In the future, the moon is a mining colony. All the colonists live and work on the dark side of the moon, where there is also a mysterious machine called “Dallos” that is a kind of local god. We are told it sucks to be a colonist because you are referred to by number and when you die your body is chemically destroyed, leaving only a ring that was implanted in your forehead. It’s not really clear that it actually sucks that much. I mean it definitely gets bad later but among Dallos’s various flaws is that it never really gets around to showing what makes living on the moon so dystopian.
Anyway, there are also rebels on the moon, led by a man named Dog. Dog kidnaps the military commander Alex Riger’s fiance, Melinda, as a bargaining chip. There’s a lot of fighting between Alex and the rebels, which involves Alex bombing Dallos in retaliation, but then Dallos activates to repairs itself and kills a lot of people. The character we follow through all of this is not Dog or Alex but a third character, Shun, whose older brother was falsely convicted as a terrorist and exiled to Saturn. Dog promises to tell Shun the full story of what happened to his brother if they both live through everything, and yet they do live through everything, and he doesn’t. This level of follow-through is generally representative of Dallos.
There’s also a subplot where one of the government figures on the moon is trying to kill Alex and part of doing that involves bombing the civilian population of the moon. This plot comes to nothing because of the aforementioned activation of Dallos, which kills all the conspirators. By the end of this story, Alex and Melinda are reunited and Shun decides to go to war with the Earth. Nobody has learned or even accomplished anything beyond, possibly, “don’t bomb Dallos.”1
Is Dallos good? This one’s an easy question to answer. No.
OK. But is Dallos… fun? Also no.
It has its moments. The cyborg dogs are very creepy (and they are the clearest foreshadowing of the work Mamoru Oshii would become most famous for, Ghost in the Shell). There’s a scene where we see bullet casings pouring down flights of stairs and another where some members of the police drop a box and a bunch of rings spill out, each representing a corpse. Both of these were distinctive ways of showing the scale of violence obliquely. (There’s also some brief but memorably gruesome scenes of people dying due to punctures in their spacesuits.) The scene where Shun and his grandfather see the Earth rise up over the mountains is quite beautiful, and the discovery (on our parts) that the “Sea of Nostalgia” is really a giant graveyard built on the near side of the moon is effective. But on the whole, Dallos is a slurry of sci-fi cliches that never really becomes something of its own.
There is an intriguing level of pointlessness to everything that happens here. A lot of people die in order for everybody who lives to end up back where they started. The rebel colonists achieve, as is painstakingly outlined for us, nothing; the Earth government also achieves nothing; the miners all go back to work; Dallos is an alien artifact that awakens and kills a bunch of people and then falls back asleep, apparently. At the end Shun throws his lot in with the rebels and we hear a speech from Earth that represents an escalation of hostility on that side. It’s not so hard to imagine a version of Dallos in which these apparent flaws become virtues. I am into the idea of a bleak story about an unwinnable war that features a deus ex machina that does not benefit anybody, resolve anything, or even take sides in the conflict.
But… that’s not really what Dallos is. It doesn’t really have enough internal coherence to be nihilistic and it doesn’t have enough good action for its lack of coherence to be ignored.2 The story, as outlined above, makes sense as is but isn’t very compelling as presented, and the characters are at best very generic types and at worst somehow less distinct than a generic type. Shun is given an interest in the Earth, but for no reason. Shun’s childhood friend, Rachel, becomes a rebel, because… it’s something to do? (That’s what she says, anyway.)
Dallos has a certain level of historical significance as one of the first works of Mamoru Oshii and also the first “OVA” in anime history.3 Without either of these facts buoying it up, I’m not sure anybody would watch it. It’s just mediocre. In the 80s, seeing a tape of this might have made an impression on somebody who had never seen a cartoon aimed at adults before. (See, those gruesome space deaths.) But there was better stuff coming out in the 80s and there would be better stuff that used the OVA format not too many years after Dallos, like Gunbuster.
Technically, Dallos is not Oshii’s big debut. That’s Urusei Yatsura: Only You, which came out in February 1983. (The first episode of Dallos came out that December.) Urusei Yatsura is a romantic comedy about a guy who keeps getting accidentally engaged to aliens. That summary is not really accurate but you know… it’s more accurate than you’d think.
Oshii is not famous in America for romantic comedies; he’s famous for dark technothrillers.4 So it’s easy to look at Dallos and try to see seeds of later greatness in there. I’m skeptical that there’s much to find. Dallos is not a neglected masterpiece. It’s a footnote in somebody’s career. Sometimes people just make mediocre and derivative work when they’re starting out. Some people don’t hit the ground running. It’s OK. You just keep going until you make something good.
This is surely the shortest post about a single work on here.
The whole premise of this story (down to the idea that the third generation of colonists will be the generation to break with the Earth) is lifted wholesale from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which is fine, but.… Heinlein’s novel does depict a colony that has its own recognizable culture, and there’s nothing distinctive about the colonists here.
On that note, I am reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I think it’s the only Heinlein novel I’ve read so far that I straight-up dislike. However, thanks to Mike the genderfluid computer, the total supremacy of women on the Moon, and the way all problems on the Moon are easily handled through murdering annoying people.… it’s definitely Dark Woke, I’ll say that much.
I think Dallos would be better if the moon were full of casual murder.
If you feel like this plot summary is impossible to follow, that’s because this doesn’t really have a very strong plot, but you are free to try this one.
When I was watching this I kept thinking of Area 88 (1985–86), an OVA about which I remember nothing except the very cool action sequences. The same character designer also worked on both, and that is probably why. (Hisayuki Toriumi was involved with both, but I don’t know that this is why.)
An OVA is essentially a direct-to-video release (or a series of direct-to-video releases). Where in an American market, that would mean that we’re talking about something made more cheaply, “OVA” doesn’t really have that connotation and their quality varies widely. They can be cheap and phoned-in. Or they can look better than a lot of movies:
Giant Robo is so good man.
When it comes to talking about Oshii, I’m a little handicapped because, truthfully, what I know him for at this point is Ghost in the Shell and not much else. I know Hayao Miyazaki’s movies pretty well (up to Howl’s Moving Castle) and I know Satoshi Kon’s movies pretty well. Oshii is something of a blank for me.