Anime

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Yuasa is just taking a long sabbatical.

[barbarella satyricon]

Not necessarily in response to Mr. S's request, but because I don't see its having been mentioned anywhere on these boards, Inter5tella 5555, the Leiji Mastumoto-supervised (directed by Kazuhisa Takenouchi) 2003 album-length feature for Daft Punk's Discovery, would be in my top ten of anime movies for sure. Thought of posting this in the music videos list thread a while back (or even musicals?), but with Matsumoto at the helm, it categorizes comfortably as an anime feature for me. If you don't enjoy Daft Punk, this one would be a no-go, I guess (this is their one studio album I find I can listen to straight through), but if the classic Matsumoto character design and artwork are up your alley, that might set it over and above regardless. When this was first a discovery, ahem, for me on dvd while still in school, it struck me as a most perfect thing, accomplishing exactly what it sets out to do with nary a slip or letup in conception and execution. The intrigues in the music industry stuff I also found surprisingly cogent, like an extended Ziggy Stardust conceit, though the plot doesn't necessitate any deep thinking. Years on, I'm still always ready to watch this one one more time (sorry).

[barbarella satyricon]

Still in an anime frame of mind, so two less-discussed films watched in recent seasons:

Tekkonkinkreet is one I gave a pass to for a while because I wasn't so attracted to the art, and also because the plot and characters looked to be more violent and abrasive than is my usual anime preference (though something like Akira is still on my all-time list). When I did check it out, though, I quickly took to the design of the film's world and its characters, and the story was more compelling in its moral weightiness and interpersonal drama than I had been expecting. The yin-yang duality stuff is a bit of anime grist for the mill, to be sure, but both the animated visuals and the dramatic stakes driving those ideas forward were strong enough that I was fairly carried along with how the story of two troubled orphan youths – names, Black and White, naturally – unfolded.

non-spoilerish general thoughts on film's endingShow

The ambiguous happy ending is what brought this home emotionally for me. It may or may not be a reality that the characters inhabit in the real world – I'd have to rewatch to be sure – but the hopeful conclusion was such a reversal of everything coming before that I just gladly took it for what it was, what it was shining up on the screen.

I watched Night on the Galactic Railroad on streaming while in the thick of covid-isolation early last year. It may have been my slightly woozy state coupled with the nighttime viewing, but the dreamlike, time-suspended rhythm of the film really pulled me in to softly knock me out, like a slow punch underwater. The glowing colors of the darkened evening streets put me in mind of Klee, the hushed, airless atmosphere of de Chirico. And if that sounds too high-toned, I'm not at all a cat person, but the anthropomorphized little friends here sometimes had me gasping at their adorable faces, their wide-eyed looks of wonderment at this or that strange thing or thought.

I didn't know anything about the source novel going in, so the Christian iconography was a little unexpected and frankly weird, but even those elements seemed to float off and fade into the inky distance without need of explanation. This was on a night I may or may not have been somewhat medicated, so I'm looking forward to revisiting it on the blu ray I picked up, with more of my faculties in play, but probably, again, at night.

[Michael Kerpan]

The author of Night on the Galactic Railway was VERY Buddhist. Kenji Miyazawa was amazing. A leading, forward looking agronomist, a poet, a writer of (mostly) children's stories, and a Buddhist scholar. He lived so austerely that it is thought it undermined his health. Takahata's Gauche the Cellist is also based on one of his stories.

I liked Tekkonkinkreet -- which I watched mainly because it "starred" actress Yuu AOI. I didn't know what to expect otherwise -- but I enjoyed the way it looked (and worked).

[barbarella satyricon]

Gauche the Cellist has become more and more a favorite with the years, so really a sentimental one. It isn't so uneventful as to be meditative, but the action is fairly restricted and housebound, by virtue of the plot. Now that you mention it in conjunction with Railroad, though, I can see how its rhythms and patterns are similarly literary, with sequences that are contained and arranged like stanzas or short chapters. It's been one I'll leave playing while tending to other undemanding tasks around the house, maybe on a rainy weekend. And the fairly rousing finale does pull me in each time.

[Mr Sausage]

I don't have anything interesting to say about them, but to scratch my itch I went for two sci-fi anthology films Otomo was involved with, Memories and Robot Carnival, and had a blast. Both are great--the former more than the latter (Robot Carnival can be dated), but they're equally filled with bizarre imagery and ideas and crammed with ingenious visual story telling. The two are incredible to look at, but the soundtracks can be overwhelming in their own right. The pieces in Robot Carnival are often music videos for Joe Hisaishi's music; and the mixing of classical opera with the regular soundtrack in the first episode of Memories was gorgeous and allowed the story to ascend into intense melodrama without tipping over into the ridiculous or absurd. Some beautiful moments there, including a perfect and delicate ending image. More please!

[colinr0380]

I still hope that the third anthology, 1987's Neo Tokyo, will get a good disc release at some point.

[barbarella satyricon]

I remember finding Memories a little hard to sit through in one go, but you're right, the animation and art are gorgeous, and I'm sure there's more I'll find to appreciate about it another time. It's also high time I cracked open that blu ray of Robot Carnival I picked up years ago, though I see that Discotek Media has put it out on a UHD disc in the meanwhile.

I still hope that the third anthology, 1987's Neo Tokyo, will get a good disc release at some point.

Haven't yet had a chance to watch, so ditto!

[beamish14]

Short Peace is another incredible anthology film. Amazing how Katsuhiro Otomo is the common link between all 4 of these films. His short manga works, which were recently reissued in Japan, are just phenomenal. One of them, Shuffle, was also made into a short film by Sogo Ishii in 1981

Both Genius Party installments are very mixed bags, but I remember being more partial to the first

[Mr Sausage]

I wonder why Otomo didn't direct more movies? He seems largely to've been a contributor to anthology films, otherwise directing only one feature in his heyday and a second 15 years later. I'm guessing he preferred to focus on his manga?

[beamish14]

I wonder why Otomo didn't direct more movies? He seems largely to've been a contributor to anthology films, otherwise directing only one feature in his heyday and a second 15 years later. I'm guessing he preferred to focus on his manga?

He has both a new feature and long-form manga in the works. If you look at his two Kaba art portfolio books, you’ll see the incredible scope of his career-production design for television ads, advertising campaign art direction, posters, etc.

It really is crazy just how active he was during the late 80’s with balancing Neo-Tokyo, Robot Carnival, the Akira feature, and the manga, which didn’t conclude until 1990 (and the ending of it was inspired by a conversation he had with Alejandro Jodorowsky!)

He was dabbling with live-action filmmaking as early as 1978 or so

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah, his upcoming Orbital Era sounds enticing. Any news on when it'll come out?

[beamish14]

Yeah, his upcoming Orbital Era sounds enticing. Any news on when it'll come out?

No. I wish I had my ear closer to the ground with news from the Japanese filmmaking world. I thought it was delayed in part due to COVID, but I wish I knew more

[Mr Sausage]

Neo Tokyo and Short Peace are terrific as well. Neo Tokyo gets less freewheeling and abstract as it goes along, starting with an impressionistic slide into a child's twisted imagination (a brilliant piece of animation from Rintaro), progressing to an elliptical but mostly comprehensible sci-fi-ish story by Yoshiaki Kawajiri about a gross race car driver succumbing to self-induced insanity, and ending with a conventional narrative from Otomo about robots gone amok in the jungle (blending horror and comedy nicely). Each episode is strong, but there's no thematic line among them.

Short Peace is concerned mainly with Japanese history and folklore, with only the last segment set in an apocalyptic wasteland (the most exciting story of the bunch, but let down by a tonally inappropriate ending). The early computer animation is often pretty, but not as fluid or dynamic as even the hand-drawn animation from the late 80s, so visually the work isn't as strong as the earlier anthologies Otomo had a hand in. Otomo's is the most visually interesting short, mimicking Japanese paintings from the Edo period down to the distanced framing, and often sliding along these frames or dissolving into them to progress the narrative. The style shifts at the end to a more traditional anime style to accomplish its action climax. It's wonderfully done and my favourite of the anthology.

These anime anthologies have been some of the most fun I've had watching stuff in a while. I'm sad I've more or less exhausted them.

[beamish14]

Well, if you’re looking for more short-form works, have you delved into the films of Koji Yamamura?

[Mr Sausage]

...have you delved into the films of Koji Yamamura?

Nope. Recommend away!

[beamish14]

...have you delved into the films of Koji Yamamura?

Nope. Recommend away!

Mt. Head is his most famous, so I’d definitely start there. You should be able to find most of his films save for his recent “mini feature” Dozens of Norths on YouTube

[Mr Sausage]

Yoshiaki Kawajiri makes crass exploitation with a streak of misogyny and violent sexuality. Demon City Shinjuku is a boring action film, alternating action scenes soaked in 80s anime cliches with wooden, talky scenes of exposition. The plot, tho' simple, is badly mishandled, with no sense for structure, pace, or character. There's plenty of ridiculous violence, male posturing, and submissive, sexualized women (who are forever menaced). Not a good movie. Wicked City is somewhat better, being pacier and more competently told. It's also one of the most misogynistic films I've ever seen, from women turning into monsters during sex (sometimes with vagina dentata) and trying to eat their male partners, to the lead female who spends the movie's run time being repeatedly raped while enjoying said rapes, and whose function in the movie is to be both an object of violent sexual desire and a broodmare for the good guys. The movie is also outdone on every level by its Hong Kong remake, a wild and inexplicable Tsui Hark production that's faster paced, more imaginatively constructed, and, wonderfully, lacks nearly all the source's misogyny. Ninja Scroll is easily the best of the three, a stylish, absurdly violent, breathlessly paced action movie with a sense of wicked invention. The misogyny hasn't gone anywhere, tho' (here it's a drop dead gorgeous vixen with a poison vagina who laments her inability to be ravished by a real man; she also gets raped in graphic detail while the camera oogles her, and her role in the story is to fuck the lead back to life or something).

Kawajiri's films reveal a lot of the worst excesses of Japanese anime from the 80s and 90s. I see why they have such a cult following--they're certainly wild and bizarre--but they're also a real drag to watch back-to-back like this.

[jojo]

So I plowed through all 26 episodes of the original 1973 Aim for the Ace series in two days.

For those who don't know, it's a shoujo series about a coach who takes an incredibly raw talent and his dream to mold her into a kind of player women's tennis has never seen before. The premise is your typical zero to hero sports story, but as they say, it's the little things that make the difference.

Where Aim for the Ace separates itself from the other sports stories of its time period is its emphasis on the psychological side of competition. While it has some of the usual gimmicks where the heroine (Hiromi Oka) faces a parade of competitors with gimmick moves that need to be overcome and so forth, a lot of the show is more about emphasizing the protagonist Oka's psychological state from moment to moment. Seeing her being absolutely terrified before every big match in the first half of the series struck me as something a lot of modern sports anime seem to have forgotten to show. As the show progresses, her insecurity slowly gives way to hesitant determination, and by the end of the series, actual confidence in her growth as a player as the show culminates into a showdown with her former idol. Basically standard coming of age stuff, but again...it's the little details that interest.

We find out later in the show that the coach's vision for Oka is to mold her into a power player who plays like the men do, which is the direction he sees women's tennis moving towards in 1973. As a viewer in 2023, we see that the original manga's prediction for where women's tennis was going was correct, so I surmise it wasn't necessarily an outlandish opinion amongst tennis fans of that time period, but to casual viewers with only a passing interest in women's tennis in 1973, it might have been seen as big statement. Perhaps deliberately, Oka's idol is the dainty and elegant Ryuzaki, who not so subtly represents the pinnacle of the "old guard" of women's tennis. Ryuzaki is pushed as the perfect package of skill, finesse, gracefulness and femininity, with her stylish clothes and long, flowing locks and her much-mentioned unbeaten streak throughout the series. This is in contrast to Oka's androgynous "looks-like-a-shonen-jump-protagonist" character design and tomboyish dress style.

Visually, the show is simultaneously very stylish and also primitive. This actually works in its favour in creating a series that has a gritty undertone, especially when the tennis matches become a whirlwind of sketchy linework and forceful, violent movements. Even though nobody actually gets into physical fight with one another, it's a very visually violent show! It uses a lot of abstract graphic elements and the dramatic freeze frame compositions that Osamu Dezaki would become famous for later in his career. The blu-ray I watched brings out the color design of the show very nicely, which would probably the show's main visual draw for modern viewers.

Aim for the Ace definitely has the hallmarks of the more overt early 70s feminist attitude in shoujo, which started to disappear around the early 80s as more female mangaka entered the industry and it was less about proving that female-made manga could sell to the masses and more about just selling to the masses, period.

[Mr Sausage]

Why does Goro Miyazaki have such a bad reputation?

[Boosmahn]

I think he's generally believed to be responsible for some of Studio Ghibli's weaker projects, like Tales from Earthsea and especially Earwig and the Witch. There's also the (unfair) expectation for him to live up to his father's legacy.

I haven't seen any of his films and am not that familiar with his reputation, so maybe someone else has more insight.

[knives]

Yeah, he just makes very middling movies that don’t really live up to the Miyazaki name. The two above mentioned films aren’t helped be hewing close to some of his father’s stylings albeit in a less successful manner. From Up on Poppy Hill is supposed to be good though and more in the vein of Whisper of the Heart.

[feihong]

I like From Up on Poppy Hill as much as most of the better Hayao Miyazaki movies. And I think the design he did for the Ghibli museum is very whimsical and fun. Goro's big issue is really the shadow of his father, of course, but it's led to some pretty wrongheaded moves which were not entirely his own fault. The producer, Toshio Suzuki, one of the co-founders of Ghibli, took the Earthsea project out of the father's hands and gave it to the son to serve as a debut film––probably a move on Suzuki's part to pass the torch. That ended up pissing off Ursula K. Leguin, Hayao, and legions of fans––all of whom expected Hayao would direct the movie––and the result was genuinely unspectacular. I thought From Up on Poppy Hill showed huge improvement––but Goro has indicated that making the film was the hardest thing he ever did, and he seemed to imply he didn't want to make another film that way again. Then begins the digital era at Ghibli, and Goro takes the lead. He comes into Ghibli as allegedly the only guy with digital animation experience, but the results––Ronja the Robber's Daughter and Earwig and the Witch––aren't good. Ronja's line art drawn thinly over CG is impressively alienating to look at, and Earwig and the Witch looks unpolished, dark, empty, joyless, and inanimate––dangerously cheap-looking output from an animation company famous for bringing a lush, jeweled look to their projects. Both projects are very boring, and they offer very little to think about. I get the feeling there is a lot of pushing behind Goro, and I wonder if Goro really strongly wants to make a movie at all. The expectation that he take over in the face of his father's impending retirement is very palpable––especially since Ghibli's move into television hasn't been successful, and the world seems only to want to see the Hayao Miyazaki movie that is still forthcoming, and nothing much else from the studio. There seemed to be the hope that Goro would be a sort of clone of his father, but how could he be that? Goro has had a completely different life from his father's. I don't sense anything like the hunger of the father in the son. And the son's intimidation at his father is very present in Goro's reflection that, upon seeing his father's drawings when he was a child, he decided to do something different with his life, because he didn't think he would be able to equal his father as an artist.

I thought Poppy Hill was in the true Ghibli style, similar to Whisper of the Heart or Only Yesterday (so not quite Hayao Miyazaki at his most inspired, but still very high-quality and moving to see), but it sounds like that work was quite a struggle for Goro. My impression is that a lot of old-school Ghibli associates came together to help that production out, because nothing else Goro has done has been very heartfelt or shown much quality. The rest of the time what I feel most is his struggle to live up to the legacy people invest in him. It's hard to see him making anything that plays so well as many of the films his father has made. And I feel like he's expected to work in such a small box––the demand to make films essentially like the ones his father made must be really crushing of some aspects of his creativity. Other animators in Japan don't have to aim for quite the broad, even international audience Goro is expected to reach. And, so far, he just hasn't proven to be a director who produces very meaningful work with any consistency.

[jojo]

I believe Hayao Miyazaki also wrote the screenplay for From Up on Poppy Hill, so Goro may have felt he wasn't truly working under his own steam in that one. I enjoyed it too, and initially felt like Goro had a bit of redemption for doing it, but I agree that more and more it felt like a one-off work that had a lot of helping hands, which in some ways must be dispiriting for Goro. I'm kind of curious as to what compelled Goro to enter into the anime industry after having tried to avoid it for so long. His insecurity for being "Hayao's son" seems to supercede whatever he wants to say in his own work.

Which is too bad, because he's a fairly compelling interview. He has a lot of interesting things to say in them, but for some reason those thoughts and ideas aren't being transferred into much of his work.

The biggest problem in Ghibli is that everyone in the studio had been subservient to Hayao Miyazaki for so long that none of them really have the backbone or spunk to carve out their own voice and style, because Miyazaki is constantly hovering around correcting people's work so that they do it the "right" way (his way). Takahata was the guy there who could do his own thing because he was Miyazaki's peer so he could slough off Miyazaki's opinions and wasn't intimidated by him. That's likely the reason why all the more well known modern talents are found outside of Ghibli. Yonebayashi seems to be the most successful younger animator to come out of that studio but it seems more apparent that he's more of a solid craftsman whose intent is to carry the torch for the classic Ghibli legacy than carving out a personal niche for himself.

[Michael Kerpan]

I preferred Poppy Hill to any of Hayao Miyazaki's post-Spirited Away work. Then again, I like Whisper of the Heart more than most of HM's work as well (and Only Yesterday more than all of it). I will watch HM's next movie -- but honestly I feel Japanese animation has pretty much passed him (and current Studio Ghibli) by. There are other studios/creators whose work I find much more consistently satisfying.