Golgo 13 is an underappreciated masterpiece by the great Osamu Dezaki, one of the most important figures in anime history. Golgo 13 excels in not just one way, but in three. First of all, this movie is a masterwork of nihilistic Neo-Noir pulp. Secondly it is an auteur film by a truly visionary director. Finally, it is a poignant meditation on the nature of evil. The three elements are all delivered masterfully and tie into one another with incredible coherency.

Golgo is a stoic assassin with little to no personality. He exists to kill and get paid for it, and is always inexpressive and cold. He has allies and business partners, who he is reliable to, but there is no warmth in any of his interactions, even with the women he beds. He is entirely amoral – killing is merely his business, he is empty. People often criticize the movie and this character for just that – Golgo is not really a human being; he is an amoral power fantasy, unspoiled by any sort of accessible charm or sentimentalism. Dezaki was willing to play this character straight, despite him being entirely unsuitable as a protagonist for standard movie goers, who look to empathize with their ‘heroes’, or at least enjoy the appealing side of an anti-hero.

There are no heroes in the world of Golgo, at most there are victims and victimizers. Every sequence exemplifies a grimy, desperate and corrupt late 70s dystopic atmosphere. Even bright scenes seem uncomfortably abrasive, as the light is always blinding and hard, and every landscape and person we see seems worn out. The music simultaneously has a kind of suave groove to it while sounding tragic, rough, and pained. At the moment I write this review I am listening to the song featured in the ending credits “Golgo 13 & I”, featuring a sexy bemoaned chorus of “kill me, kill me once again” set to dirty jazzy J-Rock. It is incredibly evocative and fitting, as is the whole score.

The story is paced and written bluntly, without any subtlety, and the plot itself is a simplistic sequence of violent and cruel events. The film achieves its powerful atmosphere with its absolute minimalism and willingness to abandon regular story telling conventions to maintain the purity of its vision of nihilistic cruelty. This is the ultimate exemplification of unmediated, brutal pulp, filled to brim with sex, violence (sexual violence as well) and hyper stoic masculinity. The world this film presents feels real enough that you can practically smell the cigarette smoke and gaudy cologne, and hear the tired desperate moans of its people as you watch it. I would liken it to an earlier take on Umetsu’s highly controversial and powerful “Kite” in terms of its tone.

The depictions of the characters are always highly detailed, often utilizing four or five tone shading for maximum dynamic effect that always matches with the inventive color palettes used to highlight the scenes' mood. Golgo also utilizes a heavy use of hatching on the characters, which adds on an extra layer of grime to their presentation. The character designs themselves are hyper realistic, and Dezaki makes his women voluptuous and far more sexy and cunning than cute, something that makes me think of the female characters in Kawajiri works like Wicked City and Midnight Eye: Gokuu ,who have a similar aesthetic to them.

What is most important about this film is that here Dezaki had come to perfect his style of direction that made him such a revolutionary figure in the industry back in the 70s (perhaps I will take this back upon seeing more of Dezaki’s later works, but this is clearly his style in its maturity). His sense of conveying atmosphere through color design and shot composition is unmatched here – as nearly every shot (not just scene, but shot) in this film is perfectly crafted to convey what it needs to. Dezaki uses visual motifs of reflective surfaces, blinding light work, and surrealistic, psychedelic, and nightmarish moments of emotional and physical impact to leave you breathless at every turn. This is of course also full of Dezaki’s signature postcard memories (sometimes in rapid fire), split screen sequences, and his use of complex background layering and motion to create immersive locations through the illusion of the parallax effect. Visually this is an auteur’s playground, and for this alone it could be considered a masterpiece, since Dezaki’s visionary approach has in many ways never been matched.

However, there is 30 seconds of atrocious 1980s CGI that this movie has become famous for. At the very least the CGI sequence has an appropriate color design for the film, but the models used in the sequence are laughable. Still, 30 seconds out of a 90 minute movie is easy enough to excuse. The intro also utilized CGI, but surprisingly it worked well. It also really goes to show the degree to which Dezaki was willing to use this film as a playground for experimentation in animation.

Finally, there is the thematic core of the film. The main antagonist Dawson lost his son to Golgo, and the plot is based around Dawson’s attempt at revenge against Golgo. Golgo may be a monster, but he is an empty one, he is less than human. In contrast Dawson is the one who shows immensely human emotional outbursts and is constantly in a frenzy of pain and hatred throughout the film. Dawson becomes a far more horrifying monster than Golgo because of how human and relateable he is in his emotional agony, resentiment, and his need for revenge, and through his actions he winds up as even more empty and despicable than the man who he initially felt righteous indignation towards. Anyone who has comprehended the monstrous actions and attitudes of "righteous victims" throughout history and in our current historical moment will understand how much truth this message conveys.

Golgo 13 is to my understanding the highest selling manga of all time, with its main demographic being an older male audience. It is something of a cult classic that has never really broken into the North American market. I cannot speak for the rest of the franchise, but Dezaki has caught my interest in the franchise through this flim. This film is not for a general audience, and is bound to offend many. It is a visceral piece of anarchic Neo-Noir art, and a flawed masterpiece from the golden age of anime.