ジーニアス・パーティ / Genius Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thundercats (2011) - season 1 part 2

 As it turns out, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t well-reported – indeed, you can still find a lot of sites online that announce this second half of the first season as ‘season 2’ – but Thundercats did what quite a few US TV shows do, and split a single season into two halves of the year. So everything I said in my impressions of the first 13 episodes of season 1, including ‘was that it?’ ought to be taken with a proviso: it seemed at the time it was, but in fact, there was more to come – the same number of episodes and a cute little comedy short featuring Snarf and baby Lion-o.

On the other hand, that might now be it, sad to say. The show’s toys haven’t sold very well (I picked up my Wilykat figure cut to a pittance) and currently the show is in limbo as Cartoon Network have not renewed it. They’d rather air such wonders as Annoying Orange, which presumably has the advantage of costing next to nothing, while I doubt Studio 4˚C come cheap. There’s a thin line between ‘not renewed’ and ‘cancelled’, so that may well be curtains for new Thundercats.

I’ll support the show when the complete series is released on DVD over here. But I’m not sure there’re any plans for that.

It’s a real shame, because this second half of the season was a big improvement – big enough that I wish it had aired at the same time, or had some of its better episodes in that lull during the first season where the cats were sort of drifting about without an aim. It’s unfortunate that it came too late for many viewers – even I put off continuing watching until months after the airing dates – and that the show has been so poorly marketed. I would love it to continue.

The new episodes brought with them many elements reminiscent of a second season. Lion-O is given trials by the other cats in a nod back to the original series, their efforts are focused on a collection quest (power stones for the Sword of Omens and/or the Sword of Plundarr, as well as the latter weapon itself), characters go off on their own tangents (the kittens getting episodes of their own, for example) and one of the new Thundercats from the original is introduced – Pumyra.

Pumyra was in some ways given the shaft in the original series, never really developing much of a character or distinct skills, and not even appearing in the last handful of episodes. She is more interesting here, shown as highly resentful of the other Thundercats at first, feeling she was abandoned by them. It seems for a while she was brought in earlier than Bengali or Lynx-O purely for the expedience of having a new romantic interest for Lion-O in order to avoid the love triangle between him, Cheetara and Tygra dragging on, but in the end we see a side of her that’s definitely a departure from the original.

Everything here has improved, really. The stories are a little more complex and rooted in questions of leadership and social structures as well as fights. The art stays more consistent and less often looks slapdash. The pacing is much better, with the story leading to its climax (featuring the update’s Vultureman!) after a neat build-up, and even if the collection quest is generic, it still focuses our allies and makes it feel less like they’re aimlessly wandering. Mumm-ra actually becomes a threat, too, and the flashbacks featuring him, which at first felt very contrived, actually became interesting.

If I had a problem, it was with the new character designs getting more and more babyish. They in particular get in the way of the kittens’ side-story – the original’s aesthetic worked because the designs ranged from the Thundercats – essentially humans with cat-pupils and marks on their faces – to the mutants, some of whom were basically animal heads on exaggerated human bodies. The new series has cartoony animals like the frog and squirrel the kittens meet who with their huge eyes and basically animal anatomy look like they’re from Sonic the Hedgehog, and it just doesn’t work. Which is a shame, because the kittens – always my favourites – really come into their own here. Despite some very silly magical powers (‘kleptovoyance’) and artefacts, their side-story sees them grow; they have a sad flashback (albeit not so sad as Tygra’s), and they save the day at the end – something they never did in the original. The last lines of the show are even reserved for Wilykit. They’re absolutely adorable characters, but they’re also useful here – which is a relief.

I definitely want to see more Thundercats – and I’d be happy with more of this version. I want to know what happens next, and how Lion-O would rule now, post-revolution. I want more of Wilykit and Wilykat, who are much too cute. I want Mandora and Hammerhand and Cap’n Cracker. And I especially want the Lunataks – as they were when first introduced, formidable enough to individually be a challenge to any Thundercat. And I want a DVD release so I can support the show.

But when has Cartoon Network ever given me what I wanted? 

Kid Icarus – 3DS animations

As part of the promotion for the upcoming release of Kid Icarus, Nintendo are releasing six shorts for the 3DS as part of the Nintendo Video program. I plan on writing thoughts of a few of the shorts on there, but mostly as part of their respective larger series. Kid Icarus doesn’t (yet) have one, though, and after all I’m quite excited abut the game overall, so they get their own entry – even if I have to update it over the course of six weeks, by the end of which I’ll have had the game a while. 

There are really three shorts here, each by a different studio. The first, Thanatos Rising from Production IG’s CGI wing, is a three-parter very much like a game cutscene in the Nintendo style, with bright colours, relatively simplistic textures and over-acting that I’m sure some will find very hard to bear. Obnoxious and overacted though Pit is, I find his voice pretty cute – though it goes too far in the second part with lines about blogs that presumably are an incredibly awkward translation of some Japanese pun and really don’t work in context. Basically, Medusa’s minion, the obvious showtune admirer Thanatos, turns the tables on an army coming to combat him by taking over a giant Trojan walker and attacking a town. Pit gets the gift of flight, as ever, and sets off to save the day. The main point is that Pit is adorable and looks cool, and if that’s all you’re looking for – and in a six-minute animation to promote a game, it should be – you will be satisfied here. Plus there’s something about gears that will always look awesome in 3D – and the 3D without glasses on the 3DS truly is the best kind.

The second, Medusa’s Revenge, is a single 3-minute short from Studio 4˚C, in more traditional anime style. For the first 40 seconds, it looks like 4˚C are going to be lazy and cop out with a whole lot of simple, barely moving animation made vaguely dynamic by camera movements – and Pit is drawn so stumpy and young-looking that he almost looks out of PoPoLoCrois. But while it’s very simple in terms of plotline – Palutena and Medusa exchange threats and Pit fights his way to her – somehow it makes the hairs on my neck stand up and comes across as very cool. I’d like it to be included in the game as an alternate intro, even. True, there’s quite a bit of laziness (a whole lot of those monsters are copied and pasted) and some of the 3D at the start is a bit overdone and flat, but I really liked this nugget. And somehow, perhaps because they were unused to the process and cranked it up too far, I actually got the best 3D effects from this film I have in any since the recent boom. It’s the first time in ages it’s seemed like anything is coming out of the screen at me. So kudos for that.

The third, Palutena’s Revolting Dinner is a two-parter from – of all people – Shaft. I was wrong to expect their trademark quirkiness, though: beyond the daft premise – Palutena accidentally brings some carrots to life and has problems with them – it’s really remarkably ordinary and predictable, which is frankly the opposite from what I’d expect from Shaft. They have anime on the more ordinary side of course – just look at REC – but they actually got Shinbou Akiyuki to helm this. The way the story builds to its chaotic ending felt quite Pani Poni Dash!, but otherwise it struck me as a pedestrian way to deal with the property.

That said, the art is really cute in it – though Pit looks a bit young – and it’s fun seeing Palutena uncomfortable, or with a big squash on her head. I just had hoped for something cleverer and a little less like any given anime for small children. 

Thundercats (2011) - season 1 part 1

I was actually very excited about the Thundercats revival, despite the He-Man reboot and the Michael Bay Transformers films being properties I’d really rather not talk about. Thundercats was a good candidate for an update, having iconic characters and a strong world but a lot of bad writing and cheesy acting. There had been rumours about feature films and live-action versions for as long as there was an internet fandom – indeed, rather longer than that.

And then suddenly it was happening. And it got better - just as the original was made by ex-Topcraft staff in Japan, the new version would be made by Studio 4°C, who were behind a favourite series of mine – Mahou Shoujotai Arusu – and had cut their teeth on animations for a Western audience with Transformers Animated. The first designs released showed a boldly different aesthetic that appealed to me, and when the first previews brought with them glimpses of my favourites Wilykit and Wilykat, looking younger than their original incarnations but so, so cute, I was sold.

Today I watched the first season’s finale, after just 13 episodes, and was left feeling what I had felt since the end of episode 3 – was that it?

Like many reviewers, I was impressed by the first double-episode and the promise that came with it. The Thundercats world had been completely reset (though some fans liked to speculate this was a far-future version of the original series, Mai-Otome style, but that neglected the events of the last season of the original series). In this version, the Thundercats rule over Third Earth largely by suppressing the other races. However, Grune teams up with the mutant Lizardmen to embrace technology and overthrow the Thundercats. Lion-O escapes with the Sword of Omens, but his only allies are his adoptive brother Tygra, with whom he has a rivalry that is not always friendly; the headstrong cleric Cheetara; General Panthro, once Grune’s close friend and presumed dead; the street urchins and thieves Wilykit and Wilykat, their tails marking either youth or low status – it’s not yet revealed; and Snarf, now a cute mascot rather than a whiny comic nursemaid. The gang set off to find the Book of Thundera, hoping to regain what they lost, but another force has been awakened, a dark wizard known as Mumm-ra.

It’s a good set-up, but what is frustrating is that it leads nowhere. The pacing of the series couldn’t be more wrong – after the first episode we should have had a few to firmly establish the lead characters and why we should like them, but we get their adventures meeting a series of one-off supporting characters, awkward character development that often internally contradicts itself – Tygra in particular has motives and loyalties that go all over the place, while Lion-O gets lessons about humility and lateral thinking that are almost immediately contradicted – and forgettable plots that lead nowhere, while major developments happen with nonsensical brevity. For example, the gang just stumble randomly across the Tower of Omens, which Panthro had been searching for over years without success. We never really get to know any of the main characters until the very final episodes, and even then it’s all too brief and sketchy. The quest is too loose and the antagonists never seem actually threatening or to have a true goal the heroes have to prevent them achieving.

And I had hoped a 2011 version from 4°C would look nicer. It has moments of great beauty and I like the character designs, but too much just seems lazy, especially contrasted with the fluidity of Arusu. There’s one SPARTAAA moment in the final episode that is truly one of the worst pieces of animation since the 80s, which just isn’t on. The inbetweening is lazy, the editing doesn’t seem right in pacing terms and the characters frequently go off-model.

It could all be forgiven with strong plotting. Indeed, I was desperate to love it, especially with the kittens (and young versions of the main characters) so very adorable. But this was a disappointment.

There had better be a season 2. And it had better be much, much better than this.

The Animatrix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

土方歳三 白の軌跡 / Hijikata Toshizo: Shiro no Kiseki

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Shinsengumi – although admittedly I’ve never managed to get through an episode of the ultra-cheesy live action Shinsengumi! series. While Peace Maker Kurogane had a lot of flaws with pacing and maintaining interest in a story that couldn’t really sustain 26 episodes, it really gripped me with its characters and imagery. I’ve since read and watched a lot about the Shinsengumi, a much-romanticised squad of samurai who were renowned for being some of the best swordsmen of their generation, and fought proudly in the losing battle against the Meiji Restoration.

Shiro no Kiseki (a bit of a pun on the Japanese words for 'miracle' and 'trail') tells the life story of Hijikata Toshizo, a vice-commander of the Shinsengumi. Like most romanticised Shinsengumi stories, it plays up Hijikata’s bravery against the odds, the tragedy of having to live by the warrior code and…well, makes him very handsome, with consistently lovely hair. Unlike PMK, though, it plays down his reputation as a harsh, brutal leader who was a butcher both in battle and when facing opposition from within his own corps, making him much more human and heroic. It also shows him as very close to Okita Souji (here looking and speaking like a 12-year-old, even in his twenties, with a design vaguely based on his surviving photographs), a popular element of shinsengumi fiction that doesn’t stem from any historical sources except for their long acquaintance. The story would probably be hard to follow by anyone not familiar with the Shinsengumi story, and the portrayal of Hijikata as brave and heroic but also extremely compassionate, mourning the men he himself cut down for trying to retreat, sending Tetsunosuke home because he reminds him of how he failed to protect Souji, riding into his final battle bathed in white hair (perfectly coiffured, of course) is a little bit much. The retro-style art, reminiscent of Fantastic Children, only serves to make it all seem rather less serious and grim than it wants to be.

It was only half an hour long, so its failings didn’t grate too much, and it could possibly be a good companion to anyone studying the history of the Shinsengumi, since most major events get covered, with dates supplied, but outside that niche audience, I can’t see anyone being particularly interested.

(originally written 28.3.06)

スチームボーイ/Steamboy

Outomo Katsuhiro’s Steamboy is the most expensive anime movie ever made. The director, who attained international fame when he adapted his manga Akira into perhaps the most famous animated movie of all time, has shifted gears significantly in the sixteen years between the two films, but they’re spiritually linked in more than one way. The most obvious is the character designs, which owe a lot to his style – Kaneda and Tetsuou are visible in Ray’s features, and his father’s appearance is not unlike Colonel Shikishima’s. But then you consider the dynamics of flight, the grim slapstick of human errors causing problems even in action sequences, and the fact that really, the plot is thin and meandering, but the strong action and powerfully evocative atmosphere of the setting leaves a distinctive mark on anyone who watches it.

It is, however, much lighter. The plot, such as it is, is that young Ray Steam’s grandfather sends him a classic McGuffin – a little metal ball full of super-compressed steam. In the tradition of McGuffins, some bad guys want it, so there are some exciting chase scenes. A snobby rich girl is introduced, promising revelations and life-lessons that never actually come, and then we see the real plot: Ray’s father is developing advanced weapons, some other people (including his own father) disagree with him, and then they all have a scrap. And some very silly things ensue.

It’s not a clever concept, but it’s a fairly clever film, with lots of great visual moments, be they precise animations of combustion engines or nice dynamic pans around some beautiful architecture, or just little details that make you smile. It’s steampunk through and through, with daft flying machines, robotic limbs and a bunch of slapdash references to real historical figures that can be totally anachronistic: the ‘alternate history’ flag can deal with that. It’s not sophisticated or original, but it’s loads of fun and it makes me smile, seeing London presented as an idealised, exotic location.

Makes me very eager to see a film version of Mortal Engines, I must say.

(originally written 30.12.07)

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)

鉄コン筋クリート/Tekkonkinkreet

Tekkonkinkreet is an interesting animated movie, something of a milestone in anime history, despite being far left of the mainstream. For one thing, it’s the first major anime film ever to be directed by a gaikokujin – American special effects artist and cell-shaded cgi pioneer Michael Arias. On the other hand, the film is very much in the house style of Studio 4°C, and was based on an existing manga, but the daring compositions of shots and the high-octane action sequences recall the (separate) sequences from The Animatrix that the director and the studio were responsible for. I think the American’s influence is most obvious in brutality of the fight scenes, the willing embrace of weird hallucinogenic sequences that recall Scarfe’s flowers in The Wall, and perhaps the need to cram in a bit too much, making the middle of the story sag really quite badly. But it’s 4°C who really leave their fingerprint on this film. One of my favourite anime of the last few years has been their Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu, and having seen that overlooked classic, I instantly recognised the distinctive style of their animation: Mahou Shoujoutai may have had prettier character designs, but it took similar risks, with impressive CG, fluid animation and quirky art that didn’t necessarily follow the conventions of anime anatomy or stay wholly consistent.

Tekkonkinkreet is the story of two street kids, Kuro and Shiro (Black and White) who rule their city. When yazuka and property developers invade their turf, it becomes clearer and clearer that despite their superhuman skills, the two of them need one another more than even they know. Kuro is the tough one, the fighter and the breadwinner, while Shiro is something of a village idiot, possibly autistic and certainly mentally undeveloped, but pure and good-hearted. It’s the situations the story forces these two into that really matters – which makes a lot of the peripheral stories seem somewhat extraneous, but the payoff is worth it.

The rather ugly characters contrasting with the beautiful cultural mishmash of the background art makes this unique and will keep it away from the mainstream, which expects its aesthetic a lot prettier, and while it could have done with a good 25 minutes trimmed off, and has some very predictable twists, it’s a moving and effective anime movie and well worth seeing, even if it won’t be for everyone.

(originally written 11.1.2008)

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.

Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu / Magical Girl Squad: Alice / Tweeny Witches

When I first saw the previews for this series, I was smitten by everything but the titles – the Japanese one was clichéd and the English one was just cringe-inducing. The footage, however, was beautiful: superb CG-infused animation, attractive character designs, and a strong Miyazaki influence both in the old-fashioned fairytale aesthetic and in the giant robotic creature that made a brief appearance.

To my surprise, pretty much none of the footage in this trailer actually made the transition to the series. No giant robot, no impressive camera-swooping-through-a-town sequence, no scene of the witches gearing up. The robot eventually showed up in the OVA releases, originally intended to be broadcast but delayed so much that they finally went straight to DVD, but I was surprised how little of the preview appeared in the episodes. Neverthless, what was on offer instead completely charmed me – at least for the first two thirds or so of the 40-episode series.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Mahou Shoujotai is that its episodes are only 8 minutes long. This leads to some very interesting writing decisions. Quite often, the action at the beginning of the episode would be quite unconnected to the last, and only later do the events in the interim get filled in. This kept the pace very fast, and was also quite satisfying, once the pieces slotted together. This was fine in the beginning, when the story was a nice, simple tale about a human girl in a magical world, gathering sprites and convincing everyone around her that magic was supposed to make someone happy. It always had a darker edge and realistic characters, so there was no danger of this childish premise making the show twee, and the direction was remarkably idiosyncratic, with odd angles, a more western art style than most in current anime, and some very quirky cutting.

But towards the end, the plot started to spiral downwards the way of so many good anime – into Pretentious-And-Barely-Coherent-Mumbo-Jumbo-Land, where various contrived magical gubbins mean that – oh no! – the world is going to end, and only equally made-up-on-the-spot powers and, of course, true friendship can save the day. Interesting minor characters get cast aside in favour of big overblown sequences, and everything descends into the same tired old action sequences. Which is a shame, because the one thing you could say about Mahou Shoujotai at the beginning was that it was most definitely a highly individual, original piece of work.

Nonetheless, it is definitely a series worth watching. Interesting characters, unorthodox storytelling and some very brave aesthetic decisions make a weird and wonderful little mini-series that has been woefully ignored by most of the online anime community.

(originally written 03.01.2006)