The best Tarantino scene doesn’t come from Tarantino himself

Quentin Tarantino is a master of his craft, even a genius for some. There are few directors whose handwriting is so easily recognizable. Expressive violence, overstylized staging, sometimes touching, sometimes trivial but always great dialogues. This makes him one of the most influential auteur filmmakers of the last 30 years.

The artistic freedom gives Quentin Tarantino’s films that certain something. Script, direction and editing – it all comes together under the creative direction of the man with the prominent chin. This is how the different elements harmonize so well with each other and this in turn results in the Tarantino style.

It is all the more astonishing that the scene that breathes the spirit of Tarantino like perhaps no other does not come from the auteur filmmaker himself. He just commissioned it and eventually incorporated them into Kill Bill: Volume 1.

Kill Bill’s O-Ren sequence is a revelation

When I was thirteen at the time, I saw part 1 of Tarantino’s revenge epic on ProSieben for the first time. The film had me captivated from the opening sequence. But after about a third something happened that made my jaw drop to the floor: An anime interrupts the live actionto tell the gory origin story of the character O-Ren.

Never again should a Tarantino scene knock my socks off so much. Maybe it was the fact that I didn’t expect this break in style. Maybe it was my weakness for gory anime like Hellsing or Berserk. No matter what it was, I have rarely experienced such a wow effect since then.

Who is responsible for the Kill Bill anime scene?

The sequence was created as a commissioned work by up-and-coming anime director Kazuto Nakazawa within Japanese animation studio Production IG Usually so concerned with creative control, Tarantino had no experience directing anime, so he outsourced the scene. The Indian thriller Aalavandhan by Kamal Haasan is said to have served as inspiration for the inserted sequence.

For Kill Bill, which is largely set in Japan, it made sense to design the section in anime form. Tarantino, who is said to be a big anime fanspecifically Ghost in the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire, specifically hired the studio responsible for those two films, Production IG, to animate O-Ren’s story for him.

What makes the sequence so good and so typically Tarantino?

Giving up creative control is risky. But the step has paid off in full here, since Tarantino was able to put his own stamp on the O-Ren sequence. About the choice of music. The soundtrack is a compilation of two songs written for two spaghetti westerns: I lunghi giorni della Vendetta (1967) by Armando Trovajoli and Il grande Duello (1972) by Luis Bacalov. In this way, the director combines two of his major cinematic influences: anime and spaghetti westerns. Image and music are perfectly coordinated and achieve a very special effect.

The decision to make a stylistic break in the middle of the film is already courageous. But the scene itself is awesome. We learn the background story of the American-Japanese-born O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who would later work his way up to the head of the yakuza. She is one of the five people on Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo’s death list.

We see O-Ren hiding under the bed as a little kid, the witnessed the brutal murder of her parents. The camera skilfully switches between hectic and calm shots and thus conveys a certain chaos together with the exaggerated and at times unrealistic violence. We perceive what is happening through O-Ren’s eyes, through the eyes of a disturbed child who has difficulty processing what he has seen.

Why the Kill Bill scene had to be kept anime style

We see and feel O-Ren’s fear, terror, pain. The anime style makes for a exaggerated level of violence and emotions. It’s not realistic, but it shouldn’t be either. The ambush is presented as a frightened child would perceive it. The father seems heroic, the yakuza diabolical.

The scene is also remarkable because of the violence through the drawn style a completely new aesthetic is awarded. If we understandably struggle to see the beauty in gallons of squirting blood, it comes across differently in an anime. The aesthetic results here from the colours, the contrasts and the washing of the surfaces, paired with the melancholic music. through the abstract effect of what is drawn we can distance ourselves from the violence better than we would in a live-action film.

Director Kazuto Nakazawa also creates an impressive and complex visual language that doesn’t seem forced. If that her mother’s blood lands on O-Ren’s face and a drop of blood mixes with a tear, many emotions are awakened: we see horror, fear, despair, anger and tragedy, but also beauty. In a real film, this would probably not be transported.

The scene is the result of Tarantino’s most important ability

While the scene may not have come from Tarantino himself, it does show where his unique skills lie. The director always has a clear vision and doesn’t shy away from pursuing it to bring to the screen with unconventional methods. It is impressive how he mixes supposedly opposite influences and gives the impact of his scenes a whole new weight.

It’s precisely because Tarantino has such a distinct style that his anime experiment works. In all his films he mixes different influences to create something new. The anime sequence therefore underlines like no other who Quentin Tarantino is and what distinguishes him: openness, creativity and courage!

True Romance by Quentin Tarantino and Tony Scott on Podcast

In the FILMSTARTS podcast on the screen, moderator Sebastian and the FILMSTARTS editors Björn and Pascal talk about Tony Scott’s True Romance and also talk about the action director’s work – including an extensive ranking! Find out which film Tony Scott’s trio likes best and what they think of “True Romance” in the podcast.

The screen love is the weekly cinema and film podcast of our colleagues from FILMSTARTS.

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What do you think of the O-Ren sequence?