Director-cinematographer-editor (not to mention co-writer) Kazuaki Kiriya's Casshern is an odd and not entirely enjoyable duck. The film's pacing is glacial, with the overwhelming majority of Casshern given over to solemn but not particularly insightful sermons about the horrors of empire. The front-end of the piece is therefore filled with scenes in which the emotionless instruments of a Soviet-presenting war machine gather to declare their slogans at each other. The acting that takes place on this film's bluescreen backlot is often unduly theatrical in how it communicates its ideas: figures wrap themselves in flags then blast their rhetoric directly at their imaginary audience. The effect is chilly and austere rather than involving. Yusuke Iseya's augmented title character, at least in this theatrical cut, is absent for nearly the entire first hour of the film as well. We do see a few, brief inserts regarding his human life though: Tetsuya as a young man, hell bent on frustrating his father's scholastic ambitions for him, as well as black and white nightmares that depict the young conscript shooting civilians before he is himself killed by a booby trap.
Resurrected, thanks to his father's pioneering research into inhuman cruelty, the artificial person that eventually takes the name Casshern finds himself, intermittently, fending off the waves of advancing, automated armies that encircle this expanding fiefdom. Technologically speaking, Kiriya's Casshern - adapted from Tatsuo Yoshida's mid-70s, child friendly animated television series - seems a reaction to the digital set-work and computer-generated set-pieces seen in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, specifically the moments in which George Lucas completely abandoned staid set-ups featuring human actors, giving the film over to two toy factions blasting away at each other during a sandstorm. Two decades removed from this deliberate unreal approximation of Middle Eastern conflict, and given that similar sequences in modern blockbusters have somehow evolved into perfunctory noise, the blaring falseness of ILM's black blizzard becomes entertaining in of itself. Lucas, unburdened from the human performers he had no interest in directing, was able to lose himself inside his very own polygonal pandemonium. Kiriya is similarly unleashed, applying the eye-catching collage of his Hikaru Utada music videos to this (much more modestly budgeted) visual effects drenched polemic.
Casshern keys into a similar sense of superimposed overabundance as the Star Wars prequels then, jamming every inch of the screen with incongruous, obviously synthetic accentuation and charmingly primitive mechanical figures. Kiriya arguably even goes a step further than his spotless inspiration by cross-pollinating his special effects plates with the filthy figures seen in Polish science fiction films, specifically the blood and shit-smeared cosmonauts from Andrzej Żuławski's On the Silver Globe. Regardless of advances in grimy spacesuits, it does seem notable that Kiriya and storyboarder Shinji Higuchi, in their thrilling (and, in fairness, fleeting) depiction of man on robot destruction, are communicating the same reaction to Lucas' simulated armies as Cartoon Network wunderkind Genndy Tartakovsky. The second season of the Star Wars: Clone Wars shorts dedicated an entire three-minute episode to a fondly remembered interlude in which Mace Windu's Jedi Master pulverised battalions of action figures with his bare fists. Almost simultaneously, and on the other side of the planet, Japanese theatres were projecting the edge of Yusuke Iseya's human hand cleaving its way through another army of bulbous robots.