I cannot in good faith recommend this movie to most people. This is a lurid, rare kind of barbarism. The visual presentation can be crude, and the subject matter explored--and the means by which it is--is socially uneasy at least. However, Chika Gentou Gekiga: Shoujo Tsubaki nonetheless remains one of my favorite films of all time. There will be slight spoilers ahead (nothing major), so if you wish to go in blind, turn back now.

For the unfamiliar, Midori (the film is known as in the west) is a Japanese OVA released in the early 1990s, adapted from the manga by Suehiro Maruo (which I also highly recommend). Set in the 1920s, the protagonist for which the film is named after is an adolescent girl who joins a traveling freak show after suffering tragedy, only to then face perpetual abuse and exploitation by the performers.

The film exhibits fairly openly graphic violence and sexual assault, even incorporating a bit of body horror. A lot of this cruelty is aimed specifically at the defenseless Midori, a character who has few accessible means of escape or retaliation against her various injuries. What distinguishes this depiction of sexual abuse from many others in Japanese media, I find, is that it is not played as pornographic. An act of rape or assault in the film does not contextualize coerced bodily transactions as ones through which the audience should derive pleasure, but instead as an act of horror and savagery, that which is undeserved, especially as it is aimed at a figure who has done nothing wrong. Such appears to be the mettle of ero guro, or at least Maruo's approach to it: to use the vulnerability and purity of human nakedness as a foil to savagery, plague and filth, the two entities engaging with each other seemingly towards entropy, extermination, and/or eternal dysfunction.

I believe this depiction and the sentiment it conveys to be important. I find this to be the case because it is willing to have an honest and unapologetic conversation with the kind of dismal that does not improve, but stagnates until it is no longer sustainable, then dying unceremoniously. Regarding its imagery, the visual storytelling synergizes with the narrative in exhibiting fundamental acts of desecration alongside moments of lush, fertile beauty, the characteristically minimal animation (all hand-drawn by one person) being greatly alleviated by so many of the film's images being gorgeous, in my opinion.

And I mean, there's also a vibe, right? There's a special experience in finding this movie on Internet Archive, downloading it, burning it on a DVD, and watching it in a dark basement all by yourself. That's exactly what I did, in fact. There's certainly lots of commentary also to be made about a more subversive means of entertainment consumption that a film like this can be associated with, having no mainstream or "official" distribution in the modern day, dealing heavy-handed in subjects as bleak as it does, and thus being relegated to niche circles on the digital fringe.

This is not pop culture: you can't sell it, eat it, and it doesn't wanna fuck you for money. Rather, I believe its main goal is to have a challenging conversation about abandonment, betrayal and displacement, one that is applicable to conditions in reality, and also one that I feel has been made an abject by most safe forms of entertainment. Thus, if mainstream media is content disregarding people who have made comfort out of brutalization for it being the center of their lived experience, then Midori matters to me for giving some unpretentious recognition for those that live through unchosen suffering, those who I believe are more common than often accepted.

It isn't fun, but there are moments where it feels nice and where the warmth feels real. And when it seems like there's no point to any of it, that is the point.