Gokiburi-tachi no Tasogare

It is always interesting when a children’s film attempts to explore deeper subjects thematically, and Twilight of the Cockroaches dares to cover the international relations and economics of Japan at the peak of its economic success in the late eighties. The great nation of Japan, at the time the second most powerful economy in the world, flatteringly portrayed as a colony of cockroaches infesting the apartment of a slobbish Japanese man.

This self-deprecating analogy is quite the contrast to what one might expect from the Japanese, who are usually more closely associated with qualities like ‘honour’, ‘strength’ and ‘tranquility’. Indeed for any group or ... nation to present themselves in such a grotesque manner is unusual; it would usually be the sort of metaphor used in a work of propaganda. This makes the premise quite intriguing and the potential for a particularly biting piece of satire is alluring. But in what sense is Japan similar to a colony of cockroaches?

The first point to be made here is that it is not really Japanese people per se that are like cockroaches, but their approach to economics at that time. Living with their slovenly landlord, food is abundant and the cockroaches enjoy lives of immense luxury, to the extent that lives of cockroaches can be luxurious. There is no expectation that these glory days will come to an end, and they make no preparations for any forthcoming ‘rainy days’. Alas, those rainy days do come, just as they did for Japan itself in the early nineties when the economic bubble finally burst. Was this a prediction of the future? Not really, such consequences are inevitable in economics, and we have been experiencing the same effect in the west for the past few years, after a housing and finance boom.

But there is more to it than that; indeed the economic crisis is something of a natural occurrence, while the fate of the cockroaches in this film is rather more deliberate, in that the host actively attempts to destroy them. After finding himself a girlfriend who is distressed by the infestation of cockroaches in his home, both decide to clean up and engage in “war” with the cockroaches. Quite what this is a metaphor of, is a complicated question. The host meeting the girlfriend clearly and comfortably represents a change in the economic situation, but their conspiring to destroy the cockroaches could be taken to be an active attempt to destroy Japan. The reputation that Japanese people had at that time was of very hard working people who would come to replace the United States as the dominant economic power due to their strong work ethic, and perhaps this is what the creators intended to convey. Alas, this is not made clear enough in the picture itself and would rather contradict the lazy nature of the cockroaches prior to the host meeting the girlfriend.


There is however one further element of the Japanese national character embodied by the cockroaches which leads one to believe they represent not only the economics of the country but its people: and that is the rather dramatic conclusion of the film. This scene is shocking, especially when one reflects on the prime audience of the film, but how it fits into a metaphor of the Japanese economy is unclear; but it does fit neatly into certain other aspects of the Japanese national character. This makes the films thematic conclusions somewhat confusing. However, one cannot help but praise the bold faced, frankness of it all.


Another aspect of the film which is unconventional is the way it blends live action and animation together. The cockroaches are animated, the humans are real people, and the environment is a mixture of the two. There are a fair few western productions that have taken this approach (‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ is the most famous example) but one cannot think of any examples from Japan. Critics might say this is because the technique has rather limited applications or because it is usually unconvincing. However, I think it is well suited to this production. And while the character designs of the cockroaches are quite simplistic to be combined with live action, it only becomes a problem in the occasional scene. Other than that the animation is up to an acceptable standard.


The film is currently only available in an English dub, which is unfortunately a bit ‘straight to video children's movie’. That is to say the voice acting, while not terrible, is a bit bland. The voice actors are capable but not particularly talented and so you cannot help but laments the lack of the original Japanese dub. The background music is suitably atmospheric, dark and ominous, which emphasises the films dark themes nicely and captures the prevailing attitude of people towards cockroaches neatly.

All being said Twilight of the Cockroaches is not a film that will appeal to anyone; in fact, it will appeal to only a very limited audience, but this is not because of any lack of quality on its part. The fact is that the film is now quite old and its animation is dated, its themes have now faded into obscurity, and what is left of the content without them perhaps too childish. However if you have some basic knowledge of Modern Japanese history and a taste for niche and experimental animation, then Twilight of the Cockroaches could be just the film to pique your interest. Furthermore if you are not familiar with the Japanese approach to children’s films outside of the Studio Ghibli catalogue, then the bluntness of their traditional approach may leave you feeling quite surprised.

When all is said and done, Twilight of the Cockroaches is a clever and daring film, without any contemporary. And for that, in the often times repetitive world of Japanese Animation, makes it something to be cherished.

Twilight of the Cockroaches is quite possibly the strangest anime I have ever seen in my life. The more I think about it, the more I struggle to believe this thing exists. This is a super ambitious, big budget children's film with seemingly zero audience. I could compare it to Titan AE, which lost 50 million dollars and seemingly wasn't made for any one demographic. However, that would be dishonest. Titan AE could have performed fine targeting the tween market if it were advertised better. Don Bluth was an experienced and highly capable director who had performed well before with unusual films like NIMH. Joss ... Whedon was red hot property after Buffy and wrote a script loosely based on a beloved childhood cartoon called "Star Blazers" which MAL users might know better as "Space Battleship Yamato". There was reasonable hope for Titan AE. Twilight of the Cockroaches on the other hand could only have been greenlit as a Yakuza money laundering operation.

The plot of Cockroaches is that a man is abandoned by his wife, and she takes the children. The man sinks into a deep depression and decides to completely give up cleaning his house. This leads to generations of carefree cockroaches who live in roach paradise and have no idea what their grandparents had to suffer through. Then one day, the man gets a new girlfriend and after 2 peaceful generations for the roaches, the man commits all out genocide against our anthropomorphic, often overly sexualized roach heroes! This is a children's movie in which all the protagonists except for one are brutally murdered. The roaches aren't just humanized and anthropomorphized; they're also clearly meant to represent Japanese society.

This leads directly to the message of the film. The depressed bachelor is supposed to be the United States. According to the director, he wanted to tell the Japanese youth of the 80s to stop partying so hard and appreciate what they have because eventually America will grow tired of Japan's success and wipe it off the face of the planet! America never stopped being virulently racist against Japanese and is simply biding its time for the opportunity to unleash nuclear Armageddon on the Japanese people! This is hands down the most deeply paranoid children's film ever made. It's hard to get more paranoid than the Russians, yet even the Soviet Union didn't make a children's film in which a character sings about how the British are going to launch a nuclear barrage against Russia because they still hate Russians due to the Crimean War of 1854. America's level of racism against Japanese was basically non-existent by the late 1980s when this film was made. Hell, we can't even get our racists to be racist against Japanese! We honest to God have weirdos online who believe in the inferiority of all non-whites with the sole exception of Japanese!

Now all of that was pretty strange, but we're not at the bottom of this rabbit hole! Cockroaches wasn't based on a manga, novel, play, or anything like that. This was a completely original idea. So, who had the charisma and the sheer industry pull to make this giant failure happen? It turns out it was a D-list voice actor who never made anything before or since! He's just some random dude who did background voices on lots of random anime. One day in 1987, he just marched in front of the executives of Studio Madhouse and made the craziest elevator pitch imaginable...and they said yes. I'm not sure if the boys at Madhouse were just drunk out of their minds that day, high as FUCK on quaaludes or if this really was yakuza related. Since this was the 1980s, it honestly could have been any or all of these things.

Did you think this was the end of the review? NOPE! This film gets weirder! This is one of the only anime ever made that's live action mixed with animation in the style of "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" or "Space Jam". However, this actually came out before Roger Rabbit! The decision to use live action/animation hybrid was instead inspired by "Song of the South" from 1946. They really wanted to make Br'er cockroach because absolutely nothing about this film is normal or makes sense.

If you've read this far, I know your brain must be overloading, so I'll just say one last odd thing about the film. The character designs are by Yoshitaka Amano, who did the character designs for Vampire Hunter D and the first 6 Final Fantasy games. That part actually makes sense because he was with Madhouse at the time, but it's still pretty weird.

Should you watch Twilight of the Cockroaches? Hell yes! This is the kind of utterly bizarre, clusterfuck of an anime that could only have been produced during the height of the Japanese bubble economy. Nothing like Twilight of the Cockroaches could ever be produced in today's Japan. I can't find any data on what this film's budget was, but I can only assume it was well over 10 million dollars adjusted for inflation and that money was essentially set on fire for the lulz. Madhouse was simply that invincible in 1987. The only studio I could imagine having the spare money to make such a project today would be Tencent. So here is how we're going to make Cockroaches 2: the Quickening. Some Chinese MAL user needs to go to Shenzhen or Shanghai and ambush one of Tencent's executives. Now the next part is really important. Go to a bar to pitch your idea and start buying them rounds of baijiu. Do not stop buying them baijiu! Then suggest a children's film in which a cartoon panda family representing the ideal Chinese family are vivisected by an evil tanuki representing Japan. Then suggest making it partially live action just so that Jackie Chan can curb stomp the tanuki at the end of the film. If we get them drunk enough, maybe we can pull this off!

I had a hard time getting into this one and for good reason. The premise is absurd but not in an endearing way. A society of cockroaches is allowed to live in some guy's apartment because he's too much of an alcoholic slob to do anything about them until he gets a girlfriend or something. A female cockroach falls in love with a random cockroach from another apartment. There's a bit about cockroaches being at war with the humans but it just comes across as odd. It's creepy. The roaches are not endearing and their interactions with humans will make your skin crawl. Think A ... Bug's Life but without anything that made it entertaining. I couldn't tell if this was for children or adults.

I'll start with the sound. Any time a human does something, it is loud and thunderous. This is done to give the viewer the perspective of the cockroaches which is a clever idea but in execution, it's too loud and mixed in a way that is painful on the ears. Aside from that, everything is bland and the character voices aren't all that animated.

The animation is acceptable but most characters are simple and there isn't much detail to anything drawn. The animation and live action scenes do blend well. Everything is rather dark and it is difficult to discern what is being shown on the screen.

The story drags. I mean it just plain drags. This film is an hour and 45 minutes and it just never seems to end. Much of the film is just fluff and could be cut. The inciting action and conflict don't come about until about halfway through, before that is just bland drama. There is little action and when it does occur, it is not compelling in the slightest. The characters are one dimensional, falling in and out of love with each other on a whim. The film has a bit of commentary about Japanese culture in the 80s but much of this is lost with the bland dialogue and odd premise.

Overall, I don't know what the hell I was thinking when I watched this one and I would not recommend it to anyone. The minor social commentary is lost and there are better ways to get a feel for the aspects of Japanese society this film was meant to portray.