Princess Mononoke – Theatrical Adaptation from Whole Hog Theatre

Something of a canny move for what is evidently a small but enthusiastic troupe of young actors, this theatrical adaptation of Mononoke-hime was publicised by websites like Kotaku and now has a Kickstarter to fund a further run. Personally, I knew as soon as I heard of it that I had to go. This is the first time I’ve written a review of a stage production for this animation blog, but I’ve written about live-action adaptations before – like that of Grave of the Fireflies – and after all, Mononoke-hime is central to this blog. Without my personal mission to see pretty much everything the two principal directors of Ghibli ever did, this blog would probably not exist, and without my introduction to the studio via Princess Mononoke back when it was the latest release, who knows how much longer it would have taken me to see the classics?

I went in expecting something small-scale and gung-ho. There are certain signs that a theatrical adaptation is going to be a drama-student-y ‘intimate’ production and share little with, say, last week’s viewing pleasure The Book of Mormon in terms of production values, and the tight space of the New Diorama Theatre, the fact that the driving force was clearly a keen little theatrical company rather than a big business and the mentions of puppetry tipped me off that this was going to be the sort of thing found in a little Edinburgh fringe venue rather than The Dominion. Which is absolutely fair enough – this is after all a niche project despite how ubiquitous Ghibli seem at present, with Film 4 pushing the boundary of what is a ‘Ghibli film’ even further than Nausicaä by including Hols, and the Prince Charles Cinema ready to air double-bills of the studio’s films that I will be very keen to attend (Mononoke-hime included). Besides, a small, intimate setting and experimental staging has much to be said for it, particularly for such a beloved property.

Was it a success then? Largely, yes. There was a lot here that worked excellently, but a few things that emphatically did not. Overall, I felt it something of a near miss, but what it narrowly missed was not adequacy – it narrowly missed brilliance. It landed, then, on being a very good production with some notable setbacks.

We were ushered in while two puppeteers onstage manipulated little kodama – the funny little forest spirits that are so iconic, and were as instantly endearing here as they are in the film. Up above a stage dressed to resemble trees, a small band provided forest noises with bird whistles and woodblocks. This band was absolutely one of the best things about the production – with only a handful of members (I couldn’t see, but around 5-7), they quite brilliantly performed lovely arrangements of Joe Hisaishi’s celebrated soundtrack, including the famous vocal selections. I left humming ‘mononoke-tachi dake’ to myself and would have been quite happy to pay the price of admission to see the band play the soundtrack.

The action began with the attack of the boar god Nago, and I must say that it took a while for me to start to enjoy myself. The early scenes had rather too much theatricality, with messages passed along a line in a very self-consciously representative way, one of several instances in a production with excellent puppets where a bunch of people under a sheet just didn’t cut it (even with LED eyes) and…well, the fact is that there was a very odd casting divide that was more prominent in the early scenes. The female performers – San, Eboshi, Moro, Toki, even Kaya at the start there, were all excellent. They were committed to their parts and had gravitas, yet also understood subtlety. The guys…well, they all seemed miscast. It comes, I suppose, in part from having key members of a theatrical company rather than auditioning, but none of them quite got it right. Ashitaka in particular was wrong. It wasn’t that his appearance was very different from his animated counterpart (being a gangly, pointy-faced white guy) – after all, so was San’s but she was excellent – it was more that he didn’t have the qualities of noble determination, innocence or quiet strength of Ashitaka, and came over more like he should be in a quirky student comedy. This was particularly evident when he was with Jigo (Jiko in the original), who had a similar quality. Jigo, along with Gonza, could get away with being rather younger than the character is because they are fundamentally comic, and can be hammy. Similarly, clownish Kouroku can look like he should be in the Footlights without it jarring. The trouble is it seems like every male member of the cast was chosen as a suitable Kouroku, only for them then to fill all the other parts. In the end, the only male performer who truly impressed was the puppeteer for the elk Yakul.

This hangup very much got in the way of my overall enjoyment, but fortunately once the story got going and Ashitaka reached Iron Town and the surrounding forests, things markedly improved. Beside the strong performances from Eboshi and San, the puppets began to get truly impressive – Moro in particular is lovely, taking three people to form and taking up much of the stage – plus, surprisingly, having someone growling and grunting under someone else’s speech sounded remarkably good. When Lord Okkoto also appears alongside her on much the same scale – but even larger – plus smaller wolves and boars flanking them, it is a fantastic spectacle in such a small space, and the idea to use slowly-unravelling streams of tape as rivulets of blood is inspired. The Shishigami’s iconic design translates well to the stage, including in silhouette, and an almost direct adaptation of the script – with a few token additions about the ‘Mikado’ (not sure why they decided to use that old and never-actually-accurate bit of terminology here) and the history of the Emishi (of course, strongly stated by Miyazaki to be in the story at least distinct from the Ainu) – keeps things brisk.

There are contrived performance elements that I could have done without. Half-hearted dance movements taken from drama school creative movement classes I didn’t need. Awkward clunky fight scenes including a rather old-hat Matrix dodge while a strobe flashed were Brechtian in all the wrong ways. People under sheets, whether boar gods, groups of shadowy apes, streams or giant out-of-control blobs of death, never look very good, and with the latter there was a very unfortunate moment where one of the people making up the headless daidarabocchi kept going ‘Nyah’ like a very self-satisfied Japanese cat being transported along with the huge monster, which I assume was not the intended effect and made the scene absurd.

But ultimately, the quibbles I had were far outweighed by the excellent, inventive elements here, and in all honesty, I’m just delighted that some young people had the gumption, the means and the enthusiasm required to get the rights to the project, put the whole thing together and corner the market. All the best to them, and I hope they (and others) will revisit the idea again, perhaps with other films. I can imagine the right project having the impact of a His Dark Materials. We’ll see. 

Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Fans of My Little Pony

While watching the first and second seasons of My Little Pony, I made a point of staying out of the fandom. All of it. I knew the story of the show gaining traction on /co/ before exploding in popularity, and I knew of Derpy Hooves and the reasons for her strange popularity, but that was it. I didn’t know one background pony from the next, I didn’t care for fan theories or headcanons, and I certainly didn’t want to look at clop pics – pornography featuring the cast of small horses.

Well, somewhere in the middle of the third season, that changed. Except for the clop part. I went looking for discussion about some teaser images, and for speculation about Scootaloo’s home life. And somewhere along the line, I fell into it. I went to Ponychan and learned which ponies were Lyra and BonBon, and how their constantly being placed together both fuelled and later was informed by the fandom liking them as a couple. I learned how Lyra sitting a certain way led to her being characterised as idolizing human beings. I found out the fandom took Derpy’s delivery job and made her a mailpony, how her being one pony who may have said ‘Muffins!’ led to her being obsessed with them, how she is often made a companion of ‘Doctor Whooves’, officially named Time Turner, and how a small filly who looks a little like her became her daughter, Dinky Hooves. I went to 4chan’s /mlp/ and found out about their fixation with tulpae, hypnosis, hatred for those who label themselves bronies and act like ‘autists’, and of course a whole lot of masturbatory imagery, with their hatred for Rainbow Dash balanced only by their desire to, ahem, cum inside her. I found out that the pony whose argument is stopped by Cadence is the OC of storyboard artist Sibsy, who has always made herself prominent, and heard the gossip about her and MandoPony, a mandolin-playing musician who has managed to get close to cast members and supports them in their music. I’ve found out about other Pony musicians – Alex S, The Living Tombstone, Eurobeat Brony, Mic the Microphone – and became familiar with their styles. I read the prominent Tumblrs – Jappleack, Molestia, Ask-TheCrusaders, Dan vs FiM, even Sweetiepoo. I found out about news site Equestria Daily and its founder Seth’s love for the minor antagonist Trixie, and how he should go to bed. I read the comics and their acknowledgement of many of these fandom elements, and laughed at how every little thing was called ‘fan pandering’ – people were even complaining that some rainbow waterfalls at the end of ‘Sleepless in Ponyville’ must have been a reference to the creepy song and later melodramatic fanfic ‘Rainbow Factory’.

I took a particular interest in the very early fandom, mostly annoyed by the fact that Know Your Meme tried to suggest that without some Cartoon Brew posts, 4chan would never have taken an interest in the new show, when there are numerous threads archived/screencapped that show conversation was already blooming markedly before that. I read older generations’ thoughts on Lauren Faust’s very first mention of the project, and laughed heartily at how one of the very first to have a very enthusiastic reaction was called ‘GoldenClopper’, a name that now means something entirely different.

In short, I become well-informed. Very well-informed. I still consider myself only as much of a fan as I am of various other series, and wouldn’t go to a convention specifically for ponies, and certainly wouldn’t call myself a brony (nor, dear anons, a Ponyfag or indeed a ‘clopnigger’, do excuse the slur), but I must admit I’ve spent a lot of time on this, now.

And so I came across ‘BronyCon: The Documentary’, later retitled as you see above. The project was initially a small-scale kickstarter, but somewhat predictably blew up with the money of notoriously enthusiastic and profligate Bronies and became a feature-length project very much in the vein of Trekkies. While that covered a phenomenon that has lasted a generation, now, though, this attempted the same with a fandom based on developments of just over two years, and a few dozen episodes. Nonetheless, thousands of people attend these conventions, and there are certainly stories to tell.

Again, much like Trekkies, the Bronies documentary follows a few individuals to three different conventions in different countries, interspersing their narratives with interviews with fans and creators alike (as well as some psychologists), with cast members giving something of a commentary throughout. There’s also the advantage of music created by the fandom for the fandom and some work from gifted animators, Ask-TheCrusaders in particular supplying show-style visuals to accompany an amusing half-spoken song written by Faust, new head writer Amy Keating-Rogers and Mic the Microphone that categorizes fans and even mentions clopping. 4chan unsurprisingly gets short shrift, but with all their wailing about spaghetti (it spilling from pockets is surreal shorthand for embarrassing behaviour), I’m sure they would have wanted it no other way, and much of the time what is left unsaid is more interesting – especially regarding Faust leaving the show. She is highly honoured here, with a rather lovely animation based on an anecdote about her childhood (I think made by the people attempting an impressive hand-drawn pony animation, though that’s largely a guess) and one of the climaxes of the piece being her being presented with a huge poster of her OC, based on the fanart of Celestia in the style of the Andre the Giant ‘OBEY’ image.

Otherwise, the stories are mostly predictable and easily understood. One teenager who looks young for his 16 years has a dad who doesn’t understand his offspring, but they end up going to BronyCon together and the father's eyes are opened. One British person with Asperger’s and an unfortunate hat (bizarrely preluded by an upside-down Union Jack) overcomes his social anxiety to blossom amongst his fellow bronies in one of the more cultish moments. The Living Tombstone, isolated in Israel, travels all the way to the States to meet his friends and has a triumphant first-ever live performance with his Skrillex soundbank thumping away. I may think it’s unfortunate the rather generic and plodding remix he did of ‘Discord’ (albeit with some fantastic drum sounds) eclipsed the rather more original and honest (but far more niche) original Eurobeat version, to the extent that Eurobeat Brony was just providing vocals for Tombstone’s mid-tempo rock, but there is something touching about these people who would otherwise go entirely unnoticed having a room full of adoring fans. Similarly, it is nice seeing Faust moved by the admiration she gets, and De Lancie clearly lapping up the attention with his gorgeous Discord figurine made by Russian bronies by his side.

The whole thing is clearly self-congratulatory. The major backers and contributors of this documentary are its subject, which isn’t exactly going to lead to a critical assessment. But to take it as anything but a celebration of a strange movement is to misunderstand: this is not supposed to help outsiders understand (it only tells them they should), and if used to inform will give only a shallow view. Rather, it is giving an audience what it wants – oh dear, have I reached the conclusion it is fan pandering? – because that’s what will make them feel good. I stand apart somewhat, and wouldn’t want it any other way, but I have to say I regard these people with affection. They may be awkward, annoying and even rather smug about their place in a mass movement, but so earnest is their enjoyment and revelry that it’s really very sweet. 

Ted

Does Ted really belong on an animation blog? It’s a live-action film with its eponymous character animated. That means it actually contains a relatively small amount of animation. Why include this, but not the Star Wars prequels, which have CG-animated elements in almost every shot, or The Return of the King, with Gollum such a major part and plenty of other CG characters? Yet I have already included Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and plan to eventually include classic Tom & Jerry ‘animations’ like Anchors Aweigh. But those are presented as animated characters existing in a live-action world, as a story element or a gimmick, while Ted is more of an attempt to have its animated character appear as part of the live-action world, similar to the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars usages of CG. But the main difference I’ve fixed on is that this is contextually in the framework of a creator known for his animation – Seth MacFarlane. That’s why it’s on my animation blog.  

Not that you’ll find any other MacFarlane works here. I’ve seen a lot of Family Guy, a fair bit of American Dad and a few episodes of The Cleveland Show too. But I only like to blog things I’ve completed, and it’ll probably be a very long time before I watch an entire season of any of those shows, for despite the wild popularity of Family Guy amongst my friends while I was at uni, I’ve never liked it much. I don’t like MacFarlane’s humour or sense of timing. I find all of the shows somewhat like a bitchy, aloof Perez Hilton type looking at pop culture and American society and rolling their eyes, making little sniping comments, and it gets on my nerves. I don’t like the riffing-on-a-single-line-with-whole-scenes humour South Park picked up on. I don’t like the reliance on stereotypes and gross-out humour, which needs the cheeky Pythonesque modesty to work without coming over as vicious. And without characters I care about in the least, it all becomes dull.

So I expected to really dislike Ted, which seemed to be a surreal cartoon plot put on the big screen with Marky Mark playing the same role he always plays these days. So I was happily surprised to find I really enjoyed it. After an awkward start right out of Family Guy pastiching 80s movies, in which the punchline is that even the Jewish kid everyone beats up at Christmas bullies main character John – while getting beaten up – it all gets quite likeable. The outline is such a familiar rom-com storyline that it’s a little awkward – a beautiful, successful woman has a boyfriend wasting his life, clinging on to his childhood and continually messing up social occasions by slipping off to party, and needs to learn to grow up and stop being selfish while not losing the boyish charm that makes him so sweet in the first place – while the girl needs to learn not to force him to be a different person altogether.

The unique element, of course, is Ted himself, a magical bear brought to life in a Christmas story. This central idea is quite a funny one – what happens when the boy in the cheesy Christmas story grows up and needs to lead a real life with the magical bear who is his best friend forever and ever? Especially when the bear, who had a brush with celebrity, has grown up too, and is a disgusting sex-obsessed stoner?

The film succeeds on three counts: firstly, it doesn’t make its rom-com structure the figure of mockery. What would have killed this for me would be it to be wryly poking fun at the tropes it’s relying on – it takes its love story seriously and thus, while unoriginal, it works. Secondly, it’s genuinely funny – the jokes are hit-and-miss and sometimes go too far, but by and large it’s extremely funny, especially with its early-80s nostalgia, particularly where it comes to Flash Gordon. It also relies on its animation heritage in some silly little side-jokes that seem surprising stylistically outside of animation, like the final punchline about the fat kid growing up, or the only fart joke in the film that shouldn’t have been cut, where three diners have an extreme reaction to it. Sometimes there are awkward moments where a random side-reference is put in (like the one to The Wall) where if you get it, you have a little chuckle, but in the cinema at least become quite aware that a lot of people around you didn’t understand and are just a bit confused and uncomfortable, but at least MacFarlane doesn’t string out these asides into painful sketches, and they’re kept tastefully-timed. Finally, it succeeds in actually presenting an interesting dilemma by showing both sides of John’s life as appealing. The ‘grown-up’ side may have been a little dull and passionless in a social sense, but it involved a sweet love life, money and a future. The ‘kid’ side was self-destructive, idiotic and led to a miserable dead-end single life, but the parties were amazing and the seize-the-day mentality led to great experiences. The balance was surprisingly deftly-woven, and made John very sympathetic.

It wasn’t perfect, and its flaws were large and obvious, but Ted was at the very least much funnier and much more heartfelt than I had expected, so ranks as one of the better cinema surprises of the past few years. 

Hatsune Miku Live Party 2011: Sapporo (screening)

Screened tonight on a high-quality projector in one of London’s West End Odeon cinemas, with horribly inflated ticket prices, was the Sapporo part of the 2011 Mikupa, which was the rather shorter of the two concerts on the Blu-ray, with a much quirkier set-list. I would have rather watched the Tokyo set, being longer and having more of my favourite songs (‘Trick and Treat’, ‘Kokoro’ and ‘Meltdown’, for starters – and one companion’s beloved ‘Double Lariat’), but hey – it’s bizarre enough as it is that one of the big chains put on a night for such a niche audience, and it’s not as though I can’t have a private screening of the Tokyo one for friends with one of my projectors (probably during a con) so I’m certainly not complaining. It was quite the novelty to be able to watch something like this in a cinema.

And the novelty had made people make an effort – the cinema was full of girls in cosplay, guys trying to imitate that awful Japanese habit of doing nothing for the whole concert but pulsing their glowsticks into the air, and anime fans.

Kicking off with ‘Kocchi Miute Baby’ put us in a giggly mood, because we always associate it with the infamous Project Diva videos of Kaito swapped in for Miku and doing some very disturbing moves. We then sobered up for a series of rather less well-known songs like ‘Albino’ (always fun to watch the changes between 3/4 and 4/4 confuse people with glowsticks – but Miku got some pretty wings for a few seconds!) and a great rendition of Hachi-P’s ‘Musunde, Hiraite, Rasetsu to Mukuro’, which I never thought I’d see in one of these concerts. The twins became the focus for a while, with a Rin song I didn’t know (‘Iroha song’ – I’d have preferred ‘Gekokujou’) and then the Daughter/Servant of Evil pair, which I’ve always disliked – shrill, annoying songs with horrible stop-start dynamics. Luckily, there was the treat of the night to follow, in my eyes, at least – Len singing ‘Fire Flower’, one of my very favourites of his. Miku returned for a few songs, most notably the crowning evil of Project Diva ‘The Singing Passion of Hatsune Miku’, and then it was Ruka’s turn. Thankfully, the choices were good – ‘RIP=RELEASE’, my favourite of her songs, and ‘Ruka Ruka Night Fever’, which I like despite preferring ‘Rin Len Romantic Night’. Then it was Miku again until the end – a nice segue from ‘PoPiPo’ into ‘Hello Planet’, two fun tunes, and fan favourites like ‘Melt’ and ‘Yellow’. The highlight for her was a beautiful version of ‘Though the Song has No Form’. Rin returned for a duet with ‘Colorful X Melody’ and it all ended surprisingly on a (lovely) song I didn’t know, ‘Starduster’.

This was not a set of crowdpleasers, which was a bit of a surprise. I expected more Ryo, and certainly more Livetune. At least a bit of Travolta-P and some OSTER. ‘Melt’, ‘PoPiPo’ and the Evil songs were really the only ones I expected everyone there to know, with most knowing ‘Kocchi Miute Baby’ and ‘Yellow’. But no ‘World Is Mine’, ‘Butterfly on my Right Shoulder’ or ‘Love is War’, no ‘Kokoro’ or ‘Packaged’. I was quite happy, and very pleased to discover some great new tracks – but I could tell a lot of the audience weren’t getting what they hoped for, a fair few of them probably hoping to more or less hear the Project Diva soundtrack or even the Supercell album. I was pleased they tried different things and went for pleasing the more hardcore fan, but I can’t help but think the atmosphere would have been better had they put in a few more obvious choices. I’d even have loved to have seen a ‘Matryoska’, though ‘Musunde, Hiraite’ was damn good.

Beyond the choices for the concert itself, though, it was fairly weird just seeing the concert footage. Essentially, the cameras treated the big screens as though a real Miku were there, with shots and direction to match. A better idea would have been to actually get the original footage and interpolate it where the director wanted close-ups, because as anyone who’s tried to film a TV knows results aren’t always good. Up close, there were obvious problems with angled edges (though more anti-aliasing would only be a bad idea), the image wasn’t very clear and there was even some tear at the start.

It was good having live band, and these clearly were interpretations by musicians playing live, which was great. Shame the drummer didn’t make the most of the little swing part in ‘Kocchi Miute Baby’ and of course the beat from ‘Rolling Girl’ was never going to survive intact, but it was a shame there was as much overdubbing as there was, and more than once a cymbal was hit with no sound, which made me wonder just how live things really were. That said, it’s much better having musicians to look at than just the screen, and they were a fun, cheery bunch.

To sum up, this was an odd experience – watching a distant concert up on a big screen in a cinema – and I wouldn’t repeat it (though I’d definitely go to a live, something I very much doubt we’ll get in the UK despite a petition). The song choices were strange, which was good for me, but probably could have been better for a lot of others. And the Tokyo version was clearly superior. But this was a novel way to spend an evening, and I very much enjoyed it.

Cheer up, Len! It was pretty good overall!

火垂るの墓/Hotaru no Haka/Grave of the Fireflies - Live action version

(This review may not make sense without first reading my review of Ghibli’s version)

In my review of Studio Ghibli’s Hotaro no Haka, I pondered how the movie would have worked if it were made in live action. Having now seen the recent non-animated adaptation of the same novel, I think I was right in my conclusions then – while it is perhaps easier to empathise with live-action actors, there are certain elements that worked better in animation because they were no more or less realistic than everything around them, whereas here there were occasional jolts of unwanted Brechtian V-effekt purely because the special effects weren’t realistic enough to be believed.

But I couldn’t tell you which version of the story is superior, because both have considerable merits. However, I would say that the animation tells the core story with more brevity and simplicity, and it was the live action piece that felt like it was complimentary, rather than the other way around. But who knows? Maybe I’d’ve felt differently if I’d seen this version first. Indeed, if I’d read the novel, perhaps I’d think something else entirely.

While a lot of visual images seem to purposely echo the Ghibli version, this is a very different film. For one thing, the narrative framework and the first half of the 250-minute drama are centred not on young Seita-kun and Secchan, but on the relative who takes them in when they lose their mother, but whose selfishness eventually drives them away. It’s an interesting and daring idea, to tell the tale from the perspective of the least sympathetic character in the piece, and keeping her unsympathetic even though we can understand her motives a little more here, but it works well. We see the aunt’s hardships, trying to feed six children and her brother-in-law, whose physical handicap keeps him from the fighting, but we also see her merciless decision to protect her own and drive out the children who need her. She is more obviously conscious of her failings and her callousness here, and she is given some degree of redemption towards the end, but that does not change her behaviour.

However, the shift of focus towards her makes sense, because the actress who portrays her (Matsushima Nanako from Ringu) gives a brilliant performance, dignified and yet so very hateful; the way she uses silence or simply ignores the beseeching words of her daughter or brother-in-law is chilling, especially when we know that the façade isn’t perfect and have seen her at her most emotional on other occasions.

But this Japanese dorama, which I believe was made for TV, suffers many of the same problems that blight British made-for-TV dramas: one or two superior performances surrounded by a supporting cast who really aren’t up to the same standard (the young actors in particular), a budget that makes directors ambitious but doesn’t get the special effects, cinematography or set construction to the level they need to be (the CG fireflies in particular, despite being one of the most important motifs of the movie, look very poor – resulting in the aforementioned V-effekt), music that knows no restraint and as a result smothers powerful scenes in molten cheese...and an inflated sense of self-importance that here results in not only the excessive running time but also a horribly vulgar montage run under the credits, where shots of Setsuko and Seita are juxtaposed with a lot of children from the Middle East, presumably Iraq and perhaps Afghanistan, with a moralising message reminding us that today, there are still many young war victims like the ones in the story. It’s unnecessary, it’s patronising and it’s inappropriate. The message isn’t wrong, of course, but evening drama shows are not the kind of forum for glib politics.

But this doesn’t change the fact that the deeply sad story is one of the best ever told about war, one of the most tragic and one of the most moving. Even though the men who die in the war are featured in this version (they are absent in the animated version), it is the fact that the film brings home the way that tragedy does not just happen on the battlefields that makes it so potent. While I personally found myself feeling more sorry for the younger-looking Secchan and the Seita-kun driven to worse extremes of petty crime in the Ghibli version, whose acting I never felt to be questionable or excessive, I’m quite sure that there are a lot of people who will find it much easier to feel for real children than drawings. Both media are equally valid, and I can only advocate seeing both.

Would I ever have seen this if not by association with anime, though? Well, no…but that would have been my loss.

(originally written 5.11.06)

デトロイト・メタル・シティ / Detroit Metal City

It’s gratifying when an anime comes along that is completely different from everything else around it, but still becomes a big success. Detroit Metal City only ran for 12 episodes, each just 15 minutes long, and yet it swept through fandom and hit a note with English-speaking anime enthusiasts. Happily, though, the reason it was such a big success isn’t just because it had a good concept or subject, but because the humour in it is just sheer brilliance.

Negishi is a timid, awkward country boy who longs to play his twee romantic pop to a fashionable audience. Yet somehow, he has ended up in Detroit Metal City, a death metal band who sing about rape and death, wear corpse-paint and perform extreme live shows involving a short, fat man in bondage gear getting abused. Negishi’s life becomes a struggle to balance his wild onstage persona with his real, timorous self – and yet when he’s needed, it only takes a quick change for him to become Krauser II, Emperor of Hell. So why do his problems only get worse?

Based on a seinen manga, everything can be more extreme than is found in the majority of anime comedy, more sexually explicit and more unpleasant. But it’s also clever, with Negishi getting into a lot of bizarre but brilliant situations and the surreal humour piling on top of itself to a great climax. It’s the contrast between reality and the onstage persona that makes this so much more enjoyable than, say, Metalocalypse.

I didn’t have much of a qualm with the music not actually being death metal. It was pretty heavy, growly and shrieky, really not that far off, say, some of In Flames’ songs. They wanted to shift soundtrack units too, of course.

I also watched the live-action adaptation, which doesn’t quite match up to the anime, mostly because the acting was that little bit too broad, the actors trying too hard to be funny so that they ended up just being a bit annoying. That said, it was one of the better Japanese live-action films I’ve seen, and Tetrapod Melon Tea were so perfect that it was hilarious. The way the singer runs is just spot-on. Despite overacting and not really looking quite right as Krauser, I eventually got behind the guy who was L in Death Note as Negishi and was impressed by his singing voices…he just went too far with things like his dancing and the run he did (pay more attention to the TMT guy!), so that it was too exaggerated to believe. The humour was toned down too, which I suppose wasn’t a surprise, but a bit of a shame. On the other hand, I liked how they expanded the mother’s role, the president was perfect, Aikawa was cute, and I much preferred the way Jack Ill Dark was presented here. Not only did they get someone of the stature of Gene Simmons to play the part (KISS being a big influence on the anime, as you may be able to tell from its title), but the competition between the two vocalists and its resolution was much more believable than in the anime, as well as making The Emperor of Metal actually seem formidable.

The mere fact that there was a real-life Metal Buffalo made me very happy too.

I’m a little sad there isn’t more of this anime. There’s more manga, and other than a poor first chapter in which Negishi tries to get laid by a groupie, which doesn’t fit with his character through the rest of the series, it seems just as good as the animation it inspired, so I shall keep reading. An extremely fun show.

(originally written 11.5.09)

蟲師 / Mushishi

Mushishi, the story of an itinerant man in pre-Westernised Japan who meets people whose lives are affected by supernatural entities and offers help and advice, has been a critical and commercial success story, albeit no smash hit. Slow-paced, stately and serious, as well as occasionally really very beautiful, it made the transition from Afternoon manga to anime, and then to a live-action film. It is certainly a series with a great deal of unique character, but for all that it is pleasant to see an intelligent, mature series become a hit and win numerous awards in Japan, I could not bring myself to feel very strongly about Mushishi. I like it, but I am a long way from loving it.

Ginko is a mushishi, a master of the ‘mushi’, which are somewhat analogous to bacteria, with magical properties. Every episode, with a few exceptions dealing with his past, Ginko encounters someone whose life has been deeply affected by interaction with mushi, from people who can’t hear through to people who have seen family members resurrected as babies, or given birth to children who are growing at abnormal rates and clearly are not quite human. Even had it not become his vocation, Ginko himself would have a life very much affected by the presence of these strange godlike but with some exceptions unintelligent entities, for a childhood incident left him with white hair, one eye (the other is covered by his fringe) and an unnatural propensity for attracting mushi, which he has to keep at bay with smoke from special cigarettes.

Thus, the series is extremely episodic, only Ginko appearing every week, and even then, not always as an adult. Even towards the very last episodes, I expected a more continuous storyline to emerge, but it never happened. Thus, it joins the likes of Jigoku Shoujo and Shinigami no Ballad for being extremely episodic, which gives a slow, strange and distancing feel to the overall series - especially since unlike the former, there is no recurring cat-and-mouse side story, and unlike the latter, the show runs for a full 26 episodes. Ginko is likeable, a very laid-back and stoic character despite all the situations he finds himself in, but the problem is that ultimately it’s very hard to engage with the world of the story, or the one link we have to it.

And the problem with the concept overall is that there’s really very little inherent drama to the idea of mushi. This is essentially a medical drama, only because the diseases are supernatural, the symptoms can be anything. While occasionally this makes for some brilliant stories with the kind of moral dilemmas that can only be posed in hypothetical worlds – whether a man can kill something he has grown to love as a child, or sacrifice himself to give life to another, or give away his very memories – it also has the problem of always being easily solved by Ginko naming the mushi and claiming the problem can be undone with some special potion. At least real medical dramas require meticulous research, and even there, the need always arises to take the interpersonal dramas of recurring characters further in order to keep an audience engaged.

So while Mushishi was sometimes breathtakingly beautiful and fascinating to watch, at other times it was slow, utterly lacking in tension and as a result uninteresting. The animation varied from excellent to plain lazy and character design got rather repetitive. It was an anime to take out occasionally to admire, like a fine jewel, but looking too often only throws tiny flaws into focus, and eventually becomes boring.

However, if I thought that the solution was to bring many of the stories together, linking them in a coherent overall story, the live-action adaptation taught me that a whole lot more development would then be necessary, for that is precisely what the filmmakers decided to do. The result is a messy, uneven and overlong film that I’m sure would be very confusing for the uninitiated. Taking the time to develop each story at least builds a world. Rushing through them only highlights how necessary a central plot is to a feature-length film, and without one, there exists only a single actor, who for all his reputation for coolness simply did not have the charisma to make Ginko interesting for two hours.

(Originally written 28.02.10)

おたくのビデオ/ Otaku no Bideo / Otaku no Video

This 1991 OVA by Gainax, back when they were still highly experimental, is a bit of a mini-landmark amongst ‘otaku’, fans who obsess about a subject to the point of excluding all else. This is because it focused on them - it put the subculture centre-stage. It’s a strange little two-part OVA, alternating a fanciful animated retelling of Gainax’s history – with plenty of artistic licence – with mockumentary interviews with real-life otaku, painting them in the worst possible light: cosplayers are ashamed of their pasts but can’t go to work without a Gundam helmet stashed nearby, porn obsessives masturbate on camera, a gaijin otaku’s dialogue is dubbed over with really over-the-top praise for Japan, and otaku come over as the lowest form of life on the planet, just under the sea slug. It’s the satirical juxtaposition of silly, posturing otaku-takes-over-the-world-and-yet-sticks-with-his-buddies idealism and an exaggeratedly grim reality that makes the concept work, and because it’s so brief, it doesn’t matter that there’s not a whole lot to develop; Otaku no Video doesn’t overstay its welcome.

A few things have changed in 16 years, and not just because VHS is obsolete, posters on an Otaku’s wall would likely be less Galaxy Express 999 and more Gantz, and cosplayers more likely to shun Lupin III to embrace Loveless; there’s also things like the Internet’s presence on an Otaku’s daily life, and increased numbers of otaku meaning increased segregation between subsets (how many gun otaku mix with anime otaku now? Even the crossover between sci-fi and anime otaku grows exponentially less prominent). But nevertheless, the similarities between Otaku no Video and Genshiken are remarkable, down to the unlikely parts (how attractive female members of the club (and the main character) are, for example, how well they pull off cosplay), despite what is almost a generation gap.

Hilarious in concept, quite funny in execution, Otaku no Video is an amusing self-referential vignette, as well as a bit of a vanity project for Gainax (who enjoy pointing out just how good the Daikon IV animation is). It is well worth watching for anyone who identifies with otaku culture, but perhaps too bizarre for the uninitiated.

(originally written 28.04.07)

Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

“I grew up watching ‘Who framed Roger Rabbit’. It’s easy to underestimate it, to expect silly slapstick rather than the clever pastiche of hardboiled noir detective fiction that you get – mixed up with numerous clever cartoon references. It’s a wonderful film with a great central story, but real laughs are still to be had seeing Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny sharing the screen (in an excessively equal way that has become somewhat notorious). The Donald vs. Daffy piano duel is still comedy gold…even if they’ll never convince me Donald says ‘nitwit’.” - Dec 9 2003.

There’s not really a whole lot more to say about Roger Rabbit, the 1988 milestone for comedy animation. It may seem commonplace to reimagine childish things in a serious way these days, but Roger Rabbit’s cynical and gritty melding of two very different worlds is pure brilliance – and executed superbly. Not only did it treat cartoons in a way that was at once affectionate and mocking, it helped Disney revive from its major slump and produce the string of hit films of my childhood. It has also proved enduringly iconic: the Jessica Rabbit character is instantly recognisable to, I suspect, almost the whole of the English-speaking world, and considerably further than that too.

Somehow, it also gives me quite a thrill that Disney did all the animation here – albeit mostly hired hands in Elstree rather than the core American teams (for more on that point, see my entry on The Thief and the Cobbler). The idea of Disney artists animating Warner’s Buggs and Daffy, or Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop somehow makes an animation fan like me strangely pleased. Very nearly every major Golden Age cartoon character appears (although there is a gaping lacuna where Tom and Jerry ought to be, whose animators after all pioneered the whole ‘animation and live action’ thing…well, not counting the Alice Comedies and various other early shorts…), but probably the best thing about it is that at its centre, it is not a cartoon, it’s a silly detective mystery with Bob Hoskins at the centre of it somehow making a great American private eye, and the cartoons just happen to be the gimmick that fills out the edges.

Nothing is quite like Roger Rabbit, but nothing needs to be. We already have Roger Rabbit, so what more would we need?

Live-Action Adaptation: The Last Airbender

I nearly shed a tear, I must admit it.

Not at the travesty of what M. Night Shyamalan did to Avatar: it was a bad film, but not as awful as has been suggested. Not at the politically incorrect parts dubbed ‘racebending’: I have never been too troubled about the casting, knowing the Hollywood machine is and will long remain extremely racially prejudiced, because it caters to its audience. Certainly not for the emotional high points of the film, such as stabbing a fish.

I nearly cried with laughter at the increasingly infamous scene of a whole group of earthbenders performing a long sequence of complex martial arts moves associated with element-bending…only for one puny rock to drift across the screen. Fortunately, this was the absolute nadir of the special effects in a generally good-looking film, although some inconsistent CG, obvious miniatures and rickety sets will date the film very quickly.

But this was not at all a good adaptation of Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, a brave attempt by a Western company to make a series with the tone of an epic anime; other similar attempts have almost exclusively been comedic. It was not entirely successful and while I look back on it with fondness and would certainly rank it amongst my favourite American cartoons, it ought not to be forgotten that the series frustrated me almost as much as it pleased me, and a lot of episodes had me gnashing my teeth at bad pacing, annoying characters, dubious power-ups and poor world-building. But in the end I loved much more than I hated, and this film made it all look so good.

Before its release, fandom was mostly critical of the racial elements. I must say that these were not as I expected. I thought that we would see a Central/South-Asian Fire Nation, maybe some East-Asian monks and everyone else would be white. In fact, while this seems right for the Fire Nation, everyone else was a cosmopolitan mix – although of course all young heroes were white. Dev Patel is an anti-hero, of course, but still virtuous, and we ought not to forget that the original casting had lily-white Jesse McCartney in the role. The Earth Kingdom seemed predominantly East-Asian and Aang himself had an appearance suggesting mixed white and Asian heritage. Indeed, while he is a long way from the series’ Aang, far less playful and yet still seeming even younger, and not so much of a pretty-boy, this ‘Aang’ (‘Ong’? One of many odd pronunciation changes) fit his badly-developed role well, performing acrobatics skilfully and delivering stilted lines with enough directness to just come over as naïve, not wooden.

Unfortunately, his co-stars were not so good. Worst was the guy from Twilight as Sokka. I assume that he was cast purely to try and draw in teenagers, because he was so, so wrong for the part. Quite seriously, if I didn’t already know the plot and world of Avatar, I would have expected a twist to come later on that revealed he was a robot or emotionless alien. His performance was just that flat. And it’s a real shame that apart from one amusing moment where Katara’s water-bending goes wrong at just the wrong moment, all comedy was removed from his character. Not even an extremely pretty Yue whose performance was excellent given the terrible material, could excuse the entirety of her relationship with Sokka being told to the audience by Katara’s voiceover.

Katara herself fit quite well, looking more formidable towards the end, but as yet she has nothing of the strength or warmth of her cartoon counterpart. Dev Patel as Zuko was worse, and he apparently worked in cahoots with the hairdressing department to give us a Zuko who was based entirely in appearance and performance on Ross from Friends. I really could not see past this. Every emotional outpouring seemed to directly channel David Schwimmer.

Uncle Iroh was a rather cool hawklike Asian man, and while there’s much to be said for hidden strength found in a fat, affable old man, this new formidable interpretation worked nicely. I can’t help but think he would make a better Ozai, though, for the man cast in the role looked like some office clerk.

The plot could have worked, as an outline, but it was all so rushed and distant, events unfolding with barely a reaction shot to give the impression the characters were in any way involved. There was no reason to care for any of the characters, and making a plot point of Aang being emotionally repressed is hardly a way to make us sympathise with him. The climax had its moments – some waterbending looked great, and Aang’s moves occasionally made him look incredible, but the crisis of the moon spirit lasted all of a minute, after which the battle was clearly decided, leaving no tension for Aang’s Avatar State moment, which while impressive did very little of any effect.

No tension, no emotional attachment to characters, no climax and no development made for a dull, detached film.

I sincerely hope that the sequel does not get made, and look forward to the new animated spin-off.