Disaster Report: PSYCHIC SCHOOL WARS

The last twenty years has been a good time for original anime films.  Studio Ghibli has (mostly) relinquished its dominance of the scene, thanks to the passing of Isao Takahata, Hayao Miyazaki’s off-and-on retirement, and Goro Miyazaki’s fruitless struggle toward competence.  That’s left a space for a lot of up-and-coming directors and studios to try their hand at similar sorts of crowd-pleasing animated films.  One of the few to find true, lasting success at it has been Makoto Shinkai.

Shinkai’s directorial career began quite modestly.  He first gained notoriety in the early 2000s for producing a series of delicately emotional, digitally-animated shorts entirely on his own computer.  While his productions grew in size, length, and scope over time, he never abandoned his focus on telling stories about young adults tentatively finding love against a backdrop of urban beauty.  This culminated in 2016’s Your Name, which became one of the most successful animated films in Japanese history and a worldwide hit.  Naturally, that success spawned many imitators in the intervening years, with pleasant (if not particularly memorable) results.

They were not the first ones to try and find success by copying Shinkai’s style, though.  Hot on the heels of 5 Centimeters Per Second and Children Who Chase Lost Voices came 2012’s Psychic School Wars.  This film was one man’s attempt to catapult himself to fame by borrowing Shinkai’s aesthetic and taking it to the next level, all while forgetting everything else that makes a good film (much less Shinkai’s work) function.

Prior to Psychic School Wars, Ryosuke Nakamura could accurately have been described as a rising star in the world of anime.  He had gone to Tokyo University in the hopes of becoming a professional sports writer, but instead ended up getting hired on as a screenwriter by Studio Madhouse.  As time went on his interests shifted more to storyboarding and direction, working on popular shows like Monster, Nana, Kaiji, Hajime no Ippo and Claymore.  He learned from seasoned directors such as Moria Asaka and Katsuji Masayama and befriended other up-and-comers like future Death Note and Attack on Titan director Tetsuro Araki.  By the end of the decade, he had managed to work his way up to series director on the obscure mystery series Moryo no Hako, but Nakamura found himself increasingly at odds with Madhouse’s legendary producer Masao Maruyama over the course of his career.

Eventually he left Madhouse and made his way to Sunrise’s Studio 8, a sub-studio which was known at the time for otaku-friendly shows about cute girls such as Mai-Hime and Mai Otome. He was fortunate enough to have a connection there, as producer Tadashi Hirayama was an old college friend who had been in the same children’s literature club as Nakamura.  Hirayama was more than happy to help his old friend make the next big step in his career, and together the two decided that Nakamura’s next project should be an adaptation of an old favorite of theirs.

Neruwatera Gakuen was a novel by the popular young-adult writer Taku Mayumura, first released in 1973.  It tells the story of Koji Seki, who attends a junior high prep school alongside his friends.  The pressure of their studies leads to some children acting out, and the newly elected student council president Michiru Takimizawa takes upon herself to stop them through the use of psychic mind control and fascist oppression.  Eventually Koji and his friends discover that she’s being manipulated by another mysterious figure behind-the-scenes.  Koji and his friends eventually rise up and lead a rebellion against their oppressors, who destroy the school before fleeing. 

It’s a story that has entertained generations of Japanese children that many critics have interpreted as a parable of Imperial Japanese fascism or the 1960s student protest movement.  It’s resonated enough with Japanese audiences that multiple live-action adaptations of it have been made over the years, including a very successful but trippy film by House director Nobuhiko Obayashi in 1981.  It’s kind of surprising that it took so long for an animated adaptation of Neruwatera Gakuen to be made, considering that a couple of Mayumura’s other stories were adapted into anime in the 1980s and stories about psychic teens have remained popular throughout the decades.  

I wonder if Nakamura felt that the anime trends of the time were in their favor.  The then-recent success of Haruhi Suzumiya certainly helped set the stage for them, as a book-based anime franchise that married schoolroom drama with supernatural subplots.  He might have also taken inspiration from 2005’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, another young adult novel film adaptation that launched the career of director Mamoru Hosoda.  Nakamura would have certainly been aware of it as it was produced and released by Madhouse while he was still working there.  As noted previously, he clearly took a lot of cues from the early works of Makoto Shinkai.  Every review for Psychic School Wars out there, be it professional or personal, has noted the obvious similarities in both style and structure.  There’s no doubt in my mind that Nakamura hoped that this film would launch his directorial career along the same trajectory as Shinkai's.

Psychic School Wars promised to boost Tadashi Hirayama's career as well.  He was a fairly new producer and Studio 8 was not one of Sunrise’s most prestigious sub-studios.  Other, more notable sub-studios there had tried their hand at making original animated features in the previous decade, but all that resulted were disappointments like 2004’s Steamboy and 2010’s King of Thorn.  If Hirayama could succeed where those other producers had failed, then his career would rise alongside Nakamura’s, leading them both to bigger and better things.  He used his position to rope in as many big names for the production committee as possible, including Aniplex, Sony, Bandai-Namco, and Shochiku.  A number of big-name seiyuu were cast in the leading roles, including Daisuke Ono, Kana Hanazawa, and AKB48 idol signer Mayu Watanabe.  She would contribute a song to its soundtrack as well, alongside the popular band supercell.  The committee even commissioned a brief manga adaptation to promote the film, which ran in Newtype Ace a month ahead of the film’s release on November 11, 2012.

What’s truly curious about Ryosuke Nakamura’s take on Psychic School Wars is how little it resembles Mayumura’s original tale.  At best it borrows only a few names and the broad strokes of the original plot.  There’s no one to blame for this but Nakamura himself, who took on the role of screenwriter after the first one, Yuko Naito, dropped out.  As Nakamura notes in this 2012 interview, he was a fan of the original novel but felt the story needed modernizing not just to make it relevant to early 2010s teens but distinguish his take on it from the previous adaptations.  Nakamura drew not just on his own childhood experiences for inspiration but also watched a lot of popular teen dramas and talk shows.  Based at the end result, it seems all he took away from his research was that he should rip out all of the story's politics and replace it with the most insipid, derivative romance plot possible.

Despite what the title might suggest, most of Psychic School Wars revolves around the tedious romantic entanglements of four everyday teenagers within the scenic shoreline town of Kamakura.  The film follows Kenji, your standard-issue high-school boy protagonist.  He lives next-door to the equally standard-issue childhood best friend, a girl named Natsuki.  She is a cute, spunky tomboy who spends most of the runtime being irrationally pissed at Kenji because he couldn’t understand her childhood romantic confession due to interference by festival fireworks.  She takes out her frustrations in classic tsundere fashion, heaping verbal abuse and slapstick violence upon him anytime Kenji misses her hints or expresses anything resembling a horny thought.  Mostly she’s just mad that he’s smitten with their class representative Kahori, who is smarter, more popular, and more ostensibly feminine than Natsuki.  Kahori in turn is crushing hard on Ryoichi, a mysterious, handsome new student with a knack for cryptic conversations and playing Clair de Lune on the piano after school in the dreamiest way possible. 

This sort of love polygon is as common as dirt in anime but it’s also the first sign that Ryosuke Nakamura didn’t actually get what made Makoto Shinkai’s films so relatable to so many.  If there’s a commonality to the plots of Shinkai’s films (both prior to and after the release of Psychic School Wars), it’s that they tend to feature a single couple separated by forces greater than themselves.  Sometimes this separation is quite fantastical, be it the intergalactic war and time-space distortion of Voices of a Distant Star or the body swapping of Your Name.  Other times it’s more concrete and realistic, such as the age-gap between the leads of The Garden of Words or the winding streets and high-rises of modern-day Tokyo of Weathering With You.  That distance is what gives these relationships both poignancy and novelty regardless of the specifics or the resolution, and the focus on a single couple keeps things simple enough for even the least attentive viewer to follow.

In comparison, Psychic School Wars doubles the number of potential couples but can’t think of any good way to make them interesting or keep them apart other than sitcom-level misunderstandings and contrivances.  The cast is mostly comprised of well-worn anime archetypes: the emotionally oblivious everyman protagonist, the tsundere childhood best friend/love interest, the pretty yet reserved romantic rival, the mysterious new kid in school, etc.  There is nothing poignant nor compelling in watching these cardboard cutouts refusing to have a straightforward conversation about their feelings for nearly two hours.  Only Ryoichi manages to distinguish himself a little, if only because he’s a much more specific sort of anime archetype.  With his soft-spoken good looks, silver hair, association with a well-known classical piece, and the omnipresent moon symbolism around him, I had him pinned as a heterosexual knock-off of Evangelion’s Kaworu long before the film revealed that he is in fact a literal time-traveler from the moon.

Oh, did I forget to mention that there’s time-travel in this story?  In fairness, this is one of the few plot twists retained from the original text.  Ryoichi has in fact come from the future to awaken the latent psychic powers of Japan’s schoolchildren in order to stave off the unspecified disaster that killed his mom and drove humanity to the moon.  It should be noted that the book’s version of him was a far more sinister figure, one who was all too happy to encourage Michiru’s totalitarian takeover of the school so long as he got the army of obedient psychic teens he needed in return.  This version is a more distant figure, largely oblivious to the damage he’s done even as he converts the school’s most emotionally vulnerable students to his cause.

The film truly flies off the rails in the third act, as the psychic student faction take over the student council and use their powers to awaken more psychics to their cause, bully the student body into compliance, and force any objectors to disappear.  It seems that the only thing can stop these psychics is another psychic…specifically Kenji.  It turns out his grandfather is also a psychic time-traveler, albeit one who settled down in the past.  Kenji not only inherited his grandfather’s psychic powers but had them further enhanced by Natsuki unwittingly transferring her own psychic potential to him to save him from a childhood coma.  Nakamura compounds these baffling additions by giving said grandfather the name of the original book’s protagonist, implying that this movie is a sequel to the original story.  This is not a supposition on my part – this is something he confirmed in a 2023 interview.

With his powers fully unlocked, Kenji first confronts the student council during their show trial for Natsuki (who witnessed them using their powers and was unable and unwilling to join them).  This is meant to be Kenji’s big damn hero moment, as Natsuki launches into a big speech before his dramatic entrance, but the mood is punctured the moment Kenji pulls a cell phone out of his Speedo before psychically sweeping Natsuki out of the room and running right into Ryoichi. Upon first viewing, I had a modicum of hope that this moment would be the point where this stupid movie would finally follow through on the promise of its action-packed title.  After all this time, all this build-up, surely it was time for a proper psychic school war! 

Alas, my hopes were smothered immediately as Kenji offers not to battle Ryoichi but grant him forgiveness.  The two of them join Natsuki, and Kahori for a rainy day on the beach before Ryoichi restores everything to normal and returns to his timeline.

That’s right.  Kenji literally saves the day not with phenomenal psychic powers or moral righteousness but with The Power of Friendship ™.

I cannot overstate how furious this ending made me.  It’s not just the lack of catharsis; it’s how badly Nakamura missed the point of the original story.  The moral of Psychic School Wars was supposed to be how collective efforts by ordinary people can overcome extraordinary evil, a message that is just as resonant now as it ever was.  Nakamura instead took the most literal approach to the message, stating outright in that 2012 interview that “I don’t think there is fascism in a modern middle school.” Trying to replace a message like that with limp platitudes about friendship and communication is an insult to the book and audience alike.  It's hard to believe the man was ever a fan of the book, considering how much he ripped out of it and how poorly he handled the rest.  Even the positive reviews for this film describe the science fiction parts of the movie as vague and confusing, as if Nakamura left all the explanations on the cutting-room floor.  In retrospect it’s clear that he greatly overestimated his abilities as a screenwriter and greatly underestimated his audience, and the only debate is how much of this was due to arrogance, sheer incompetence, or some combination of the two.

To be fair, his version of Psychic School Wars is about more than derivative romantic drama.  It’s also about communication!  This movie isn’t exactly subtle about psychic powers being a metaphor for interpersonal communication.  On one side are the psychic oppressors, who believe their powers allow them to overcome the lies and imperfections of everyday people.  On the other side are our heroes, who over the course of the film come to accept the imperfect nature of their relationships and overcome their troubles through empathy and understanding.  This would be a fine message…if that was all Nakamura had to say on the matter. 

A ridiculous amount of the film’s runtime is spent lecturing the audience about the evils of smartphones.  Right from the start, the student council bans the use of phones on school grounds for no reason beyond vague hints of a connection to the recent death of a student that are never brought up again.  At regular points throughout the film, the narrative stops dead so some supporting character can talk about how cell phones are a distraction from the world and only put distance between people instead of bringing them closer.  All of the anti-phone people are framed as sensible, confident authority figures while the kids who protest are portrayed as too dumb and addicted to technology to know what’s best for them. This also becomes the stance of the psychic faction, who regard their form of communication as superior to those dastardly, distracting phones.  At times it feels like the script is regurgitating every anti-tech, Baby Boomer-brained take on cell phones you’ve ever seen on social media.  It’s clear that Nakamura never stopped to think about the optics of having the pseudo-fascist antagonists of his own film adopt a cause he clearly champions, much less that his message was bound to fall flat with a generation who had never known a world without cell phones.

Nakamura’s hatred of phones is matched only by his passion for filling the screen with as much visual noise as possible.  Ever daytime shot is bathed in the hyper-saturated tones of a sunset.  Every night sky looks like a nebula, a sea of stars swirling within vivid clouds of purple, blue, and green.  Every building we see is loaded with windows and every flat surface is polished to a mirror sheen to generate as many rays of light as possible.  Every ray is faceted into enough lens flares to make JJ Abrams choke.  Every outdoor scene is drowning in cherry blossom petals.  Even something as simple as Kenji's bedroom is filled up with a giant model railroad, running distractingly through some of the film's most emotional moments.

The need to fill the screen with movement extends to the characters as well.  They do not merely move – they bounce, flounce, skip, flail, fall and even backflip their way through every single scene.  Every little gesture they make is further enhanced with motion blur, no matter how inconsequential.  The gangly, bobble-headed character designs by Mieko Hosoi don’t help things, as all that excess motion just highlights their awkwardness. It’s hard to believe that the same woman would go on to adapt the elegant character designs of Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu.  This film has beautifully painted backgrounds but it's hard to appreciate any of them because every single frame is crammed full of STUFF.

Why does Psychic School Wars look like this?  The answers can be found in the second half of that 2012 interview.  In it, Nakamura talks about wanting to use this film to show off the charms of 2D animation in a world where 3DCG was becoming the norm. By all appearances, Ryosuke Nakamura is a man with a lot of passion for animation despite having no training or experience as an animator himself.  That enthusiasm combined with his lack of experience led him to fall for the same fallacy many casual anime fans do: that more a piece of animation moves, the better it must be.  He gave his animators a lot of contradictory instructions about making the characters’ movements realistic yet exaggerated, suggesting they use both early Ghibli movies and old Tom & Jerry shorts as reference.  He believed all of that flailing, hyperactive on-screen movement was a way to visualize the heightened feelings of the cast and make the most of his cinematic format.  In reality it comes off like animated overacting, making Psychic School Wars that much more visually chaotic. 

It seems that another lesson he did not take away from the likes of Makoto Shinkai was the importance of quiet and stillness.  Good animated films can use those moments to punctuate a moment of revelation or heighten drama while allowing the audience to relax their eyes and minds and process their own thoughts and feelings. Nakamura seemed to be desperately afraid that if his film ever took a moment’s pause, it might explode lose his audience’s attention entirely.  Thus, he relied on sheer spectacle to dazzle them, in much the same manner as jangling keys before a baby's face.  His lack of confidence in his own material only served to transform Psychic School Wars into a hyperactive, hollow headache of a film to watch.

Nakamura and the production committee must have believed that Psychic School Wars had a lot of potential international appeal.  That has to be the reason why its world premiere was not in Japan, but at the third annual edition of the Scotland Loves Anime film festival on October 20, 2012.  The handful of personal accounts I could find from the time don’t seem to be particularly impressed with the film, especially when compared to some of the other premieres such as the K-On! movie and Studio 4C’s Berserk adaptation.  The fact that it wouldn’t get another film festival screening until many years later is probably a good indicator that its debut didn’t go quite as well as hoped.

Its domestic debut came a month later, and the Japanese trailer makes it clear that they were hoping to market this as a date film for the romantic Christmas season.  While I can’t find any information on its box-office performance in Japan, the sheer lack of merchandise on the second-hand market combined with the lackluster quality of what does exist makes it clear their efforts were very much in vain.  It’s definitely reflected in the Japanese home video sales charts, where the Blu-Ray sold just short of 2400 copies in its first week (despite featuring a special hybrid disc that would allow PlayStation 3 users to view a variety of special features) and the DVD only sold around 550 copies.

Psychic School Wars slowly crept its way to the English-speaking world over the next few years, even if very few people noticed.  It was first licensed by Madman Entertainment in Australia in 2013.  Anime Limited would release it in the UK late in 2015, even going so far as to commission a dub from NYAV Post for their release.  Funimation quietly released the film and its dub for a Blu-Ray release in 2016.  It barely got a chance to find an audience via streaming, as it went up on Crunchyroll in February of 2018 only to be removed from the site in November of that same year. Like so many Funimation releases, it went out of print after their merger with Crunchyroll and the presence of Aniplex on the production committee all but guarantees that it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

Psychic School Wars was a failure, but it didn’t completely end Ryosuke Nakamura’s career.  While he was forced to go freelance, he did find a niche in the industry well-suited for his artistic sensibilities: directing anime openings.  Throughout the 2010s, he would direct openings for popular shows like Barakamon, Attack On Titan, Arakawa Under the Bridge, and Your Lie In April, just to name a few.  He managed to eventually work his way back to the director’s seat, bringing many of the senior staff members of Psychic School Wars along with him.  He started with the obscure 2013 short series Aiura, but in 2016 he would serve as both director and series composer on the fantasy series Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash.  It may have been one of the many SAO-knockoffs to emerge from the early days of the isekai light novel boom and Nakamura hasn't directed a show since then, but critics at the time praised the show's visuals and approach to grief, and you can still find defenders for this show to this day.  The failure of Psychic School Wars didn't seem affect Sunrise or Studio 8 very much either.  Sunrise has released plenty of animated films since then but all of them have been sensibly tied to their most popular franchises.  Tadashi Hirayama finally found success as a producer after Studio 8 became home to the popular Love Live! anime franchise, starting in 2013.  

The world may have moved on  from Psychic School Wars, but it's the sort of fascinating folly I live for as a reviewer.  It was an ambitious failure, on meant to launch its creator's career into the stratosphere only to crash and burn instead.  I'm honestly kind of shocked at just how obscure it is, even among modern-day connoisseurs of bad anime. Hell, the only reason I learned about it was because I stumbled upon a rant review by Arkada made around the time of Funimation’s Blu-Ray release. That's why I have taken it upon myself to subject as many friends as possible to this film in all of its gaudy, frustrating glory.  The movie itself may be a derivative, eye-searing mess, but as a failure it’s truly a one of a kind experience.