As you may have seen I’ve been dabbling in a little anime lately, trying to find interesting ones that speak to me. I can’t remember what tipped me off to A TREE OF PALME (2002), but it’s one I found interesting, first because it has an unusual style and transports us to a distinctly strange fantasy world, then because it has a complex mix of tones and emotions that speak to the experience of being human and what not. Two things I enjoy in cinema.

I went in blind, and the first scene after the credits made me think it was gonna be kinda like DUNE. It’s night time in the desert, a blue-skinned warrior lady is being chased by goggled men driving mechanical spiders through the dust storm. They are transporting something covered in burlap that I’m afraid looks very much like a giant penis. The lady decapitates one of her pursuers in self defense but gets swarmed by some plants like the thing they’re transporting, which turn out not to be penises, but weird moving cactus things called Bolas.

Then we meet our title character and realize that this is gonna be a strange riff on PINOCCHIO. At this time Palme is a lifeless dummy dangling upside down from the vines of a giant “koo-loop tree.” He has wires and servos in him like a robot, but in this world they call that a puppet. An old man named Fou carved him from kooloop-wood for his wife Xian when she got a terminal disease. Palme would enthusiastically pamper her, picking flowers and preparing food for her, but when she died he just shut down. He’s been asleep for years when a giant, ornate fish flies over and he wakes up and tears himself apart chasing after it, spilling oil onto a horrified Fou below.

He survives, but Fou says that without oil he would turn back into a tree, which might be painful because he’d still have his memory. “The koo-loop tree thrives on the particles of memory it draws up from the remains of ancient civilizations buried in the soil.”

Palme woke up just in time to be there when the blue warrior lady from the opening shows up injured at their cottage. He thinks she’s Xian, but she’s Koram, from the Sol Tribe of Tamas, the kingdom below the surface of the earth. The people of the surface world, Arcana, never go Below, but as we see here with Koram the members of the banished tribes sometimes sneak up here illegally. She gives Palme something called “the Egg of Touto” and asks him to get it to Tamas for her. It comes with a pouch of a sap called crosskahla that will keep the egg and Palme alive and that coincidentally Xian spent her life searching for, like Henry Jones Sr. with the Holy Grail except she never found it.

A dying Fou tells his son to go on this quest, not because he thinks it’s an important mission (Korma doesn’t even explain what the egg is) but because he thinks Palme waking up means he’s “grasping at something to live for,” and this will give him a sense of purpose. Good parenting. Palme carries the egg inside his chest as his heart, brings his pet crow-snake (flying lizard) Baron, and wears Xian’s pendant that makes a sound that detects crosskahla.

Man I’m dumping alot of information on you here and this is only the set up, and even then it’s only what I understood enough to boil down into simple terms. I just had to go with the flow on this one, TENET style. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Somehow in between cuts Palme gets locked up in a wagon with some orphan thieves (some of them part animal) but they escape, so he hangs with them in a town called Flamingo. Their leader Shatta is an older kid who comes from the Sol tribe. When he realizes Palme is a puppet he thinks he can sell him to an “eccentric” rich guy named Gyariko, but the other kids say “He’s one of us!” Shatta scoffs and says he’s only a puppet, but he feels the need to hold a dagger to his throat, so obviously he understands that he’s alive! A girl named Pu is a true friend though and threatens to set their boathouse on fire if he doesn’t let Palme go. And she accidentally does!

The kids cross paths with a girl named Popo, whose haircut and choker made me think she was Natalie Portman in THE PROFESSIONAL. She’s in a terrible situation, either being groomed or molested by Gyariko, but instead of protecting her her mom is jealous and yells at her. At first Palme freaks her out because he thinks she’s Xian. They become closer after he goes through some shit and is able to tell her straight up I’m sorry, I was made for this lady who died, now I understand that she’s dead and you aren’t her you just remind me of her, it won’t happen again. And it doesn’t.

This one was a little challenging for me – there’s such a downpour of mythology to take in, the story is not always very clear, and then it’s made even more puzzling by revealing some of it out of order in dreams and flashbacks. I was okay going along with it anyway, then intimidated when I realized it was a 2 hour, 10 minute movie. I’m really more pro-long-movie than anti but a dreamy and episodic story like this becomes even harder to stick with the more exhausting it becomes. Do you know that feeling of being into a movie but struggling to hang on because you’re starting to doze off? It kind of felt like that even though I was totally awake. I don’t think I ever totally followed the stuff about a centuries old mutated koo-loop tree named Soma who “bore fruit” with a soul-less being called Laalaa. And then they get into Korma’s backstory, and she becomes a ghost child? It’s alot to take in.

But I enjoyed the journey, and I also found some meaning in it. It’s a really good depiction of that comforting feeling that the people we lose live on in us. In his naive Pinocchio way (but also through a near death experience) Palme learns that “Xian is alive even now, within you” because “inside you lives the memory of being loved.” So he finally understands that he keeps confusing women and girls for Xian because they have good qualities that remind him of what he loved about her and how she made him feel. Once he understands that he can be more in touch with his loss and also have better relationships with those people who aren’t her. He initially connects Popo to his mother because she sings the same song as her, and later we learn in her dream that she learned it from her father, who she misses in the same way.

There’s something poetic about the koo-loop wood carrying memories from the soil. Palme bridges the people above with the people Below because he understands them. But also Soma apparently went mad from mutating on these memories for centuries, so maybe there’s something there about holding onto things from the past for too long.

I like the way they handle the “becoming a real boy” aspect of Pinocchio. When Palme hears of a way he could become human, Popo seems kind of sad about it. She likes him as he is, why would she want him to be “real”? But she thinks about it for a second and asks, “Is that what you want?” and then seems to support him. His desperation to become human brings out a bad side of him, he stops being innocent cartoon boy and starts throwing some tantrums, but she forgives him.

For me that was enough substance to act as the magical sap that adds life force to this journey into a different reality. To me NAUSICAA is a much better story, but this has some of that same beauty of being able to lose yourself in a fantastical place with its own bizarre plants, creatures, technologies and beliefs. On the surface people live simply and in touch with nature, they have swords and cloaks, but down below they have jet powered glider things and laser cannons and shit. Maybe that’s why they were banished.

The movie is cute and sweet and pretty at times; it also gets very dark and eerie and horrifying, but it’s not like the latter is subverting the former. They’re just different parts of life. We can deal with all of them.

I think the score by Takashi Harada is particularly good. Much of it sounds very traditional and classical in a good way, but I learned from the DVD extras that the haunting high pitched sound comes from an electronic instrument he plays called the ondes Martenot. It turns out he started as a jazz pianist but became enamored of this instrument, became the first Japanese musician to play it solo and established the first ondes Martenot school in Asia.

The ondes Martenot looks like a keyboard, but he drags a ring across a wire in front of the keys to create the sound. It seems like something that could exist in Arcana, but it was invented in France in 1928 and has been used by Johnny Greenwood in Radiohead and on scores ranging from LAWRENCE OF ARABIA to HEAVY METAL to THE BLACK CAULDRON to (men’s) GHOSTBUSTERS. It’s also the sound I assumed was a theremin in MARS ATTACKS!. There’s a documentary about the instrument called WAVEMAKERS. You learn something new every day.

Writer/director Takashi Nakamura was an animator on NAUSICAA, he was the animation director for AKIRA, and he directed a weird movie I had forgotten about until just now called CATNAPPED!. Yeah, actually I can see some of all three of those in A TREE OF PALME, and that’s a weird mix. If you can get a grip on this it’s a special one.