ジーニアス・パーティ / Genius Party

I’ve been meaning to get around to watching Genius Party for a long while. Well, today turned out to be a good day for it, because I had set aside some time to marathon Natsume Yuujinchou, only to find I only had series 4 to watch. So as I was in the mood for something new rather than something I’ve been watching for a while, I fixed on Genius Party.

If the title makes you expect a rave with a Tales of Symphonia character, have another think, and forget modesty. This compilation film is rather in the vein of Fuyu no Hi – several respected directors get a chance to show off their stuff. This is somewhat of a lesser project, though, in terms of its inception – it’s not international, every director represented here being Japanese, it’s not linked by a stab at being high-concept like the Basshou theme there, and the animation is done entirely by Studio 4°C. When it was made in 2007, the studio were clearly very keen to put their stamp down as a highly capable, quirky and arty studio, building on their contribution to The Animatrix, the pleasantly oddball Tekkon Kinkreet and the wonderful Mahou Shoujotai Arusu. Of course, over the next few years, they were not exactly highly idiosyncratic, getting bogged down in animating Transformers: Animated and the ill-fated Thundercats revival, with not much else to show for their newly-established place in the anime world but the entertaining but not exactly ground-breaking Detroit Metal City and their game-related animation like the cutscenes for Catherine and one of the Kid Icarus shorts.

Divorced from the studio history, however, all the component parts of Genius Party are interesting in their own rights, though in no way make up a cohesive whole. Essentially they are linked only by being together in this compilation.

The first segment is the eponymous Genius Party, directed by veteran female key animator Fukushima Atsuko. Having contributed to Akira and Kiki’s Delivery Service, she’s worked with the best, though I’d like to see her helm more than this oddball segment. In a very music video-like sequence, a lanky dark-skinned man in a very strange burlap bird outfit hunts the hearts from little living stone faces in the desert. Most hide, but one is caught tripping out with a glowing flower. The bird-man gobbles down its heart and gains glowing wings, flying up to the sky. The flower, too, has floated up high and the bird-man eats it, becoming a shooting start. Whether as a result or by coincidence, clouds form an bright sparks rain down, restoring the soul of the little stone face whose heart was eaten. The shooting star bird-man returns to fly about and the stone faces show their approval with big glowing hearts, which pop suggestively when they’re most excited. One gets so stimulated it projects a giant trippy energy-flower into the night sky, which also becomes a bird. One of the heads becomes a huge, clearly living thing. This is clearly about inspiration and creativity inspiring all those around you...but how exactly is pretty subjective. It’s a bit of trippy vagueness that is very enjoyable visually but ultimately says little of importance.

Next is an offering from Kawamuri Shouji, the man who went from helping design Optimus Prime and other original Diaclone proto-Transformers to creating Escaflowne and designing mechas for Ghost in the Shell and Eureka 7. The length of a typical anime pilot, his Shanghai Dragon features a snot-nosed little Chinese boy who picks up a piece of alien tech that makes what he draws become real. Unfortunately, this draws vast intergalactic forces, and some big CG mechas come to catch him. The overused CG is looks dated now, but the action is incredibly stylish - and very, very silly! Fantastically paced wish fulfilment, it’s a cut above what can be done on TV budgets, and hilarious, but nothing you’d call artistic.

Third is Kimura Shinji’s Deathtic 4, with CG shaded to look like a grim gothic children’s book – with a heavy Burton influence. Kimura is comparatively unknown, but was art director for Steamboy and Tekkon Kinkreet. In a world of zombies who speak a kind of Japanesey Swedish, a boy gets in trouble when he finds a living frog. It’s a good effort and I love the art style, but attempts to inject action and fart jokes fall flat. A slow, meditative, creepy pace would’ve worked better.

Mangaka  Fukuyama Youji’s Doorbell is next, and the nadir of the film. Hideously ugly designs, bad CG and an overdone doppelganger storyline make this one to skip on any repeat viewings.

Futamura Hideki’s Limit Cycle is almost as bad, a faux-intellectual discourse on utilitarianism and existentialism that rambles on and on. Futamura is another key animator, though directed some bits and pieces like some episodes of the old Jojo’s OVAs, and this gets a pass from being a disaster for striking visuals. It’s all so juvenile, though. So 6th-form artwork.

Of course, the main draw here for me was Yuasa Masaaki’s Happy Machine. As a confirmed Yuasa fanboy, this short was everything I hoped his Adventure Time episode would be – and wasn’t. A surreal yet moving story of a baby discovering mortality, it had the odd yet coherent and sometimes stunningly smooth animation of Kemonozume, the freewheeling plot of Mind Game and some of the emotionally affecting qualities of his Wakfu episode. It had pee and poop and farts, yet the infantile qualities suited it, and didn’t seem embarrassing at all. Strange and yet moving, it was everything I hoped for from Yuasa, and makes me happy he could go on to direct Kaiba soon after.

Finally, big hitter Watanabe Shin’ichirou brings us Baby Blue, which is also well worth the hypothetical price of admission. The story of two students escaping ennui with an impromptu trip to the beach with a hand grenade, it succeeds primarily by being very straight, with superb naturalistic dialogue. The fantasy of blowing up an old-fashioned yankii gang helps, too. This is perhaps the most ordinary work here, but also the most mature and most meaningful – and beautiful.  

The Animatrix

I got The Animatrix shortly after its release, back in 2003 – nine pieces of varying length that acknowledged what the Wachowski brothers had already made abundantly plain: that The Matrix was as cool as it was because it drew heavily from anime’s aesthetics. This was an homage. It was also several months before The Matrix Revolutions made the whole world realise that there was not going to be an impressive and satisfying end to this immensely popular franchise, and it was going to disappear into psychobabble and overwrought symbolism.

You could say it was anime that made The Matrix the incredible success it was – and ushered in an era of anime being more fashionable than ever before. On the other hand, you could also say it was anime that held it back from being what it so nearly was: the new Star Wars. Because that ending fitted right in with 90s and early-2000s anime storytelling. But it did not cross over to a mainstream audience, because not enough people wanted to trust the filmmakers when they promised depth in what looked like nonsense. It’s 2011 now, and I know far more about all the studios who worked on The Animatrix.

The Final Flight of the Osiris
First on the DVD is The Final Flight of the Osiris, a 10-minute CG story that Square Pictures gasped out before the debts from The Spirits Within consumed them. Like that film, what in freeze-frame looks like an impressive piece of work comparable to much of today’s CG work is in motion stiff and awkward. As is the writing - the best contemporary animation money could buy was used to render a scene where a man and woman, blindfolded, use advanced martial arts techniques to slowly strip one another. Back in reality, they discover Zion is in danger, and decide a message must be delivered within the Matrix. The girl makes the drop (later seen in the Enter the Matrix game), but the ship is overwhelmed.

It’s a mere snippet without much of a distinctive voice – and there isn’t really much to connect the viewer with the characters. It’s basically a showpiece for CG, a box ticked for saleability, and at heart is just a video game intro.

The Second Renaissance: Parts I&II
The main ‘meat’ of The Animatrix, The Second Renaissance is essentially a documentary told from the point of view of the machines that the main Cartesian twist of the first film reveals have taken over the planet. It begins in an almost twee post-Asimov manner, with little humanoid robots gaining the ability to at least claim to have desires and fears. Humans and robots clash, humans make mistakes on an absurd scale, the tone shifts first to purposely confounding juvenile expectations – as in the scene where a robot woman first has her clothes ripped, then her face, and ends up in an unsettling middle ground that is a complete opposition to the techno-erotic imagery of the likes of Ghost in the Shell. Throughout the second part, the image of a human being is systematically objectified, until one final image of a child reminds us briefly that we are considering real people, before the illusion gives way to the reality in a harrowing sequence that is by far the most striking and memorable part of this project.

The animation screamed Gonzo to me – but as a matter of fact what I was recognising was Maeda Mahiro’s style. In evidence is the animation-overlaid-on-static-pattern most famously used in the brilliant Gankutsuou, and those CG creations were very much like what he designed for Last Exile. In fact, though, the animation work was provided by Studio 4°C: their work here is possibly what made them able to go on to such strong and successful work in 2004-6.

Kid’s Story
Kid’s Story comes next, and is again animated by 4°C. While much of the line-art, pseudo-rotoscoping and mixed media brings to mind eccentric 4°C works like Mind Game, the overall aesthetic, pacing and use of music owes much more to director Watanabe Shin'ichirou, building on his Bebop work and pre-empting SamCham. It’s a basic story of a student who discovers hints of the Matrix online, gets a phone call from Neo telling him to run, so does. What it lacks in interesting storytelling or interesting characters, though, it makes up for in style and fast-paced but quirky, down-to-earth action.

Program
This time when there was a strong Madhouse flavour, it was an accurate one. In fact, this one looks right out of Vampire Hunter D – Bloodlust, with an extra notch or two of stylisation. This is probably unsurprising given that it was written and directed by that film’s helmsman, Kawajiri Yoshiaki – with the character designer/animation director he had collaborated with there and in Ninja Scroll, too, Minowa Yutaka.

The melding of great, old-fashioned art, feudal aesthetics (in a ‘simulation’) and an interesting dilemma – what happens when one who knows about the Matrix wants to go back to ignorance with the robots’ help? – should make for a great short, but ultimately this one is sterile and predictable. No small part of this is down to the flat, lifeless voice acting.

World Record
Always my least favourite segment, this is another Madhouse effort, and it is ugly, disjointed and totally out-of-keeping with the tone of all the rest of the project, never mind the main films. I disliked the idea that a ‘kid’ who was contacted by Neo, escaped agents and has a near-death experience could escape from the Matrix by himself, but a guy who just pushed himself to extremes? As though that doesn’t happen all the time, all over the world? Directed by an in-betweener who years later would make the interesting and much less insipid Redline, it is ugly, its story is mawkish and the way the creators have obviously decided on certain little animated exaggerations thinking they’ll seem clever and unique only adds to the impression of it being juvenile, undeveloped and unnecessary.

Beyond
This segment sees Studio 4°C’s founder and Outomo collaborator Morimoto Kouji step up to the plate, and all the stops are pulled out. Beautiful background art and extremely detailed animation pre-empt Steamboy while the quirky character design and great work with an imagined camera lay the groundwork for Tekkon Kinkreet, the former being one of the studio’s landmark collaborations (with Sunrise) and the latter being their most groundbreaking movie. The kids playing in the abandoned house are gloriously in the middle of the two films design-wise in a way that makes me very happy as a fan.

With a lovely tense mood that often rapidly changes, striking visual images with the glitches and an interpretation of the world of The Matrix that is highly individualistic yet still works very well with the established premise, it is by far the best of the experimental films. The voice acting is also generally speaking much better than in the other shorts.

A Detective Story
Watanabe’s second contribution is again full of mixed media, but this time to pastiche noir films. The anime flavour, though, is very 80s, largely thanks, I think, to animation director Nakazawa Kazuto, who made the very juvenile and ultraviolent Bubblegum Crisis spin-off Parasite Dolls. He would later go on to work as an animation director with Watanabe on SamCham. I like the look of this piece, and the general concept, but it’s just not very interesting story or consequential.

Nice final pose, though. An archetypal image for a pastiche. Very Watanabe. Yet also very Studio 4°C.

Matriculated
The writer/director behind the last segment is not known for anime, but by the Korean American Peter Chung, with DNA Productions. Most remember Chung primarily for Æon Flux, but I remember him for Phantom 2040, and ‘Baudelaire LIKES the Phantom’. He also had a hand in the design for The Rugrats. There’s something nice about the inclusion of this different flavour, not so familiar as Square’s. The CG is bad and some of the animation needs a lot more subtlety, but the Giger-derived backgrounds are great and the concept – making a robot empathise with the humans – is a lovely bit of reversal. The very American animation flits between immature and absolutely perfect, and there are gorgeous lighting effects here.

サムライチャンプルー / Samurai Chanpuruu / Samurai Champloo

The first episode seemed to me to promise something great. After the success of Cowboy Bebop, the director, Watanabe Shinichiro, was given a new project with an extremely high budget. The animation was stunning, the fight direction inspired, the characters well-designed and expertly voiced, the story – three misfits thrown together by tenuous circumstances – fairly interesting and the anachronistic humour of inserting elements of hip-hop culture into 17th-century Japan gave ample opportunity for laughs. But SamCham suffers from the same flaw as Bebop – no story. There’s a loose framework: the characters are searching for ‘a samurai who smells like sunflowers’, and get into all sorts of scrapes on the way, but ultimately, the series was totally episodic. This made for an extremely varied quality – sometimes good, solid stories were told in one or two episodes, sometimes it degenerated into terrible slapstick, as when the drifters were forced to play baseball against some visiting Americans. Yup. We also had to endure ogres, fake Christian missionaries, graffiti artists and beatboxers. The hip-hop elements were funny as incidental details. Over a whole episode, less so, especially when you just want to know when the real plot is going to kick in.

But in the end, it was an excuse to have two hyper-powered, pretty much invulnerable heroes (who survive stabbings, massive explosions and various other grievous injuries unscathed) going around kicking arse. Okay for a while, but it gets old quickly. Especially since the characters weren’t that good to begin with. Mugen was essentially Zoro from One Piece (with the same voice and everything), except less likeable. Jin was the strong, silent type, which was fine, but didn’t allow for much development. Fuu was the everyman character, but the injected plot device of this sunflower-smelling samurai that she keeps whinging on about despite never seeming very personally involved made her rather irritating.

The show was at its best when showing traditional fight scenes, such as when Jin battles a blind woman who is nevertheless an expert with her weapon on one of those Japanese bridges that has a gap between every step. Hard to swallow, perhaps, but extremely impressive nonetheless. But good fights can’t make up for a deficiency in plot, and that’s what really matters. A shame, because I was hoping to genuinely love this show.

It will find an audience with people overawed by pretty clashes and bangs, who like superpowered heroes who never really seem to be in much danger. But for people who want a little more substance, I would advise looking elsewhere.

(originally written 3.11.05)

マクロスプラス/ Macross Plus

Let’s go back ten years – almost eleven, in fact. On May 13, 2000, I wrote in my diary that my mum had ‘bought the subbed animé Macross Plus for me (as a 2 for £10 deal!)’ and that ‘it was quite good, if a little too long and slightly boring. Still, though, pretty good.’

Obviously, back then I wasn’t so interested in qualifying and assessing, and quite unaware that I was watching something quite seminal. It was also quite possibly the first time I watched a subtitled anime rather than one dubbed for localisation, although that made little impression on me, having grown up reading the subtitles for Chinese films. Though I didn’t know it, this movie, expanded from four OVAs, was my introduction to the music of the brilliant Yoko Kanno (entirely unnoticed by me) and the direction of Watanabe Shin’ichirou, years before I heard of his 1998 smash hit Cowboy Bebop. It was also small wonder I didn’t find this easy to follow, it being a direct sequel to the original Macross series, and thus built upon exposition I’d never seen. Add to that the fact that I’ve never found mecha inspiring and it becomes quite clear why this made little impression on my young self.

The plot is simple: two show-offs put everyone in danger trying to outdo one another piloting their giant robots, but when their childhood friend gets into danger, they have to work together to rescue her. Uninspired stuff.

A nice bit of anime history because of the names involved, and after all part of one of the most important mecha series in all of anime, it nonetheless never inspired any great passion in me and ultimately, I’ve yet to feel compelled to check out the rest of the franchise.

Cowboy Bebop

When I first saw Cowboy Bebop, which was when I joined the anime club in my first year at uni – before the interest blossomed into an obsession – I thought it was quite a good series, but not brilliant. The anime club was essentially a springboard for me: I found some series I really enjoyed, got hold of all the episodes, and then began finding out what people who liked my favourites recommended. But I never felt much desire to go back and watch any more Bebop. I’d seen about 8 episodes, and the episodic narrative, with its simplistic characters, never hooked me. What I DID take an interest in was the music, an exuberant jazz score (with some very eclectic variations thrown in) by Yoko Kanno that I still listen to frequently today. The series, though, just hadn't gripped me.

I’m glad to know that even ignorant of 99% of the anime world, my taste was as it is today.

After hearing endlessly how wonderful it was, and watching Samurai Champloo (same director; same structure (none); similar characters; same audience), I thought I’d finally take the plunge and watch the whole series.

I can’t say it’s a shining example of anime’s focus on substance over style. I can see why it appeals to the Buffy and Hollywood crowd, but that’s not what I’m looking for, and that’s why Bebop leaves me cold.

I’ve heard quite often that the characters in Bebop are brilliant. But they’re far from it. A couple of flashback episodes and a pretty face does not a good character make. Spike is a tribute to Lupin III, a classic anime character – a nonchalant, laid-back and slightly goofy antihero, charming and everyman-ish, yet much duller than his predecessor. While not a bad protagonist, he failed to do anything that made him likeable, even when it came to slow motion-laden, artsy episodes that revealed his skimpy backstory. Jet is a clichéd old mentor character, grizzled, grounded and thoroughly functional. Faye was slightly better, a self-centred, greedy woman without a past, but she was left underdeveloped. And then there was Ed, adorable little girl and computer genius, whose sheer exuberant randomness I thought I would find charming, but she was left so totally one-note, so excessively ridiculous that she was actually really annoying. And she got one line in the whole series that was serious, and that was the last one. Character-wise, I can’t say I found anything to grip me.

And then there was the plot. Okay, the idea is that it freewheels like improvised jazz, changing genres here, quoting there. In a limited amount, this is very amusing – the first episode is a tribute to Desperado, there are western and sci-fi references all over the place, most of the episode titles are taken from great blues, jazz or rock songs. Best of all, one non-speaking bad guy is quite obviously ‘played’ by Woody Allen. But after a while, it just seems to be done for the sake of it, to the expense of, y’know, the actual series itself. As though a saxophone solo started quoting Beethoven and then went on to ignore the original song to carry on with the 5th symphony. For example, one entire episode is devoted to Spike hunting down a super-assassin whose appearance seems to be a tribute to either The Joker and The Penguin or that guy from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. There’s no character development in the episode, no real threat, no statement, just a few fights. And then there’s the episode that parodies Alien but falls far short of even Red Dwarf. The movie, too, is full of beautiful animation, but mediocre in story terms, featuring a whole series of McGuffins and then an evil plot that really isn’t a threat at all – but of course, Spike has to go and have a big climactic fight anyway.

When we finally get episodes that focus on the characters, like 'Ballad of Fallen Angels' or 'Speak Like a Child', there are some great moments, and we see what this series could have been. But so concerned were the writers with being clever and being funny that they missed out on making something that was actually engaging.

(orginally written 21.12.2005)