MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Cockroaches’: Imaginative Animation

Hiroaki Yoshida’s provocative and imaginative “Twilight of the Cockroaches” (at the Nuart Saturday through Tuesday and beginning Wednesday, at the Little Tokyo Cinemas) alternates between the sentimental and the tart as it combines animation and live action. In anthropomorphizing cockroaches, of all creatures, it creates a heroine, Naomi, so pretty as to seem a cross between Snow White and the youthful Elizabeth Taylor.

Naomi and her community live charmed lives. (Yoshida has helpfully said that her community stands for a Japan caught up in the good life). They inhabit the apartment of a divorced young man (Kaoru Kobayashi) whom they worship as a god but whom we recognize frankly as a slob, loathing to keep house. That’s why the cockroaches flourish--not because he has any respect for them as living creatures.

Naomi, who is about to marry the dutiful Ichiro, has her horizons suddenly broadened when Hans, a cockroach from a distant tribe, arrives. He is handsome, square-jawed, with one eye hidden by a lock of hair, Veronica Lake-style, and he dazzles Naomi. He comes with a tale of a terrible impending roach genocide--and his tribe’s equally frightening militaristic response; then we realize he has come across the vacant lot--for him the other side of the world, a dangerous jungle thicket in which a puddle becomes a veritable ocean--from an apartment whose tenant is a young woman (Setsuko Karasumaru) who is an insecticide-wielder determined to wipe out cockroaches. The catch is that the young man and the young woman are about to begin an affair.

Yoshida is adept at projecting an allegorical fantasy, which suggests how vulnerable all living creatures are and how we deceive ourselves with illusions of security. (You have to give the cockroaches credit, however, for rationalizing insecticide bombardments as God’s way of ensuring the survival of the fittest of their species, as immunity to the poison ever increases.) Yoshida steadfastly maintains the perspective of the cockroaches, which is often amusing in effect, especially as humans loom as tall as skyscrapers and, to the cockroaches’ acute hearing, their every action is so loud and thuddingly ominous that the working of a zipper sounds like a peal of thunder and lightning.

At 105 minutes “Twilight of the Cockroaches” is at least 15 minutes too long, and animator Hiroshi Kurogane’s cockroaches, while certainly serviceable, are the simple, pallid-hued line drawings of routine Japanese cartoons; his flair is nowhere near that of Yoshida, currently shooting his first American picture, “Iron Maze,” in the Rust Belt steel mill town of Braddock, Pa. Even so, “Twilight of the Cockroaches” (Times-rated Mature for adult situations) is sufficiently original to be engaging.

‘TWILIGHT OF THE COCKROACHES’

A Streamline Pictures release of a Gaga Communications presentation of a TYO/Kitty Entertainment Group production. Executive producers Tatsumi Eatanabe, Mayumi Izumi. Producers Hiroaki Yoshida, Hidenori Taga. Writer-director Yoshida. Animation designer Hiroshi Kurogane. Music Morgan Fisher. Art director Kiichi Ichida. Sound Susumu Aketagawa. With Kaoru Kobayashi, Setsuko Karasumaru. In Japanese, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.