Gokiburi-tachi no Tasogare

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.

Twilight of the Cockroaches is a bit of an oddity for me to cover here thanks to its mix of live action and animated footage used for its run. So in a rare case, I'm not gonna bother handing out grades on Art for this one since it would be impossible for me to judge this properly on any merits for its animation.

The movie is focused on a colony of cockroaches who seemingly live a peaceful coexistence with the human owner of an apartment. But not all is what it seems as once the homeowner gets a girlfriend, the lives of the colony become a ... living hell when the humans start wiping them out. The movie is focused on two different colonies in this film: those living with the bachelor who are peaceloving yet quite lazy and a militaristic colony who are regularly at odds with the woman who would become the bachelor's girlfriend. It appeared both sides were being portrayed as extreme elements in Japan's history with the militaristic roaches personifying Japan's militaristic regime under Hirohito during World War II and the peaceloving ants portrayed as Japan's modern youth having lost sense of their country's cultural identity from the peacetime it gained after World War II. The film appeared to be an allegory for what Japan could face if it continued to or returned to paths the country shouldn't take in light of now being part of the international community, the humans personifying how outsiders would perceive Japan. This symbolic approach works well for what it wants to tell.

However when it comes to being an engaging work, there are many points in this film where it can be a struggle to watch through depending on what you hope to get out of Twilight of the Cockroaches. The movie occasionally focuses on a young female cockroach named Naomi who comes to interact with both cockroach societies, though her character doesn't get proper focus or development thanks to the movie's focus on the interactions both societies have with their human owners. This also leads to an unconvincing love triangle to develop with Naomi being engaged to a male cockroach from her colony, yet also becomes interested in a male soldier named Hans from the militaristic roach colony. The movie's slow pacing also works against it at a number of points in the film as Twilight of the Cockroaches can get too fixated at points showing off its cinematography to show how the cockroaches perceive themselves dealing with their human owners or traveling around the outside world.

The animated element to this film in the form of the cockroaches are on the simple side in terms of details and are quite outdated in the style in which they are drawn. However, the film's cinematography is still excellent with showing how the world would look through the eyes of the cockroach colonies with point-of-view shots of objects and humans appearing like giants in the eyes of the roaches and use of still shots to show roaches fleeing in terror or dying from human objects like shoes and bug spray. Playing along with seeing the world through a roach's eyes is that the live-action human actors seen in this movie are kept silence (even as they talk) so as to limit the movie's POV to the roaches alone and not having the audience see things through human perspective if the actors were given audible lines.

Overall, Twilight of the Cockroaches is a bit of an oddball of a title thanks to its mix of animated and live-action footage. It does effectively express its symbolic messages involving the cockroach colonies being elements of Japan's history past and present and their perception to foreign nations. However in terms of storytelling, the movie won't be for everyone as it doesn't effectively focus on characters from an individual basis, gets more focused on the colony relationships with their human owners and the slow pacing can make it a chore to go through at points when the movie gets wrapped up in showing off its cinematography. Anyone looking for a title quite different from older and more modern anime could get enjoyment out of this. But if you aren't a big fan of live-action films, I wouldn't bother picking this up.

imagine a cockroach ...
a girl ...
and hundreds of baby cockroaches .
these baby cockroaches have same mother(that girl) , but not same father . and they are immune to insecticide .
now put that scene in the end and make it your happy ending .
what do you expect from such anime ?!
it's exactly as you expect it !
the story could have been great if you exclude that happy ending .
for art and sounds you can not expect something more from something that old .
the combination of animation and live action make the art look even worse .
... the supporting characters were more developed than the main characters .
our heroine was the less developed character .
from the beginning till the end you can not understand what was her reason for doing this or that .
and for enjoyment ...
if you could take the first 1 hour , there's less than half remaining .
althought it has some enjoyable scenes and that scenes really worth watching .
the problem is that that "some enjoyable scenes" are less than 15 minutes .