Dimension Bomb

“Dimension Bomb” is the name of a movie-short featured in Genius Party, an anthology of experimental animation shorts out of Japan. This movie was directed by Koji Morimoto, and was featured at the Kennedy Center back in February. I was given the opportunity to see it, having gotten a ticket for the event from a close friend for Christmas. To be honest, I was real reluctant about going–I used to be a fan of anime once, well before it became mainstream. Since then, my enthusiasm had, to put it bluntly, greatly waned, even though I was never much of a fandom-scene person to begin with. In any case, I had gone with some reluctance at first, and little did I know that it would, like Daniel Pinchbeck’s novel title, break open my head. And it did.  To quote from the Kennedy Center playbill:

Dimension Bomb (directed by Koji Morimoto) follows the character, Shin, in his inner world.  As Shin begins to rush through his inner world, he eventually breaks through the barrier of dimensions.  A unique music clip is featured.

This unique music clip was Juno Reactor‘s Tanta Pena (link to song with crummy Tomb Raider music video–ignore the video). Incidentally, Morimoto offered some kickass album art on the Gods and Monsters album that Tanta Pena was released on.  The song, coupled with the nightmarish futuristic backdrop, really set the tone and the energy for the entire movie, let alone the stream-of-consciousness dialogue going on.  Here is the trailer for Genius Party Beyond, with Dimension Bomb occurring at about 2:40 in the video.

The thing that got to my attention first was the character Shin: he looked identical to myself, and by that I would mean identical to how I always see myself (which isn’t much different from how I am now actually, just maybe a change in hair color and texture, and no breasts).  This gave the eerie impression that I was indeed watcing myself up on that screen.  Shin’s journey through his inner world–and in a way, reality itself, was very much reminiscent-if not outright-a shamanic journey.  He even has a guide, an eerie, almost gypsy-looking girl who appears to be initiating him into his journey, and is seen trance-dancing through some of the movie. 

It certainly didn’t help that a day or so before I had been very ill for no discernible reason–nausea, dizziness, bad headaches, and frequent trance-states.  The last part was very unusual for me, as I tend to have a good amount of control of my trances, and when I choose to engage in them.  It was a troubling state, and it only seemed to worsen with the realization that I had not taken any medication or otherwise ingested anything that would bring me to this state.  This coupled with some strange and somewhat disturbing nightmares.  It had taken us longer than expected to drive to the Kennedy Center, as I kept getting car-sick and dizzy.  When I had gotten there, I was already in some strange, disconnected state, which only seemed to throw gasoline on the already smoldering flames.  When the movie was over, I had left large puddles of sweat on the armrests from my palms.  I staggered out of the theatre, legs shaking and head spinning, trying to avoid some dizzy fangirls in cat-ears.  I had a bad metallic taste in my mouth, and it wasn’t until I finally got home did I realize that I had bitten my lip wide open during the movie, and had not even realized it.

Seeing Dimension Bomb during that state, and in the middle of some important things going on in my life, really brought things to a certain degree of perspective for me.  The eerie similarities of the character Shin to myself, as well as some other creepy parallels seen in the movie, only seemed to agitate the already building list of “coincidences” that had been occuring for some time up until that point.  It really did seem as if I was watching myself on the movie screen, and for days later I would have nightmares about that film.  It almost makes me feel stupid writing about this here–I’m hardly what one would consider an animation fanatic, but I will say that these films listed wasn’t your average anime, your average characters or your average settings (at least from what I had seen, which, admittedly, isn’t that much).

So.  This is Dimension Bomb.  The journal cataloguing my journey through my own “inner world” and straight on to the other side.