‘Take the X Train’: Rintaro’s dark sci-fi comedy
Although anime has become one of the most beloved art forms in the world, there’s something to be said about the glaringly empty space left by older generations of artists whose unique styles were rapidly replaced by newer and faster techniques. Despite this, new fans continue to trawl through internet archives to find anime masterpieces from the 20th century that redefined the medium. One particularly strange example is Take the X Train by Rintaro.
Japan, during the 1980s, was experiencing an economic boom, facilitating the rise of consumerism and shaping a different kind of national identity. Anime also experienced exponential growth during the decade, aided by the popularity of Studio Ghibli as well as global interest in other beloved Japanese intellectual properties like Astro Boy. It was from this particular socioeconomic environment that a subversive and cynical gem like Take the X Train was born.
Rintaro’s brilliant 1987 work, co-written by Yoshio Urasawa, follows a man named Ishihara Toru, whose life is terribly mundane. On sweltering summer days, he has to watch his boss deliver horrible presentations about trains to uncaring executives who don’t even let him finish his meal. In addition to his unimpressive professional trajectory, his personal life is filled with meaningless trips to seedy love hotels with a girlfriend he doesn’t even like.
Toru experiences a massive shift in the intensity of his existence when he encounters a supernatural phenomenon at a subway station, shocked by the passage of a train made out of pure energy. As he falls deeper and deeper into the infinite hole of secret government programs, shadow organisations, bizarre conspiracies and psychokinetic powers, the world around him continuously morphs and is tinged with that unmistakable shade of paranoia.
Having worked on Neo Tokyo that very year and just preceding Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 magnum opus Akira, Take the X Train belongs to a special oeuvre that emerged at that time. Utilising sci-fi frameworks and incisive political commentaries, many anime artists tried to visualise the future of a technologically advanced Japan as well as human civilisation. Similar post-human concerns can also be observed in the live-action features from that period, evident in acclaimed films like Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
Dedicated to Duke Ellington and supplemented by a beautiful jazz score, Take the X Train is as radical as the music and transcends the limitations of its form. Projects like this are almost extinct now, especially since Rintaro and Yoshio Urasawa somehow got a corporation like Konami to fund such an experimental and daring artistic statement. The old-school art style perfectly merges with the music, painting a vivid picture of the anxieties that constitute the foundation of the Technological Age.
Toru’s character, a disenchanted, meek protagonist, is also a fascinating response to the popularity of anime like Astro Boy (on which Rintaro worked as well), where the national identity is linked to glorious ideas of heroism. Take the X Train makes no such pretensions, inviting us on a train ride to nowhere, accentuated by flashes of fear and the future.
Watch the film below.
