14-year old Nadya (voiced by Elena Chebaturkina) faces a special destiny in a war-torn Soviet Russia besieged by the Nazis. Blessed with amazing psychic powers, Nadya trained as part of an elite fighting force of gifted teenagers known as First Squad. Now she is the sole survivor after a Nazi ambush claimed the lives of all her comrades, including her sweetheart Leo. Whilst eking out a living entertaining troops with her psychic talents, Nadya has a sudden vision of a knight on horseback killing Russian soldiers.
Pursued by assassins, she reaches the headquarters of General Below (Aleksandr Grusdev), commander of First Squad. He clues her in that occult obsessed SS officer Schutzstaffel has struck a supernatural pact with Baron von Wolff (Sergei Aisman), a twelfth century Teutonic knight whose army once ravaged Russia. Now the Nazis plan to open the doorway between worlds, allowing the Baron to pick up where he left off. Strapped into a hi-tech device called Sputnik, Nadya projects her subconscious mind into the netherworld where she discovers her deceased First Squad comrades waging guerilla war against the forces of evil. She must somehow use her powers to bring Leo and company back into the mortal realm, to foil the Baron and save the world.
In the tradition of cross-cultural co-productions like Ramayana (1998) and Little Nemo (1992), First Squad is a Japanese animation aimed at the Russian market. The project began life as a music video for Russian rap artist Ligalize. Working alongside innovative anime producer Eiko Tanaka, of Studio 4°C, co-creators/screenwriters Misha Shprits and Aljosha Klimov here expand their concept to not-quite feature length in an attempt to use anime motifs to refashion Russian myths and history into an exciting pulp adventure. In spirit it is not too different from something like Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), though it tempers the more gung-ho aspects with believably harsh images of wartime suffering and that uniquely Russian resignation towards the bitter ironies in life. The stream of consciousness story structure so often favoured by anime melds well with the cerebral style of Russian science fiction and fantasy, yielding some dreamily inventive sequences (e.g. Nadya sitting in a cinema while her life unfolds in flashback on the movie screen; the First Squad take a literal rollercoaster ride through Nadya’s memories en route to the real world) while the fragmented narrative pleasingly cajoles viewers to work hard to join the dots.
Yoshiharu Ashino, whose work includes the recent Thundercats remake, crams an awful lot into a little over fify minutes, but his attack plan of all-killer, no filler leaves scant room for emotional involvement. He glosses over what should be a poignant reunion between Nadya and her deceased sweetheart Leo to get to the next battle. With the exception of our lead heroine the characters are uniformly comic strip thin, cheerfully ready to sock it to the Nazis without any grievances about being dead. The film shares certain conceptual similarities with Zach Snyder’s oddball-but-interesting Sucker Punch (2011) with its juxtaposition of parallel worlds mixing archaic and futuristic designs, a fascination with bringing dreams into reality, and a little blonde schoolgirl heroine wielding a samurai sword (where did she get that?), but what it most resembles is Blood: The Last Vampire (2000), another anime that is conceptually dense but light on story. First Squad is laden with back-stories, subplots, ideas and character details but Ashino merely hints at these. They never go anywhere. The film seems more like a pilot for a television series with an ending that is frustratingly inconclusive. Music by DJ Crush.
