Blame! movie: Single syllable title, single digit FPS

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Blame! movie: Single syllable title, single digit FPS

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

Xy Hapu posted:

That was an amazing retelling of the manga, and a perfect way to transmogrify it into a 2 hour movie. Loses some of the atmosphere and sense of scale but I found myself not really caring that much, even though those were the two things I like most about Blame. I was never really into the look of any kind of CG animation, but Cibo and Sanakan sold the gently caress out of it, it's the first time where I thought, 'yeah, they couldn't have done this better with traditional animation.' Also is it just me or did they reduce the framerate on everything else in the entire movie just so they could raise it just for those two for effect? Or did their fantastic animation just trick me into thinking that?

I am gushing like a teenage fangirl but I 1000% expected a disjointed and mediocre direct adaptation that tries to rush through the entire manga's plot, but instead got a lovingly crafted reboot/alt universe/whatever that completely stands on its own while keeping much of the key imagery of the original. Every dollar I threw at Netflix over the years was totally worth it if it helped fund this.

Some cons: teenage crush was stupid, and I agree Killy felt pretty off, he just seemed like a robotic/superquiet dude in the manga, here he's a lobotomized samurai, I don't think newcomers to Blame will understand or like his character at all. Sanakan slowly narrating herself was silly but the fact that I was making GBS threads my pants in terror distracted from that effectively

This basically. Unless we get a reclusive crazy billionaire with infinite money to make a studio to hand-draw the entire series, losing millions of dollars, this is Good Enough, Maybe Even Pretty Great.

I'm curious what people who never read the comic thought. I definitely imagined Killy as sounding much older, the JP VA and voice direction didn't do much for me and made him sound like a moody teen.

Pierson fucked around with this message at 16:13 on May 20, 2017

# ¿ May 20, 2017 14:52

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 06:30

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

Biomega feels like his first attempt at Sidonia and more regular-style plotting. The entire thing read fine until the back third when he just sped up until the end and everything happened so fast. It felt like Zouichi and Nishu should have spent a lot more time on the transformed earth teasing out what Nyaldee was up to, with Hiigarde and Kardal doing the same thing from the opposite 'side'. Instead we got what we got and the entire thing felt rushed and wasted. Dunno whether it was forced or not though.

It also had just a ton of cool poo poo like the bikes and their AI and the weird shrike bird-machines, and the post-earth societies they touched on in random chapters.

Pierson fucked around with this message at 00:24 on May 22, 2017

# ¿ May 22, 2017 00:21

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

Xy Hapu posted:

Cool stuff.

Worth noting that the Governing Agency of the netsphere does still seem to be reasonably sane throughout, but they're just as cut off from reality as reality is from them.They manage to make it past the Safeguard pretty early on by piggybacking down on a connection to have a talk with Killy and Cibo and then turn up occasionally after that to assist when they can, which isn't often. Most of them are running off the last instructions they were given which are basically implied to be 'protect human life' and 'stop the city's expansion'.

Even the Safeguard aren't monolithic or all-knowing due to how hosed the Netsphere is: Some have a lot more sapience than others depending on their assignment and the status of their floor. It's implied Dhomo and Pcell had a thing at some point, and (pretty major spoiler) Sanakan or a version of her is wrested away from them to work directly for the Governing Agency.

NOiSE is a story about early Silicon Life and two future-cops trying to hunt their cult down. Things are pretty much already past the point of no return by then though as the Safeguard are already planning on turning off all non-gene login methods and then cleansing everyone without it.

Always put backdoors in your world-spanning code kiddos.

# ¿ May 23, 2017 16:21

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

That stuff about the gun is cool but wouldn't that make it a Gravitational Beam Suppressor and not a Gravitational Beam Emitter. :v:

I didn't know the other stuff though, I never really went down that rabbit-hole of hunting for old interviews and Nihei has always been super-good at giving information to the reader without it seeming forced or having a character go LET ME EXPLAIN, or sometimes even speak at all. Dhomo and Pcell is implied across maybe ten panels total and zero words and it's still super obvious there's history there.

I'm just taking the excuse to re-read the whole thing and some of the imagery is still breathtakingly good.

Pierson fucked around with this message at 03:25 on May 24, 2017

# ¿ May 24, 2017 03:20

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

It's just one of those things in how the art style has changed a lot since early Blame! and how events needed to be cinematic but I wish they'd hewn closer to the older style for Sanakan the same way they did Killy and Cibo. That first scene of her manifesting among the transformed colonists was baller as gently caress.

ACES CURE PLANES posted:

So what was up with the chapter one rescued boy and not-Cibo? I can only assume it was a scrapped plotline idea for Killy to try saving people who might have the gene, and Cibo was his support, but Nihei flies in abject defiance of traditional storytelling concepts so I can't say how much was intentional and just not meant to be explained like so many other things, or if it was just a dropped idea. I'd totally read a full length Blame Academy though. Guess I'll chug through Netsphere Engineer and Noise now.

Xy might know the answer but I just took it as early concepts later scrapped. It would still work though even if they were intended: The kid like you say could easily have had either the gene or the potential for the gene, and the girl could have been the last member of his support team to keep up with him, or from an organisation he met along the way that had a similar goal. We know he was wound up and let go by somebody (probably as a last resort), and volume one was so much earlier in the journey (those timescales again) it's possible he still had contact with them.

# ¿ May 28, 2017 17:55

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

Rime posted:

That there is not more of this Manga is a tragedy. I just finished reading everything and

There is more but it's kind of just ancillary random chapters that confirm stuff the ending implied. Besides Blame Academy's comedy stuff you've got solo chapters of Netsphere Engineer and Blame!², they're quick reads if you can find them: The first shows a megastructure back under enough control to have an operational system of engineers/sheriffs solving and disarming the leftover Safeguard caches, deathtraps and nasty poo poo that hundreds of thousands of years bred. The second shows that both humans and Silicon Life now have working societies that still hate each other a whole bunch.

Nihei seems to flirt from one project to the next until he gets something solid enough to run a whole series off, with varying results. I'm pretty excited about where Aposimz is going based on the background dropped so far.

# ¿ May 28, 2017 19:25

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

MachuPikacchu posted:

I just finished watching this amazing movie, and it pushed me to read the manga.

Could someone please explain what happens in like, everything after they meet Dhomochevsky.

Huge spoilers obviously:

The level of the megastructure that arc takes place on was still under construction with its links to the Netsphere not as secure or finished, and so either didn't need or only needed an artificial/incomplete Net Terminal Gene for login priviledges. Davinel, Pcell and his Silicon Life crew take that opportunity to hijack it, closing off the entire level from the Safeguard so they could work on hacking in and looting the Safeguard tech undisturbed. The Safeguard noticed too late (or couldn't do anything about it) and so create Dhomo and his lil' ghost buddy as their last act before they get entirely locked out.

INFINITE TIME PASSES

Killy and Cibo arrive, along with an incomplete net terminal gene given to them in an earlier arc, and kick everything into high gear. The weird stalemate/detente between Dhomo and Davinel is broken and massive sweet-as-gently caress fights are had. Schiff (super-fast knifeman) is taken out by Killy, Blom (huge fat laughing guy) gets shot, crushed and generally blown to gently caress, and even Pcell (who appears to be rocking some kind of gravitational weapon herself as well as a sweet get-out-of-jail-free nano-swarm form) gets dunked on pretty hard. The gene eventually gets taken by Davinel who uses it to finally get a valid Netsphere login. The final fight takes place with Killy, Dhomo and Cibo all gunning for Davinel hard. A whole bunch of stuff happens at once, very fast:

Davinel gets his login and meets with some kind of Safeguard script he's apparently talked with before, they jaw a bit. It knows he wants in to steal but since he has the auth codes it can't really stop him. He's really smug about it.
Dhomo and Killy get distracted/ambushed by Pcell and they score mutual hits on each other. She goes down hard and they get pretty messed-up as well.
The Safeguard login guard distracts a very smug Davinel enough so that he doesn't notice his connection is throttled. So much so that time has slowed down for Davinel immensely while he's logging on, giving Dhomo time to headshot him.
Cibo is unfortunately connected to the same login session as Davinel and the feedback gibs her.
As his last act Davinel manages to swipe some incredibly high-level Safeguard tech and downloads it into the last receptacle available: Cibo/Cibo's corpse.
This unholy Cibo/Safeguard combo manifests and loving annihilates everything by teleporting a slice of the sun to her and spitting fire. BUT...
Pcell manages to get one last shot off and severely injures Cibo, loving her up enough to render her brand-new Safeguard half dormant and Cibo herself (at this point basically a host for the tech) a childlike blank-slate.
Only Killy escapes in what could reasonably be called good condition, or any condition at all.

The last volumes are basically Killy and Sanakan (who has been taken out of the Safeguard command chain and now works directly for the Governing Agency) trying to keep Cibo and the godlike Safeguard/netsphere core she carries out of the hands of Silicon Life. It turns out Sanakan is pretty cool when she's not under murderous instructions. There was also something about Cibo's level-nine core somehow having some of Sanakan's genes in it, but I don't remember how that bit worked.

Pierson fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Jun 7, 2017

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 10:29

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# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 06:30

Pierson: Oct 31, 2004; College Slice

There was a great bit in Sidonia after the android-girl came back and was walking around just in her exoskeleton and one of the other girls complains, so she points at Tsugumi's avatar and says "yo you live with a penis".

I also really love his older style of art but I've come around to the character designs and art from later Sidonia and now Aposimz. It feels like he thought that the character art of Blame! wouldn't really translate well to more emotional teenagers/young adults (which I get, most Blame! characters didn't really emote ever) and Sidonia was him trying to establish a new one that would work, and Aposimz is building on it. The environmental detail is still there in spades but Sidonia was set on an inhabited funtional ship and Aposimz is a literal iceball so he just uses white a lot more I think. If the series ever descends into the true core I think we'll see a lot of that old megastructure-sprawl come back.

Pierson fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jun 14, 2017

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 13:13

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Blame! movie: Single syllable title, single digit FPS