The Drifting Classroom

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Children Go To The Future, They Always Do

In this episode we talked about The Drifting Classroom manga from 1971-4 by Kazuo Umezu and the 1987 film of the same name by Nobuhiko Obayashi. All audio clips belong to that film.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. Today we’re talking about the manga and associated film of The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu. Enjoy!

Ren Hello Adam!

Adam Hello Ren!

Ren Are you excited to talk about some wild manga?

Adam I’m excited, and a little apprehensive and overwhelmed because The Drifting Classroom is one damn thing after another.

Ren It sure is! So that’s what we’re talking about today, The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezu from 1971-4, I believe.

Adam Yes, that was the run.

Ren So that’s 11 volumes, of just… well, horror and chaos and apocalypse, and yeah — all sorts!

Adam There’s a lot! Recently republished in collected editions by Viz Media, which I lovingly ordered for Ipswich library so if you live in Suffolk, listener, you can get hold of these in the library now.

Ren Nice. How did you come across it?

Adam That’s a good point — I don’t know! It presented itself to me. I read it around the time that I did my PHD, I think the second year. Is that seven or eight years back? But I don’t even know how! I was already into Junji Ito so I’d probably scoured through all of that and looked up ‘best horror manga’, and I ordered the first volume. I did quite respectably not read the scanlations online and ordered the individual volumes.

And I liked having it staggered, actually, and reading it in instalments. It was a serialised manga and it is a lot to read all at once, as I’m sure you experienced!

Ren As I can attest — yes, it was a lot to read over the course of a week or so.

Adam Well, thank you for doing that and for indulging me.

Ren I really enjoyed it — but it was quite the journey.

Adam So, this is basically Lord of the Flies in the future, BUT MORE. And the ‘but more’ is capitalised, and underlined, and embossed, and given a shadow.

Ren Yeah, I do have to admit at this point that I’ve never read Lord of the Flies.

Adam It’s fine? I read it in school. It’s much more misanthropic than The Drifting Classroom. The Drifting Classroom is much wilder, but you get the sense that Umezu likes kids, and believes in kids, whereas you don’t get that from William Golding. It’s a bit of an ‘old man waves fist at cloud’ book — ‘urgh, these kids these days, if you leave them to their own devices look what happens. Human nature!’ whereas, as much Umezu is shaking his fist at mankind for despoiling nature and generally despoiling the world, he definitely thinks that kids have more about them than adults.

We’ll get onto this, but the adults of The Drifting Classroom do not come out of this well!

Ren No, they sure don’t. So, very briefly — A Japanese elementary school is at the centre of an explosion and is transported into the future, where the (initially) 862 students and faculty (although they very quickly start to drop off) have to try and survive in a world that’s become a barren expanse of sand inhabited by monsters and face a lot of trials and tribulations.

And our main character is called Sho Takamatsu, and we’ll introduce other characters as we go.

Adam Y es, so Sho’s a boy of spirit — he’s quite steadfast and stubborn and is shown at first to have mother issues, and there is a film adaptation from ’87 by Obayashi, who is the same director as House, which if you’ve seen any of his films is the one you would have seen. It’s a bit of a cult classic. The Drifting Classroom is not a cult classic. Not even Arrow Video has released this one.

Anyway, Sho’s mother issues are doubled-down on, troublingly, in the film.

Ren Oh, yeah.

Adam They’re present in the manga, they have a very intense relationship. (Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: Sho says “I love you, I love you, oh my dear sweet mummy!”)

They have a kind of love/hate relationship, and on the day he goes to school and then is blasted into the future he has a very stormy argument with his mother where he says ‘I wish you weren’t my mother!’ and she says ‘I wish you weren’t my son!’ and this whole sequence is very fraught, and my nine year-old stepson finds it hilarious. He cackles away at it. Mostly because Sho’s angry because his mother has thrown away his bits and bobs from his drawer, like an old bone and some gunpowder, the kind of thing a kid has in their drawer, and he’s really outraged and angry, and she turns around and she’s got a kitchen knife in her hand and you’ve got this great shot of the knife pointed at Sho and he says ‘Are you going to stab me??’.

And the expressions in The Drifting Classroom are incredible, because they’re very much all or nothing. Most of the time the kids react to everything with this mouth-agog, eyes-wide open gaping expression with lots of angry vibration lines around their heads, so they’re in constant states of shock or anger.

Ren But on this occasion, the adult is not going to stab the child…

Adam Yes, on this rare occasion that is not Sho’s mother’s plan, but Sho is so outraged that he pulls of the tablecloth and throws all the breakfast cutlery and implements onto the floor, and what George finds really funny here, which I hadn’t even really picked up on, is that Sho’s mother only seems to be angry about one very plain-looking bowl that has cracked. He’s knocked everything off the table, but she’s crouched over this very boring bowl, incredibly angry. So I guess that was her favourite bowl. Anyway, she speaks some harsh words that she will soon regret.

Ren Yes, we should probably clarify that this is not for children.

Adam I mean, it is, my nine year-old stepson loves this manga, Ren. It was originally intended for older children, or younger teenagers.

Ren Okay, it’s not what we would generally, in the UK, consider suitable for children.

Adam Yes, I think that’s fair. This manga really highlights a difference in terms of the media that might be considered suitable for children in Japan, and in the UK.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film. Sho: Take your Japanese and shove it! Adult voice: Sho!)

I would make a fairly strong case for it being okay for slightly older children. Okay, it is very violent. It has a cartoony style… Umezu can draw, but he has his strength and his weaknesses. He’s great at background detail, the architecture of the school is very convincing, he’s great at monsters. His human anatomy tends to leave something to be desired. His characters can be a bit off-model, and they’re also weirdly stiff. They don’t have much flexibility, and when they fall over they just look like a domino being pushed over.

Ren Yeah, they’re just like flumph

Adam So, they don’t look quite like real people, so that creates a bit of distance. I was reading it and I showed George the argument with Sho’s mother, and then he picked it up of his own volition and I was like ‘I dunno, George’ but then I said ‘I guess it was originally intended for boys your age, sure’. And he doesn’t really cope with things that are obviously coded as horror, so I had another Umezu collection from the library and it was called ‘Umezu’s creepy book’ and George said ‘Oh no, I can’t read that, it says it’s creepy’ — he’s quite literal and by-the-book in that way.

But he read The Drifting Classroom as an adventure story. A very violent adventure story. But when I said ‘Oh, it’s quite violent’ he said ‘Well, I have seen Patrick from Spongebob fall of a building and explode’. And in a way they’re no less cartoony. They are human characters, but this is clearly taking place within a fantastical realm, and what Umezu’s very good at is getting inside a child’s perspective. He’s good at capturing that all-or-nothing perspective you have as a child. There’s a good series of articles about The Drifting Classroom on the Hooded Utilitarian blog, and one of them talks about how about how adults are drawn. All of the men are barrel-chested —

Ren — Oh yeah, they’re hulking.

Adam They’re massive. But that’s how a small child looking up at an adult will see them. For a small child, adults are really big. And I think it is committed to a child’s understanding and vision of the world, and the way that the children appraise themselves and see the adult world strikes me as quite accurate. The kids do have their own society, and they get on with things, and have lots of — quibbles is a bit too light as they try to kill each other — but they also see the adult world as a bit strange and ridiculous. They have to kind of respect adults, and sometimes they do see them as parental figures, but they don’t have so many illusions about the adult world, I would say.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: ‘What happened to my big game, Taggart? Where did it go?’ ‘Don’t ever lose hope Mark, it’s all we’ve got!’ ‘Hope! In this situation! Do you have hope, Taggart?’)

So yeah, I do think he gets children , so in some ways…

Ren It has that perspective in children’s horror where you have that character you can relate to, and is coping with the situation, so you can cope. As long as Sho is coping, you can cope.

Adam I think that’s very true, and Sho is so infinitely amazingly resourceful. And it wouldn’t have seemed like this in ’72 or ’74 but it’s very video game like in many ways, in terms of its plotting. It’s one obstacle after another, and George has grown up playing Minecraft and he’s generally that kind of kid anyway, he’s good at doing things with his hands, and he likes to know how to do things.

He had been going to this weekly outdoor school for neuro-divergent kids where they were building fires and riding horses and so on, so it makes sense to me that The Drifting Classroom would appeal to him, because the kids are very hands-on and it’s very engineer-y and solution-focussed. They’re confronted with problems and then Sho will generally find a way to deal with that problem, and some lives will be lost, but they’ll move on.

Ren And thinking about it, this is partly why I found the bit where Sho has his appendix removed the most disturbing part. I mean, apart from the horror of someone being operated on without anaesthetic, it’s also the one part where Sho is not in control, and out of commission.

Adam That’s very true, and being operated on by an untrained child, of course. I’m not sure how we… their is so much in terms of the plot.

Ren Yeah, shall we talk about how quickly the adults go off the rails?

Adam Yes, so what adults do we have? It’s basically all teachers, isn’t it?

Ren Yes, mostly teachers and then Sekiya, who isn’t a teacher but a delivery man who has a massive chip on his shoulder about this, we’re led to believe.

Adam Yeah! Which is kind of tragic because at first the kids seem to love him, and they call him the lunch room guy, and he’s like ‘I hated that! You kids calling me the lunch room guy!’

Ren Yes, so Sekiya is our human villain as the adult that survives the longest and causes the most trouble. But initially we have our faculty of teachers, and as soon as the school realises that… well, initially they think the whole world beyond the school has been obliterated —

Adam — Yes, I think they assume it’s been a nuclear war.

Ren So the teachers notice and the kids rush out towards the gate, and a teacher called Mr Wakahara blocks their exit. And there’s a panicked rush and a teacher called Mr Awakara grabs his own son —

Adam — Well, you don’t even know it’s his son at first! The fact that it’s his own son is his explanation for why it’s acceptable.

Ren Yeah! So he just grabs a child, takes off his own glasses, smashes the glass and stabs this child in the arm with the broken glass, and he’s holding this child who is gushing blood onto the playground with a bloody weapon in his hand shouting ’Now will you please calm down!’

And I mean, what’s more likely to calm a group of children down than that?

Adam It’s in every teacher training book I’ve ever come across.

Ren And then this is revealed to be his own son, which makes it… better? Question mark?

Adam So yeah, the teachers don’t cope so well.

Ren Yes, and it’s pretty soon that Sekiya says that he’s going to horde all the food for himself, and then sets the teachers on fire who are around the classroom trying to reason from him.

(Clip from the The Drifting Classroom film: Sound of flames and screams.)

And at this point, I think Sho is like ‘I think we’re going to have to look after ourselves’.

Adam And the kids do quite well at temporarily restraining Sekiya, don’t they?

Ren Yes, they tie him up and put him in a locker, which works for a little while before he gains a child’s sympathy and get him to let him out. Meanwhile, Mr Wakahara gets in a murderous rage and kills all of the remaining teachers.

Adam He does give them fair warning, though.

Ren Yes, he does say ‘Tie me up, I’m having a turn’ kind of thing, and they’re like ‘What?’.

Adam And then a guy starts tying him up and he’s like ‘Too late’. Too slow, too slow tying me up. Crystal Maze escape room failed.

Ren Yep, so Mr Wakahara kills all of the remaining teachers apart from Sekiya, and then tries to run down the students in a car.

Adam Across the desert wasteland.

Ren And this is where we get the first example of two of this brilliant plot device, that I’m in love with, where Sho and Nishi, who is a girl who uses crutches and Sho has to help her quite a bit during various running-away-from-peril situations, but it turns out that it’s through Nishi that Sho can talk to his mother, in the past.

Adam And I think there are some altmoded gender dynamics here, Sho is generally the one to rescue Nishi and she is often referred to in terms of her disability, but there is a kick-ass moment where she hurls her crutch through the windscreen of the teacher’s car. Which is given a really big panel of the crutch going through the windscreen and the glass shattering.

Ren Yeah, yeah, and this is before safety glass. Big shards. But Sho and Nishi escape to these bombed-out buildings, and they’re crawling through tunnels and end up looking out over the wasteland from what used to be a high-up window in a tall building. And Mr Wakahara is just behind them —

Adam — bearing down on them —

Ren — Yes, and Sho realises he needs his mother’s help and through Nishi he manages to communicate with his mother in the past, and tell her where he is and that he needs a knife, and then we get this break to the past and Sho’s mother, and everyone thinks she’s mad —

Adam — But she’s not, she’s just incredible!

Ren Yeah, she’s just amazing.

Adam Sho’s mother is easily my favourite character.

Ren So she’s like, ‘Sho needs my help!’ and she finds this building and breaks in —

Adam — and takes one of Sho’s 10 year-old friends with her!

Ren Yes, she takes Shinchi! And they disturb this couple in flagrante in this hotel room, like ‘Get out of there, my son needs my help!’, and the security staff restrain her and bundle her out, but she goes back in a disguise the next day, and books the hotel room for herself and says ‘Shinchi, distract them, I need to drill a hole in this wall, make sure no-one calls security’ and she gets out her drill and embeds the knife in the wall, so that Sho in the future can reach into this crumbling wall and grab this knife and stab Mr Wakahara who falls to his death.

Adam And it’s not even the most outlandish of Sho’s mother’s plans, by a long way!

Ren It’s not! The next one is even better! Shall we just go onto that?

Adam Yes, it’s amazing. I don’t even know how to describe the next one!

Ren Right, so, one of the obstacles they have to overcome is that there’s an outbreak of The Black Death among the student population.

Adam If you thought it was bad that they didn’t have any food, or water, and that there’s monsters running around — The Black Death comes back!

Ren Yeah, yeah. So there’s a student called Hashimoto who gets these black spots on his leg, and the doctor’s kid who later does the appendectomy is like ‘Er, think he’s got the plague’ and so Sho and all the kids who have been near Hashimoto are forced out of the school pursued by kids who want to murder them. So they run out into the desert, and they think that they’re infected, so Sho says ‘Right, we should find the old hospital’, because they’ve managed to look up what antibiotic it is that cures The Black Death. The hospital’s mostly a big hole in the ground, but they find the basement that has a mummy in it.

Adam Yeah, a real life mummy! That sits up, like in the movies.

Ren Yeah. But it’s the only sheltered spot anywhere, so they turf the mummy out and spend the night in this basement bunker. They wake up without any fever or black spots, so they’re alright, but it turns out that there were other kids who were looking after Hashimoto, and they have been infected by The Black Death.

So Sho shouts to his mother, through Nishi, ‘We need medicine! We need this particular antibiotic! — we have a mummy!’

Adam And so a plan is formed! And the mummy has a scar.

Ren Yes, the mummy has a scar on his right wrist.

Adam So shouldn’t be hard to find.

Ren So Sho’s mother goes on this epic quest. She goes to the hospital to try and find these antibiotics, she sees a man with a scar on his wrist and she’s like ‘right, that guy’s that going to be the mummy’. He turns out to be a famous baseball player, she takes Shinchi to a baseball game. The player gets concussed by a baseball.

Adam After Sho’s mum invades the pitch.

Ren Right, she invades the pitch.

Adam Which I think is worth noticing because it gives rise to the most unreasonable murderous mob in the whole of The Drifting Classroom. There’s a lot of mobs in The Drifting Classroom, but usually that’s because they’re dying of the black death or they’re starving. In this case, it’s just because this baseball player doesn’t make the play, and they’re so angry at this they’re trying to kill Sho’s mother.

Ren Maybe this is an indication of how far society has already degraded. But yes, he gets concussed, Sho’s mother goes back to the hospital and the staff say he’s in a coma, and Sho’s mother is like ‘Oh, okay—‘

Adam ’—interesting’.

Ren So she invades his room at it turns out he’s not in a coma, he just doesn’t want to play baseball anymore.

Adam There’s a great Goosebumps style ‘It was a monster! Oh, it was my dog in a mask’ moment, where his silhouette appears with a baseball bat and she’s like ‘Are you going to kill me??’ and he’s like, ‘No? What? I’m a baseball player, I was just practicing my swing’.

Ren And then… I’ve forgotten?

Adam Right, there’s a random robber apropos of nothing who attacks a child, and the baseball player saves him, but dies, and it’s so heroic that he’s mummified.

Ren Right, the Japanese government decide to put him in the basement forever.

Adam ‘Better make him a mummy!’

Ren As you do. So she sneaks into the basement, cuts open his stomach, sneaks in the antibiotics, sews him back up —

Adam — badda bing, badda boom —

Ren — Sho cuts up the mummy’s stomach — medicine! Everyone’s cured. Brilliant.

Adam It’s also what makes it hard to do a ‘Claim of the Week’ this week. Because the whole of The Drifting Classroom is one long series of claims. And more to the point, anything that Sho’s mum says could be taken to be a claim of the week, except for the fact that they turn out to be right.

Ren Yeah. I also love that there was a fake-out of this happening for a third time, later on when they’re in the old subway station and it’s flooding, and Sho’s like, ‘Right, I’ll just call my Mum and get them to not build a pipe here’, and I’m like, ‘Oh, what’s she going to do this time?’ but then it doesn’t work because Nishi’s not there.

Adam But this theme of a mother’s love being eternal is really important in The Drifting Classroom, and I think contributes to the sentimentality of the film, which we’ll discuss later.

Partly why I wanted to talk about The Drifting Classroom is because I did an academic paper on it recently. It was a psychoanalysis, but instead of being inspired by Sigmund Freud, it was inspired by Melanie Klein. Because I prefer her, and find her ideas more interesting. And the difference between Freud and Melanie Klein is that Klein did her therapy with very young children, and she has this idea of the good breast and bad breast. So the very young child, the infant, doesn’t understand their mother as a human being, just as a provider. And when the mother has milk to give that’s the good breast, and everything is right with the world, and when the mother’s absent or doesn’t have milk to give that’s the bad breast and everything is awful. And she’s thinking about why babies are either gurgling with happy excitement or screaming as if the world is going to end. It’s this binarised view of things being wonderful or terrible, and it’s exactly this kind of logic that defines The Drifting Classroom.

Either everything is celebratory and the mother is present and she can solve everything magically, or everything is devastation and the world is over. It’s very infantile logic, as a response to anxiety. And, I was arguing, this maps on quite neatly and interestingly to how people, in our society at least, tend to respond to the threat of ecological devastation and climate change.

On one hand you have the deniers and delayers who say ‘Eh, it’s not that bad’ or ‘Geological engineering will sort it out’ or ‘Elon Musk knows what he’s doing’ or ‘It’s a conspiracy’ or ‘We just need to take incremental steps and put some policies in place and carbon taxing’, and then on the other side the doomer position of ‘Well, it’s too late, our fate is sealed, near-term human extinction, we’re all going to be gone within 15 years anyway’. And both ways are ways of not staying with the trouble, to use Donna Haraway’s phrase. Both ways avoid the anxiety by collapsing it to certainty — either everything is fine or everything is already ruined. It’s not dealing with the slow decline, or the suffering, or adaptation measures etc. It is ‘everything’s over, humanity’s extinct’. It kind of disavows the process, because even if that is the case it’s not going to happen overnight. And that’s hard, that’s hard to sit with. It’s scary. So the way to deal with that is to throw up your hands and say ‘There’s no issue’ and think it’ll be magically solved, or to say ‘It’s too late, and there’s nothing I can do about it or that government’s can do about it.’

And I think The Drifting Classroom is quite similar in that logic for the most part, although the ending of it does say that we should try and stay with the trouble and be adaptive.

Ren Yes, well it is Sho growing up at the end.

Adam And he accepts that he can’t go home again, so he does not return to the past and return to his mother. What he does is make the best of it. He accepts that the Earth is in a state of ruination but he is still there, and the kids are still there, and so they try and live as long as they can live, basically. Because it does strike me that the whole of The Drifting Classroom is about anxiety, and about responding to anxiety and fear. And Sho does learn to do this over the course of the story. Because if you compare him to… can you remember the name of the other child leader?

Ren Otomo.

Adam Yes. Well, there’s two other self-appointed leaders. There’s Princess, or Queen, and Otomo. And he’s very different to Sho because he’s more harshly pragmatist, but also much more pessimistic and more willing to resort to violence. So Sho will say ‘We’ve got to keep going, we can find a way to save these other kids!’ whereas he will say ‘No, give up on them’ or ‘No, just kill them now and save the food for other people’. That tends to be the split between them, and Umezu is definitely on the side of Sho, there’s no doubt he’s our hero.

And Otomo becomes Mark in the film, who is perhaps a more significant character, and a more annoying one. So for some context, the film was made with kids for a Transnational military school. So some of the kids are Japanese, and some are American. They’re mostly speaking English, but there are some lines in Japanese.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: Kids talking and milling around at the beginning of the school day, speaking English.)

It seems like the way kids were recruited for this film was a bit ad hoc. I read an interview with the guy who played Kenny, who is the one black child in the class, and he says that literally the way he was recruited was that he was walking to school and a man in a car slowed down next to him and said ‘Hey kid, you wanna be in a movie?’

And thank heavens, he actually was a film producer!

Ren What are the odds!

Adam But clearly they struggled to get bilingual kids for this film because they’re of very varying ages. I guess this sort of makes sense, because the kids in The Drifting Classroom seem to have ages spanning from 5 to about 12-13. However, the guy playing Mark looks like he’s a good ten years older than the rest of them. Which would be okay, except he seems to have a romance with one of the other kids, who looks a lot younger than him.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: Mark: If I win again don’t I deserve a kiss? Alright! This is going to be my big game!)

So I think we’re inclined to not like Mark very much from the start because he seems like a complete creep. Which might not be so much the performer’s fault or the character’s fault as the casting director’s fault. But he’s also the only one who’s coded as wholesomely All-American. He’s a football champ, and he likes to remind viewers of this at any opportunity. No matter how bad the situation gets, the true tragedy is that it was going to be Mark’s big game.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: Mark: My big game is gone! Everything’s buried, deep in the sand!)

Ren It was his big game!

Adam As if it weren’t for the fact that they were teleported thousands of years into the future he would have got to play his big game, but alas. There’s a lot of Mark being very self-indulgent, and moping about not being able to play football. And an amazing shot where he kicks a football into space.

Ren Do you want to hear my Drifting Classroom film notes that are not going to illuminate anything about the film whatsoever?

Adam So these are the notes you took while watching the film?

Ren Yes. Right. — Here comes the bride interlude. — ‘Oh yeah, a time slip!’ — Green wobbly legged creature. — I hate sand. — Trombones and musical medley. (Clip of musical medley) — Bloody skeleton effect. (Clip of kids saying ‘watch out!’, droning noises and screaming) — Crab creatures — ‘Finally, you will be king Mark.’ — Gooey xenomorph horseshoe crabs. — ‘Children go to the future, they always do’. — ‘I hope to have your babies someday soon’. (Clip of girl saying ‘I hope to have your babies, Sho, someday soon’.)

Adam Yeah, well that sums up the film pretty well. To be fair. So it may seem like a counterintuitive choice, on the surface, to turn what is a fairly bloody horror-adventure manga into a sentimental, comedy-romance-musical filmed entirely inside an aircraft hanger filled up with sand. And that would be true! I can’t argue with that. But I really like the damn thing, and I don’t really know why. It’s pretty shoddy production, I think it’s fair to say.

Ren Mmhm.

Adam You’re not going to disagree with that! Like with the far-superior House, or Hausu it has a lot of matte painted backdrops, which I tend to be a bit of a sucker for. So lots of painted backgrounds, and they’re really obviously fake here. As I said, it was all apparently filmed inside an aircraft hanger filled up with sand.

Ren The blue screen is wavering around the characters outlines for the whole thing.

Adam Yes, you have to get used to that. And it must have been a horrible production in many regards. The guy who played Kenny said it was quite fun, but the film’s sponsored by McDonalds, and fairplay I think it is quite gutsy of McDonalds to sponser a vision of a post-apocalyptically environmentally blasted Earth, at least that’s sticking to their vision of the future. And you do get a McDonalds sign at one point in the film.

Ren Well, it’s like the Coca-Cola sponsorship in The Road, isn’t it.

Adam Yeah, it is quite like that. But apparently the whole catering budget was McDonalds, and that was the only thing the kids were fed. This was the sponsorship deal — they did a bit of placement for Maccy Ds, and in return they fed the whole cast and crew. So if you imagine a closed set, an aircraft hanger, full up with sand and —

Ren Urggh.

Adam — Hundreds of McDonalds burgers. I mean, the smell must have been wretched!

Ren Ahhh.

Adam That alone’s a vision of hell, frickin’ heck. So it feels like maybe not everyone’s on the same page with the production. You have maybe one semi-famous actor with Troy Donahue playing the teacher character, a stalwart of many B movies.

(Clip from The Drifting Classroom film: Troy Donahue’s character saying ’This is your great dane? You’re telling me that’s your dog?’)

He’s really the only name actor we’ve got here. And the kids vary a lot in their acting ability, which personally I find quite charming because it gives the whole thing a kind of naive earnestness. The kids do feel like real kids and a lot of them are quite awkward on camera. Why they decided to make it a half-way musical, I don’t know. It only has two musical sections —

Ren Yes, there’s the ‘Here Comes the Bride’ bit.

Adam And they do a little dance at the same time, and someone’s playing violin, and the kids are banging their hands on the desks to create percussion.

Ren And then there’s the bit with the trombones.

Adam Which is a whole kind of musical medley. Well, it’s mostly ‘Camptown ladies sing this song, doo-dah, doo-dah’.

Ren But there’s other songs layered on top.

Adam Other Yankee Doodle songs, over-layered at different pitches and registers, and sung at different times as well, while they do kind of co-ordinated dances?

Ren …Yeah. Kind of.

Adam The rest of the music is excellent — it’s the same composer as Nausicaa (Joe Hisaishi) who did the synth music here. I kind of love it because it’s weirdly like these are characters from Saved by the Bell or something, they’re clearly going for these teen archetypes, but pushed to the limits. Like, Mark is the jock character, but he’s only defined on those terms. He’s constantly shown with his football.

It’s tricky right, because this isn’t really an appropriate thing to make fun of, but it’s also played kind of comedically in the film? So I want to step kind of lightly around it, but while Sho definitely has an intense mother fixation in the comic, the film starts with him getting out of the shower naked and like, grabbing his mother. At the very least harassing her.

Ren Yeah… it was surprising. I was a little taken aback by that.

Adam Yeah! I don’t know if it was just to foreground the intensity of the mother-son relationship? But the violence isn’t dialed-up, there’s clearly an attempt to go for a family audience. But some emotional aspects are dialed-up. It’s much more overtly sentimental than the manga is — there are heartfelt exchanges where Mark is like ‘I’m never going to be able to play my big game’ and Troy Donahue saying ‘You’ve got to have hope, Mark, there’s always hope’, ‘How could I have hope here, Taggart??’.

And they try to introduce this goofy mascot character who isn’t in the manga at all, this kind of green alien character. I don’t know if this was meant to be the McDonalds toy tie-in? If it was it would have to have a little reservoir container for water that you could squeeze and it would pee, because the main thing the alien does is provide water for the kids. Which is great, and needed.

Ren It’s a little puppet thing.

Adam A kind of cute puppet thing that wees a lot and dances around. But it’s quite important in the film, because in the comic they spend a lot of time fighting these crab creatures. And it turns out that these are just the descendants of humans, and can’t they just get along? And I can’t remember what they do in the comic, do they just put their differences aside?

Ren The crab-mutants just end up, I don’t know if they’re eaten or they just run into the mouth of a giant worm. I don’t think it’s clear what their relationship is to the giant worm.

Adam So this is a rare example of some better plotting than in the manga. In the film the alien turns out to be the infant version of one of the crab creatures, and it ends up going off to them and I guess bearing good news like, ‘hey, these kids are alright!’ and so we have a nice scene of Sho and possibly Nishi being embraced in a big bear hug by one of these crab creatures.

Ren We hadn’t mentioned the whole part of the manga where it turns into The Fly.

Adam What, all the body horror stuff?

Ren Yeah, yeah.

Adam I guess I haven’t mentioned it because I don’t really understand it! Is it just through sheer force of will that some of the kids start transforming themselves —

Ren — they eat the mushrooms!

Adam Oh yes, of course.

Ren They eat the mutant mushrooms that start sprouting up in the school garden and they start transforming into the mutant crab creatures. But before they get there, there is a moment, like in The Fly where they feel euphoric and super-powered.

Adam Yes, and they’re walking around on all-fours. But anyway, crab creatures and human children do make peace in the film, and we’re left with this bizarre utopian vision — they look like they’ve started a cult? — they’re all wearing these kind of white sackcloth robes and this is where you get the line that you mentioned, with the Nishi substitute character saying ‘I want to have your babies, someday soon’ to Sho. And Sho looks very proud. He makes a very ‘I’m the man’ expression. I think that might be the last line of the film.

Ren Yes, I think it is.

Adam So I guess the kids will be alright? They’ve started their future civilisation! So yeah, in some regards it is a disquieting film. There are quite troubling elements to this film, but I think this is undercut by the odd amateurish and the sentimentality possibly. Because describing it I think it should trouble me and weird me out more than it does. And it’s partly cultural differences but it reassured me, reading this interview with the guy who played Kenny and he said it was a fun film to make and all the kids had a a good time.

So that’s good to read, that it wasn’t like some horribly exploitative or degrading process to make this film. It is a bit squicky. But it’s also so weird it’s hard to get a handle on. Because the manga’s already very odd but it knows what it’s doing. Umezu is clearly a man of curious ideas, so there’s some wild stuff in the manga but it feels of a piece with itself. The film is not like that at all. The film is one of the messiest things I think I’ve seen, which is kind of why I like it because it’s so chaotic and it’s fun to watch a film and think ‘what on Earth was the creative process behind this?’.

It definitely doesn’t work as an adaptation of the manga in the slightest. So if you look at the Youtube comments you tend to get a lot of very angry comments from fans of the manga. But I kind of think that that’s people taking the manga too seriously, because it’s ridiculous in the first place!

Ren Yeah, I mean at the end Sekiya is literally killed by the half-face and arm of a burglar, where his arm and half of his face are in the future, and the rest of his body is in the past. And he manages to propel his arm and half-face with a knife into the air to kill the villain. So…

Adam It’s high concept! And while I wouldn’t recommend you go straight from The Drifting Classroom to Fourteen, which is a later Umezu manga, if you want to see Umezu double down on his high-concept ideas, that’s the place to go.

So Fourteen is much more of an adult audience than The Drifting Classroom, and more disturbing, and deliberately disturbing. The basic plot of it, which I won’t really be able to recount in any sensible amount of time, is that genetically modified synthetic chicken mean comes to life, becomes a creature called Chicken George which is the combination of all animal consciousness. Chicken George has a second in command best friend called Chicken Lucy, who is actually a chicken. Chicken George meanwhile is a chicken-human hybrid man who wears a lab coat.

Ren Right.

Adam Meanwhile, the world is ending. There’s no green trees or green foliage anywhere anymore, and no-one seems to have noticed until the President of the US is like ‘Oh no, we’re going to run out of oxygen pretty soon. We’d better stop people from panicking by making pretend leaves out of foil and putting them on all the trees around the world overnight.’ There are a lot of plans in this comic. But basically, a lot of terrible things happen and Chicken George decides to create his own Noah’s Ark to rescue all the animals who have been so badly treated by humans, who is going to leave on the cursed planet.

So, okay, Chicken George’s logical explanation of why humans are as terrible as we are, and he does a totally scientific DNA test to prove this, is that humans evolved from the Tyrannosaurus Rex and, the T-rex is the most evil of all the dinosaurs. However, despite this, he choses ironically to make his spaceship arc in the form of a giant T-rex. But anyway, he fills that up with some animals and then some children do get on board, they make friends with Chicken George, and they cross into a parallel dimension that’s mostly chicken people, and they find out that the whole universe in which the Earth was contained was just an insect. And that’s the end.

Ren …Okay.

Adam If that sounds incomprehensible, it’s much more incomprehensible to read it. That’s me wrestling with some effort some sense out of Fourteen.

Ren Thank you for your hard work.

Adam So if you’ve listened to this podcast and thought ‘I don’t know, The Drifting Classroom seems a bit tame for me. Doesn’t sound like enough happens. A bit too down-to-earth for me. A bit too slice-of-life, a bit too kitchen sink.’ Then you should read Fourteen.

Ren I just need to go to the loo.*

Adam Well, shall we finish off - we’re at the hour?

Ren We still need to do Texture of the Week.

Adam Oh my God, we haven’t done Texture of the Week, disastrous!

Adam and Ren (bang things together, plinky plonky music in the background: Texture texture texture of the week. Of the week.)

Adam Gosh, well, there’s a lot of textures. I really love the kind of squamous, gelatinous textures of the proto-plasmic alien beings. There’s a shot of the landscape with all these writhing ditto-like creatures. Which is amazing. So that would be my outright texture, but also similarly gelatinous — the texture of the tears? Whenever the children cry in this, their tears look like jelly. In keeping with the aesthetic of The Drifting Classroom it’s all or nothing, and when they cry they bawl and their whole faces fill with these gelatinous tears.

Ren Nice. My one, which is quite close to the beginning, is when the teachers have been massacred and the first batch of students have died in various ways — some of them fall of the roof and such, they bury their dead and because they don’t have any incense to burn on the grave mounds they take cigarettes from the staff room and burn them on the grave mounds. And I just love that image.

Adam So, I don’t know — would you recommend The Drifting Classroom?

Ren I’d recommend the manga! I’m not wholly sold on the film.

Adam But you would recommend the manga?

Ren Yeah, I mean it’s a romp and a half. We haven’t even touched on most of the plot. There’s just not enough time.

Adam You’d have to do ten episodes, to be honest. There’s so much malarkey and chaos. I wouldn’t really recommend it to kids, although that’s very hypocritical of me because I’ve been letting my 9 year-old stepson read it. It is very violent, but it is also ridiculously cartoony, so I think it really depends on the child if they would find it disturbing or not. I wouldn’t have coped with it as a kid, I don’t think. But I don’t know, if you’re listening to this and you’re a survivalist and you and your kids live out in a cabin and go hunting, they’ll love this.

Ren It is in black and white, which helps, with the graphic blood.

Adam It’s weird, I would more readily recommend the manga to kids than the film, even though the film is ostensibly more child-friendly. The film is clearly aimed at this family audience, but I find the film more troubling than the manga. But yes, it’s a wild read, and I certainly haven’t read anything quite like it, apart from Umezu’s other manga.

Ren I enjoyed it. I got increasingly into it, and was aghast at what twist would be served up next.

Adam I think when I look back on my life I will be glad that it was part of my experiences. It’s not a manga that’s easily forgotten.

Ren Yes.

Adam Well, thank you for reading it. Maybe we’ll do something more lowkey next time.

Ren I enjoyed it. Do you have a sign-off for us?

Adam Always have hope, creepy kids. Hope’s all we’ve got.

Ren See you next time, creepy kids!

Adam Bye!

• Authenticity!