Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.5

Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie Review

Finally, someone's watching Big Brother back.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 7, 2011

There’s a whole subgenre of anime devoted to dystopian future realities, usually the result of some horrible nuclear calamity or hideous disease. Many of these titles take place in a far off future which allows contemporary viewers to feel safe, vicariously removed from any eventual “reality” any individual project might offer. One of the most interesting things about the 2010 Japanese feature film Loups=Garous is that while, yes, it posits a dystopian future society, it’s one that isn’t that far off into the future to create a sort of safety buffer within the subconscious, and in fact the film has a number of elements which are creepily similar to things going on in our present day reality. While depicters of the future going back to George Orwell (and even beyond Orwell) have frequently painted a future rife with Big Brother governments, electronic eavesdropping and constant monitoring (Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is another great example), Loups=Garous does the same thing within the confines of technology that any parent sees their kids carrying around daily, namely things like cell phones or handheld gaming systems. Loups=Garous also deals with a near future society that has been decimated by a plague, leading to the abolition of human contact, meaning that electronic interfacing becomes all the more important. One could obviously make the case that current day affairs are filled with that same sort of distant electronic “touching” without the causal element of disease making it necessary, but it’s just another way that Loups=Garous manages to cash in on trends which are already happening, preventing viewers from easily dismissing the film with a cavalier, “Aw, that’ll never happen.”

Loup-garou (loups-garous is plural) is French for werewolf, but amorous young females coming to this enterprise expecting a Twilight-fest of star-crossed love and “really, really cute boys” will probably be incredibly disappointed by Loups=Garous (the equal sign is evidently a typographic sleight of hand, though it’s used in so much press for the film I’m repeating it here). While it’s probably not much a spoiler to mention that there is at least one werewolf in this outing, that subplot doesn’t really rear its big, furry head, at least in any meaningful way, until fairly late in the film’s game. Instead Loups=Garous is a kind of weird, disjointed melding of a murder mystery blended with an unusual depiction of a future society where nefarious goings on may or may not have something to do with those selfsame murders.

One of the major problems with Loups=Garous is that it plops the viewer down seemingly midstream in a story with little or no context. It’s only by deduction that perceptive audience members come to figure out the ins and outs of this society, where “real” food has been replaced by synthetic meals made from plants, people don’t interact much face to face anymore, and schools have been replaced by smaller social units called communities, which is where the gaggle of girls who make up Loups=Garous’ main focal point meet each other. The film would have done much better to have spent more time developing the actual background of author Natsuhiko Kyogoku’s source novel, as it is evidently a multi-layered and complexly formulated affair that goes into greater detail about this near future society than the film has the time or perhaps just the willpower to examine. Be that as it may, the main thrust of the plot involves a shy girl in one of the school-like communities who is sucked into an attempt by another community girl to find one of their missing classmates (if that's even the right word), a girl who may be the latest victim of a serial murderer preying on young kids.

Instead of a well detailed look at a society that bears some frightening resemblances to what we're actually experiencing these days, we have a group of characters who are broadly drawn, are often just ciphers, and who are involved in a series of conspiratorial events that fail to have a lot of impact simply because we don’t have enough background and therefore don’t really care whether someone’s in mortal danger, whether that danger is coming from a werewolf or a— er—meat eater (you’ll understand that reference if you watch Loups=Garous, but let’s just say that pork isn’t the other white meat in this movie and that as a certain Charlton Heston screamed in a long ago movie something or other green was people). Loups=Garous has some undeniably intriguing elements going for it, and the fact that its future dystopian society so creepily mirrors what’s actually going on in today’s electronics-dominated world makes it more relevant than a lot of dystopian animes. But this is a film that largely misses the boat by simply not giving the viewer enough information to really draw them in and hook them into what exactly is the connection between a string of murdered children and an all knowing government and its synthetic food service provider.

Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Loups=Garous is presented on Blu-ray by Sentai Filmworks with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. While the transfer is generally strong and artifact free, it's hobbled by something it can't control, namely the generic look of the feature. Characters have nothing really very dramatically innovative about them, and backgrounds similarly have a same old, same old look a lot of the time. The best elements here are some of the more graphic elements, when some victims meet their fate. At those moments, Loups=Garous finally erupts into something distinctive looking, with some excellent color and moody design. Line detail is generally very strong throughout this presentation and the colors, while muted a lot of the time due to a preponderance of dark nighttime scenes, look decently sharp and well saturated.

Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Loups=Garous offers two nice lossless tracks, one in the original Japanese and the second a very good English dub, both in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. This film certainly would have benefited from a surround mix, but the stereo mixes presented here are surprisingly robust and pack quite a bit of wallop a lot of the time. The Japanese girl group SCANDAL (they like their name capitalized, don't blame me) actually delivers some very forceful music to the proceedings (the group also appears in animated form in a sort of cameo within the film itself), with some great low end thumping courtesy of some aggressive bass and drums. Dialogue is well presented and well mixed, with excellent fidelity and very good dynamic range.

Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Junichi Fujisaku (Director) (1080i; 7:20). Fujisaku discusses how he got involved with the project and how he sought to adapt the original story to the medium of anime.
• Interview with the Japanese Cast (1080i; 17:19) includes comments from Kanae Oki (Haduki Makino), Hiromi Igarashi (Ayumi Kono), Marina Inoue (Mio Tsuduki), and Miyuki Sawashiro (Rei Myao).
• Interview with Natsuhiko Kyogoku (Original Author) (1080i; 3:45) talks about how in just the nine year span between writing his novel and the anime adaptation how some of the things he predicted had already come true.
• SCANDAL Meets Loups=Garous (1080i; 15:45). SCANDAL is a Japanese all girl pop-rock group who appear in the film (in animated form), and this features Haruna, Rina, Tomomi and Mami in real life discussing the film and their contributions.
• KOSHI-TANTAN Promotional Video (HD; 1:34) is a brief quasi-music video featuring SCANDAL.
• Movie Digest (HD; 12:31) is a sort of Reader's Digest version of the film.
• Pilot Movie (1080i; 12:43) is an early version with more basic animation, perhaps made as a promotional reel.
• Picture Drama (HD; 8:30) features some vignettes from the film playing out to still frames.
• Japanese Promotional Videos (1080i; 1:59)
• Japanese Trailer (HD; 1:20)

Loups=Garous Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Loups=Garous has an intriguing enough premise, and the source novel is evidently widely admired and loved in Japan, but somewhere along the way the translation to anime lost something. This is an effort that really could have benefited from at least a slightly longer running time to allow the audience to be provided with more information about this near future society and how the characters fit into it. The film also never develops a real narrative or dramatic flow, so that when we do get a series of denouements toward the end, they seem anti-climactic at best and just kind of pointless at worst. But those who have read the original source novel may have enough context to derive more out of this presentation than the casual viewer, and those folks may want to check this out at least as a rental.