The Incredibles 2

While certainly one of the less outright iconic and emotionally affecting Pixar movies, I definitely think of the first Incredibles movie fondly. It's nice to see what happened next, even if after a frenetic opening with plenty of interesting character dynamics, we find out that not much has changed.

In an effort to get Supers legitimized again, Mr. and Mrs. Incredible team up with a telecommunications firm who essentially aim to improve their PR. Because Mr. Incredible is so destructive, they choose Mrs. Incredible - AKA Elastigirl - as their opening gambit, meaning Mr. Incredible is left to be a single dad for a while. That leads to some very funny and well-judged scenes of Mr. Incredible alternately struggling, seeking help and having genuinely sweet breakthroughs with his kids.

This is most likely the strongest portion of the movie. The rest of it suffers somewhat from not really seeming like anything special. Brad Bird's best movies are when there's really heavy emotional hits - The Iron Giant will likely always be his masterpiece - but there aren't really meaningful emotional stakes here. The bad guy was only ever going to be one of two possible new characters (or possibly both) so there's no weight to the reveal. Despite the fun set-up of Elastigirl getting the limelight and Mr. Incredible having to deal with his conceptions of his own superiority, that kind of gets left undeveloped when the battles kick off and everyone has to get involved. It also seems a bit weird that nobody reacts to the latest episode of the Supers causing massive damage because of a supervillain who basically exists only because Supers exist in the same way that they always did, too. Overall, the story felt too much like an episode of a spin-off TV show and honestly, it wasn't a whole lot different from Despicable Me 3. 

There were some great moments as usual. Edna has always been the best thing about The Incredibles and that remains true here. Baby Jack-Jack is adorable and a fun element of chaos in the mix. I loved the theme songs they made for the characters at the end, especially Frozone's funky one. And I liked Violet going from shrinking violet to stroppy teen. From the trailers I wasn't sure, but by the end I was won over by the new direction they took her, and her moment when her father apologises to her probably is the scene with the most heart. 

Obviously, the visuals and animation are top-notch as always, with elements like fire, ice, underwater scenes and midair battles all spectacular throughout. Wouldn't have minded a post-credits scene, though. 

僕のヒーローアカデミア / Boku no Hero Academia / My Hero Academia season 3

The third season of BnHA just ended, and honestly it feels strange. In many ways, this show is a successor to the big Shounen Jump series of the past – Naruto, Bleach, HunterxHunter. As such, it doesn’t really suit coming out in seasons. The story isn’t designed that way and there’s no real hook to the season openers or the season finales. Plus we had to have much of the first episode taken up by recaps. I’d much rather the show could be continually produced every week like those other titles – as long as there wouldn’t be too great a dip in quality and we didn’t have to descend into filler hell. Maybe that’s just too much to ask for.    

    

Which is not to say that Boku no Hero Academia is lacking in quality. It’s a great shounen show full of interesting characters, inventive powers and some great humour. Yes, it’s still as derivative as it ever was, with training arcs, tournament arcs and more and more concepts we saw years ago in Naruto or decades ago in X-Men, but everything is done so well, and centred on such likeable characters, that it never feels tired or recycled.

This season follows our academy class through some pretty significant changes. The kids go to a training camp where they get attacked by the villains, acquitting themselves pretty well but ending up letting Bakugo get kidnapped. That leads to a rescue operation that intriguingly subverts some expectations for shounen manga and has Midoriya-kun learn the lesson that trying to play the hero and face up to your foes can often be totally self-destructive, whereas running away and letting your elders and betters take care of it tends to be the better strategy. 

This chain of events, though, leads to the most important part of the series, awkwardly in the middle of the run. All Might faces his nemesis and the puppetmaster of almost all the bad guys un the shown One for All, and in their showdown the big bad realizes that All Might has passed on One for All and is essentially running on fumes. It's a pivotal moment, especially as it unfolds with the world watching, and the final result is that All Might s revealed to have lost his powers and will no longer be the sole protector of the world. In a society with heroes at the very centre, this has vast repercussions as the populace loses their sense of security under a fittingly almighty protector. 

The rest of the season is essentially the fallout from that event. The kids enter another exam, to get their provisional hero licences, but there's a shift in the mood. This isn't just about the kids working their way up the ranks - there's a power vacuum now and people are uncertain and liable to lash out at the system that's supposed to protect them if they feel it's showing cracks. These kids won't just continue carefree student lives if they get these licences, they'll be on the front lines against villains out for blood. And then awkwardly appended on the end before they go off for new, more serious internships, they meet the top students at the academy, including some weird guy who looks like Lucas from Mother got buff.

So in the end, my biggest complaint here is that adapting an ongoing Jump show in seasons makes for unsatisfying pacing and weird cliffhangers, like introducing Overhaul but having no development at all for him. But that being the worst thing I can say about a show means there’s really not a lot to complain about here. BnHA does what it sets out to do fantastically, with a rich and varied cast, a likeable protagonist, great setpieces, an intriguing world, beautiful fluid animation and flawless voice acting. It’s not breaking any new ground, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the most fun things to watch right now – anime or otherwise.

僕のヒーローアカデミア / Boku no Hero Academia / My Hero Academia seasons 1-2

It seems to be a pattern with me and Jump series - I try them out, don't get on with them at first, then return to them after a while and end up loving them. Or at least enjoying them quite a bit. It happened with One Piece, Bleach and in a way with good ole Dragonball.

So this is the new hit shounen action series. It's doing pretty well, with quite a lot of promotion, a third season and movie recently announced and a video game in the works too. 

I tried out the first few manga chapters months ago, but couldn't get over the weird art, especially of the true form of the #1 hero, and found the pacing very weird. That may have been down to poor-quality translation, though. But I eventually tried the anime, and found it to be a lot of fun. 

The show's world has a lot of echoes of Hunter x Hunter and One Punch Man (OPM itself being in many ways a tribute to HxH in any case), with a little Tiger and Bunny thrown into the mix, all of which could be said to be riffs based on a premise set up by X-Men. 

Boku no Hero Academia shows us a world where 80% of kids born have a 'quirk'. A mutant power, basically. This can be just about anything, from super strength to invisibility, with some very weird and inventive ones in the mix too. Our hero, little Midoriya Izuku, or 'Deku' as he gets called by the school bullies, is one of the 20% who are quirkless. This is a shame because he loves heroes and could be called a fanboy in the depth of his knowledge. The show actually uses the English word ‘Nerd’ for him, rather than ‘otaku’. A chance encounter with a prominent hero leads to him being bestowed great powers - so he enters a school for the gifted and through a series of exams similar to those in Naruto (even being interrupted by a more serious clash just like Naruto's) proves himself to his heroes and his former bully. 

There are a slew of anime just like this. A school for the gifted where the sweet-natured, unassuming one ends up the centre of attention and gains great power to use against real bad guys can be seen in, for example, Gakuen Alice, Soul Eater and Mahou Shoujotai Arusu. The basic idea is common in the west too, not only in X-Men but Monsters' High, Miss Peregrine's, The Incredibles et al. It's all basically riffing on superhero tropes and there will be thousands more iterations of the same thing in years to come. 

But while HeroAka treads familiar ground, it does it well. Midoriya is an extremely likeable protagonist, not only sweet and insecure (and adorable even if everyone keeps describing him as 'plain') but generous, hard-working and ambitious. It's interesting that at first he's given a power he can't really control and causes him great pain, because that opens up dynamics about self-preservation and sacrifice, though by the end of season 2 Midoriya has moved beyond that. 

The supporting cast is also great. The teachers remind me of Soul Eater's, unhinged and often goofy but awesome to see in action. There are lots of interesting fellow students, from major players with daddy issues or anger issues or abandonment issues to very enteratining ensemble characters like the frog girl or the bird-headed kid with a shadow beast living inside him. 

Compared with other strong Shounen series, the bad guys are currently a bit lacking. I like the main antagonist’s design a lot but much of his story arc so far has been about finding his true purpose, and a villain who lacks a clear purpose is not a very impressive one. There are other villains here, too, the charismatic and interesting Hero Killer who sadly pales beside One Punch Man’s treatment of a similar misguided philosophy, and All For One who so far is just a shadowy figure pulling the strings with a motive apparently rather like Orochimaru’s in Naruto. There’s a lot of potential for the main villain to become very interesting, but so far it’s only potential. Then again, HunterxHunter, Naruto and Soul Eater were slow in revealing their primary antagonists, and D. Gray-Man waited a very long time to add nuance to theirs so I can see him getting depth later. If mangaka Horikoshi Kouhei fails to deliver on that front, though, it will be a major letdown.

Nothing here is groundbreaking, but the best shounen series seldom are. We've had pirate stories and ninja stories and stories about Son Goku before, but the best Jump series make those familiar storytelling realms their own in quirky, inventive ways. The same can be said for Boku no Hero Academia, and it's hard not to root for lil' Midoriya-shounen, whether he's getting all determined, fighting down tears or reaching out to someone in need.

As for that weird character design that got me so hung up at the start, well, I guess in the anime it just about works. Just about. 

The Lego Batman Movie

I was looking forward to this. The LegoMovie was an unexpected joy, there’s more potential to mix franchises here than anywhere else, and word of mouth was good. But honestly, I don't think this matched up to its predecessor. It lacked the exuberance and anything-goes freewheeling nature of that film, and had more one-note humour. Still, for casual and hardcore fans alike, there was a lot to enjoy here. 

Riffing on the Batman of the first movie, all self-referential boasting, claims of being awesome and deep emotional repression, there were a whole lot of great points here. Having a full roster of Batman villains - and then one-upping them with the big bads of numerous other franchises - was a whole lot of fun. A small scene with the Justice League gave some laughs too. The big action setpieces were great to look at and often very inventive. And the strange thing about comedy is that the more overt, exaggerated and silly you make a character's hang-ups, problems and angst, the more directly you can switch gears to actual pathos and touching character moments. Making the film essentially about how Batman's bravado is all a front for his yearning for family and companionship makes that very easy to do - especially when you pair him with a Joker longing for acceptance, where the joke is that the protagonist-antagonist relationship has a lot of parallels with a romantic relationship. 

So all in all I wanted to enjoy it. I got most of the jokes and references and it often raised a smile. Because it's a comedy it doesn't really matter that loose ends aren't really tied up, like why the Joker didn't have to go back with the rest of the baddies. I loved the little touches like Bane sounding like the movie version and Robin's costume origin. It was also nice to have Barbara Gordon written so strong and capable. 

But in all honesty, it wasn't what I'd hoped it would be. Everything was superficial by design, so I ended up not connecting with anyone on the cast - which wasn't the case with the Lego Movie. There was no way to prevent Gotham getting totally torn apart so it felt like there wasn't much more at stake after that, nor that the characters particularly cared about any of the carnage in any case. And while the Lego Batman character was great as a side-note to a wider story, he wasn't really that fun as a protagonist. 

Not bad by any measure, but just not that fun either. 

ワンパンマン / Wanpanman / One Punch Man

I realised when I posted my review of the OVAs that I had never actually written my thoughts on the first season of One Punch Man – in fact, I decided not to because those OVAs were coming out and I thought I could write everything together. But that was six months ago and I forgot all about it. Well, I’ve posted my thoughts on the OVAs, so I’d better post about season one!

One Punch Man has an interesting creation story, which really helps its success. It’s the kind of feel-good underdog success story that you can really get behind. A writer calling himself One started to publish a crudely-drawn webcomic about a superhero so strong that no matter how powerful his opponents, they can be beaten with one punch. Rather than looking incredibly cool, this hero is a rather ordinary-looking bald guy with a silly costume reminiscent of Anpanman with colours inverted, the Japanese title being a play on that classic children’s character. Not only is our caped hero Saitama goofy-looking, but he has a very detached, deadpan attitude to the world, speaking his mind and undercutting all the usual inflated rhetoric of comic book villains by using a single punch to destroy them. As a vehicle for bathos to undercut all of the clichés of a world where huge monsters and cheesy superheroes do battle, it works marvellously.

I was a little sceptical when I heard the premise. Godzilla vs Bambi is never much fun. If Saitama overcomes all obstacles with one punch, what drama can there be? But this is where One’s writing makes a difference, and why, I presume, readers were hooked despite the terrible art (which has it has to be said vastly improved by this point) and the obvious concept. Rather than Saitama’s power, it is the world he is part of and the way he balances indifference and yearning to be recognised and appreciated that makes this series so compelling.

One of the things that I like the most about One Punch Man is that in many ways it echoes HunterxHunter. One is not shy about this – some character designs are direct echoes, and one frontispiece had Saitama reading and praising HunterxHunter in Jump. The Hero Association in One Punch Man is very similar to the Hunter Association, with some very familiar dynamics.

The real compelling drama of One Punch Man is the slow recognition of Saitama’s talents. He is first acknowledged by Genos, a rather adorably pure-hearted cyborg out for revenge and powerful enough to go right to the top of the Association. Saitama, meanwhile, is held down by not being the brightest bulb, despite what his shiny head might make you think, and enters the association near the bottom – and is given the rather unfortunate name of ‘Caped Baldy’.

This premise is what got me hooked, but it’s the ensemble cast of S-Class heroes that took me over the boundary to loving this series. Each of them revealed thus far is very interesting and interacts with Saitama in a very amusing way, be it tetchy master telepath Tatsumaki or the wonderfully misleading King.

I’m delighted that One Punch Man is so popular and will soon be having its second season. It’s funny, it does smart things with its simple concept, and above all, it’s likeable. I want more!

One Punch Man: Season 1 OVAs

One Punch Man remains the darling of anime fandom at the moment, and I’m very much under its spell, especially as it keeps adding characters that really seem like nods to HunterxHunter. I’ve read all of One’s webcomic currently available, as well as the nicely redrawn manga currently exploring its own original side-arc (written by One), and thoroughly enjoying it all.

So it’s nice to also have some original material presented in animated form. And with the DVD releases came six more episodes, with original side-stories to add to what we already saw in the anime. While there are a number of side-stories in the manga that could have been adapted very nicely for this purpose, the creators decided instead to have original material. And I have to say I was quite pleased with that decision, because the days of horrible low-quality filler are past and the anime team came up with some very entertaining short side-stories. Some were very inconsequential, like Bang stalking Saitama or a hot springs trip for most of the prominent S-Class heroes (with a silly murder mystery thrown in), though all contain some really fun character moments – and I love seeing Child Emperor getting all bossy and playing detective.

But others really gave more depth to the characters, especially the first one dealing with Saitama getting his uniform. Fubuki really gets some good moments in the fifth OVA as well, adding more to the rivalry story between her and her sister Tatsumaki that has underpinned all her appearances.

Some of these episodes are a tad lazy. Not as much hard work and love goes into them as the main series. But then again, that’s par for the course. And the fact is that there’s an audience still very keen for more Wan Pan Man, so they’re a very good way to tide the fans over until the second season begins. Though personally, I’d like to see much more of the webcomic!

The Lego Movie

You can colour me surprised. Even with all the rave reviews and the excellent word-of-mouth, I really didn't think that The Lego Movie was going to be much good. The Lego franchise has felt overbearing to me over the past few years, with all the tie-in games - Lego Star Wars, Lego Harry Potter, Lego Marvel superheroes...none of which I've been remotely interested in. Then came the trailer for this film, full of humour that seemed to be trying way, way too hard and the less-than-appealing tagline of 'From the creators of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs'. That it was animated by Animal Logic, whose Happy Feet and Legend of the Guardians I enjoyed would have been a bit of a plus, but I didn't actually find that out until the closing credits. 

By which time, of course, I was completely converted. The thing about glib, self-effacing humour is that out of context - like in a trailer - it's a lot harder to tell that it's undermining parts of the character and just seems goofy. In the film itself, it was a lot funnier, and a lot more likeable. 

And that's what The Lego Movie has done well - be likeable. And that despite also going for a biting bit of satire on modern life, which is quite an impressive feat. Plus it is very clearly aimed at Generation X as opposed to the teeny kids of today, who I imagine were mostly confused by the trippier moments and cameos from Teenage Turtles and Lando Calrissian.

This is one way that the Lego movie could really stand out - being able to use the characters from their toy ranges and mash them together...though I'm guessing there was some kind of deal with DC so that only their comic superheroes made it. It's a hell of a lot of fun to see Batman interacting with the crew of the Millennium Falcon, especially with them all exaggerated versions of themselves, not to mention a council that includes Dumbledore, Gandalf and Abraham Lincoln in his space chair. And, of course, Michaelangelo the artist and Michaelangelo the turtle. 

From the beginning the film establishes its silly tone: a very funny prologue sees Will Ferrell's character Lord Business stomping on brilliantly ridiculous boots to overwhelm Morgan Freeman's silly old wizard character Vitruvius and establish control over the film's Macguffin. We then have the main character introduced: the construction worker Emmet, who lives in a world that despite what you may have read is far more Huxley than Orwell: everyone is kept brainlessly happy, placated by mindless entertainment and overpriced coffee instead of Soma, which has the added appeal of, y'know, actually being a recognisable critique of modern American culture. Though everything is awesome - as the earworm song goes - Emmet is not only incredibly dull, but very lonely as well. He has no real defining characteristics and no friends. His comfortably life is shattered, of course, when he sees a (beautiful) intruder on his construction site, then happens upon the 'Piece of Resistance', a piece that can put a stop to the evil plans of Lord Business. 

Now a target of Lord Business and his brilliant henchman Bad Cop - who also has a good cop face, and is voiced by Liam Neeson having the time of his life - but falls in with the faction of the Master Builders, including Vitruvius and the beautiful Wyldstyle, who have the ability to disassemble the Lego parts around them and reassemble them into things that suit their needs. With them, Emmet discovers the other worlds kept apart from his - the Wild West, the medieval world, and even the mish-mash of 'Cloud Cuckoo Land' where denizens like the intensely cutesy Uni-Kitty reside. But since Emmet has the 'Piece of Resistance', Lord Business will not rest until he is captured. 

The broader context of this, of course, ends up being that classic of self-referential toy franchises, the tension between the adult collectors who become obsessive about perfection and the idea of children actually using toys as intended and being creative. Hinted at from the start with 'relics' like highlighter pens and Vitruvius' chewed-lollipop staff, there's a live-action portion that jars a little at first but ultimately works and for all that it is an obvious concept, also seems like exactly the statement a Lego movie ought to make. 

The film perfectly balances its silly humour, its epic adventure and its more serious message about creativity being stifled - with an amusing stinger about a little sister to boot. There's an eagerness to undercut sacred cows that works particularly well here, with an incredibly goofy Green Lantern, Batman's hilarious angsty song (with a final line in the version played at the end credits that is possibly the edgiest thing I've heard in a kids' film, in a song parodying edginess no less) and a very amusing version of Lando Calrissian from Billy Dee Williams himself. Add in spices of The Matrix and Toy Story, and it’s a success story.

What the Lego Movie does, it does very well - it's hilarious, it makes you like its characters, it's irreverent and it looks good, too. It's restrained, of course, by the need to look like Lego, but while that could have been a disadvantage, it also makes for the best visual idea here, which is to make all the explosions and lasers and other visual effects be constructed from CG Lego bricks as well. Great idea. One of many, which is why this unlikely film can be such a success story. It's also nice that I'll be able to have this critical success to point to the next time someone claims that 80s cartoons being toy adverts precludes any sort of artistic merit. 

The Powerpuff Girls: Season V

By season 4, the Powerpuff Girls formula was wearing a little thin and getting a bit dull. I fully expected to see an episode in this season where I could go, ‘Yup, that’s where it jumped the shark’, but in fact the show-writers managed to rather exceed my expectations and as a matter of fact, I’d say that moment doesn’t come until the season 6 episode ‘A Made Up Story’, which given how close it was to the show’s end isn’t a bad stretch. Even the clips episode here is quickly subverted so that it’s quickly apparent that the flashbacks are actually all-new and often rather nonsensical snippets.

By this point, the bulk of the writers and episode directors on Powerpuff Girls are the people who will go on to write most of the episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, though Amy Keating Rogers had yet to contribute. Lauren Faust is established enough to really be taking a back seat here, but Chris Savino has his first work in this season and helps define it, while Cindy Morrow also joins to put in some small-scale episodes in her recognisable style.

Two things, I feel, kept this season from becoming tired – one, the use of an ace long kept up a sleeve in that finally, after being in every intro sequence yet not actually having been in any episodes since their first appearance in the first ever full-length episode back in season 1, the Rowdyruff Boys make their return, coming back for a full-length episode and then later for two more half-episodes. They are an interesting counterpoint to the girls and their return is welcome, making for some very enjoyable episodes, especially when poor Bubbles has to pretend to be one of them.

The second strength is that the show falls back on its old successes of imitating other shows and styles, but picks some very unusual things to imitate. One full half-episode parodying Rocky and Bullwinkle is so-so at best, but there’s a really lovely episode that imitates both silent movies and that era’s cartoons at once, the excellent episode about judging by appearances ‘Substitute Creature’ has some brilliant pastiches of pulp comic panels, and Chris Savino makes up for the slight misfire of the Rocky and Bullwinkle episode with a cracking rock opera tribute, ‘See Me, Feel Me, Gnomey’. While of course taking its cues mostly from The Who, it also has hints of The Wall and War of the Worlds, and it is a rather bewildering and dark tale about the girls taking a wish from a sinister little gnome to rid the town of all its evil in exchange for their powers, only for the gnome to then assume the role of saviour and force have everyone suppressed and lacking individuality. The girls and their father/creator decide this is not real peace and rebel. It’s a story confusingly-told, morally ambivalent and even rather disturbing when the girls drive the little man from a branch and to his death, and never aired in the States – rumour has it because the story hinted too heavily at weighing up communism and democracy, though I find this dubious – but who cares when it has wonderful 70s synths and guitar solos and a full-on Jack Black impression from Wakko Warner voice actor Jess Harnell? It’s not quite ‘Meet the Beat-Alls’, but it’s bolder overall and another, lesser-known highlight.

Otherwise, things are largely unambitious, often just poking at the boundaries of cartoon humour without taking many risks. There’s an episode where Bubbles hears a naughty word and everyone is shocked to hear the girls saying it – so soon they fight a giant potty mouth. There’s a swipe at the far Left when the girls are prevented from stopping Mojo Jojo’s crimes because an animal protection lobby group get self-righteous and force them to stop. 

The Mayor’s stupidity is played upon – and he sounds more and more like the Ice King – with him taking over Monster Isle and being turned into a rampaging monster himself when Chemical X makes him huge. And Cindy Morrow turns in bland but entertaining episodes about bet-wetting, some adorable fluffy animals turning master criminals but nobody except the girls wanting to prosecute them on account of being so cute, and an annoying passive-aggressive dog being looked after by the girls as they try to protect him and persuade him to tell them about a crime he witnessed. The mixture of full-on weirdness, small-scale drama, repetition of old ideas and attempts to get the girls into different scenarios – including seeing caveman equivalents of them – retains the fun.

So yes, while I genuinely expected this to be quite the disappointment as a season, it actually turned out to be pretty good. 

The Powerpuff Girls Movie – plus shorts and commercials

Midway through the fourth season of The Powerpuff Girls, where ideas were starting to run a bit low, the theatrical movie version came out. It may seem like an obvious cash-in now, but it was hardly common for Hanna Barbera at the time, this being in 2002 their first feature film since the lamentable Once Upon a Forest almost a decade earlier in 1993, and at the time the only extension of a Cartoon Network property to the big screen. 

Prior to this, their only film that could be called a cash-in on a current weekly series (as opposed to an adaptation of a decades-old favourite) was 1986’s Go-Bots: Battle of the Rock Lords, and until the constantly-in-production Samurai Jack film comes out, it remains the only instance of a big-screen version of a Cartoon Network property. If it seems like every series that makes it big gets a cinema version (just look at Equestria Girls!), as a matter of fact that doesn’t apply to Cartoon Network, and that in large part seems to be down to this film just not making money.

There’s no denying it – The Powerpuff Girls was a flop. Even with Treasure Planet competing against it, it was the lowest-grossing animated movie of 2002. On the other hand, quite fortunately it was done on a shoestring, so whereas Treasure Planet cost $140 million and made back about $111 million, this more modest effort cost just $11 million and ended up making $16.4 million, no huge loss but clearly no blockbuster.

Part of the problem is really that while the series seems clever, that doesn’t come over in its big-screen counterpart. Deciding on an origin story, essentially the film retells the story from the episode Mojo Jojo comes to understand he was in part responsible for the girls’ creation, then extends the plot to show how at first the girls are not understood by the wider public. They have a game of tag without knowing how to restrain their powers and tear the city apart. The Professor is arrested and the girls become pariahs – which becomes worse when Jojo manipulates the girls into building his observatory for him and facilitating his plot to empower all the zoo’s monkeys to take over the city. They have a moment of deep rejection on the moon before hearing the Professor’s cry for help and learning to use their power to save people – and mete out enormous violence on those deserving it.

Where it seems the series would deliver the twist that what the girls really learn is how to be incredibly violent and beat people up with a glib irony and a knowing wink, the film does none of that. And without its cleverness, surreal touch and knowing nods to an adult audience who knows that the clichés of kids’ TV are being subverted, the mood just doesn’t come over, to the extent that the adults who watch this without being stoners who already watched the show simply won’t get what made The Powerpuff Girls such a success. Couple with that the fact that it really doesn’t have much original thought put in, being an expansion of a story already established in the show, and I see why it flopped. There’s also the fact that while there’s a polish to the cheap, simple look of the show, it’s clearly not an animation from a leading studio – hence the tenth-of-Disney’s-budget thing, and it seems that while Cartoon Network were putting about big talk about their feature film, internally it had to be made clear that this was a small-scale project, reportedly with the voice actresses having to be talked down when they were a little deluded about the budget involved and went on strike because they didn’t get a big pay hike.

Watched as an adaptation of a TV show in the mode of South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut or Beavis and Butthead Do America, though, it makes sense. The show’s simple style is retained, with a nice sheen overlaid to make it prettier and the action more impressive. The Gangreen Gang in particular end up looking much more striking as a result. To lose that would be to lose much of the piece’s charm, and after all this is primarily for the established fanbase rather than new viewers. Taken in context, as a cheap extension with nicer animation, it is charming and does the job very well.

Just don’t expect too much – and, sadly, don’t expect the old smartness that made the series work in the beginning.

I also took the time to watch the DVD extras (fun seeing the actresses recording their lines, with the ‘deleted scenes’ basically more dialogue in the construction scene) as well as promotional animations for the show, and several other adverts and eyecatches made for the series. It’s a lot of fun seeing promo animations made with the characters interacting with other Cartoon Network figures, but best seeing different animation styles, including the kind of cereal advert that the series lampooned. It’s great to see an attempt to integrate the girls into live-action shots with heavy shading, and other animators rendering the girls in slightly more lanky form. A footnote, to be sure, but interesting and entertaining to watch. 

天体戦士サンレッド/ Tentai Senshi Sanreddo / Astro Fighter Sunred

It took a long while to finish watching Sunred, because I waited months for the original subtitling group to release the final two episodes of the second season. Eventually, I decided to just track down the alternatives for my last two morsels of pleasure. Because short though its episodes were, Tentai Senshi Sunred has been one of the funniest and most likeable series I’ve ever seen, and a great companion piece to Detroit Metal City, as both began airing in 2008 and packaged themselves in short, snappy 10-minute episodes. Both were rather successful, although DMC seems to have struck much more of a chord in English-speaking fandom, perhaps being rather more immediate. Sunred is smarter, though, and has the honour of having its brilliant pastiche of an opening immortalised in my favourite Nico Douga medley.

Indeed, everything that Sunred is comes from pastiche, and a brilliant reversal. The starting point is the world of sentai TV shows, the best-known in the West being the heavily-adapted Power Rangers – heroes in colourful suits and masks battle against superpowered monsters sent by an evil organisation seeking to take over the world. But the twist in Sunred is that the cartoony premise is then overlaid by a heavy dose of real life: what does the evil organisation do when not in battle? How do they make a living and what happens to monsters outside the battles? What if they all live together in a big house, trying to get ordinary jobs? What if they live near one of the heroes and treat him as a neighbour and work colleague? What if he has a troubled relationship with his girlfriend, while the head of the evil organisation is actually a lovely guy who seems to be much better at understanding her than the hero is?

Sunred is often portrayed as a sentai story in which the good guy is a bullying oaf and the bad guys are all good people who happen to look like monsters, but that would be greatly oversimplifying. They’re all just ordinary people, with their faults and their virtues, and their mistakes cause them problems, whoever they are. And the result is utterly hilarious.

Many of the jokes revolve around the nature of the monsters. There are the ones who just look absurd or have very one-note powers for a quick gag or two. There are the ones who are completely useless, like the guy who is just a piece of prawn for sushi, or the ones who get laughs from trying to act tough when they are totally adorable and impossible to take seriously. But the real reason Sunred works so well is that most of the humour works regardless of the setting. With the relationship between Red and the main antagonist Vamp-sama, for example, the absurdity of the fact that these two archetypes are squabbling over cooking or how to go about doing chores is only an additional layer on what is already genuinely funny dialogue. That’s why Sunred is so good – it is simply good writing.

I will always remember Sunred with fondness. I’m even tempted to one day go to see Kawasaki, the city in which the story is set. It’s not hard to reach from Tokyo, after all, the two cities barely being separate entities – if you’re in Shibuya, for example, you’re about the same distance from the series’ beloved Mizonokuchi as from, say, Akihabara or Ueno.

タイガー＆バニー / Tiger & Bunny

I was a bit cautious about Tiger & Bunny. When everybody tells me this is the next big thing, I tend to get sceptical, especially as there have been a lot of very popular anime in the last few years I’ve not liked one bit.

But Tiger & Bunny was not only superb in concept and execution, but the perfect series for Sunrise to make. It fit their style perfectly, and the hilariously understated ‘Sunrise ending’ was both poking fun at expectations and fulfilling them.

In a future metropolis in what is pretty clearly the United States (Sternbild’s money still has the motto ‘In God we trust’), superheroes are celebrated as reality TV stars. A whole industry has grown around the core superstars – the ice-powered Blue Rose, who wants to be a singing idol; big powerhouse lummox Rock Bison; lightning-slinging Dragon Kid with her adorable Mickey Mouse ears; flamboyantly gay businessman Fire Emblem; the unintentionally goofy but very successful Sky High; the silly inexperienced Origami Cyclone, who mostly wants to be in the background of important scenes to please his sponsors – and the stalwart veteran a little past his prime, Wild Tiger, who can greatly boost his strength, speed and agility for five minutes. Into the fray comes Barnaby Brooks, Jr, with no secret identity or sponsorship – but the same powers as Wild Tiger.

He is quickly picked up and given a deal, but their similar powers mean that Wild Tiger and Barnaby are put into a double-team, paving the way for an odd-couple set up that works brilliantly. The first major arc of the story revolves around the two gradually coming to accept and respect one another and to work as a team, while helping the various other heroes with their various problems. Tiger gives Barnaby the nickname ‘Bunny’, as especially in Japanese they sound similar, and soon finds out that his new partner’s purpose in life is to track down the murderers of his parents, who apparently work for a criminal organisation called Ouroboros. Inexplicably, almost nobody seems to have heard of the symbol.

More about this organisation comes to light, but in the wake of a confrontation with the man Barnaby believes killed his parents, it becomes apparent that his memories may have been tampered with. With Wild Tiger facing his own problems – waning powers – the series reaches its final climax…albeit leaving plenty for a follow-up.

This is a classic example of what anime does best – takes a rather daft concept and comedic characters, but develops them to be taken very seriously, so that you care about them by the time they are in real danger. It’s the little touches in the characters that make everything work so well, when they get some depth. It’s when Blue Rose realises she has a crush, and when we see Dragon Kid’s thoughts about her parents. It’s the shocked reaction Sky High gives when he realises people think he’s goofy and when Fire Emblem drops the ridiculous pouting to become serious. It’s the funny scientist man whose voice is so quiet he needs to amplify it to be heard, and the way Kotetsu always gets it wrong with his daughter.

And the look of the thing is great throughout. The mixture of CG and cel animation is obvious, but hangs together better than in any other series I’ve seen use CG so extensively, and allows for some impressive fluidity. I like how the character designs have the usual signifiers for black and white people from anime, yet without them looking too absurd to be major characters. I like the music and the crazy design of the city and, in fact, the whole world of Tiger & Bunny.

Neither what I expected nor something startlingly new for Sunrise, Tiger & Bunny did a superb job with a good, solid idea. There’s plenty to expand on yet – Ouroboros, Lunatic, young Kaede’s developing power – so I both expect and hope for more!

Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow

Marvel Animation, in its various iterations, is perhaps under-appreciated as an American animation studio. Over the years, there have been a huge number of Marvel properties adapted into animation – Ralph Bakshi was animating Spiderman in the 60s (very badly) just before he went to work on Fritz the Cat; a wide variety of shows in the 90s were made under the studios of New World Animation that became the ‘Marvel Animated Universe’, including the X-Men, Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk cartoons; while in more recent years, the likes of X-Men Evolution and its follow-up Wolverine and the X-Men have been successes for Marvel Animation. The studio’s latest project is a series of anime produced in collaboration with Madhouse, thus far a mixed bag. But from 2006 until the May of this year, Marvel produced eight animated films for Liongate. Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow is one of them, the most kid-friendly and light-hearted, but just like all the rest, making minimal impact on the world of animation or the mainstream and being released direct-to-video.

Next Avengers comes so close to being superb enough that I would go recommending it to anyone who may be interested as an attempt to do what Teen Titans did but better, and without the contrived anime stylistic imitations – albeit not first, and for that many will dismiss it as a poor imitation. What holds it back, sadly, is the animation. It’s a little strange, because the production values are high: pause the film at just about any point and the frame will look superb. The character designs are by and large cute and appealing. The story, while odd, is good, and the voice acting much better than I expected. But the characters just do not move right. They are stiff and often weightless. They do not move enough, and do not seem to connect with one another, especially in action sequences. There’s a scene where Torunn is slammed to the ground, grasps her sword and flies back up at intense speed, and it should be awesome – but it just seems so flat and lifeless.

It’s a shame because there is real promise here. The premise is oddly dark and might well cause some confusion with young kids who don’t know about Marvel’s multiple universes and assume this will be the ultimate fate of the Avengers: after a period of peace, they are attacked by Ultron and crushed, almost all of them killed. Iron Man escapes, taking with him the four children of Avengers – Captain America and Black Widow’s son James, the Pyms’ son Henry Jr, Black Panther’s son Azari and Thor’s daughter Torunn. Hawkeye, too, had a son, but Iron Man was not able to reach him before they fled to the Arctic.

Somewhat out-of-character for him, Tony Stark spends twelve years in hiding while Ultron conquers much of the world. He trains the children and tells them stories of their parents, all dead but for Thor, who had returned to Asgard. They grow up as siblings: James is a somewhat self-centred boy who yearns to set out from their ‘island’. Azari has more of a sense of responsibility and is the sensible one of the bunch. Pym is the youngest, and the cute, mischievous comic relief – probably the most likeable of the four. And then there is Torunn, who wears a very silly breastplate reminiscent of Zero from Megaman and tries to imitate her father’s speech, being quite adorable when she gets it wrong – and right. ‘I say thee nay!’ Always gets me.

One day, with an amusingly nonchalant entrance, The Vision, damaged, comes to the island to tell Stark about Hawkeye Jr. The children follow Stark into an underground layer, where he is repairing The Vision. They accidentally set off Iron Man’s robotic versions of the Avengers, who are not only captured by Ultron and made into his soldiers, but who give away the hideout, meaning the Next Avengers are on the run. Of course they eventually must confront Ultron himself, but even with the help of the much more worldly, rather flirtatious new Hawkeye, they’re going to need help. Torunn’s father may help in some way, but he won’t return. But perhaps there is another Avenger still alive – the strongest of them all.

I really wanted to love this. Seeing the cute designs and fluid motions of the very first shots, I was eager. I could forgive the utterly awful exposition piece with static cut-outs of the Avengers moving about as stylised. I even liked how Storm’s appearance was limited to just a hand – perhaps a rights issue? But then the real story kicked in and it just looked clumsy, and only for a few minutes of the whole could I put aside how poorly animated and clunky it all was. A shame, because I really liked the characters and probably even prefer the general premise to that of Young Avengers. Oh well.

Teen Titans

Teen Titans was probably the first cartoon I came into contact with that was tarred with the ‘anime rip-off’ brush, as I had steered clear of the hideous Totally Spies! and 80s cartoons after all are often a lot harder to distinguish from the other Japanese animations the same studios were creating. Teen Titans found itself in a middle ground that was often quite annoying: it didn’t really look like anime, even when directly imitating it. Its references were by and large extremely dated. And it was far, far better leaving that gimmick behind and presenting itself as a straightforward Western cartoon. Having finally seen the movie that marked the series’ swansong after its cancellation, it’s time to write down my impressions.

The basis of the story is, of course, deeply Western, drawn from the DC comics series of the same name that has run since the 60s, and a success story since the 80s, and sat well amongst the in-house shows on Cartoon Network. Probably wisely, the cartoon incarnation takes only one of the sidekick characters – Robin of Batman fame – and for the rest ignores the likes of Kid Flash and Superboy to fill the cast with the relatively obscure Titans who were the team’s first original additions in the comics – Starfire, Raven, Cyborg and Beast Boy, also known as Changeling, who was previously a member of the Doom Patrol.

These five, joined for a few episodes by Terra and with guest appearances from a secondary group, Titans East, as well as various ‘honorary Titans’, fight off various baddies from the comics with nefarious comic-book plots. Some of these are extremely annoying comic relief baddies, like the poor excuse to let animators play with psychedelia, Mad Mod – who not even Malcolm McDowell can make formidable – or the insipid Thunder and Lightning. On the other hand, there was some very rich tension in the comics to draw from, and plot arcs featuring Raven’s father, the downfall of Terra and Slade’s brilliant toying with Robin’s mind made for serious, clever and extremely compelling episodes.

This is why Teen Titans was good: when it got things right, it got them very right. It also did an excellent job of endearing characters to the audience, not just the main heroes, whose dynamics made for great comedy, but the minor players too: the likes of H.I.V.E. seemed pathetic when they appeared, but then through repeated appearances, humanisation and redemption became much more interesting.

The problem was that in between these came the unfunny comedy episodes, or the exaggerated semi-satirical, self-referential concepts that just seemed like the writers were trying much too hard and not managing to do what they were attempting. And the fact is that the anime influence was much to the detriment of everything beyond the cute character designs. The cutesy opening intro was fun and played very much into perceptions of Japanese music in the West, but sounds nothing like any anime intro I ever heard. The anime-style eyes sometimes didn’t look quite right on faces, especially Raven’s. But these were very minor beside the real problem: an attempt at anime styles of humour.

Teen Titans characters turn SD, appear at different sizes on the screen to play with ideas of space, get blown up slapstick-style and pull ridiculous simplified faces. But it just is not done right: it’s not so much the slightly-off art or the performances, it’s the pacing. Things happen at the wrong times, too fast or too slow, without the right transitions that make this sort of thing work so well in the likes of Azumanga Daioh. The only anime I’ve seen that paces things so oddly and jarringly was Fushigi Yuugi, where I think the creators got their cues from – and that fell flat too. Everything felt like it was trying to be an early 90s anime, and the most recent reference seemed to be Furi Kuri. Add to that the often borderline offensive Trouble in Tokyo movie, in which the Titans battle Astro Boy clones and catgirls while pursued by squealing schoolgirls, some of whom seem to have slitty eyes and big teeth, and you wonder how sincere this tribute to anime is. They also manage to write 楽wrong on signs and slip in a rather eye-roll-inducing tribute to Akira, another sign of how dated the frame of reference is.

Teen Titans was in many ways great for American cartoons. It had good characters and possibly the best voice acting I’ve heard on American TV, including the guy from Boy Hits Car, Scott Menville. It was on the serious side, and showed anime styles were viable in US cartoons, which may have paved the way for Avatar and was the one reason I’m grateful for the attempt. But the show would have been better without the SD and weird faces, the poor attempts at cutesy aesthetics. Or, more specifically, it would have been better doing them right.

The Incredibles

When I saw it back in 2005, I found The Incredibles quite brilliant. It was, I wrote, easy, silly fluff based on a great idea – after all, what’s more modern and ironic than a world where superheroes have been totally suppressed by lawyers? It was cute, visually stunning, had some classic moments and the kids were just adorable. I loved the fun, snappy storytelling that came with a grounded, ironic vein that I often don’t overly enjoy, but here found charming. The story clearly took its cues from Watchmen, with the idea of outlawed superheroes yearning for the old days. But it never felt like a rip-off, only like a tribute, and an exploration of the concept in a different direction.

This film is really Brad Bird’s baby – and he was definitely a great addition to Pixar, even if arguably he brought with him a short period where the studio’s popularity started to wane, until Wall-E brought it all back. The film is what brought him to Pixar, and broke the Pixar mould by centring on a cast of real humans. Well, superhumans, but still fundamentally human beings. The film had been destined to be an traditionally-animated feature for Warner Bros before their theatrical animation division shut down – and it was really thanks to the fact Bird had gone to college with John Lasseter, with a little help from the artistic merits of The Iron Giant, that the move to Pixar happened. Bird also provides the voice of the scene-stealing Edna Mode, one of the film’s best characters, and was very visible in the DVD extras, and for whatever reason I felt the need when I saw these to observe he looked extremely like a grown-up Haley Joel Osment.

Bird is a bit of wild card in the current Pixar. They’ve got their first critical disappointment on their hands with Cars 2, and Bird is busily making a live-action film about the 1906 earthquake that will be the biggest change in mode for Pixar yet. I’m not sure what Pixar’s future will be, but their place in history is assured and I’m eager to see Brave.