Jin-Rou

Story:
An incredible wealth of potential wasted on hand-holding the audience into a waste of time. There's a constant motif of this narrative being symbiotic to Little Red Riding Hood, and while this is a cool thing at first, it's played to death over and over as the narrative continues. Virtually nothing new comes forth from this motif, and because it's crowding the run-time with over expository allusions, there's no room for characterization, world development, or memorable sequences. What crawls out from this hot mess is something that's more brawns than brains.

There's no real goal any of the characters are trying to achieve. It's not that ... I needed any aspirations clearly stated for me, but since this narrative forsakes visual allusion for blatant dialogue expository hand-holding, it was strange for the writer to conveniently forget to explain what it is the cast of characters each individually want. I'm not asking for a wealth of subplots, but by doing so, the writer could have created a world I could connect with.

For instance, the first 10 or so minutes of this film are fantastic. There's clear evidence as to what everyone is doing and why. Then, upon Fuze killing the girl, the film starts to go downhill. It becomes impossible to really understand what anyone wants, why, and how they're going to go about doing it. From then on out, it's a matter of guess-timating and accepting what takes place merely because the film says so, not because the characters or anything around them would naturally do so.

And, upon the film's final moments, nothing really comes to fruition. There's no message, theme, or value to be retrieved from the narrative. Because it fails to properly create anything other than visual pleasure, the project fails to do anything than that.


Art:
The animation here is incredibly solid. Many times it felt like watching a live-action. Not because the images were so realistic, but the motions themselves looked great. Characters do more than sit still. They look around, brush their hair to the side, turn their head to the side, tap their foot. It all feels very real and based on an immersive intention.

The backgrounds feel lively, but as the film progresses, things are re-used and less interesting. It's as though the film halfway decides to put anything new aside and return to the old stuff we'd seen before. It's not a super big deal, but considering how gorgeously dystopian everything looked I will admit that I was disappointed to not see anything new halfway in.

Characters look marginally different and realistic. Some anime like to hyperbolize features, but this film is definitely grounded in realism with its designs.


Sound:
An excellent, wonderful soundtrack. I only had issues with one song, and that's because it didn't sound as good as the others, but was still pretty great.

Sound effects were all very good and felt fitting. Unfortunately, they used a stock bullet effect that sounds unbelievably unrealistic. It's used in so much stuff and I still have no idea why. It sounds terrible.

Audio levels for the dialogue are all pretty great. Things sounded solid and I thought the VA work was quite exellent.


Character:
I don't care about anyone. Nobody has any character at all, and nobody has anything to care about anyway. The only reason this isn't a 1/10 is because the use of motifs for the 2 lead characters is still cool despite it being executed horribly.


Enjoyment:
I couldn't wait for it to end during the last 10 minutes. The whole project was downhill after the end of the complicating incident's scene. If I ever watch this again, it's just that beginning part. After that, I'll turn it off.

I will, however, definitely be listening to that soundtrack again. It's excellent, and I'll be damned if anyone ever thinks it's no good. It sounded absolutely beautiful, somber, and sobering. If anything, the music has the potential to recover such a boring work. However, this was still plagued with far too many errors in regards to its execution. Such a shame.


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jin roh is the specific type of garbage anime movie that anime fans will point at to say that anime can be serious, and this movie is seriously boring. a masterpiece of animation that could only be created by someone with a lot of script that they had no idea how to make interesting other than animating it.

the main character's name is fuse and he's a rogue cop with a short fuse in my ideal world. however in the movie he's a standard muscle protagonist type 2 with some ptsd, this does not characterise him in a way that is remotely interesting and i'm also ... quite sure it's an inaccurate portrayal of said ptsd. also movie twist but giving a reason for being a boring piece of shit does not excuse a character being a boring piece of shit. the other character is girl i dont care about + some politic guys.

animation wise i'd say this genuinely suffers from being animated too much in some places, you get the cool shots with lots of movement and then you get the terrible awful shots where nobody moves at all for twelve seconds. sound was unremarkable at best.

maybe i just didn't understand this movie, that's quite likely, honestly this isn't my kind of movie but we did decide to watch it even though i PERSONALLY voted for pokemon movie number destiny deoxys. jin roh is a stupid poopy movie for stupid poopy babies who like drinking poop sewer water from a sewer with poop in it, i'd recommend genocidal organ which was this movie but with infinitely funnier grammar.

they stole the armour from fallout new vegas 3/10 plagiarism is bad.

If I hear one more Little Red Riding Hood allusion, I am going to lose my mind. You know a movie's commitment to a metaphor is in trouble when you're yelling, "Okay, okay, we get it already!" at the screen - and you're only thirty minutes in.

I think a large part of my gripes with Jin-Roh is that it's a tale of inter-and-intra departmental conspiracies and coups, but it's hard to care when said governmental agencies (and, really, the setting at large) are so hazily sketched out. This is the kind of storyline right at home in the world of Ghost in the Shell, but ... there Public Security Section 9's place is clearly defined (and, unlike here, filled with a memorable cast of characters). Fuse, our main character, suffers from PTSD over the course of the film, but it feels like the impact of his inability to shoot a young terrorist, and the soul-searching the incident sparks in him, is minimized because we have no idea what he was like beforehand; we just have to take his and others increasingly ridiculous claims that he's a "beast" or a "wolf" at face value even though all evidence points to the contrary. It doesn't help that the central metaphor is so belabored that it becomes grating and hard to take seriously the more the film drags on.

There's some beautiful animation on display, with sequences reminiscent of The Third Man's delirious final chase in the sewers being a particular highlight, but they can't carry the stilted script. Perhaps this would have benefited from a longer adaptation that could have better fleshed out the world and its inhabitants instead of cramming everything into a tight 100 minutes. A bad movie is one thing; a bad movie with so much care and craftsmanship on display is damn near heartbreaking.

Jin-Rou is proof that a superb soundtrack and amazing animation does not make a movie good.

Story: The initial concept is interesting, a large arena is set up for political turmoil, we have factions, and a gritty, realistic scenario. Then we get the main character's mental conflict, which is a brilliantly executed setup...then we get pretty much a fluffed up bunch of nothing.
The main character doesn't really develop, the factions don't really do anything that you weren't expecting after the first 20 minutes and you're given no actual information on why anyone is actually doing anything as radical as they are. There's the initial idea of ... people don't like the special police force (about 5 minutes in) and then you're mostly left to assume what reasons anyone may actually have beyond 'probably some political power play'.
The entire movie only wraps up the red riding hood theme, which would have been fine if they didn't feel the need to ram it down your throat every few seconds to make sure you know for certain that they are definitely talking about red riding hood. Just so we're clear, the theme is red riding hood, not another thing. Talking about a wolf, and girl in red, house to visit, you know the one. Red riding hood. Is that written in a way that's annoying to read? Because that's what you get for your movie story.

Art/Sound: For what they were working with, the soundtrack set a perfect atmosphere, there's not much more to say for that end. As for the animation, there are some reused assets, but nothing detrimental there. The world felt realistic, for lack of a better term, which is odd for an animation. The art direction made great use of subtle movements, gestures, and less prominent differences between characters looks to really give off the feeling of realism. Where most animation will accentuate differences, their choice in doing the opposite was perfect.

Characters: The main character was sort of fleshed out by the end, with nobody else really changing. Nobody was particularly interesting or memorable.


Conclusion: This movie felt like it would have been handled better as something like a 8-10 episode series so they could have actually developed anything. As it stands, it's like a weird flesh-covered skeleton; Aesthetic touches are done, the structure is there, but there's no meat in the suit to fill it out.

I don't really know where to start with this one, but I guess the first thing I will say is that I've noticed that outside of Ghost in the Shell, I have not really cared much for Mamoru Oshii projects: I've started (and in these cases dropped) both The Sky Crawlers and Angel's Egg. It's nothing against him, and I recognize that he is a talented filmmaker, but there's just something about his minimalist storytelling that I just really do not enjoy most of the time.

Talking specifically about Jin-Rou, though, I will start with the good.

The animation quality, especially with facial expressions, is insanely good, ... almost scarily so. The first act of the plot is compelling and paced extremely well. But that's about it.

The bad is almost entirely plot and character based. The main issue with Jin-Rou is that our main character, Fuse, has absolutely no character arc; the vast majority of the movie focuses on his feelings or lack of feelings of guilt after a certain event in the first act, but after what feels like a bunch of filler, he ends up making a decision at the climax that just leaves everything unresolved. While it is probably a valid argument that this is one of the main points of the movie, I can't accept that in good conscience when the story itself is ultimately a very generic dystopian world, insurgency-fights-it deal. If Fuse has to be a statue of a character, then there MUST be a compelling plot past the exposition and a great climax so that my time isn't wasted.

So essentially, what Jin-Rou provides us with is a rehashed, almost creepily mediocre story everyone knows and no characters worth any emotional investment in. The artwork, sound design, and first act are all very well designed, but all that is dragged down by a pitifully forgettable (and I have done my best to forget it) plot and cast.

How this is almost an 8/10 average is eons beyond me. I would only recommend this to aspiring animators as a case study in how to effectively animate facial expressions and small movements, and to aspiring editors/directors as a case study of exactly how NOT to make a compelling story that can express an idea/theme.

For me, I give it a 4/10. It's not worthless, but it tries its best to be.