The Ideon - A Contact

Yoshiyuki Tomino's The Ideon - A Contact unfolds with the impressionistic fervour of a collage. As a logical, narrative-based, proposition this 85 minute feature is basically unintelligible. Characters intuit incredible perceptual leaps to explain away the pure momentum we are witnessing. Punch card diagnostics become swirling, operatic, rhetoric as teenagers attempt to explain their brief communions with a massive combining robot-cum-God. Similarly, the film's scowling cast find themselves in roles and situations with very little explanation of how they got there or why they might be suitable for a particular task. There's a sense of real propulsion in A Contact though, we see a (pointless) war begin then escalate in real time, sparked off by a defiant alien Princess and her overprotective bodyguards while they nose around one of humanity's far-flung colonies.

Built out of Space Runaway Ideon, a television series that ran for 39 episodes from May 1980 to January 1981, A Contact is not dissimilar to the Neon Genesis Evangelion recap film, Evangelion: Death, in that its main function is to recombine already produced footage to set the stall for a forthcoming theatrical conclusion - in this case, The Ideon - Be Invoked. Tomino's attempt at summation cuts far past the bone though, the director tearing through hours and hours of small screen continuity to flag up complex animation or dream-like moments, rather than the basic grist of plot or character insight, as a way to communicate his expanding tale of a desperate, intergalactic, pursuit. Events in A Contact are therefore (obviously) episodic. A Contact allows us a stuttering glimpse of a larger story that revolves around a mysterious and apparently inexhaustible power source that resonates with imperilled children as well as the dangling insinuation that the otherworldly and, we are repeatedly assured, extra-terrestrial belligerents - the Buff Clan - are not actually that biologically distinct from humans.