THE BUU ARCHIVE

Case file

It wasn’t evil. That was the problem.

In 1992, a child psychologist named Fumiko Sato working as a creative consultant for a production house in Osaka received a project brief unlike anything she had been asked to review before. The brief described a central figure that was “not malevolent in any conventional sense — curious, hungry, and completely without the capacity to understand consequence.” The production house was registered under the name Innocent Reel Co. No address. No prior credits. Sato later wrote in a private journal recovered from her estate in 2018 that she had agreed to the project because the brief read less like a script and more like a case file.

What Innocent Reel Co. produced over four weeks was 28 minutes of Dragon Ball Z Majin Buu footage that Sato described in her journal as “the most unsettling thing I have ever been asked to evaluate, not because of what it shows but because of what the central figure does not understand about what it is showing.” Every scene of destruction was filmed from the perspective of the figure causing it — curious, unhurried, almost gentle.

The DBZ pilot aired on a cable channel in Osaka, March 3rd 1992. Runtime: 28 minutes. Broadcast at 2:21am. A night engineer at the station filed a report the following morning stating that three separate viewers had called during the broadcast asking the same question. The report does not record what the question was. It records only that the engineer did not know how to answer it.

Innocent Reel Co. dissolved the same week. Sato’s journal entry for the day after the broadcast is one sentence: “I don’t think it knew it was being filmed.”

The question the viewers asked was never documented.

The engineer retired the following month.

He has not given l.

Fiction. An imagined lost film by Daniele Arcangeli, made with generative AI and edited by hand for Instagram.