A ravenous cinephile in his youth, by the time Oshii graduated from Tokyo Gakugei University the Japanese film industry was approaching freefall crisis, and so the aspiring director applied for a job at animation studio Tatsunoko Productions… and with this began one of the great careers in anime. With two of his films recently restored—the enigmatic allegory OVA (Original Video Animation) Angel’s Egg and his first live-action film, The Red Spectacles—and playing here at Metrograph, we’ve invited Oshii to program some films that have exercised an influence on his own work. The eclectic mix, which includes cult “pink film” softcore (Inflatable Sex Doll of the Wastelands), one of Andrei Tarkovsky’s forays into science fiction (Stalker), and a hard-bitten dystopian noir from Jean-Luc Godard (Alphaville), are a testament to the catholic—and impeccable—taste of a true one-off innovator.
