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Dragon Quest: Your Story is on Netflix now! It's very pretty but that studio is definitely stronger in texturing/lighting/rendering/comp than animation. A lot of the acting scenes are clumsy and very slightly polished pose-to-pose. The CG animation Orange does for their shows looks a lot more naturalistic, which makes me think the animators weren't filming reference for their shots (whereas Orange uses edited mo-cap for their acting shots.) The plot is DQ 5 until the last 15 minutes where it twists, and manages to insult the audience twice! First, an AI replacing the final boss tells the main character he's childish and rotting in nostalgia for playing the VR version of the game. So the audience feels insulted. Then the main character defeats the final boss with a cloying speech about how it might be a game but all the characters and the world are real! Which makes our protagonist seem a bit too invested in video games, and slightly mentally ill. They should've just stuck with the original plot. Also they leave out the Hero's daughter, which is too bad.
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Feb 20, 2020 03:14
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:42 |
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I think I watched Spriggan in a high school anime club and forgot everything about it. But I have seen a few clips from it on sakgua compilations and it looks amazing, like the platonic ideal of semi realistic anime designs and movement. The kind of stuff you only really saw in the Cowboy Bebop movie and some of Satoshi Kons work.
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Feb 26, 2021 04:07
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I watched the finale Fate Heavens Feel movie, spring song. Fate is a franchise I like more for its parts than the sum of its parts. Individual characters and the concept of mage craft and the amazing animation, music, and general production values from ufotable are all great. I feel like the series does not quite have the gravitas to address some of the subjects it tackles, or wants to get away with both pandering to certain parts of the fanbase while also tackling issues that mean it should not be doing said pandering. All those vagaries aside, the film has several super hype sections where the music and animation and narrative come together perfectly. It also has some talky bits where characters are needlessly obfuscating about their intentions, or where a dramatic reversal feels contrived. It breezes over certain sections that were probably explored further in the original visual novel but can leave a viewer going “wait, was that thing ever brought up before? How long have they just been keeping Shirou’s soul in a birdcage? These movies and the other two ufotable tv series are probably all I’ll experience of this franchise as I find the various spinoffs baffling and shameless. But they did good with these movies.
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Apr 2, 2021 05:10
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Woah the new trailer for Mamoru Hosodas Belle just got released and I don’t know the last time I needed to hear the full version of a song so badly. Does anyone know who the singer/composers are? https://youtu.be/hM8T-6OvWpo Production wise it looks amazing. This film involves character designs from Jin Kim (responsible for the main characters in Frozen) and some scenes from Cartoon Saloon in Ireland. I think the last shot of the trailer is one of theirs. It also combined hand drawn animation in the real word with cg in digital spaces, making it a kind of time capsule of where the entire art form is at today.
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Apr 2, 2021 16:19
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Arcsquad12 posted:Just remembered a film I watched back in high school, Sword of the Stranger. The stuff with Nanashi and Kotaro is really good and Luo Lang is great whenever he shows up. I didn't really care for the subplot with the Daimyo or with the Ming warriors evil plan, but that ending remains one of the best sword fights ever. I love that film. I think that's where Yutaka Nakamura really came to a lot of people's attention. He had done great work up until then, but that sword fight really made poeple go "what, who did this, who animated this amazing thing." The whole film has incredible visuals though, there's not a single clash that doesn't look exceptional. The final fight just has the absolute perfect combination of music and choreography.
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May 3, 2021 18:45
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I wish we got a new Kawajiri film every few years. It’s bonkers the last film he directed was Highlander in 2007 (which was really good!) But apparently he’s been storyboarding on a lot of the best series thatve come out in the past 5 years so maybe he enjoys that more than full directing duties.
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May 4, 2021 03:28
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Darn, I was looking forward to the Shirobako movie.
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Jun 20, 2021 21:11
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Yeah I thought Belle was pretty bad. It was a disservice to the visuals, certainly, and Hosoda needs to start working with screenwriters again.
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Jan 18, 2022 01:46
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I am so confused about why they did 2.0. What was the logic there
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Jan 26, 2022 05:47
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Satoshi Kon's movies are free this week in the US through an event. I can see them anytime I like so that's not the main draw, but the harder to see documentary Satoshi Kon: The Illusionist is also available and an interesting watch. The film is basically an overview of all of Kon's animated work, with a brief mention of his cancelled manga with Oshii. The portrait it paints is basically of a guy who was certain that he was a genius from age 22, and would not work under anyone. His films were unprofitable but Madhouse had faith in him and so kept giving him chances, which eventually paid off? In artistic value, certainly, but maybe not financially in the end, especially since they sunk money into his last film that was never finished (can't blame Kon for dying though.) I think trying to cover 4 films and one tv series in a single documentary didn't allow they to go very in depth. There some talk of how he raged against the industry and tried to demand better pay for animators, as well as a bit about how his final unfinished film was meant to be a training ground for the new feature animation talents. He told Aya Suzuki that the main female protagonist in Perfect Blue was based on himself, with the idol industry substituted for the anime industry. Darren Aronofsky appears in a few sections to talk about how he met Kon at a premiere and later requested to be able to borrow some shots from Perfect Blue to recreate in Requiem for a Dream. Aronofsky says the confusing thing that he wanted to direct a Prefect Blue remake in the 2000s but that America did not understand the concept of pop idols yet because Brittney Spears hadn't become famous. Considering that she was already famous in 1999, I don't know what he's talking about. And pop idols were a thing in America before that. Confusing. I didn't realize how many of Kon's works were based on books. I wish they had gotten a chance to interview Susumu Hirasawa, because his music is so many Kon works is why it feels a certain way, but he is absent. Compared to films like Persistence of Vision about Richard Williams, or The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness about Miyazaki, I felt it was a far inferior documentary. It mostly made me wish that Kon was still around so he could make more films and they wouldn't have to just do a tepid retrospective of his works.
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Mar 27, 2022 23:41
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Ride Your Wave was good, excellent water animation, a bit too sappily sad and ordinary for a Yuasa project though. Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko is a beautiful looking movie that works pretty well. The kind of film that would definitely not be made using animation except in Japan, since the subject matter is very down to earth. But the use of animation allows for some interesting contrast between realistic and broad caricature animation. Children of the Sea worked in the first half. Then it descends into madness but is probably worth seeing just because of how absolutely balls to the wall the animation is. Studio 4c makes everyone else look like chumps. Ghost in the Shell Solid State Society is great fun, reminded me of Production IG's golden age. Nowadays Kamiyama's directorial career has him doing some of the worst looking cg anime in existence, so it was nostalgic to look back upon a time when the projects he directed actually had visual appeal.
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Aug 29, 2022 03:55
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I watched Royal Space Force: Wings of Honneanmise. I didn't know anything about this movie other than it was made by a lot of the Gainax founders when they were in their 20s. Its an interesting film. Seems like Yamaga put all his interesting ideas into this movie and then just sorta dropped into the background of Gainax afterwards. Its funny because the image I have of Yamaga comes from his money grubbing portrayal in Blue Blazes (Aoi Honoo) drama, so I wouldn't have pegged him as someone with such a big story to tell. It feels like a lightly dramatized biopic of the first astronaut in a fantasy world. The guy first comes off like a shallow fuckup, coasting along in a department that doesn't seem like it has any chance of realizing its goal. But you can tell that there's more going on under the surface since he doesn't go for the available women in town but instead is attracted to the slightly unhinged religious weirdo handing out hand printed fliers all day every day. They strike up a sort of relationship which he tries to consummate in the one part of the film that made me very uncomfortable and seemed to be making sure we know he's also kind of a messed up guy. All of the aspects of a mid-20th century world reimagined in a fantasy context is really well done. The food is different, the cups are different, the spoons are different, the outfits are different. This was all done to try to make otaku take notice of the world: "Yamaga and Okada believed that this sensibility among some fans explained why anime often combined plots that "symbolize modern politics or society" with characters whose age and appearance was "completely incongruent with reality". The Royal Space Force plan proposed to use the creative techniques of anime for a radically different aim, to make "the exact opposite of the 'cool,' castle-in-the-sky anime that is so prevalent these days ... It's on our earth now, in this world of ours now, that we feel it's time for a project that will declare there's still something valuable and meaningful in this world."" "It is essential to pay close attention to the smallest design details of this world. It's because it is a completely different world that it must feel like reality. If you ask why such an approach—when the goal is to get anime fans to reaffirm their reality—it's because if you were to set this anime in our actual world to begin with, that's a place which right now they see as grubby and unappealing. By setting it in a completely different world, it becomes like a foreign film that attracts the attention of the audience. The objects of attraction are not mecha and cute girls, but ordinary customs and fashions. If normal things now look impressive and interesting because they've been seen through a different world, then we'll have achieved what we set out to do in the plan; we'll be able to express, 'Reality is much more interesting than you thought.'" Since the film was a box office failure i suppose they didn't succeed. In 2001, 14 years after Royal Space Force was released, Yamaga directed "Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden" which suggests that he eventually surrendered to the fact that most otaku don't want anything other than cute girls, mecha, and appearances incongruent with reality. Ccs fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Sep 19, 2022 |
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Sep 19, 2022 04:47
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Yeah I like the SAC tv series a lot. Which makes me so sad that the recent netflix additions had to ruin everything by going with Sola Digital Arts as the studio. The worst animation company in Japan. Even Berserk 2016 looks better from a CG perspective than what that place puts out.
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Sep 19, 2022 14:12
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I'm not sure Kamiyama's recent visual tragedies are the result of going into CG or just being saddled with the worst cg studios. He did a recent tv movie that is also from a bottom of the barrel studio with no resources. Meanwhile there are decent cg studios out there like Sanzigen and Kamikaze Douga, not to mention Orange, but he doesn't get to work with them.
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Sep 19, 2022 17:54
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Oh right, so he did get to work with Kamikaze Douga on something with a decent budget. Hopefully the Lord of the Rings movie he's doing also comes out okay.
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Sep 19, 2022 19:22
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I accidentally bought tickets for the dub version of Suzume. I regret this decision as none of the actors were able to sell their lines. Very pretty movie though.
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Apr 16, 2023 01:44
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I watched Maboroshi, Mari Okada's newest film. I had watched her previous film Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms back in December and liked it enough, although I wasn't the biggest fan of the character design and felt sometimes character arrived at places very conveniently when the plot needed them to have a chance meeting. But on an emotional level I felt it held together. I'm not so sure about Maboroshi. It concerns similar themes and topics, parenthood, abnormal experience of time, fear of change, finding the courage to face uncertainty, etc. but it lumbers along with multiple points that seem like they should be the climax.... only to lead into another set of events that seem like they should be the climax, only to then lead... etc. I guess the pacing is my main complaint. There's some other aspects I wasn't thrilled about, like the feral girl who is 14 but has the mind of a child. She makes sense as a part of the plot but is annoying every time she is on screen. Beautiful art an animation though.
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Feb 19, 2024 22:52
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Arc Hammer posted:https://twitter.com/catsuka/status/1778082565158535472?t=D3gTsrdxre39iPTcy6-Pfw&s=19 Ah, this and Redline are like the perfect spectacle anime movies.
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Apr 11, 2024 01:30
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 07:42 |
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I think that fight was the one that put Yutaka Nakamura on a lot of people's radars and led them down into the sakuga rabbit hole.
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Apr 12, 2024 01:13
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