Eternal Family

Alternate Title: Eikyuu Kazoku

Eternal Family

by Dustin Kramer

The opening text crawl of Koji Morimoto’s Eternal Family tells us about six strangers who have been gathered together, had their memories erased, and convinced they are a family. The reason? Science, natch. But in order to pay for the experiment’s operating costs, the scientists sell the surreptitiously recorded footage of the fake fam to a television broadcasting company. The ensuing reality series is a huge hit, and these six deeply disturbed people become stars ignorant of their own celebrity.

Ben is the father; he is an actor by trade and the only family member who has not been brainwashed. Working for the broadcasting company, he carries around a blow-up doll with a hidden camera installed in its gaping mouth. A-ko, the mother, suffers from constipation, an affliction that will contribute heavily to the incident that sets the story in motion. Akiko is the elder daughter; she is a pyromaniac divorcee looking for love. Sasuke is the oldest son; he’s a graffiti artist that huffs paint fumes and occasionally fires his machine gun. Sae, the younger daughter, speaks through a hand puppet. Michael is a baby; he’s always carrying a pair of scissors. A dog named Tamasaburo and a chicken are the titular family’s pets.

One day, after a bad bout of constipation, A-ko causes a plumbing disaster that releases her and the rest of her family into the “real world.” The broadcasting company pulls out all the stops and offers a whopping 200 million yen per family member to whomever can find them. On their brief journey, the unknowing prisoners learn of their renown just before being captured and returned to a state of tabula rasa. In the final moments of the series, Tamasaburo helps his family escape the brainwashing machine. Ben gets fired over this and begins searching for these five strangers he now calls family.

In retrospect, Eternal Family appears to have been much more prescient than a 1997 audience might have expected. Debuting a year ahead of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and right on the precipice of the reality TV boom of the late 90s, the series seems to understand the morbid curiosity with which TV watchers consume this most cynical of genres. The extreme propensities that each of the family members possess is an apt satire of similar casting choices in shows where the point seems to be “put these people in a confined space and watch them implode.” Mercifully, Morimoto’s story isn’t quite as contemptuous as this. Ben’s final actions cement a much more uplifting sentiment: that family doesn’t necessarily mean blood.

The animation is pretty wacky — a visual cousin of works like Hiroyuki Imaishi’s 2004 film Dead Leaves. A noticeably lacking budget leaves everything a little on the sloppy side, but the art direction by Hiroshi Kato manages to hide the brunt of these issues. The music is all over the place — from barely-there to bombastic, rhythmic action supplements — but nothing about it is very memorable.

In 1997, Studio 4˚C began releasing Eternal Family in 53 30-second installments, and the episodes were collected for a DVD release in 2004. I know I’ve been calling it a series, which it is, but watching it compiled feels much more like a filmic experience. The 30-second segment serial is an experimental format, and just like in the scientific world, experiments can fail. In this case, the format’s victim is undoubtedly the story’s pacing. The need to have something “happen” in each segment makes the whole thing feel choppy and needlessly breakneck when watched uninterrupted. The limited runtime leaves little room for dialogue, therefore necessary exposition doesn’t come across naturally — or at all. I imagine the expository text crawl was a late-game addition when someone on the production crew realized that the thing didn’t make any damn sense. These problems really did a number on my viewing experience, and although it wants to be, Eternal Family isn’t a lot of fun to watch. The total runtime clocks in at just under 30 minutes, so you won’t have to put up with it long.

Koji Morimoto’s Eternal Family is violent, misanthropic, and darkly prophetic. Despite this, it manages to strike a sympathetic chord in its final frames. However, its limitations — both involuntary and self-imposed — encumber its potential for success.

[starrater]