Week 12 (Sept 6 – 12) – Japanese V- Cinema: V-Cinema is shorthand for the Japanese direct-to-video wave of the 90s and 00s. These movies were often produced by major studios on very low budgets, but they allowed the filmmakers a great deal of creative freedom as long as they could deliver the “exploitable elements.” This proved to be a great training ground for young directors like Takeshi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hideo Nakat and more.
I always wanted to get into those gunpla kits.
Artist and sculptor Kow Yokoyama definitely did. He was already capturing the imaginations of model-kit builders and sci-fi heads each month in the pages of Hobby Japan magazine. Yokoyama’s aesthetic was a brilliant marriage of the futuristic and the gritty-retro, cobbling together walking mechs and hardware using everything from leftover military model parts to common household items like yogurt containers and plastic spoons.
When model manufacturer Nitto Kagaku teamed up with Hobby Japan and legendary tokusatsu powerhouse Tsuburaya Productions (the folks who created Ultraman decades prior), the result was S.F.3.D. Original Video: Nutrocker—a 30-minute promotional live-action special released across VHS, Betamax and VHD formats.
Set in the year 2884 AD, the story drops us straight into a grueling war in the Australian desert (or Wiltshire wastelands, depending on your translation lore) between the Earth-based Independent Mercenary Army and the intergalactic Strahl forces. The narrative centers on Corporal Robert Bush, pilot of an S.A.F.S. (Super Armored Fighting Suit). Waking up on a silent, electromagnetic-wave-heavy battlefield as the sole survivor of a four-suit deployment test, Bush has to coax his heavily damaged power-suit back to life. His primary objective? Avoid getting exterminated by the titular Nutrocker, a menacing, hovering enemy tank. What follows is a tense game of cat-and-mouse through rugged miniature landscapes, culminating in a desperate cliffside showdown where Bush has to blast the tank’s vulnerable underbelly just as the ground gives way beneath it.
Eschewing traditional animation, Tsuburaya Productions brought Yokoyama’s iconic designs to life by blending live-action footage with intricate miniature sets and gritty scale models. Seeing these iconic mechanical suits trudge through practical terrain gives the production an authentic, greasy-gearbox charm. While the narrative is delightfully sparse and weirdly abstract for the uninitiated, Nutrocker remains a holy-grail artifact of 1980s mecha world-building, paving the way for decades of model kits, art books, and a global following for Ma.K.
I watch this at 3 a.m. so that my wife doesn’t realize that she doesn’t watch me closely. I’m going to start making these robots.
You can watch this on YouTube.
