Monster

Monster is sort of interesting in how it sometimes combines both the best and worst aspects of what you can find in anime. It has a tone that isn't exactly typical to the medium, telling a tense and moody story about a larger-than-life serial killer, manipulating others to do his bidding and working towards some unknown, probably terrifying goal. It plays to the strengths of being an anime by being unafraid to go anywhere or do anything with its story, and by allowing certain moments to have huge impacts that can be difficult to pull off in text or live action. One common fault of anime though is that it takes a long time to get anything done, and the show does seem to suffer a bit from having filler. It frequently deviates from its main plot to tell another little isolated story, ignoring the main characters for a few episodes. These side stories usually end up tying back in to the main show, but it's a bit odd to see it seemingly meander so much. Monster is interesting, but it should have taken 74 episodes to reach its ending.

The show stars a Japanese doctor called Kenzo Tenma, living in West Germany before the fall of the wall. He's an extremely talented neurosurgeon, but his career takes a bad turn when he saves the life of a small boy over the town's mayor. But then some murders start happening that benefit him, and he becomes a target, both of a former patient and the authorities who believe he's responsible. He goes on the run, both to prove his innocence and stop the killer from making any more victims. It soon becomes clear though how futile that is, as the only thing that surpasses the monster's derangement is his ability to realize it. Kenzo meets a lot of people on the way, helping who he can and avoiding those who want only to stop him. I think I might have preferred something that was a little tighter, with fewer extraneous pit-stops and dramatic revelations, but the show itself usually worked and pretty creepy throughout and occasionally devastating. It's too flawed for me to consider it great, but it's worth watching if you'd like to avoid most of the medium's worst parts. Besides the whole taking-too-long thing.

Movie Update 29

Well, here we are again.

The Castle of Cagliostro


Hayao Miyazaki's first film as a director, before Studio Ghibli was a thing, is based on the Lupin III television series he worked on, which was based on a manga created by Monkey Punch, which was inspired by the Arsène Lupin character created by Maurice LeBlanc. The film's plot is also based on one of the original Lupin stories. So yeah, there's a lot of adapting going on here. Cagliostro is a lighthearted action adventure about Lupin and his buddies stumbling on the world's biggest counterfeit currency operation in one of its smallest countries, and trying to both thwart their plans and rescue a princess at the same time. I've only seen a bit of the show, but it doesn't take much of that to get familiar with the principal characters, and they all show up here and have fun little parts to play. It's a simple movie, but there's a nice energy to it, a reasonable amount of excitement in the twists and turns, and like all works by Miyazaki there's a nice feeling to the animation, which isn't the most fluid ever but does what's required to set the right tone. It's kind of a standard adventure movie, but it's a well executed one.

Killer's Kiss


Not Stanley Kubrick's first feature film, but the first that's readily available for public consumption. It's also his weakest that I've seen. There's nothing very bad about the movie, but there's just not much to it. A boxer meets up with a dancing girl, and they try to leave the city and start a life somewhere, but her crook of a boss isn't a fan of the idea. It's a pretty bare-bones noir story, with the only thing that really makes it work being Kubrick's great photography. There's lots of great little shots that stick out as distinct for the era, including use of reflections, some stuff with shadows that I haven't really seen before, and a memorable conclusion in an unusual setting. There's not much to the characters though, and the tacked-on ending doesn't really work. Its only real use is to show the potential Kubrick had for his work later on.

The Killing


The very next year Kubrick made this, his first really good movie. It actually feels a bit less distinctly his than Kiss, but it's certainly a lot more fun to watch, and might actually be the most purely enjoyable movie he ever made. In one of the few instances I can think of of him using an actor more than once, he has Sterling Hayden as the main character, a criminal trying to pull off one last job, robbing the take at a horse track, with a complicated scheme that involves multiple people both inside and outside the place. It's a pretty good plan, though there's also a lot of moving parts, and of course things get screwed up and the situation eventually gets pretty hairy. There's a lot of build up, and the pay off when it all starts falling into place is pretty great. Stylistically, there's not much in the movie that wouldn't be in another noir movie from the period. But it's also just a really good example of the genre, and sometimes that's all you need to be successful.

The Tree of Life

This is a film about life, and growing up, and pretty much everything that entails. I said before that I imagine a film by Terrence Malick entirely in his reflective/observing-nature's-beauty mode might get tedious, and that's somewhat true here, but the film is so beautiful and poignant that it's hard to be really bothered by the slow bits. The film isn't exactly in chronological order, but what it's basically about is Sean Penn remembering his youth growing up with his parents and two brothers, and also experiencing some sort of vision of the birth of the universe and what possibly lies beyond it. It's a staggeringly gorgeous movie at times, especially in the scenes showing the early moments of existence, with visuals that avoid computer animation in favor of more natural means. The more normal stuff looks great too, though it's mostly just people walking through houses or the woods. Brad Pitt plays his father, and does a really great job making him into a terrible dad that should really be feared and despised without being over the top about it. Just the way he touches his sons on the neck is enough to establish that loving parenting doesn't come naturally to him. I don't think the movie needed a name like Penn to play the adult version of the main character though - he doesn't really do much acting besides walking around and looking at things. The Tree of Life is a bit ponderous and in love with itself at times, but what it does right is memorable and unique enough to make the film worth watching, especially if you're a fan of film as a visually artistic medium.

Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance

I would have seen this sooner, but I'm no longer in the habit of paying for DVDs of movies I haven't actually seen yet and Netflix took their sweet time making it available for rental. The second part of Hideaki Anno's theatrical retelling of the Evangelion story satisfied me more than the first, covering more of the original series' plot and doing so in a less easily predictable way. There were some slight differences between the events of the first movie and the handful of episodes it covered, but they generally weren't significant enough to pay much attention too. They really took strides towards their promise of doing something different with You Can (Not) Advance though, introducing new characters, shuffling around their appearances, and changing certain memorable events in significant enough ways to produce even more major changes down the road. It's often just the little things, but the twists they add in make the project seem worthwhile rather than just a way to cash in on the franchise's large number of fans.

If you don't already like Evangelion, I don't think anything about this movie will change your mind. It's definitely made for people who already know what the story is about. There's a certain feel to the proceedings that make them a bit esoteric, where it's much easier to follow what's going on if you've already seen the several hours of episodes that the less-than two hour film summarizes. It results in a film that's a lot of fun for certain people, but probably wouldn't play to a larger audience very well. Personally, it's hard to be bothered too much by that - I'm aware that the structure of the story doesn't fit the traditionally acceptable mold for a feature film, but I also don't care so much because it's really interesting to see these familiar events play out in a slightly altered way and with significantly higher production values. The animation and art design in general on these films is top notch, and with the right appreciation for the medium you might get something out of them even if you have no idea what's going on otherwise. The frequent fan-service is a distraction, but not enough to keep the movie from being the most enjoyable animated film I've seen in a little while. I know it's going to be another long wait before we get the last two movies, but I guess I can live with that.

Movie Update 18

Does this even need an introduction?

Brazil


Terry Gilliam has a long history of misfortune trying to get his movies made, but if nothing else I think he can look back on this as one film that he got to do completely on his terms. Unless he actually didn't, but it sure seems that way. Brazil is a combination of satire, violence, slapstick, and oppression that I don't think I've ever seen in a story before. Maybe something Kurt Vonnegut would write, I guess. It's set in an odd dystopian future where a gigantic bureaucracy seems to control everything. Johnathan Pryce is part of the system, but he gets caught up in something bigger involving a terrorist played by Robert De Niro and a beautiful girl he's been seeing in his dreams. It's both very funny and extremely dark at points, featuring some really great imagery and a killer ending. Unique and worth checking out.

Halloween


Despite really marking the beginning of the slasher movie craze, Halloween has a remarkably low death count and lack of a focus on gore. It's almost like a Hitchcock movie in its focus on suspense over shocking the audience. Like all older horror movies, it doesn't register quite as terrifyingly as it probably did in the past, but it's still a pretty effective little film. I definitely think I like John Carpenter's work in the horror genre a little more than action. Some teenagers do things Michael Myers doesn't like, he stalks them and kills them brutally, and he repeatedly fails to die. A lot of tropes, but it's a tight, tense movie.

Ponyo


As far as Hayao Miyazaki movies go, the plot in Ponyo is pretty slight. His films have always balanced family-friendly whimsy with deeper ideas, but I think this is easily his most child-focused movie, even more than My Neighbor Totoro. That doesn't make it bad though, of course. I still liked it a lot, from the undersea mythology it quickly builds to the gorgeous animation and painterly backgrounds. The environmental themes and dialogue (at least in the American dub) are a bit too obvious and expository, but they just flavor a fun little fairy tale. Not the best Miyazaki movie, but still a really good one.

Wings of Desire


This is a weird movie. I actually saw the American remake (and hated it) around when it came out in the 90s, without realizing it was based on this German film. The original is a lot better, but still really weird. It's based on the creepy idea that angels are always walking around outside our vision, watching over us and sometimes longing to be one of us. Bruno Ganz, also known as Hitler from Downfall and those funny youtube videos, plays an angel who falls in love with a human, and considers becoming a human to be with her. There's a lot of extended scenes with the angels just listening to the thoughts of humans, which can get repetitive, but they are really artfully shot, and the use of black and white and color is another effective touch. There's also a very strange subplot where Peter Falk plays Peter Falk. Yeah, it's a weird movie.

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown


What do you call a dark comedy that you really like, but isn't really that funny or that dark? I'm not sure, but that sort of describes Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Carmen Maura stars as an actress whose affair with a costar has recently ended, and now finds herself caught trying to figure out what happened. At the same time, her friend recently slept with someone who turned out to be a terrorist, and she's considering subletting her apartment to an awkward, nerdy looking Antonio Banderas, who happens to be the son of her lover. Also, his wife is crazy and wants to kill her, or really anyone. It's a twisty, entertaining little movie, though it never reaches the crazy sort of climax or fevered pitch that the best movies of its ilk tend to. Still, a fun, well made movie.

Karas

Karas is sort of a weird case, released as six episodes on DVD in Japan, but sold as a pair of movies in the US. Either way, it's about three hours of content, a bit light on meaningful story and character development but full of crazy visuals and reasonably entertaining action scenes. It's not easy to summarize, because what story is there is fairly obtuse. In fact, I'm having some trouble remembering what it was really about, and I saw it only a week or two ago. Basically, Yokai are spirits that most people don't believe in, and even fewer can see. A Karas is someone who protects humanity with the use of a special kind of armor that can also transform into things like a jet. Yeah, it's weird. Try to keep up. The bad guy is a former Karas who turned rogue, and he has several especially dangerous Yokai on his side. The protagonist is a newer Karas, a former Yakuza hitman with a lot of skill, and there are a couple sympathetic Yokai on his side, and also another Karas I guess but she doesn't do much.

But all of that doesn't really amount to much, because it's mostly a series about crazy looking things fighting each other. There are a number of supporting characters and subplots that seem like a concession to the episodic format more than anything else, because they are mostly relegated to watching from the sidelines when things really start happening. It's all an excuse for some pretty nice computer generated and traditional animation to happen, and from that end, it works quite well. It's interesting, even though the plot is fairly unimportant and generally tough to truly understand, I still found myself enjoying watching it play out, even if I was at most vaguely sure of why things were happening at any moment. Anime gets away with that more than other entertainment with me for some reason. And yeah, those action scenes are pretty entertaining, although I found myself enjoying them more when they relied less of computers. It's watchable, but probably tough to get into unless you're really used to what anime is like, and director Keiichi Sato's The Big O is a much better bet, with the second season also explaining Karas' predilection for being totally strange.

Kino's Journey

Kino's Journey is an example of a kind of anime I really like. There are definitely other kinds I enjoy as well, but I feel like this sort of show is one that's unique to the medium, and simply couldn't exist in another form, at least not on US television. It takes place in a unique fictional setting, and doesn't really bother with explaining itself or the history of the place, it just puts you in that world and lets you enjoy some stories in it. Haibane Renmei is something I reviewed fairly recently that is sort of like this, although Mushi-Shi is a better comparison because they both feature mysterious protagonists traveling alone and encountering strange situations week to week without much continuity. Kino is the star of this series, a girl of undetermined but fairly young age who visits various countries for no more than three days with her talking motorcycle. She's well equipped with guns and knives to protect herself, but often episodes resolve their stories with no violence committed at all.

Kino does have a past history that explains how she got to this position, but the show doesn't overly concern itself with the details. We see how she ends up setting off from her home to become a traveler, and that's all we really need. A lot of the situations she encounters are unusual but not really dangerous, and sometimes she doesn't even need to do anything, she just takes in the tale of wherever she happens to be along with the audience. Other times people need her help, and she may or may not agree to offer it depending on how she's feeling. Sometimes someone just wants to hear a story from her travels, and once in a while she has to use her weapons to right a wrong, help someone, or save her own life, but this is rare enough that it's always exciting and important without resorting to ever getting too over the top or bloody. It's interesting how often her presence is entirely peripheral to the plot at hand, and puts her in the same position as the viewer, just seeing what's happening because it's interesting. It's not the most dramatic or shocking story, but it's a pleasant and thought-provoking one. It's the sort of show people always ignore when they talk about how brainless and silly anime is.

Escaflowne: The Movie

Escaflowne is sort of an interesting experiment in trying to convert a longer story (like from a TV series) into a shorter one (like in a film). Certain things have to be changed, compressed, and so on to try to make it fit into a hundred minutes. Plus more alterations are made to perhaps make it appeal to a slightly different audience. It's certainly a bit more guy friendly than the series, beginning with a scene where Van slaughters a room full of anonymous bad guys with a sword (which was actually one of the better animated fights I've seen in a while). So it does a few things to try to make itself work as a movie rather than a show, though in the end I don't think it succeeded that much. It wasn't bad, and I found myself enjoying parts as much as anything from the series. But there was just something that didn't sit quite right about it, and I don't think that it's just that it was changed from the original story.

The series definitely tried to appeal to both boys and girls, with romantic subplots just as prominent in the story as the main adventure. A lot of that's been stripped out, and it just sort of feels like a generic action movie with a weird mix of past and future in the setting. There's a whole lot of ideas that it doesn't have much time to get across, and the loss of fidelity is damaging not just because it's different, but because it's just less developed. In the series, you had time to learn about the villain and what he was doing and why it was bad. In the movie, you basically have to accept that he's a bad guy because the good guys tell you, and not really because you see a whole lot of the damage he's supposedly causing. The main thrust of a normal high school girl being transported to a mysterious place and forced into a momentous period in its history is still there, but the rest of it just seems like it's going through the motions of hitting all the biggest moments from the show without them really having much impact, because I don't know why I should care. Again, it's a reasonably enjoyable film a lot of the time, there's just something missing. I'd still recommend the show first.

Metropolis

So this film was based on a story by the legendary manga creator Osamu Tezuka. It also takes elements from the classic German silent film of the same title, an image from which inspired Tezuka's story in the first place. So it takes from both, but I'm not entirely clear what bits came from each because I haven't seen the movie or read the manga. But anyway, it's about a gigantic, futuristic city that purports to be an amazing place to live but of course is filled with tons of seedy elements eating away at its core. There's a lot of strife between the classes, robots are treated like inferior beings, and there's something going on with the powers that be. It's really not a very original set-up, but they execute on it well enough to get away with it for the most part.

I'll admit to having an issue with the art style for a lot of the film. It's simple and cartoony, and it just doesn't really fit the tone or subject matter of the film very well. It's well animated, sometimes gorgeously so, but I think the character designs could have stood to be a bit more natural. There's even a thing where people's legs thicken as they get closer to their ankles. What the hell is that? Who's ever looked like that? I was mostly used to it before the movie ended, but it's the rare case where an animation's look got in its own way. But I still enjoyed it. The main characters are an interesting group, the mysterious suddenly-appearing girl is well-handled, and the villain is a real son of a bitch. It also features a really great particular scene near the end, with an unexpected musical accompaniment. There's not a whole lot new here, but it's done well enough to keep it pretty watchable for a hundred minutes.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust

I think if I saw this nine years ago when it came out, I would have been more into it. But I want more out of anime these days than just some, blood, and the aesthetic is just sort of weird and off-putting. I did like it as a story more than the first D movie, although by the end it seemed to be a lot more muddled. I'm guessing it takes place after the first movie, though I'm not sure how many years because of D's whole immortality thing. The Western influences (Western as in cowboys, not western as in American movies. Although Westerns are generally American movies.) are a bit more obvious, especially in a couple scenes that tended to be the most interesting in the film. One of these is the opening, when D is hired to track down a rich man's daughter who's been kidnapped by a vampire and rescue her, or if it's too late, put her to death.

There really wouldn't be very much to the story if it weren't for the Marcus Brothers, a group of mercenaries who have been hired to the same job, with a variety of abilities. They cross paths and butt heads with D a bit, especially Leila, the adopted female of the group. They're not exactly good guys, but they're made to be relatively sympathetic, as they're slowly picked off by the various groups of monsters they encounter while pursuing the vampire. There's a twist eventually, that in most cases would sort of result in the end of the conflict, but not when there's money on the line. It's a pretty solid film until the end, when some pretty incomprehensible stuff starts happening. Like, I was eventually able to make some sort of sense of it after a certain point, but for a while I was totally lost, and I still don't understand a few bits of it. The plot goes in an unexpected direction, and it kind of ends up with no one being totally happy. Which is pretty appropriate for a dark, violent anime like this. Again - it was pretty good. Holds up better than the first film by a lot. But it doesn't exactly feel like 16 years of progress either.

Steamboy

Katsuhiro Otomo directed Akira, based on his own manga, and it's easily one of the most famous anime in existence. Which is part of why it's surprising that it's one of only two animated films he's done. Yeah, he's done segments for three different anthology movies, and dabbled in live action recently, but it's still weird that Steamboy is just his second real film. It also makes it a bit more disappointing that it isn't better. Steamboy starts out quite strong, and the animation throughout is pretty incredible, but the whole second half of the movie felt like kind of a mess to me. I enjoyed it overall, but it seems like it could have easily been much greater.

Anyway, the movie is the definition of steampunk. Ray is a genius young inventor in England, the man of the house while his father and grandfather are searching for a pure water for a more powerful steam in America. Quickly a package from his grandfather arrives at the same time as a couple representatives from the organization he was working for. Inside is a strange ball, a device key to their plans, and Ray has to escape from the organization in what I thought was easily the film's most thrilling sequence. Eventually though he finds out there's more to what's going on than expected, and what follows is an absolute ton of disagreement and argument about the purpose of science and technological advancement.

The second hour of the movie is basically a smattering of action scenes as two sides fight each other with elaborately built equipment and try to win over Ray with their arguments for what's right. And it's really not as exciting as that sounds. Eventually he gets fed up with the both of him and just focuses on saving the various people he cares about after a behemoth of steam-powered technology goes haywire. All that stuff is really cool, I just they weren't by far the most interesting thing in the story. And I also wish it didn't take so damn long for him to become the titular Steamboy. It's like a superhero origin story that goes overboard with the origin part and forgets the superhero part. The end is fairly thrilling though, and suggests further adventuring that I kind of wish the movie itself had been about. A decent work, but it seems muddled in its own philosophical ideas and doesn't have nearly the impact of Akira.

Vampire Hunter D

I don't think I've seen a more thoroughly 80s anime than this. Two animated D films have been released, based on a series of books, sixteen years apart. They feel fairly different thanks to the immense gulf in visual quality that represents, but otherwise they share the common elements that makes the setting unique and kind of weird. It's a crazy mishmash of influences, both post apocalyptic science fiction and horror. It's like a futuristic Gothic action western or something. It takes place many of thousands of years in the future, when humanity is struggling to survive against demons and a society of vampires who all somehow happen to come from nobility. I don't know if the vampirism spread among an elite class that formed after our current civilization was destroyed, or if they made themselves elite because they were vampires. Either way they terrorize normal people, but there are hunters like D who try to stop them, for a price.

D is half vampire himself, and thus an outcast everywhere. He's the strong silent type, although he has a talking hand and rides a robot horse, so he's kind of weird too. He's hired by a young woman to protect him from a local count who's marked her as his next plaything, and so D spends a while fighting off his henchmen and resisting the temptation to get involved in her life anymore than he's being paid to. There's a bunch of other characters to worry about in the town she lives in, some who are all right but mostly they're unreliable. There's some unusual action peppered around along with some more exploitative stuff, before the inevitable final confrontation. It's a reasonably entertaining movie in some parts, but in others it really isn't. Some of the issues can be attributed to the movie's advanced age, but others are just some clumsy storytelling. Overall I'd call it decent, but I don't think they realized the world well enough for it to be better than that. The sequel addressed some of this while having other issues of its own.

Kiki's Delivery Service

It's always bittersweet when you get close to running out of unseen films by a favorite director. I don't know how many more stories Hayao Miyazaki has left in him, and now the only ones I haven't watched are his first, The Castle of Cagliostro, and his most recent, Ponyo. Luckily, Kiki's Delivery Service was one of the best, so the experience of seeing the work of possibly the best director of animation ever continued to be pleasant.

On the face of it, there's not much that sets Kiki and her story apart from most of Miyazaki's other work. The main character is a young girl on an exciting adventure. Unlike many fantasy heroes, she's allowed to have loving parents. The story is almost too warmhearted, but it never quite steps over that line. It's appropriately funny and charming in parts, but it gets serious when it needs to for the sake of a natural plot. In some ways it's basically boilerplate Miyazaki, not really separating itself from his other work, but the success is all in the execution. It's wonderfully animated, touching, gripping in its dramatic moments - there's really nothing it doesn't get right. Of all his work starring little girls, this one was my favorite.

This is one of the few Miyazaki films not based on his own idea, but it fits right into his style. The only difference might be that the main character herself is the source of the fantastic element in the plot, rather than a normal child wandering into a world of wonder. Kiki is a young witch, who at the age of 13 is ready to fly to a new town in order to hone her skills for a year. She runs into some trouble at first, but thanks to a kind baker, settles into a town by the sea. She doesn't really have any skills besides flying on her broom, so she quickly starts a business delivering things around the area while helping in the bakery. They find ways to make the deliveries difficult and perilous adventures despite some rather mundane circumstances, as simple things like an angry pack of crows or some rain can become major issues.

Kiki makes some friends in her new home, but before long some things start going poorly and she begins struggling with her identity, and the very nature of her being a witch. As can be expected though, she eventually perseveres and of course saves the day in the end, in one of the film's more thrilling flight sequences. In the end it's a pretty simple story, but again it succeeds because everything about it was just done with an exceptional amount of skill and grace. You don't need to get super fancy, the right amount of simple craftsmanship will take you a long way. I'm kind of glad it took so long to see this one, because it's one of the crown jewels in a brilliant man's body of work.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Season 2

These episodes aired in a pretty unusual manner in Japan. There were shown alongside the original series, in chronological order, which is sort of a brand new way to look at the whole thing. I enjoyed the new content, although I can't say it was fun as the first season, mostly because there just isn't enough there. It's fourteen episodes again, but they only cover three stories, and rather infamously, eight of those episodes are basically all the same thing. If you haven't heard of Endless Eight, the main characters are stuck in a loop during the last weeks of summer vacation, and struggle to find a way out. The first episode just shows what the end of the vacation is like, but by the second, the characters start to realize that they've been doing this over and over for the equivalent of years, but unfortunately the loop restarts before they are able to stop it and they forget about it again. The plot slows to a crawl at this point, as the last six episodes are basically all the exact same thing, reanimated with new voice overs but with more or less the same script until they finally break out in the eighth episode. On one hand it's pretty ballsy to make the same episode eight times, but on the other it can get pretty irritating. A really good Star Trek: The Next Generation episode covered more or less the same plot and and wrapped it up in forty minutes. If the story only lasted like three episodes, it would have been a lot more acceptable.

The other two stories are a bit easier to like. The first is a stand alone episode involving time travel, and is pretty enjoyable. The other is a five episode arc showing the filming of the movie that the kids made for school in the first episode. I thought it would be dragging things out again, but it actually got pretty interesting, as Haruhi's powers again unwittingly causes a danger to the whole world that Kyon has to take care of. Not terribly unique, but still a fun, interesting story. It's pretty obvious that these episodes weren't meant to be the next big thing for the franchise, as a feature film was released in Japan only a few months after they aired. It's been licensed for home release here, and I'm looking forward to that happening.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days

Makoto Shinkai's second film is quite a bit more ambitious than his first, Voices of a Distant Star. It would kind of have to be, being more than three times as long and a full studio production rather that being animated mostly by himself at his home. Like that first film, it combines elements of heady since fiction with the pain of growing up and being apart from the ones you love. I have to admit that people too young to vote having access to all this highly advanced technology is still a bit of a silly cliché with many anime, but if you can get past it it's a pretty interesting story.

The whole backstory of the situation is only really explained through snippets of news broadcasts, so you have to pay attention to really understand it. It takes place in an alternate history, where Japan split politically between north and south, with the south protected by the United States and the north by the "Union". The Union has built a giant tower in the northern island, and the two main characters begin the story as students who work as engineers in its shadow. One year they become friends with a girl, but during the summer she disappears and they go their separate ways.

It then jumps forward in time, and focuses less on character and more on some of its crazy ideas. There's war looming, and small steps into parallel universes, and somehow the girl is in a sleep state that's tied to the tower. It's seems alternately torn between ideas of science and mysticism, but it's all held together by the emotional connection between the three characters. They could have gone too far with it, but I thought the balance between melodrama and acceptable believability held pretty well, and it keeps the center of the movie strong.

I think probably its biggest asset is the look. The film is filled with beautiful scenery and animation, not overly flashy but just a pleasure to look at for the full ninety minutes, which certainly makes watching it easier. I also liked the soundtrack, which is very understated but effective when necessary. The story itself wasn't perfect, but it was fully satisfactory, and manages to combine the two separate elements of science fiction and drama very well. The ending was nice if bittersweet, and I'm definitely interested in checking out Shinkai's next movie, which seems to deal with the same subjects.

Haibane Renmei

Part of why I watch anime is because of series like this, that tell stories you simply won't see in products from the Western world. Maybe a book might be similar, but never a movie or TV show. It introduces a unique fantasy setting and concept, tells a story within it, and then it's done. I could never imagine this happening here. It's about a group of youths that live together and resemble angels. They come from inside cocoons that grow from seed sized until they take up half a room, and once they escape, they are provided with a halo that sticks helpfully in place, and wings emerge painfully from their backs. They have a rigidly defined relationship with the other people in town, working for credit that they can use for supplies, and are watched over by an organization that prevents them from leaving the confines of a large wall around the town and surrounding environment. It's never very clear about the actual nature of their creation, although you can easily draw your own conclusions.

There's sort of two phases to the series, which lasts thirteen episodes. In the first, they gradually introduce its various unique ideas and develop the cast for a little more than the first third of the run time, and in the second things get a bit heavier and plot heavy. It's sort of paced like a movie that way. The first phase isn't exactly funny, but it's pleasant in that slice of life sort of way, beyond a couple disturbing scenes. It's much more dramatic after that, but never fully abandons that sense of wonder with the setting. The focus becomes more on two characters at that point rather than the whole group, almost to a fault, but at least their story is interesting. The ending is appropriately bittersweet, and allows for possible further exploration of the setting that won't happen. It's not necessary, although I can't say I didn't like it a bit more when they were just letting the original ideas on display breathe. Still, it was enjoyable the whole way through.

Serial Experiments Lain

Serial Experiments Lain is a good series from the 90s if you can get past how totally strange the whole thing is. It's never very straightforward, and asks you to pay attention pretty much the whole time. It does recap most of its significant events at one point, but even that is obscure with it just seeming randomly edited to some freaky guitar playing. Very basically, it takes place in a world not quite like ours. It was a bit ahead of its time, predicting some aspects of Internet culture before it really took off. People use "Navis" to connect to the "Net", and eventually the main character Lain gets involved, but she starts to find ways that the Net world crosses over to the real one. Eventually there are major questions about the very nature of her existence. There are various factors tugging and pulling her like a mysterious god-like figure and a secret society that might be pursuing her. It successfully builds an atmosphere of paranoia and questions of what's really going on. If you pay attention it never gets too crazy, and after a while it actually makes sense, for the most part. It obviously gets more intense as it goes along and gets into a lot of really bizarre imagery, but they actually do a good job of resolving it in a way that keeps everything within the realm of understanding. It's not exactly a fun show, but it's a really intriguing one if you can deal with its oddness.

Honey and Clover - Season 2

Honey and Clover's second and final season continues and resolves the various plot lines entangling its various characters, with a focus less on cute comedy and more on trying to wreck you emotionally. It almost feels like a different show. The quality of the animation and writing and character performances is the same, it just simply is no longer concerned with making you laugh. If the humor was all I liked about the first season it would be disappointing, and honestly some of the charm is missing with it being so maudlin all the time, but it's still a high quality series for the most part. You sort of wonder why some characters make the decisions they do, but people carrying feelings that they know will never be returned is sort of what the whole thing is about. There's some pretty depressing moments throughout the 13 episodes, but it still manages to do that anime thing of finding a way to seem positive after the fact. Bittersweet, I guess. The ending definitely has that in spades, and might be one of the most touching conclusions to a story I've ever seen. It's a series that really captures the feeling of unrequited longing, and it's still worth seeing for anyone interested in intelligent entertainment.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory

Chronologically, this is the third OVA that takes place between the original Gundam series and Zeta, which continues the story with another new threat to uh... whoever the good guys are. I'm not going to pretend I know a ton about the Universal Century's backstory. The Zeon guys are colonists who rebel against the Earth government, with the latter portrayed as the protagonists, although they usually make efforts to have at least certain people with Zeon seem sympathetic. Other shows like Gundam Wing take place in very similar but definitely different universes. I haven't really been watching these OVAs because of interest in the overall story though, more of out some weird appreciation for what they do. I definitely prefer the look of modern anime to stuff from the 90s, although sometimes that stuff is fun to see again. What might be most interesting about the whole Gundam series is that despite being about giant robots, it's still relatively hard science fiction, and that stuff is interesting to see on the rare occasions where it's actually filmed or animated.

And it's a series that really doesn't hold your hand. You have to try to follow the various factions and characters to really know what's going on. Stardust Memory takes place a few years after the first big war from this timeline, and a few more years before the next big one, and serves as a bridge between the two conflicts. In addition to its heavy military plot, there's again a love story to humanize it and keep it from getting too sterile. I wasn't a huge fan of the way they handled this one, though. It seemed schizophrenic in its efforts to remain interesting. First they like each other. Then she's a bitch for no reason. Then she treats him like a kid. Then he goes AWOL. It's all just a bit forced. But it gets tied in somewhat interestingly with the main story, resulting in an emotional and seemingly significant ending. It's sort of a foreboding one, although the main characters themselves seem to come out okay. The 13 episodes are a pretty quick and entertaining watch whether you really care about the political and military jargon or just like seeing robots blow each other up. I'm almost interested at this point in checking out the full TV series from the same storyline.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

The original Fullmetal Alchemist adaptation was already perhaps my favorite anime series ever. So when you take that existing greatness, and then change the plot so it more closely matches the source material, improve the quality of the art and animation, and provide it with an ending that actually feels cohesive and fits the story... well, you have my new favorite anime series.

Not that the entire thing is amazing. There are a few issues tied into the whole deal of it redoing the story to fit more closely to the manga. So here's the deal: Hiromu Arakawa started the Fullmetal Alchemist manga in 2001. It was very popular, so they started up an animated series in 2003 After about half a year, they were already caught up with the events of the still-running manga, so they made up the rest of the story on their own, and the second half deviated greatly from the source material. Then last year, as the end of the manga finally came into view down the line, they made this series, which blasts through all of the content the original series got right in about half the time. It then strictly follows the real story through to the end, where it only finished about a month after the manga. It mostly worked out, but there are a couple hiccups. For one, that beginning section where they're basically speeding through the early plot simply isn't as good as the original series. It definitely feels rushed, and it was a necessary evil so they could establish the story without wasting too much time. Also, the series got in danger of overtaking the manga yet again maybe two thirds through, and there's a bit of a lull as they wait around not doing much so it doesn't happen. It's only a bit of filler, but it's a noticeable drag and kills the momentum a bit.

But it's okay, because everything else about the series is fantastic. The studio did a pretty good job of coming up with a story after Arakawa specifically told them not to do what she was planning, but the real plot here just works better. Lots of details and characters change, generally for the better, both in terms of what's interesting and what makes sense with the overall setting and mythology. One of the major changes is the real origin of the Homunculi, and while the original explanation might have actually been a bit cooler, the real one just fits the plot great. And that's what the new things tend to do. The real climax and resolution don't come out of nowhere, and all of the characters get more fitting and conclusive ends to their stories. And I mean... all of this would have been fine, and the series would have been very good, if the action was just decent. But it's... I mean... I'll put it like this: practically every fight scene from this series would have been one of the top five fights in the entirety of any other show that I've seen. Maybe top ten in a really good show. But every fight! It's absurd how creative and well-animated and unique and just cool every single action scene in this show is. And it's not like they find something that works and sticks with it, there are tons of characters that all get their moments to shine. With great characters, amazing action, an interesting plot, and a fair amount of humor thrown in, it's pretty much all you could ask for from an anime.

Dead Leaves

I'd definitely say Dead Leaves qualifies as one of the craziest things I've ever seen. It begins with two people waking up naked in the future, one with a television for a head, neither remembering who they are or knowing why the moon appears to have been blown to pieces. They naturally decide to go on a wild crime spree, but then get captured and brought to a prison on said destroyed moon, leading to an escape attempt and more and more insanity piling on top of itself until the end. It's 45 minutes of pure animated energy, as things pretty much go without stopping, only pausing briefly to dole out little bits of its equally nuts plot. The art and animation are very kinetic and stylized, focusing on unique memorable imagery over smoothness of motion. Things are constantly moving and exploding, or just being a little disgusting. Besides the constant violence there's some weird sexual stuff too, not exactly explicit but it still can be disturbing if you're not expecting it. Definitely not something for the kids. The short running time seems about right for the pace and out-there nature of the story, and it does have a natural arc to it despite it never seeming to take a breath. I wouldn't call it great but it's an interesting, very watchable experiment. It's funny how despite how out of its mind it is, it wasn't actually that much out of line with any of the other strange movies or anime I've seen... maybe a little crazier, but not too much. Still, it was pretty fun.