Crying Freeman

(Kuraingu furîman, Daisuke Nishio, Japan, 1988-1994)

This Japanese series from Toei Animation, based on a manga (1986-1988) by Kazuo Koike (script) and Ryoichi Ikegami (illustration), and dubbed into English by Streamline Pictures, has a captivating central character.

Crying Freeman is a righteous killer. He strips off to reveal the imposing insignia of the 108 Dragons clan emblazoned on his body and then goes to work, literally taking apart his foes. Yet, as each corpse hits the floor, Freeman cries an ocean of tears for the tragedy of human folly.

The animation techniques in this series are well below the standard set by the feature Wicked City (1992). It is a TV-style cartoon, with semi-static figures tilting this way or that to suggest ordinary movement. But in the violent clinches, which are graphic and numerous, the image comes alive with lurid colours, slow motion and bizarre, X-ray glimpses of shattered anatomies.

Although Crying Freeman has plenty of nudity and polymorphous, childlike frolicking, one senses that these intensely violent sequences function as a displaced substitute for the sexual extravaganzas that fill Wicked City.

Accordingly, the roles for men and women in this action-packed scenario are particularly fraught and fascinating. Freeman, as we have noted, is the ultimate, walking paroxysm in male pathos. Our ever-tearful hero fights at one moment against a grotesquely large and obese female member of his own clan, and at the next against a chic, balletic hit-woman who groans orgasmically as she murmurs: “I want to see pain in Freeman's beautiful face”. And who wouldn’t?

A live-action, Canadian/French Crying Freeman feature was made by Christophe Gans (later the director of Brotherhood of the Wolf [2001]) in 1995, co-written with Cahiers du cinéma contributor and prolific author Thierry Cazals.

MORE anime: Jin-Roh

© Adrian Martin September 1994