Moving away can be tough, but it doesn’t always have to be. For Satsuki and Mei, two rambunctious children living in Japan in the 1950’s, it’s an adventure, in spite of the sad circumstances that brought them to their new home. The Kusakabe family has just moved from the big city into a more rural, country-esque community, surrounded by farms and woods, but they aren’t there for the change of scenery. They’ve moved there to get closer to the hospital that their mother is staying at while she battles an unspecified long term illness. The community is warm and welcoming, their
...
new neighbors are supportive to them, but most importantly, they have each other. While their father Tatsuo spends his day working in his room, Mei and Satsuki play with each other around their new property, searching the house for ghosts, running around the yard, and exploring all the weird and quaint wonders of their new home.
It isn’t long at all, however, before things start to get strange. Their first encounter with the supernatural was fairly innocuous, as they discover a horde of tiny black soot spirits living in the dark rooms of their home, which flee into the shadows whenever the two of them enter a room. Things get even more bizarre the first time Mei is left to her own devices, and she begins to uncover creatures living near them in the woods, including the mighty Totoro, a hibernating beast nestled deep below the roots of a giant tree, who becomes fast friends with her. Described by her father as The King of the Forest, Totoro isn’t always around, but he shows up when they need him, keeping them company or helping them out, all without saying a word. They’ll need his help more than ever, however, as a vague telegram brings up the troubling news that their mother’s condition has gotten worse, and a fight between the two sisters creates a terrifying situation. Can they rely on their spirit friends once more to see them through, or have they been all alone from the beginning?
This is the third Studio Ghibli film that I’ve reviewed, and out of the three, this one is probably the closest to what I’d consider the standard Hayao Miyazaki style. Of course, almost all of Miyazaki’s movies are visually gorgeous... My Neighbor Totoro is a solid thirty years old now, after all... But Totoro is one of his more cartoony looking projects, and it’s probably one of the best looking out of them. One particular note I’d like to make is something I didn’t really notice until watching this movie again this week for the third time in my life... There are exceptions, notably Spirited Away, but for the most part, the characters in Hayao Miyazaki’s films look less realistic the younger they get, with the adults having more or less realistic proportions, children being a little more exaggerated with larger facial expressions, and the littlest of children being portrayed as adorable little goblins with heads too big for their bodies and mouths wide enough to make Totoro himself jealous. It works well because of the cartoony nature of the designs, though.
The same can’t really be said for the backgrounds, which are highly detailed and realistic throughout, although they did manage to create some incredibly diverse scenery. There are times when the background can feel a bit stiff and lifeless, but this is mainly during scenes where we’re supposed to be paying attention to the characters anyway, and the artwork itself is still beautiful to look at. I haven’t been this entranced by the clouds in the sky of an animation since I reviewed Diebuster, and a lot of the imagery from the forest seemed like it was taken right from the forest next to my own house, which I used to explore quite liberally when I was younger. Honestly, the tunnel under the shrubbery that Mei takes to get to the large clearing is a dead wringer for a similar path that I used to crawl through back in the day. Backgrounds that actually move, like scary swaying trees at night, tall grass being pushed through and fields of grass and other plants being rustled by gusts of wind, are very well captured and lushly drawn.
The character movement is perfectly fluid and graceful, well, as graceful as two clumsy, awkward kids and a cat bus with creepy, millipedey legs can be. There’s a lot of running, which I’ve heard can be particularly difficult to animate in 2D, but that’s what this movie entirely is... Traditional, hand-drawn 2D animation, which makes the aesthetic especially impressive. And that’s not anything against the CG that Miyazaki would use in later movies... I understand perfectly well why they needed to use it in Spirited Away, because the story took place in one giant set piece, with a terrifying number of working parts and crazy inhabitants, so it had to be a major boon for them, but I still vastly prefer the look of the hand drawn Kusakabe house, as it gives so much life to the crumbling old structure. The final thing I should mention is probably the design of Totoro himself, as they were so flawlessly able to walk the line between unique looking monster and fluffy, adorable gentle giant, and while I don’t know enough about Japanese mythology to place whether he’s based on anything, I can still understand any kid wanting to befriend him.
Just like Spirited Away, the music for Totoro was composed by Joe Hisaishi, but this time around, since there’s less going on in the story, I was able to soak it in a lot better, as his tracks aren’t just supporting the product, but acting as important elements all their own more often than not. Since there’s no real action to speak of in the film, the score is very childhood oriented, with tracks ranging from happy, fun and upbeat to calm and relaxing, with very few exceptions for the sake of it’s few serious scenes. The most memorable track is easily it’s theme, literally a song about having fun with your friend Totoro, and while it’s been parodied mercilessly(The South Park Cthulhu version is my favorite), it’s hard to listen to without feeling something. The instrumental portion has a curious motif going on, as quite a few of it’s tracks, which otherwise don’t sound that much alike, do manage to have a few bars in common, and they’re bars that also get hummed by the characters a few times, but i’m not sure what the significance is. They are pretty, though, which I think I can say for the rest of the score as well.
As for the English dub, I was actually surprised to find out the two main child characters, Satsuki and Mei, were actually played by the Fanning sisters... Respectively, Dakota and Elle. Remember in my review of Spirited Away, how I said the character was voiced in a more childlike way compared to the sub, and it didn’t feel like much acting was really being done? Well, the same thing happens here, but it works a lot better for three reasons. First of all, this is a different kind of story. I won’t get into too much about the focus of the story just yet, but it’s not the kind of story that really requires the individual characters to be particularly interesting or memorable. The focus is primarily on the family, so of course the kids are going to be portrayed as kids. This of course leads into the second thing, the brilliant casting of two real life sisters as the main characters. The bond between Dakota and Elle translates completely into their characters, and you can feel the love and familiarity of their established bond, and it adds a level of caring to their dynamic onscreen.
The third reason is that even in her worst movies(Hide and Seek, anyone?), Dakota Fanning’s been a fantastic actor ever since she started out in her career. From her collection of TV cameos in the year 2000, she’s always had the kind of acting chops, timing and stage presence that some adults are never able to achieve, so even in a role where she’s not really expected to do anything more complex than hang out with her little sister, she still manages to shine whenever one of her scenes calls for more emotion... When Satsuki’s worried about her mother, or frustrated with her sister, or going through the big climax of the third act, she does manage to put on a compelling performance. Elle, to a lesser extent, does an okay job as well, I mean she couldn’t really bomb this part as long as she continued to read her lines, but like I said before, the most important thing was their bond, which does sell the characters to us. We do wind up caring about them.
As for the rest of the cast, there really aren’t any other major notes I can make. Satsuki and Mei’s parents are played by respectable character/voice actors Tim Daly and Lea Salonga, one of whom has a long resume stretching back to the eighties, and the latter being a mainstay of Disney movies, playing the singing voice for numerous Disney Princesses. They’re strong actors, but neither had a lot to do here. More noteworthy is Pat Carrol, who was born in the twenties and has been acting since the forties, and is actually still alive and performing today, with a recent role in the Tangled cartoon series. She plays a very kind and lovable old woman, the first person to welcome them to the village and the person who explains the spirits in the area to the two girls. Finally we have the legendary Frank Welker, voice of millions of animated animals, playing the titular character Totoro, among others. It’s a testament to his abilities that he’s able to convey emotion and personality from a role that’s basically just Chewbacca roaring. The adaptive writing does change things, but it does so with a bit more respect for the audience than some other films.
While most of Ghibli’s films are able to garner their own consistent reputations, My Neighbor Totoro seems to be one of the more divisive films in their collection. There are a lot of people who consider the film to be a great nostalgic classic, one of the main movie of their childhoods, I’ve seen an equal number of people saying that they find the film to be boring, and it’s hard to not see both sides. As much as it manages to be a whimsical tale of childhood innocence, there really isn’t a lot going on in it... It has almost no plot to speak of, and they wind up so disengaged that they wind up focusing more on the puzzle of whether or not Totoro even exists in the story, rather than anything actually going on in it. There’s also a third camp, people in the middle, who think it’s perfectly fine as a kids movie, but doesn’t have as much appeal to an older audience. These are all solid points, and I can understand where they’re all coming from, but I honestly do feel that it has more to offer, even to adults, than most viewers would realize.
As I stated before, Satsuki and Mei are not, on their own, interesting or compelling characters. You would never want to go to great lengths to see them in any other context, now would you really want to catch up with them in the years following the movie’s conclusion. They work as a unit, and while they’re not entirely defined by each other... Satsuki is a bit more serious and responsible, Mei is a bit more careless and dependent... They are each other’s most important qualities. What I didn’t mention is that they both share equal space as main characters, something I rarely ever see in sibling-centric stories. Ed and Alphonse are both important in FMA, but Ed is still clearly the main character. Mirai is clearly the star of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, with her brother/puppy Yuuki just being there to act cute, die, and make us cry. Gregory is a very interesting and quirky character in Over the Garden Wall, but he’s still clearly a sidekick in Wert’s story. Mabel and Dipper share equal billing in Gravity Falls, but Dipper is still the one moving the plot forward.
With My Neighbor Totoro, however, both children get equal time to shine, spending more or less the same amount of time both alone and together, both having interactions with Tororo himself, and the only real exception... A certain crisis in the third act... Is still entirely focused on their relationship, despite the relatively dramatic stakes. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’d gone over ten years without watching it right up until the time of this writing, the two of them would have been a shoo-in for my top ten siblings list a few years ago, as the bond between them is so strongly written and developed that Miyazaki had no trouble making you care about them and get invested in their story, despite their lack of individual development. I’d even go as far as to say I like the two of them on a more personal note, as they remind me a lot of my brother and me as children... Granted, we were closer in age than these girls are, with only about a year and a half between us, but we still hung out a lot, explored together, and fed both off of and into each other’s imaginations.
And that’s ultimately the point of this movie... The importance of imagination in a healthy childhood. My Neighbor Totoro makes no bones about the fact that Satsuki and Mei are going through a rough time, with their mother in the hospital and their dad working, so the two of them are left with nothing but each other as a support system, coming up with fantasies and elaborate creatures that the adults in their lives are more than willing to humor and encourage. Yeah, that’s right, I think al the supernatural stuff that happens in this movie was imaginary, because I’ve been there... I’ve been a kid, entertaining myself with epic fantasies playing out around me, and even when the creatures in the movie DO tangibly interact with the girls, I could easily see these moments being recreated from stories they told each other or came up with to describe the events around them, much like Edward Bloom from the movie Big Fish. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Totoro and his little minions didn’t appear until Mei was all alone.
With her sister in school, Mei no longer had her playmate, and had to come up with a new one... A big, giant furry one who’s subtly hinted to be based on a frog, and maybe a little off of Mei’s initial impression of the old lady next door. Satsuki didn’t see him at first because it took her a little while to understand why he was important, and to come around to Mei’s way of thinking. Then again, maybe I’m wrong, and it was all real. Maybe Totoro really is the spirit of the forest, he really can fly and call upon help from a cat bus with weird centipede legs, and the two girls are seeing something that’s really there. If this were the case, it wouldn’t bother me at all, as it wouldn’t take away from the movie at all. It’s never made clear whether or not Totoro exists in the real world or just in the children’s heads, and that’s exactly how it should be. It’s that blur of fantasy and reality that expresses just how important and, well, real our imaginations are to us, both when we were children and even as adults.
All right, before I wrap this up, I should talk about the elephant in the room. Actually, there are two; The first one is that there’s a nude scene in this movie. It’s only a few seconds long, but it shows the girls and their father bathing together, and while that may seem weird and creepy to a western audience... I wouldn’t judge you for not wanting your kids to see it without parental guidance... It is, in and of itself, an innocent scene, as families bathe together in a completely non-sexual context all around the world, so it’s a perfectly innocent moment. I did, however, have a friend once who, when I mentioned the movie to him, immediately said “Ooh, the bath scene...” We’re not friends anymore. Don’t be friends with people like this. The other elephant is a weirdly popular fan theory that the movie is a metaphorical retelling of an old murder, with the girls both secretly dying in the third act, and while I don’t personally believe in this theory, I can kind of see how it came about, and I do get that there’s some evidence for it. I don’t think it holds up, myself, and I personally like to view the movie on it’s own merits. It’s worth it.
My Neighbor Totoro is available from Gkids, with the original Disney release being out of print. A novelization by Tsugiko Kubo and illustrated by Miyazaki himself is also available stateside with an English translation. Interesting not\e, Totoro also showed up as a plush toy in Toy Story 3. If you can find it, there's also an older DVD where, on the case's artwork, it looks like Totoro's top is sticking out of his butt. Your welcome.
My Neighbor Totoro is one of Studio Ghibli’s flagship titles, with the big fluffy Totoro himself serving as the Studio mascot, much like the Cat in the Hat is with the Dr. Seuss empire. It might not have accomplished as much as certain other titles in their filmography, with Spirited Away being their only major award-winner in the United States and some of the more dark titles garnering far better critical praise, but in my opinion, this is one of their biggest triumphs. This movie does everything it set out to do and so much more, becoming a timeless classic that even thirty years later, still manages to capture the hearts and minds of children and even some adults(like yours truly). It’s simplistic, but it still has an unmistakable dignity to it, and it stands as proof that you don’t need epic circumstances, intense action scenes or complex writing to make a movie good, and you don’t need randomness, quick editing or flashy CG to appeal to children. If you treat your audience with respect, they’ll come tyo you, and they’ll never forget you. I give My Neighbor Totoro a 9/10.
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Jun 22, 2018
Tonari no Totoro
(Anime)
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Moving away can be tough, but it doesn’t always have to be. For Satsuki and Mei, two rambunctious children living in Japan in the 1950’s, it’s an adventure, in spite of the sad circumstances that brought them to their new home. The Kusakabe family has just moved from the big city into a more rural, country-esque community, surrounded by farms and woods, but they aren’t there for the change of scenery. They’ve moved there to get closer to the hospital that their mother is staying at while she battles an unspecified long term illness. The community is warm and welcoming, their
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Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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May 23, 2018 Mixed Feelings
In the distant future, with the concept of recorded time itself having become irrelevant, the world as we know it has changed. The land is a vast desert, society has been pushed to the brink of existence, and mankind is no longer the dominant species. As the result of a great war, the world has been taken over by beastmen, a race of humanoid creatures that range from beings who look like normal humans with random animal features, to full-bodied anthropomorphic bipedal animals of varying heights. As wacky as that idea may sound, the oppression of the human race is anything but,
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as humanity has been designated a race of second class citizens, with some settlements killing us on sight, others enslaving us or simply refusing to acknowledging us, and the areas where we can exist as equals being few and far between. On top of all this, the world’s oceans have somehow vanished with time, replaced with a literal sea of sand, where aquatic creatures have adapted to swimming through the earth itself, and terrestrial life forms having to ride boats across the vast sandscape.
The wars between mankind and the beastmen have left countless casualties in their wake, but none have had as much impact as the death of the idealistic Revi, a young man with a vision to create a world of harmony and prosperity. Upon his death, however, his older sister Morte manages to come into possession of a legendary device called The Destruct Code, a device with the power to end the world. Mourning her loss and wishing to end the unfair world that took Revi’s life, this one girl will set out on a quest to find out how to use the Destruct Code to make her own desire a reality. On the way, she’ll team up with a nomadic human cook named Kyrie and a strong willed Dwarf Bear beastman named Taupy, with the three of them unwittingly adopting the moniker of The World Destruction Committee, officially labeling them as enemies of the people, highly wanted criminals among beastmen and humanity alike. With their epic quest unfolding, and the mysteries of The Destruct Code unraveling, who the fuck are we supposed to be rooting for here? Visually speaking, this show isn’t anything special to write home about. It’s not terrible looking, but it’s also not great looking. The only thing noteworthy about it’s animation is that it was produced by Production IG, whom I used to have a really high pinion of before I started taking a closer look at their resume. They’ve put out a ton of great looking titles throughout the years making up a cozy majority of their output, but there are a few clunky looking titles peppered throughout the list. From what I can tell, it looks like they don’t allocate high budgets to any project that they don’t think people are going to pursue for their visuals... Titles like Cromartie high school, which is mostly renowned for it’s comedy, and Chevalier D’eon, which would mostly be popular for it’s writing and sophisticated Elizabethan tone. They must have thought the same about Sands of Destruction, with their assumption being that since it’s based on a video game, it’s market would only extend to fans of said game. I’ll give them this, from what I’ve seen, none of their anime titles have looked bad over-all, even if there have been some bad looking moments in them. Sands of Destruction definitely looks cheap, though, and it doesn’t take a lot of viewing to pick up on this. At worst, there are a couple of moments in the first few episodes where they ran into frameless action or just had really long scenes involving still character images talking to each other, but thankfully moments like this aren’t the norm. I’d honestly say the worst thing about the visuals is the setting, as in accordance to the premise, a huge chunk of the series run time is spent with the cast riding their boats out on the sand sea(which I never got used to), which granted the animators an opportunity to feature long, static talking and interaction segments against an easy to manage background, which was no doubt a huge budget saver, but for the audience, the novelty of seeing that sand sea in the first place was the only thing visually interesting about these scenes. Different areas that our cast visit and their interiors have a much more interesting look to them, which is kind of a give-away when you consider that they’re traveling from area to area, like the cast of One Piece. The different settlements across their home land are highly diverse and offer a lot of diverse set pieces, so that even if the characters are just talking to each other without doing much moving, you can still enjoy the surprisingly detailed artwork that serves as their backdrop. There’s a massive library in one episode, and while the plethora of books don’t look incredibly diverse, the shadows and cobwebs still give the area a sense of identity as an old, worn down family business. Right in the first episode, we’re introduced to Taupy as he drinks in a bar, and what a bar! The background in that scene is beautifully lit, offering a surreal glow around those standing in front of it. Also, I mentioned that the sandy backgrounds didn’t offer much to be desired, but the creatures inhabiting the sands, when you get to see them, are pretty cool. The character designs were taken straight from the game, as I understand it, and they seem competent enough. Most of the main cast is designed to type, with certain elements of their aesthetic informing their personality, like how Kyrie’s ruffled hair is just wild enough to maybe be a main character, but at the same time just subdued enough to be written as a sidekick, with his blonde hair and friendly, innocent eyes painting his good nature that the very act of altering them slightly could set up a more sinister change. Morte, the heroine, is red-haired and busty, with an outfit that carefully straddles the line between conservative and fetishy, and of course, one of their enemies has long white hair. More interesting are their friend Taupy, a dwarf bear, who looks like he was created by a pirate enthusiast at Build a Bear Workshop, and then you have Lia, whose design fits her as the most interesting and entertaining person in the show, as she’s just overdesigned enough to suit how funny she is. What I actually found disappointing was the race of beastmen, who you’d think would be the epicenter of imagination and possibilities, but they’re just anthropomorphic animals and people with animal parts. Princess Tutu did more with animal/human hybrids than this show does. The music in Sands of Destruction is way cooler than it has any business being, and far more fun to listen to on it’s own than as a part of the series. Yoshihiro Ike is a seasoned veteran in the field of anime music, and I honestly don’t think this series deserves his talent, but since they were able to land him, I’m glad they put him to such good use. honestly, it kind of depresses me that with the show being as obscure as it is, nobody’s likely to hear it a solid decade later. Even outside of instrumentation and tune, the sound quality alone is beyond impressive. Most of you reading this probably won’t ever watch Sands of Destruction, but at the very least, look up the track Yoru no Houmonsha, for a taste of just how rich and complex this music is. Having said that, the opening leaves something to be desired, as it’s visuals are a bit clunky and jarringly inconsistent, and the tune... Particularly the sting at the beginning... Create a promise of edginess and grit that the series fails laughably to follow up on. The English dub is a Funimation effort, and since it came out around the turn of the decade, it makes sense that they went with two of their safest options for the lead roles. Everybody loves Luci Christian and Todd Haberkorn, especially when they’re doing their normal shtick, right? They’re recognizable voices, usually strong performers, and they’re both really popular, so it made sense to put them here. And yeah, they do solid jobs, so I can’t really take anything away from them there, even if their casting doesn’t feel inspired at all. Luci has a lock on playing strong female characters, especially ones who have red hair... Has anyone else noticed that? She’s able to dial up the necessary drama and tragedy, and even the occasional comedy, whenever she needs to. I’ve never really understood what people see(Or hear, I guess) in Todd Haberkorn’s nasally voice, but when he raises his pitch, he can play likeable little-brother type characters really well. And like I said before, he’s a solid actor in general. Leaving the human characters for a moment, there are two actors who had to play tough, hardened warriors in the form of small Teddy bears, and the fact that they were able to do this without cracking up or breaking character is a testament to their professionalism and dedication to their craft. Christopher Sabat may have only appeared in one episode, but lending his growling, deathly serious tough-guy routine to the tiny Yappy instantly elevates him to the top of the pack, at least for this show. Robert McCullom, who I don’t think I’ve ever talked about before, takes a slightly lighter approach to the main character Taupy, also a tiny bear, but where his old friend has turned from the path of justice, Taupy still carries a touch of innocence inside of him, which his actor is great at bringing out. My favorite performer in this dub is probably Trina Nishimura, who plays Lia, a descendant of Dragon beastmen, and since her character is an overzealous and easily angered loose canon, she has way too much fun with her. Beyond these names, the cast is saturated with well known Funimation names, and it’s an okay dub in general. It’s not overtly obvious throughout the series that it’s based on a video game, but once you do hear that piece of it’s background, it does explain a lot. I’ve never played Sands of Destruction for the Nintendo DS, but from what I’ve heard, it’s the kind of final Fantasy inspired game that starts off promising, but eventually loses it’s focus and crumbles under it’s own weight. to be fair, that does seem like something the anime went through, but only at the very end, and to it’s credit, it only happens very briefly. More to the point, it’s video game origin does explain a lot about it’s story structure and pace, as it’s a show about a small party of misfits from different walks of life who travel all over the map to accomplish a vaguely stated goal relating to the end of the world. There are times when it does feel like a video game speedrun, except with all the grinding, random encounters and puzzle-solving cut out to tell just the story on it’s own merits, and while it’s not impossible to tell a good story like that, there’s a good reason why not many franchises ever try it. For one thing, the most important element of any game is the actual gameplay, which is where the majority of the focus during production should go. Gameplay isn’t just a string of endless fights and challenges, it endears you to characters. It gets you invested in them. It drives the story, as the character’s struggles become more personal to you. Free exploration is a fantastic way of developing lore and dumping exposition, things that are difficult to do in scripted media. With the element of gameplay removed, media based on games has been almost universally bad to a laughable degree, even in regard to some anime adaptations, and when a game has as little actual depth as Sands of Destruction, that lack of gameplay is a compensation to make. Thus, this series is puddle deep even at the best of times, being incredibly shallow in both it’s story and it’s characters, with no real themes or ideas to play around with, nothing really engaging going on at any given time, and it’s few flashes of emotional resonance being exactly that... Nothing but the briefest of flashes. All of this could have been a huge issue, making it a dull, boring slog the likes of Ragnarok the Animation, if it was to make the mistake of taking itself seriously, but thank God, Sands of Destruction was able to dodge that bullet. I’m not going to say this series doesn’t try, or doesn’t put in any effort, but it’s extremely light-hearted, which is a life-saver in terms of watchability. It embraces it’s weirdness, explores the ramifications and implications of it’s universe in ways that are straight forward while at the same time delightfully tongue-in-cheek, and it plays the ‘sea of sand, how bizarre is that’ card at every opportunity. Very early on, I thought about how darkly funny it would be to see one of these sand ships get stuck under...sand, with the crew having to face the threat of drowning in sand, and while I was just being a dick at the time, you better believe they actually go that route in one episode. No character is ever allowed to point out how ridiculous these kind of occurrences are, but the audience is highly encouraged to try and wrap their heads around it, and I respect that kind of approach to weirdness. But the biggest asset that Sands of Destruction has is it’s cast of characters, and the dynamic between them. To be clear, none of them are any deeper than your common golfing divot, but our heroes, our stock characters and even a few of the villains are still all fun and interesting to some degree. As I alluded in my plot synopsis, the main cast is on a quest to destroy the world, which almost instantly makes their enemies likeable, as they’re on our side, trying to save the world. Even our heroes, in spite of this, are still effective because of their motives. Morte has a reason to want to end the world, and while it doesn’t make much logical sense, it makes perfect sense from an emotional perspective, and of course she grows to be conflicted as she nears her goal. Her friends stick with her because... Well, they’re her friends. They’ve been lumped in with her as criminals through circumstance, and they really have nowhere else to go, so they support her, they stick with her, and they just kinda hope she’ll change her mind. And I think it’s this sense of camaraderie that keeps me coming back to the series. Despite the apocalyptic premise, I like seeing this collection of friends on their journey, all of them genuinely caring about and supporting each other, even though one of them wants to inadvertently kill all three of them. And while the tone of the series may be entirely laid back, there are still several touching scenes and moments, from the conclusion of the cherry blossoms episode to Morte’s temporary connection to the beastmen working in his family’s bookstore, it has the ability to pull heartstrings, at least on a small scale. It does sort of foul this up towards the end, with a series of huge reveals taking the story in kind of an unnecessarily dark direction, but like I said before, it’s brief, and it ultimately builds towards a fairly decent conclusion that only flirts with pretentious misanthropy, instead of going all the way with it like Morte’s character kind of suggested it might. It’s a lighter, looser kind of adventure, and I suggest checking it out at least once. Sands of Destruction is available from Funimation as part of it’s SAVE collection, which makes it really easy to find and really cheap. I’m afraid I can’t say the same for the game it’s based on, as even a used cartridge, on it’s own, can run you around thirty dollars. The manga, by ASCII Media works, is not available stateside. I wish I could say that this anime’s obscurity is unjustified, or that it’s some forgotten gem that must be seen and appreciated for it’s brilliance, but I can’t. It doesn’t honestly have that much to offer outside of some weird spectacle and an all-around pleasant and inoffensive experience. I definitely like it, but I could also definitely live the rest of my life without ever seeing it again, sad though that may sound. At the very least, it’s surprisingly good by the standards of video game adaptations... I mean, it’s a much more enjoyable experience than something like Xenosaga the animation... So it’s kind of a miracle in how it stacks up to other titles of it’s ilk, but as an island, it’s a pretty forgettable show. If you’re looking for a cheap, light-hearted and easily digestable action show, you could do a lot worse. I give Sands of Destruction a 6/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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May 17, 2018
Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi
(Anime)
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Moving away can be a tough situation, especially when you’re still a child. Your parents probably have a good reason to relocate... Changes in the economy, lucrative opportunities at work, declining property values and rising crime rates... But how is that supposed to matter to you when you’re being uprooted from your routine, removed from the home you’ve grown attached to, and being forced to say goodbye to your friends? Anybody in that situation would be bummed out, and Chihiro is no exception, sulking in the back of her family car, hugging the one reminder she has of the life she’s
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leaving behind, a bouquet of flowers. There’s nothing she can do but pout as her family gets closer and closer to their new home, but when her well-meaning father takes a shortcut and winds up getting them lost, that sense of worry and disappointment gives way to something far more ominous.
At the end of a lonely, suspicious unpaved path, past a wasteland of ancient shrines, Chihiro and her family are stopped in their tracks by an old statue outside of the mouth of a tunnel. Guided through said tunnel by sheer curiosity, Chihiro’s parents wander through it, with their reluctant daughter in tow, and what they find on the other end was more than they could have possibly imagined. Thinking the structures at the other end to be an abandoned theme park, her parents find a booth of fresh food, which they almost immediately begin to chow down on, even as the whole world seems to go to hell around them. As the park’s true inhabitants begin to make their ghostly selves known, Chihiro’s parents are turned into pigs, and the terrified girl suddenly finds herself stranded alone at a bathhouse for wayward spirits, and if this unwitting stowaway wants to have any chance of rescuing her folks and escaping this supernatural spa of spooks and spirits, she’ll have to leave her spoiled, selfish upbringing behind and grow up fast under unforgiving circumstances. This is only the second Studio Ghibli title that I’ve reviewed, and it couldn’t be more different from the first one, Only Yesterday. To start, this film was actually directed by Hayao Miyazaki himself, and not by the recently departed Isao Takahata, and you can tell the difference from the visuals. I mentioned in my previous review that in Only Yesterday, the animation budget was, perhaps, much higher than it needed to be, as there wasn’t much going on in terms of action, and almost everything save for one fantasy flying scene was more or less realistic. In Spirited Away, however, the animation is just as fluid and lavish, but it’s being used for so much more. Studio Ghibli doesn’t really have any bad looking films, with even it’s lesser titles at least being nice to look at, but even among a filmography that’s full of beautiful artwork and vivid animation, Spirited Away still manages to be right up near the top as one of their best looking, if not THE best looking, titles ever released by the prolific studio. In any Ghibli title, you’re going to be able to expect a very high visual standard, consisting of... At the very least... Fluid animation, graceful character movements, expressive faces, and highly detailed, immersive environments. Spirited Away has all of these, but it also adds so much more that helps it to stand out among it’s peers. The bathhouse, as well as the spirit town surrounding it, is a huge setting with no shortage of different locations to explore, and every single inch of it that we’re allowed to see is rich with detail and personality. The cast of characters, from the main ones all the way down to the hundreds of spirits inhabiting the area, are incredibly diverse, offering enough unique designs to fill out an entire here’s Waldo book, and while a ton of them were obviously pulled from Japanese mythology, they’re still drawn in such a way that the youngest of viewers probably won’t be afraid of them. They also all have their own individual mannerisms and styles of movement that must have taken an unbelievable amount of effort to nail down. Purely in terms of aesthetic and style, Spirited Away is probably the most visually identifiable title of the Ghibli canon, which is probably why it’s lived on to become the Studio’s flagship title. It’s hard to say what it is, exactly, but once you get past the instantly recognizable creature designs of Haku, Yubaba and the Noface, Chihiro and her parents just have a certain quality that none of Miyazaki’s other human character’s have. It’s like a slightly realistic look, not so much as to make them look realistic themselves, but just enough to distinguish them from more traditional-looking anime characters. Look at any other of Hayao Miyazaki’s human characters, and they most likely have the big eyes and simplistic facial structure that Chihiro and her parents were somehow able to avoid. If this was intentional, then it was an especially brilliant move, as it adds another layer of separation between Chihiro and the denizen of Yubaba’s business. I’ve seen this kind of design choice in Takahata’s work, but I can’t think of any other Miyazaki project like it. Being that this is a Studio Ghibli production, the animation isn’t the only thing you can expect to be top notch. The music, composed by longtime Hayao Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi, is amazing, the kind of whimsical full-orchestra score that you’d expect to see in a Disney or Don Bluth production. If you think I’m pulling that comparison out of my ass, then please, listen to Reprise and try to get through it without thinking of An American Tail, or any heartfelt movie moment when characters are tearfully reunited. Of course, that’s also kind of my only real problem with this soundtrack... As tearfully wonderful as it can be, it also feels a bit generic, like a lot of it’s tracks just sound like they’d be from some other movie. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great, and they do their job with the story, it’s just that when all’s said and done, it’s just a little forgettable. Even the ending credits song, Always With Me, which is a charming song with a folksy indies feel to it, was just recycled from a scrapped movie that it was originally written for. As for the English dub, well, my thoughts there are a bit more complicated, and that’s mostly due to the fact that the sub and dub for this film are radically different creatures. It’s a very Disney-sounding dub, especially when compared to the Disney output of the early 2000’s. The adaptive trade-off can be broadly boiled down to ‘personality vs. subtlety,’ as the new version adds a bit more life to the cast, but also skews the dialogue to be a lot more accessible to the average English speaking child. For most of the cast, the acting in the dub is really good, with a couple of obvious stand-outs being Jason Marsden in the role of Haku, which he knocks out of the park despite sounding nothing like the original(and noticeably female) Japanese seiyuu, and the legendary Suzanne Pleshette playing the dual roles of Zeniba and Yubaba in a performance that’s far superior to the original. Fun fact, this isn’t actually the late Pleshette’s only anime role... She also had a small role in Trigun, believe it or not! Of course, there are other surprisingly big names in the cast... Michael Chilis and Lauren Holly play Chihiro’s parents(I don’t think their last name is mentioned in the movie, but I’ve found them credited as The Oginos), and I’m guessing they were instructed by the director to make them sound like ignorant yuppies, because that’s kind of how they come across, with a few minor dialogue changes and their over-all delivery. One particularly weird choice was Susan Egan as the character Lin, who sounds uncannily similar to Meg from Hercules... Which makes sense, because she also played that character. I don’t know if that’s just how she naturally talks or what, but it’s still such a strange connection. You look at Lin, you don’t think “Hey, she probably sounds like Megara!” And yet, you’ve got the same voice actress, doing the exact same performance. David Ogden Stiers, a certified Frasier and Disney legend who passed away this year, played the role of multi=armed boiler man Kamaji, and he did a much better job creating a new performance. And that leaves us with Daveigh Chase, a somewhat forgotten child actor who had this as one of her three defining roles when she was still a child... Chihiro is one of her signature characters, along with Lilo from Lilo and Stitch and the little girl from The Ring, and I’m sad to say, any brilliance she might have shown in those other two roles is lost here. Well, okay, maybe that’s not entirely fair. She doesn’t do a terrible job, and I’m willing to give her the benefit on the doubt and chalk her performance up to bad direction, but DAMN is she hard to listen to at times. The original performance by Rumi Hiiragi, who was only slightly older than Daveigh at the time, sounds a bit too old for her role, bringing a deeper register to the character, but she also did a stellar acting job, with emotion and voice control beyond her years. Daveigh’s performance, on the other hand, is mostly full of screaming and lines that sound like they just used the first take each time, but she does sound more believably childlike, but for my money, I’ll take good acting over authenticity any day. If you’ve only ever owned the original Disney DVD, then you won’t know anything about the adaptive script, which, ho boy, they made a ton of changes when they dubbed this title. I’ll be fair, none of the changes were so bad they had to be removed in later releases, like that disastrous mistake they made at the end of Kiki’s Delivery Service, but it still comes off a little condescending at times. It’s well intentioned enough, but it goes too far at several points. There were a lot of dialogue changes to put events in a more clear context and add more foreshadowing to the story, but adding pig noises to the scene where the Oginos have just started eating the spirit’s food was a bit ridiculous. There’s more explanation given to certain Japanese ideas, with the ‘break the seal’ bad luck curse scene being a smart and necessary example, but I don’t think kids need to be immediately told that Haku’s a dragon just because we don’t see him transforming before flying off, and the last words added to the ending come bafflingly out of nowhere. Also, it puts a lot more emphasis on a romance between Haku and Chihiro, which kind of misses the point of their relationship. It’s a fine dub, but I prefer the original Japanese. A few years ago, I was reviewing a series called Petite Princess Yucie, where I pondered the merit of reviewing children’s media. On the one hand, yeah, kids will watch anything, but as adults, is it our job to judge the quality of the media we show them? I had a tentative answer for this question, but I’ve changed my tune a bit recently. As long as it’s subjectively safe, and doesn’t contain any harmful lessons, yeah, kids should be able to watch anything. The Magic Voyage is a piece of shit, but I still liked watching it as a kid, and I’d have bitten you if you tried to stop me. I hate Nightmare Before Christmas, but I’d still rather let a kid watch that then Coco, which advocates how noble a choice it is to give up on your hopes, dreams and personal fulfillment just because your toxic, unsupportive family arbitrarily says so. Yeah, I really hated Coco. But from that perspective, Spirited Away is a fantastic movie to show to children, as it’s full of imaginative visuals, a solid color scheme, and it teaches a lot of important lessons, which I’ll get back to in a minute. Having said that, even if children’s media is safe for it’s target audience, that doesn’t exempt it from criticism, as adult like to watch that kind of thing too, and I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of kids out there reading reviews. You read reviews to see that reviewer’s opinion, and in my opinion, Spirited Away is not one of Studio Ghibli’s best titles. That’s not to say it’s bad by any means, but in terms of writing, it come up short in a lot of areas. To start, Spirited Away is severely lacking in characterizations. One of the reasons that I feel the actors for Haku, Zeniba and Yubaba did the best job is because they had the most to work with... Particularly with the old mutant biddies, both of whom sport deliciously fleshed out identities, personalities and an interesting dynamic between each other. The character of No-Face feels confusingly pointless and could have been written out with nothing really being lost(Insert Sin Cara joke here), and while Lin has a more important role in the story, I can’t say I know anything about her by the end. The same could be said for Chihiro. She does manage to grow and develop through the story, but the change is vague, as she’s basically just tougher and slightly more wise by the ending. Aside from refusing to eat with her parents, it takes her all the way until the third act to start showing agency and making decisions, and none of those decisions are ever more complex than ‘do the right thing.’ She’s a likeable character and you do feel for her, you do want her to strive, survive and succeed, but out of all the things in this movie that might stick with you after seeing it, she’s just not one of them. Some of the dangers she gets into don’t even wind up coming back... She starts to fade away, which gets dealt with and resolved by Haku and never comes up again. She signs away her name, which she remembers again when Haku reminds her, but between those two points, I couldn’t recall her forgetting her name ever being a thing in the story. Like, okay, I guess that’s important, but where was it stated that she forgot her name at all? Part of this weakness is probably due to Miyazaki’s writing style. I’ve heard several rumors about the conception of this story, like that it was written as a present for Miyazaki’s niece, or that Chihiro was based on someone’s daughter, and while I can’t find source information to prove these rumors, they do explain a lot, like how the story seems to be woven together from a bunch of mismatched morals and fables, and how it teaches a lot of small lessons to the viewer, and why Chihiro is such a lego brick. It feels like a story that somebody wrote so they could hide a bunch of these lessons underneath the story so a young viewer might subliminally pick up on them. As I said before, most of these lessons are good ones, and there’s really nothing wrong with teaching them, but there really doesn’t seem to be any sort of unifying theme between them, making the story feel like more of an anthology held together with a tenuous thread of a story than any sort of grand fable. Of course, there’s one more problem with that approach, and it’s a much worse one. Out of the lessons that this film tries to teach, you’ve got all of these important gems like ‘don’t be greedy,’ ‘be respectful,’ ‘finish what you start,’ ‘be grateful to those who help you,’ ‘good deeds will come back to you,’ and ‘if you help one person, everyone else will expect it and take advantage of you...’ Okay, I said they were mostly good, give me a break. Anyway, the problem with these lessons is that you never actually get to see anyone learn them. I’m serious. These lessons are taught directly to us, and not to any of the characters. The only lesson Chihiro actually learns is that the working world is hard, but was that ever important? I know the pig scene comes to mind, but Chihiro already knew not to steal food, and her parents had their memories of the event wiped. Most of the lessons are things a character already knows, or something completely inconsequential that only the observer will pick up on, like the lesson revolving around Yubaba and her sheltered baby. All of this feels indicative of one other major rumor I’ve heard about the film, although this one has a bit more backing... Miyazaki is the kind of story-teller who doesn’t like to put story first. From what I’ve heard, he was still writing this movie while it was being animated and story-boarded, which is a distinct departure from the norm, but I believe it. Out of every movie of his that I’ve seen, the only one I refuse to believe was written this way was Princess Mononoke, which had a superb story. But Spirited Away feels way too underwritten in contrast, and it shows in some very weird ways. I wouldn’t go as far as calling Chihiro a Mary-Sue, but her flaws are way too simple, she never has to struggle in making her decisions, and it feels like she was just created to be a role model. There’s also a ton of small contrivances I can’t get over, like the Boiler man having an extra train ticket, or the river spirit just happening to give her an object that would wind up helping her twice, or Yubaba just happening to have taken an oath to give a job to anyone who asks. I don’t even feel like Haku’s relation to Chihiro, which I won’t spoil as it’s supposed to be this huge revelation, really mattered in the end. It’s foreshadowed in some strangely disconnected ways, with a brief line from Haku early on being the only really connection it gets to the story, and it just kind of winds up feeling random. But hey, if you look at it as a story of a girl trying to survive in a perilous situation where both her and her parents’ lives are on the line, it’s still a fine movie. The pacing is great, the story never drags or gets boring, and the larger writing issues can be ignored by anyone who just wants to sit back, enjoy the visuals, and root for Chihiro as she struggles against all odds to save the day and get back to normal society. Also, I like how there's no clear villain, and there's actual nuance to the conflict. As I said before, it’s not a bad movie, in fact it’s more than competent enough to be worth your time, but I don’t think it deserves to be held up among the greats... Not among the anime film medium at large, or even among it’s Studio Ghibli peers. Could be worse, though... It could be Earthsea. Spirited Away is available from Gkids, on both DVD and bluray formats. The original Disney DVDs are out of print, but it’s still fairly easy to find. A manga adaptation that’s mostly just a compilation of still from the movie is available from Viz Media. If I’m being brutally honest, I’m not the biggest fan of Studio Ghibli. It’s not that I hate them or anything, and it’s not like I have any specific issue with them, it’s just that it really doesn’t appeal to me personally. I’m not really into Miyazaki’s approach to story-telling, and while I strongly prefer Takahata’s approach, it also doesn’t always work. There are only about three or four titles of theirs that I’ve come to love... Only Yesterday, Grave of the fireflies and Princess Mononoke, and maybe Porco Rosso pending an upcoming rewatch, but as for the rest, I’m just ambivalent to them. Unfortunately, Spirited Away falls into the latter category. I respect it as a children’s movie, but I don’t really understand what people get out of it when watching it as adults. Sure, My Neighbor Totoro and Only Yesterday are plotless, but they use this shortcoming to their advantage, whereas Spirited Away is all plot with little sense of character or cohesion, and that’s worse in a lot of ways. I don’t regret seeing it, I’d be happy to watch it again, but I still expected more from it. I give Spirited Away a 7/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 10, 2018
Inferno Cop
(Anime)
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Every so often, there comes an area where crime has run rampant, becoming a scourge on the innocent people who want nothing more than to live there peacefully. In places like Townsville, Gotham city, Metropolis, New York City, Tokyo and others seem to be under a curse that attracts the worst of the worst to their streets, where they build their empires, corrupt the political systems, or just rain general destruction down on the population. There are many of these locations, all of which are really better off being avoided, but one town stands out among all the others. There’s one town
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where the light of hope has all but flickered out, and the concentration of evil in the form of gangs, super villains and horrible monstrosities has almost become the majority. This is Jack Knife Edge Town, and yeah. with a name like that, it’s no wonder things have become so bleak. In a town like this one, the only entity that can stand in the way of the forces of evil to protect the innocent is one man... No. One cop.
That cop is none other than Inferno Cop, who is really more a mass of sentient muscles than a man in a police uniform. Oh, and did I mention that he has a flaming skull for a head? Yeah, despite looking every bit like a hellspawn himself, Inferno Cop is the one man the criminal population fears, and he’s dishing out the kind of hardcore, bloody justice that would make Sleepy Johnny Estes jealous. Having lost his family to the Southern Cross gang, Inferno Cop wants both justice and revenge, and will happily fire his inexplicably explosive bullets at any being that opposes him, even hostages on some occasions. Unfortunately for Inferno Cop, neither avenging his family nor cleaning up the streets of Jack Knife Edge Town will be as easy as shooting a bunch of gangbangers, because there’s a lot more going on here than just your average every day criminal behavior. He’s going to have to fight giant monsters, cyborgs, judges, robot dinosaurs and the forces of heaven and hell themselves to bring this story to a happy ending. It’s a mad world out there, but is he mad enough to survive it? Well, guys, it’s Studio Trigger time again. I talked about this company a few years ago in what turned out to be one of my favorite reviews from my collection, Kill La Kill. That and Inferno Cop are their first two titles, and also regretfully the only works from them that I’ve actually seen. I’ll eventually see Darling in the Franxx when it’s finished airing, how could I resist with the amount of controversy surrounding it, but for now, all I really know about them is their origin. Studio Trigger was established by former Gainax employees, including director Hiroyuki Imaishi, and information about their first official title... Titled Inferno Cop, if you haven’t guessed by now... has been hard to come by. I read in an interview that they were hired by a youtube channel to create a short length anime series, and after a few concepts fell flat, they eventually settled on an idea they thought nobody has heard of before... A cop who’s on fire and slays evil. That explains the show’s low budget, but there was another detail mentioned that I’m a bit more curious about. Further down in the interview, Hiromi Wakabayashi states that the basic idea behind Inferno Cop was to put in as little effort or time as possible, and that each episode had to be completed in under two hours. I’ve tried to find some explanation on how mandated this, what circumstances dictated it, or any kind of reason why this was the rule, but in lieu of an explanation, I’ll instead say that Trigger responded to these limitations in a surprisingly inspired way. the animation in this series is a bizarre combination of high-definition sprites and stock visual effects like fire, explosions and blood spurts. I know people like to say that shows like Robot Chicken are just guys playing with star wars toys, but stop motion animation of any kind is a lot of hard work compared to that image. Well, that same difference in effort exists in Inferno cop, with their on screen motions looking like someone cropped an image and is moving it with his cursor compared to actual frame-by-frame animation. Does that mean it doesn’t look good? Hell no. As relatively easy as it probably was to animate, Inferno cop looks awesome. Kill La Kill would occasionally move a character like they did in this show, and it was usually pretty funny, but seeing it done non-stop throughout the series is kind of a unique experience. It’s especially ridiculous when you see just how gritty, detailed and edgy the designs are, from the run-down, crumbled aesthetic of Jack Knife Edge Town to the masculine, testosterone-laden character designs that look like they were taken out of a vintage western comic book, being used in such a rudimentary way, there’s something about it that just works. The time and budget restrictions also lead to a lot of the characters having repeated templates and poses, with simple artistic and fashion-related changes distinguishing between the characters. Yet, somehow, it never looks cheap. Yeah, the characters are just still images being moved around(which looks hilarious in the racing episode), but there’s so much happening on screen at any given time that the effect is lost. Well, that works just fine for the animation, but I’d like to think the music got a little more TLC from the producers, because it’s pretty awesome. There are several episodes that include commercials for the Inferno Cop soundtrack right in their run-time, and I would really like to snag a copy of it, because this show’s music is fucking tight. The music is a hard, fast blend of rock and techno, and I don’t air-guitar very often(or ever, really), but these tracks make it pretty tempting, especially with background tunes like Hell Dillinger and Chaser. There are some cool gimmick tracks like the Egypt-inspired Desert City, the ominous Theme of Southern Cross, and the swanky, swinging OZOMBIEDESUKA, but the real gems of the soundtrack are the vocal tracks. The song Die Hollen Polizei serves as both the intro and closing of the show, and it’s also used constantly as an insert song, which would be annoying if it wasn’t so awesome. My personal favorite, though, is Grue Elise von mir, a bona fide rock ballad that gets used for any ‘sad’ or ‘touching moment in the series, even though they’re kind of hard to take seriously. Inferno cop never got picked up for an American release, which is a huge shame because I know that Funimation would knock it right out of the park, but they did manage to cast an actor for Inferno himself when his character made a cameo in another anime, Space Patrol Luluco. Christopher Sabat wound up being perfect for the role, as anybody could have predicted, but he hasn’t been able to touch the main series, unfortunately. The original Japanese voice actor was Junichi Goto, a newbie at the time who brought a tough and grisly-voiced performance that makes it sound like he was trying to channel Segata Sanshiro. He’s pretty damn good, as far as my English-speaking ears can tell. The rest of the cast was basically just a handful of guys doing hastily improvised voices, and they’re cast so repetitively that... I swear to God this is true... In the credits in the final episode, they actually fast forward through the cast listing, even though they still list every single character, important or not, meticulously crediting each role. When I was first exposed to Inferno Cop, I really didn’t have any interest in it. I honestly didn’t even know it was anime... I thought it was Russian, or something. I knew made a brief appearance as an okay joke in an AMV Hell movie, and it made another brief appearance in a terrible reanimated clip in a Ponies the Anthology installment, but aside from those glimpses, I spent five years never having any reason to check it out... That is, until April of this year, when I volunteered at my local anime convention. They had me doing a bunch of odd jobs, but my last one was acting as host and head-counter for a couple of showings, the first among them being Inferno Cop(which got a two hour slot despite being an hour long with Fact Files). Having to watch it in a crowded room full of adults whose IDs I had to check, and being part of a group viewing experience, I’ll admit, I got sucked in. I was able to embrace the ridiculousness of it, warts and all, and it wound up being one of the highlights of the con for me. Having said that, Inferno Cop is stupid. Like, it’s really stupid, a show full of randomness, logical inconsistencies, problematic elements, and an almost impressive number of cliches and deus ex machinas. If you’ve read my reviews up until this point, this would seriously not seem like something I’d ever be into. I mean, how can I have the gall to gush about this series when I very recently called Excel Saga lazy? And no, I’m not going to backpedal on anything I’ve said in the past, nor am I going to make up some bullshit about this show having depth, or some underappreciated metaphors or social commentary. Inferno Cop is exactly what it looks like from a cursory glance: It’s stupid nonsense full of bad writing and juvenile sensibilities. I’m not gonna deny the fact that just about every element that went into this series is something I’ve shat on other shows for doing in the past, so why am I being so much nicer to this one? Well, there are two things Inferno Cop does right, and they’re both pretty important. For the first thing, let’s take a look at Magical Play, a show I was distinctly disappointed with, despite it being every bit as weird as Inferno. It was appropriately weird and full of batshit crazy ideas, and it created an unpredictable environment where anything could happen in it’s world of fluffy nonsense. Despite having all of this going for it, it got boring real fast due to a lack of direction and a tone that was always shifting in confusing ways. Are we here to see the girls getting into weird dream-like situations, or are we here to see a backstory, plot and earnest attempts at feels? Unlike Magical Play, Inferno Cop is whole-heartedly committed, making for a sense of consistency in the execution. It knows you’re just there to see what crazy thing it’s going to do next, so it never tries to be serious, it never tries to make you feel(it kind of makes fun of you for it, honestly), and it never loses focus of what it’s doing, tying it’s most entertaining element directly into it’s vague and highly forgiving plot threads. And for the second thing it does right... I’ll be honest, this one feel like the more important one of the two, even though Magical Play actually did kind of nail it. There are several shows based on random lunacy that I just wasn’t able to stay interested in... I’m talking titles like Excel Saga, Hayate the Combat Butler, and Hare + Guu. Yeah, they were great at first, full of wild and exciting comedy that felt brazenly and defiantly weird, but as time went on, they just sort of lost their momentum. Once you’ve seen a little girl eating everything in sight, transporting them to an alternate Kirby-style stomach dimension, there’s really nowhere to go from there. Comedy styles can be overused, at which point they become predictable, after which they became dull. The worst part of Excel Saga was the part where you realized all it was doing was lazily parodying a bunch of genres with by-the-book observations and padding them out with weirdness. And Hayate jumped the shark so often that it just made people miss the manga. But this leads me to the biggest thing Inferno Cop does right... It’s short. The biggest weakness of random nonsense comedy is that it has a shockingly poor shelf-life. The longer it goes on, the more exposed it gets, and the clearer people are able to see the method behind the madness. It’s not impossible to keep this kind of comedy effective for lengthy stretches, but you have to be working extra hard to keep the comedy fresh by reinventing it and taking it in new directions, like Baka and Test was so good at doing. This is why I’m not really on board with the new FLCL reboot... 6 episode FLCL was perfect FLCL. Inferno cop is only an hour long, and that’s WITH the fact files segments, which I actually feel are a necessary part of the experience. It’s because Inferno cop is so short that it never lags, and it’s able to jump from plot point to plot point like an anime speed-run without ever feeling overwhelming, and all the things it does that WOULD be ran into the ground by a longer run-time, like all the cliches, deus ex machinas and on-point Evangelion references, are able to leave a fond impression on us by only happening once or twice each. And on top of that, it actually manages to have a pretty satisfying conclusion. Inferno Cop is available on Crunchyroll. It hasn’t been released on any form of physical media that I know of, not even a freaking Malaysian bootleg, but it damn well should. There's also a series of in-between segments that I mentioned earlier, called Fact Files, which gives deliberately pointless information about what you just saw, and it's totally worth your time. A second season has recently been announced, but hasn't aired yet. As much fun as it is to watch Inferno Cop, and as highly as I do recommend checking it out, it’s obviously going to run into a glass ceiling with me. It’s a good show that’s a blast to see, especially with other people, but there’s still so many more enriching anime titles out there, titles that a lot more time, effort and thought put into them, that i’ll always recommend first. I think the best way to describe the experience of watching this show would be that it’s like seeing two really close friends with similar tastes and interests just try to create a narrative on the fly, making constant attempts to one-up each other and make each other laugh, and even if you don’t get the story they’re coming up with, you feel like pointing out all of it’s problems would just be mean. “Like, why does a world-wide cruise have to be dirt cheap for Inferno Cop to ride it when he just won a million yen?” And the answer is “Shut up, we’re playing with giant robot dinosaurs now!” It’s no masterpiece, not even close, really, but it’s an experience I highly recommend having at least once. I give Inferno Cop a 7/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 1, 2018 Mixed Feelings
The year is 2019. It’s been 31 years since a mysterious explosion happened in Japan, which somehow triggered World War 3. In the current society, a version of the city has been restored, and dubbed Neo-Tokyo, not to be confused with Tokyo-3. But as it turns out, what was supposed to be a new haven for humanity has already become dilapidated and worn down, with the new government at odds with the people, sparking violently destructive protests that are in no way helped by the scourge of anarchistic youths waging war with each other one the backs of their motorcycles. See,
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this is why we can’t have nice things. Two of these gangs are called the Capsules, a handful of middleschoolers with the image of a pill emblazoned on their jackets, and the clowns, a gang of... Other thugs... Who wear weird masks and stuff. Existing somewhere between The Sharks vs. The Jets and The Bloods vs. The Crips, their rivalry is a notoriously violent one, and their fights have terrorized an already restless population.
In any case, it’s during one of these particular skirmishes that the Capsule Corps, led by the main character-ish young man named Kaneda, stumble upon a strange little Benjamin Button boy who inflicts another member, Tetsuo, with some sort of abnormality. The local government snatches up Tetsuo and the little geezer, and they disappear them to a secret facility to perform experiments on them. In order to rescue Tetsuo, Kaneda must work his way into a rebel faction in order to infiltrate the facility... But strange things are happening to Tetsuo, within whom a dangerous entity has begun to awaken, granting him power beyond his control... Power that attracts the interest of Button and his friends, who antagonize him in order to bring about his full potential. When Kaneda finally does manage to reach Tetsuo, what kind of reunion will await the two of them? Can Tetsuo be saved from the destiny that’s begun to develop around him, or is it too late for anybody to be saved? Akira was animated by TMS, also known as Tokyo Movie Shinsa, one of the oldest known Japanese animation studios. They’ve produced not only anime over the five decades that they’ve been in operation, but plenty of western animation from their subsidiary company Telecom. I’ve seen a bunch of Telecom’s titles, with a particular highlight being the fucking Ducktales(Ooo-Wooo-Ooo), but out of their local work, i’m honestly not that familiar with them. They’ve produced some iconic titles that have been around for impossibly long periods of time, like Lupin(the only installment of which that I’ve seen was The woman Named Fujiko Mine) and Detective Conan, which I only saw the first season. Beyond that, any title they’ve released is either something I saw very little of, or something I haven’t seen in over a decade, so it’s kind of hard to get an accurate grasp on them in regard to their oeuvre of work. Whatever they’re like, they clearly had a ton of money to burn when they were producing Akira, and boy does it show. The animation in this movie is insanely fluid, especially for a title that was released in the late eighties. The quality is consistent throughout, but it only takes a few minutes to see that this isn’t your average production. Just as we’re dumped into the interior of a seedy, suspicious bar, we’re shown that not even such an arguably unnecessary visual as channels being changed on a TV is still given the kind of lavish treatment that would suggest that they really spared no expense with this one. To be sure, the movie then quickly moves on to one of it’s biggest highlights, the motorcycle race war... Yes, a literal race war... Between the Capsules and the Clowns, which may be one of the single most well-animated sequences in anime history. It’s several solid minutes of gritty dudes racing through town on their various models of bikes as they try to kill one another,r to varying and somewhat vague levels of success. This sequence is so fast and fluid that even the residual trails of their taillights in the night sky is beautifully present. It’s weird looking back and thinking that an anime from 1988 could look as good as this one does, but it was just as weird for the world back then, as Akira was immensely groundbreaking with it’s visuals. The kind of facial animations and fluid movements it featured were unimaginable at the time, even though they’re more or less commonplace today. Most anime of the time was stiff, with limited articulation and frozen faces with moving mouths, which made this particular piece all the more breathtaking. Now, having said that, it’s kind of understandable, but I just can’t help but feel they might have gone a bit too far overboard with this achievement, as the characters’ facial expressions are so over-exaggerated that it’s kind of hard to take what they’re saying seriously at time, but that’s just a nit-pick on my part. Akira’s visual prowess doesn’t just limit itself to the fluidity of it’s animation, either. It’s also pretty well directed, with the man in the director’s chair being Katsuhiro Otomo, whom, if you didn’t know, was also the creator of the manga, so in terms of the presentation, nothing was lost in translation. His sense of direction isn’t perfect, as some of his action scenes can stray into a feeling of sensory overload, but there are moments in the government facility and especially in Tetsuo’s room that feel downright chilling with the way they’re framed. The backgrounds of Neo-tokyo are so extensively detailed that it’s almost sad how much of it you’ll miss if you’re not constantly pausing to check out the environment, with it’s variety of different buildings and gorgeous lighting effects. It almost feels like a real city, and one that you could actually imagine living in, thanks to the level of immersion it manages to hit. I’d keep going on this topic alone, but I’m struggling to find the right words to do it justice, and you kind of have to see it for yourself in order to appreciate it. Although, to be perfectly honest, my favorite thing about Akira is the music, which is uniformly unconventional in it’s orchestrations, and carries a level of depth to it that kind of evades the story itself, as composer Shoji Yamashiro, which is actually the pseudonym of Tsutomu Ohashi, and while further work of his is hard to find, Akira is his most renowned project, and with good reason. The music for Akira is stunningly powerful, full of hard percussions and haunting vocal effects, some of which tell us more about a character and their arc than the story itself does. For example, the most popular track in the movie is probably Tetsuo’s theme, which uses bells and flutes to signify the titular character’s younger-brother relationship to Kaneda, showing frustration in the beginning while slowly becoming more unhinged and unsettling as it builds up to one of the most famous vocal spike notes in anime, the infamous DAAAAAA DAAAAAAA DAAADAAA that heralds the arrival of his powers later in the film. The rest of the ost is just as creative, however. Kaneda’s theme isn’t as long or involved as Tetsuo’s theme, but the instrumentation is still like nothing I’ve heard before from an anime, as it’s decked out with lightning sound effects and shifting percussive beats that sound like they were taken from a traditional Japanese festival, complete with chants of Rasse-Ra, a chant used to welcome the summer. Other noteworthy tracks include Battle Against Clown, the battle theme for the opening gang war that somehow managed to take the sound of a guy breathing too hard and make it sound epic; Winds Over Neo-Tokyo, a tune that starts out slow and dreamy only to sound more ominous and carnival-y as it goes on; And Dolls’ Polyphony, a damn creepy track that’s used appropriately in the film, as it’s use of a female voice uttering the nonsense word “Perom” over and over again sounds like it was taken right out of a slasher movie, and that’s before the deeper male chanting starts to drown it out. Al;l in all, I highly recommend picking up this soundtrack, whether you’re a fan of the actual movie or not. To my knowledge, there are two english dubs for this movie... An old one, which was really awkward sounding and badly acted, and a newer one that sounds a lot more natural and human. The drawback is that while the old one at least managed to fit the insane mouth movements from the characters, the newer one doesn’t even try, which in turn makes the over-animation look even more obvious and silly. I don’t really think either dub is that great, but i kind of prefer the older Streamline dub, just because it sounds more interesting, even as terrible as it was. Don’t get me wrong, the Animaze dub had a cast of much more talented and well-respected actors, and they did act out the roles a lot better than their Streamline counterparts did, but like I said, the natural sound and grounded delivery doesn’t really feel like the right fit for the movie’s style of facial animation, whereas the Streamllne one just feels like a better fit for this world. Not to mention, as talented as the newer acting pool is, it’s not made up of the most compelling actors in the industry. The perfect example of this is Kaneda, the apparent star, who’s played by Johnny Yong Bosch, a highly talented actor who can give stellar, engaging performances when given the right material, but he has way too wide of a comfort zone, and once he’s in it, he falls right into typecasting hell. It’s a shame that he can be so boring at times, but here, he just sounds like a less interesting version of Ichigo. On a similar note, there’s Wendee Lee in the role of Kei, whose performance output is almost fifty/fifty in terms of quality, with just as many awesome roles as terrible ones, and since Kei isn’t that meaty of a character, she falls somewhere in the middle here. Michelle ruff, a personal favorite of mine, is wasted in the role of Kaori. The exception to this trend is Tetsuo, who’s played powerfully by Joshua Seth, a Digimon veteran who plays up his character’s youth and frustration, wearing his torment and rise to power on his sleeve. Either way, I’d still recommend sticking to the sub. All right, I’m going to try to keep this brief, because I don’t really have all that much to say about Akira. To give this review a little background, I’ve never read the manga this movie was based on. Honestly, I don’t read that much manga in general. My reading is reserved for books, mostly by Stephen King, while I’m passing time on my lunch break at work. Yeah, I’ve gotten into a few series, but I can probably count on one hand the amount of titles I’ve read to completion, or at least to the point of being caught up. I’m sorry, but I’d rather absorb a story visually, where it takes less time and money to do so. Having said that, it means that I was essentially going into Akira blind, and taking it completely at face value, with no source material or outside information to explain it’s story, universe or world view to me. I’m reviewing this movie in a vacuum, as any title SHOULD be reviewed, and I’m not going to do any research to augment or explain the material. A good adaptation should do that for you. So how does Akira hold up under these conditions? Well, frankly, this movie doesn’t make any fucking sense. From beginning to end, it doesn’t do any more than the bare minimum in explaining anything. To start right at the beginning, we’re told that Japan accidentally bombs itself(I won’t tell you how, as it’s a spoiler), and that this event was the spark that caused World War 3, and that the story takes place several decades after. Okay, so, how did World War 3 start? And yeah, I hear you guys saying “With that explosion,” but that’s not what I mean. How did Japan accidentally bombing itself lead to the third World War? That’s not a small detail. You know what a world War is, right? It’s a war where a group of allied nations fight against the rest of the world. Did Japan blame the explosion on another country? Who were it’s allies? Who were it’s enemies? did it win? did it lose? How long did the war last? how did it end? Did it even end? what was the death toll? You can’t just throw World War 3 into your narrative because it sounds cool, damn it, you have to explain that shit! Okay, here’s another one: What are people protesting about? What is the government doing that’s got the people so pissed off? What’s the conflict there? Or here, I’ll give you an easier one: Who’s the guy we see leading the Benjamin Button kid through the crowd? Did he help him escape the facility? How? Or instead, I’ll tell you what... How did Tetsuo get his powers? We see him crashing his bike right in front of Button’s face, only to have it blow up between them, hurting neither of them... i mean, sure, Button was probably able to protect himself with a force field, but the explosion happened right in front of Tetsuo, who wasn’t even scratched. Was it contact with Button that triggered his change? Is that a normal side effect of interacting with Button? Can he just do that, or was Tetsuo a special case who just happened to have dormant apocalypse inside him? Was it the experiments at the facility that changed him? Is there some piece of equipment they have that gives people apocalypse tumors? Would all of this crap have been avoided if Tetsuo were released with his friends? Or died when his bike blew up? I could throw it a bone if it had a cast of memorable characters, but guess what? I have no idea who any of these fuckers are! I want to start by bringing up Kaori, because while she may not be one of the main characters, her role in the film is memorable for all the wrong reasons. She’s Tetsuo’s... Sister? girlfriend? Stalker? I have no idea. She’s barely in the movie, gets maybe five minutes of screen time, and her only big scenes are where she gets her face punched in and her top ripped off by a Clown member, and when she’s gruesomely axed off towards the end of the movie. Her only contributions to the film are suffering, dying, and adding two seconds of nudity to the film’s content rating, and it’s all so undeserved that it’s honestly kind of uncomfortable to watch. She had no reason to be in this movie. She’s not the only female character, but Kei is so underwritten that I’ve heard hardcore fans of the movie just refer to her in passing as ‘the female.’ She’s a terrorist, but why? What’s her connection to the government? What are her motivations? And it’s a sad state of affairs that I have to say this, but speaking of Kei, who the fuck is Kaneda? Why am I supposed to be rooting for this person? What’s supposed to be so interesting about him? I think he’s the leader of the Capsules, right? And he’s just... Main character material, or something? What does he want with Kei? Does he just happen to spot “ooh, female,” and decide right on the spot that he’s going to get her out of trouble and pork her? Like, half the movie he’s just trying to get laid, and when he’s not trying to guilt her into it, he’s going up against armed adults in her honor. This is coming from an asexual person, mind you, but is a random girl who doesn’t seem interested in you really worth taking a bullet for? I get the whole devotion thing, but when your life is on the line, dude, there are other fish in the sea. You shouldn’t ally yourself with literal violent terrorists over someone until you’ve at least established a relationship with them. I mean, okay, I tried to assume that he was just sniffing her ass because he thought getting involved with terrorists could help him to get closer to Tetsuo, but he would have been enacting this plan way too early for there to be a believable amount of desperation, and besides, he hounds her about turning herself in, going straight and dating him afterwards. That sounds a little counterproductive, don’t you think? And moving onto his relationship to Tetsuo, I didn’t know what kind of connection they shared until that random exposition dump at the end. Apparently they were orphans together. Up until then, I had no idea if they were friends, brothers... Even lovers could have been possible... or if Kaneda was just super dedicated to his gang members. The most fleshed out character is Tetsuo, but the only thing we get from him is his frustration over his connection to Kaneda. The changes that happen to him over the course of the film are it’s only, yes, only, source of character development. I’m sorry, but you need more than faces and names to have characters. The only real concession that I can make for Akira is that it has a really well pronounced cool factor. Seeing gang wars waged on the backs of motorcycles against a vaguely post apocalyptic setting is really cool to see, and the movie would probably be better if that were all there were to it, but it gets so involved with it’s muddled, convoluted plot that it’s impossible to know what’s going on without reading the source material or making a ton of assumptions. It’s like this huge, thousand piece puzzle where none of the pieces fit. I didn’t even bring up the other two Benjamin Button kids, as their plans involving Tetsuo are so confusing and inconsistent that I’m hesitant to even call them spoilers. But like I said,. regardless of what it was they’re actually trying to accomplish, their efforts still play into the movie’s cool factor, as they manage to bring us some truly trippy and surreal visuals when they’re using their powers to attack him in his room. It’s not much, but I guess if you’re just watching Akira for spectacle, I can understand the appeal. Akira is available stateside in a number of different home video releases, most recently from Funimation is a very cheap DVD/bluray combo pack. Other releases are available, such as the limited edition steel case that I’m currently borrowing from a friend. The original manga has also been available in numerous printings, with the most recent being from Kodansha comics back in 2009. Each volume is still relatively cheap, or you could splurge and spend a little more money on the box set. At the very least, I’d recommend grabbing a copy of the soundtrack Cd, which is available from Milan records, and is fairly inexpensive online. I’m sorry, guys. i know this is one of the most popular anime movies in the medium, but I just can’t get into it. It’s not a terrible movie by any means... The pacing is really good, and it never gets boring. I’m the kind of guy who literally can’t stay awake through a single showing of Empire of corpses, but I’ve never fallen asleep during Akira, which at least speaks to it having some kind of entertainment value. I understand that adapting a phonebook thick manga collection into a two hour movie isn’t an easy feat, but at the same time, I don’t want to have to look up footnotes and plot synopsis just to figure out what the bloody hell I’m watching. The version of the movie I watched had a sort of pop up feature that was designed to give you extra information at random points, but after like twenty minutes, all it had been showing me was a map and some Japanese text translations, and I was relying on THAT to try and be fair. I like movies that challenge me to figure them out, but not like this. For the animation and music alone, it deserves it’s place in anime history, but I guess I’m just not a fan. I give Akira a 5/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Apr 27, 2018
Omoide Poroporo
(Anime)
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There are two people with us at any given moment... There’s the person we currently are, who’s in charge of every decision we have to make as it comes to us, and there’s the person we remember being. This can be the person we were back in school, where we wistfully wish we’d applied ourselves harder; This can be the person we were last week, when we wish things had played out differently on that date or that big important meeting; This can be the person we were when we were much smaller, as we reflect on how that child could have ever
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become the adult we are now. For Taeko Okajima, that person is her fifth grade self, and it has been for a while. There was just something about that age, when she stood awkwardly on the cusp of womanhood, that she can’t help but relate to as she navigates the equally confusing path into her late twenties.
As a child growing up in Tokyo, Taeko had dreamed of visiting the countryside like most of her friends, but she didn’t have any family there, and her family didn’t really have the time or resources to uproot and vacation somewhere that they had no connection to. Now, fully grown, and with one of her older sisters married to a man from an extended farming family, Taeko has taken to using her vacations from work to visit her in-laws and work in their fields, which fills her with a satisfaction that she could never get before. This time, she’s going to be picking safflowers, a beautiful, thistle-like yellow crop that is used to make red dye and rouge. It’s not her first working trip, but with the charming Toshio picking her up, and with some of her strongest nostalgic recollections finally getting unexpected resolutions, will there be more to this vacation than she bargained for? So, there’s this small animation studio that I haven’t gotten to in any of my reviews yet. It’s kind of obscure... You may have heard of it... Studio Ghibli? Yeah, I know, but trust me, it’s a pretty big deal in some small circles. All joking aside, I’m kind of ashamed that it took me this long to talk about one of their titles, but if I’m going to start doing so, then I figured I should start with my favorite movie of theirs... And surprisingly, it was NOT directed by their biggest name, Hayao Miyazaki. He produced it, but the screenwriting and directing was handled by Isao Takahata, the same man who directed one of their most renowned works, Grave of the Fireflies. He also did two of their less-beloved titles, Pom Poko and My Neighbors the Yamadas, but I haven’t seen either of those apparent bombs, so I’ll hold off on judgement. He actually passed away a few months ago, which really should have been bigger news, since his final film, The Tale of Princess Kaguya, was actually quite successful. An astute viewer may notice right off the bat that this film was animated and drawn in two completely different styles. It takes place in two different time periods, one being Taeko’s childhood in the sixties, and the other being her adulthood in the eighties. The material taking place in the eighties has a more modern, realistic feel to it, with the image being crisp all around, both people and backgrounds being exquisitely and intricately detailed, down to the smallest safflower, and to the lines on an adult’s face(which, unfortunately, makes Taeko look 47 instead of 27 in some shots). The childhood material, in contrast, is a lot more cartoony, with character designs looking slightly more anime-ish(that’s vague, I know, but you’ll see what I mean when you watch it), with the more simplified features, and slightly more blurry backgrounds, and an over-all presentation that has a kind of haze to it. When characters from this period show up in the later period(which happens), they seem eerily out of place, which was of course intentional. Thankfully, this difference in style doesn’t come with any drop-off in budget, as Only Yesterday is insanely well animated, especially when you consider that it’s such a normal, down to earth story with no real action scenes to speak of. There’s like one flying scene(because this is Ghibli, and those are pretty much contractually guaranteed), but the rest of the movie is just people interacting and doing various activities, like driving around, working, and talking. It really doesn’t need to be animated as fluidly or as gracefully as it is, but all of the extra motion in peoples’ movements and facial expressions makes the film feel a lot more immersive, as if you were actually there with them, and even when they’re doing the most mundane things imaginable, like visiting the baths or eating various fruits at the table, you want to be there with them. There were parts where I honestly suspected the use of rotoscoping, but that’s obviously not true... The Ghibli studio is known for their lavish budgets(most of the time), and Only Yesterday obviously benefited from this. Being that this is a film and not a series, there isn’t much I can say about the soundtrack, but that’s a matter of quantity, and not of quality. For only being two hours long, the music in this movie is still beautiful, another one of Ghibli’s more consistent marks of excellence. There were multiple composers on this project, and in addition to the obvious few Japanese composers and their wonderful piano work, there were a few from eastern europe, as well, with the Hungarian Gheorghe Zamfir bringing in a few joyous, uplifting flute melodies, and there were also a handful of festive tracks from Hungarian artist Marta Sebestyen, who also lends her haunting vocals at times. I’m not sure whether or not I should be surprised by this, because I’ve heard western songs being adopted as motifs in anime before, You Raise Me Up for Romeo X Juliet and Country Road from Whisper of the Heart being the most obvious examples, but Only Yesterday uses a cover Bette Midler’s The Rose, which honestly doesn’t fit the movie as well as it sounds, but the way it’s used does work emotionally, so i’ll let that slide. Before I start talking about the dub, there’s something I’d like to point out about the original sub, and that’s that much like the animation and aesthetic, the two time periods were also recorded differently. The childhood material was recorded in traditional ADR fashion, with the character’s lip flaps animated first so that the actors could dub their lines over it, but the adult material? That was done in Pre-lay, which is much more rare in Japanese productions. This is how western animation is recorded. They had the actors do their lines first, and then they animated over the performances, and if you’re wondering how this is such a huge difference, it’s because instead of people having to match animation, animation had to match people, and the result is far more realistic, as the actors could talk naturally, and the animation was able to capture their mannerisms and vocal quirks. This was another huge element in the disjointed feeling between a childhood memory and what’s happening in the here and now. Quite a few people were scared that any dub of the movie would lose sight of this, and both sides of the story would be homogenized and just sound the same, but I’m happy to report that this is not the case. The people who dubbed this title knew damn well what they were doing, and while I can’t really put my finger on why, the performances on the pre-lay side of things sound far more grounded and down to earth than the ADR characters, who sound more like what you’d expect from an older anime dub... If I had to guess, it might be because while her childhood memories are populated mainly by actors who mostly each have a significant background in voice acting, the actors playing the two main roles in her adult life don’t have this benefit, having not done any voice work outside of video games prior to voicing for this film, and thus were a much better fit for what was supposed to be the more natural sounding side of the dub. Who are these actors, you may ask? In typical Ghibli fashion, the lead roles aren’t played by career voice actors, but by predominantly hollywood actors, and I’d dare to say that it work better here than it does in most of their films. Taeko is played by Daisy Ridley, whom the worst of you know as the Mary-Sue who ruined Star Wars with a pro-feminist SJW agenda. Screw all y’all, I loved her in the new Star Wars movies, and I love her in this dub, where she puts aside her British accent and manages to sound convincingly older than she really was at the time, being only 24 when voicing the 27 year old Taeko, and her voice actually sounds a lot deeper and wearier than she actually sounds in interviews. It’s honestly kinda hard to tell that it’s her without knowing ahead of time. I would call her the best performance in the dub, but surprisingly, I’d have to instead give that honor to Alison Fernandez, an american child actor who played her younger self in the flashbacks. She’s been acting since she was seven, and she’s built up a pretty solid resume since then... If you need a great example of this, she was in Logan. Dev Patel, who rose to fame in Slumdog millionaire and tried his damnedest to not suck in The Last Airbender, was NOT able to ditch his british accent for his role as the loveable Toshio, but that’s one of the things that become more tolerable when you find out that he just recently moved to the countryside to farm. His accent kinda sticks out, but his performance is good enough that you can suspend disbelief and take him seriously. Ashley Eckstein, whom you may know as Ahsoka from the recent Star Wars cartoons, plays one of Taeko’s older sister, arguably the one who’s featured most prominently, and she was a good choice for it, as she and Alison have the right kind of tough love dynamic. Tara Strong has a small but substantial role as Naoko, a teenage member of Toshio’s family, and while there isn’t much for her to work with, she still makes it work. The only real issue I have with the dub is that the adult portion happens in the eighties, but there’s still some modern slang in there... At it’s worst, Taeko saying “Sho nuff” is a bit cringey, but it’s still a dub that shattered expectations. So if you knew anything about this movie prior to 2016, you probably knew it as one of the mysterious two Ghibli movies that had somehow not been brought to america yet. These movies remained something of a mystery for any anime fan who wasn’t desperate enough to scrounge for a halfway decent fandub, if for no other reason than to figure out why they’d been left behind. now, for Ocean Waves, this was easy... It simply wasn’t very good, and unlike the worst of Ghibli’s output, it wasn’t interestingly bad either. It was just an unremarkable film that didn’t make a compelling case for existing. Only Yesterday, on the other hand, was much more successful, and had some actual acclaim behind it, so why was it forgotten? Well, from what I’ve heard, Disney got a bit shy over an extended flashback that dealt with puberty and children getting their periods. That may seem ridiculous to you now, but this was over twenty-five years ago. Going back just ten years ago, to the 2000s, and kids media couldn’t come within spitting distance of the topic of death, so it makes sense they’d have found this questionable back in the early nineties. It did eventually get a theatrical release two years ago, alongside it’s cousin Ocean Waves, and if there’s any specific reason for it, I’d venture that there were two reasons; The first is the existence of the internet and the film’s rising cult popularity, and the second is that Only Yesterday was never really a children's’ movie, and only in the last few years has the appeal of the animated medium to adults become more obvious to studios. This is a very adult movie, and I’m not referring to content... It’s technically safe, provided that a child has the proverbial parental guidance to explain the period-stuff, but I’m honestly not sure it would successfully hold a younger audiences’ interest, especially at it’s already taxing two hour run time. This is a decisively mature film, and it’s meant to be viewed by mature people, almost any of whom will find something relatably nostalgic in the deeply intimate narrative. Of course, that’s not saying you have to be a child to find some parts of this movie boring. I certainly did, at least the first time around. It is, at it’s core, a slice of life movie, and a lot of what happens in it doesn’t initially seem to be important. There are several long, extensive conversations that seem to go nowhere, particularly in the adult portions of the story, and there are some scenes where they spend full minutes not even doing that. This isn’t the kind of storytelling westerners are used to... It doesn’t really follow any standard rules of story structure, very little ever comes back in any obvious way, and with it’s considerable run time, it can feel overstuffed at even the best of moments. It’s obvious that Takahata was going for a more realistic feeling story, as though it were a sequence of events that was more true to life than the average story, but that kind of thing rarely works in cinema, with the bulk of M Knight Shyamalan’s filmography being the perfect example of how this can go wrong... So how does Only Yesterday do it right? I’ve seen this movie twice, and to be frank, I loved it SO much more the second time around. The first time, I WAS getting bored, I WAS wondering what all of the fluff was leading up to... And then, like a lot of other viewers(and in fact, like a lot of other REviewers), I was finally able to put it all together in the final minutes of the movie, right after the credits began to roll and The Rose started playing. In the final scene, everything clicked. I won’t spoil what happens, but to put it in vague terms, Taeko is given a choice to make, and it’s potentially one of the most important choices of her life, and the follow-through made for an immensely satisfying conclusion. This is a movie about growing up, which is common for Ghibli films, but where most of them are about children becoming adults, this one is about adults becoming adults, and that’s by no means a rare topic, but it’s still refreshing to see it done in this way. It’s a reminder that as adults, we have a kind of agency that we didn’t have as children, and there’s no reason we can’t pursue what were once impossible fantasies. We choose where we belong, we choose where we end up. Of course, there is one glaring flaw in the film... As amazing a director as Isao Takahata was, he always had a habit of sneaking social commentary into his work, and while this may have worked out well in Grave of the Fireflies, which contained a message that the Japanese youth of the time desperately needed to hear, this one feels like extremely slanted propaganda in favor of people getting into traditional farming. Toshio will NOT shut the hell up about his feelings on the subject, how it’s a field of work that needs to be kept alive, and how important it is to be connected to nature, and while it’s easy to write off his zeal as the passion of one whose eyes were opened to it late in life(everyone who was raised on it is much more easy-going about it), it oversteps it’s bounds by constantly insinuating that country folk are all around better quality people than city folk, painting them as superior in worth and attitude, when this really isn’t fair. Both walks of life contain good people and shitty people, which can leave the film feeling heavy-handed at points. Thankfully, it’s not a big enough issue to sully the experience. Only Yesterday is available from Gkids, on both DVD and Bluray format. The original 1982 manga of the same title by Hotaru Okamoto and Yuko Tone is not available stateside. Only Yesterday is a wonderful film, and I’m so glad that it was able to reach our side of the world while Isao Takahata was still alive. It may not be his best film, as Grave of the Fireflies was obviously superior, and it may not be as an powerful experience as it was for me, but it’s still my personal favorite, not just of his movies, but of Studio Ghibli’s movies. It falters a bit from making an unconvincing first impression, and from it’s ham-fisted agenda, but it all comes together in the end, making for a much more engaging experience the second time around. Your mileage may vary, but I found myself crying at the end upon both of my viewings, and in a weird way, it was one of the factors that led me to deciding that I wanted to come back to writing reviews again. It’s stunningly directed and animated, making it easily Studio Ghibli’s most underrated films, although maybe not one of their over-all best, but that’s not saying much when you consider the amount of perfect and almost perfect films that make up their filmography. I give Only Yesterday an 8/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Apr 23, 2018
Inu to Hasami wa Tsukaiyou
(Anime)
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Not Recommended
Harumi Kazuhito isn’t your ordinary bookworm. His entire life revolves around books. I know that may sound like hyperbole, but oh no, I mean that with complete sincerity. I also mean it literally, but we’ll get to that. For now, Harumi is a high school boy who has dedicated his life to the pastime of reading. He basically chain-reads, buying up books by the handfuls, burning through them at supernatural speeds, and hoarding every volume he finishes. He even refused to live with his family, opting instead to live in an apartment by himself so he could go to
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school in an area where the books he wants are able to come out slightly quicker. One day, while he’s reading in a cafe, a crazed robber bursts in and begins to wave a shotgun around. He threatens a young woman who’s distractedly writing away in another seat, and Harumi gets up to defend her... Not because he’s generally a nice person, but because he can’t stand to see a fellow book-lover get hurt. Yes, that’s how his mind works... Or, how it DID work, until the robber blew it out of his skull.
Now freshly dead, Harumi decides he can’t cross over to the land of the dead yet... He has so many books he still wants to read, including the final book from his favorite author, Akiyama Shinobu. He manages to pull himself back to the land of the living with the strength of this passion... So, like I said, his life literally revolves around books... But through some mix-up, he’s reincarnated into the body of a dog. A miniature dachshund, to be exact, who’s kept in a small cage in a pet store even though he’s not for sale(this is never explained). He’s soon adopted by the girl he rescued, as the connection they share has given her the ability to hear his thoughts(at least I think that’s the reason?), and she takes him home... To murder him. Until he finds out she’s really Akiyama Shinobu, she finds out he’s a fan of her work, and she inexplicably becomes sexually attracted to him. And as it turns out, these are not going to be the only extreme oddities in his life going forward, as the world around him just gets weirder and weirder. Good god, let’s just get this turkey over with already. Studio Gonzo may have some acclaimed titles under their belt, what with the Fullmetal Panic franchise and arguably Linkin Park’s best music video having been produced by them, but when you tally their output together, the bad far outweighs the good. They’ve put out some visual wonders like Gankutsuou, but they’ve also let out some real clunkers like Gantz, and while Dog and Scissors, may not be THAT far down the ladder, it’s pretty close to the bottom. The animation is stiff and cheap in a way that’s honestly hard not to notice. They’re clearly able to save a lot of money with the fact that the central character, living in the body of a dog, is able to speak telepathically, without the burden of having to animate lip flaps, so all they have to do is repeat animation cycles when he’s on screen... Be it slight movements in his fur, or wagging the tuft of hair on his head... But this advantage becomes stale very fast, as it’s just a variation on the talking heads that make up the rest of the cast. And speaking of the cast, I’ll be honest, the character designs look pretty good. If you’re just looking at still images, the series actually looks really crisp and pleasing to the eye. A few of the designs look a bit cliched, and they all look a bit standard, but they’re all pleasant to look at. Harumi makes for an adorable little doggy(which makes up for how intentionally bland he looks as a human), and maybe this is a matter of personal taste, but I love the design of his chop-happy new owner Natsuno. She’s like a grown-up version of Ai Enma who walks around dressed up like an extra from the Matrix movies, and I dig it, she looks really cool. I also really like the afro guy who runs the pet store. not only does his apron feature a clever Jojo’s bizarre Adventure easter egg, he just looks like he’d be a really chill dude to hang out with. The backgrounds are also immaculately detailed, with shelves full of diverse looking books giving our characters’ collections their own sense of personality, and each character’s living space is detailed enough to add a new dimension to their personalities, especially in the case of Natsuno. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the animation. Despite what the premise may have suggested, there’s action in this series, but considering how well it moves, you may as well just read the damn light novels. The only thing that looks like it had any real money put into it was the opening, which is fast moving, full of visual effects, and actually manages to translate the characters’ awkward movements into some really fun dance cycles. You’ve probably seen an anime where characters imitate dogs or cats by moving their half-clenched fists in a certain way to resemble paws, haven’t you? This opening features nearly the entire cast doing step-dances that heavily incorporate that kind of movement, and it’s so adorable you just can’t help but smile when seeing it. They also have doggy ears and tails, and as a possible result of the video’s fast pace, it’s disquietingly easy to not notice this the first time watching it. This video has no right to be as fun as it is, but at least it was SOMETHING to look forward to. Of course, it probably helps that the song was also really catchy. It’s by Inu Musume Club, and it’s called “Wan Wan Wan Wan N_1,” and that may sound like gibberish at first glance, but there’s a really popular Japanese pun behind it. Wan is the Japanese onomatopoeia for the sound a dog makes, which any American would call Woof or Bark. Wan also sounds like One, hence why the title begins with barking and ends with an obvious abbreviation for Number One. This actually isn’t even the only opening theme to employ this pun, hell, it’s not even the best one, as Working!!! actually did it much better, but leaving that aside, it’s a funny little footnote. The ending theme is almost as delightful as it’s op counterpart, with Natsuno flying a scissors-inspired private jet, her rival’s black-suited bodyguards expressionlessly dancing in tandem, and generally just a bunch of creative and funny imagery gets paired to a slightly more low-key but still catchy song with the bizarre name Lemonade scandal. I wish I could tell you more about the music, but unfortunately, I barely noticed it at all during the show. I guess that means it was doing it’s job? I can’t remember ever hating the music... At least not as much as generally everything else... And I can vaguely recall tapping my foot to a few fun-sounding tunes. This is normally where I’d be looking up each individual track online, but I can only find one, by the name of Mieta Kibo, and god help me, it sounds absolutely divine. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprise, as it’s credited to one Akito Matsuda, who Wikipedia says WAS in charge of the music of the series, but since there’s only one track available online, I’d have to rewatch the show to hear it’s ost... And I’d rather stick a thumb-tack through my eyelid. Thankfully, he’s done the soundtracks to a lot of other recent anime, and now that I’m hearing some of it, I suddenly REALLY want to watch Sound Euphorium. His composition, as I’ve heard, was the one and only interesting thing about Glasslip, so Dog and Scissors’ music was probably just as solid. The English dub is... Well, it’s weird, but hey, this is a weird show. It’s a mix of bizarrely enthusiastic standouts and adequate, okay performances, with thankfully no real duds to speak of. At the very worst, some of the casting choices are standard, just the actors we know coming and doing their thing, catching an easy paycheck off of a role that they were suited for. Chief among these is Blake Shepard, who I’m normally not a huge fan of, playing the lead role of Harumi, and while his delivery skews the line between hammy and wooden whenever his character is excited, he manages to nail it whenever he’s supposed to sound serious or sarcastic. And then on the other end of the spectrum you have Jessica Calvello, an actor who... Well, if you assign her to one of your characters, you’re pretty much bringing out the big guns, because putting her in any role but the lead is fucking overkill. Luckily, she’s playing one half of the titular pair here, and her penchant for hitting a wide range within one single character adds a level of insanity that makes Natsuno far more tolerable than her disturbingly subtle Japanese portrayal. There are other actors, of course, and I’d like to bring up Luci Christian as a highlight because she put an absurd amount of effort into a suicidal self-blaming character... And the adaptive script is really good at localizing the dialogue without straying too far from the original intent, although it does fuck up once towards the end and make i sound like someone's responding to Harumi's thought-comments... But I really want to skip right to the second half of this review, because I have a lot to say about the writing and meat of this anime, and none of it is pleasant. So let me just say that the dub is good, and I’d highly recommend it over the sub, because the sub just sounds too grounded, which makes a lot of it’s more problematic elements harder to stomach. The dub gives it more of a wacky and bizarre personality, allowing you to mentally remove it from the harsher implications of a lot of it’s so-called jokes. Then again maybe that’s just me being dumb American and not appreciating the Japanese language or whatever. If you’re going to watch this, I recommend doing it in English. Right, now that that’s over with, I’ve been holding this in for far too long. If I haven’t already given this away, Dog and Scissors is bad. Like, it’s really, really bad. It’s not funny bad... It’s not interesting bad... It’s the kind of bad that I only place among the worst of the worst, which, for me, is a list that not even School Days has been able to crack. I actually hesitated to write this review, and even thought about stopping a few times, because I honestly don’t think a review is necessary. This is the kind of show where you can immediately tell whether or not it’s worth watching... Yeah, it’s ironic that an anime revolving around books would be so easy to judge from a glance at the cover. In fact, here’s all you really need to know to get a feel for the series: A woman adopts a puppy because she wants to kill it, and then spares it because she wants to have sex with it. I know that’s not entirely fair, and it’s taking the scenario out of context, but it’s not inaccurate, either. That literally happens, and further details don’t do much to improve things. Everything about this series... Well, aside from the music, dub and art... Is either stupid, confusing or awful. There is not one redeeming quality outside of those few production efforts. I could do an entire Inconvenient Questions post about each individual episode, but I won’t, because watching this show twice in my life was twice too many times, and I cancelled IQ for a good reason. Thus, I’m only going to focus on my biggest problems with this series. For starters, I failed to mention until now what the biggest connection between Natsuno and Harumi is. He can’t talk, being a dog, but she can hear his thoughts. This might not bother you, but it bugs the hell out of me... His thoughts aren’t treated like thoughts, but like regular conversation. She hears him as though he’s speaking. That’s not how thinking works. You never stop thinking. And yeah, you could SAY that she can only hear thoughts he sends to her, but this also isn’t true, because the only reason they met is because his thoughts, from elsewhere in the city, were distracting her, and she tracked him down. Right there, it’s established that not only can she hear his thoughts without his consent or knowledge, but that there’s a long range, and she can’t shut it out, but there are possibly thousands of instances in the series that directly contradict this. Why does she ask him questions? Why does she ever think he’s lying about something? You can hear his thoughts! He shouldn’t be able to lie to you! Why do you each read a book at the same time, when you should just be able to hear him reading it? Did his thoughts distracting you from writing just stop? Did that problem go away the second you decided to not murder him? If you were able to track him down to the pet store he was being kept in(like a parrot), why do you EVER have to look for him in order to find him? I’m sorry, I really am, but this entire premise is so frustratingly inconsistent that I honestly found it distracting throughout the series. Even comedies... No, especially comedies... Have to take themselves seriously to enough of a degree that they pay attention to fucking detail. Oh, and speaking of comedy, have you noticed how small Natsuno’s breasts are? Good, because I just spoiled at least 60% of this show’s comedy. The other 40% is largely made up of BDSM and animal cruelty. I don’t like speaking in absolutes, but I have to say this: In anime, jokes about a character’s bust size are never, ever funny. I’m not saying that because such humor is sexist, or mean-spirited... although they are both of those things... I’m saying it because that is THE most overused joke in anime history. Characters bringing up cup sizes happens more often than tsunderes over-reacting to misunderstandings, and that’s saying something. The only time I can ever remember a boob-size joke being funny was in Yamada’s first time, when Yamada was imagining what her best friend’s life must be like with big boobs, getting all jealous, but then we get a glimpse of said friend having to apply lotion to herself because of how much the damn things chafe. See, that was a clever subversion of expectations, and it;’s an example of how hard a boob-size joke has to work to even be kind of funny. Dog and Scissors relies heavily on this idea, but it doesn’t put anywhere near that level of effort into it. Despite the fact that he’s not into real live women, Harumi is constantly berating Natsuno on her bust, and even when he isn’t, she’s constantly seen obsessing over it. It gets to the point where I was seriously wondering why Natsuno didn’t just get a damn boob job already. Yeah, I know I shouldn’t promote a shallow image of beauty, and people look fine just as they are, but plastic surgery can help people who have confidence issues relating to their appearances. Natsuno’s a grown woman, she makes her own decisions, she lives independently off of her success, and she clearly has Seto Kaiba levels of disposable income lying around, so why doesn’t she just get some work done? oh, right, because that would take away the one lazy-ass joke that this series keeps on dragging out of the dumpster to try and amuse us, to the point that even a dead horse would tell them to stop beating a dead horse. And speaking of Natsuno, try to wrap your head around this; She’s twenty years old, hasn’t written anything since she was 19, and is implied to have a bibliography that would make Stephen King jealous. She’s written a ton of novels spanning all types of genres, and at least six of her books are thick enough to contain at least a few thousand pages each. By the time she was 19. Not only is she considered one of the three top best-selling authors(the words “In Japan” is never attached to this, so it’s fair to say they mean worldwide), but the other two, who we meet in this series, are also young ladies of a similar age. Hell, her most vocal rival spends most of her time as a pop idol! Did any thought go into any of this? Even her threats to kill Harumi don’t add up to anything, as all she ever does is cut off portions of his fur, which grow back in less than five seconds... And yet he still acts terrified of her, every single time she attacks him. Hey, dumbass, she may say she’s going to cut off one of your ears, but I think you’re gonna be fine. And honestly, even it’s focus on books and reading was completely shallow. All dog and Scissors knows is that reading and writing are things. Possibly fun things. Possibly lucrative things. It knows they exist, it knows they’re important to people, but it has no deeper understanding of any of it. Not only do we never find out anything about Natsuno’s books outside of their titles and a seven deadly sins gimmick, we don’t even technically know if they’re fiction or non. Hiromi is extremely pretentious, being that he loves to read, he deifies books, he defends books from critics, he judges people(even his own damn murderer) on whether or not they’re readers, and get this; He has no defined taste. This moron would probably get his jollies off reading the ingredients on a packet of McDonalds ketchup. This series knows as much about books as Adam Sandler knows about video games. We never find out what literature means to anybody, but it wears it on it’s sleeve. And if any of you are holding out hope that the plot and mystery aspect might have something to offer, don’t. Harumi’s killer is found and dealt with so early that it can’t even be considered a spoiler. It turns out that after killing him, the killer had time to rob him before running away, and has been hiding in the second apartment that Harumi’s been keeping secret from his family AND his landlady. Chew on that for a moment. They find him, they chase him down, and it turns out he’s got Natsuno’s six thickest books hiding in his coat(even though they’d definitely be weighing him down and banging into his body while he was running), and he uses them as weapons in the worst anime fight scene since Master of Martial Hearts. She beats him, and gives Harumi the choice to either kill or spare him, all while I’m screaming “Neither! Call the fucking cops!” Oh, and we never meet his parents, we hear nothing of any funeral, he has no drive to get his life back, and we meet his sister, but... Hoboy. Had to dip into the incest shit, didn’t you? Bottom of the barrel wasn’t low enough? Dog and Scissors is available on both DVD and Bluray from Sentai Filmworks, and it’s available both in dubbed and undubbed formats. The manga and light novel are not available stateside. I’m not gonna lie, guys, this was a tough one to get through. The only reason I even bothered is because I’ve been on hiatus for a few months, and I needed something especially bad to rage on. Thus, I figured, why not an anime where one of the biggest running jokes is the main character commenting about shit not making sense, while completely missing the bigger picture each time? Like I said before, the artwork and character designs are good, the music is serviceable and the opening and closing themes are awesome, but these are really the only things it has going for it, and they’re the only qualities that pull it up from a possible 0 score, and I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s wrong with it. It falls apart if you give it even one seconds worth of thought, which is why I have to wonder if the people who enjoy and defend it checked their brains at the door, or at birth. I don’t condone threatening violence against dogs with a pair of scissors, but this is one tail that definitely should have been cut short. I give Dog & Scissors a 1/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Apr 13, 2018
Kenpuu Denki Berserk
(Anime)
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Recommended
As far back as anyone can remember, the land of Midland has never been peaceful. It’s unclear how long the Hundred Year war lasted, with kings waging war against each other for territory, and a number of uniquely named mercenary bands fighting on their behalf, but the casualties have been many, and the conflict has only recently appeared to be resolved. You would think that the end of this war would bring piece to midland, but you’d be sadly mistaken, as the rise of a cruel demon king has led to the earth being invaded by terrifying monsters, the likes of which not
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even the darkest imagination could comprehend, and whom hunger for the blood of men, women and children. It’s a dark time for the human race, one where death waits around every corner, and any given person can become the dripping dinner of a demon at any given moment. We live at their whim. We are their cattle. Among us, there is only one human the demon scourge fears. One they’ll try to kill at any cost, as they know full well he’ll do the same thing to them.
That man is named Guts, and the demons are right to fear him. Towering over other men, covered with battle scars and always ready for a fight, he is almost literally a killing machine. With one eye, a prosthetic arm chock full of demon-killing weapons, and a giant 400 pound sword resting on his shoulder, he travels midland looking for demons to slay. Sadly, he’s not motivated by the survival of the human race... He’s killed more than enough humans to be considered a demon himself. It’s revenge that he thirsts for, and his target is the herald of the apocalypse himself, the Demon King Griffith. See, this isn’t a story about the demon-infested world, but of how that world came about... And these two have a history spanning several years. Once upon a time, Guts was just a wandering soldier, bouncing aimlessly from battle to battle, sort of like a mideval Ronin Warrior. It was his chance meeting with a young Griffith, still just a brilliant, strategic genius leading a fledgling mercenary group, that would entangle his destiny with what he could not have possibly predicted would be the end of the world as we knew it. It’s been around twenty years since this series came out, and in that time, there’s been an ever-present demand for a new adaptation to be released. There have been a few reasons for this, and I’ll get to one of them later, but the other one... and perhaps the more persistent one... Has to deal with the animation quality of this initial adaptation, and just how dated it looks due to the technical and financial limitations of the time. The truth is, however, the animation in Berserk was bad even back when it came out, and it had it’s pedigree to blame for it’s disaster. It was animated by a company called Oriental Lights and Magic, yes that’s an obvious Star Wars pun, and not only was Berserk their fourth series, but their only other major claim to fame was... You’re not going to believe this unless you already know about it... The Pokemon anime. Yup. They had just gotten started animating the Pokemon anime about six months prior when they decided to try their hands at one of the most infamously mature and intensely beloved manga properties of all time, and God help me, they tried. I’ve talked in the past about how low-budget anime productions can use a lot of tricks to hide the weaknesses that such a restraint holds over their productivity, and how more experienced observers can pick out these techniques. With Berserk, however, even the greenest of viewers can spot the corners being cut. Right in the first episode, the onslaught of a struggling human settlement is portrayed by static images being either panned across or zoned in and out of while the music plays. The static images look good, like high qualities paintings depicting the horrors of war, so it’s not like any of it comes off as an eyesore, but it does sort of defeat the purpose of animation, which is a word that’s defined as movement. The speed lines are even worse, as they really do drag down the action of a series that’s mostly famous for it’s action. Dialogue scenes are often reduced to a series of talking heads, and when they don’t have any shadows to play around with, these issues are embarrassingly exposed. So of course, new adaptations came. People got what they wanted, and in a weird sort of twist, they’ve only served to make the original series look better. Yeah, an anime whose visuals were already on the low end of the scale back in the late nineties looks better now than it did when it was new. Thanks to the new adaptations, it’s aged miraculously well. Part of this is due to the new adaptations looking like complete ass... The movies in particular employ extravagant CG, and while it obviously had a lot of money poured into it, they just look ugly and clumsy as a result, with a serious case of Uncanny Valley plaguing all of it’s characters. I haven’t seen the new series, but from what I’ve heard, it’s not that different. A quick comparison between movies that spend a lot of money haphazardly, and a series without much money that had to be responsible to make ends meet, Berserk has actually managed to develop a certain kind of nostalgic charm and respectable sincerity to it’s plethora of visual issues. I won’t go as far as saying that it looks good, but it’s hard to look at the amount of effort and artistry they put into it without cutting it some serious slack. So the visuals are a mixed bag, but you know what definitely isn’t? The soundtrack. The music in Berserk is almost as famous as the show itself, and with a composer like Susumu Hirasawa behind the wheel, it’s not hard to see why. In addition to Berserk, Susumu has also done the scores for several Satoshi Kon projects... And that alone is a high praise. While his contributions to The Berserk franchise may not be as deep or cerebral as those, they are some of the most epic, powerful orchestrations you’ve ever heard from the medium. The over-all aesthetic of the soundtrack is something akin to what you’d hear in a really inspired opera about King Arthur... Fantasy, destiny, war, the rising tension of a battle that’s about to start, the inner conflict of deceptively complex characters, and none of it sounds like it was just picked for the sake of sounding good. for a few examples, a tune like Behelit is subtle but bone-chilling, while Guts’ theme song, which you’d expect to be some sort of roaring metal anthem, instead sounds like you just entered a fairy sanctuary, and it’s used in scenes where’s he’s most at peace, and we get to see who he is behind the carnage. The most famous track from this show is without a doubt Forces... Okay, well, the God Hand Remix is the one people seem to hear the most often, but the original track is still the most popular from that release. While there are other tracks that feature vocals, I’m pretty sure forces is the only one outside of the OP and ED to feature actual lyrics. The most famous part is the chorus, which awesomely belts out the phrase HAI EEE YAI FORCES a few time before lapsing into instrumentals, but the interesting this about that is that you never hear this during the series. The song plays once in one of the early episodes, but cuts off right before the chorus can hit. I’m not sure what the history behind this song’s usage must be, but it is weird that the most famous 16 seconds of Berserk’s soundtrack don’t actually make it into the show. To give the opening and ending themes a quick mention, they’re okay. I initially didn’t like Tell Me Why by Penpals, I felt it was too light and upbeat for the material, but it’s grown on me recently. The ending, Waiting So Long by Silver fins, I’ve always been cool with. It’s a cool ending. The English dub is... Good. It’s not particularly remarkable, as almost everyone across the board does their job competently, with only one or two performances standing out in one way or another. Mark Diraison does a perfectly fine Guts, and while his acting is never bad, the best thing you can say about him is that he has the right voice for the part, as he plays the character with a low, gravely tone that makes him sound appropriately tough. He used pretty much the same voice in his other major role... Oh good lord. He played Zoro in the 4Kids One Piece dub. Moving on, as you damn well should after learning something like that, Carrie Keranen is amazing as the Hawk’s sole female warrior Casca, whose interactions with the other main cast walk a tight rope between her strengths and weaknesses, as she speaks forcefully and proudly as a leader, yet still insecure and full of longing for her unfulfilled ambitions and desires. They’re both better than Kevin T Collins, who plays Griffith in a very hit-or-miss fashion. He has his moments of brilliance, and can be downright chilling even at his charismatic best, but can also sound stiff as a board inbetween. Those three make up the majority of the show’s dialogue, but there are also a lot of memorable performances in the supporting cast, as well. Rachel Lillis plays a charming, naive young princess who catches Griffith’s eye. Veronica Taylor plays the child version of Griffith, who shows up once in a surreal scene towards the end. I was a huge fan of Mike Pollock in this show, as he plays a recurring antagonist General named Adon, who’s just an arrogant loudmouth over-all, but still manages to become a fitting arch-rival for Casca. It’s very likely he was typecast, as he also played Eggman in a lot of Sonic properties. Famed Goku actor Sean Schemmel takes on several roles, including a low-level hawk member, and if I’m being honest, most of his best lines are bloopers. Actually, speaking of bloopers, those are totally a thing, and while you can find a ton of them on each individual disk, you can find the entire set on Youtube. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Guts do a Shwarzenegger impression, Casca rant in a lisp or Griffith bust out in all his showtunes glory, I highly recommend checking them out. Berserk is not the only anime in history to be granted a do-over. I feel like this is kind of obvious, but one of the most notable examples is Fullmetal Alchemist, which carried a lot of the same complaints that Berserk did... Mainly, though, it was too different from the source material, and people wanted to see a more faithful adaptation. As we all know, Brotherhood came out to monstrous fame and adoration, while surprisingly, Berserk seems to have had the opposite effect. The movies, as much as people praised the first one, and the 2016 remake, which I’ve pissed people off by calling Berserk Brotherhood, is popularly considered an actual dumpster fire. I have not seen it, but I’ll take their word for it until I finally do. But all of this does raise a very interesting question: If the original 1997 series had so many shortcomings that people demanded a do-over, why are there so many people who still consider it the best version? I mentioned earlier how it’s animation has aged better than anyone thought, but I think there’s more to it. One iof the first problems you’ll hear from people with grievances over the original series is how incomplete it is. Now I’ll be blunt, I’ve only read the first seven volumes of the manga... Give me a break, I’m not a huge manga reader, and there’s like hundreds of volumes... But it’s not hard to see their point, especially since the prologue in the manga was way longer than the one we got for the series before it went back in time for Guts’s origin story. There are other things that were cut, and other changes that were made for the sake of streamlining the story, and while this may be considered a mild spoiler, they cut a part of Guts’s childhood where his guardian sold him for a night with a grown man, who raped him. I don’t think this is a particularly bad cut, though. The story works just fine without it, although it does sorta rob him of a connection he shared with Griffith and Casca. The more obvious change, however, is that the story doesn’t properly end. After a huge climax, it leaves off on a massive cliffhanger, wrapping around to the prologue that we’d seen in episode 1. I don’t personally mind this, but we’ll get to why in a moment. And if you think the removal of Guts’s pedophilic abuse scene means the series was toned down in any way, you’re fairly well mistaken. I haven’t read much of the manga, so it’s hard to say how far the story truly went with it’s content, but Berserk rests firmly as one of the most R rated mainstream anime in existence. It has just about everything you could want in a mature title, such as blood, gore, sex, nudity, uncompromising violence... It’s oddly light on foul language, I noticed... And it presents all of it with no shame or hesitation. Now, some of you may be asking, so what? The movies did this too. Well, yeah, but here’s where I’m going to be a bit prudish... No matter how far the 1997 Berserk’s content went, it was always, well, tasteful, which is quite a bit more important than you might realize. A long time ago, I ranted hard on Blood C over it’s violence and depravity, and it wasn’t because I have a problem with gore or anything, but because I had a problem with how it was used, and how the series was basically just a vehicle for gore porn. But leaving the blood splatters behind for a moment, let’s talk about what’s possibly the most controversial and divisive element in any media, nudity. This has always been a weird element in anime, as producers will happily use it to titillate audiences, but they have to bend over backwards to avoid showing certain things... So you get weird compromises like convenient censorship and straight up nipple-free Barbie-doll bodies. You get situations like Sankarea, where it’s okay on some characters but not others. Berserk has nudity, but it never goes too far in either direction. It doesn’t bother censoring anything(unless it had to legally), and it also doesn’t create situations like endless showering and bathing scenes just to push out more flesh coverage. If it’s in the story, it happens, and not one single fuck is given as to how you feel about it. If you’re offended, you know where the fast forward button is. If you’re turned on, you know where the pause button is. It’s not there to please or shock you, it’s part of the story... And that’s how Berserk is about everything, really. Every single second of this anime is important in some way. Every conversation, every fight, every death(even those involving nameless soldiers and mercenaries), every second of sex and inch of flesh, every single second of material has a direct purpose, such as establishing mood, developing characters and their relationships, communicating details to us, furthering the story and even foreshadowing later events. This is in stark contrast to the Golden Age movies, who valued spectacle over story, and would often gloss over important events in order to, presumably, ‘get to the good parts.’ Like, there’s a moment where Griffith, depressed, making a huge mistake by sleeping with someone he should have stayed away from. The series made no bones about what was happening, but only showed you what you needed to see in order to follow what was happening and appropriately fear the outcome. The movies straight-up presented it as a hot, sexy porn scene, completely missing the point to a confusing degree, and to make matters worse, the same thing happened regarding a rape at the end of the third movie. I don’t know which version was more true to the books, and frankly, I don’t care. I’m worried for these characters, so why are you trying so hard to make me jerk off? You don’t need to destroy the tone of the story to keep my attention, and the series knew that. And that’s when mature content becomes a problem... When it’s manipulative. If you write something into your story as fan service, with the effect it might have on the audience as even one of your main intentions, all it will be is fan service. The original Berserk doesn’t give a shit about it’s audience, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. It never tries to shock you, or titillate you, or coddle you, or excite you, it’s focus is squarely on it’s own damn story, which is where it should be. If you need boobs and catgirls to get invested, fuck you. If the material goes too far for you, fuck you. Berserk is the story it wants to be, and while that’s not always the best thing to say about an anime... Garbage that wants to be garbage is still garbage... Berserk legitimately is a great story. And yeah, i know, Berserk doesn’t really have the kind of story I’d normally praise in a review. I’ve made it kind of a theme to talk about metaphors, social commentary, allegories, real symbolic stuff, and as far as I can tell, Berserk doesn’t really feature any of that. It’s a fairly straight-forward story, with everything that’s happening being right there on the surface, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have depth. Whether it was intentional or not, Berserk(at least the parts that made it into this anime) has managed to become something very few anime can actually claim... A Greek tragedy. This ancient style of storytelling takes flawed characters from all walks of life, gives them some lofty ambition to pursue, and then follows them as they put everything they had before on the line, make heavy sacrifices to get within inches of their dream, and then ultimately lose everything when they fail, due in major part to those flaws they just couldn’t overcome. There are countless ways that Berserk stands as the perfect example of this, and it’s unflinching look at pain, suffering and despair only serve to cement it as possibly the greatest Greek Tragedy Anime of all time. There’s also the dynamic between Guts and Griffith in general, which is probably one of the most important elements of the story, but getting into that would be going WAY too heavy into spoilers, so check out Bennet the Sage’s review if you want to know more about that.. Berserk was originally available from Animeworks, with individual DVDs way back in the early to mid 2000s, and a thinpack that was released back in 2009, all of which are currently out of print, but the thin pack isn’t too expensive online, if you’re bent on owning it.. The follow-up movies are also fairly cheap on DVD, but the 2016 remake, which has just started hitting the shelves about a year ago, is still worth a pretty penny. The original manga is available from Dark horse, and yes, i know it’s just 39 volumes, I was kidding earlier. There are also a few video games, including titles for the Sega Dreamcast and the PS4. It’s frustrating to see just how close Berserk came to perfection. Much like the hero of any Greek tragedy, it came so close, only to fall to it’s own undisguised, insurmountable shortcomings. Like I said before, I don’t personally mind the cheap animation, but that doesn’t make it any less of a problem, and it was a driving force behind the demand for a reboot. The same could be said for it’s crippling lack of an ending, and while I think the way it wraps around to the prologue ultimately justifies it, I still completely understand how cheated some people feel over it(Unless the ending of the third Golden Age movie is manga accurate, in which case I can firmly say that I’m GLAD it cut off before reaching that shit). On it’s own, Berserk is still such a thrilling and engaging story that I sometimes have difficulty remember which episode I’m watching, as the story flows so naturally from moment to moment that my mind barely registers the episode breaks. I can’t call it perfect, but I can call it one of my favorites of all time. I give Berserk a 9/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Dec 22, 2017
Shigatsu wa Kimi no Uso
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
Inspiration can be a fickle thing. The muses may guide our hearts towards a particular passion, but they don’t always stick around to see us through it. As a child, Kousei Arima felt a natural attraction to the piano. He could play music by ear, was a gifted mimic, and had boat loads of potential to one day dominate the instrument. With the help and encouragement of a family friend, Kousei’s mom set him on his desired path, but life as a pianist was harder than he thought. Rather than playing for fun and expressing himself through music, she wanted him to be able to
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make a living through his music, so she went as hard on her little pianist as possible, going as far as to beat and abuse him if he underperformed or tried to play a piece in his own way. By the time the terminal illness she’d hid from him took it’s toll on her, his passion was gone, replaced with the cold, robotic delivery of one who could deliver a piece perfectly, but found no more joy in doing so. He lost his mother, along with his ability to hear the notes he was playing.
Two years later and about three feet taller(I’ll GET to that), Kousei still tinkers around with the piano, but hasn’t played it seriously, to the chagrin of all who enjoyed his work, or just hate to see him so incomplete. It’s at this point, like all down-trodden men who’ve lost their luster for life, that along comes that one girl to bring color back into his world. Her name is Kaori Miyazono, and she’s a violinist who cares nothing for rules or convention, finding childish but somehow wise joy in every aspect of life, and with this one chance meeting, Kousei finds a new muse... A capricious, cheerful beauty whose revisionist musical performances instantly connect with the crowds she plays for, and whom seems singularly obsessed with performing alongside Kousei, and helping him to relaunch the career that he’d so recently abandoned. But her dedication to helping him to overcome his tragedy hides a secret tragedy of her own, and one simple lie she told back in April will live on to define their relationship as they change each others lives through mutual inspiration. I haven’t seen everything that’s been produced by A-1 pictures, but I honestly can’t remember seeing anything they’ve done that looked outright bad. Sure, Sword Art Online and From the New world looked a little sloppy at times, resorting to broken character models to show fluid motion at reduced costs, but if that’s the worst they can do, then they could do a lot worse. They seem to take a lot of care with their work, putting an admirable amount of effort into quality control, like letting a low budget get the better of them would be an insult to their pride or something, and if that observation is correct, then I like the way they think. I’ve noticed that they generally have a penchant for putting a lot of energy into special effects, and then using just enough budget saving tricks to compensate without going overboard or letting it become noticeable. Key frames are well drawn and pleasing to the eye, and they feature a little more than just flapping mouths, with occasional shifts in posture to keep the characters expressive. Of course, there don’t need to be special effects in a show about musicians, right? Wrong. Not only are special textures like water given special treatment, but we often get visual representations of the emotions brought out by a piece of music, which use environmental and 3D effects to keep our attention during the sequence, especially towards the end when Kousei and Kaori are playing together in a fantasy sequence, and the camera liberally revolves around a beautifully 3D animated piano. The characters also have a lot of inner monologuing that’s shown to us in artistic fashion, reminiscent of His and Hers Circumstances, but what I found the most impressive was the actual animation of the characters playing their instruments on stage. I can’t confirm this, but I have heard from a few people that A-1 pictures used a technique similar to rotoscoping, and I feel no justification for doubting this rumor, as every movement of the performing musicians, from fingers on the keys to the way the bow’s movements perfectly matches the music of the violin. It would be so easy to get away with having a still image on screen while only the performers arms moved, and more intense note being played offscreen while only the audience’s frozen faces of adoration are showcased, but as I said, that would be an insult to A-1. Kousei, Kaori and several others put their entire bodies into their performances, losing themselves in it, and you feel every drop of their adrenaline. Character designs are beautifully polished and easy on the eyes, with it’s only major departure from reality being that the musician characters look a little more distinctive and exuberant than non-musicians, like Kousei’s friends. Well, okay, there is one other unrealistic detail that bothered me a bit... The difference in height between 14 year old characters and themselves at 12 is fucking insane. My jaw dropped when they said that Kousei quit the piano at 12, because he was so short that when he sat on the bench his feet didn’t even touch the ground. I could have sword he was, like, 6 or something. It’s my only real issue with the visuals, but it’s still a pretty jarring one. The music of the series... Do I even have to say it? It’s a series about musicians, and you can’t do something like that if you don’t have the knowledge or resources to pull it off, and they seriously pulled it off. Not only is it full of classical music, you can tell the difference in the way these pieces are being played, and the music that is meant to inspire and astound people does exactly that to the audience as well as the characters. From what I gather, Yuna Shinohara, a decorated Japanese violinist who was only 21 at the time, played the music for Kaori, and her wealth of training and experience did not go to waste. I can’t find as much information on Eriko Kawachi, who played all of the piano pieces, which is unfortunate. The show’s actual soundtrack was composed by Masaru Yokoyama, and while it isn’t as memorable or powerful as the character-based performances, it’s still solid and well-orchestrated, so it’s a shame it gets overlooked in favor of the insert tunes. The English dub was produced by Aniplex, and features a lot of newer actors from this decade, alongside a few industry veterans. I’d like to say these newcomers step up and use this show as a platform to make a name for themselves, but I’d be stretching the truth a bit, mostly on account of the many loops that Your Lie’s text throws them for. Their performances were not consistent, which is a direct result of their material not being consistent, and I don’t really think it was fair for them to be thrown into something this eclectic. For the most part, they do a fine job voicing the characters while nothing’s really happening. It’s just characters talking to each other, sounding like natural teenagers going about their lives. Where they really shine is during dramatic scenes, and ho boy are there a lot of dramatic scenes in this anime. There’s a lot of pain, insecurities, confusion, all of that fun adolescent stuff, but with a much harsher but still believable edge to it once you realize the kind of real life circumstances that they’re dealing with. While some of these issues may be worthy of an eyeroll from the viewer... Most of the characters who are in love with Kousei fall into this category... They’re going through issues that you probably had to deal with as well, and you can scoff at it from your seat as a grown up, or laugh at how silly it is for this obvious harem to try and be something more, they’re feeling something you’ve felt at some point, whether you remember it or not, and they damn well make you feel it. The exception, where several otherwise amazing actors begin to falter... Is with the gag humor, when the characters go SD Chibi for exaggerated reactions, and I don’t think they were ready to transition the specific roles they were playing into it. Max Mittelman, for example, is one of the best voice actors to come out of the 2010’s, and even though he hasn’t been acting long, his voice control and dramatic chops have landed him plenty of leading roles. He can do comedy under the right circumstances... You’d know what these circumstances are if you’ve seen One Punch Man... He sounds horrible during the gag jokes. It’s even worse for Erica Lindbeck, who had a tough job playing such a nuanced character as Kaori, whose happy-go-lucky persona hides a darker interior, and she does a great job of it, but the gag scenes just make her sound like a despicable asshole. Smaller characters face the same issue, albeit on a smaller scale, but the few veterans are able to navigate the minefield a lot more skillfully, like Wendee Lee(Who, in all fairness, never has to do a gag scene), Stephanie Sheh and Carrie Keranen. They have the experience to stretch their roles beyond the appropriate tones, which comes in handy here. The adaptive script is loose, but still accurate enough, and changes the vernacular so everyone sounds more like contemporary English, without ever sacrificing the intent of the text. They make a handful of charming and character-appropriate references, like occasional nods to Charlie Brown and The Phantom of the Opera, although they also use the phrase ‘as you know’ a few too many times. They probably should have changes some of the text, as a lot of it, when translated, sounds weird coming from 14 year olds. Okay, so, here we are again. It wasn’t too long ago that I was calling out modern anime fans for letting their emotions cloud their judgement, saying that they often give perfect scores to any anime that makes them cry. Seriously, you could give a critic a massage, a home cooked meal and the best sex of their life and you’d still be working harder for a 10/10 than most anime do. Back in 2016, I’d just uploaded my reviews of Clannad and Clannad Afterstory, and I asked social media to recommend an anime that had genuine feels... nothing manipulative, nothing manufactured, nothing too formulaic, just an anime that would touch me emotionally and make me cry with sincerity. The overwhelming answer was Your Lie in April, a show i’d been avoiding due to all of the hype. I finally gave it a watch, and did it stand up as a heartfelt masterpiece, or did it offer the same old same old? Well, to be honest,it’s a little of both. My feelings on this show were mixed the first time around, and the second viewing hasn’t changed that. Unfortunately, Your Lie doesn’t get off to a great start. The first thing we see is a foul ball hitting our man character in the head, lying on the floor and bleeding with what has to be a serious concussion, but not only does he heal immediately, but he shares the blame for the broken window the ball flew through. That’s not just bad, that’s disturbingly bad. It sets an early precedent for him being a sad sack with no will of his own, which I guess is kind of accurate, but it also makes his closest friend look like a monster for taking advantage of it(Trust me, this feeling is only gonna get worse. I try to move past this, but almost immediately, it becomes apparent that all three of Kousei’s friends are some of my least favorite cliches in anime history. His two primary friends are Tsubaki and Watari, and they are... Respectively... A childhood friend who’s hopelessly in love with the main character, and a girl crazy guy who exists to make the main character feel desirable in comparison. I am so sick and tired of these two archetypes being stuck in orbit around at least half of the main characters in the medium. And Kaori’s worse, because she’s a trope that I usually don’t see in anime, and I’m not complaining about that. She’s happy-go-lucky, she’s childish, she’s an enlightened soul who’s able to see all of the simple joy in life, and she comes out of nowhere to dedicate her life to dragging the main male character out of the slumps. She is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which is to sexism what the magical negro trope is to racism. Granted, she deconstructs the trope a little bit, as she actually has a backstory and a reason to help Kousei, but she makes up for that small silver lining by taking the “Life begins at man” trope to a new extreme, as “Life begins AND ENDS at man.” I’ll give her this, she IS the reason I kept watching the series, as I was entranced by her violin performance in episode 2, and she made me want to keep watching s I could hear more of her work, which sounded even better when she played with Kousei. On top of that, she plays an important... Dare I say instrumental... Role in Your Lie’s deeper themes. Your Lie in April is a story about inspiration, and it attacks this concept from every possible angle. As annoying and cliched as his friends may be, Kousei is a good character who has a great arc that deals with this theme. He begins as a child, having fun doing something that he’s gifted at, until he stops doing it for fun and starts doing it as a future career, being forced to perfect it and take it seriously by his mother, who pushes him to the point of abuse. She controls his life, making everything he does revolve around the piano, even taking away his cat and abandoning it somewhere so it can’t scratch his hands. He loses the ability to hear the notes he’s playing, and quits altogether to avoid his mother’s tyranny along with the intense pressure she put on him for not being good enough. On the surface, this is a very mature look at child abuse and the way it can have long term psychological effects on the developing mind, such as Kousei’s performance anxiety, and especially the fact that cats pose a trigger for him(And I mean the actual definition of trigger, not the bullshit internet definition), and the abuse in question is realistic, rather than cartoony or melodramatic. Below the surface, this is a story for anyone who’s ever lost their passion for something they once loved. The idea that expressive and interpretive music is frowned upon, and only literal performances are acceptable in competition, which is enforced by both the competition committee and Kousei’s mother, gives an understandable reason for his loss of inspiration. His music was becoming routine, and pointless. I don’t think his inability to hear the notes he’s playing is realistic at all, but it’s symbolic for that loss of passion. When your work becomes routine, it becomes repetitive, and it finally becomes robotic. When your hobby becomes work, you fall out of love with it, which is why Kaori coming into his life was such a major turning point for him. She showed him that there was another way to play. She inspires him, breathing new life into his abilities, and helps him to separate his passion from the pain and sadness that he’d come to associate it with, and it changes his life in so many ways... He starts playing again, he comes out of his shell, and he even begins teaching a younger pianist... That he winds up inspiring her in return. They also make an argument that you play even better when you’re playing for other people, and while I’ve never personally agreed with that, they make a compelling case for their argument. Your own music, your own performances, are not your only legacy. The music you inspire others with is just as important, as your work also lives on through their work. They make a great point at one point that it’s hard to play the piano when you compare yourself to Beethoven, but it’s not nearly as hard when you remember that Beethoven was once just like you, a rookie trying his best to measure up to the greats who inspired HIM. It’s a shame they had to resort to a manic pixie dream girl in order to pull this off, but it’s largely forgivable, especially considering certain reveals that happen in the final episode. So yeah, this is not a shallow series. There is meat to the story, and something meaningful that you can get out of watching it. I’d be happy to say that the series was also executed well, but sadly, this is where things start to break down. The text of the series, for example, is severely lacking. The idea of inspiration and Kousei’s character arc are well written and exactly as subtle as it needs to be, but the other subplots... The romantic ones in particular... Are annoyingly obvious, and frankly, kind of arbitrary. I mentioned Tsubaki as a ‘childhood friend’ earlier, and while this should instantly telegraph that she’ll never get her guy... They never fucking do... She does absolutely nothing else to justify her presence. Everything about her revolves around her love for Kousei and why he won’t respond to it. Every aspect of her life ties in somehow to her love for him, and since it amounts to nothing, she could have been written out in the first half of the series. I won’t go into too much detail about the other romantic subplot, or how it offers Watari his only relevance to the plot(although he does have a few moments relating to the theme), but they commit one other huge mistake... They use constant, and I mean constant, voice over narration from the characters as they explain their feelings to the audience. It’s lame, it’s tedious, and it seems to be trying it’s best to keep YOU from thinking too hard about what you’re watching, because it doesn’t want the pointless teenage melodrama to lose it’s effect. Another huge problem is the gag humor, which feels inappropriate and out of place. It makes the heavier themes of the show harder to swallow, and not just on an aesthetic level. For example: We see Kousei sustain head injuries during two of these gags, that result in him lying on the floor and bleeding out. We also see Kaori hit him right in the crown of the head with an axe kick, driving her heel down into his skull. Now, if these instances didn’t cause any lasting damage, and the people doing it are supposed to be seen as likable, how am I supposed to feel when his mother beats him in the head with her cane? I’ve seen him shrug off shit like that before, so I don’t care. Am I supposed to feel different because of the tone of the scenes? this isn’t the fucking Looney Toons. I can’t be expected to believe that a portion of the material shown to me doesn’t count just because the writer was making a joke. That’s disgusting. I’ve complained about Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood making this mistake, but Your Lie is way worse about it. And then you have the plot, which did not work for me at all. Like, I said the themes were strong in this series, but they suffered one major setback. Kousei’s mother physically abused him and forced him to play music the way she wanted him to, all because she thought it was in his best interest. His friends, however, do exactly the same thing. Sure, they might not take away his beloved pet, but they still harass him, assault him, chase him, break into his room and generally like complete assholes in order to get their way. He warns that his performance might not be good, he falters due toa psychological breakdown, Kaori has Tsubaki and Wartari start roundhouse kicking him, and HE apologizes. How are they any different than his mother? Because it’s supposed to be comedic? I’m not exaggerating when I say that most of the interactions he has with his friends make me cringe, with their only justifications being ‘comedy,’ and the fact that they just happened to wind up being right. So the ends justify the means. And then you have Kaori’s entire plot, which... Okay, I’m going to try not to go into spoilers, but if you’ve seen the show, you know damn well what I’m talking about. And this is the big one, the one that makes everybody praise the show out the wazoo, so I’ll try to be gentle. At the end of episode 4, Kaori faints on stage. At that moment, even though I was trying to enjoy the series despite it’s flaws, I couldn’t help it. I knew where this was going. I said, “Oh fuck, she’s gonna (censored), isn’t she?” I am dead serious about that. The beginning of the fifth episode featured her in the hospital, and folks, I predicted everything. I knew what was going to happen to her, i knew she was keeping it secret, I knew that it was going to be kept deliberately vague, I knew I’d never hear her play again(outside of maybe a dream or fantasy sequence), I knew what her backstory and connection to Kousei was going to be. Knowing this stuff in advance took a huge damper off of the emotional impact of literally any point of the show. Granted, I did make one prediction that wasn’t true. I predicted we’d never meet her parents, which I wish had turned out true, because her parents are... Brace yourself for this... They’re Nagisa’s parents from Clannad. They are literally that. They own a pastry shop, they’re wacky and over-the-top, they live in said shop, and... Well, there’s one other spoiler connection, but that, along with a painful firefly sequence, made your Lie feel TERRIBLE at foreshadowing. I found myself, in both moments, shouting at my TV screen, “Okay, I get it, she’s gonna (censored), shut the fuck up about it!” So did the big bad tragedy work on me? No, of course it didn’t. The only part I got choked up at was a late scene when a cat died at a vet’s office, because it brought up painful memories of my own cat Shadow. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something here, and it does make the experience a rewarding one, but it just couldn’t stick the landing. Your Lie in April is available as a Rightstuf Exclusive, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the price is offensively high. Even on sale as part of the site’s holiday deals, it’ll still cost 130 dollars for each HALF of the series, down from 160 dollars regular price. Used copies on ebay go for as low as 60 dollars for each HALF, and I can not recommend you pay that much for an overrated series. You can watch it for free on Netflix, but if you absolutely need a physical copy, I’d actually go against my better judgement and recommend the Malaysian bootleg, which does come with a dub for a fraction of the official price. The manga is available from Kodansha comics, and volume 1 even comes with a sweet exclusive cover if you get it from Loot Crate. The live action movie is probably available stateside, but from what I've heard about it, I don't care enough to check. Your Lie in April isn’t a great anime, but it’s also not a terrible one. So, overall, is it good or bad? Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy the vast majority of it. I found the gag humor annoying and in bad taste, I found the comedic violence way too similar to some of the tragic material, there are too many cliches, and I caught on to some of the more important plot points way too early to fall for them. Having said that, I can’t say the experience was a bad one. The themes of Kousei’s character arc resonated very strongly with me, as someone who’s currently falling out of love with a long time hobby, and while I found his friends to be wholly unlikeable, his piano rivals were much more interesting, and I actually want to see more of him interacting with them. The final tragedy would have been a lot stronger if it hadn’t been so obvious, or if it at least had a proper explanation, and you can’t possibly deny that the audio and visual production went beyond top notch. It had a lot of problems, but honestly, it’s an okay show. It doesn’t live up to the hype, but it’s worth checking out. I give Your Lie in April a 6/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 8, 2017 Not Recommended
“This world is corrupt! In order to prevent further degeneration, the natural order must be put to right. And yet! Should the human race be unified under one rule, the ignorant masses would doubtlessly experience untold trouble adjusting to the new status quo. Revolution, though necessary, should not happen all at once, for such a thing would overwhelm the very problem it was created to solve. Nay, like the proverbial toad in hot water, the world must be conquered gradually, so the ideals of the future can have time to settle in the minds of the people. Thus, rather than aiming to conquer the entire
...
world, or even an entire country, an act that would most assuredly be met with violent opposition and unflattering propaganda, a more prudent first step towards overall domination would be a much more reasonable goal... The conquest of a single city! Yes, this far more modest approach will allow the population to acclimate to our presence, while also giving us some very lenient room for setback. Oh, and we also don’t have much of a budget, so kindly see yourself to a part time job or something.”
These are more-or-less the words that greet new recruits of the highly ideological organization Across! While the majority of this organization remains shrouded in mystery, but we can at least indulge in some insight into the situation of the F City F Prefectural branch, which may or may not be the only one in existence, and is overseen by the ambitious and campy Lord Ilpalazzo, a man who rarely ever leaves his lofty throne while giving orders to his minions, the dysfunctional duo of Excel, a hyperactive zealot, and Hyatt, a demure beauty who would sooner spit blood on you than say hi to you. With their forces combined, along with a pet dog ans emergency food supply named Menchi, these two constant failures are at the forefront of the battle for city conquest, when they’re not battling to pay the rent and put food on the table, all while living right next door to the opposition that’s trying to stop them. As the battle heats up between the forces of Across and a brigade of underpaid civil servants, whose side will you choose? Or rather, with all the wacky and nonsensical comedy going on, will you even bother to pick one? I’ve probably talked about JC Staff the second most out of any other animation studios, right behind Studio Gainax, and I’ve made a habit of saying that it’s visual style is inconsistent. Well, inconsistent is the word of the day here, because I’ve seen them put out a bunch of different looking anime, but I’ve never seen anything else in their library that looked like Excel Saga. This is probably because they shared production duties with another Studio, namely Studio Shaft, and to call this an unholy union would be an understatement. Shaft has always been really weird visually, and when their sensibilities are combined with the animation of a company that can’t seem to stay consistent from scene to scene, let alone from episode to episode, Excel saga is probably the strangest looking anime that I’ve ever seen. And to put that into context, I posted a review over three years ago of the series that ripped this one off, Panty and Stocking. At least in that show, the visual changes were intentional and artistic. The animation quality here is indescribable. That’s not to say it’s good beyond words, it’s to say that I literally can’t describe it. I honestly can’t even figure out what kind of budget it had, or how it managed said budget, because the level of quality goes up and down more often than your mom making the rent money. There are scenes that flow beautifully, with graceful animation and smooth movements, and then there are moments where movement becomes stilted and stiff, with long periods of talking heads periodically interrupted by bits of movement. There are two clip shows that obviously exist for budgetary purposes... Both of them even spend a lot of time recapping the same character arc! And then there are scenes where the action is happening so fast that you’d swear it was going at a million frames per second. I can only assume the budget was so high that the studio, also high, didn’t give a shit how it was used, and the clip episodes were done more so to make up for a lack of ideas than a lack of funds. The characters whose images were bought to life in Koshi Rikdo’s original manga have been given a massive cartoony upgrade... Or downgrade, depending on the scene... And while they don’t look too unrealistic, for the most part, they still look like anime caricatures of real people. These designs are mostly reflective of the original manga, but with the aforementioned cartoony upgrade presenting them as more polished and malleable, making them ideal for the anime’s screwball comedic style. The backgrounds, on the other hand, are much more stable and consistent, and they’ve been endowed with way more detail than they actually needed, as the director makes use of very short cuts. The lighting can at times remind you of an actual stage play, as even an episode taking place in a sewer can be more than bright and open enough for you to enjoy the action, without ruining the illusion of a claustrophobic environment. The set pieces are also incredibly diverse, as the characters venture out into an untold number of unpredictable locations, and they clearly had a lot of fun bringing them all to life. : The music is just as bizarre as the visuals, but personally, I like it a lot better. I own a couple of CDs from this show’s soundtrack, and back when I had a car that had a CD player, I would often steal tracks from both of them if I felt like making an Instrumental mix. The music was produced by Victor Entertainment, and they get a much higher billing in the series than most music producers ever do. They totally deserve it, too, putting out a soundtrack full of instrumental and synthetic sound, which work both as standalone tunes and occasionally as parodies of the musical convention of other shows. A good example would be the bland, repetitive track it attached to a literal dating game, which was somehow able to sound good while still capturing the cringe of the harem genre. They forego the synthetic tunes completely in a later episode focusing on a rock star character, and it winds up sounding legitimately badass. I’d keep going, naming off good tracks and why I like them, but it’s probably better to just say that it’s a really diverse, really weird soundtrack. The opening, Love/Loyalty, is also one of my favorites. The song itself sounds like something from Michael Jackson, which isn’t surprising if you’ve seen some of the director’s other works. It’s sung by The Excel girls, a fictitious band made up of two idol singers pretending to be members of Across(They appear as characters in the series, too), and they seem to have a lot of chemistry together. The video is basically what you’d expect from an anime... The main characters being shown in different situations, with the rest of the cast getting highlighted in brief shots, only it’s done with that special brand of Excel Saga insanity. It’s skippable, but the ending theme isn’t. They being the dog character Menchi on screen to sing about how she’s resigned herself to being eaten(In barks, while a woman translates), which is amazing in it’s own right, but then you have the dub, where they stuck a lot of jokes in the credits, some of them actually being funny. If you’ve forgotten the list I posted a few years ago of my top ten favorite English dubs, then let me get you up to speed: Excel Saga has one of the best dubs ever. Period. It was one of ADV’s attempts to translate Japanese comedy for American audiences while still retaining the spirit of the original, and since Stephen Foster wasn’t involved at any point, they pulled it off beautifully. Every performance is either good in all the right ways or bad in all the right ways, with very little room for error... For the most part. It was, I believe, almost perfect, and if you know the series well, you pretty much know what I’m referring to. Jessica Calvello, who disappeared from the business for nearly a decade before recently making a triumphant career resurgence, plays the title character of Excel, and I’m going to stake my reputation on the claim that it’s the single best performance in anime dubbing history. Her role was an extremely demanding one, but she still owned it, and I’d even argue that she did a better job than the original seiyuu. Due to the translation differences between the two languages, the English dialogue would often be a lot longer than the source, and instead of making changes to shorten it, Calvello just ran with it, talking way faster than her Japanese counterpart without ever diminishing the quality of her performance. Even during her most rapid speeches, you could feel how devoted she was to Ilpalazzo, how enthusiastically zealous she was for Across’s cause, and how little she cared for anything else. She could portray pain and suffering even better than Brittany Karboeski can, and get this, she even spoke with a perfect Kansai accent... well, as perfect as the English language can convey. She plays it like she’s tried to get rid of it, but it’s still kinda there, and it only comes out full force when she’s shocked or emotionally overwhelmed. The amount of control she had over her voice was insane, and,well, it took it’s toll. You’ve probably heard about this, as it’s kind of a famous story in the industry, but Jessica Calvello put so much raw energy into this role, pushing herself so far beyond the limit, that she wound up injuring her throat, and had to be replaced by Larissa Wolcott halfway through the series, and it’s a noticeable step down. Larissa didn’t do a bad job, or anything... To be fair, she did an admirable job matching the pace of Calvello’s performance, and anybody who can motormouth like that deserves recognition for it... But she just didn’t have the acting chops to measure up. It felt wrong. It was kinda like when Dan Castelanetta played the Genie... Yeah, he did a fine job, but he’s no Robin Williams. On a side note, Calvello also had a knack for Adlibbing that helped to Americanize the humor in some neat ways, which is probably why some of Excel’s dialogue gets stranger after the switch. Thankfully, there were a bunch of other really good performances that we didn’t have to lose. In addition to a handful of heavyweight voice acting veterans proving their ranges by playing an unbelievable number of characters... Like John Swasey, Spike Spencer, Tiffany Grant and then-newcomer Kira Vincent Davis... They even got great performances out of two of my least favorite voice actors, Mandy Clark and Mark Laskowski. Clark did an amazing job on the tragic pint-sized assassin Cossette Sara, and Laskowski’s knack for sounding stiff and hammy at the same time was a perfect fit for the goofball Iwata. It’s a lot of fun hearing Chris Patton play a rock star, as he actually got to sing the translated songs, and he fucking nails each one. It’s a shame he wasn’t in Beck. Rob Mungle uses an over-the-top latino accent to play the immigrant Pedro, and while I was never a huge fan of that character/story arc, his commitment to the character was impressive. Brett Weaver was also impossible to ignore as Nabeshin, the parodic avatar of director Shinichi Watanabe, playing him as a kind of white Richard Roundtree(his words, not mine). Rounding out the main cast, this anime was my introduction to Monica Rial, whose portrayal of Hyatt is probably one of the best in her repertoire. Taking a step up from her Seiyuu counterpart, she incorporates the character’s anemia and weak constitution directly into her speech, as she perpetually sounds like she’s on the verge of fainting. She also has no problem at all with all of Hyatt’s... Well, let’s just say her ‘bodily malfunctions.’ Jason Douglas takes the flat-voiced, one note character of Ilpalazzo and seems to channel Maximilian Pegasus to create a more foppish, melodramatic shine that the character was so sorely missing. They really didn’t have any need to redub the character of Menchi, as she’s a freaking dog whose only lines consist of dog noises, and they could have easily just kept the Japanese performance like Pokemon did with Pikachu, but they cast Hilary Haag anyway, and her dog noises are almost as funny as Luci Christian’s duck noises. Even if you’re a hardcore sub fan, this is one exception I highly recommend you make. If the name Shinichi Watanabe means nothing to you, it means you’ve never seen one of his anime. If you had, trust me, you’d know it. Watanabe, or “Nabeshin,” as he’s also known, is something of an auteur, as his work generally has a distinct style and personality to it that’s directly reflective of his influence on it. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, as any follower of Akiyuki Shinbou or Hayao Miyazaki will tell you, and for Nabeshin, it’s kind of both. He often gets praised for his work in the genre of anime comedy, as well as for his flare for satire and genre parody, and the results have been... Well, mixed. His work tends to consist of lightning fast pacing, rapidfire jokes, and constant references to other anime, and that’s pretty much Excel Saga in a nutshell. Granted, he’s worked as episodic and storyboarding director for a lot of other peoples’ projects, but he’s taken on very few himself, so it’s easier with him than it is with most directors to examine what it is that he’s all about. His work, particularly in reference to Excel Saga, has garnered a reputation for being insane and random, and it’s here that I feel I have to disagree. The Excel Saga anime is not the work of a madman, or an unhinged mind. The writing on this show is in fact very calculated. With examples of genuine insanity and randomness out there, like FLCL and Rejected, Excel Saga skews closer to one of those focus-group facades of insanity and randomness, like (and I am so sorry, but you know it’s true) Invader Zim, but with an extra bit of conceit and arrogance hiding behind it. Nabeshin took the premise and characters of the manga, saw how offbeat it all was, and used it as an excuse to just not give a fuck. Yes, Excel Saga is one giant bag of fucks not being given, and by God does it show. It’s so easy just to write whatever you want, make fun of what’s popular, and do constant pop culture references... That’s why Family Guy does it. Excel Saga is, at it’s core, the true anime version of Family Guy. Moreso than Lucky Star will ever be. And for those of you getting annoyed at me for interpreting the intentions of a creator that I’ve never met before, I’m not just talking out of my ass on this. I know that the anime wasn’t a product of actual insanity or inspiration, because I know what those things look like in the narrative... I have, after all, read the original manga. The Excel Saga manga, created by Koshi Rikdo in the 90’s, is an example of what true insanity looks like... It’s not unhinged and disconnected ramblings of randomness, it’s a genuinely batshit narrative that reads like it made perfect sense to the person writing it. Yeah, it looks bonkers from the outside looking in, but it still gives off a sense of consistence and intention. It was a grand, sweeping epic with foreshadowing, themes, depth, smart callbacks and meticulous attention to detail. It’s like if Lord of the Rings were written by a mental patient. I don’t know how Rikdo actually feels about Nabeshin getting all the popular credit for his work, I mean he DID take a couple of ideas from the anime long after the fact, but I still don’t picture him looking upon it fondly. One of the biggest downsides to this is in terms of characterizations. Nabeshin didn’t just bastardize the original concept, he also turned almost the entire cast into one-note jokes and shallow gimmicks. There’s almost no character development in the entire series, outside of a few plot-specific changes and a few early actions taken from the manga. Aside from these, their actions are largely interchangeable. There’s not a whole lot I can say about that, as I don’t really want to give away too many spoilers about either entity(especially the manga), but there is one character I might be able to offer up... The fourth Civil Servant and later Municipal Force member, Misaki Matsuya. She starts out in the manga as a bit of a tsundere, spurning the annoying advances of Iwata, and in the anime, that’s basically where she stays... A violent and ultra-capable stick in the mud with stilted speech patterns and a no-nonsense demeanor. She even legitimately tries to kill Iwata in one episode, but can’t because her gun misfires. In the manga, however, she gets a lot more development, and feels a lot more like an actual person. She becomes friends with her teammates, and shows at least enough compassion towards Iwata to care whether he lives or dies. Did you know she’s a hardcore gamer in her free time, and that she wanders over to her coworkers apartments to hang out if she’s feeling goofy from losing sleep to a gaming session? Did you know she forms a bond with computer geek Sumiyoshi by helping him to test out his elaborate computer set-ups? Did you know that when their boss Kabapu’s plans get out of hand, she actually attempts to leave the country to avoid getting dragged into them? No, you don’t know any of that, because Nabeshin did jack shit with her character. And she’s not a special case, either. Every single character in this series has expansive development that far outshines anything they did in the anime, and yes, I mean literally every character, from the pedophile scientist to the ill-fated dog Menchi. If I told you what was supposed to happen to Iwata down the road, you’d seriously think I was fucking with you. And I know it’s tacky to judge an anime by comparing it to the original manga, but I’m not doing this to condemn it for being inaccurate, but as a device to show you just how lazy it is. Yes, that’s right, the Excel Saga anime isn’t crazy, it’s lazy. It takes what it needs to from the manga, and then just puts no effort into anything that it did with it. Don’t get me wrong, the music and animation clearly had a lot of love put into them, but in terms of writing and story-telling, and especially with the comedy, Nabeshin just did the easiest things he could at every turn. Breaking the fourth wall is easy. Random gag humor is easy. Parody, or at least Nabeshin’s brand of it, is easy. Justifying your show’s problems by having characters complain about them, and having meta characters talk about the production, is taking the easy way out. Having your Lupin-inspired stand-in complain about the lack of story and plot doesn’t create a story or plot. You can only wring so much of an excuse out of calling your show “Experimental” before people start to wonder what substance you’re actually experimenting with. And I can’t just shut up and turn off my brain, and enjoy it as a goofy comedy, because about 90% of the time, I just don’t find it funny. I’ve heard people refer to it as satire... Are you kidding me? Satire has a point. Satire has logic. Satire has intentions. There is no satire in this show. The closest it gets to satire is picking a vague genre, blatantly calling out what’s wrong with it, exaggerating a few cliches and then just adding some weird shit like monkeys to the mix. The very idea of an existing internal logic is completely absent. If there’s any satire in it, and if any of the comedy in it is smart in some way, then it’s buried under culturally impenetrable Japanese references. There’s a rule in comedy that if you’re going to do a reference joke, it has to work as both a reference and a joke, so that people who don’t get the reference can still enjoy the joke. I first saw this series almost fifteen years ago, and I still don’t think I’ve seen a quarter of the anime I’d have to in order to fully enjoy the experience. Excel Saga was originally available from ADV Films, but after they went under, this property was one of the many they wound up selling off. It’s currently available from Funimation, and while the form they’ve released it in isn’t as visually impressive as its’ previous forms, it is more affordable and easier to obtain. The original manga by Koshi Rikdo is available stateside from Viz, and while a couple of volumes were impossible to find a few years back, it’s all readily available nowadays for some decent prices. An extra episode called Going too Far serves kind of as the true ending of the series, and it can be found on most DVD sets. A spin-off series called Puni Puni Poemy is also available, and it actually IS genuinely insane. I feel like the reason Excel Saga is looked upon so fondly is because people generally haven’t read much of the manga. This is also probably why Nabeshin’s adaptation of Hayate the Combat Butler wasn’t as well received, because people actually cared about that title's source material. As for me, I’m not gonna lie and pretend that it’s a good show, but I do I have a soft spot for it. It’s mostly because of the dub, but it’s also because it was one of my formative anime. When I decided to venture beyond what was available on TV, this was one of the manga that my local library introduced me to, along with Love Hina, Chobits, and Azumanga Daioh. I can't out and out hate it, but I do consider it to be something of a guilty pleasure, like how I occasionally might get bored, fire up Netflix and watch a Family Guy episode. It’s crap, but once in a while, crap is comforting. I do recommend checking out the series sometime, if for nothing else than for the awesome English dub, but don’t pretend it’s some comedic masterpiece. I give Excel Saga a 4/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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