Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade (1998) is an animated feature film directed by Hiroyuki Okiura and based on a manga written by Mamoru Oshii.
Jin-Roh is based in the fascist post-WWII Japan envisioned in Oshii's Kerberos series. The main character, Kazuki Fuse, is a member of the elite Panzer Corps, an antiterror outfit with heavy personal armor, Stahlhelms with masks containing breathing and night-vision gear, and heavy machine guns all. Fuse suffers from a loss of faith in his mission when he fails to shoot a young, female terrorist; the girl detonates a bomb in front of him, killing herself. He strikes up an ill-fated romance with the terrorist's sister, Kei, who he meets as she mourns her dead.
The movie features a musical score by Hajime Mizoguchi.
Story
The movie opens with scenes of public protests interspersed with a girl walking alone. The girl is revealed as a terrorist courier - called Little Red Riding Hoods by the terrorists (a.k.a. the Sect) - helping to deliver bombs in satchels and she makes her way to a delivery of one of the bombs to a protester. The protest slowly turns into a riot, and a terrorist flings the satchel bomb into the police lines, with the result that the police move to break up the riot.
The courier makes her way next to pick up another satchel to deliver, and then goes through the drain system to her next delivery. On the way, she spots heavily armed troopers - the Panzer Corps - making their way toward her fellow terrorists. She runs away. The band of terrorists moving equipment towards their next point is caught at a ladder up to the surface and they are slaughtered by the Panzer Corps when one opens fire.
The girl runs on for a while, until she is confronted by a Panzer Corps trooper. Out of fear, she decides to blow up the explosive satchel she is carrying, but the trooper strangely doesn't shoot. The girl is blown up and the trooper only survives because another trooper rushed up from behind and pulled him down to the ground. The trooper takes off his mask as a result of the explosion, and thus we are introduced to the main character, Fuse Kazuki.
A trial is held to determine why Fuse didn't fire and Fuse is sent back into training. One day as he goes to visit the ashes of the dead girl he didn't shoot, he meets a girl, Kei, who is apparently the sister of the dead Riding Hood. They develop an apparently casual relationship and spend time with each other. Along the way, Fuse has nightmares about the incident in the sewers where he didn't shoot - seeing the girl being caught and devoured by a pack of wolves and not being able to do anything about it - and Kei is revealed to be a plant of the Metropolitan Police, although a rather unwilling one.
A trap is set up where Kei calls Fuse one night to say that strange men are following her. It was in fact a trap by the Metropolitan police - and one of Fuse's friends, an ex-Panzer called Henmi - to discredit the Panzer Corps, showing a Red Riding Hood passing a satchel bomb to a Panzer Corps trooper. Fuse sneaks in, grabs Kei without the police knowing, and gets out of the place with the police in pursuit. Eventually they throw off the police and settle down for a while in a closed amusement park (it is night after all) to wait. There it's shown that the relationship between Kei and Fuse is more than just friendship after all.
They make their way to the sewers once more, where other men make their way to pass Fuse a full set of Panzer Corps armor and weaponry, before getting out of the way with Kei in tow. Henmi and a bunch of heavily armed police make their way to the sewers and attempt to find Fuse, but he in his armor slaughters them all, with Henmi killed last.
Eventually, they end up at a junkyard. Fuse is revealed to be a member of the semi-mythical Wolf Brigade, a small group within the Panzer Corps proper that seeks to maintain the existence of the Corps, and Fuse is told to kill Kei - it was safer to have her dead because then she couldn't be found by the police, and at the same time it would threaten the police with the implications of Kei revealing her entire story - including the police-organized setup - to the press. Fuse cannot do it, and there is an emotional scene with Kei hugging Fuse (who is holding a pistol) and refusing to let go. In the end, the trigger is pulled (somehow) and as Kei slides down, dead, Fuse can only stand there like a man thunderstruck.
Interpretation
Jin-Roh borrows heavily and overtly from the tale of Little Red Riding Hood - the older, darker version that existed even before the Brothers Grimm and certainly before it was Bowdlerized and "cleaned up". The female terrorists who carry bombs for the Sect are known as "Red Riding Hoods," and Kei reads a bloody version of the tale to Fuse throughout the film.
The story itself, in fact, can be read as a modernized version of the old children's tale: Fuse is at heart a wolf in human clothing. Kei is the real little red riding hood - though she is revealed to be an ex-terrorist courier herself, she is shown as being fundamentally youthful and human. She and Fuse are in love, but in the end has to kill her against his will, since it was part of the plan that the Wolf Brigade devised to turn the trap for the Panzer Corps that was laid by the police. Fundamentally it shows that as in Little Red Riding Hood, humans and animals don't mix well together.
In this interpretation, the grandmother is absent, although it is also possible to argue that the "grandmother" of this tale is also Fuse - or rather, who Kei thinks Fuse to be, not realizing that he is in fact the wolf of the story.
Fuse and Kei are the two main characters, after all, and all the other characters are there to serve the story.
Notes
At the time of release, it was believed that Jin-Roh would be Japan's last completely hand-drawn cel-animated feature. Viz Communications released an English-language dub to theaters.
External links
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