ANI-MOVIES, *King Of Thorn

Yuji Iwahara was a former video game graphic artist-turned manga creator who had some decent sales from his Chikyu Misaki title, but his next one of King Of Thorn roused enough attention that it was able to get its own anime movie in 2009 from Sunrise. It was directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama who also did The Big O and there is a grand scale of a terror-filled fairy tale. This story plays out like an old Playstation survival horror game such as Resident Evil or Parasite Eve, even though as it goes along you notice there's quite a variety of reality breaks going on in this. The science-fiction premise has an out-of-control plague, rampaging monsters, psychic battles, and possible global destruction, so there is quite a variety in store here. The death game genre has been used in Deadman Wonderland and Battle Royale, but King Of Thorn took this to a different level of weird.

A strange virus is sweeping across mankind called the Medusa strain which turns its victims to stone. A pharmaceutical company named Venus Gate plans to take 160 people and cryogenically freeze them until a cure is found. The patients wake up sometime later to which they think is at least a few years it's in reality only a few days with the entire facility been covered in thorns and inhabited by bloodthirsty beasts. The main character Kasumi is one of the small numbers to survive the first few monster attacks and tries to find out what happened to her twin sister Shizuku who was also supposed to be among the patients but is nowhere to be found. Within the remaining subjects are the special forces office Marco, the bipolar Katherine, and the young lad Tim who seems to think the entire situation they're in is like this video game he's addicted to which somehow give him insight into each hazardous situation they run into. The entire Venus Gate base is under the control of a malfunctioning computer called Alice that's tied into Shizuku who has inherited some reality-altering powers that was passed on from a child that she got from an asteroid that landed in Siberia. The thorns start to grow all over the place and change the base into a giant plant monster taking on the shape of a dragon that threatens to grow all over the Earth. Kasumi tries to free Shizuku, only to come to the realization that she was a copy of Kasumi after the original died just before Shizuku began to go all "Akira" on everything. The still living Kasumi stops her creator/sister and walks off with the now freed Tim to an uncertain future.

The drawn animation of the characters is very well done, but the majority of the monster animation is CGI back in the late 2000s when the art still hadn't solidified. A large flaw in the movie is that it took the main antagonist from the manga and left them completely out of the plot which is like leaving Darth Vader out of Star Wars. The film could've used a more central villain as it keeps shifting to flashbacks while trying to make sense of what is currently going on in the story. King Of Thorn plays out like a twisted children's story fused with a first-person shooter game. The movie operates on a sliding scale as some find the constant plot twists good while others take it a being just another glib action anime.