What Is Wicked City?

Wicked City (Japanese title Yōjū Toshi) is a 1987 animated neo-noir horror film, produced by Video Art and Madhouse for Japan Home Video, and the solo directorial debut of Yoshiaki Kawajiri. It adapts Black Guard, the first novel in the Wicked City series by Hideyuki Kikuchi, the writer of Vampire Hunter D.

The setup is pure noir. For centuries a treaty has held between the human world and the Black World, a parallel realm of demons. As a new treaty signing approaches, the Black Guard pairs two agents to protect the diplomat Mayart: Taki Renzaburō, a human who sells electronics by day, and Makie, an agent of the Black World itself. The film is a bodyguard story in which neither side of the treaty trusts the other, and neither agent trusts anyone at all.

It very nearly was not a feature. Kawajiri was commissioned to make a 35-minute short; when Japan Home Video saw the first fifteen minutes of finished animation, they extended it to feature length, and he completed the whole film in under a year. He did nearly everything on it: direction, the screenplay (written under the pen name Kisei Choo), character design, animation direction and key animation.

Released in Japan on 19 April 1987, classed as an OVA yet screened theatrically by Joy Pack Film, it was a critical and commercial success at home and gave Kawajiri the freedom that led to Ninja Scroll. Kikuchi himself praised the film as the book he had imagined. Hong Kong remade it as a live-action film in 1992, produced by Tsui Hark. How the West received it, cut and redubbed, is its own story.