There’s a scene during one of the early moments of Love & Pop featuring Hiromi and her friend go with an older guy to a shabu shabu restaurant for compensated dating, when an innocent distraction leads to the man unleashing his inner frustrations on his life trajectory onto the young girls. “Won’t you realize the end of your teenage years are so important? If you don’t do anything, you’ll go to a bad college, get a bad job, and end up in an awful marriage!”
‘It’s not that he’s entirely wrong, but I just don’t want to hear about this stuff from him,’ she grumbles in monologue afterwards.
Anno began production work on Love & Pop just a few months following the release of End of Evangelion in Japanese cinemas, using it as an experimental breeding ground to explore creative ideas both in story and style within a new medium. It began a streak of films he would create away from animation that included Ritual and a live-action Cutie Honey that blended the freedom of animation’s ’blank canvas’ with the rawness of live-action. It would define his work in both mediums for decades to come.
The film takes place over a single day following four high-school girls and particularly Hiromi, who is wanting to scrape together the money needed to buy an expensive ring before the store closes. Her friends have engaged in compensated dating before as a way to get quick cash, allowing them to buy cameras and hang out on an older man’s dime, with Hiromi seeing the chance to do the same.
Japan was in a state of economic stasis by 1997 when the film released. The post-war bubble that transformed the country to an economic powerhouse with never-ending growth ahead burst at the end of the 1980s ushering in a lost decade of stagnation. The collapse stole with it the belief of adults who felt unable to provide in the way they once could and those coming of age without any hopes for their own future. The salarymen were angry and betrayed, the kids were nihilistic and devoid of desire.
Love & Pop is an examination of this mindset, often quite literally. Anno had become intrigued by the blossoming array of digital cameras beginning to enter the market that were small while allowing for full video recording and utilized them for almost the entirety of production beyond a closing sequence on more typical 35mm. By being so small, the cameras worm their ways into every facet of these worlds and their lives, their lenses scratched and raw as the lives they depict.
Film can often present a dreamlike, idealized view of our world where, even in strife, there’s a beauty in how it’s depicted that makes it feel self-important and profound. It looks painful, but we feel enriched and educated for seeing this vulnerability. Anno wanted nothing of the sort. Cameras are placed in the rafters of buildings, on the floor, inside skirts, as a first-person perspective on events, squished and distorted and filmed against the sun for ugly flares that crush the image till it’s near-impossible to parse. Desaturated, blurry and ugly as was all that early digital could reproduce, this natural, unpolished video feed captures the world at its most truthful, free from artifice.
With this, we enter the hustling sprawl of Shibuya from the perspective of Hiromi and these young girls. For them, compensated dating is a sense of power against the never ending chaos and anxieties of the city which envelops them. There’s agency and control that comes in manipulating these men to act pathetic towards them, to give them money simply to spend time in their presence. Never mind how much it serves as a middle finger to the moral panic that was going on over the practice amongst broader society, and why would their opinion matter when it destroyed their future?
Of course, that isn’t to say we should glorify the practice. Just as much as this looks at social anxiety through these teenage eyes as both a desire for something they control amidst a society falling away from them, compensated dating is looked at frankly as both agency and an enforcement of sexist power dynamics that often exploit their innocence and existence and push boundaries. It’s one thing making money from running a free-dial cell phone to collect numbers for future use or enjoy someone’s cooking, and a man asking you to chew and spit out a grape for future use or forcing you to jerk him off in the middle of an adult video section.
Or go further.
Love & Pop is an angry but unfiltered look at a society that has abandoned itself, using its unusual creative process to enhance these emotions. When Hiromi is being examined by an introverted Uehara before being taken to a video store, the mixed-use of a fisheye lens exaggerating Uehara’s gaze as Hiromi cowers in the side is deliberately uncomfortable, but it also reflects Hiromi’s feelings towards the situations and projects it in a way only this creative choice can allow.
The innocent desire to buy a ring or hang out together for one last summer, the ruthless, cold, gruesome acts of men who view these underage girls as pleasure objects and little more. All a desire for both sides to feel something when society no longer makes sense as the post-war consensus falls apart around them. While I’d hardly say there’s hope to be found in this story, there is at least a recognition that a self more worthy than one which throws itself around hoping to feel something no matter the consequence can be found, if one desires.
It’s a masterclass of using the tools of filmmaking to enhance this message, and it’s the connecting tissue to his animated works and his work in multiple mediums in the decades to follow. As Evangelion’s world deconstructed itself into the cels and sketches that created its world to explore the cycles of depression, isolation and loneliness and how we connect, Digital camera footage distorted or crassly photographed in this manner achieves this in a new medium.
The lessons learned using this would be taken and expanded in his next film, Ritual, and to capture the bureaucratic absurdity of Shin Godzilla in partnership with long-time creative partner and the film’s director Shinji Higuchi, going further in Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider.
If Evangelion will perhaps always remain his most iconic and defining work, Love & Pop is the work that connects this Anno with the one who continues to create today. In its disturbing lechery and unrelenting voracity, it may also be his best.
