very atmospheric, much in the same as the Vampire Hunter D and Wicked City adaptations.

Darkside Blues is is a difficult recommendation. On one hand, it's very atmospheric and has a nice slow moody pace to it. On the other, it's borderline incomprehensible plot is going to turn a lot of people away from it. If you're the type of person who loves a good David Lynch film, enjoyed the adaptations of Vampire Hunter D and Wicked City, or just really enjoy a moody atmospheric aesthetic and don't mind a plot that is a tad less coherent than something you'd normally watch, then this might have something that you like.

Beware for Darkside is coming to Earth. No I am not talking about the DC comic super villain who terrorizes the heroes of the DC universe. I am talking about the unnamed dark clad man who comes through a dimensional portal on a horse drawn carriage arriving in Kabuki-cho "The Dark Side of Tokyo" which is one of the last places on Earth that isn't controlled by the Persona Century Corporation. This mysterious Darkside brings a coming change and renewal to poor and disenfranchised people of Kabuki-cho, as well as the power hungry rulers of Earth that run Persona Century, and the rest of the ... citizens of Earth.

I had originally watched Darkside Blues around fifteen years ago, and at the time I really enjoyed the film, but after seeing the film again after such a long time I realize that while Darkside Blues is an entertaining film with some grand ideas it is also a very flawed anime film as well. The film follows a whole cast of characters from wayward rebels living in Kabuki-cho to members of the anti-Persona group to Persona representatives. There are so many plot threads, genres and themes taking place in a miniscule running time of eighty three minutes that it takes away from the quality of the film. There is the plot thread revolving around Darkside and the Persona Corporation. Apparently the Persona Corporation sealed Darkside in another dimension, but the film never tries to explain the reasoning behind it only implying that the return of Darkside will be extremely bad for Persona. I found the plot and the character Darkside interesting and wished the film could have explored that plot thread better. There is another plot thread that revolves around Mai and her past dealing with the Guren the heir to the Persona Corporation, and there are many more plot points, and plot twists in Darkside that might have worked better if Darkside had been a longer film or had a thirteen episode anime series.

There were obvious messages that writer Kikuchi Hideyuki and director Yoshimichi Furukawa wanted to convey in their film as "renewal" or "rebirth" in overcoming loss, rape, or some other kind of hardship and being reborn. There are many religious undertones to the film and other themes about peace, like whether world peace can be achieved peacefully or must it be achieved by force and ruled by a dictator, and if that is achieved is that truly peace. There are many interesting themes that could have explored better if the film had been longer or had Darkside Blues been turned into a short series. You can see the running theme I am going with as I continue my review. The other problem with the film is the all the different genres being blended together. Darkside Blues is a Dystopian film that blends fantasy, action, science fiction, drama, suspense and romance to name a few, and at certain points in the in Darkside it did work well, but you know where I am going with this so I'll stop here.

While the plot, characters, themes weren't fleshed out enough one of the things that did work for the film was the tone of Darkside Blues. The anime film was dark in color to emphasize the themes of the film and it works really well. Even when it is daylight you can still see the shadows of the darkness and it just emphasizes the points the writer and director are trying to convey. While I am sure the animation was good nearly twenty years ago when the film came out Darkside's animation certainly does not hold up as well as other anime films, but is still decent and enjoyable. Now to what is perhaps the best part of the film which is the music scored by Kazuhiko Toyama. The music is beautifully scored and fleshed out fully encompassing each scene in the film. Then there was the ant-persona ballad song. I don't know who sang the song, but it was wonderfully written and exquisitely performed by the singer with a simple guitar. I tried to looking online to find who sang both the Japanese and English words for the song, but I could not find out who performed the ballads.

I truly believe Darkside Blues could have worked extremely better as an anime series. The plot, characters and themes could have been completely fleshed out in a twelve or twenty four episode series. Unfortunately instead we get a jumbled mess that is at times an entertaining film in Darkside Blues that blends to many plot threads, themes, genres and characters into a short film that. I give Kikuchi Hideyuki and Yoshimichi Furukawa props for trying to create a meaningful film, but they have sadly failed and I can't recommend Darkside unless you are a true anime fan then you might find the film worthwhile or entertaining like I did.

Darkside Blues is a product of the late 1980s to mid-1990s anime period, where seemingly half of all OVAs or series would simply tease the audience and never become a finished product. This movie follows that trend, its 80-minute running length leaving us with many unanswered questions, though it stands alone decently as an aesthetic actioner, with an expected sequel—it never came. The manga-is-better-crowd doesn't even win here, because the manga is just as unfinished—abandoned after the first two volumes were published by Vampire Hunter D writer Hideyuki Kikuchi and artist Yuuho Ashibe.

This series is tagged with words like vague, ambiguous, obtuse, etc, but ... the really important one is INCOMPLETE; it's not easy to tell if something will remain vague until the work is complete. but it's true that few ideas are adequately explored or explained. Furthermore, both Kikuchi and Ashibe are in their 70s and there doesn't seem to be any plans to continue, and it's questionable whether or not they would care to return to something they dropped in the early 90s.

The work, indeed, bears some similarity to VHD: an enigmatic and asocial main character who is meant to be an overpowered badass; lots of quirky antagonists with unique powers; supernatural elements; elegant or gothic imagery; style over substance, though this time there's a bit more of an arty or pseudo-philosophical veneer that accompanies the flashy animation. I'd say this occupies territory somewhere in-between the two VHD films. It doesn't have the budget to compete with Kawajiri's souped-up visual spectacle, but it's far more polished than the mess that is the original VHD.

There is a strong synchronicity of sound design and visuals to create a compelling atmosphere, as well as the entertaining pulp of its well-animated action and set-pieces. Even if the ideas and storyline are a little half-baked, it's certainly more compelling than your average action sci-fi romp, and its clear that a completed work with the same level of production quality and more fleshed-out and, most importantly, COMPLETE script could easily be an excellent work of art with a great deal of potential. The ambiguity, the strange illusory nature of Darkside's tenement building, and the dream aspect are especially intriguing.

Of course, it has its flaws other than being unfinished. Some of the events seem pointless, and there are too many characters to have very in-depth characterization and development in the span of just 80 minutes, so there really isn't much there. It can definitely seem a little cheesy or b-movieish, and this definitely isn't a cinematic masterpiece. Many of the events don't flow together so well or can be a bit jarring.

The story seems alright—it's a kind of dystopic/cyberpunk sci-fi with a dark, somber atmosphere, sometimes leading some to lump it into the horror genre. Themes of globalization and new world order are explicit in the Persona Century Corporation (PCC), which owns pretty much the entire world. There are the expected groups of rebels who oppose them.

Where everything becomes a bit more speculative is with the character Darkside. He acts as a catalyst for many of the events that will come, reminding me of the mysterious man in Texhnolyze who creates chaos in the underground city to "further human evolution."

For those who are interested, I'll provide some details that I gleaned from both the manga and the anime. Most of the remaining portion of this review will summarize or clear up a few events and make comparisons between the manga and anime:

There's a device called the Mirror of Arbis, which seems to be a portal to another dimension. For some reason, Darkside was placed in this dimension by PCC when he was 3 years old, and he developed rapidly into a full-grown man with incredible psychic powers. At the very beginning, he rides out of a wormhole from the fourth dimension on a flying horse and buggy. Why he was sealed away, the nature of the dimension, and what allowed him to leave is a complete mystery.

Darkside assists our protagonists against PCC numerous times, and he specializes in some sort of dream therapy that allows people to be "renewed." This is all very unclear, and while we can't known what the creators intended for this renewal process and its importance to the plot, it can be seen as a sort of psychotherapy, but much more direct, allowing him to enter into the subject's mind and dramatically reenact his or her memories; he even uses what appears to be the same process against Enji, so it was probably going to be used to "renew" both commoners, heroes, and villains alike.

The source material consists of a 380-400 page condensed manga, and if you read this with hopes of finding out more... spoiler warning, you won't find much else. The anime is a pretty faithful adaptation, with a few scenes cut, added or reworked. There is a sort of elegance to much of Ashibe's art, with some of the more elaborate scenes reminding me of artists like Suehiro Maruo; however, the backgrounds are often rather simple, other than establishing shots and more stylized sequences; unlike, say, an adaptation like Berserk, where the anime is inadequate at adapting the technical precision of Miura's art, Darkside Blues is an adaptation that is mostly superior. The imagery is improved, and it benefits greatly from sound and animation. Most of the changes in the anime were actually for the better.

The ending is about the same in the manga, but the man with the mask (who I think may be a distinct character from Guren in the manga) is revealed to be Guren at the end of the anime and there's a confrontation between him and Mai, which partially develops/resolves a subplot... kind of. This isn't in the manga, but it makes the anime feel more well-rounded. The nature of the dialogue between Selia and Tatsuya about peace and tyranny is pretty much the same, but possibly expanded a little bit in the manga. Near the end of the anime Enji is ordered to kill Darkside, beginning an interesting sequence where a whole city block is turned to stone, although Enji's fate is... left open to interpretation; this never happens in the manga either, and may have possibly been more of an invention by the adaptation team to give the appearance of more closure and to shoehorn a nice fight scene in at the end.

Another difference is a very strange one: during the scene where Tamaki tortures the rebel, she is holding a replica of what appears to be the fake control center that the rebels bombed while thinking it was the real one, and a scene is shown between two workers, but it doesn't make a lot of sense, and when the girl's body is turning into gold, Tamaki rams the replica into one of her wounds. It's very weird and may have been seen as too graphic for the adaptation.

Other than that, Katari is changed up a little bit and actually has a few short lines of dialogue in the anime, compared to his effeminate and mute character in the manga. The little sphere he holds isn't in the manga, but it's a good symbol to represent Darkside's opposition to the current order.

I really wanted to like this a lot more than I did. I am not familiar with the source it's based off of, but my guess is that the source material has more time put into the characters. In my opinion the biggest thing stopping me from really enjoying it more is the somewhat strange pacing and open ended ending.

I could go into particular things I liked or didn't like but in the end I think it needed more than 83 minutes to build the characters. It does successfully create a very somber mood and I like the juxtaposition between most scenes being not only ... full of light but almost blindingly so. This is at odds with Darkside's total blackness, and I dig that. It has a whole lot going for it in style and mood, I only wish the characters had time to be fleshed out and gave us more reason to care about them.

I also just didn't feel all that satisfied with the ending.I certainty expected there to be a final confrontation of some kind with Persona Century's leader and his blonde lackey. What I got instead was somewhat of an art film ending where I guess the fight continues on? I also don't really understand the role he plays or the side that Darkside is on, but maybe that's the point? I was also too dumb to figure out what Kitari represented and what the ending alluded to and again default to my assumption that it's something I'd understand better had I read the manga.

NOTE: This review was originally posted on my Letterboxd account on 3/1/2022

I only remember seeing this anime once on VHS when I was a kid, and I barely remember what happens. I went into this anime expecting it to be an underappreciated gem. To be honest, it's a decent film. Although the animation in Darkside Blues is excellent, the story is disappointing in my opinion. The animation is incredible, and I adore the film's dark tone. Despite his lack of involvement, it has the feel of a Yoshiaki Kawajiri film. It has lovely dark shading, and I like how dark colors are used. The ... backgrounds are extremely well-detailed, and the character movement is incredibly fluid. The soundtrack for the film is composed by Kazuhiko Toyama (Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII), and it is very well done in my opinion. The film's melancholy tone is perfectly captured by the music.

Darkside Blues has a great premise, but the characters ruined the movie for me. None of them piqued my interest, and I had trouble caring about what was going on. The DVD quality of the film has aged terribly, and an HD remaster is urgently required. When an HD remaster is released, I can see myself enjoying it even more with a better mindset. Also, the English dub for this film sucks. I was unable to find the Japanese version, so I was stuck watching the English dub instead. I recommend staying away from the English dub.

Overall, Darkside Blues is an average film that I only recommend if you're interested in seeing it. Rating: 6.5/10