ואלס עם באשיר / Vals Im Bashir / Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir got a lot of attention – primarily with arthouse audiences – upon its release in 2008. With a striking, realistic art style, a hard-hitting and intellectually fashionable subject matter and unconventional structure, it was nominated for an Oscar not for best animated film but best film in a foreign language, won the equivalent award at the Golden Globes and earned top awards from respected animated film awards such as grand prizes from Zagreb and Tokyo Filmex. It is not hard to see why it was such a darling of the arthouse animation crowd: completely adult-oriented, based on harrowing real-world experiences and from a culture not generally associated with animation (this and $9.99 being the first animated films made in Israel since 1962), it is certainly not the average animated feature.

Key to its seriousness and distinctiveness is that it is an animated documentary. Not a thousand miles from Nick Park’s Creature Features work, a series of interviews are taped and then the animation is made to match it. But these interviews, some repeated or even conflated to make the details work better for a film, are not simple observations of life delivered by cute animals: they are recollections of Israeli soldiers from the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The main character of the film, the director and writer Ari, has a strange memory of his time serving in Beirut, but can remember almost nothing of the actual events. So he sets out to interview others who were there to try to piece together the truth. There is brutal violence, graphic depictions of death, even one absurd sequence where gratuitous pornography is animated, something I doubt could be featured in live-action. And at the very end, in a fine moment of contrast, real news footage is played, reminding the audience with stunning simplicity just how real these events are, and the distance between reality and animation is artificial.

This is not made to tell the story of a war. It is not to educate, to make political statements or to excuse. If you don’t know the background, you may well be lost. If you don’t know why there would be Palestinians in Lebanon, or who the Phalangists were, you might struggle to understand all the implications of what is happening, but you are likely to understand the stories individuals tell and the sense of despair, helplessness and disgust so many of them retained after the event.

Visually, there is much to be praised, though it is somewhat annoying to read other film reviewers who clearly have very little to do with animation clearly not recognising the very obvious visual characteristics of Flash animation, presumably because they see only blockbusters and have no knowledge of the evolution of Flash on the web or the cartoons from the likes of Cartoon Network that make extensive use of it. Those disconnected limbs and that odd fluidity, the slow movements of the heads and the way the camera can squeeze in and out – all are hallmarks of Flash. There were accusations of rotoscoping here, presumably because those bold lines and the smooth motions are reminiscent of the likes of Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings and the like, but the filmmakers vehemently deny the technique was used. On the other hand, there are a few junctures where I suspect that at the very least the faces are traced or very heavily drawn from film footage – for example, one martial artist demonstrates a kick in a sequence the filmmakers were clearly so proud of they repeat it a few times – and his face has the most realistic expression for a person doing martial arts I have ever seen in animation.

Other sequences are fine for their strangeness and the symbolic elements, the very reason for making this a piece of animation; the are visions and dream sequences that come with really surprising and impressive moments of beauty, including the eponymous waltz. On the other hand, there is much that doesn’t satisfy: the idea of the suppressed memories seems artificial and forced, and the fleeting mentions of the Holocaust needed far more development to be valid thinking points.

But Waltz for Bashir is nothing if not memorable, powerful and unique. Well worth watching, if not one to enjoy.

Dead Space: Downfall

Dead Space: Downfall is spin-off of a successful atmospheric sci-fi/horror game. Serving as a prequel, it tells the story of how the player comes to be on a spaceship full of nasty alien creatures that can turn humans into six-limbed killing machines. I’m guessing the idea was to produce something along the lines of The Animatrix, an animated tie-in that is well-received by fans of the original, animation fans and general critics and ties up some loose ends.

Unfortunately, with terrible dialogue, characters it was impossible to like and a very juvenile fetishisation of violence, it was far too bad to like, and almost (only almost) too hard to enjoy with merciless mocking. Made direct-to-DVD by American studio Film Roman, who farm most of the work to Korea and are best-known for animating the bulk of The Simpsons, they manage to make everything look ugly, move awkwardly and sound silly.

The game it’s tied in with is undoubtedly far better, but nothing that interests me. I’ll stick with Aliens, which the film so clearly ripped off that it didn’t even bother to hide it in the last scenes.

(slightly expanded from impressions, 19.8.09)

クレヨンしんちゃん 嵐を呼ぶ モーレツ！オトナ帝国の逆襲 / Crayon Shin-Chan: The Storm Calls! The Adult Empire Strikes Back (Shin-chan Movie 9)

It’s perhaps purely because of his vague presence on Cartoon Network in somewhat bastardized form that Shin-chan isn’t seen as the national treasure he is in Japan. The success of Crayon Shin-chan is phenomenal, both as a manga and on televisions, the anime having run continuously since 1992. The end is in sight only because of the tragic passing of series creator Usui Yoshito in 2009, but such a fixture of television animation is little Shin-chan that his name ought to be uttered in the same breath as the likes of Doraemon and Sazae-san.

Like Sazae-san or Tonari no Yamada-kun, the appeal of Shin-chan is the presentation of a family unit, drawn in crude comic-strip style, having silly but charming small-scale adventures. While the free-wheeling and ugly aesthetic is hardly the peak of beauty on the screen, there is not such a big leap to, for example, the respected artistry of Yuasa Masaaki, whose first jobs as animation director were on the Shin-chan series. If I ever watch all 800+ episodes of the anime, it will not be for a very long time, so for now, these thoughts can be confined here, to my impressions of the ninth Shin-chan movie.

2001’s The Adult Empire Strikes Back begins with the usual Shin-chan fare: crudely-drawn, crazy, puerile, parody humour in the South Park vein. However, soon after, it becomes a strange, rather epic, almost didactic movie about what would happen if adults acted like children. Like South Park, the creators know exactly how far to take their ridiculous premise, building upon the inherent absurdity of the scenario with plenty of incidental gags until it all gets very strange, but stopping short of being unfunny – and I’ve seen few things stranger than John and Yoko (or, perhaps, their beatnik clones) taking over the world.

Of course, Shin-chan is still mostly suitable for small kids, which you can’t say for South Park, despite the similarly diminutive characters. That said, perhaps some American audiences would be appalled by the comic nudity and talk of retracting balls and big maternal bottoms. The film is also unafraid of genuine sentimentality. The movie was well worth viewing, and provides some fascinating insight into the mixed attitudes to modernisation prevailing in turn-of-the-century Japan, despite their global image as futuristic and ultra-progressive.

One final thing: no matter what you make of Shin-chan and his misadventures, it cannot be denied that one of the best examples of panicked Engrish ever exists in this film: ‘I’M-SORRY-MY-KID-IS-SORRY-I’M-BEAUTIFUL-JAPANESE-WIFE-PRETTY-SEXY-FINE-THANK-YOU!’

(expanded from impressions, 20.5.05)

Beowulf

Beowulf turned out to be quite a surprise, albeit not a very good one.

I didn’t think it was going to be animated to the extent it was. I thought it would be like 300 or Sin City, heavily stylised live-action with lots of CG overlaid. But alas, Robert Zemekis is no Robert Rodriguez, and is still hung up on his Polar Express experiments, so Beowulf takes the interesting step of having real actors, motion-capturing them, faithfully recreating faces and expressions, but sticking them into computer animation. The final effect is like human faces pasted onto the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and the opening scenes in particular, with lots of sub-Shrek crowd scenes, look terrible. Scenes with horses make the intro to the original Tekken look state-of-the-art, and everything still looks moulded out of plastic, be it skin, fabric or eyes. Aesthetically, a total failure. They may have made Ray Winstone look young and muscular and Brendan Gleeson look like Gimli, but it really wasn’t worth it for the floating, swollen, immune-to-momentum mannequins we had to watch, even in glorious 3D – and this really isn’t a film to see without the 3D effects, because they provide what little interest there is in the visual spectacle.

The story is a typical Gaiman reimagining, the kind of thing that looks really clever in a single comic issue if you’re familiar with the source material, because a flaw is shoe-horned into Beowulf’s character so that there can be clever-clever talk of unreliable narrators. To be fair, though, for a movie to work, some way to tie the dragon into the main storyline was needed, and that was really quite a seamless way to integrate it. Despite this advantage, the whole fight against the dragon was so Saturday morning that it became intensely dull.

And this is really the problem with the film. The two- or three-part narrative of the poem (ah, much scholarly debate about which it is) all gets neatly tied together, in a very modern femme fatale sort of a way, and there’s the macho revivalism of 300 at play, but this film fails where 300 succeeded because it just isn’t any fun. The fights are plastic and false, Beowulf isn’t interesting as a man or hilariously excessive as a warrior (as is Zack Snyder’s Leonidas), the conclusion is gobsmackingly cheesy and the CG falls way short of what it needs to for this film to be in any way watchable in ten years’ time. Oh, and ‘hiding the penis’ gags may work in Austin Powers or The Simpsons, but they really don’t belong here.

Kudos to Gaiman and collaborator Roger Avery for their little Macbethian revisionist unification of the tale and their attempt to humanise an idealised hero, but as a film, this really did fall flat.

劇場版 NARUTO 大活劇! 雪姫忍法帖だってばよ!! / Gekijōban Naruto Daikatsugeki! Yukihime Ninpōchō dattebayo!! / Naruto Movie 1: The Snow Princess’s Book of Ninja Arts

This, the first Naruto film, is also the only one to date that I saw on a big screen. I saw it first as a fansub in 2005, but then caught it again in 2007 when there was a single promotional screening in London. That may well mean that it is the one and only Naruto film I’ve watched through twice. By 2007 Naruto was already losing its lustre as a series, though had nothing like the blind hatred it gets today, but in 2005 I was quite genuinely keen on the series, before filler made it a laughing stock and the post-timeskip manga storyline even put off the long-term fans.

There were worse ones I could have suffered through. I quite liked this movie adaptation, if truth be told. Because, as I wrote on May 02, 2005, it really made me giggle.

‘I really enjoyed it!’ I went on. ‘No, it was nothing like as good as the early chapters of the manga, and had a very trite story, but that was alright. Team Seven have never been so beautifully drawn and animated, Naruto himself has rarely been so hilarious and some of the shorter fight scenes were very satisfying. The story was merely functional, with barely a new idea throughout, but on occasion, it's fun to watch something brainless - especially if you know and like the characters already. The context (movie stars, machines) was so different from the kind of thing Kishimoto writes that it felt like another series altogether – and we also got a USEFUL Sakura, which was just bizarre, but very welcome!

I found it to be a lot of fun. Not the best movie ever made, but certainly enjoyable, and I'd watch it again quite happily.’

Those impressions have not changed, really. Naruto had a great cast in 2005 and some really fun ideas. Those who pour vitriol on it today likely never experienced the exuberant fun of it when we didn’t know what a state it was going to end up in. Back then, the aesthetic could still be stunning, the associated talent still remarkable (director Okamura Tensai coming fresh from working on Wolf’s Rain) and the end result still pleasing. Fond memories here, and I don’t care who disapproves.

(the English title is Naruto the Movie: Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow)

はるのあしおと The Movie - 桜鈴奪還 / Haru no Ashioto The Movie: Ourin Dakkan / Spring’s Footsteps: Recapture Ourin

This silly little piece of moé frivolity was apparently based on an H-game, and given that although it calls itself a ‘movie’ yet is only 20 minutes long and dispenses with more or less everything that could be called exposition, it’s one for the fans.

But anyone familiar with archetypes in anime will instantly understand the cuteness factor of the girls here, and the charm of the broad slapstick comedy. Three girls rebel against their vice-principal, who has taken over their school and likes to laugh like a villainess. Little girlies fighting usually brings in a bit of a fanbase, especially when done in a cutesy way.

No brains, no originality and with low-budget animation from Asahi Productions, it’s just a fun little diversion for fans of the game, but for something to make you smile for twenty minutes, you can’t do much better.

(Slightly expanded from impressions, 8.9.08)

メトロポリス/ Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis

Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis was a very interesting project. Made in 2001, of course long after the death of the legendary Tezuka, who created the likes of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion, it was based on a 1949 manga he created, adapted by Akira’s Outomo Katsuhiro and directed by Rintaro, renowned Harlock helmsman who worked with Tezuka in the 60s.

These names, the legacy of the ‘Godfather of Anime’ and Madhouse at their very best make for a striking feature. The production values are excellent, and Tezuka’s distinctive and old-fashioned designs look superb when animated beautifully. The setpieces, cg-tinted like those of Gankutsuou, are often stunning, and the jazz soundtrack is undeniably fun. It’s midway between Tezuka’s manga, which sounds a bit odd and babyish, and the live-action film (Tezuka supposedly wrote his version based on nothing but a movie poster) – Tezuka’s recurring character designs and overall tone dominate, but scenery and power structures are straight from Lang’s vision.

The plot gets somewhat sloppy towards the end, with Rock in particular mostly just being there as an unstable catalyst, but it’s beautiful and good fun and a fitting homage to the legacy of one of the most important figures in animation history.

(expanded from impressions, 28.2.08)