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drunkenmonkeystyle
Jan 16, 2020

Gonk!!

Probably better to talk about this in here.

So in 2002, an independent anime movie called Tamala2010: A Punk Cat in Space. Not much is known about the film besides it being created by a duo called t.o.L, which stands for tree of Life (yes this is how they capitalize it), which was a music group that was signed onto hide's Record Label LEMONed. They had one hit single - One Day for Maria, and one album - the soundtrack to Tamala2010: A Punk Cat in Space.

Anyways so this duo who go by K and Kuno created this story loosely based on The Crying of Lot 49, and using the fast paced cuts and jumbling of scenes creates a very surreal avant garde landscape that attacks corporations and religious control of said corporations, while at the same time showing the degradation of society using sanrio-like characters.

It's trippy as balls and I loved it as far as I can find there is no good eng subs for it, and it has of course never been dubbed.

It's sad the trilogy was never made because I woulda liked to have seen what happened.

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Sindai
Jan 24, 2007
i want to achieve immortality through not dying
I finally got around to watching Patlabor 1-3. They're really great and I wish I watched them sooner! Especially 1 and 2. Both have these incredible sequences of shots of Tokyo set to soft music that are absolutely beautiful (especially the military occupation sequence in 2.) You can tell 3 had a different director and it definitely felt weaker than the first two, but it's still pretty good.

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

i watched Ziggy Sore Yuke! R&R Band yesterday, which is a 90s film made in promotion of a japanese rock band. unlike many anime made to promote bands/artists and so on, the music was actually decent, if rather generic rock. the plotline is fun nonsense featuring a murder mystery and battles against neo nazis in london. animation is nothing special. better then most of the crap orphan puts out

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

today i watched hello world. starts as a rather generic romcom movie, the sort of dime a dozen movies the industry has been pumping out since the success of your name. after that a couple of clever twists create an enjoyable movie and actually make the fact its a cgi movie worth it. some great visuals in the last half of the movie

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

watched Karuizawa Syndrome on request of gorf. sort of anime that doesn't get made any more since it presumes its audience isn't an average of 15 years old. lots of sex, frank talk about abortions, rape and drugs and all else abhorred by the generally conservative culture of anime production (and its fanbase lol). type of mc the average viewer could never relate with as hes an alpha chad, and theyre beta. not me though, big alpha here. i miss all the character types in this that don't appear in anime any more. all that said its an hour long adaptation of a 9 volume series so it just speeds through scenes with little context, something that gets worse the further along the movie is. its also a bit ugly

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

Stuff I watched recentlyish

My Hero Academia: Heroes Rising - Quite possibly the best possible result that can happen out of a movie that has to follow that particular kind of rigid Shonen Jump movie framework. I suppose that's fitting considering the series is at its best when it's giving a solid execution of well-trodden ground. Glad I had the chance to catch it in theaters.

I Want to Deliver Your Voice - Honestly the most flagrant amount of montages I've ever seen in a movie and apparently they think it's a good substitute for actual characterization?? It's bad and I don't want to think about it anymore.

The Weathering Continent - I was hoping for something in line with the style of Koichi Mashimo's previous movies but alas there was not even a spark of it to be found. Instead I got some bog standard 90s fantasy anime aesthetics with a story & cast that felt like I dropped into the middle of someone's not particularly interesting D&D campaign. Not unwatchable, but not compelling either.

Tokyo Godfathers - Was fortunate enough to catch this on the big screen shortly before movie theaters were closed forever. The new restoration looked as fantastic as something from the early digital age can get. Watching it made me sad that nobody has been a clear successor to what Satoshi Kon was doing as a director. He was one of a kind and I still miss him. What else can I say, it's a classic and its qualities are obvious.

Black Fox - It might as well be a superhero origin movie, albeit one with all the fat trimmed off. Turns out that goes a long way. The threadbare character relationships play fine enough in a 90 minute movie while they'd be a slog in a longer movie (or god forbid, a tv series), insomuch as they exist to be downtime in-between the pretty decent action scenes. It's hard to say much else about it. While I can't find any official confirmation it sounds like it was originally planned to be a tv series but circumstances led to them turning what they had into a movie. I'm glad that happened since I likely wouldn't have bothered if it were a tv series.

Hello World - I've typically not cared for the stuff Tomohiko Ito has directed. I was ultimately disappointed by Erased after its wet fart of an ending and to me Sword Art Online is a blight with a negative influence that is still felt to this day. But I'll admit that that the majority of my beef with his work is at the scripting level. I looked up the credits to Hello World prior to watching as it was freshly available in English so I had no idea what to expect. And what would you know, Mado Nozaki wrote the script. If there's one thing everyone knows about Kado it's that the ending was universally loved and is why it's considered one of the greatest anime of all time, right? Joking aside it's a pretty serviceable sci-fi/romance story that manages to work well within the confines of a movie. It throws out just enough ideas and character dynamics to fit its runtime without being too overstuffed, giving me the sense that a tv version of this would have been quite threadbare. And because the writer is who he is, he throws a bunch of twists at you but unlike the stuff he's known for they mostly make sense and don't retroactively ruin everything. There's really only one that sticks out as egregious but I'd classify it more as a cheeky thing to do. Something that would be a slap in the face in the ending of a tv show but in a 97 minute movie? Sure, it's alright by me. I certainly won't watch any tv anime with his name on it but if he writes more movies? I'd be down for that.

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

okko's inn was fine as a movie meant for teaching morals for 6 year old girls, however i am neither 6 nor a girl so i was bored

the exploration of ptsd was the most interesting part of the movie

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

lupin the 3, the first makes the wise choice to be a cgi movie that does not try to look like an anime, rather copying the style of pixar. its a very smoothly animated affair with a lot of fun visual humor. the story ain't that special, though it serves its purpose. has to be one of the few pieces of media with a nazi bad guy and 0 heil hitlers which felt odd. if it weren't for the hitler cameo they could have been any generic villain group. the bondgirl of the movie was fine, although the whole thing was severely lacking in any of the usual eroticism, outside of one or two vulgar jokes it was even cleaner then cagliostro. all that said i give it a 7 and repeat the creed that cgi anime creators should be quickly eliminated by being quashed into oblivion like one of the unfortunate bad guys in the film

Chas McGill
Oct 29, 2010

loves Fat Philippe
I thought Weathering with You was pretty good apart from the music, which really imposed itself in a bad way on the more dramatic moments, instantly cheesifying the movie even more. Looked incredible though.

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

I watched it awhile ago but forgot to post about it, but I finally saw Promare. It was enjoyable! The character designs are what stood out most so it's no surprise that there's an endless amount of fanart for it. It was a little overlong and I was a bit overwhelmed by the end. I'm glad I waited to watch it because I suspect I would have been underwhelmed initially from the hype.

I also rewatched Metropolis and there's still something new I notice about it each time I watch it. Truly a great film

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

lily cat is a fairly dull anime knockoff the thing and alien. the captain was ok, didn't care for it otherwise. some decent gore occasionally, but all of it is just taken from better films so eh

Kingtheninja
Jul 29, 2004

"You're the best looking guy here."
Oh man, lily cat. Brings me back to sci-fi channels Saturday morning anime.

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

I watched Sword for Truth, an Osamu Dezaki directed chanbara anime that was so bad he took his name off of it. The story is really quite generic and if you've watched any other 80s/90s ninja anime you know what to expect. A troubled loner master swordsman with a tragic backstory has to save a damsel in distress while being made a political pawn and fighting an assortment of hideous freak ninjas with different magic powers. The only interesting part is the Christian opium sex cult but they don't really do anything. There's also a cool jiujitsu guy but he also doesn't do anything either except fight a random politican in the streets. It was obviously written with sequels in mind but perhaps it's for the best none were made. Very disappointing film that lacks much of the characteristic flair you'd expect from Dezaki. Of course because of the similarities with Ninja Scroll it was aggressively marketed back in the day and was rightfully lambasted by the anime fans of old.

GorfZaplen fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Jul 5, 2020

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

Despite this I'll still be watching the movie based off of a different novel from the same author so look forward to that ninja fans

Relin
Oct 6, 2002

You have been a most worthy adversary, but in every game, there are winners and there are losers. And as you know, in this game, losers get robotizicized!
children of the sea is probably the prettiest anime film i've ever seen

but the story is putrid steaming garbage. i have no idea what central theme it was going for. and sora had big lipped shojo character design disease, which was more visually off putting than the snaggle-toothed old lady

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

Jotted down some stuff about some movies I watched lately (read: past few months).

Beyond the Boundary: I’ll Be Here - Past - I haven't given any serious thought to Beyond the Boundary since it originally aired nearly 7 years ago. It was a show I watched because it came out at a point in time where I was really into what Kyoani was doing, so naturally it was a given that I'd watch a new action anime by them. Regrettably it was a dire show that was made tolerable enough because I knew someone who was also following it weekly, so at the very least I had someone to chat about it with. Even younger me was skeptical from the onset. Right from the first episode I felt that despite the qualities of its animation the writing was on par with the kind of stuff that a show like Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions was poking fun at. Something that would eventually turn out to be true when it tries to unconvincingly tell the viewer that having badass powers would actually suck, something that would be worthy of moping over. It was also a show that talked a lot about its lore but did such a shoddy job at communicating it that I found it difficult to decipher the finer details of what was going on, nevermind the finer details of what exactly was at stake.

I decided to hit up the two Beyond the Boundary movies after talking to a friend about some Kyoani anime. During that conversation I brought up Beyond the Boundary as an inflection point for me. It didn't make me immediately stop watching Kyoani's output but it was definitely when I started to feel some increasingly diminishing returns from their stuff. I decided y'know, why not hit up the two movies they made and see what happens.

So Beyond the Boundary: I’ll Be Here - Past is a bad compilation movie even when judged relative to other compilation movies. Forget your Madokas or Mobile Suit Gundams. Even mediocre compilation movies look great by comparison as they may give you the gist of the overall plot. Beyond the Boundary goes in a bold direction by jarringly editing the tv series down to under 90 minutes such that the main villain from the tv show just vanishes at one point and is never mentioned again even though he plays a role in the sequel movie. Quite odd! At any rate what was a needlessly convoluted yet uninteresting plot in the tv series becomes a fever dream in the compilation movie. Climaxes of story arcs get shown without context making it feel less like a movie and more that I'm binge-watching the tv series while heavily medicated, drifting in and out of consciousness.

But I suppose on the other hand this means that the guy whose only character trait is that he wants to gently caress his sister gets way less screen time. Maybe it's not all bad.

Beyond the Boundary: I’ll Be Here - Future - I usually hate using the term angst when describing something. Especially when talking about anime in particular as there used to be a time when it became overused to the point of robbing it of any meaning whatsoever. But all the same it's the word that comes to my mind when thinking about the sequel movie to Beyond the Boundary.

The end of the tv series is immediately retconned such that the show's heroine now has amnesia and the cast decided that the two leads should no longer be friends as it's for her own good. It's a tough argument to sell even without the retcon and the movie never manages to come up with a convincing justification. This results in a lot of moping around and just like the tv series we're told that actually, having badass magic powers would suck and leave you all alone when everyone sees what a monster you are. This isn't an inherently flawed notion. However the only problem is that virtually every named character of note in Beyond the Boundary is secretly a demon, a wizard, or both. There are no normal people to speak of. Being able to conjure a sword out of your own blood is quite mundane in the heroine's social circle, so to focus on that ability as a reason for her loneliness makes all of the emotions involved ring false.

The actual conflict itself in-between the moping and the inevitable return to the status quo via curing the amnesia is true to the spirit of the tv series, in that it's a simple idea made a million times more complicated than it needs to be. It is easy to answer what is going on (there's a spirit that infects people through sight that turns people evil) but not the why (I sure can't tell you what the villain was trying to prove with that plan). There might be that usual Kyoani flourish with the animation but it's servicing a thoroughly uninteresting package so I ultimately got nothing out of it. At least with this out of the way I'm done revisiting a series I didn't particularly care for in the first place, so I can close that book.

I've Always Liked You - I'm not going to say that it's impossible for a multi-media project to be good but the odds are usually against it. One of many assorted projects based on a series of songs by a Vocaloid group, I've Always Liked You is half a hackneyed romance anime and half shilling for said Vocaloid group. I can at least have a chuckle over the shilling. If they just used a lot of the group's songs that'd be fine. It's a bunch of inoffensive, forgettable pop. But not only are there a few scenes where some of the cast talk about how great this Vocaloid group is, there's even an entire scene where two of the characters attend one of their concerts. It's utterly shameless. It's also the only interesting aspect of this movie as the romance anime aspect falls flat. Cliché stuff and I bemoan the fact that the movie goes out of its way to poo poo on the guy in the love triangle who is proactive in trying to get a relationship. Just a pet peeve of mine with a certain kind of anime romances, in which the guy or girl who is actively trying to form a relationship is punished. The ultimate "winner", so to speak, is the one who is passive about the whole ordeal and just hangs around the person they're in love with until a relationship happens. It reeks too much of a sort of nice guy-ism that disgusts me.

The Moment You Fall in Love - A pseudo-sequel to I've Always Liked You that happens in parallel, with its climax happening shortly afterwards. There's not much to say about it, it doesn't shill the Vocaloid group involved in its production and it's a very by the numbers romance. The only thing of note is that the guy from the previous movie who didn't end up with his crush doesn't get with a different girl in this movie either.

Calamity of a Zombie Girl - It's a very specific kind of horror B-movie (in the vein of Until Dawn, is what I would say if I had ever played it so I'm just going off what I imagine it to be!). It's occasionally inventive in its violent acts in ways that feel like it's from a bygone era of anime, but many of the scenes in-between the violence are a chore to sit through. Still, it's channeling something that you don't exactly get much of in anime so there's value in that. Best watched with friends, or not at all.

Fragtime - Short enough that I wish it could have fully committed to either the fanservice-y hijinks or the drama. It aims for both without being particularly great at either and leaves me with little to say other than a shrug.

The Relative Worlds - Starts out with a compelling enough premise by coming off like someone threw Persona (the video game franchise, not the film!), Terminator, and Looper into a blender. It's able to keep the tension going for most of the film. But sadly for the third act the heroine doesn't even get to join in on the final battle, and it treads some very familiar ground in its final showdown. Sadly unlike the blockbuster films it imitates, The Relative Worlds uses that very video game-like style of CG that tries to imitate anime instead of playing to CG's strengths, so my lasting memory of this movie will be that muddled mess instead of its promising beginnings.

One Piece: Stampede - What an exhausting movie.

I've had an on and off relationship with One Piece over the years. As a young anime fan in the mid 2000s I devoured as many fansubbed episodes as I could get my hands on. Teenage me loved its grand sense of adventure and its wacky characters that could still be taken seriously when the plot demands it, never feeling like the tonal whiplash was unearned. Teenage me loved that it was a story that was very serialized, yet never-ending.

Flash forward to today and while I respect One Piece a great deal I haven't kept up with it in ages. Partially because it's hard to keep a consistent level of interest in something for 15-some years but also partially because the series has been weighed down by the sheer scope of the lore it carries. Some folks enjoy that but I'm at a point where that's not for me. I do however keep up with the movies as it's not a commitment to watch a movie every few years.

The last movie, Film Gold, used the framework of a heist movie such that all of the Straw Hat Pirates had something to do. It worked quite well and made for a solid movie!

Sadly, Stampede does the opposite. it crams a lot of characters that haven't been seen in years. Just like in Super Smash Bros Ultimate, everyone is here! That works great for a video game but not for a movie. Everyone who shows up gets to use their powers along with a quip or other personality quirk that you've seen before. And unfortunately this all comes in service of fighting a villain who is a black hole of personality. He's strong in a way that is reminiscent of Broly from the Dragonball Z movies; a guy with big muscles and is angry in a thoroughly uncompelling way. He's an obstacle, not a character. There are other fights too but because the movie has to respect the canon of the manga, the fights between named characters that aren't created for the movie have to end in a draw with neither side getting any decisive blows in, 'lest they contradict any power level crap that could come into play later on.

There's plenty of nice animation but it's in service of a story that I just cannot get invested in and that's a bummer. Here's hoping that the next movie tries to tell a slightly more personal story instead of trying to convince us that the stakes have never been higher.

A Whisker Away - Comes off feeling like a better version of The Cat Returns. I prefer Mari Okada scripts with more teeth to them, but as far as movies for children go at least it's not talking down to them. An overall pleasant watch that won't have as much staying power as other anime written by Okada but that's perfectly alright.

A Silent Voice - Even on a rewatch I was unable to make an emotional connection to it. I get why people like it, but if you're not able to make that connection then it's dead in the water.

Dirty Pair: Project Eden - What could have merely been a standard anime franchise film is elevated by a music video mindset. This mentality easily carries the whole film, with just the barebones amount of exposition needed to string the stylish set pieces together. Plenty of scenes completely lack dialogue, preferring to let the music and the animation do all the talking. Scenes that could have contained superfluous, forgettable dialogue as many anime franchise films are wont to do are instead defined by their relation to the soundtrack. It just all clicks together perfectly to make something I can rewatch over and over again without feeling a single dull moment from start to finish.

Our Seven-Day War - Comes off like a more leftist version of Home Alone. Instead of practicing a trap-based form of castle doctrine against criminals, it's a group of teens using traps to stop immigration enforcement from taking away an undocumented kid. It's a moderately entertaining watch, though its unsubtle message of acceptance works better with the leads than it does the undercooked supporting cast who get some pretty wild revelations that are barely commented upon.

Hilario Baldness
Feb 10, 2005

:buddy:



Grimey Drawer

Kingtheninja posted:

Brings me back to sci-fi channels Saturday morning anime.

That was actually one of my first exposures to anime (the first was Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland).

Watched Vampire Hunter D and loved it.

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

non non biyori vacation




a lot of nice water to be sure. unfortunately every animal looked bad cause modern anime artists lack skills in the drawing normal looking living beings department

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

Stuff I watched over the past month:

Lupin III: The First - As a longtime Lupin fan the initial promo for this movie led to some mixed reactions. The CG looked like it could have much more personality than your usual CG anime. But I was more concerned about the writing side of things. Far too many Lupin movies go with some rote capers and plotting, and the franchise is at its best when it can deliver the unexpected. The full movie wound up being pretty much what I expected. The CG does a fair amount of heavy lifting in giving a lot of personality to the cast. Unfortunately the writing and plotting are a bit too safe. Perhaps it's because I'm such a longtime Lupin fan but it's hard for me to get fully invested in the crew going through their usual motions. And like in all too many Lupin movies the villain is after the same treasure as Lupin because it's an object of immense power that can be used to conquer the world. I'll admit I've gotten pretty tired of that kind of heroic Lupin, the kind that is more a treasure hunter than a thief. It's a good thing they have done a fine job with the CG because were it not for that there'd be nothing unique about this outing.

At any rate, this type of Lupin story has been seen in so many movies that I swear I've seen the final scene play out the exact same way at least half a dozen times. It's hardly the worst thing in the world, but I'm hoping if they make another movie in this style they decide to take a few risks. As-is what we got is perfectly watchable and something I'd gladly show to people who haven't seen much Lupin since it's quite approachable, but I'd like for Lupin movies to aim to be something more than that.

Modest Heroes - At this point in time I view Studio Ponoc similarly to the way I view Studio Trigger. Both studios feature talent from legendary studios, and yet while I am impressed at their animation prowess their writing typically falls flat for me, not living up to their legacies. Unlike Mary and the Witch's Flower, at least it's less of a detriment here for Ponoc. The first and third shorts are just animation showcases. Fine enough but not particularly exciting. The second short is decent enough, a perfectly cromulent story about a kid who is deathly allergic to eggs. Ultimately a story for children, but at least it doesn't talk down to them. It's hard to get excited since they're all varying degrees of "just fine enough".

Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Arrow of the Orion - I have only seen one episode of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?. I watched it when it was new, it was mostly inoffensive except for the propensity to insert videogame-y numbers into what was already a setting very much inspired by videogames. It's not an isekai anime but it sure shared that aspect. What can I say, my policy is that when it comes to numbers you can count me out.

At any rate on a whim I decided to hit up a few franchise films of anime I was only mildly familiar with. And that's what brought me to Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?: Arrow of the Orion. It's legitimately very surprising to see that the creator of the light novels wrote the script for this movie. Not that I have seen enough of the anime to really get a handle on his writing to compare it to the movie's script. Rather, the movie hits all the notes for a franchise anime film that is trying as hard as it can to not contradict any canon. There's a new character and her problems take the cast on a journey that sends them (I assume) far from any familiar locale from the series. And of course, the new character has to take their exit at the end of the movie in such a way that they won't show up again in the series. None of this is inherently bad, of course. Heck, I can think of some pretty solid movies that fall under that banner! Unfortunately I'm taking this lengthy preamble because there's not a whole lot to say about the movie itself. It's a below-average anime franchise film that goes through the motions without doing anything to stand out. The main issue is the villain is just a big ol CG scorpion that doesn't speak. I'm not picky when it comes to villains in these types of movies, I just want any reason at all to root for the hero to pull off a sick finishing move on them, but a nonspeaking villain that wants to destroy the world with no clue as to its motivation doesn't give me much to chew on. The stakes in these types of movies that necessitate a return to the status quo at the end work far better when they're personal stakes instead of apocalyptic.

There's also a B-plot that mainly serves to remind you that the tertiary cast exists. While the main cast is out on their quest, monsters invade the city and it's up to the tertiary cast to fight them off with just enough screen time to do what I assume is the quipping and special attacks they're known for.

The only saving grace is that like many of these types of movies it manages to stay watchable. It is not particularly interesting but at least it goes by quickly.

The Case of Hana and Alice - Gives off more of a live action indie comedy vibe than anything resembling anime, in no small part because it's a rotoscoped movie directed by someone who isn't a part of the anime industry. I put off watching this for quite awhile since I assumed I wouldn't be into it, but the camaraderie between the two leads that develops over the course of their quirky adventure was highly compelling. A much different beast than the usual sort of anime story about friendship between two girls. And if you were to ask me if I prefer the indie movie or anime flavor of that kind of story I wouldn't hesitate in saying the former.

Fuse: Memoirs of the Hunter Girl - It gets by on its pleasant aesthetic and its off-putting portrayals of violence. It seems like it has a lot it wanted to say, what with its portrayals of the roles unmarried women can play in a feudal society and the androgyny present within the two leads (Our heroine is constantly mistaken for a boy, and her love interest stars as the heroine of a play). Unfortunately its third act falls off the rails yet does so in a mundane fashion, resulting in the very rare instance of an anime that could have actually been helped by a longer epilogue. I'm left without being able to suss out what it wanted to say, beyond the obvious (cycles of hatred & violence? Why, they're bad). Thankfully this doesn't drag it down too much, it just makes it a pretty decent watch instead of a hidden gem.

The Irregular at Magic High School: The Girl Who Calls the Stars - At this point in time it feels a bit odd to be thinking about The Irregular at Magic High School at all. Thinking back several years to when the tv series first came out it raised a stink all over the place with its objectivist leanings and its main character who was simultaneously the most powerful person alive while also being treated as an underdog by the story. But its bigger crime is that even by trashy power fantasy standards it was quite boring due to its dull direction and stiff characters. I only watched as far as I did because I was watching it with a friend so we could chat about it. Once it temporarily stopped having despicable messages we ran out of stuff to talk about so we both decided that it was best to cut our losses and bail on it.

I decided to watch this movie for old time's sake, as for some reason or another the subject of the tv series came up in a recent chat with that friend. I was curious to see how I'd feel about it several years removed from the last time I saw an episode of the show.

This preamble is to hide that there's not a lot to say about the movie. Instead of pushing forth an objectivist message it's a more centrist one; there are scientists in the navy that want to nuke the planet(!!) but hey it's just a few bad apples that aren't representative of the organization as a whole. Considering this is an anime that had an episode end with a monologue about how poor people are too greedy and selfish, this sort of common setup is disappointingly benign. I'd have to squint to get any sort of concrete message out if it, as the scientist who wants to nuke the planet literally gives no reason. The movie cares so little about his motivations that I can't even recall if we ever hear his name.

The dull direction of the tv series is in full force in the movie as well. It's a lot of infodumping featuring slow camera pans over characters that are usually standing or sitting perfectly still while they drop Proper Nouns and take dozens of minutes to agree on the proper course of action after they've already agreed on the proper course of action. This camera direction even applies to the few fanservice scenes in the movie, resulting in what might be the most disinterested voyeurism I've ever seen.

I've seen a lot of anime franchise films but this might legitimately be one of the worst. The scant few action scenes are rather puzzling (and it takes around 50 minutes before any onscreen action begins!) and it can't even deliver a compelling power fantasy. It might have abandoned the more vile aspects of the tv series but in doing so it's robbed of any interesting elements. There's nothing compelling to say about the movie itself, because the movie doesn't have anything it wants to say.

Baton - Comes off as more of a proof of concept with a patchwork structure than something meant to stand on its own. It has a lot of big ideas, but not the resources to execute on them so it just throws them out there. It's just hard to say a lot about Baton because it's so lacking in connective tissue that the few nice individual moments don't cohesively come together as a whole. The most entertaining part is the first segment, which is almost entirely a single long action scene. The CG might have looked old when it was brand new, but there's some solid choreography at play here if you're able to look past how cheap everything looks. It's ultimately just something that's an alright enough watch but doesn't give a whole lot to say about it afterwards.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

Hi srice I enjoy reading your movie reviews

Spiritus Nox
Sep 2, 2011

I watched Children Of The Sea last night.

The Good: An aesthetic triumph in basically all regards. While some of the character design work didn't really work on me on a subjective level, it was all immaculately drawn and animated, the storyboards and backgrounds were breathtaking, the soundtrack was great, the voice acting was really good.

The Bad: *Everything* else. The movie as a whole is steaming nonsense, vacillating between emotionally inert navel-gazing, blank character work, needlessly trippy musings on facile Natural Philosophy 101-level themes, and some wildly uncomfortable (nonconsensual???) pregnancy metaphors. I'm usually reluctant to call any sort of art "pretentious", but I really struggle to find a better word for this one - other than "bad."

The Ugly: It's hard to even appreciate the stunning aesthetics in a vacuum knowing that Studio 4C has been successfully sued for pushing its workers into near-slavery working conditions and deathmarches to produce this movie.

Only worthwhile purely as an uncommon work of sakuga - and even that comes with some major caveats.

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

ninjewtsu posted:

Hi srice I enjoy reading your movie reviews

Hello, and thanks :cheerdoge:

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

Nobody posts about movies enough for this thread to warrant yearly iterations so this is now The Anime Movie thread, now and forever.

AlternateNu
May 5, 2005

ドーナツダメ!
I watched Jin-Roh the other day for the first time, and now I understand why everyone considers it a classic. The animation was superb (and I really miss that kind of fluid, hand-drawn stuff missing from modern productions).

Also, the subject matter is pretty eerie considering the state of the US right now but then again. Fascism/Law & Order types exist in every era. :ohdear:

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

Watched 2 flicks recently:

Promare which was the same old recycled Trigger nonsense that was hard to care about in any way and had some oddly ugly bits of animation for a major movie. The only saving grace was the beautiful voice of Mayumi Shintani.

Ore wo Suki nano wa Omae dake ka yo: Oretachi no Game Set: Mediocre show, mediocre movie that thinks its cleverer then it actually is. The 12 year olds with the top MAL reviews liked it a lot though. Maybe im too old for this hobby

macabresca
Jan 26, 2019

I WANNA HUG
Promare was so hyped that when I sat down and watched it and thought that it was ok but nothing special, I felt maybe more disappointed than I should've. The plot was nothing to write home about, it wasn't as gay as Internet made it out to be and the visuals literally gave me a headache

Coaaab
Aug 6, 2006

Wish I was there...
children of the sea (ayumu watanabe, 2019)

hahaha good lord i can see how people got annoyed watching this despite the exquisitely beautiful animation, what with the tenuous links from scene to scene with merely glancing explanations as to what's going on, compounded by the even more tenuous connections between the characters. it doesn't pay much mind to narrative cohesion yet it doesn't want to commit to complete abstraction either. tonally, it reminds me most of the more outré terrence malick films, right down to the quasi-expository monologuing. it really is something of a jumble of the greatest hits from the manga. and as a daisuke igarashi devotee, especially of this series, a good lot of it welled up the same feelings & memories of reading through that manga, and thus, i still heartily enjoyed the experience as an anime movie.

graventy
Jul 28, 2006

Fun Shoe
I had only seen a few of the Miyazaki movies, so as a quarantine project I watched them all with a friend, in release order, which was a delightful experience. I highly recommend it.

Then we rounded out the Ghibli experience by watching the rest of those, which was also pretty great.

So I thought, hey, let's do this with more anime directors, and started with Makoto Shinkai because of Your Name and Weathering with You. His early movies are...rough.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days - Shinkai's first feature, takes place in a world where the Soviet Union half-invaded Japan, and built this giant tower near the border to do weird science in. Two boys build a plane to go check out the tower, and a girl watches them do it. We skip forward several years and they've drifted apart, and a huge amount of technobabble happens and honestly I should have stopped watching at this point. The clouds and planes are pretty, at least. I think the art is gorgeous, but otherwise, this put a huge damper on my desire to keep going.

5 Centimeters per Second - This is three vignettes about love and regret and loss, or really, two vignettes and a music video. The first is about a boy and a girl who are young and in love but never tell each other, and the second is about a girl who unrequitedly loves a boy and doesn't tell him, and the third is a music video about telling people you love them. Basically. Again, gorgeous, again, very pretty clouds, but I didn't find the story emotionally moving. Perhaps I am a monster.

Does anyone have any directors whose entire work is worth a watch? Right now my list includes Hideaki Anno, Masaaki Yuasa, and Mamoru Hosoda, though I'm open to suggestions.

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

graventy posted:

I had only seen a few of the Miyazaki movies, so as a quarantine project I watched them all with a friend, in release order, which was a delightful experience. I highly recommend it.

Then we rounded out the Ghibli experience by watching the rest of those, which was also pretty great.

So I thought, hey, let's do this with more anime directors, and started with Makoto Shinkai because of Your Name and Weathering with You. His early movies are...rough.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days - Shinkai's first feature, takes place in a world where the Soviet Union half-invaded Japan, and built this giant tower near the border to do weird science in. Two boys build a plane to go check out the tower, and a girl watches them do it. We skip forward several years and they've drifted apart, and a huge amount of technobabble happens and honestly I should have stopped watching at this point. The clouds and planes are pretty, at least. I think the art is gorgeous, but otherwise, this put a huge damper on my desire to keep going.

5 Centimeters per Second - This is three vignettes about love and regret and loss, or really, two vignettes and a music video. The first is about a boy and a girl who are young and in love but never tell each other, and the second is about a girl who unrequitedly loves a boy and doesn't tell him, and the third is a music video about telling people you love them. Basically. Again, gorgeous, again, very pretty clouds, but I didn't find the story emotionally moving. Perhaps I am a monster.

Does anyone have any directors whose entire work is worth a watch? Right now my list includes Hideaki Anno, Masaaki Yuasa, and Mamoru Hosoda, though I'm open to suggestions.

Satoshi Kon
Osamu Dezaki
Rintaro
Yasuhiro Imagawa
Akiyuki Shinbo
Yoshiyuki Tomino

Good luck on your crazy quest, traveller

Srice
Sep 11, 2011

graventy posted:

I had only seen a few of the Miyazaki movies, so as a quarantine project I watched them all with a friend, in release order, which was a delightful experience. I highly recommend it.

Then we rounded out the Ghibli experience by watching the rest of those, which was also pretty great.

So I thought, hey, let's do this with more anime directors, and started with Makoto Shinkai because of Your Name and Weathering with You. His early movies are...rough.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days - Shinkai's first feature, takes place in a world where the Soviet Union half-invaded Japan, and built this giant tower near the border to do weird science in. Two boys build a plane to go check out the tower, and a girl watches them do it. We skip forward several years and they've drifted apart, and a huge amount of technobabble happens and honestly I should have stopped watching at this point. The clouds and planes are pretty, at least. I think the art is gorgeous, but otherwise, this put a huge damper on my desire to keep going.

5 Centimeters per Second - This is three vignettes about love and regret and loss, or really, two vignettes and a music video. The first is about a boy and a girl who are young and in love but never tell each other, and the second is about a girl who unrequitedly loves a boy and doesn't tell him, and the third is a music video about telling people you love them. Basically. Again, gorgeous, again, very pretty clouds, but I didn't find the story emotionally moving. Perhaps I am a monster.

Does anyone have any directors whose entire work is worth a watch? Right now my list includes Hideaki Anno, Masaaki Yuasa, and Mamoru Hosoda, though I'm open to suggestions.

Satoshi Kon is the most obvious one you haven't mentioned, and because he only directed 4 movies and 1 tv series before his tragic passing it's easy to watch everything he did.

Isao Takahata is also a big one. You've mentioned watching all of the Ghibli movies but he directed a fair chunk of stuff prior to Ghibli's founding too.

Mamoru Oshii has directed some iconic stuff but I generally have a good time with everything he has his hands on. If nothing else he's rarely uninteresting.

Takeshi Koike doesn't have that much stuff under his belt wrt movies (Redline and a few Lupin movies) but it's all fantastic.

GorfZaplen
Jan 20, 2012

Oh I forgot this was the movie thread so tske Imagawa Shinbo and Tomino off the list unless you want tv shows too

graventy
Jul 28, 2006

Fun Shoe

GorfZaplen posted:

Good luck on your crazy quest, traveller

Thanks, I'll check them out! Kon was on the list, I just forgot about him.

I didn't think it was crazy when I was doing Ghibli and every movie was, at worst, pretty good. It's becoming a little more onerous.


Srice posted:

Isao Takahata is also a big one. You've mentioned watching all of the Ghibli movies but he directed a fair chunk of stuff prior to Ghibli's founding too.

Thanks! I'm counting Takahata as done, though I guess I technically only watched Gauche and Horus. Horus is the first movie I've ever seen where they essentially just admit "hey this action scene was too drat expensive here are some stills of what it might look like". I guess maybe the last episode of Evangelion counts.

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

graventy posted:

Thanks, I'll check them out! Kon was on the list, I just forgot about him.

I didn't think it was crazy when I was doing Ghibli and every movie was, at worst, pretty good. It's becoming a little more onerous.


Thanks! I'm counting Takahata as done, though I guess I technically only watched Gauche and Horus. Horus is the first movie I've ever seen where they essentially just admit "hey this action scene was too drat expensive here are some stills of what it might look like". I guess maybe the last episode of Evangelion counts.

Takahata has quite a few more works outside of ghibli and it would be a shame to not watch stuff like panda, go panda or chie the brat!

outside of that don't forget to check out ever Katsuhiro Otomo movie!

Pootybutt
Apr 5, 2011

Miyazaki (and Yoichi Kotabe) worked on Animal Treasure Island and that movie rips. I find these older cartoony anime flicks from Toei have a way of just turning into one long looney tunes chase scene near the end, lots of running and physical acting and comedy, ATI hits a great balance where it never feels tiring the way Puss n' Boots kinda does.

Davincie
Jul 7, 2008

Pandora to Akubi is a crossover ova between the mobile game monster strike and tatsunoko productions property Hakushon Daimaou. various other tasunoko series like speed racer, gatchaman, yatterman and a fat dinosaur also play roles in the series. it looks alright but its a bit dull because despite being a crossover between various series only 50 years would be old to be nostalgic for, it has the writing of a kodomo anime, but not the modern pacing and plotting that would actually keep a child interested. as a whole this makes it a fairly dull watch unless your nostalgic for these series, but i have none. it was mostly saved for me by one of the main 2 girls, Akubi, being the adorable type of moe airhead with the intelligence of a loaf of bread that only rarely appears in modern anime (wherein the moe archtype more leans on helplessness, which she certainly isnt) and which is an archtype im very fond of.

graventy
Jul 28, 2006

Fun Shoe
Children Who Chase Lost Voices - Easily the most anime-rear end name of any movie I have watched so far (although all of the Shinkai films are pretty goofily named). Asuna is a lonely middle school girl who lives with her seldom-home mom. One day she gets attacked (?) by a mysterious bear-like creature, and a mysterious boy shows up and rescues her and then dies for some reason. Drawn by the mystery, or because he's the only person to ever show her affection, Asuka looks for answers, finds another mysterious boy, gets attacked by soldiers, and then things go off the rails.

This was easily my favorite of his films so far, and all of his movies are gorgeous looking, but this felt like a mish-mash of Ghibli themes and characters and ideas without the underlying heart. Asuka is so thin of a character that even she doesn't know why she goes on the adventure, except apparently to do the womanly tasks of cooking, washing clothes, and caring for children, which she does pretty frequently for a girl on a trip into the land of the dead. The last ten minutes or so feel completely out of left field. Why even have two mysterious boys when they're basically the same person?

I do like the trope of the main character having a cat that is obviously not a cat.

Test Pattern
Dec 20, 2007

Keep scrolling, clod!

Pootybutt posted:

Miyazaki (and Yoichi Kotabe) worked on Animal Treasure Island and that movie rips. I find these older cartoony anime flicks from Toei have a way of just turning into one long looney tunes chase scene near the end, lots of running and physical acting and comedy, ATI hits a great balance where it never feels tiring the way Puss n' Boots kinda does.

Every time I see your AV, I'm astonished you're not posting about the Urusei Yatsura movies, the middle three of which are tonally radically different from the TV show or OVAs. Least weird of those three, and also the only one to get US release until AnimEigo crowdfunded (pre-Kickstarter) the entire series, was the 2nd, also notable for being an early directing effort of a little-known creator named Mamoru Oshii. The third and fourth are also good, if barely comprehensible.

To further expose myself as an old with nostalgia-poisoning and to also expose myself as someone with utterly terrible taste, I will admit to still liking the first Tenchi movie.

graventy
Jul 28, 2006

Fun Shoe
The Garden of Words - As a proof of concept movie about how to animate rain on lakes and trees in a city and park, it is perfect, and gorgeous. As a movie about a lonely 15-year-old and a lonely 27-year-old falling in love, uh, yeah, no thanks NO THANKS. "But it's a friendship and platonic love!" some might say, but no, it's not, or if it is meant to be it's doing a poor job of portraying that. It's presumably more acceptable because the younger one is a boy and doesn't look 15, (and also nothing happens) but please no.

Your Name. - This movie made me happy to have watched all of his earlier work, because Shinkai is incredibly iterative. (Or if you prefer to be ungenerous, repetitive.) He's taken pieces of each of his earlier works and kind of combined and improved them here. We've got your pretty sky, and rain, of course, but also the gateway to the dead inside a cool crater, and subway missed connections. We get a (self-insert) main character who likes to draw (here architecture, earlier a foot fetishist/shoe designer). The ending is basically the same as 5 Centimeters per Second, only much more satisfying.

I thought it was pretty good, though the beginning seems poorly laid out on purpose to keep you confused about what's going on, and the ending goes on too long teasing the audience before delivering.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

I personally didn't get super grossed out by garden of words because the core thematic point was about how these two people were far too different in life circumstances to actually have a romance but they deeply affected each others' lives anyways, so to a certain extent "ew gross" is the point, but yeah I wouldn't ever really recommend it to anyone because of the optics of that (also I just find it kinda boring, although extremely pretty)

Honestly my experience with shinkai's works has been that his movies pre your name are all of the "dull but very pretty" variety. Maybe I'm dumb and have a small brain but the more dramatic, exciting narratives of your name and weathering with you are way more enjoyable than the subdued character pieces he used to do.

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graventy
Jul 28, 2006

Fun Shoe
I think you're right, I was probably too harsh on Garden of Words, but it squicked me out. In a similar vein I loved, LOVED, almost all of From Up on Poppy Hill, but when the central conflict was is this incest? it makes what is otherwise a pretty lovely film a lot... harder to recommend to people.

Weathering With You - It's a fine movie. Beautiful, of course, but the plot pretty much follows the same arc of Your Name. And it's probably the old man I'm turning into but I don't have a lot of sympathy for the main character whose only reason for leaving a stable home is 'small towns are boring'. Anyway I'm pretty happy to be done with Shinkai. The Your Name cameos were neat but if it's a shared world you'd think maybe the flooding of Tokyo might have come up earlier.

Next up Hosoda!

Digimon: The Movie - An incredibly awesome 90s soundtrack but is otherwise pretty digi-boring. The digikids are all pretty digicute though. Going into this, all I knew about Digimon was the theme song. It's still the best part of Digimon.

One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island - I think I read the first manga once? Anyway this is very bright and colorful and well animated until it gets ridiculously dark and depressing. (I don't think the pure 3d stuff holds up at all, though.) Why it had to go from goofy team competing in goofy challenges to 'all your friends are dead choose death or eternal loneliness' is beyond me. Maybe that's a One Piece thing.

On the plus side I learned a new word! Nakama nakama nakama nakama

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time - It's the story of a lovable doofus who figures out she can leap through time and uses the power mainly to avoid paying extra karaoke fees or returning to Taco Tuesday. It's a little slow, but she's the best, and her attempts to fix things are clumsy and awkward like teens generally are. The movie gets a bit too portentous towards the end and I don't think I really understand the ending, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. So like, he says he'll wait for her, but we aren't ever given an idea of how far into the future his future is... isn't this going to turn into a 'garden of words'-situation where she is 27 and he is still future-17? Can't he just go home and recharge his jumper and come back? Why didn't she take him to see the painting that her aunt was restoring if he cared so much about that painting?

graventy fucked around with this message at 16:51 on Sep 25, 2020

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