“Sex is not nice” is rather underselling it. In fact, sex is a very bad thing, and a dirty thing, and the worst thing on earth is exposing children to sex, and it’s better to let children watch you shoot people in the face with a semiautomatic than to let them accidentally watch homemade pornography.
It may or may not surprise you to learn that it’s German.*
The nasty little plot: August is a missionary who comes back from wherever when his sister Christina dies, apparently as a result of some disease she got during her prolific career as a porn star named The Princess. August adopts his niece, Mia, and gets so angry at the evil people who led to his sister’s death (especially her first boyfriend/porn studio owner Charlie), that he kills them all violently. V-I-O-L-E-N-T-L-Y. Except for the person who beat and presumably diddled Mia. That person, he lets Mia emasculate with a crowbar. Then she kills him. With the same crowbar.
I certainly don’t mind violence, and the violence here is stylized, insofar as this is actually an animated film. Actually actually, it’s a German anime film, of all damn things, except it’s not very good at anime: the character design isn’t very interesting, and the backgrounds are fairly bland. The whole reason anime seems to be invoked is because of its X-Treme reputation: “anime is like, fuckin’ violent! Dood, check out that guy’s ear getting ripped off!”
(Also, the anime – or really, Japanese – trope of the too-cute child with a cute animal sidekick, in this case a bunny doll with a huge and kind of scary grin, and a Hobbesian tendency to become real from time to time).
Where was I? Right, I don’t mind gratuitous violence, in the main. I do mind the hell out of sanctimonious hypocrisy, and that’s here in spades. I can’t express how often and how clearly the theme is stated: “we must save the children’s morality by committing hideous acts of vengeance.” The ending makes this even more appalling: August’s plans go terribly wrong, resulting in considerable collateral damage, and the result is a nice fuzzy scene where everybody ends up in Heaven with God and all the little angels (rather, everyone ends up at Heaven’s beach, for reasons having to do with a tedious motif raised elsewhere in the film).
I don’t know if they have fundies in Germany and Denmark, but the whole thing plays like violence porn for Christians (you know, that). Sex is Teh Ee-vil, and anyone whose morality is even slightly deviant from your own deserves to be brutalized. This isn’t Mr. Militant Atheist Film Critic talking, this is the film: in one scene before August kills a half-dozen men with his bare hands, he notices a crucifix on one of the men, and takes a moment to thank God for giving him this clear omen that whoop-ass should be unleashed. I’d almost like it to be a commentary on self-deluding Christians of the sort who support torturing Muslims, but the film’s moralising tone, and that damn ending, make it pretty clear what the game is.
It’s not, mind, that I love pornographers or want to defend child molesters. August’s enemies are very scummy people. But to validate his mindless vengeance rampage (as I’ve said before, I do not care much for vengeance narratives that don’t show a toll on the avenger) speaks to the lowest of our nature.
What the film does well, in the interest of balance, is mix animation with live-action video. All of the porn tapes, and some moments that appear to be memories, are video; so is the end. It’s not just for show, but actually a really interesting meta-commentary on how videotaping would work in an animated world. Not to mention flipping the idea of “real world” vs. “fabricated world” 180° from what we are used to. It’s a bold and even revolutionary idea that nearly drags the film’s entire visual schema into respectability, and I deeply wish it was in a better film.
3/10