Stratosphere Girl
CH 2002 85'
Director: Matthias X. Oberg
Script: Matthias X. Oberg, Claudia Steffen
Costumes:: Ulrike Wachstum
Production:: Dschoint Ventschr, Paradis Films, Palomar
With: Rebecca R. Palmer, Burt Kwouk, Tuva Novotny, Filip Peeters
Drawing manga-style comics is Angela's passion, but it won't get the dreamy, 18-year-old out of her European hometown. Hungry for adventure, Angela follows the Japanese DJ Yamamoto to Tokyo to work as a hostess.
Tokyo instantly casts its spell on the impressionable youth, and her comics soon turn into animes, threatening, violent action comics that unreel before her eyes with terrifying vividness. Angela plunges into a dark story of cruelty and murder, of naïve young European women swallowed up into the brightly lit nights of downtown Tokyo, of men so powerful that even the police steer clear of them. Aware that she is and must be the heroine of her epic, Angela, the Stratosphere Girl, feverishly sketches the story that will reveal the truth. As she lives out the comic she is drawing, each stroke of her pencil brings her closer to triumph or doom. STRATOSHPERE GIRL blends European storytelling with Japanese anime cartoon power into a stylized action-mystery. With a stunning visual concept, director MX Oberg (Undertaker's Paradise) and cinematographer Michael Mieke (Baby) vividly capture an alienating world.