Shelf Life

A Spirit of the Sun

A Spirit of the Sun is a two-part television special produced by Madhouse, which first aired in 2006. For the first forty minutes or so of its 2.5-hour runtime, it takes the form of a boilerplate disaster story, with Japan suffering from the fallout of a devastating set of earthquakes and the eruption of Mt. Fuji. Entire cities are drowned by the ocean, over half of Japan's population is killed, and a neverending sky of ash and smoke chokes the life out of many lingering survivors. At the center of it all is Genichiro Ryu, a good-hearted and selfless young boy who finds himself without his family and without a way out of the disaster zone. That's the first part of the story. The rest of the narrative takes a shocking number of twists and turns, and for A Spirit of the Sun, that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

Getting through that first forty minutes or so is rough though, and it's a shame that so much of what doesn't work about A Spirit of the Sun is frontloaded at the beginning. From the very beginning, it's clear that Madhouse isn't necessarily firing on all cylinders with this project. While some scenes are accentuated with bold lines and skillful animation that help to amplify the drama, the effect is inconsistent, and much of A Spirit of the Sun looks poor. There's clearly effort going into making this large-scale disaster feel resonant and dangerous, but too often still frames and sloppy direction make the destruction of Japan feel remarkably boring. The extremely limited and repetitive music by Toshiyuki Honda is perhaps the worst aspect of the production. Honda's compositions are themselves fine, the typical melodramatic horns and strings you'd find in any budget disaster-epic, but by the time the entire miniseries was finished, I got the feeling that only two or three songs were actually written for the show, and they're just played on repeat for every major scene.

The script does the story no favors either, with most of the characters wasted delivering awkward exposition or saccharine, soap-opera dialogue. Genichiro is probably the story's biggest Achilles' heel; from the moment he gets rescued by a well-meaning relief worker to the final shots of the story, Genichiro is presented as flawless, a young boy so loving and innately good that he literally changes people's lives simply by talking to them for a couple minutes. He wins the heart of a complete stranger and convinces him to risk his life to save other complete strangers, he manages to help a Taiwanese gangster overcome his lifetime of being prejudiced against the Japanese within a single conversation, and he even manages to take down a government-wide conspiracy by just standing around and telling people to be good. By the time the “destruction of Japan” portion of A Spirit of the Sun was winding down, I was bored and frustrated in equal measure. But at that point, the story opened up and things improved significantly.

Without spoiling too much, to call A Spirit of the Sun a disaster-thriller isn't quite right, because once Japan's collapse is complete, the narrative shifts gears and focuses on how things have only gotten more complicated for the island nation decades later. The mainland has been split in half by the U.S. and Chinese governments, and tens of thousands of Japanese end up stranded in refugee camps in Taiwan. This mass influx of refugees breeds resentment and prejudice amongst the native Taiwanese, and eventually shady government types look to profit by stoking racial tensions and watching the flames grow. All of a sudden, A Spirit of the Sun feels downright prescient in its storytelling, often going out of its way to portray the difficult nuances that Japanese refugees face in trying to regain their dignity, much less the right to return to their homeland.

Of course, there are two problems that A Spirit of the Sun is never quite able to outpace. The first is that Genichiro is a terrible protagonist, and only by the grace of the slightly more interesting side characters does the story remain afloat. The other problem is that this is a 2.5-hour adaptation of a story that feels like it would need a whole series to properly flesh out. Once the main plot in Taiwan gets going, we pivot from a potential serial killer investigation to a gang conspiracy to political storms that threaten to undo the entire government of Taiwan.

That would be a lot to get through in a 24-episode run, so giving A Spirit of the Sun about ten percent of that real estate means that character development and pacing are thrown right out the window in favor of hitting as many plot points as possible. Characters go through entire arcs of development over the course of just a couple scenes, and entire relationships are built on the foundation of only a couple minutes' worth of interaction on screen. It's incredibly messy storytelling to say the least, and by the end of the second episode the story doesn't even feel finished. We leave Genichiro and his buddies on an elliptical shrug of a conclusion, teasing a much more interesting tale that has yet to be adapted in any other form outside of the manga.

This Blu-Ray collection of A Spirit of the Sun has been put out by Maiden Japan. The dub is serviceable enough. There are plenty of side characters who sound stilted and awkward, but most of the central cast do well by their characters. Adam Gibbs plays the idealized optimism of Genichiro with gusto, and Jason Douglas imbues the gangster Zhang with a gravelly tough-guy air. Of all the performances, the one especially worth highlighting would be Joanne Bonasso's turn as Genichiro's adopted Taiwanese mother, Shu Qin. She only gets one scene, but she absolutely nails the fraught emotionality it requires.

Outside of that, the set is as bare-bones as they come, which makes sense for a budget-priced niche release like this. A Spirit of the Sun isn't a terrible show, but it is terribly uneven, and its story feels so rushed and incomplete that I'm not sure who I would recommend this to. It doesn't work well enough as a standalone viewing experience, and I imagine fans of the source material would be better off just reading the manga. I suppose I wish Genichiro and his pals well in their journey to reunite a broken Japan, but I'm more than happy to say goodbye to A Spirit of the Sun and find better stories to fill my time.
-James[TOP]