The Stratosphere Girl
Drawing manga-style comics is Angela´s passion, but it won´t get the dreamy, 18-year-old blonde out of her European hometown. Hungry for adventure, Angela spontaneously takes up the idea of Japanese DJ Yamamoto, whom she meets at her graduation party, and flies 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.
The Stratosphere Girl blends European storytelling with Japanese anime cartoon power into a stylized action-mystery. With a stunning visual concept, director M. X. Oberg (Undertaker´s Paradise) and cinematographer Michael Mieke (Baby) vividly capture an alienating world.
Director M.X. Oberg :
A few years ago, an exceptionally beautiful young woman sat down next to me in the
window seat on a plane. When her long blond hair brushed my face, she apologized - and
I saw that her beauty was marred by a black eye. This was such a glaring defect in the
otherwise perfect picture she presented with her white dress and aura of purity that I
unwittingly began to phantasize about what could have happened to her. Though I tried to
conceal my curiosity, she must have felt that I was thinking about her and she soon started
to tell me her story. She was returning from Tokyo, and could hardly wait to get back home
to her family in Germany. What a silly idea it had been, she confided, to go work in the
nightclubs of Tokyo! What came next was an absolutely harrowing story, the drama of how
the life of a bright high-school graduate was turned into a living hell for one whole month in
Tokyo - by other European women who were also working as hostesses! They were all
perched together in tiny apartments, and since the economic slump had made Japanese
men less generous than in the past, there was an intense rivalry among the girls. After
getting into a fight with two Swedish girls, my acquaintance managed to escape with
nothing more than a black eye … I took this girl´s adventures as the basis for a plot I had
been working on for quite a while already: the story of a young woman who draws a crime
story that then actually unfolds before her eyes. I felt that a place like Tokyo, and especially
the strange world of the ´Mizo Shobai´, would make the perfect setting for this story.
A few years ago, an exceptionally beautiful young woman sat down next to me in the
window seat on a plane. When her long blond hair brushed my face, she apologized - and
I saw that her beauty was marred by a black eye. This was such a glaring defect in the
otherwise perfect picture she presented with her white dress and aura of purity that I
unwittingly began to phantasize about what could have happened to her. Though I tried to
conceal my curiosity, she must have felt that I was thinking about her and she soon started
to tell me her story. She was returning from Tokyo, and could hardly wait to get back home
to her family in Germany. What a silly idea it had been, she confided, to go work in the
nightclubs of Tokyo! What came next was an absolutely harrowing story, the drama of how
the life of a bright high-school graduate was turned into a living hell for one whole month in
Tokyo - by other European women who were also working as hostesses! They were all
perched together in tiny apartments, and since the economic slump had made Japanese
men less generous than in the past, there was an intense rivalry among the girls. After
getting into a fight with two Swedish girls, my acquaintance managed to escape with
nothing more than a black eye … I took this girl´s adventures as the basis for a plot I had
been working on for quite a while already: the story of a young woman who draws a crime
story that then actually unfolds before her eyes. I felt that a place like Tokyo, and especially
the strange world of the ´Mizo Shobai´, would make the perfect setting for this story.
Jul 25th 2010