1986, Japan. Starring Akira Kamiya, Michiko Kawai, Hideyuki Tanaka, Toshio Furukawa, Tessho Genda, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Norio Wakamoto, Michihiro Ikemizu, Kozo Shioya, Tarako, Tsutomu Kashiwakura. Directed by Satoshi Dezaki and Tsuneo Tominaga. Written by Moto Hagio, Toshiaki Imaizumi, Katsumi Koide. Purchase from Amazon.com.

They Were 11 continues a recent trend for me, which is visiting old anime titles that, for one weird reason or another, I never actually got around to watching back in the day. In the case of Crusher Joe, it was because I didn't think the title sounded interesting. Realizing how wrong I'd been about that movie after finally watching recently, I decided to investigate another title I'd skipped over for an even more bizarre and nonsensical reason.

I have no idea why I thought this, but for years I labored under the false impression that They Were 11 was another "team of spunky girls save the galaxy" type OVAs in the spirit of Gall Force or Dangaioh. I have absolutely no idea why I ever got this notion stuck in my head. It's made all the sweeter by the fact that not only is They Were 11 not a "spunky girls saves the galaxy" movie, but there aren't even any girls in it period. Well, not really. I'll get to that. I'm trying to remember why I ever though it was another Gall Force sort of thing, but about the best I can come up with is that I should chalk it up to seeing the old VHS box art from a distance on a day when I wasn't wearing my glasses. And it was hot. And maybe I was drunk, even though it would have come at a time when I was going through my straight edge phase. So I was blind, uninformed, and drunk on sobriety when I spied the box from across a parking lot and thought to myself, "Hmm, that looks like it'd be sort of like Dangaioh. I didn't really find Dangaioh all that interesting. I think I'll watch Crystal Triangle instead."


Once again, however, the polite suggestion of friends and the good graces of the DVD industry have conspired to convince me that I really should have seen this movie a long time ago, back when I was wasting my time by doing things like watching stupid Guyver OVAs instead of watching Crusher Joe and They Were 11. Not that I condemn people who liked The Guyver. I know there were a lot of fans of the show back in the day, but it never really did anything for me. Of course, I could just be suffering a case of sour grapes, as I still harbor a grudge over the fact that no television network was interested in my idea for the McGuyver television series, in which a high school science teacher finds the Guyver bio-suit and proceeds to don it while using the practical application of Mr. Wizard-style science to solve a variety of crimes and cases of espionage, or in the instances when scientific ingenuity can't provide a solution to the week's predicament, he shoots a bony spike out of his elbow and through some guy's skull.

They Were 11 is an interesting take on sci-fi anime from the eighties, and definitely a marked departure from the vestigial space operas overflowing from the previous decades and the wham-bam sci-fi actioners that defined the eighties. There is really only one action scene in the entire movie, and that's a pie fight. Yet despite the dearth of robots on roller skates shooting cannons at each other, They Were 11 is an engaging, tense, and engrossing piece of science fiction that makes you feel like it's action-packed even though it isn't. The basic premise was derived from an old Japanese short story (I believe) about a group of children at a playground who suddenly realize that there is one more child there than there should be. There's a good chance the extra kid, whichever one he may be, is some sort of monster. In They Were 11, we have a group of potential space cadets vying for coveted spots in the galaxy's premiere space flight school. After passing a variety of tests, the cadets receive their final assignment: a group of ten are to board a derelict space craft, get it semi-operational again, and successfully staff and maintain it for a certain length of time. The only contact they will have with the outside world is via a panic button which, if pushed, will call in a rescue squad but also automatically fail everyone on board and disqualify them from obtaining entry to the academy.

Upon arriving at the ship, the cadets -- who have never met one another -- realize there are eleven people on board. The first assumption is that a simple administrative mistake has been made. Then it's posited that this mysterious extra person is part of the test. But when the cadets discover bombs strewn about the old ship and begin to uncover its doomed past, a third possibility emerges: that the eleventh member of the team is a terrorist. Unwilling to forfeit their chances at passing the test by pressing the panic button, the eleven cadets split their time between trying to solve the mystery of what happened to the ship with trying to solve the mystery of who is the false member of the team.

Although They Were 11 falls pretty frequently into the classification of space opera, it's really less of an opera and more of a space parlor mystery, the sort of thing you'd find on a British stage or an Agatha Christie book. It's a potboiler. There's plenty of the typically cool future tech we expect from eighties' anime movies -- lots of cool spaceships, laser guns, weird spores, and so forth, but the concentration is really on the characters.

We're told in the prologue of the film that rapid expansion throughout the galaxy has resulted in centuries of war between various planets and factions, and that the violence is only just now beginning to simmer down. So tensions are still strained between various races already. The fact that one of the cadets is potentially a saboteur only makes matters edgier. The story's protagonist is the young Tada (Akira Kamiya, who did voice work on the Yamato series, a bunch of those Go Nagai giant robot shows, Macross, Urusei Yatsura, and Record of Lodoss War, though he's probably most beloved as the voice of Ryu Saeba in City Hunter and Kenshiro in the heartwarming animated children's film Fist of the North Star), an ace cadet with emerging telepathic powers that enable him to detect whether or not a person is lying. He runs this test on the rest of the cadets, but two problems immediately emerge. One, no one is lying when they say they aren't the false member of the team; and two, since everyone but Tada (who can't test himself) has been proven innocent, suspicion inevitably falls upon the young telepath. That he seems to have an intimate knowledge of various aspects of the derelict ship only deepens the suspicion of the others.

And then an explosion knocks the ship into a decaying orbit that causes the temperature to rise, which causes spores growing all over the ship to germinate and produce a deadly virus. And you thought your American history final was hard.

The other two strong personalities amongst the crew include the arrogant but not unlikable King Maya (Hideyuki Tanaka, another North Star alumnus), the lavender-haired ruler of a planet who has submitted himself to the academy entrance exam in order to prove his worth as a leader, and Frol (Michiko Kawai), a hermaphrodite who hails from a planet where your sex isn't decided until later in your life. Men get all the glory, and women get to stay home and have babies. Frol is assigned to be a woman but isn't looking forward to a life of meek servitude. Passing the entrance exam means she will get to reverse the decision of her planet elders and become a man. King leads the pack in being suspicious of Tada, while Frol emerges as the young man's ally and potential crush, though the dual-gendered nature of Frol leads to some mental confusion for Tada.

Although there is very little action, there is plenty of tension in the story, and the movie is well-paced and smartly plotted. The whodunit nature of the story is subverted somewhat by the fact that everyone can prove their innocence and no one is even sure if anything has been done to get all whodunit about. The interaction and behavior of the characters is engrossing and believable. This is one of the rare instances when characters in a movie act and react and think in a way that actual people in a similar situation might act and react. And best of all, the plot keeps you guessing and serves up twists that you can't really see coming but also make perfect sense when they happen. I really hate plot twists that make no sense at all and were thrown in simply because they would "catch you off guard." For some reason, certain writers liken "you didn't see that coming" to an idea actually being good when, in fact, it's more akin to being sucker punched in the back of the head by a complete stranger while walking down the street. Just because you didn't see it coming doesn't mean it was good. They Were 11, however, manages to be unpredictable and puzzling without ever relying on utter incoherence or out-of-the-blue nonsense. It's a very different sort of sci-fi anime movie, but one that is enjoyable despite the lack of shoot-em-up action.


They Were 11 was directed by Satoshi Dezaki, listed sometimes as the brother of famed animation director Osamu Dezaki (last seen around these parts during our review of the touching romantic comedy Golgo 13 -- and by "touching romantic comedy," I mean it pulls your trigger, lovingly and softly). Other times, Satoshi is listed as a pseudonym for Osamu. I honestly have no idea which is correct. If Satoshi is a brother rather than a pseudonym, the influence of the elder Dezaki can be seen in the animation style. Although the cast is entirely male with the pseudo-exception of Frol, there's a definite feminine quality to many of the characters, chief among them the King Maya, who looks sort of like Edgar Winter. Osamu Dezaki sort of pioneered the "girly boy" frilly style of character design in his film Rose of Versailles, which is a direct influence on the modern yaoi (rhymes with zowie) trend in manga and anime that boasts high stylized and very feminine male character designs with flowing hair and long eyelashes and watery doe-eyes like in those old seventies paintings of waifs. They Were 11 absolutely does not fall into the realm of yaoi, even if the potential romance between Frol and Tada blurs the gender lines, but it would be remiss not to mention that there is a seed of that sort of character design that no doubt came from Osamu and infected Satoshi like one of those puffing spores in this movie.

And if I've gotten some facts wrong about yaoi, you can write to correct me if you really want, but I won't care. Yaoi just ain't my bag, baby.

To be honest, as much as I love this movie -- and I thought it was spectacular -- I didn't really care for the character design. The animation and backgrounds are gorgeous, as you would expect from an eighties feature film, but something about many of the character designs just didn't click for me. Tada looks OK -- a pretty standard seventies style design with a dash of Osamu Tezuka in it, but some of the other characters (like Red Nose ) are kind of unappealing to me. They're still well-written, just not well-drawn. This is, however, just an opinion, and the character design is certainly not so bad that it in any way ruins the overall effectiveness of such a wonderful film.

The script was based on a comic by a woman named Moto Hagio, and the fact that she's not a writer I'd ever heard of doesn't mean much since I only know a few manga writers. A little research (we do it from time to time) turns up that, while I can't claim any sort of familiarity with her work, she is considered by some to be the mother of shojo (girlie) manga, but once again while They Were 11 does have an obviously more "feminine" touch in some ways, it's hardly shojo. It's feminine in the same way that Chu Yuan kungfu films (such as Clans of Intrigue, Legend of the Bat, and Magic Blade) are feminine. They're still full of bad-ass fights and cool characters. It's just that from time to time, a swordsman in a white robe will drift across a misty river in a swan boat and give another swordsman a flower. You're not going to argue with the swordsmen, because it's Ti Lung and Yuen Hwa and they can fly and split people in half from fifty yards away, but there's a certain delicacy and grace beneath the action. To continue to wander through the kungfu film analogy, because I do love wandering through kungfu, They Were 11 is to the bulk of otherwise macho, action-packed and violent sci-fi anime (even the ones where spunky chicks save the galaxy) what Chu Yuan films are to the more macho, gorier films of Chang Cheh. They Were 11 doesn't really have the weepy melodrama of shojo or even space opera, but it does have a realism in its emotion that sets it apart and makes it a more intimate and believable sort of film than, say, Fist of the North Star, though I'd like to market Fist of the North Star as "the bittersweet exploration of one man's lonely search...for love...for acceptance...for a punch that will turn your bones into jelly."

This is not the only time Moto Haigo played with gender in one of her works (just to belabor the point further, Chu Yuan also loved playing with gender roles and homoeroticism in his films), though my unfamiliarity with her comic X+Y means I can't really compare this to that in any greater detail. Frol's predicament is handled in an interesting fashion. Either she become s a woman and acquiesces to a life of housewife servitude, or she becomes a man and lives a rollicking life of sweeping space battles and Buffalo wings. In this is one of the key issues in analyzing the role of women in anime and action films. Anime, and in the nineties, action films, like to pat themselves on the back for providing audiences with a host of "strong" female characters who were more than capable of kicking ass. However, in an effort to move away from the "damsel in distress" stereotype, most of these movies just turned the women in men with boobs. There was nothing about them that was identifiably female. Rather than being strong women, they were characters who simply made gender interchangeable. And in the end, they were still fetishized -- who doesn't love a gal with nice gams, a white tank top, and a big gun? You can read that whole thing as a subtle wink at the oft-inherent homoeroticism in many action films, but that's a philosophical debate I'm not prepared to dig into right now, fun though it might be.

What Chu Yuan did, and what Moto Haigo does with They Were 11 is eschew the testosterone-packed "action chick" fetish in vaor of portraying women who are more identifiably female -- which is ironic since Frol really isn't a woman. They are different from men, react to things differently, and this is seen as a difference rather than a weakness. If action chicks are often little more than men with boobs, then Frol is literally a man with boobs. And she thinks that to lead any sort of an exciting life, she must, again quite literally, become a man. However, Haigo explores the unspoken third option for the character than no one ever thinks of: that she could lead an exciting life as a woman, and that she could oppose the submissive role of women in hr society. If you don't see reflections of contemporary (for the time the story was written, though it's plenty relevant today as well) Japanese (in particular, though it's certainly not relegated to Japan) society and gender roles, then you aren't watching very closely. Haigo's story is an affirmation of the fact that you shouldn't have to be a man to have fun, that women should have the same rights and access to adventure and beer as their male counterparts.

I don't have the inclination in a review of an anime movie to delve too deeply into gender and society in Japan except to mention it and perhaps say that it's fitting, in a way, that so many Japanese women have taken to traveling the world and befriending foreigners while the men continue to chain themselves to their desks and define "adventure" as having a few too many Heinekens at the office karaoke party (and yes, this is a gross over generalization, but I'm trying half-heartedly to make a positive point, so forgive my lack of coherence). These women aren't butch pseudo-men. They're women. Like Frol, they've realized that they shouldn't be forced into deciding between "being a woman" and staying at home to mother a lame salaryman husband or "becoming a man" and eschewing everything feminine in favor of becoming "the office butch." They can, instead, live a woman's life of fun and action.


I don't know if a male writer would have come up with the same solution, or even posed the problem in the same way, but it's quite a complex issue that is tacked well by They Were 11 without ever becoming ham-fisted or stealing the focus away from the central mystery of who is the fake crew member and how do we prevent ourselves from all dying horrible deaths at the hands of fever-inducing space spores as our derelict spaceship plunges toward the atmosphere.

The script for the movie was written by Toshiaki Imaizumi and Katsumi Koide. Neither had any real experience at the time of this production, and neither had much of a career after this movie (though they did collaborate again on Urusei Yatsura: Inaba the Dreammaker, the only other high profile credit for either screenwriter). They handle Moto Haigo's source material perfectly though, and they should be commended for managing to take so many stylistic elements (space opera, mystery, action, shojo romance, a dash of yaoi) and strike the perfect balance between them. This is by and large a sci-fi mystery film, but the shojo tendencies of the original author are allowed to underpin the action and give it an emotional depth absent from many other sci-fi films. At the same time, those tendencies toward romance and melodrama are kept securely in check and doled out only in tiny increments at just the right moment, allowing them to augment the central sci-fi style without overwhelming it. Their script is also expertly paced. It never hits a slow spot, but neither does it rush through details haphazardly. They know they have a delicious set-up, and they relish exploiting it without ever sinking to "monster lurking in the shadows" silliness or lapsing into drawn-out tedium. Everything is infused with a sense of unease and tension that propels the story along at exactly the right pace.

To redeem myself somewhat, the art director for They Were 11 is a guy named Junichi Azuma, who went on in the same year to work as art director on Gall Force. Yeah -- now that must be where my initial mistaken impression came from. Certainly. Can you prove otherwise?

They Were 11 is a surprisingly tight science fiction thriller that can be enjoyed without problem on a purely superficial level. If you are looking to dig deeper, then the movie gives you plenty to think about, including the aforementioned gender issues as well as the topics of xenophobia and international (or interplanetary, as the case may be) cooperation. Though it stops short of being profound, They Were 11 is a complex and thoughtful story wrapped up inside a smashing good sci-fi yarn. My only disappointment was that I thought it was "like Gall Force" for all those years and rented The Guyver instead. But then, as I said in my review of Crusher Joe, at least that afforded me the recent delight of discovering this oft-ignored and nigh forgotten anime gem.

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s, Science Fiction, Year: 1986