Sky Crawlers

Somewhere, in a country similar to ours
There are children who do not became adult
They are very similar to us
– PRODUCTION NOTES

Oshii’s newest anime is about a media war over Europe, with teenagers doomed to eternal youth as air fighters. The airfight scenes, true to the quality of anime studio Production I.G, are thrilling. The movement and spatial depictions, a combination of skillful 2D and 3D animation, and the Lucas Company empowered soundtrack create a dizzying experience for the viewer. These can be seen as a commentary on the fascination and horror with which we watch such media-enhanced conflicts as the war on Iraq. But under the excitement and tension, a typical Oshii type of melancholy, here driven by the sadness of the doomed romance, lingers. Oshii’s detailed combat scenes are created with care to technical details. The combination of action scenes and long dialogue scenes, familiar from Ghost in the Shell: Innocence, is also there, and, true to Oshii, there is a dog living in the air base. What you may not have expexted is the depiction of love and sex. Oshii succesfully breaks new ground here, and has again created an animation for intelligent adult taste.
– EIJA NISKANEN, TOKYO JOURNAL

Oshii, the director of Kokaku Kidotai (Ghost in the Shell) (1995) and Innocence (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence)” (2004) – highly acclaimed exercises in dark sci-fi – is not making a typical fi ghter-pilot fi lm, though. Instead he is conducting an investigation into the consequences of messing with the core definition of humanity. What happens when you wipe out a person’s past? Make him ageless? Enlist him in a war that never ends – and a life that has no future?
– MARK SCHILLING, THE JAPAN TIMES