Jin-Roh

Directed by Oshii's protégé Okiura Hiroyuki, who did character designs and supervised animation for Ghost in the Shell, Jin-Roh (aka The Wolf Brigade) offers a unique blend of retro sci-fi and fairy story with a powerful sting in the tail. It's set in a 'parallel universe' Tokyo of the late 1950s/early 1960s, where shadowy military intelligence forces battle a highly organised and heavily armed underground of subversives and terrorists. In the course of an anti-terrorist action, secret policeman Fusé Kazuki traps a suicide bomber but hesitates to shoot her - long enough to allow her to explode the bomb. He is reprimanded for his scruples and sent for retraining. In a library he encounters a young woman who claims to be the bomber's sister and explains the origins of the dead girl's cover as 'Little Red Riding Hood'. Fusé's 'strong arm of the state' mind- set is challenged and seemingly subverted as he befriends the sister and gets into the meaning of the Brothers Grimm story. But the more he understands the story, the more closely he identifies with the wolf... Vividly designed and realised with consummate technical skill, this is the best Anime of recent years. Oshii's original script plays like a pessimistic re-reading of Angela Carter's work on lupine myth - from the wolf's point of view. (T.R.)