STAR DRIVER Kagayaki no Takuto, ep 1 thoughts

Well, well, well. It appears that Enokido Youji, one of my life-long writer-angels, has come back from the dead with a new series concept: STAR DRIVER Kagayaki no Takuto.

Star Driver Kagayaki no Takuto

Revolutionary Girl Utena, Sailor Moon Super- these are classics that defined my adolescent and early adulthood years. Neon Genesis Evangelion? Yeah, he wrote episodes for that, too, bringing his unique and dense blend of allegory, visual and verbal metaphor, alchemical and mythological symbolism to play in each of these series.

You don’t so much watchEnokido’s writing as decode it: he takes no prisoners and suffers no fools in an audience, preferring to drop heaps of surreal symbolism laden with metaphor and inner meaning and then demanding that you pick up the ball and run with it.

Over the years, he’s developed a visual code and shorthand that long-term devotees can recognize and interpret: the clasped hand, the light in the breast, the locked fence with the mountain beyond; the groove on the floor, with feet waiting anxiously on one side to be crossed.

If ever there was a time for an Enokido series to return, and for Enokido to return to form, it’s now: in a time when we are bombarded by grey, dark, brown, realistic images, when everything has to be literal, when ambiguity is intolerable.

Yet, after watching the first episode of this series, I felt both a kind of wistful sadness and fondness. And to explain this, I have to explain that since I grew up with Enokido’s work I also grew up with the knowing of his symbols. I’ve watched them develop, change, mutate in meaning.

The ‘daimon machine’ in Sailor Moon Super becomes the ‘washing machine’ sequence in Utena: The Movie; becomes the literal consumption of the human form into the machine in FLCL and Evangelion; now it becomes the ‘coffin’ sequence that forms the visual centerpiece of Star Driver. The Star Driver pilots are the Student Council of Ootori Gakuen by way of NERV.

There’s nothing wrong with a remixing and remaking of previous parts. But to come back to a world that is so close to the overall form and function of Utena without radically changing the meaning of its inner elements feels like a step backward; a pedestrian move; slumming it because returning to old metaphors is easy. In a career that has always trended upward, perhaps with missteps along the way, it’s unsettling to see what feels like a backstep. We graduated from Ootori. We rebuilt the world in Evangelion. We’re adults now, so why return to the high school metaphors?

It may be that this round of mutation is a subtler one; the ‘coffin’ sequence builds on years of pre-existing metaphors and combines the ‘hidden personality’ aspects of the final stages of Utena with the cold, mechanical ambience of Evangelion – itself a piercing psychodrama on the masks that we hide behind, the forces we exert, and the walls we seal ourselves within.

On the other hand, Enokido without a strong directorial hand (ideally that of lost auteur Kunihiko Ikuhara, his friend and original mentor) can lead to a kind of self-indulgent and rambling plot quality; probably the best example of this is Melody of Oblivion, one of the ‘purest’ works of Enokido, but also one of the most unfocused. MoO advanced the symbols, but lost its audience, and is now as forgotten as Shounen Ou in the heirarchy of Enokido works.

Star Driver does not suffer from this.

But the moments of silence, the moments of division, the moments of parallel and mirroring frame shots – all of these were done back in 1997 in Utena, and in 1995 in Sailor Moon, and while the direction is as close to Ikuhara as we’ll get without it actually being him, do we need to regress an entire decade in order to speak again?

Time will tell. If the old watchmaker is still on form, the meaning and form will radically shift by the end. But to those of us who have broken through or still struggle with our coffins, will it provide another key – or will it be just an echo of the same old note?

Advertisement