Katsuhiro Otomo's Domu Pilot: An Unnerving Movie Adaptation That Could Have Been

Domu is a unique story within Katsuhiro Ōtomo's illustrious career as a mangaka and director, and not solely for its content. Despite being its predecessor, Domu is often compared to Akira due to its inclusion of children and other characters with extrasensory powers. Still, its setting is not the post-apocalyptic ruins of a nuclear-wasted Tokyo but an on-the-surface, seemingly normal Tokyo apartment complex. It offers this dark and brooding tale a sense of surreal normalcy and intimacy. As an old man with these powers sets off a series of murders within the building, a young girl with similar powers confronts him to change his actions.

What elevates Domu and has ensured the series has stood the test of time even in the shadow of its famous motorbike-riding younger brother is how this manga is, underneath its almost ordinary setting and morbid supernatural tone, an eloquent tale of social inequality. Otomo is known for injecting social commentary within many of his works: Akira tackles a dissatisfied youth rebelling against a corrupt government, religious fundamentalism, and, of course, the legacy and trauma of the nuclear bomb. He handled the script for Hiroyuki Kitakubo's Roujin Z, which firmly tackles our treatment and dehumanization of the elderly and vulnerable in care situations. At the same time, Steamboy questions societal benefits from technological progress.

Yet Domu offers a piercing look at Japanese society from a time when the country was experiencing a bubble economy of seemingly endless prosperity that obscured the reality of life for many left behind. This urban horror uses the suicide of the residents of this apartment block and some disturbing imagery to illustrate a story of futility, of people who can't improve their status and hopeless prospects for reasons beyond their control, and whose humanity is often forgotten in the context of the investigation we follow. This futility is arguably more terrifying than any image that could be offered, giving it an unsettling feeling that lingers long beyond its final panel.

And yet, even as the investigation and world around them often forget their humanity, Domu is ultimately a human tale. That's what makes its succinct one-volume so effective.

The other thing making Domu unique is its failure to make the jump from Otomo's pen to the big screen, and not for lack of trying. Despite the creator's work in anime and live-action films and the story's cult status, attempts to bring Domu to the big screen have repeatedly ended in failure. At one point, David Lynch of Twin Peaks signed on to bring his unique creative touch to a Western adaptation. At another point, Guillermo del Toro was taking the helm. And in the early 2010s, Otomo himself took a hand at bringing his work to the screen just as he had done in the past with a since-abandoned live-action project.

That's not to say we have nothing to show for these efforts to bring this work to cinemas. Indeed, at Niigata International Animation Film Festival, one such attempt at adapting the seemingly impossible resurfaced during a retrospective on the creator's career.

After del Toro and Touchstone Pictures relinquished the rights to an adaptation of the film, Otomo got to work on his own adaptation in conjunction with Bandai Pictures and other partners. In this early stage, the director put together a seven-minute pilot for the project to capture the tone and mood and represent what a completed film based on the manga would be like. Unfortunately, this was as far as production got, and for many years this pilot was left unseen by the general public, bar a single screening in 2016 at the Angouleme Film Festival.

Niigata proved to be the stage for the Japanese premiere of this pilot, giving audiences a chance to see what the adaptation could have been. For manga fans, it proved to be an intriguing, unsettling mood piece capturing the uneasy atmosphere of the original story.

Even the opening shots of this short film, showing a man walking along the open corridor of a concrete apartment block lit only by the flashing green-tinted fluorescent lights long since needing renovation in a winged cap, leave us troubled. His walk looks unhuman, like a man possessed, and the flash of an old man in the elevator at the end of the hall only leaves us even more concerned. What could be going on here?

Broadening our scope to the entire apartment block and its surroundings, we see a place forgotten by the world, left behind in the past of a world that never stops marching toward the future. Even the people around the complex - a pushchair with nothing inside, a man sitting on a bench alone, a solitary tenant building a model in his room - look lost, hopeless.

Then a man jumps from the building. Blood drips. A spiral keychain with a gun hangs in front of the camera, almost teasing the audience. Answers are sparse, but the tension is palpable. The blocks explode in a burst of violent rebellion, a chance to be seen before all comes to an end.

For those familiar with the manga, the imagery noted here appears familiar. The gun, stolen from an investigating police officer, the man on the bench, one of many suspects, and the guy in the winged cap, one of the first to jump to his death in the original manga. These are disjointed images brought out of the context given within the original story yet come together in this pilot to create a fascinating tone-setting short true to the intent of the manga.

Importantly, as a standalone short, the decision not to recreate a part of this story or condense the plot and instead focus on recreating its atmosphere leaves us with something more in-line with what a feature-length adaptation of the story could accomplish. While certainly a low-budget affair, the potential is there. No one knows this work better than Otomo himself, and if he could have turned this into a full feature replicating the lightning in a bottle we see in these brief moments within this world, the result could have been something special.

But it was not to be. Domu instead remains a cursed affair: forgotten in the shadow of Otomo's more famous creation and repeatedly stumbling in attempts to bring it to a broader audience. It remains a story reserved for the select few who seek it out. Even this screening remains a curious oddity and, in some ways, a missed opportunity. Domu's pilot is a window into what could have been, but an enthralling one nonetheless.