T.o.L - Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (2003)-Cinema of the World

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T.o.L - Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (2003)

Gönderen anybody

Official site: http://www.tamala2010.com/

Quote:

Hello, space kitty: "Tamala" a far-out trip
By Ty Burr, Globe Staff

Boston Globe
Published: 10/31/2003

Some movies exist beyond quantification, so I'm giving three stars to the Japanese animated whatsit "Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space" only because my editor says I have to give it something. The film screened last week as part of the Brattle Theatre's first Boston Fantastic Film Festival and starts a proper weeklong run today; a midnight movie in spirit if not in scheduling, "Tamala 2010" is so spectacularly bent that it exudes a contact cough-syrup high all its own.

The best way to triangulate the film is to call it Hello Kitty meets David Lynch in outer space. The plot, inasmuch as such a word applies, concerns a potty-mouthed feline innocent named Tamala, who journeys from Cat Earth toward the planet of Orion, where she was born. Knocked off course by an evil mailman, Tamala lands on Planet Q, where dogs are busy repressing cats in a seedy urban district called Hate and where she meets a sympathetic boy cat named Michelangelo. She insists on calling him Moi-Moi, which makes as much sense as anything else here.

Created by t.o.L., a shadowy Tokyo collective of animators, graphic designers, and musicians, most of "Tamala 2010" is drawn in the faux-naive style of early black-and-white anime. The film could be a surreal hiccup from 1962 except that whenever Tamala falls asleep, she dreams in full-color, high-resolution computer animation. The figure that stalks those dreams is a burnished robot dominatrix named Tatla -- a female Terminator who is brainwashing children throughout the universe.

On behalf of whom? Stay with me, because things get really funky from here on in: Tatla works for the behemoth Catty & Co., which is the most recent permutation of an ancient religious cult called Minerva. Tamala herself is either an unconscious product of Minerva -- a sort of eternal living logo -- or the cult's destroyer. Or she's just an adorable furball with a mouth like a sailor.

I haven't mentioned the evil dog policeman who keeps a caged mouse named Penelope for his S&M pleasure, or the lovestruck and maggot-infested professor who fills Michelangelo in on the cult, or the giant Colonel Sanders figure who stalks, Godzilla-style, through some scenes with an ax in his head. A bewitching Tinkertoy J-pop score also wells up throughout, threatening to lend the movie more meaning than may actually be present.

Beyond a fashionable paranoia regarding massive corporations, it's tough to say what "Tamala 2010" is about. The film has the feel of a rigorously private creation myth, or an alien object that has been only partially decoded; it's not so much fun as splendidly puzzling. The filmmakers' Japanese website seems to indicate that this is the first of an intended trilogy and that various adjunct projects have Tamala poised to become the "super-idol of the 21st century." Answers, if not global domination, may yet be forthcoming.