Dead Leaves

Plot

In the near future, the only humans left on Earth are clones. Retro, who is incredibly strong and has a TV for a head, and Pandy, who has a pink panda-like birthmark over her right eye, wake up in a field with no memory of how they got there. They steal some clothes, food, and a car, but the local cops object, there's a shoot-out, and the pair are thrown in prison on the Moon. The penal colony is known as Dead Leaves, and the jailors can abuse and kill inmates at will. Retro and Pandy form a strange relationship with their jailor, Galactica, and meet other inmates, including Dino Drill, who has a gigantic drill where his genitals should be, leading to some messy battles with the prison guards. But Retro and Pandy aren't incarcerated for long, as having sex mysteriously sets them free to lead a bullet-laden rebellion against a wicked warden.

History

After several years of being told by fandom that it was misrepresenting Japanese animation abroad, Manga Entertainment had the last laugh by co-producing this puerile and often incoherent cartoon. It qualifies as anime, but its visual style and general outlook often makes it look more like one of the False Friends-compare to Kill Bill: The Origin of O-Ren, which was similarly a Japanese production made to meet parameters defined by Western demands. With a frenetic pace that often plays like a series of disconnected shorts along the lines of Aeon Flux or Blame!, DL is also senselessly violent and obsessed with bodily functions. Ironically, it became a symbol of the maturity of the anime business; in an environment that now supported the works of Studio Ghibli on American release, the company associated with the old sex-and-violence titles was now obliged to make them itself in order to meet its own requirements. Once relocated as a subsidiary of Anchor Bay, Manga Entertainment sensibly revisited past glories and threw itself into the sequel to Ghost in the Shell-a far better way of celebrating its achievements than this odious hour-long fight sequence. LNV