Baton (バトン) is a 2009 Japanese animated science fiction[1] film written by Shunji Iwai and directed by Ryuhei Kitamura comprising three 20-minute episodes released exclusively for the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port of Yokohama to trade with the West following the 1859 end of the policy of seclusion.
Plot
Episode 1: Stowaway
Apollo, an android running the Falcon operating system, discovers the disembodied head of the android Saturn and downloads its Cipher operating system, rendering Apollo unable to talk.
Episode 2: Apollo and Mikaru
Apollo's human companion Mikaru takes him to the doctor, where soldier robot Tomboy agrees to help. Tomboy explains that Cipher was running a legendary operating system that Hades was running when he led the robot uprising fifty years earlier.
Episode 3: Cipher
Apollo remembers his memories from his earlier incarnations as Cipher, Artemis, and Hades. He tells Tomboy to guard Mikaru, then flies into the sky.
The film was produced using rotoscoping. It was Ryuhei Kitamura's first animated film[2][3] and Shunji Iwai's first experience with rotoscoping. In an interview with alltheanime.com, Iwai explained, "I had written and produced a film called Baton. That was the first time I worked with rotoscoping, but there was no way to do it in Japan, so we had to get a team together in America. We cast very famous Japanese actors in Baton, but the US team didn't know the actors, so they found it hard to reproduce the faces. In a sense, Baton was a kind of test, a preparation for The Case of Hana & Alice."[4] In an interview with Zoom Japan, Iwai explained that Baton "was a very important step in developing the necessary skills to make my own anime. We used rotoscoping for the first time and stumbled on a number of problems, most importantly the fact that the characters' faces were too real and not cute enough. In Baton's case it wasn't a big problem because of the very nature of the story, but when it came to The Case of Hana & Alice I knew we had to do something about it. So working with Kitamura made me realize the problems I would come across later on my own anime film."[5]
The film reunited Kitamura with Aya Ueto, with whom he had previously worked on Azumi.[6] It also reunited Kitamura with Nori Sato, with whom he had previously worked on LoveDeath (2006) and The Midnight Meat Train (2008).[7]
Baton was released as three separate episodes exclusively from April 28 to September 27, 2009, for the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port of Yokohama to trade with the West following the 1859 end of the policy of seclusion.[10][11][9][6][3] Episode 1 was released April 28, 2009, episode 2 was released May 31, 2009, and episode 3 was released July 11, 2009.
Reception
Even before the release of the film, there was discussion of Ryuhei's suitability as a director of an animated film. Todd Brown of Screen Anarchy wrote, "As frustrating as Versus director Ryuhei Kitamura can be when working in live action (which is very), when you think about it most of his annoying excesses in that format are things generally considered strengths in animation. Hyperactive camera motion? Lots of posturing and over emoting? These are not issues so much in the animated world, and neither are the high levels of production design that Kitamura generally demands but frequently cannot deliver on his tight live action budgets. And so the hopes are high for Baton, Kitamura's first foray into directing animation."[3] Todd of Ain't It Cool News wrote, "BATON is heavy on the rotoscoping and the quality looks a touch uneven, but I'm actually quite excited to see what Kitamura can pull off in the world of animation, a world where most of his directorial excesses will actually play to his advantage."[12]
Following the film's release, reviewer Nikola Gocić of tasteofcinema.com wrote, "Created for the 150th anniversary of the opening of the port at Yokohama, Baton is director Ryūhei Kitamura and writer Shunji Iwai's first foray into the world of animation. Even though it’s pretty tame in terms of top anime weirdness, this rotoscoped sci-fi adventure is quite outré and impressive for something that was conceived during the night of drinking. Reminiscent of Laloux's works and Filmation-produced cartoons, it is also a great throwback to the 80s. [...] With its light, almost uplifting atmosphere that stems from a simple, yet effective design of milky colors, Baton is far from a typical cyberpunk flick. It can easily be labeled as 'style over substance', but the limited (barely one hour) time-frame is fully utilized to introduce likeable characters and an interesting story."[2]
Criticizing the animation, author mjn of Zhihu Daily wrote, "traditional rotoscoping animation, such as 'Baton' produced by Shunji Iwai in 2009 and 'Flowers of Evil' by Hirofumi Nagahama, cannot avoid one problem: the animation is ugly. When the characters in rotoscoping animation make small movements, the effect of rotoscoping is similar to the vibration of the same tracing, and there are many redundant movements of real people, so the lines feel like they are shaking all the time, and the effect of directly tracing the expressions is definitely very poor. When 'Baton' was rotoscoped by an American animation team, they had a poor recognition of Japanese faces, and the first problem was that the drawings were not like the real people".[13]
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