Bits Pieces Being new to anime, I watched this with no expectations and no background knowledge. This is one amazing, intelligent movie.The early scenes have a persistent, eerie, dislocated feel to them. Soon it's obvious that this is deliberate. What the characters do not say, and do not do, is more important than what the viewer sees and hears. The stillness and emptiness on screen hint at something very menacing off-screen.The hints gradually give way to answers. This is a horrific, predatory world where humans exploit perpetual adolescents - "kildren" - to keep the peace. By fighting and dying in stage-managed battles, the kildren help maintain a comfortable stable social order for the adults to enjoy. The adults also get to enjoy, vicariously, the thrills of warfare.The kildren do what they have been trained, engineered, and ordered to do - kill their own kind. But as they slowly, one by one, become aware, of the nature of their lives, the kildren suffer. Some turn suicidal. Some try to blot out the awareness with continual distractions, of chain-smoking, alcohol, sex.How do you live, when you realize you have been bred like cattle, for butchering, and your last day could well be this day? There are some thought-provoking themes here, and it's a nice touch, somehow very fitting, that the sex scenes are as sad as they are modest.Predation of the young, abuse of power, the pain that comes with awareness. These are difficult high-level concepts, skilfully handled in this artful piece of work.

Kong Ho Meng I have to try to write a short review to avoid spilling out any beans But all I wanted to say is, this movie is like a bible - its hidden meaning is totally unlike what it seems from merely its outer appearance. If you cannot think outside the box or if you cannot treat this anime as coming from a surreal genre that requires a high level of intellectual thought to peel off its layers, then you are not prepared to embrace its true power.For those of you who are ready, just think of the Children and keep this thought throughout while watching this movie (which is understandably made at an ultra-slow pace). It forms the basis of the link between things happening in the movie against something that is already apparent in real life. If you need more clues, please read Oshii's interviews online on his intention of making this movie.Otherwise, if you get any of the mind-blowing revelation, once you uncovered something along those lines, that caught me off-guard like a plane shooting up sky-high, you will probably feel that 10 stars are not enough for this masterpiece either.

tieman64 The near future. Humanity has achieved some semblance of peace. To remind the masses of pain and suffering, and to inject wonder, gratitude and emotion into a world that has long calloused into apathy, multinational corporations stage elaborate wars fought by cloned fighter pilots called "Kildren". The corporations are named after German football teams. The Kildren do not age and remain in a state of perpetual adolescence."The Sky Crawlers" was directed by Mamourou Oshii, who cites Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky as influences. His film begins with Yuichi Kannami, one of many fighter pilot Kildren, arriving at a military installation. Everyone at the installation knows that Yuichi is simply a clone who's been assigned to them and died countless times before, but they nevertheless treat him as a "real" human being. It is a charade they're tired of maintaining."Why bother to grow up if I'm going to die?" Yuichi says early in the film, the line encapsulating his indifference to all things. Unfazed by the possibility that he may be bioengineered, a machine created for virtually no purpose, Yuichi spends his days drinking beer, playing war games, having sex and lazing about. He never questions who he is, why he's on the island or why he fights. He has no memory of what came before "now" and little regard for what will come next.Towards the end of the film Yuichi begins to develop some modicum of self-awareness. Seeking a kind of Sartrean authenticity, and desperate to end the charade he is caught up in, he takes to the skies. He is then mercilessly shot down by a fighter pilot called "the teacher". The following day (wait until the end of the credits) another clone of Yuichi appears at the military base. It then becomes apparent that each clone is destroyed or commits suicide prior to attaining self-awareness. For the Kildren, ignorance is bliss.The film is philosophically heavy, Oshii swimming in waters routinely visited by Antonioni. Today in Japan an estimate one million youths, or roughly one percent of the population, are classified as "hikikomori", which literally means "being confined". These are youths who have sequestered themselves in family homes and have little contact with the outside world. Having given up on the idea of being a contributing member of society these youths either remain unemployed or work in menial jobs, embracing stagnation and self medicating themselves with various post-industrial creature comforts. In addition to this, the number of students dropping out of school in Japan has doubled since 1990, and women are increasingly going on "womb strikes", refusing to have children. With this comes a shrinking work force and a fall in birth rates. An entire chunk of Japan no longer wishes to live.While many believe the "hikikomori" to be social misfits or psychologically damaged, it is better to think of them as an early warning signal. Like coal mining canaries, which were once used to detect toxic gasses, the "hikikomori" are a red flag, sensitive individuals who sense that something is wrong and so retreat to the wombs of their bedrooms to escape from a society they view as being toxic.Much literature has been written about the "hikikomori", but their existence essentially boils down to one thing: Japan is the world's first true post-modern nation. What you have in Japan is a conflict between East and West, between group and individual, between modernity and post-modernity. It is a country caught within a web of diametrically opposed forces, forces which are pressure cooked because of several relatively unique factors.So on one hand you have a country cocooned by walls of water. A country with a fixed national identity, heavy immigration restrictions, a rigid school curriculum, a homogeneous ideology, a society built on strong social mores, honour, tradition, hard work, loyalty, group-ism, specific aesthetics, a hierarchical structure emphasising the inequality between persons etc etc. And on the other hand you have a country which no longer believes in the myth of Progress. Which suffers the atomization of the family, the rampant feminization of men, which now heavily borrows and models itself after Western culture, and which, in the wake of the economic boom of the 1980s, finds the pursuit of material extravagance to deliver emptiness rather than inner contentment.Of course existential questions of meaningfulness and identity traditionally crop up in wealthy societies, as man's focus shifts from self-preservation to introspection. But Japan goes beyond this. Postmodernity is epitomised by relational identities, a loss of absolutes and widespread fragmentation. It abolishes the idea of fixed essences and leaves individuals to construct identities by appropriating from vapid, but always shifting, cultural and ethnic positions. End result: today the essence of the Japanese is "to have no essence", a stance which the "hikikomori" feebly rebel against.So at its core "The Sky Crawlers" is about a society of youths caught in limbo, refusing to grow up because they have nothing to live for. Stuck in stasis they become increasingly infantilized, soothing their pain with vices like anime, which in this film takes the form of "staged" or "theatrical" wars "fought by actors". Oshii, in other words, attacks the anime industry itself, an industry in which the same old thing is repeated ad infinitum, all with the same interchangeable boy pilot avatars. Resentful of a dead creative environment (see "Children Of Men", in which the future is literally sterilized) he urges his hero, and audience, to escape and strive towards something. Interestingly, this pursuit is seen to be suicidal. Dedicating the body to a cause is itself the decision to erode the body for that cause.Many complain that the film is too slow (even its dog fights are made banal), but those familiar with Antonioni will be at home here. The film isn't slow so much as it is beautifully nauseous. It's Antonioni's "Red Desert" with fighter jets.8.9/10 - Flawed masterpiece. See "The Tin Drum".

Gregory If your one of those people who had rather think than speak, then this movie will probably be memorable and an instant top favorite within your archive of loved anime. This is a drama, it's plot is one that forces the audience to place themselves in the fantasy to better understand it. It's not just a bunch of pretty pictures but has in itself a meaning; perhaps it's meaning is meaningless in the real world, it is, however, a movie that has a story to tell. In the end that's what it's all about is the story. Remember it or forget it, it's not your choice it all depends on whether it's a story worth telling... if it is, it's most likely worth remembering. This is one of those. --->I think it is anyway<--- :)