イナズマイレブン / Inazuma Eleven: season 1

I have to confess that I love anime like Inazuma Eleven. They are perfectly aware of how completely, utterly stupid they are, but they show no sign of that at all. There's no hip, ironic self-referencing, and no clever-clever signals that the writers are secretly above all this, but doing it anyway - the Joss Whedon disease. 

Yet, with complete sincerity, charming honesty and buckets of enthusiasm, Inazuma Eleven is incredibly, brilliantly stupid. In the tradition of many manly, manly sports series, from Slam Dunk to Rookies, it focuses on the competitive spirits of sportspeople as their rivalries and hardships push them to greater and greater feats. But, probably in part because it's based on a video game (by Level 5), Inazuma Eleven is about as silly and boyish as it gets, though coming just over a month after the release of the game, it's pretty clear the anime was developed in tandem with it rather than a later, derivative property. 

Inazuma Eleven shows us a world where football (soccer to those who don't want to listen to the people from the sport's birthplace) is not only played to an incredibly high level but full of ridiculous special moves. At first, we just have effects that could seem like they're symbolic, an expression of characters' inner feelings and powerful moves like the shoots that envelop the striker's foot in flames or have them surrounded by a dragon - but then later we end up with characters generating tsunami and solid walls from thin air, stopping time and launching penguins at one another. Yes, really. These kids have abilities that could solve the economic problems of the entire world, put an end to crime and end most military conflicts, but all they do with their superpowers is play football. In school leagues, no less. 

What's more, despite the supernatural adversaries they face, our heroes never, ever lose a match that matters. Not a single one! They go from no-hopers without even a full team to national champions against unprecedented opposition with absurd magical powers without once losing. If they concede goals, someone's strong feelings will come through in the end and win them the match in a montage of goal-scoring. For something based on sports, these anime really don't show the glorious ups and downs of close competition, but instead teach the Japanese youth that if you want it hard enough, and put yourself through enough stupid yet painful training, the sincerity of your emotions will overcome lack of talent or years' preparation - or, indeed, such dishonest measures as imitating others, over-analysing their skills rather than being intuitive and of course doping, because that's how sports really ought to be. Reality is sobering afterwards, but of course, reality doesn't have giant flaming pegasi rampaging across the sky because the goalkeeper and two close friends have rushed out past midfield. 

And it's the sheer absurdity that is so fun. Matching it is a cast of truly outlandish characters. The main team has its misfits - the giant lummox of a boy, the tiny little one with pin-eyes, the creepy one nobody notices and more than its share of very pretty ones - this is, I should probably mention, one of the great favourites of fujoshi at the moment who gleefully ship the young boys together - and their opposition match their silliness. The schools they face tend to be themed in the great tradition of enemies of the weak in most Japanese shows, with schools where all the kids are ninja, schools where they are all otaku and, ultimately, one where they are themed like Greco-Roman gods. 

On the way, generally the boys will come up against some personal hurdle, then have a match where they get crushed only for inspiration to strike and the hurdle to be overcome to win the match. It’d be irritating presented many other ways, but the conviction and lack of gall has a winsome charm and the appeal of the cute designs and bright colours are hard to resist. 

These 26 episodes, covering the 'football frontier' are but the opening chapters of an extremely long anime. From the looks of it, there will be a lot of turnover in the main team - already there are so many new members, from childhood friends to former rivals, that many of the characters are stuck on the subs bench (including clearly the best pretty-boy, young Handa), and I've seen plenty of advertising media with entirely different line-ups. It's something of a marvel to me that Takeuchi Junko not only has enough time to do all the work she has for Naruto, but as well as taking on the dubbing for Gumball, has the lead role here as Endou, too. I suppose with the end of Reborn! she had a little more time, but c'mon...Naruto alone ought to fill most schedules. She's prolific on a whole new level. 

Inazuma Eleven is easy, brainless watching, but that's a big part of its appeal. I enjoy its simplicity and straightforward silliness, and I like the designs and vague homoeroticism around the whole thing. I shall stick with it, and add it to the long list of incredibly long-running shows I watch...though very possibly it will stall just like all the others and I'll crawl through it over years and years!

Plus…it’s slightly strange, but I genuinely was wondering until I watched this what OLM were up to these days. 

Stitch! The Movie (2003)

Well, after watching Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch, it made sense to also check out Stitch! The Movie, which as I said in that review, actually came first, in 2003. Made during a period of unrest in Disney’s television department when the animators for the television shows went to Disney Channel while Disney MovieToons became DisneyToon and became part of Disney Feature Animation (and thus started to improve), there’s an element of confusion as to which department made this, but I strongly suspect that it was the Television Animation guys, because for one thing, it was a direct-to-video film intended to kickstart a spin-off series they were making, and for another, the quality here is much, much lower than in Stitch has a Glitch, and has Rough Draft written all over it – so it was no surprise to see them in the end credits.

Where Stitch has a Glitch was impressive for a sequel, there is little impressive here. The movements are stilted, jerky and often nonsensical. The character models are loose and often unsightly – especially poor Lilo from the side. The plot itself is functional and entertaining enough, depicting how an evil rival to Jumba called Hämsterviel – Python-esque French to Jumba’s Russian – tries to get his hands on the 625 other experimental creatures Jumba created before making Stitch, as he was Jumba’s partner and financed the projects. Hulking jobsworth Gantu from the original film is hired to get these experiments, currently in capsule form, which he manages to do except that Experiment 221 was already taken by Lilo and Stitch. They kept Experiment 221 because upon hearing about these other experiments, realise that Stitch has a family – ‘cousins’, as they call them – which is rather what Lilo & Stitch is all about. Rehydrated, 221 turns out to be rather like Stitch but with the powers of electricity, and a similar vocal performance from Frank Welker, who for me will always be Megatron.

Thanks to the alliance of these two powerful creatures, Hämsterviel’s rather arbitrary plot – which he adapts from kidnapping Jumba for ransom to killing and cloning Stitch to make his own personal army – doesn’t stand much of a chance of working, especially when upon activating Experiment 625, he finds him to be a fat, lazy yellow version of Stitch with a sandwich obsession, although remarkably unlike his kin a perfect grasp of English in an annoying Brooklyn accent.

In the chaos, the various pods are scattered across Hawaii, where upon contact with water they will become evil, setting up the collection-quest scenario of the ensuing series. It’s a bit of a mess and clumsily-done, but it’s functional and at an hour long hardly outstays its welcome. It is, however, cheap and rather insipid Disney formula stuff and only for completists. Rewatch the original instead, or opt for the far superior Stitch has a Glitch.

On the upside, I know what’s going on when Experiment 221 – renamed ‘Sparky’ by Lilo – attacks in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep. So that’s a plus!

Avatar: Legend of Korra – Book 2: Spirits

I ended my review of the first season of Korra on a disappointed but optimistic note. I wasn’t very impressed by the new setting or characters, or the X-men-derived powered-citizens-vs-non-powered-citizens plotline. But none of my problems with the season, I said, meant that s2 couldn’t be much better.

And, indeed, that’s exactly what happened. I liked the second season of Korra far more than the first. The scope was far greater, the cast got a lot more to do and the new characters were much more interesting. Instead of having the insular, urban theme of the first episodes, we had a conflict that may have started and ended in Republic City, but spanned the entire planet with an emphasis on the poles. 

Rather than a dull, far over-prolonged subplot about a sports tournament, the other members of the new Team Avatar get interesting and highly individualised things to do – Asami has to revive her company with the help of the hyperactive, charismatic but devious Varrick, who is an utterly brilliant new character; Mako gets away from the whole sports-and-romance thing to be a serious investigating officer, a far better role for him; and Bolin becomes a star in the ‘movers’, an affectionate parody of badly-made early films, providing some genuinely very funny moments.

There’s great development for the rest of the cast as well. Tenzin’s brother Bumi (with the luck of the devil) and sister Kya (a stern waterbender played by Cuddy from House) force him to confront his issues about living up to Aang’s legacy, as well as accepting the fact that his father wasn’t as perfect as he remembers. His adorable eldest daughter Jinora also has a much-inflated role, going from sweet but rather dull eldest child to member of the family with the strongest spiritual power and absolutely crucial to the final confrontations. If the characters were lacking in development in the first season, they get a whole lot more now, and all are very much likeable.

The main plot of the season involves the long-standing tensions between the Northern and Southern Water Tribes. Korra isn’t an ordinary low-born girl, but actually the daughter of the rightful chief of the Northern Water Tribe, Tonraq. However, he lives as de facto leader of the Southern Water Tribe because he was exiled in disgrace after a disastrous episode involving upsetting forest spirits, with his younger brother Unalaq instead assuming leadership of the Northern Tribe – and as a result, the overall leader of the two tribes.

Struggling to understand the spiritual lessons Tenzin is giving her, Korra eventually ends up instead being impressed by Unalaq’s knowledge of spiritual matters and decides to study under him instead. Of course, Unalaq is up to no good and uses her to open an ancient, sealed portal to the Spirit World. The portal links the North and South Poles, but more importantly contains the Tree of Time, which imprisons the dark spirit of chaos Vaatu. 

In a vision of her past lives, Korra learns of Avatar Wan, the very first avatar. Ten thousand years earlier, Wan had been the first to leave behind the safety of human cities, when he was exiled for not returning the power to fire-bend to the giant lion-turtle on whose back the humans lived. He lived amongst spirits in the ‘Spirit Wilds’ and was given the gifts of element-bending by all the world’s different lion-turtles, but also happened upon the struggle between the great spirits of order and chaos Raava and Vaatu. Inadvertently helping the evil Vaatu, Wan puts his world in danger, but saves it by working with and eventually merging with Raava, and ends up imprisoning him in the tree of time and sealing away the entry. Korra opening the portal not only allows access to the Tree of Time, but with ‘Harmonic Convergence’ approaching, Vaatu may be able to break free and inhabit a vessel to create a ‘dark avatar’. You can probably tell how the rest will go, and just what epic confrontations might form the big climactic episodes of this season. It’s not highly original, but it is spectacular and much more satisfying than the oddly-motivated assault from the Equalists.

Instrumental to the final conflict, and very possibly the most important swinging element of the whole series, are the hilarious and brilliant twins Desna and Eska, near-identical despite being different genders and Unalaq’s children. They are machine-like and sarcastic, but the female twin Eska decides to date Bolin and the odd-couple relationship is priceless, especially when heartbreak is involved. With Varrick, and if you discount the final-epsiode cameo, Bumi, this season brings in some characters that are brilliantly capable of being hilarious most of the time but also formidable when need be.

It’s little details that make Book 2 so enjoyable. The backstory and how it feeds into the main storyline. The little dragonfly-bunny spirits and the very Ghibli-like world Wan inhabits. The moment at the final episode where Mako, Bolin, Kya and Tenzin represent the four elements. The return of Wan Shi Tong the librarian owl and the fate of General Zhao. Uncle Iroh! Perhaps things are a bit too convenient at the end and the idea of ‘balance’ is…well, pretty one-sided, but it all works satisfactorily.

What would I like to see in Book 3? Well, more about Toph’s legacy perhaps, and maybe more of Dante Basco’s newer role, Iroh. More from Studio Pierrot, as it was fun to see them animating half of this season. But if I’m totally honest, what I’d really like to see would be … well, for the comics being drawn by GuriHiru for the original universe to be animated. 

Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch has a Glitch (2005)

Somewhat confusingly, Lilo & Stitch 2 is not the second Lilo & Stitch film, but the third. It is, however, the direct sequel to the first film, so set before the events of the actual second film, 2003's Stitch! The Movie and its subsequent TV series, the latter still in production when this film came out. For the rather minor, odd child of the Disney feature film studio in the midst of its difficult period, Lilo & Stitch certainly gave rise to quite the franchise - and that's not even mentioning the Japanese series, the bizarre Kim Possible crossover or Kingdom Hearts.

So, before the introduction of any of the rainbow-coloured Stitch derivatives, this film retains a more simplistic, less-gimmicky core. Disneytoon were finally pushing against their bad image of churning out highly inferior sequels and this was even slated for a theatrical release until finally going direct to video...which given that Return to Neverland made it to big screens can be attributed only to nostalgia trumping quality in the world of Disney executive decisions - which I have to say are very probably correct.

For all the negative connotations that come with the idea of a Disneytoon direct-to-video sequel, the quality here is good. The animation is not feature-film Disney but it is also not an embarrassing drop or inadequate for the big screen. The casting is strong - if you can't get the original voice actress for Lilo (because she is busy voicing Lilo elsewhere, supposedly), you can't do much better than getting Dakota Fanning in instead, especially when the two are good friends and she does an excellent impersonation while retaining a few of her own recognisable quirks. Despite not directing this - and How to Train Your Dragon still a few years off - Chris Sanders returns to voice Stitch (as he seems happy to do for just about anything), with helm duties taken by future B.O.O. creator/director Tony Leondis - alongside Michael LeBash.

In a classic sequel to a sci-fi story, and as hinted in the title, here we find Stitch having a glitch. When Jumba made him, he was not quite fully charged-up, and thus he is now losing energy. As he does so, he reverts for a few moments to his original, highly destructive personality. This causes a great deal of problems for Lilo, who is trying to put together a hula dance in honour of her deceased mother, only for Stitch to periodically go feral and destroy things. Little Lilo only sees it as him being randomly cruel, and he himself can only describe it as his 'badness' coming out, so it causes much heartbreak between them, especially when he keeps causing problems on a pilgrimage to all the sites Elvis visited in Hawaii.

Eventually, everything comes to a head and Lilo realises just how serious Stitch's problems really are, seemingly too late. In truth, the ending is very clumsy indeed - how did Jumba's machine get there?? Couldn't we have had a line about the readings malfunctioning or some residual power trickling through rather than the ultimate cheese of it being declared impossible and too late only for it not to be? Especially since, y'know, this being a midquel takes most of the tension out of the situation.

But ultimately, this is better than the vast majority of Disney sequels, and the Stitch story lends itself to continuation. It's simple, its characters are well-defined and interact well - including comedy aliens and hapless love interest for Lilo's big sister - and the chance for a big ole group dance at the end is always going to be sweet. It's uncomplicated, unambitious and clumsy at the end, but it's also very cute, perfectly functional and a lot of fun. So I don't mind recommending this above just about any Disneytoon sequel I've seen except Simba's Pride, and let's face it, there are definitely rose-tinted spectacles affecting my view on that one. 

私がモテないのはどう考えてもお前らが悪い! Watashi ga Motenai no wa dou Kangaetemo Omaera no Warui! / No Matter How I Look At It, It's You Guys' Fault I'm Unpopular! / WataMote

The last of the series from the excellent last season that I picked up before it ended - and like *Magi, one that I started watching because of advertisement I saw in Japan, as well as an episode that aired as we happened to have the television on late one night - I like most others I know found WataMote hilarious and deeply sad. 

A strange little gag comic, it has quite a pleasant success story, from being effectively a webcomic for Shounen Gangan's site to appearing in print in Gangan Joker, and then finally becoming a short anime series, I'm sure it has gone further than anybody involved in its making expected. And as a short, 12-episode gag series, its limited premise is very watchable and difficult to dislike because it does not outstay its welcome.

The bittersweet premise here is that the short, plain fifteen-year-old Tomoko starts at her new high school full of hopes of becoming popular and finding others like her, who love otome games and enjoy her rather grim and often perverted sense of humour. However, her contempt for popular girls, crippling social anxiety and somewhat creepy appearance - with dark messy hair covering half of her face and heavy bags under her eyes - mean that she is largely ignored or feared. She comes up with a series of schemes to make herself more well-liked, but they are mostly either based on anime and thus not applicable to her life - like being the expressionless character - or utterly delusional, like when she thinks that she is attractive and lucky because she has sprayed a can of Coke Zero on her face, when in fact she just has ants crawling in her hair. Most of the humour comes from just how far poor Tomoko falls, how much she ends up making us cringe, like when she buys fancy panties to fit in, misplaces them, then ends up thinking she is fanning herself with her handkerchief when in fact she is waving her panties at her teacher.

Tomoko doesn't really interact with others and is cripplingly shy around her peers. She has a little brother who used to dote on her but now is a surly yet popular teen who is sadly only driven further into a kind of dull horror by his sister's attempts to be affectionate. She also has a best friend who attends another school, who has blossomed into a pretty and popular young woman, exactly the sort that Tomoko wants to be, and though their friendship remains strong, Tomoko's attempts to imitate her usually end in disaster and humiliation for her. Even the little cousin who used to dote on her, upon meeting her again, starts instead to understand her lies and her affection turns, rather more tragically than if she had been repulsed, to pity.

Of course, Tomoko's design isn't that repulsive. She is cute in her way, and towards the end, random acts of kindness by strangers towards her, especially the popular student council member, are rather lovely moments. When she gets enough rest (thanks to the sexual gratification of an otome game) she even looks cute for a while, much to her own pleasure. It's no secret that this is an anime made for the male otaku who see themselves in Tomoko and can fantasise about finding a girl like her, with such similar intersts, and helping them with their self-esteem issues, while finding their clutzy antics sweet and amusing. It's also part of the increasing number of depictions of fujoshi culture in anime - which perhaps started to boom with Lucky Star, through Chuunibyou and became dominant in Genshiken Nidaime, a pleasant melding of affectionate mockery and glorification that can appeal to male otaku and the subjects themselves.

The main criticism I've seen of WataMote is that it's just too much. The poor girl has to suffer too much humiliation, to the extent that it's painful to watch. For my money, though, despite the fact that I admittedly watched slowly, there's a decent balance, especially towards the end, between the abject misery of her existence and the rays of light that come into her daily life thanks to others.

If there's another series, I think I will watch, in hopes that things start to perk up for young Tomoko. I'd like to see more of her attempts to date boys, even if she fails spectacularly, and it would be good to see her open up to someone apart from her friend Yuu-chan. Silver Link obviously had a lot of fun here in the same vein as their work on Baka to Test, pitching their tone as something akin to a less abrasive and frenetic Shaft, utilising the same shifts in art style, pastiche and references to other anime, but with less obscurity, randomness and in-jokes - something I find to be quite well-judged here.

WataMote was perhaps too sour to appeal to everybody, and too short to truly make an impact, especially in a season of such big-hitters as Shingeki no Kyojin and Danganronpa, but for me it had just enough light and shade by the end for me to very much enjoy what it had to offer.

Turbo

If there’s a trend that has emerged as the grand tradition of the American CG feature, it’s that of the unlikely underdog transcending his nature. Little cleaning robots can alter the fate of humanity. An ant can shine as an individual. The evil mastermind can become a pleasant family man. So it’s probably not a huge surprise to anyone that eventually, a film was going to come out about a snail being able to go really, really, really fast.

This is probably the most babyish of all the films made by Dreamworks Animation, who post-Shrek have tended to go for vaguely subversive and hip (Shark Tale, Monsters vs Aliens) or – my personal preferences – relatively epic and serious (How to Train Your Dragon, Rise of the Guardians). They probably need to veer towards the latter to finally shake off the Pixar-derivative tag, with this film having a whiff of A-Bug’s-Life-Meets-Cars about it. But there’s always a different flavour to the Dreamworks comedies that is a bit cheekier than anything from Pixar and less timeless and universal. And it’s in this frame of reference that Turbo succeeds – in being something a little by-the-numbers and uninspired, but very silly and very enjoyable.

Ordinary garden snail Theo is unhappy. Though he works loyally in the tomato patch with the other snails – where death by crow is a sad everyday occurrence – at nights he watches videos of championship car racing and dreams of going fast. After a particularly bad day, he goes to watch the cars at the freeway and ends up managing to fall into the engine of a souped-up car during a street race. He is quite literally turbo-charged as he is caught by a flooding of nitrous oxide, which in an origin story worthy of Stan Lee for being half-baked and preposterous, this makes him not only able to travel at the speeds of a race car, but to gain other car features as well, like a radio, headlamp eyes and even a reversing beep.

When his brother Chet is taken by the crows, Theo chases after them and rescues him. However, he is caught by a portly Mexican who enters him into a snail race outside his run-down taco stand. When he witnesses the absurd speed of Theo – now wanting to be known as ‘Turbo’ – Tito the cuddly Mexican realises that Turbo could be the key to revitalising their business. Theo himself, though, he has grander plans than a tourist attraction, and just might be able to convince Tito to get him entered into the Indianapolis 500, where he can meet his heroes.

A very classic underdog story, there’s a lot about Turbo that is very obvious storytelling, but for me one big qualm at the centre. It seems strange for me that the film goes from ‘let’s enter a snail into the Indy 500 to get publicity for our taco stand’ to ‘Turbo must win or the whole thing is meaningless.’ Let’s face it, they got a snail into a major car race. There’s a montage depicting how Turbo goes viral online that’s crucial to the rest of the plot, which even includes a pastiche of Autotune the News-style Youtube compositions, which the composer must have had a whole lot of fun putting together. Surely that’s enough to make the taco stand incredibly famous? I can cope with the usual cartoon questions of ‘why isn’t the entire world wanting to experiment on/reproduce/analyse this incredible phenomenon? Doesn’t the way the snails are so obviously sapient change every human being’s outlook on other life on Earth?’ and suchlike, but that moral heart of the film, that the hero must actually win rather than just participating and perhaps more importantly that the unworthy rival must lose…that doesn’t sit well.

There’s not much to say technically. Obviously, a huge amount of work went into Turbo, but it’s the same animation we are constantly seeing in CG animations these days. They’ve done a lot of work making such an unappealing creature as a snail look like a friendly cartoon character, with hints at chins in the shapes of the bodies, but these aren’t the first cute snails we’ve ever seen. Ryan Reynolds and Paul Giamatti are a spirited duo, and there’s no doubt that it’s a strange thrill to hear Samuel L. Jackson and Snoop Dogg collaborating as – of all things – a couple of badass snails, though it certainly feeds the notion that those two will do any roles these days.

It probably won’t surprise or particularly delight anybody, but Turbo will entertain enough for it to be worthwhile giving it a try. As for the spin-off series…can’t say I feel much inclined to watch that any time soon. 

テイルズ オブ シンフォニア THE ANIMATION 世界統合編 / Tales of Symphonia: the Animation Sekai Tougou-hen / United World

Symphonia is the Final Fantasy VII of the Tales Of series. Possibly not the most fun to play nor with the best graphics, characters or writing, but the most iconic and memorable, and the one that I personally enjoy the most, in part because I enjoyed it so much when it was the newest RPG around. It never attained the universal acclaim of Square's big hit, amongst RPG fans its popularity has always been high.

It's also a good time to be a fan. The HD remake, including the dodgy sequel, is soon to be released, and in Japan, that meant we could enjoy promotional campaigns in various shops and restaurants, including some lovely desserts in Namja Town I didn't want to eat because they were decorated with the characters' faces. (No such qualms for Tales of the Abyss's Mieu - stab stab stab!)

And a few days ago, the complete blu-ray set of these OVAs came out. I remember being somewhat disappointed back when the project was announced that there were only going to be four episodes, but it turned out that these were just the first part of a larger project that spanned five years, ultimately resulting in eleven episodes, each close to twice as long as the episodes of a television anime, so there was quite a long time for the story to be explored. I’ve already written my thoughts on the previous two chapters, but now I’ve finished the third and final part.

And I was very pleased, because this is a story I very much like, populated by characters I really love. Genis is one of my favourite characters in video game history, and I loved how the final episodes made him seem more the heart and soul of the series rather than Lloyd thanks to his friendship with Mithos. That isn't to say I don't like Lloyd as a protagonist, who is a kind, loving and endearing soul very capable of kicking some butt when needed. Presea the axe-weilding little girl I will always remember, and motherly Raine with her daft Japanese name of 'Refill' (to go with her little brother 'Genius') has a very funny intense side. Sheena is a character type I don't usually like but won me over, and even ridiculous lunk Regal is likeable, as by the end is Zelos when it becomes obvious his swagger is just a front. There's a lot of hatred for dojiko Colette, but she doesn't grate on me. Then the classic badass Kratos fills that role probably better than any other I can think of.

The story evolves neatly from a small-scale story about a young girl who from infancy is told she is a 'chosen one' who will become an angel to uncovering a conspiracy involving that old anime chestnut of using people as a vessel to revive a dead but very powerful individual. Stopping this involves travelling between worlds, each of the heroes' allies revealing the painful secrets of their pasts and some fantastic magical powers. There's a hint of one of those anticlimactic stories where the bad guy gets what they want only for things not to work out as they had hoped, suggesting that even without the intervention of the heroes, the plan would never work, but Yggdrasil would clearly have ended up punishing the world without intervention. The anime does a good job of taking the most salient and iconic parts of the long game and other than a slow start pacing it very well so that the whole story is satisfying and works primarily through the feelings and desires of its cast.

And UFOtable most certainly stepped up their game for these animations. Arguably the ultimate effect is that the studio ended up losing relevance, this and other OVAs meaning they only managed to produce one weekly series in the past few years - the high-impact Fate/Zero - but I have the feeling that despite it being a bit of an obscurity in the West beside the big series that come out every season, the OVAs were quite a hit in Japan. And the fact is that it looks beautiful - the production values are high and the already rather lovely character designs look fantastic in motion. There's a little of the problem Sword Art Online had with characters of opposite genders looking rather too similar when the framing is very tight on faces, with Genis and Presea as well as Colette and Mithos looking uncannily like one another at times, but that simply carries over from the game and I actually find the resemblances rather cute.

The fact is that this is fanservice, and I was more or less guaranteed to like it as soon as it became clear the whole game wasn't to be crammed into four episodes. I love the characters and setting and all the other related media, including the manga. But it's not churned out with no effort - it has been done with care and high production values, and I was very impressed throughout. And if there's more to come with Lloyd and Genis - and even Emil - I will be very eager to watch it, even if like the last few episodes here, there's difficulty finding fan translations, because after all the active fansub groups six years ago aren't necessarily the same ones active today.

铁扇公主 / Tiě shàn gōngzhǔ / Princess Iron Fan

This 1941 feature film continues my delving into the history of animation. Released in the same year as Dumbo, and four years before Momotarou: Umi no Shinpei, it is Asia’s very first animated feature film, produced as a direct reaction to Snow White and undertaken by the Wan brothers during the Japanese occupation. Apparently released on January 1^st, it is the fourth ever animated film to be made for theatrical releases that is entirely in traditional cel animation, after Snow White, Pinocchio and the Fleischer Brothers’ Gulliver’s Travels – a sentence I’ve worded carefully to exclude Fantasia and 41-minute promotional compilation release Academy Award Review of Walt Disney Cartoons. It also excludes that various other earlier animated feature films that are realised with stop-motion or cutout animation, by which count Snow White comes in at #8.

Having seen the breathtaking advances in animation that Snow White brought, then, did China step up to deliver something equally magical? Well, not really, no. There is clearly a fair bit of effort put into Princess Iron Fan, and Momotarou isn’t really of much better quality, but it is no Disney or Fleisher classic to stand the test of time. It is in black and white, its animation techniques betray a far heavier use of rotoscoping and a far more shaky grasp of physics and timing, and while its story is a solid and interesting one, it assumes knowledge of the back-story of Journey to the West, being a retelling of one of the more memorable episodes – also covered in Damon Albarn’s Monkey and numerous other interpretations of the classic.

You may know the story, but it has its own twists: the monk Xuan Zang, often called Tripitaka in English translations, is journeying to the west in order to retrieve some Buddhist scriptures, aided by the strange supernatural beings Sun Wukong (Monkey), Zhu Bajie (Pigsy) and Sha Wujing (Sandy). 

In this version, Monkey is quite cute in a design obviously influenced by Disney, Pigsy is able to play with the laws of physics, not only transforming himself just like Monkey but even at one point flattening a giant creature and rolling it up like a carpet, and Sandy has a severe stammer. The four pilgrims’ journey is interrupted by mountains engulfed with a demon’s flames, and the only way to put them out is to use the magical fan belonging to – you guessed it – Princess Iron Fan, which is made of – you didn’t guess it – leaves.

Going to the princess’s home, they are first rebuffed in amusingly blunt fashion by one of the princess’s family members, then by the woman herself, blowing them away with her fan. Given a stone that allows him to stay rooted in place by some random monk from earlier in the journey, Monkey turns into a ladybird and gets swallowed by the princess, beating her heart from inside her body until she relents and hands over the fan. It’s a fake one, though, so next – in a variation from the story – it is Pigsy’s turn. He turns into the princess’s husband, the Bull King, and tricks her into revealing the secret of the fan and handing it over. He is tricked in turn, though, when the Bull King turns into Sun Wukong to get the fan back. The film can then proceed to a great climax with the battle against the Bull King in his bestial form for possession of the fan, which works well.

But the fact is that the execution is very clunky indeed. Using a story where characters have incredible powers and a penchant for metamorphosis lends itself to animation, but the way things are done have all the bizarreness of very early American cartoons and more. There’s no reason behind half of the neck-stretching and eye-rolling and it’s clear that they’ve often just drawn over actors’ movements without being able to preserve what the motions really mean, making this a film full of inexplicable motions, awkward pauses and sudden changes from detailed, rotoscoped movements to highly simplified flights of fancy that don’t have a good sense of flow between them.

But still, this is a very interesting historical vignette, the first direct response to Disney’s scope and ambition in another culture altogether, and it’s very possible that without its impact on Asia, there would be no Momotarou and who knows? Perhaps Osamu Tezuka wouldn’t have felt able to pursue the life he did, leading all the way to modern anime. And there are moments with a lot of charm, especially when they abandon the obviously filmed reference materials and just freely animate things like rampaging bull demons and strange firey masks in the sky.