Blue Seed [vol. 1-4] (1996) * * 1/2 A movie review by Serdar Yegulalp Copyright 1997 by Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: A mixture of POLTERGEIST, ALIEN, THE X-FILES and CLUELESS. Obviously, an item at odds with itself.
BLUE SEED is an anime that feels as if it's suffering from multiple personality disorder. Equal parts of POLTERGEIST, ALIEN and of course the ubiquitous X-FILES have gone into this story of a team of experts recruited to stop supernatural incursions (by force if neccesary) in modern-day Tokyo. What brings the whole thing crashing down in on itself is a tone and tenor to the material that feels lifted from something with the featherweight plotting and writing of CLUELESS. Even stranger is that the whole thing is the product of Yuzo Takada, who gave us the searing and excellent 3X3 EYES series.
Much of the story focuses on Moumiji Fujimiya, a young girl who's become the target of a hideous monstrosity called the Kushinada. (It's relatively easy to get the tricky Japanese names down pat when they're repeated ad nauseam.) Apparently Moumiji has honorable blood in her veins, and her death would mean a great deal to this creature. However, there's someone also vying for her death: Mamoru Kusanagi, who's been implanted with a kind of symbiotic organism called the "blue seed", which gives him fantastic power (at the expense of his humanity). This is all potentially interesting, but the story doesn't go much of anywhere with it.
The story quickly sets itself up into neatly encapsulated half-hour set-ups. The biggest significant event, which is gotten over with relatively quickly, is Moumiji's own implantation with one of the Blue Seeds (more or less by accident), which gives her an sixth-sense sort of edge over the monsters she faces off with. But the setups and resolutions are so quick and tacky that they don't develop the story in more than unsatisfactory little nibbles. There's not enough sense of real carry-over from one segment to the next, and the characters are developed with fairly obvious, broad strokes. One of them, for instance -- Koume, the "weapons specialist" (i.e., hotheaded woman with a gun) wins Moumiji's friendship in an episode that we remember more for its manipulativeness than anything else.
BLUE SEED's biggest problem is its overall tone. At core, this is much darker material than I think the filmmakers had the nerve to admit. There's a a great deal of effort by them to lighten the story -- dumb panty gags, for instance -- that it's ultimately counterproductive. BLUE SEED seems to have been made with the mind of a horror film and the heart of a sitcom. It's not a good compromise.
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