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May 5, 2017
_The Tale of the Princess Kaguya_ is the best known Japanese fairy tale: a beautiful child is found inside a bamboo plant; she is raised into a princess, attracting the attention of noble suitors, who fail the tasks she sets them, eventually the emperor himself takes an interest in her; finally, she returns to the Moon from whence she came, having either been exiled for a crime or hidden on Earth during a lunar war for her safety. What can Isao Takahata bring to it, his last film, one which took so many years to create, experiencing the most protracted development-hell of any Ghibli movie?
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Much, and it is worth rewatching. (I do not know if _The Tale of the Princess Kaguya_, likely Takahata's last, is the best Ghibli film ever, but it is far superior to Miyazaki's last film, _The Wind Rises_.)
First, the animation is stunning. It is in a sort of hand-crafted moving watercolor. I am reminded of my reactions to watching _Redline_: every scene leaves me rapt, feeling that nothing like this may ever be created again. The labors that went into this movie show in every frame: no studio has as much money or prestige as Studio Ghibli (which is gradually ceasing animation), the animation industry conversion to computerized processes is long over, and it may never be possible to pay enough Japanese animators poorly enough to afford such luxuries in the future.
What did Takahata mean by it? Takahata himself is one of the enigmas of Ghibli: a Marxist while young, infinitely respected by his junior Miyazaki (who he also towers over physically, we see in _The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness_), but more obscure. We know _The Grave of Fireflies_ for its searing sorrow; _Pompoko_ is considered a comedy despite the disturbing undercurrents of group suicide and the near-extinction of the tanuki; but why the tale of Princess Kaguya, written by the Heian nobility about themselves, which hardly seems like a promising topic for Studio Ghibli, much less Takahata?
A close watch makes clear a cyclical pattern: built into the original story's parody/criticism of the nobility, Takahata extends it into a deeper critique of the aristocracy and social striving and the nihilism of Buddhism. Her father takes the heaven-sent gold and kimonos, and, well-intentioned, becomes convinced that Kaguya's life must be uprooted and destroyed because Heaven demands she become a princess, slowly forgetting his original goal and focusing on social advancement; Kaguya delights in the beautiful kimonos and wardrobes she is given but they become a burden as she is forbidden to play or act like a child (or human) or have pets; she is taught to write and be educated, but forbidden from drawing or cartooning; she is forced to engage in eyebrow plucking and teeth blackening (the latter famously invented to hide an empress's decayed teeth and then became tradition) to meet arbitrary social standards; her popularity renders her unable to go out to see cherry blossoms; a party supposedly in her honor turns out to merely be an occasion for drunkenness and insults; all of this is merely to feed the greed of the nobility for women they have hardly seen, and her ultimate reward for satisfying her father's ambitions is to become subject the emperor's assumption he can rape any women he pleases (in one particularly ugly incident related in Keene's _Seeds in the Heart_, the emperor complains to a father that raping his daughter wasn't as enjoyable as he hoped because she didn't resist enough).
Moving to the capital, despite granting her access to high culture and beautiful clothes and gardens and parties, renders her miserable by coming with the distortions of rank and hierarchy and inbred court customs.
At the party scene, in one of the most striking sequences, Kaguya flees in a rage through the monochrome night back to her old home which she pines for; the mountain and forest are dead, but a charcoal maker, who tells her that life will return; vanishing, the ragged Kaguya appears to collapse in the snow, alone, waking up back at the party. At the end, she meets her childhood friend, now a grown adult, and confesses her love to him, saying it's too late for them to live happily together; together, they jump off a cliff and fly across the countryside, invisible, until Kaguya is pilled to the Moon by an inexorable force, but again she is back at the capital. What do these sequences imply? As so often in Takahata's movies (_Grave of the Fireflies_, _Pom-poko_), suicide makes an appearance: these are two possible rejection reactions, disappearing and dying as a penniless beggar, and a love-suicide - both possible futures are, however, futile. In the first, leaving her role in human society renders her an outcast without any position, to die alone of exposure; and in the second, a death pact solves nothing, merely killing her friend/would-be lover and returning her to the Moon quicker. Finally, she resolves to commit suicide if she must become the Emperor's woman.
"People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them."
Beautiful clothes should be something to rejoice in; parties should be occasions for fun and festivity; young children should be able to play freely and have pets; one should choose freely one's husband; one should live a long life before dying; all of these things should be blessings, and not curses.
In the end, Kaguya rejects her mortal life, and the Moon's Buddha (in full Indian regalia & retinue, to make it impossible to miss the point) inexorably returns to take her back to the Moon; only then does she remember her life in the Moon and yearning after mortal life's joys and sorrows amidst the peace of the grave of the Moon. She could remain on Earth only so long as she desired to. Too late does she accept her life as a whole, too late does she yearn to remain. ("You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.")
"That the pleasure arising to man / from contact with sensible objects, / is to be relinquished because accompanied by pain— / such is the reasoning of fools. / The kernels of the paddy, rich with finest white grains, / What man, seeking his own true interest, / would fling them away / because of a covering of husk and dust?"
The feeling one is left with is Fujiwara no Teika's _yugen_: a mysterious feeling of depth. Kaguya arrives in mystery, walks in beauty, and departs in mystery. Was it a war, or poetic punishment? Takahata avoids ever explicitly choosing, leaving the viewer in doubt and uncertainty. In the end, there is only silence; in the end, there is only the sublime; in the end, there is only life throughout spring, summer, fall, winter, with birds, bugs, beasts, grass, trees, flowers...
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Apr 2, 2017
A biopic following a airplane designer from youth to the death of his wife and end of WWII, skipping the rest of his life. TWR is heavily fictionalized to the point where 'biopic' is questionable, which raises the question: if the point is not to depict Jiro Horikoshi's life, by adding an entirely fictional romance and death from tuberculosis, and entirely skipping over the last 37 years of his life, then what was the point, and why did Miyazaki choose animator & director (but not voice actor) Hideaki Anno to voice the protagonist?
A good hint comes from the title of the excellent accompanying documentary of
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the process of making TWR and Studio Ghibli's other film-in-progress, _The Princess Kaguya_: _The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness_. Indeed, TWR is more about dreams than planes or war: it starts in a dream, ends in a dream, and the fast cuts without any dissolves or other signals or markers of time produce a dream-like effect where one never knows when a scene is set or when in the future the movie has jumped to or if one is in one of the several dreams and what in the dream is real or not. (For example, the dream with Caproni features an absurd looking multi-story multi-winged flying boat passenger plane which probably most viewers assumed was some sort of 1920s-esque parody, but the prototype of the Caproni Ca.60 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caproni_Ca.60 was very real.)
The documentary, to some extent, focuses on the human cost of making anime: it is a notoriously brutal career path which burns out animators, requires endless hours of painstaking labor from hundreds of people, and destroys any kind of family life. Stories abound of animators making sub minimum wage or sleeping 4 hours a day, and Miyazaki's son has written of his anger with his father for putting his anime career above his family and hardly being a father at all. (Although Goro Miyazaki comes off as a bit of an ass in the documentary himself.) All to produce some stories and entertainment, mostly for children, of dubious social value.
It is no surprise that Miyazaki and Anno have often expressed doubts about the value of their careers: why do they make anime? Then again, did they ever really have a choice? However much Miyazaki might vow after completing a movie to never undergo the insane ordeal again or to retire, he winds up making anime again. (As indeed, he predictably has after vowing TWR would be his last, and is working on an anime, _Boro the Caterpillar_, even now.) They can't stop, won't stop. In the lottery of fascinations (http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/30/the-lottery-of-fascinations/), they drew a cursed ticket. In the same way, Jiro (and it's interesting that the other 'Jiro' that instantly comes to mind is from _Jiro Dreams of Sushi_, which likewise examines the question of a normal life vs the demands of an obsession leading to greatness) 'simply wanted to make a beautiful plane'; but in that era, and even now, there is little civilian market for a fast maneuverable single-person plane - only the military needs such a thing. It was easy to make the scientist/engineer's Faustian bargain with the military: you can get the funding you need for what you want... as long as it has military applications, and you don't mind selling your soul or having to witness the consequences. (Admittedly, most who make that bargain don't see it backfire as quickly and spectacularly as the Japanese did.)
The intended conclusion, presumably (given the bizarrely abrupt non-ending), is that expressed by Baron Caproni, when he analogizes war-making planes to the pyramids of Egypt: as terrible as the human cost to build them was, their greatness and immortality were worth it, and the world is the better for them. One can quibble about the facts there (archaeologists apparently regard the pyramids as built by a largely voluntary labor force in the Nile's off-season where agriculture was not possible, which given Malthusian conditions might not've affected standards of living) but the analogy falls flat: I don't wind up convinced that there was anything particularly beautiful about the Zero, much less any enduring eternal beauty which could justify contributing to so many unjustified wars. Jiro and the other should have, like the proverbial Chinese scholars, declined to serve an evil emperor and retreated to the hills to await a better regime to serve while they tended their gardens. Even after two watches, the rationale comes off as weak despite all the soap opera histrionics. And while the use of Anno as a voice-actor is an intriguing art-mirroring-life choice, ultimately Anno is something of a disappointment in going through the movie in a pleasant monotone. (You can also listen to Anno voice-acting in the _Evangelion_ Addition audio-drama, and to interviews of him like _Hideaki Anno Talks To Kids_ to confirm that he voices Jiro as himself, essentially; I'm always surprised how high-pitched Anno's voice is for such a relatively big guy.) Indeed, the plot and pacing overall are deeply unsatisfactory, and I think I liked the movie considerably less after rewatching it, as all the flaws became much more obvious on a rewatch: frankly, it's kind of boring! Actually, I would have to say that the documentary about TWR, _Kingdom of Dreams and Madness_, was much more interesting than the movie itself...
So the message falls flat. What was good about it then? I would say: the opening dream-flying sequence is indeed lovely in the same way as _Ponyo_'s ship & water animations; the earthquake sequence, though brief, is also good; there are occasional parts of interest in the plane designs and the Caproni dream sequences. Overall, I would rank this as above _From Up On Poppy Hill_ (with its egregiously awful plot twist) or _On Your Mark_ or _Only Yesterday_ (and maybe _The Cat Returns_) but well below the Miyazaki classics like _Castle of Cagliostro_ or _Whisper of the Heart_ or _Ponyo_ etc.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Sep 24, 2016
A short (47m) but striking old children's anime movie from 1978, _Chirin no Suzu_ is remembered for an unusually serious anti-Disneyfied plot like that of _Grave of the Fireflies_ or _The Dog of Flanders_. I watched this on the recommendation of Justin Sevakis's 'Buried Treasures' column, using the dub which is the only version I could find online as a torrent. The dub is a little overwrought and the music inappropriate (although some reviewers think the over-cutesiness of the sound effects & young-Chirin's voice actor makes the contrast all the more striking), and I suspect the Japanese version is more preferable. The animation is low-resolution
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and dated since Sanrio/Madhouse could not compete with _Bambi_ in terms of animation extravagance, but still watchable due to the attention lavished on movement, especially as the colors and landscape transition to match the thematic changes.
It starts off _Bambi_-style, with our bubbly lamb protagonist bouncing around the meadow encountering all his animal friends and mother, who warns him to never leave the farm lest the Wolf on the mountain devour him. As one can guess, she will be the first to die. Chirin is a good kid and never does leave the farm (the opposite of what one might guess). One dark and stormy night, the Wolf descends, and the Wolf bursts into the fold, defeating the guard dogs, and enters the barn, a wolf among sheep, who can only cower in terror, because as always, 'the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must'. Chirin's mother throws herself on the half-asleep lamb to save him from the Wolf, who kills her. Shattered by grief, he rages. What reason was there for his mother to die? None. What can he do about it? Nothing. What response can the others offer? Silence. If that is how the world is, then better to be a wolf than a lamb! He follows the Wolf, swearing revenge, but unable to affect the Wolf, who brushes him away with his tail. Chirin continues to follow the Wolf around but is hardpressed to keep up, and realizes the gap between him and the Wolf. The Wolf refuses to train Chirin to be a wolf.
While ineptly hunting one day, he sees a snake attacking a mother bird guarding her nest, and lunges in to hunt (but really protect) the snake, and while succeeding in driving off the snake by biting it, the bird is dead and all her eggs shatter. This second blow also shatters Chirin. I am reminded of the Talmudic story of the Other One, the great Rabbi Elisha ben Abuyah, who one day witnesses a boy steal a bird's eggs but also kill her without any punishment as promised by Deuteronomy, and witnesses a second boy spare the mother bird but immediately fall and break his neck without receiving the specific reward promised by Deuteronomy; and became a heretic devoted to breaking every law of God - which may sound extreme, but how much evil is required to pose the Problem of Evil? The Wolf preaches to Chirin: all living things live at the expense of other living beings; there is only strength and survival and whether one will choose them or not. There is no god, no celestial judges, no karma, no rights to survival, no law and no nature but red in tooth and claw; the race is not to the swift nor the contest to the strong but time and chance happeneth to them all; one man launches his tech startup and goes bankrupt, another launches it six months later and becomes a billionaire; one man gets a lucky set of genes with 10 extra good variants and lives a happy life while another gets 10 extra bad ones and rots in jail; no amount of exercise can guarantee one will not die of a heart attack, and many contract lung cancer who have never smoked a single cigarette; there are only atoms and the void in the desert of the real. Chirin is converted.
Chirin becomes the Wolf's pupil, practicing tree-shattering headbutting and combat, and - montage - grows into a gruff billy goat with the eyes of a killer. This world is hell, the Wolf says, and Chirin replies that he now thinks of the Wolf as his father and will live in that hell. The final lesson: an attack on the original farm on a dark night. Chirin defeats the guard dogs easily and bursts into the barn, where the sheep cower before him, and prepares to kill - but stops helplessly as another lamb is sheltered by its mother. The transformation into a wolf is incomplete. The Wolf naturally tries to finish the job, but Chirin is forced to fight him and, the student having become the master, kills him. His revenge, such as it is, has been gained, and the Wolf dies content: the weak must yield to the strong. Chirin tries to be re-accepted among the sheep, but he is too different and they cannot imagine he was ever once like them, and he returns to the mountain, never again to be seen by the sheep. There, alone, among the rocks where they sparred, he mourns his father. Not truly a wolf, nor yet a sheep, but, he tells his father's memory - he still survives! And in the mountains, the Buddhist bell sounds, reminding men of the impermanence of the world ("Chirin, I hear the sound of your bell, and it reminds me of quiet crying, the sound of all the world’s sorrow").
There are not many anime from the 1970s which could be said to be as worth watching now as the day they were made, but _Chirin no Suzu_ manages to be one of them for its unflinching honesty. The plot is surprising and the ending gripping, reminding me of _The End of Evangelion_ in its similar starkness, honesty, refusal to take a cheap easy way out, and sense of despair yet determination. Like Shinji, Chirin has taken a path far from the common herd and cannot return to how things were, and his relatives are dead at his own hands; yet - he still exists.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Sep 8, 2016
Fairly generic shonen anime along the lines of more popular ones like _Naruto_.
(In fact, the similarities between SE and _Naruto_ - whose manga started several years before SE's manga and was a big success by that point - are glaring enough as to straddle the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism, from the visual design of the iconic ninja vests & headband to the eccentric powerful but dark white-haired mentor to the immensely powerful ancient city leader being trapped in a magical field while an epic battle rages.)
SE's best aspects are its visual style. Some scenes and designs are memorable: the moon, whether it's grinning
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or dripping blood, is regularly disturbing in a Tim Burton-esque fashion, the little demon in Soul is an interesting take on the Devil and suits (and the hand-biting an excellently disturbing mannerism), and the revival of the Kishin is fantastic, whether it's the extremely creepy hallucinations afflicting characters before the revival or the animation of the body reconstructing himself and learning how to move again, or Medusa's 'vector' weapons. Character designs are also sufficiently memorable that one is unlikely to confuse anyone, and are colorful enough that one rarely gets bored of watching the main characters (although I wish Maka Albarn's face & eyes were less of a cipher, Kid Death makes up for it with his wardrobe and peculiar martial arts). I must of course mention Excalibur, who is both visually striking (what is he, anyway? an anteater?) but also quite funny.
The OPs and EDs are likewise excellent pairings of visuals and music.
The characters are decent (once their shticks stop being run into the ground), but the plot is even weaker. Reviewing the overall plot, it feels like the SE anime almost made a point of failing to explore intriguing possibilities and leaving Chekhov guns unfired.
The first time we see the Kishin's face, it is a shock as he is instantly recognizable as looking like Kid Death, down to the white hair highlights; one assumes that Asura is actually Death's son and Kid's brother, and this will be extremely important - but nothing is ever made of this and Asura is implied to be human.
The series drove me nuts by name-dropping Maka's mother constantly, but never once showing a photo of her or her on screen or giving any information whatsoever about her - surely once we finally learn in episode 39 or 40 that she's still alive and traveling the world and has a unique powerful magical ability, she will turn out to be critical to the war against the Kishin and has been engaged in extremely important work for the DWMA and will be a major character? Nope; all we learn is that she's fat.
The danger of the Kishin's madness infecting the world is emphasized again and again, and the danger shown in one of the most memorable scenes during the escape of the Kishin; surely once he escapes, the series tempo will speed up dramatically as the world begins to fall apart, everyone from Death on down begins to go insane, and tough choices will be made, showing that SE can pull off the classic escalation formula of starting as comedy and turning into dark action-drama that made other series like _Fullmetal Alchemist_ so memorable? Nope. Stein is literally the only character to go mad, and the series tempo slows down, if anything, and the striking visions are totally abandoned even in the final battle face to face with the Kishin inside his bubble.
Speaking of Stein, since he's the only one who goes mad and this is a major plot point over dozens of episodes and a core part of Medusa's schemes, surely the consequences of his insanity will be equally major and core to her plan? Nope and nope.
Well, what about the hints that Death is not such a pure and noble defender of order and has a sinister background scheme going on which may betray the efforts of the protagonists and justify the criticisms of the 'evil' characters, in a subversion that leads to meaningful conflict and weighing difficult moral choices? Hah, nope! Nope, Death really is a great guy, you were just being paranoid.
How about all the witches who would awaken, under the leadership of the 'Old Witch'? Nope nope.
Or what about Black Star, the most mentally unstable and dangerous of the 3 protagonists, who you keep expecting to go off the reservation? Nope.
How about Excalibur, who gets an entire episode demonstrating how he is the most powerful weapon in the world and is a Chekhov's gun among Chekhov guns - I will eat my hat if he doesn't even fight by the end! Nope. It's a good thing I didn't make any bets about that one since hats take a long time to cut up and eat.
So weirdly, while it certainly feels that SE could fill up 51 episodes without any problem, it winds up being surprisingly empty and full of MacGuffins and unimportant one-shot episodes.
(Reading the WP summary, the finished manga plot is quite different. I wonder how many of these problems stem from the adaptation challenge where the anime studio tries to avoid making changes or anticipating the manga.)
SE's aversion to ever killing off a character, no matter how minor or merited, removes any sense of weight or impact from plot twists. It doesn't matter if Soul sacrifices himself - you know he'll be fine no matter what. Or Medusa. I simply sighed when I saw the epilogue implying she had survived. *Again*. I thought Medusa surviving once was a bad decision as it took the accomplishment away from Stein and meant his 'fall' was less a lingering legacy of Medusa than some more of her scheming and so less due to Stein himself (a fall because of internal character conflicts is far more interesting and tragic than a fall due to the machinations of a tempter), but surviving twice is just in bad taste. How can any victory ever feel satisfying or any defeat tragic when the series refuses to let there be real consequences?
Often plot twists or endings come off as feeling deeply cheap and unearned and by authorial fiat. The Black Star / Tsubaki episodes tend to be particularly flawed: when Tsubaki defeats her brother, how exactly did she resolve her brother's problems? You can't tell me because the episode jumps straight from his festering resentment of her to her killing him somehow. Or consider Black Star's final duel with Mifune: Mifune quite reasonably thinks Black Star is a mad dog who needs to be put down before he becomes a demon like his father, and Black Star declares that this will not be a problem... because he'll simply be better than that, somehow, and cuts down Mifune. To say that this is an inadequate resolution of the problem is to dignify the episode by implying it had any resolution, and a particular pity because Black Star had the most genuine character growth over the series
What the 'meaning' of the whole series is supposed to be aside from the usual shonen tropes is unclear. Asura is clearly intended to be some form of Buddhism, as his name references the class of both benevolent & malevolent warring gods a level up from humans that Buddhism adopts from Hinduism, his weapon is a vajra (the double-ended dagger symbolically associated with Buddhas and enlightenment), vajras symbolize an entire branch of Buddhism (Vajrayana, as opposed to Hinayana or Mahayana), I think the triple-eye motif may be drawn from somewhere in Buddhism as well, Asura's appearance of rags closely resembles a mendicant priest, his third eye opening is another Hindu/Buddhist trope, he makes mystical mudra gestures (also associated with esoteric Buddhism), and his talk about killing his imagination to avoid fear could be very vaguely considered akin to Buddhism's goal of eliminating craving and hence suffering; but what does it all amount to?
And what was the role of the black blood? I thought it was supposed to reflect the Kishin's madness in some way but it never winds up being given any particular importance (quite aside from the cheap and easy way that the black blood madness infection keeps being resolved).
Overall, was this worth 51 episodes? No, not really. (Feel free to watch on 2x.)
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 23, 2016
_M&H_ is an adventure anime featuring a young orphaned girl Hatchin who is kidnapped from her foster parents by an escaped felon to look for her father, Hiroshi McGuffin. They travel from town to town in a quasi Mexico-Brazil, searching for him while evading the police; invariably, they discover the princess is in another castle and must leave town under hot pursuit. Every episode, someone beats Hatchin, scams her, tries to sell her, kill her, abduct her, or lie to her, while no plot happens. This goes on for 22 episodes.
To be blunt, _M&H_ is an astonishingly mediocre anime. The plot is astoundingly boring as
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Michiko and Hatchin kill time in random cities until something bad happens and they have to leave. The initial plot, finding Hiroshi, seems like it will be resolved within a few episodes and the series will get serious and deal with the incipient gang warfare, except, that turns out to be the *entire* series, dragging out endlessly as they miss Hiroshi skipping out on them like 4 times. Characters are brought in only to never play any particularly meaningful role (what was all that stuff with Satoshi Batista? it never went anywhere until he's casually killed off at the end). More time is spent ogling Michiko's breasts and stomach than trying any world-building so most of the time we're stuck watching the same Martian desert hellscape we've been watching for 15 episodes before. There is no dramatic suspense as we know that no matter how much Michiko screws up and no matter how many cops are after her, she will never be hit by their bullets and will somehow jump over all their cars in her motorcycle in sequences that have approximately 1.2% as much excitement or interest as a _Lupin the Third_ escape sequence. Did I mention that Hatchin is just treated absurdly badly by everyone in the whole series (including Michiko, and excluding the Chinese singer, who as far as I can tell is literally the only person in the series who actually treats Hatchin well - because even her 'friend' Rita somehow neglects to mention that the circus will sell her off).
The series is produced by Shinichirō Watanabe and created by Manglobe (Ergo Proxy, Samurai Champloo), but while I kind of guessed as much since I was getting a _Cowboy Bebop_ vibe, _M&H_ highlights by contrast just how great _Cowboy Bebop_ is: CB was regularly punctuated by unforgettable music and scenes, from "Green Bird" to the finale; _M&H_ has totally forgettable themes except for the mildly interesting animation of the OP; CB had a hallucination episode which, aside from being amusing, deepened the characterization of the main characters and added foreshadowing, while _M&H_'s hallucination episode was just some wacky images; CB had semi-realistic combat scenes and jeet kune do inspired martial arts, while M&H just leaves us eyes rolling at a woman in high heels yet again beating up some burly men; CB had a spaceship which bled and suffered with the main cast, while M&H has a motorcycle which keeps breaking yet mysteriously keeps showing up; CB had a thought-out yakuza backstory driving the central conflict, while M&H has some random stuff in the early episodes which turns out to not even matter once Satoshi gets killed off; CB had distinct locations and worlds, from Mars to Earth to Ganymede, while M&H has just two locations, a seaside town and dusty baked-dry slums. M&H just comes off as bizarrely half-baked, as if some notes were taken on a possible anime but then the anime studio had to turn them into an anime overnight without any time to research locations or come up with interesting places to go or things to do. Whether it's bizarre Japanisms like ear-cleaning (I am pretty sure girlfriends in Mexico do not clean their boyfriends' ears with giant fluffy q-tips) or the lack of any understanding of racial politics or identities in Latin America/Brazil (no matter the color, everyone interacts the same) or rendering pointless character arcs (the cop Atsuko, Michiko's masochist lesbian friend, who is hunting Michiko but keeps assisting her and letting her escape, finally definitively breaks with her at the end, declaring Michiko dead to her, in one of the few moving scenes: 'the next time we meet, it'll be as strangers'. So *of course* in the final episode, Atsuko will go and free her again!) (Satoshi, the gang boss, seems to have some sort of goal or grudge, although he remains mostly a cipher despite enormous amounts of screentime, but of course he is killed before meeting Hiroshi) or bring out sudden swerves in plots (in a brief timeskip at the end, we find Hatchin living and working on her own... as a single mother. Despite Hatchin having been the only sensible character who worked hard or planned ahead in the series! Can we believe this? No, we cannot. Nor can we believe that Michiko somehow escapes from jail without anyone noticing and spends weeks refinding Hatchin, who is then going to go on wild road-trips with Michiko and her baby.) or are just pointless (Hiroshi, far from being some sort of Jay Gatsby figure, turns out to just be a loser who keeps scamming people and disappears as soon as they find him) (if Michiko isn't Hatchin's mother, who is? No answer is ever given and hardly anyone even asks) (what was up with those tomatoes anyway?).
The only two episodes which were any good was the bull-fighting episode, and the aforementioned Chinatown episode where the 'actress' rescues Michiko for Hatchin. (I was surprised to learn there were Chinatowns in Latin America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatowns_in_Latin_America I hadn't known there was significant Chinese emigration to any of those countries.)
So: the plot is boring and nonsensical; most of the characters uninteresting or undermined; the art would be OK if it ever changed; the music totally forgettable. It is a waste of an anime and worse than season 2 of _Kaiji_ or _Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro_.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 23, 2016
Ninja battle to the death royale in the spirit and '90s-esque visual appearance of _Ninja Scroll_ (despite its 2005 production). What makes _Basilisk_ special is that it resists the trend towards dilution of the 'ninja' concept into just super-powered samurais throwing chi-balls and shuriken in the vein of _Naruto_ (although there are still plenty of bizarre powers and characters such as the snake-like Jimushi Jubei) but takes a much more brutal and yakuza-film-like approach: "all warfare is deception". _Basilisk_ plays with deception, information, and vision to an extent I can't remember seeing in any other series. For example, based on the first episode, one expects
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a quick descent into all-out warfare, and the tragic Romeo & Juliet ending of our two protagonists blatantly foreshadowed and my own reaction was to wonder how this plotline could possibly take up a full 2 cours/24 full episodes and whether I had perhaps made a mistake - and episode 2 totally confounds my expectations by *one side stealing the announcement* while the other side remains totally unaware that there is even a war on! This provides tremendous dramatic tension as they must balance the reward of ambushes and surprise attacks against the risk of alerting the others that they are no longer at peace. The issue of knowledge remains a theme throughout with shapeshifter Saemon's many appearances, particularly in impersonating a dead ninja and fooling his girlfriend Hotarubi; cruel as that was, the knife is twisted even further in one of the most memorable deaths in _Basilisk_. The protagonists are too good and pure to be at all sympathetic or interesting, but thankfully they only occasionally take center stage and the other characters get ample time on screen, the better to enjoy the twists and well-animated violence. (While many ninja shows set the action at night almost to a fault, _Basilisk_ fairly evenly allocates day/night scenes.) Overall, definitely one of the best ninja anime I've seen.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 13, 2016
Supernatural mystery. In the episodic format, demon Neuro Nogami drags a highschool girl from murder mystery to murder mystery, solving it easily (often with a deus ex machina from the '777 Tools' - thankfully, there are not actually 777 mysteries in the series) and puppeting the girl to accuse the murderer, who supernaturally transforms into the symbol of their motive and attacks Neuro, who defeats them and 'consumes their mystery' by draining them of life force. The approach is similar to the earlier _Night Walker_ and the later _UN-GO_.
The animation & art are unremarkable and somewhat offputting: very dull flat color palette, blurry washed out
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animation (despite being from 2007, which is not *that* long ago).
Worse, for a mystery anime, the mysteries are absolutely abysmal. The first episode sets the tone - the instant the assistant chef was pointed out masked by steam, I thought to myself, 'I hope that it's not as trivial as the assistant has been murdered already by the head chef and that's his body propped up to provide an alibi'. It was. The denouement of episode 1 was even more bizarre, as the motive was the head chef was selling drug-laced soup (‽) to perfect 'Doping Consomme Soup' which transforms him into a muscular red giant (‽‽‽). If you don't take it seriously, it was actually somewhat funny, so I wondered if MTNN was going to go for an over the top comedy, but no. The following episodes are the same. The mysteries tend to be rubbish, and to not play fair with the watcher, leading to episodes which are either trivial and can be guessed long before the resolution, or impossible and of little interest, either way, of zero rewatch value. (I don't know why people compare this to _Case Closed_ when all the CC episodes I happen to've watched on Cartoon Network occasionally struck me as much better mysteries than pretty much any MTNN mystery, who has an unfortunate fondness for ropes and frozen things as a mechanism.) Motivations are cursory and implausible, to say the least, and the examination of 'heart' is ill done - it is simply impossible to believe most of these mysteries rather than roll one's eyes.
This might be OK if there was any real chemistry between the characters, but there isn't. Yako eats a lot and gets insulted by Neuro while Akane wiggles on her cellphone. Yeah, we get it.
As dire as the first few episodes are, and I would not blame anyone who watched episode 1 and dropped the series like a hot potato, it does get *slightly* better. The deus ex machinas don't get used as much and Yako takes on more of a role. There are a few nice touches like Yako having nightmares (most detective series neglect that the protagonist is human and would be affected by their work). The mysteries improve slightly, and we see that some of the changes are deliberate and intended to show Neuro becoming weaker and more human, and even some of the weaknesses get attempts at justification - for example, the attempt to rescue all the mysteries' total motive implausibility by appeal to an 'electronic virus' as the first major arc. This first arc did not strike me as satisfactory as it turns into an action-adventure-SF anime but without enough time to develop it or work in any mysteries, and then right after that, the long awaited resolution of the Phantom Thief Sai arc turns out to be... a fight inside a pyramid. We have watched for 25 episodes expecting to find out the mystery of who killed Yako's father, how and why, and at the end we find out.. it was Sai somehow (lol) and it was because his house reminded Sai of his birthplace (‽), oh, and of course Sai escapes. That's it? That's our payoff after 25 episodes of foreshadowing? Talk about a total gyp.
So overall, while it improves over its horrible first few episodes, MTNN never reaches the point where it's worth watching.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Mar 1, 2016
The sibling franchise to _Akagi_. _Kaiji_ follows a fairly standardized beat: Kaiji lazes around until catastrophe befalls him; to get out of it, he participates in a gambling game, is naive & trusting, plunges further into disaster, wakes up and (often with the trust & assistance of some even bigger losers than him) comes up with an ingenious trick or stratagem to win back all his losses and then some; and then he falls right back asleep and since he's a gambling addict/loser, he'll eventually lose most or all of it again, to repeat the cycle... Structurally, it's the opposite of _Akagi_ (even though there
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are some _Akagi_ references in it), because Akagi is the inscrutable gambler par excellance, who coldly weighs every odd and plans every move on multiple levels - like the 'security mindset' of a good hacker, this is not something one turns off, and we cannot imagine Akagi ever co-signing a loan nor lazing around nor cheating nor can we imagine him ever falling for, say, a 'friendly' game of cee-lo without taking gambler's ruin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_ruin) into account nor could he be said to be addicted, because he's always in control; but also Akagi only ever plays one game, mahjong, while Kaiji plays a different game every time. Not being a mahjong player, _Akagi_ was almost entirely lost on me, while the games in _Kaiji_ are clearly explained and often simple. Some of the invented games are quite interesting: Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors layers a mini-economy onto rock-paper-scissors to produce complexities I'd love to see investigated more deeply, while E-Card is simple yet exemplifies what game designer Sirlin calls "yomi" (http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/7-spies-of-the-mind). The art is about the same as far as I can recall: no women anywhere (which makes one wonder if that's misogynistic or not: does he think that women don't matter, are too sensible to fall into these traps, or that men will always sacrifice themselves?), and characters with heavily stylized faces and noses so sharp that a losing character could commit seppuku with them; I can't decide if I love or hate it. The narrator, once you get used to the purple prose, is hilarious (at one point I noted that the narration could be used in a pornographic film with little or no editing.) The music takes a punk rock approach, echoing one of the major themes: that society is structurally unfair, filled with traps and deceptions and false promises of rewards to encourage people to trample on each other and throw away their time/lives to win position & wealth from the meritocracy, becoming 'slaves to those above, and tyrants to those below' only to eventually be fed into the maw of the system by their successor and discarded when their usefulness is over; those who win are not those who are lucky but those who have seen through the lies fed to the ordinary people and realized that you must cheat, deceive, and steal your way to the top - when the Chairman talks about a "king's luck", it is merely an euphemism for cheating (so in other words, 'kings' *make* their own 'luck'), and those who refuse to cheat but entrust their hopes to chance or God will eventually lose and will deserve to have lost, and indeed, failure to understand this is Kaiji's ultimate undoing at the end of season 1. (The critique is generically Marxist, complete with obese capitalist plutocrats savoring the suffering of the lumpen-proletariat.)
So that's the stew of ingredients which is _Kaiji_: a loser with a heart of gold and occasional flashes of genius who is too weak-willed and soft-hearted to escape his permanent cycle of debt-hell and is plunged into exotic games for the amusement of the wealthy where he must scheme & cheat for his salvation. Is it successful? I would say no. The character himself is too implausible to take seriously (again, we may not like Akagi or see any depth to his character, but he is like a shark: his eyes are flat and reveal no consciousness inside but he is perfectly adapted to his environment). The art remains a problem since we're going to be staring at Kaiji's face for a very long time. Solutions to the gambles are not always satisfactory, as Fukamoto is better at inventing games than solving them, so the resolutions often involve some overly convenient devices like some valuable jewels just feet away Kaiji can grab to save himself or cheating. (Season 2 in particular is a huge letdown in this respect.) Some of the twists make no sense: how is a man blown to his death from a window opening on the 22nd story? That is... not actually all that high up! And at the end of season 1, how can we possibly believe that it could end that way when one of the 3 special rules was very visibly broken and so Kaiji didn't actually lose? (Since the folding of the ballot was clearly depicted in the animation, and folding was explicitly forbidden by the Chairman as a rule, I was convinced that Kaiji would point this out and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, leading to my single greatest surprise in watching _Kaiji_.) The cheating in E-card made no sense: if a billionaire wants to cheat at his own card game at a time & place of his own choosing with his own custom cards in his own custom game room, there are approximately an infinite number of ways to cheat which don't involve elaborate electronic gadgets attached to someone, and heck, the cheating wasn't even necessary, since the entire arc would have worked just fine if Toneagawa had good tell-reading skills and Kaiji had to use desperate measures to defeat the reading! (Tonegawa was probably my favorite character, and I was disappointed to see him made to resort to such clumsy cheating.) The pacing of both seasons is atrocious, as episodes are grossly stretched out: season 1's Restricted Rock-Paper-Scissors was too long, the Human Derby & death bridge were much too long, and the E-card / lottery games were somewhat too long; while season 2, with only 2 games in it (cee-lo and the pachinko machine) should have been done as maybe 9 episodes at the most (with zero loss) and I strongly advise watching at 300% speed if you watch season 2. (I wonder if the manga suffers from the pacing problem? I suspect probably not.) The pachinko machine arc is - let's not mince words here - pretty stupid, especially when you start season 2 with the understandable expectation that Kaiji has learned his lesson and will meet the Chairman again in an even more epic duel. (He hasn't, and won't.)
Ultimately, some fun games & hilariously over the top narration and an initially very promising first arc can't rescue a series with a flawed protagonist, ugly art, repetitive plot, simplistic social commentary, and direly slow pacing.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 24, 2015
An attempt at an all-ages family film dealing with childhood traumas (in this case, the loss of a parent) with fantasy/supernatural entities as acoping mechanism; very Ghibliesque, particularly similar to _My Neighbor Totoro_ in using the device of a move to the remote countryside (an island) to live in an old-fashioned building and encountering folkoric creatures. Sounds promising, yet I was disappointed.
The basic trouble with _Momo_ is that it executes well on *none* of these aspects. Momo herself is an ultra-bland character who cannot stand any comparison with Ghibli heroines like Sen or Shizuku. The island setting is woefully underused throughout the movie (except for
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the pig-chasing scene). The architecture and backgrounds are accurate but again, bland. The music is unmemorable and cannot be commented on. The trio of supernatural characters are more irritating than they are ever interesting or endearing and I wished that almost all of their scenes didn't exist as the humor is nonexistent. The animation is adequate but again bland, except for whoever worked on the pig-chasing scene and the pulsating spirits at the shrine (who stand out as the most visually interesting aspect of the movie, and give the later bridge scene its interest). And the plot...
The plot has a truly outrageous reliance on cliches - from the guilt of Momo telling her father to leave right before his accidental death to her mother conveniently developing Anime Coughing Sickness (yes, really! they really had the chutzpah to use that cliche!) to endlessly predictable scenes (serious question: in the mirror-breaking scene, is there anyone who from the first cut didn't know that that mirror was going to break?) to scenes so illogical that the movie can't even depict the events (why on earth would a doctor agree to cross the bridge at the end in the middle of a typhoon...? don't ask _Momo_, it just cuts straight from getting across to the happily-ever-after). It compounds these scenes with a lack of imagination (no use of the "Night Parade of One Hundred Demons" is just criminal) and in the ending where it commits the greatest of sins for this kind of movie by forcing a heavy-handed conclusion and collapsing the border of reality/imagination. It has the bad taste of, like pornography, insisting on showing you everything. I could have maybe tolerated all the rest of it and considered it mediocre but still watchable far down the list after the Ghibli movies, _Wolf Children_, etc, but that choice of ending is a final kick in the nuts and insult to everyone who watches it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 1, 2015
anime about the making of anime, following in the occasional footsteps of other anime such as _Otaku no Video_ and _Animation Runner Kuromi_ and to a lesser extent shows about doujinshi like _Genshiken_ or _Comic Party_; a 2-cours anime, each cours focuses on, naturally enough, the making of a 1-cours show by the show's anime studio (mostly a stand-in for Studio Gainax, I thought, given how the in-show anime _Jiggly Heaven_ is said to have fallen to late storyboards by the director, like _Evangelion_, and the poor animation provoked a firestorm of Internet criticism, which happened with _Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann_; but others argue it's
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more akin to the producing studio itself, P. A. Works, due to the problems with their previous anime, _Girls und Panzer_, which if true would make the second half much more trenchant and the whole anime that much more meta).
_Shirobako_ is not a documentary so much as a brightly-colored love-letter to an idealized image of the anime world, sanding off the rough edges like the starvation wages of animators or the outsourcing of much work to other countries (China and South Korea do not exist in the world of _Shirobako_), in which everyone is attractive & well-dressed, no one lives down to their stereotypes, plucky wannabes can succeed if they work hard, and the assholes work outside the studio or are just traumatized by past experiences, but still focusing on all the steps that go into producing a single anime episode and the large cast that tames the chaos. (Ironically, I say that it's an idealized image, but the anime industry still comes off as sometimes quite vicious nevertheless...) Shonen-style (or given that anime are made by teams, perhaps that should be sports-manga style?), our protagonists will follow their dreams and tackle the obstacles as they pop up. Like in _Animation Runner Kuromi_, the lead protagonist becomes the Production Desk, in charge of coordinating all the disparate stages and having their fingers in everyone's pies. The plot twists are a bit telegraphed (was anyone surprised when the author caused problems a second time?) or have occasional holes (how exactly was Hiraoka cured of being a embittered slacker, anyway? and I always assumed that the old guy Sugie *was* working on their current show, so that he was the solution to their animal-animation crisis came as a total surprise to me and not in a good way), and the anime references & allusions are surprisingly sparse - I particularly enjoyed the _Initial D_ homage in episode 1, the very appropriate use of the themes of _Space Runaway Ideon_ in episode 5 to reconcile two feuding studio members, and the homage to the final scene of _Cowboy Bebop_ in episode 23. Apparently every other character is a _roman a clef_, but I must admit I only caught Hideaki Anno's unusually serious appearance and Itano (of the Itano Circus), and certainly none of the voice actors or their agencies. (The parodies of light novel-based series are self-explanatory.) And naturally in an anime about producing anime, the backgrounding and design is excellently realistic ("In making the handle of an axe by cutting wood with an axe, the model is indeed near at hand.") Overall, a great watch for anyone interested in the making of anime.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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