Live-Action Adaptation: The Last Airbender

I nearly shed a tear, I must admit it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paprika

Kon Satoshi’s recent death has probably affected me more than the passing of any other director since Kubrick, and in fact probably more than that. Having become one of the three or four most prominent anime directors alive, I felt he was on the brink of international fame, and that with a few more films he might rival Miyazaki in the Western mindset and perhaps help Japanese animation to be recognised as increasingly sophisticated and adult-oriented. And then a few days ago, I was genuinely shocked to hear the news he had passed away, apparently suddenly and without warning, his latest film The Dream Machine unfinished.

Last night a final blog entry from Kon himself was disseminated around the internet and quickly translated. It stands as one of the most moving pieces of writing I have ever read. He knew that he was in the advanced stages of cancer and had come to terms with his imminent death at the age of just 46. He detailed how he and his wife reacted to the news of how close he was to death, how he thought he would not be able to see his parents again but managed to recover from pneumonia for long enough to see them, and his regrets over how The Dream Machine cannot possibly be what it would have been had he lived to see it completed. Most affecting of all, at the end, he had accepted that he was about to die and closed this final epistle, this auto-eulogy, with dignity and, indeed, happiness.

Thus it was with turbulent emotions that I watched what will essentially stand as his final complete work, excluding the one-minute short he made for NHK. Apart from one last episode of Paranoia Agent I’ll watch in the coming days and that little short, watching Paprika means that I have seen everything Satoshi Kon directed, a distressingly short corpus, and rank Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress and especially Paranoia Agent as amongst the best anime I have ever seen. So it pains me to say that Paprika, for me, doesn’t match up at all.

There are many ways in which I can sing its praises: it is utterly beautiful, smoothly animated, consummately drawn and shows fantastic imagery that brings wonderment still exclusive to animated films. The voice acting is pitch-perfect, from seiyuu of great standing like Hayashibara Megumi to Kon himself in a cameo role alongside the novelist who wrote the original story. The concept, too, is fascinating, made of very similar stuff to what made Inception such a success: a machine has been invented which allows people to enter the dreams of others and explore their psyches for information, used here for psychotherapeutic reasons. Of course, the machines go missing, abused in the hands of people with nefarious agendas, and chaos ensues.

There are some appealing characters here and some stunning, memorable visuals. But the trouble is that the plot is so poor. It’s clear from early on who is going to be the self-appointed defender of dreams, and there’s really no good reason for dreams to start pouring into reality. A lot of characters, like the police inspector, are left underdeveloped even when their backstories get laid out, and the chanting of nonsense gets old very quickly.

But the real problem is comparing this with Kon’s other films. Even Perfect Blue, similarly dark and strange, had strong emotional content and a sort of appealing innocence. Tokyo Godfathers and Millennium Actress are both heartfelt, full of affection and fondness and warmth, even if they take darker turns or face a grim reality. In Paprika everything seems to be at arm’s length. The main characters are all aloof and professional, and the protagonist even splits herself into two distinct parts. The only naïve and innocent character is soon turned mad and trundles about detached from everything for the climactic final act. And the problem with removing reality from the equation is that makes it extremely hard to find points of identification and empathy. This is Paprika’s problem, and the reason why it does not quite stand with all the rest of the great man’s finest works.

Yuri Norstein’s Сказка сказок & Ёжик в тумане / Tale of Tales and The Hedgehog in the Fog

Yuri Norstein is a giant of animation, and so seminal are Tale of Tales and The Hedgehog in the Fog that quite frankly I am ashamed of never having seen them until last year. Today, I rewatched The Hedgehog in the Fog and remembered just how brilliant it was. Indeed, 29 years since his last animated release (not counting his 2-minute segment of the Winter Days project), I feel it’s high time he got a move on with The Overcoat...

All jokes aside, as I’ve mentioned before, I regard it as a shame that so many fans of animation are tribal and tend not to stray beyond their devotion to, for example, Disney or anime. On the other hand, once one is aware of Norstein’s work, his stature becomes more obvious. Along with Paul Grimault, Miyazaki Hayao has cited Norstein as a great influence, international polls often put these two titles at the top of ‘best animation of all time’ lists and the wolf from Tale of Tales even cameos in an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei.

Norstein’s animations are grim, almost devoid of colour but complex to look at, and are capable of that kind of empty, plaintive storytelling that to the viewer seems profound and beautiful. While Tale of Tales is the more serious, weighty and symbolic of the two, my personal preference is for the coherence and simple storytelling of The Hedgehog in the Fog, which creates its strange atmosphere through direction and art rather than disconnected segments. The latter’s story follows a little hedgehog who, concerned about a horse, goes into a frog, is startled by various encounters in the strange world there, but is ultimately aided by weird but good-hearted creatures and is reunited with his friend the bear cub, whose voice actor delivers one of the best performances I’ve ever heard in no more than a handful of lines. Tale of Tales, conversely, makes a degree of sense following the little wolf, but otherwise it is mostly strange snatches of skipping bulls, apples and soldiers. Both, rather like poems, can bring strong emotions with just the slightest impressions, but I find elements of the lack of story and bizarre imagery to be overly simplistic and without symbolic power, rather than the other way around. I have never been keen on images which may mean numerous profound things, because it is equally probable, if not more so, that they mean nothing at all. This is likely because I put more emphasis on the storyteller’s intentions than my subjective interpretation.

But it is undoubtedly the uncanny mood of Norstein’s cut-out animation, moving between several layers of glass with different textures upon them, that makes him so prominent. Take the exact soundtrack and storyboard and animate in Disney’s style and see if you get the same impact. Norstein is a master of mood, of his own strange aesthetic, and of pitching animation to be both cute and unsettling. And these are no small feats. Essential viewing.

カフカ 田舎医者/ Kafuka Inaka Isha / Franz Kakfa’s A Country Doctor

Much as I love anime, when one thinks of arthouse, it is not where the mind first turns. Anime may have outgrown its eighties clichés of ultraviolence, big-boobed airheads getting molested by tentacles and plotlines with little more to them than good guys and bad guys have a scrap, but while modern anime is more sophisticated, little of it appeals to international arthouse crowds. Osamu Tezuka’s experiments are long in the past, and seldom revisited. Today’s anime is dominated by cutesy comedies, fantasy action series and a few shows which aim for realism. Arguably some of SHAFT’s stranger work has a heavy arthouse influence, Takahata’s work with Studio Ghibli has an artistic angle that balances Miyazaki’s populism, and some of the releases from Madhouse and Studio 4˚C have certainly been exceptional, from Mind Game to Tekkon Kinkreet, but these are recent examples, and that they stand out so much is indicative of how little they represent the immense anime industry.

But anime, especially in 2010, is getting to be as broad as cinema in general. While the minds of those who think of arthouse animation may still go first to Yuri Norstein or the Zagreb School, arthouse anime is still being made. And here is a rather unsettling, grotesquely beautiful example, directed and seemingly almost wholly realised by Yamamura Koji. A Country Doctor is a pretty direct attempt to render Franz Kakfa’s weird short story of the same name in visual terms. Thus, the hallucinogenic and Protean way the narrative weaves about and hints at political commentary comes through as a strange, scratchy and almost monochrome animation in which characters and objects swell and change and move without weight, but remain recognisable and can interact with one another, while overlaid filters shift and blend, giving a scratchy overall texture not too distant from Norstein’s work. At times the delivery seems juvenile: choral delivery of narrative in spooky, flat voices immediately brings student theatre to mind, for example. However, as a whole the mood is unsettling, iconic and grotesque and suits the strange story well.

Of course, the question of the validity of Kafka’s narrative, which quite probably means nothing at all in conventionally storytelling terms and is instead a series of emotional expressions, is a debate far too large for this page, but this anime at only 20 minutes long can bewilder, disturb and to a degree amuse without becoming tedious.

Never to be a popular hit, nor to be of much note in any history of Japanese animation, it is nonetheless an award-winning animation worthy of attention and interest. Unfortunately, at least in the West, those who would be impressed generally steer clear of anime as lowbrow, while those who adore anime are more ‘in it for the pretty’ and would be baffled and irritated by something like this. Ah well. In my view, that is their loss.

Majo no Takkyubin/ Witch’s Delivery Sevice/ Kiki’s Delivery Service

The change in tone between Mononoke-Hime, one of Miyazaki’s most epic, serious and Japanese films and tonight’s viewing, the intimate, whimsical and very European-flavoured Majo no Takkyubin, is a true indication of the director’s versatility. Kiki is few Ghibli fans’ favourite of the studio’s movies, but I think I’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who admires Miyazaki’s work who doesn’t at least like this warm-hearted, thoroughly sweet little story. Indeed, I can think of few fans of Japanese animation, beyond those who like nothing but giant robots, big explosions, gunfights and overlarge boobies, who wouldn’t have a place in their heart for Kiki, Jiji and their charming little world.

Set in an imprecise European location in the 40s or 50s, the tone is somewhat reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking (which Miyazaki and Takahata at one stage wanted to adapt for a TV anime) or the Heidi books (which were adapted into an anime series directed by Takahata, with Miyazaki working on layouts), although the story was based on a book (more a series of short stories) by a Japanese author.

Kiki is a young witch. At thirteen, she must leave home to find a city in need of magical services, where she will stay for a year in a traditional rites-of-passage ritual. With only her black cat Jiji (who can speak only to her) for company, she finds life in the big city difficult when she first arrives, but since her ability to fly on a broomstick is her greatest asset, she soon strikes upon the idea of setting up a delivery service.

There’s barely any plot to speak of. Of all the Ghibli anime, this is the one that feels most like it is simply a truncated version of an anime series. Pom Poko jumps about from character to character, plotline to plotline, but there’s a goal that unites all the different parts. Porco Rosso has the merest strand of a story, but it lasts the whole movie through, and has consistent development of character relationships. Majo no Takkyubin just…keeps things simpler. Kiki arrives, gets herself in trouble, picks herself up and sets up her business with the kind baker woman she meets, delivers various items, with the focus on her going beyond the call of duty to help people, makes friends with Tombo (who has saintly patience with Kiki), has a crisis where she loses her powers, then gets them back in time to help avert disaster so that there can be a strong ending. As you can see, it’s a very episodic plot, and other than Kiki and Jiji, none of the characters really share the screen with our young heroine enough to be developed very well. Even Tombo seems like a two-dimensional nice-boy character.

But that’s not really the point. The point is that Kiki is a lovely, sweet little girl in a mostly very sweet world, who has her ups and downs and enriches the lives of everyone she meets. She does little favours to lovely people, whose reciprocal acts of kindness really bring a smile to the face. This is winsome, innocent fluff, the wholesome entertainment most Westerners expect from their cartoons – but it’s done very well. Very well indeed.

I was watching another of my old, slightly dodgy subs, from the pre-Disney licensing of the movie. Every time I re-watch some anime, I’m thankful that I know a little more Japanese than I used to, because some of the translated lines were so much more aggressive than they needed to be. And whoever thought they were being clever by making a television announcer say, ‘Oh, the humanity!’ when a dirigible was crashing…well, you weren’t. I really should get new versions of these films soon. The washed-out colours and bad transfer were a pain. There are lots of cheap Ghibli DVD offers at the moment – I should make use of them. Despite this, I could see how good the art was, how beautifully this fictional city had been depicted, how sweet young Kiki looked, and how utterly cute Jiji was.

And the voice acting here really is top-notch. Kiki is played by Takayama Minami, who was recently making headlines in the anime world after successfully proposing to the man who created her most famous character, Conan, and who was one of the first seiyuu I ever really admired (since she played Emilio in Psychic Force). She plays Kiki with such earnest sweetness that I was astonished to discover that she also played the worldly, headstrong Ursula. But then, since her most recent role I’ve seen has been playing two identical (male) twins with totally different personalities in Jyuu-Ou-Sei, her versatility shouldn’t come as a surprise!

Also worth noting that while Tombo’s role wasn’t very complex, he was also played by another great seiyuu, Yamaguchi Kappei, who is most famous for playing Ranma and Inuyasha, but also does lots of generic young boy voices like Ryuichi in Gravitation and Iwaki in Rizelmine. And also plays Usopp in One Piece. Trust me when I say that you cannot beat his performance as Usopp. It is just peerless. Comparable might be Clarence Nash’s Donald Duck or Dan Castellanata’s Homer Simpson, in their own respective cultural spheres. Sure, Tombo isn’t up there with Usopp, but it’s still worth mentioning!

I’ve digressed somewhat, but the fact is that there isn’t a whole lot to say about Kiki. It’s simple, clean, sprightly fun that won’t challenge you, confuse you or surprise you, but will put a smile on your face. It’s not Totoro, or Sen to Chihiro, but aside from those two classics, I’d say there was no better Ghibli movie for younger children.

(originally written 20.08.2006)

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.

レイトン教授と永遠の歌姫/ Reiton-kyouju to Eien-no Utahime / Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva

Let’s face it, I was always going to enjoy this film. I love playing the highly successful games and find the characters really engaging: civilized ‘Eikoku Shinshi’ (English gentleman) Professor Layton and his adorable square-headed ‘apprentice’ Luke go off investigating mysteries and uncovering secrets, all the time stopping to answer puzzle after puzzle, be it offered by the people they meet, all of whom seem to have a puzzler or two, or simply challenging one another, inspired by things like trees or fonts. It’s all very sedate and charming and wholesome.

So a feature-length animation had a lot of appeal to me, even if unfortunately some things in the film rely on knowledge of games not yet released on these shores – although it’s nothing too puzzling. Only a few picarats’ worth.

Professor Layton and Luke are called upon to investigate mysterious rumours of reincarnation and eternal life in an opera house. Going to see the performance, they get wrapped up in an intriguing game, eternal life promised to the winner who solves the puzzles that will eliminate all others.

It’s a sprightly, likeable anime, character designs consistent with the quirky, Hergé-influenced designs of the game, animations from Pokémon’s studio OLM Inc. fluid and vibrant and locales from England lovingly recreated – not only the usual sights like Tower Bridge and Big Ben, but Regent Street, Covent Garden and later, The White Cliffs of Dover, all of which gave me a small thrill. Layton is an engaging Holmes figure, quietly charismatic and at once gentle and formidable. Luke is utterly adorable, especially trying to assert his identity and relationship to the Professor, and the rest of the cast, even the ones with selfish motives, are amusing and hard to dislike.

As with the games, though – and far more so than them – the film is slightly disappointing. Not because it is bad, but because it could have been rather better. Just as the games tend to give the impression some clever twist that shows why the impossible science-fiction world is possible in reality, only to finally fall back on fantasy inventions, I feel the film would have been more of a success had it left aside karate kicks, chase scenes with wolves and, yes, giant mecha, and instead aimed for a Holmes-derived mood of battles of the wit rather than the fist. For a film that had so many puzzles it could have fallen back on, the few that get thrown in here are rather unimpressive and obvious, and it’s a real shame that the overall mystery just gets tossed away when it’s time for the climax to come, essentially boiling down to ‘This whole thing could have just been a simple kidnap of one person and worked far better, the main mystery is just a tempting lie, and our machines do magical things.’

But as an anime for charming visuals, extremely lovable characters and a real sense of fun, you can’t go wrong. Not to mention that Layton is one of very, very few places where I hold the dub (UK, not US) just as dear as the original, both of which I believe are equally good – as a result, I look forward to hearing the localised version!