火垂るの墓/Hotaru no Haka/Grave of the Fireflies

This film is beyond a doubt Takahata Isao’s masterpiece (although I may personally prefer Cero-hiki no Gauche), and amongst Studio Ghibli’s best films. Arguably it is their best.

The movie was released on a double bill with Totoro (at the time, Totoro was considered too hard to market to release on its own!), although the sole resemblances between the two films lie in character style, attention to detail and nostalgic childhood settings. They represent the opposite ways of approaching storytelling concerning childhood: the winsome idealism of a fantasy world or the brutal indifference of a cruel reality. In Hotaru no Haka, a teenaged Japanese boy and his tiny sister struggle to survive when the Second World War leaves them all alone in the world. Few films are more affecting; Hotaru no Haka is commonly spoken of (after the example of Roger Ebert) as one of the best war films ever made, regardless of being animated.

Indeed, the film would have worked well in live action – there has recently been such a version made that I’ll watch sometime in the coming weeks. Certain elements will have to be dealt with very carefully to be as effective as they were in animated form, such as the lights of fireflies cast over the children’s faces or the silent watching figure who reappears several times bathed in red light, whose presence is made more acceptable by the coherence of the art than it might be in live action. Besides, the character designs, beautiful period backdrops and the attention to detail in animation on which Studio Ghibli can pride itself make it an animated project of extremely high standing.

A simple but heartbreaking little story, Hotaru no Haka succeeds by allowing its characters some degree of happiness even in their destitution, moments that really make you smile before the seriousness of the situation is once again brought to the fore. The story develops at just the right pace to never be boring, despite the scarcity of actual events and the extremely melancholy atmosphere. Moving, beautiful, unforgettable and haunting, it is a purposefully small-scale and personal tragedy, and all the more powerful for it. I can find little to fault. The only kind of person I can envision not considering this a great, indeed a classic movie is the kind of person who only wants to be evanescently diverted and a little amused by their entertainment, never upset or made to think. If this is not you, I urge you to see this film, no matter whether or not you’re interested in animation. Unforgettable.

(originally written 17.10.06)

Additional: first impressions from July 3, 2004.

Grave of the Fireflies is an astonishingly powerful movie, a tragedy that exists simultaneously on the smallest and largest conceivable scales. I agree with Ebert when he declares it one of the best war films ever made – and yet despite being the catalyst for the events of the story, the war is almost incidental.

The characters are always children, always so real…and their flaws are understandable but paramount…it is Seita’s childish stubbornness and pride as much as tragic circumstance that brings about the final tragedy. Deeply sad, truly magical film–making with a fine voice acting cast. To have a five-year-old give that performance is nothing short of breathtaking, and the life given to the characters by the animators is inspirational. Seita is beautiful in his humanity, Setsuko so pure, showing the link between sweet behaviour and weakness.

One of the best films I’ve ever seen – and probably the saddest.

ヴァンパイア騎士/ Vampire Knight

A popular young girl in a prestigious school is in love with a powerful and mysterious vampire schoolmate. However, she is also in love with her best friend, who hates vampires and is trained to kill them, restrained only by an uneasy truce. The girl for some reason seems to be special, though, with blood the vampires find irresistible and some strange, latent powers of her own. When she is threatened, will the men she loves be able to put aside differences and work together to protect her?

If this all sounds like Twilight to you, you won’t be the first to make that observation. But while Vampire Knight is indeed also highly derivative, about as lazily misogynistic despite being written by and for girls, and very nearly as downright poorly-conceived, it grows in a very different direction from Twilight (which itself supposedly grows in a challenging direction in the final book) and is a little cleverer. On the other hand, it contains elements to make the audience squirm every bit as much as glittering skin and yet shares a compulsive quality, where despite the overall plots being terrible and the characters being very hard to sympathise with, its screen adaptation is stylish and pretty enough to make it watchable and even compelling - though that's not to say it does not have irritating elements large and small.

I thought that this might just be the worst bit of vampire fiction I had ever come across when I first started to watch it. The academy the action takes place in has a ‘Day Class’ of ordinary students and a ‘Night Class’ of vampires – with the cover story that they are all models and celebrities, and work during the day, so have to study during the evenings. Thus, we’re shown a world where a group of elite students go to school each day with girls screaming at them for attention and getting overexcited about how beautiful they are. If there has ever been an awkward and contrived way to present a group of characters as attractive and superior, it is this. Vampires as teenaged heartthrobs. Vaguely acceptable as a background detail, but not centre-stage.

Later in the series, made up of two thirteen-episode seasons, the plot develops in more interesting directions. Yuki discovers her past is not what she thought it was, her vampire love interest Kaname is revealed to have been quite the puppetmaster, and her childhood friend Zero not only has to wrestle with his changing nature after himself being bitten, but meets his identical twin, presumed dead, for considerably more drama. There’s easily enough to keep the drama going, as well as some rather poor action, some spoilt by over-powered vampires just making lower life forms pop, the rest underwhelming because of the ‘level E’ concept in the world of this story.

True vampires, you see, are born and not made. Only children of vampires are really stable, and purebloods are the most powerful. Those who are bitten and lose their humanity are first puppets, and later feral ‘level E’ monsters, like the zombies of 28 Days Later. While at least offering an explanation why not everybody desperately wants to join the elite bloodsucking club, in practice the mindless zombie-vamps are extremely stupid and drag down the tone.

And Vampire Knight also has many of the worst shoujo tropes. The ‘Ouran High School Host Club with vampires’ opening episodes notwithstanding, most of those initial vampire characters ending up being unimportant, undeveloped peripheral figures, the main drama is replete with the things that mystify me: the strong-willed girl actually ends up constantly powerless in the hands of men, pulling sex faces as she is bitten and restrained. Rape – or symbolic rape, with neck-biting instead of violation – ends up being something titillating, helplessness being erotic. Identical twins are portrayed in annoyingly patronising manner, talking about being incomplete, stealing life from one another in the womb, wanting to be combined as one and suchlike. And the best kind of power is not earned through hard work or devotion, but what is given by birthright: nobility and influence trump earning or proving anything.

Vampire Knight was wildly popular for its run. It is now almost never mentioned. A shallow flash in the pan, I feel.

瓶詰妖精 / Binzume Yōsei / Bottle Fairy

Why did I ever stop watching Bottle Fairy? I was really enjoying it when it first began, but then for some reason I just stopped. I don’t know why. Perhaps I was enjoying too many HEAVY things at the time.

Because Bottle Fairy is cute, fluffy, silly fun. It’s about four little fairies who live for some strange reason with a teenaged boy they call Sensei-san, and try to learn about the human world through the somewhat dubious sources of information they have access to – books, and the little kid who lives next door.

In many ways, it’s the spiritual successor to Azumanga Daioh, which remains amongst the very funniest series I’ve ever seen, anime or otherwise. The fairies themselves bear strong resemblances to Osaka, Tomo, Sakaki (though a little more boyish) and Chiyo (though they ALL have the supremely cute factor), and the humour is very similar. The direction, with quick, sketch-like scenes and character-driven, surreal comedy comes from the same school.

While it doesn’t have Azumanga’s emotional range, it does have a more accessible premise and, since it doesn’t have a background of realism, can be even more bizarre.

I must watch the rest. I was missing out, and series 2 is on its way!

(originally written 1.4.05. Sad now that there was no second season!)

Invader Zim

The vast majority of the cartoons you’ll see on Western television are zany comedies based on quirky characters, be they child geniuses like Dexter or Jimmy Neutron or anthropomorphic angry beavers, cows or chickens. Generally, the success stories are either the simple, recognisable ideas done well (the babies of Rugrats; the everyday life of broadly-characterised kids in Hey Arnold) or the totally crazy (an anthropomorphic sponge, or three bug-eyed kindergarteners with immense powers and a simian nemesis). Anything in the middle, like Fairly Odd Parents or The Wild Thornberries tends to flounder and disappear. However, since the 80s, there have been very few animations with serious, non-episodic storylines – pioneering CG animation Reboot, a few action movie tie-ins, the recent anime-imitating Avatar. What American animation does best is humour.

And sometimes something subversive comes along. There are the prominent adult-oriented cartoons – The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Beavis and Butthead et al – but then there are a select few that get shown on kids’ networks, are ostensibly marketed at kids, but are totally against all the sanitised, predictable moulds cartoons tend to be squeezed from, and get a cult following amongst adults and teenagers. The first and perhaps greatest of these was Ren and Stimpy. But the one that has the most vociferous followers is 2001’s Invader Zim.

Created by Jhonen Vasquez, the mind behind the repetitive but nicely dark Johnny the Homocidal Maniac, Nickelodeon must have known what they were getting themselves into, despite later cancelling the series because 10-year-olds weren’t watching. And Vasquez delivered, with a daft tale about a hapless alien with an insane but adorable robot sidekick GIR, whose plots are usually discovered by Dib, a conspiracy nut hated by his sceptical classmates and his laconic little sister Gaz. I’d say that he usually foiled Zim’s plans, but to be honest most of them don’t really need foiling.

This is as dark and weird as mainstream cartoons get. Ghostly, snake-like schoolteachers, weird machines, little green men from the planet Irken, lots of slime and grotesque fat people, plenty of satire of media culture and a few dollops of out-and-out surrealism (like Pig-Boy, who appears just to undermine Dib’s attack on Zim, cries and jumps out of a classroom window, only to fly off into the sky), not to mention lots and lots of pain for all the major characters; Postman Pat it ain’t. It’s also remarkable in really lacking any identifiable figures. Zim is a crazy megalomaniac, Dib is a pariah and a nutcase and Gaz is violent and antisocial. It’s a cartoon made by outsiders, for outsiders, which is perhaps why it has such a large internet following. But it’s also a slickly-made cartoon, with nice stylised art, great B-movie/techno music and the kind of over-the-top comedic voice acting the Americans do so well. Zim and Gir are just superbly-voiced.

But having watched all the episodes ever produced, I can’t say I’d watch more than one or two of them again. For such a good concept, Zim was rather lacking in laughs. I don’t think there were enough ideas to sustain the entire run, and when a whole double-episode is devoted to Gaz being put under a spell that makes her only able to taste pork, you know Vasquez was scraping the barrel. Most of the real laughs were based on performance, not writing, and Zim’s voice actor has a great way of emphasising random WORDS in a sentence that always made me smile. It was a great concept, and some of the surreal moments work perfectly. Minor characters like the sardonic Almighty Tallest and the dramatic Professor Membrane were extremely well-conceived. Perhaps if it hadn’t been cancelled, the show could have reached its full potential and really been the classic some of its fans would have you believe it is (most of them, I have to suspect, just wanting to impress on you how hiply alternative they are), but as it stands, it was an entertaining diversion, worth watching, but fell short of being something I can wholeheartedly recommend.

(Originally written 16.3.07)

Sky Girls (Series)

It’s over four years now since I watched the Sky Girls OVA and giggled at the stupidity of it. I eagerly started to watch the series when it begun, but for a variety of reasons, including hard drive failure, backing up the files to some obscure corner of an external hard drive to wait for the last DVD specials, conviction there would be a second series and, of course, plain laziness, I only just watched the final bits and pieces this morning.

The full series of Sky Girls is more of the same. The three moé stock lolis from the OVA are given a much larger platform for their struggle against the mechanical menaces the WORMs, not to mention love interests who mostly look like their fathers and some adorable angst designed to evoke the desire to give a big hug. There are also two new Sky Girls for the show, both expanding the ethnic base: first, the blond-haired, Teutonic Elise, who looks even less likely to be in her middle teens than the other characters and makes the show yet more obviously derivative of Evangelion by acting bratty and conceited in a way that is very reminiscent of Asuka. Then there is the enigmatic Indian girl Aisha, who like many token characters with bindis, has mysterious mental powers.

Predictably, there isn’t much story to spin out into 26 episodes, so the pacing is woefully slow – and yet the ending is still rushed and the heavy-hitting emotional climax at the end of it all basically gets completely ignored after the event. The Worms are never interesting and the love interests are kept cutesy by means of much blushing, stuttering and awkwardness, and while that’s pretty adorable, it never actually leads anywhere, so the show ends up with no momentum at all, instead relying on a series of rather contrived mental issues.

But obviously, nobody should be surprised that Sky Girls is shallow. This is the show that features scantily-clad teenagers who look about 11 held in big flying machines that contort their bodies in all sorts of demeaning ways. This is not meant to be cerebral, or heavy, or emotional. It’s supposed to be moé moé. And with its incredibly cute art, it is undeniably that. Every face pulled by Otoha or Elise or Karen or indeed any of the girls is a poem on what is adorable and innocent and pure in anime. It’s cute children doing their best, and that is always going to be heart-warming. Even when you pretend they’re 16 and put them in skin-tight clothing.

I’ve mentioned the last gasps of the moé trend a few times now, how there seems to have been a backlash after the likes of Lucky Star took everything too far, and how fashions are now turning away from cutesy and more towards zany or violent to a degree that seems like a fetish. I can’t say I want to hold up Sky Girls as an example of how good things used to be, as it is undeniably brainless, objectifying, rather paedophilic trash, but at the same time if I had to watch it or more Panty and Stocking, I’d definitely have more fun with Sky Girls.

Well, there’s still Strike Witches for more of the same. But I have to say, I’m yearning for another Monster or Ergo Proxy. Maybe I should get back to watching Dennou Coil instead of just cycling through the big shounen shows…

Sky Girls (OVA)

Ah, Sky Girls makes me giggle. It has no qualms in acknowledging that it is what it is: a daft throwaway half-hour of loli fanservice, with some nice ideas, pretty good animation, cute characters and a guaranteed feeling of being dirty afterwards.

Here’s the amusing plot: after a war with bio-mech monsters called ‘Worms’, humanity is devastated. 90% of all males between 20 and 30 are dead. Thus the military has to rely on…why, what else? Little girls piloting giant robots!

What’s better, the three girls the show focuses on, who are supposed to be 16-17 but really don’t look it, pilot robot exoskeletons reminiscent of the loader in Aliens – except that these ones fly, transform between jet and human modes, and require the girls to wear ‘nano-armour’. This is, of course, an excuse for them to wear very skimpy little outfits complete with neko-tail for plugging themselves in and to be suspended in full view while piloting the robots, hanging in the air almost as if they were being held up by…oh, I don’t know, tentacles?

And of course our three heroines fit neatly into moe anime types: there’s the stern tsundere one, the shy but very intelligent one and the genki one, and all of them blush at just the right moments to make otaku squeal.

Combining Lolita fetishes with over-the-top action sequences, this is a perfect example of bad, bad anime – and also of how much fun it can be to watch it! Bring on Strike Witches, Gonzo’s stab at a very similar idea!

(Originally written 18.10.06)

ガン×ソード/Gan Soudo/ GunXSword

The title is indicative of the exuberance of this production. ‘Hey guys – what’s awesome? Eh? Guns, yup. Swords? Yeah, they’re cool, too. I know, let’s put BOTH of them in the title – and then add in some giant robots for good measure!’ Well, sounds like a fun ride to me. And so it was, if nothing more.

Van in an antihero who looks like Spike Spiegel cosplaying as vampire hunter D. His personality is also somewhere between the two, being both taciturn and a little bit goofy while also a very skilled fighter. Yup, he uses a sword that is also a gun, something like FF8’s gunblades…except more flexible and more capable of calling down...a giant mecha from space!!! Oh yes. Called Dann. Van’s Dann. Yus, there’s very much a specific audience for this, and there’s not a whiff of irony about GunXSword.

Van is on a quest for revenge, and on his search for the man with the claw who killed his beloved on their wedding day (for reasons that were never explained) he meets young Wendy, who is searching for her brother. After a series of episodic encounters, defeating baddies or helping the needy and getting several allies on the way, he finds the claw man, defeats his henchmen and foils his plan to destroy the world.

Silly, silly pulp, as you can tell. But for a few episodes, it seems like GunXSword is going to be something more interesting. For a while, it seems like the Claw Man is genuinely benevolent, that perhaps he had a good reason for doing what he did to Van, and that our hero, being driven by nothing more than a thirst for vengeance, might actually be in the wrong. That would be a novelty – a main character who is actually morally wrong, and a bad guy who is in fact right. In fact, this is not the case, and we soon see that while the baddie is a surprisingly kind, gentle man, he’s also a nutcase who not only kills easily (and, by his reaction, accidentally), but wants to return the world to nothingness, or destroy the concept of space and time, or enter the consciousness of every living person, or SOMETHING. It seemed to change every episode – indeed, it would have been hilarious parody, if it were parody. But it’s done straight-faced (so much the better for me, who might use that interesting situation myself one day), and therein lies most of its appeal.

Because it doesn’t matter that GunXSword’s story is crap, or that there’s a whole episode of the most embarrassing fanservice you’re ever likely to see. It’s got great stock characters (the cute naïve girl, the hopeless boy, the genki dancing girl, the prodigious little twins, the redeemed ex-prostitute etc) as well as some ideas just silly enough to work (like the five old men in an 80s-sentai-style giant robot, past-it both in the world of the anime and in reality). Van has appealing character quirks (he has to cover every meal with as much sauce as he can, before yelling about how spicy it is). The art is nice, the music is cool and some of the transient emotional scenes are, while entirely superficial, at least ephemerally touching. Loads of fun.

It will never be anyone’s favourite anime, nor would it win over anyone who doesn’t think much of animation. But for embracing daft fanservice clichés and having some great action scenes and cute girls, I won’t hesitate to say I very much enjoyed GunXSword.

(originally written 17.12.06)