James Nicoll Reviews

The 2015 anime The Empire of Corpses is director Ryoutarou Makihara’s adaptation of a 2012 steampunk novel by Toh EnJoe¹ and Project Itoh. 

Victor Frankenstein taught the world how to re-animate the dead. But one crucial component of Frankenstein’s research was lost: the art of imbuing the reanimated dead with an actual soul. Others may call the dead back to life, but none will be able to replicate the will and soul of the One, Frankenstein’s first creation. No matter: necroware suffices to restore a semblance of life to the dead, a semblance that sentences them to unpaid labour under the direction of the living. 

Doctor John Watson is determined to rediscover the lost method of soul restoration. He is so determined that he persists in his researches even though they are illegal: reanimation is a closely held state secret. He succeeds in resurrecting a dead friend, but fails to restore his soul. The reanimated man is an empty shell, which Watson nicknames Friday. 

The British Empire is adept at dealing with amateurs like Watson. Soon after Friday is reanimated, Watson is arrested. M, head of the Secret Service, offers Watson a choice: a lengthy prison term or service as a British agent overseas, there to use his recherché talent in the interests of the empire. Watson takes the second option. 

The Russian corpse-engineer Karamazov has used what he has gleaned of Frankenstein’s methods to create a nightmarish Central Asian kingdom populated by the animated dead. Watson, accompanied by British agent Burnaby and Russian guide Krasotkin, must venture through war-torn Afghanistan to confront Karamazov and seize his work for the Empire. It’s likely that Watson will die in the attempt. 

But he does not. He finds Karamazov, who reveals that Frankenstein’s original records can be found in Japan. Watson undertakes to find and destroy the documents. Utterly convinced that the world needs to be protected from the full extent of Frankenstein’s methods, Karamazov sacrifices himself and Krosotkin as a demonstration of the destructive nature of Frankenstein’s lost secrets. Horrified by what he has learned, Watson nevertheless persists in his quest to find the missing documents. 

Frankenstein’s work is indeed in Japan. So is the One, who has his own plans for his creator’s work, the first step of which is using his superior understanding of necroware to turn the dead against the living. As terrible a threat as the One can be, his threat may pale next to that posed by Watson’s true opponent: M himself. 

~oOo~

Hands up, everyone who was surprised that a high ranking functionary in a shadowy intelligence organization should turn out to embrace problematic methods? Or that an obsessed scientist would find it nigh impossible to abandon a line of research to which he had devoted years of his life, even after discovering the malign purposes to which it could be put? 

As far as I know there has never been a translation of the novel on which this is based. I am familiar with other works by Project Itoh: Harmony, The Genocidal Organ, and Metal Gear Solid: Guns of the Patriot. Based on those works I suspect that considerable liberties were taken when adapting the novel to anime. Karamazov’s method, M’s plan to end all human misery: those plot elements are Project Itoh-esque. The plot itself (a series of loosely linked action-filled confrontations in widely separated exotic locations) reminded me more of James Bond than of Project Itoh. Various aspects of the anime, such as the character design for Burnaby, suggest that this resemblance is deliberate. 

The animation is often striking, in both a good and negative sense. The machines are depicted in detail, humans aren’t. The main female character, American agent Hadaly, is imbued with Gainaxian dimensions little informed by actual female anatomy. 

At two hours, this was too long for its slight plot. It did leave me wondering what the novel would be like. 

The Empire of Corpses is available here (Amazon). It does not appear to be available from Chapters-Indigo. 

1: At least, according to Wikipedia, EnJoe was co-author.