Dead Leaves

Movie Overview

Dead Leaves (デッド　リーブス) is a sci-fi adventure-comedy anime movie created by Production I.G in 2004. It’s also only 52 minutes long including the ending credits, so it’s not a huge time commitment to watch — unlike the movie I was originally going to review today which is 2 hours.

The “plot” of this movie, if you can even call it a plot, is that our two protagonists are attempting to escape from a prison on the moon. There’s really no motivation behind their actions. They act purely on instinct, and that’s partially why I find it difficult to say there’s a real plot.

At the start of the movie, Pandy and Retro wake up naked on the outskirts of a city. They immediately enter the city to commit a string of crimes and are sentenced to life in prison on the moon.

At no point do they actively decide to break out. They suddenly realize that they know how to free themselves from their restraints, and so they do. And this is is how the rest of their escape works. They just do things that they inherently know without knowing why (due to their amnesia).

Now, the biggest disclaimer I have to make for this movie is that it’s made for mature audiences. Not only does it contain copious amounts of graphic violence, but it’s also extremely sexual. There are (often visual) sex jokes everywhere.

And, these sexual parts of the movie are intertwined with everything else that’s going on. For example, the way Pandy and Retro free themselves from their restraints is by having wild sex in their prison cell.

It’s a very weird movie and I can’t say I was mentally prepared for what I watched.

Main Characters

Pandy is the female lead of the movie. She’s called Pandy because the red ring around her right eye makes her look like a panda. Pandy is also the more serious of the two and has a greater interest in figuring out who they were before they lost their memories.

Retro is the male lead. He gets his name from the fact that his head is literally just a retro TV. Retro is more prone to getting caught up in the moment and usually just accepts that things are the way they are rather than wondering why they are that way.

You may also recognize Retro’s voice actor as the voice of Usopp from One Piece.

While in Dead Leaves Prison (that’s where the title comes from), Retro befriends another inmate who’s referred to as Chinko Drill. His name translates to Penis Drill, and if you’re wondering why, it’s because his penis is a massive drill.

As for the antagonists, there are three, but I’m only going to go over two of them here. The third one only shows up at the end of the movie and there’s nothing I have to say about them that wouldn’t be a spoiler.

666 and 777 are the two “main” antagonists of the movie. They serve as the prison’s guards, though I feel like it was either mentioned or just implied that they’re prisoners as well. In either case, they’re the ones tasked with watching over the prisoners 24/7 and killing anyone who breaks the rules.

The only other character of note is Dr. Yabu. His name means that he’s a quack doctor and I believe he says that he’s in prison because a bunch of people he operated on died. Anyway, his main role is to give us an info dump about Pandy’s and Retro’s situation.

Visual Overload

I have quite a few complaints about this movie. The lack of a plot made it difficult for me to care about anything. All the crude sexual humor isn’t really for me. And the visuals were kind of a lot to take in.

In this section, I want to focus on the visuals. And to start, I think the fact that I watched this movie in 480p quality wasn’t helping things. It’s from 2004, so maybe you’d be able to find a 720p version. But, this isn’t me just saying that older anime are bad because they have worse visual quality.

The big issue with watching Dead Leaves in 480p is that the low quality combined with the highly stylized art and quick animation puts a lot of strain on the eyes. This is a very colorful movie and after the opening scene, it’s pretty much non-stop action. It’s hard to follow.

There was never a point in the movie where I didn’t understand what was going on from a visual perspective. But, I could easily see that being the case for some people. However, I did have to pause the movie a few times and look away from the screen just to give my eyes a break.

When I reviewed Promare, I described watching that movie as watching a kaleidoscope in anime form. That was a compliment. Watching Dead Leaves is like having the colored glass of the kaleidoscope poured into your eyes.

Simply having the movie upscaled to 720p or 1080p (or remade entirely) would probably solve a significant portion of the visual problems. But, adding in more plot wouldn’t hurt either. It would add interest and allow for natural spots with no action so viewers can have a little break.

Conclusion

It’s kind of hard for me to give Dead Leaves a score. I don’t hate it. But I still feel like I have to give it a 4/10 because of the issues I have with it. If the visuals were better quality, it might get up to a 6 just because the visuals are so important to this movie.

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