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Dec 27, 2023
Let me just get the preamble out of the way: I'm not a Ghibli superfan. I like a lot of their movies, but I don't think Miyazaki is infallible. I also had literally no idea what to expect from this movie going into it, not even the setting. All I knew was the title and what the main character looked like, so it's not that the movie didn't live up to my expectations or anything like that.
Let me also say that me being negative in this review doesn't mean I completely hate it. It has a lot going for it. The animation is absolutely stellar,
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as is always the case with Ghibli. The music is phenomenal and fits the film perfectly. The opening scene is an 11/10 masterpiece that had me thinking I was about to watch the greatest movie of all time. Even the movie's first act had me intrigue in what was coming next, although I do think it dragged on too long.
If I'm being honest with myself, the idea behind this movie was amazing. There's enough drama inherent in the setup of Mahito losing his mother in a fire; add onto that that his father then married his aunt, his mother's younger sister, and you've got some serious intrigue. And this is what the first half of The Boy and the Heron does: builds up this tension between Mahito--the quiet, curious, sneaky boy protagonist who is polite to a fault, gets into fights, and who is hiding a deep, unimaginable grief over his mother's death--and Natsuko--his aunt who is now his mother and who is pregnant with his younger sibling.
Being a Ghibli movie, though, the fantastic and the supernatural are to be expected. And so it's not necessarily surprising when the titular heron begins to talk to Mahito and call him to the mysterious, off-limits tower. It's not really surprising when he is pulled into another world and meets a younger version of his mother and his great-granduncle, who was said to have disappeared decades ago. And if I'm being completely honest, it's not even surprising when this movie takes a shit on itself and transitions to a save-the-dimensional-balance plotline because every serious movie nowadays seems to love jacking themselves off with magical quantum physics.
People will say that I and others who didn't like this film 'didn't really understand it,' and while I'm not claiming I've figured out the plot, it doesn't take a genius to get what Miyazaki was going for. It's a story about grief, love, and life, and dealing with all of these things in reality. How do we make a world free of malice when that world is controlled by Imperial Fascists hell-bent on taking it over? How do we move forward after we lose somebody? How do we let go of our own fears and reservations to do so? The themes and ideas that the movie is trying to convey are all there, and honestly, I think they are really interesting. The problem is that the execution is absolute dog water.
Even though I said I liked the first half of the film (and I did), it has its problems. One of the problems I have with this film is that nothing is explained. Why does Mahito hit himself in the head with a rock? Why does Natsuko go to the tower? Why is the heron not actually a heron? (This, by the way, is to say nothing of the fever-dream, whiplash inducing second half where things just happen like a slideshow with the characters acting more like staples holding the pages of the script together than the people the story is about). Some people will say you can infer the answers to most of the questions, some people will say it doesn't matter. Personally, there wasn't enough there to get me engaged.
But I am almost positive that the details like that wouldn't have mattered had the movie not suffered from its biggest problem, and that is a complete lack of emotion and feeling. Other than the first few scenes that show Mahito and his reaction to his mother's death, this film is completely empty. Character development is on a speedrun: Mahito goes from not liking Natsuko to wanting to save her to treating her as his mother to being at peace without a single line of acknowledgement that his feelings are changing. This dude has the personality of a 2x4, and maybe that would be okay if I could understand why he acted in the ways that he did, but I can't. His feelings are never given the spotlight, and whatever moments of revelation he has regarding Natsuko and his mother are either offscreened or glossed over. The same goes for Natsuko and Himi (and even Kiriko and the Heron). These people aren't characters. They're hollow caricatures who are going through the motions of a heavy and resonant story without the weight to make their feelings real to the audience (or at the very least, to me).
Case in point: Mahito and Himi spend 10 minutes together before they are kidnapped by the parakeets. They are then reunited near the end of the film and they cry as they hug. "I thought I lost you," says Himi. Christ almighty, what the fuck are we doing here? In what world do these two have this kind of relationship? Is it because they are mother and son, and the tower somehow connects those feelings through time and space? SAY THAT THEN!! But I have a sneaking suspicion that that's not the case and the folks at Ghibli thought "yep, this is good." I say this because the same thing happens in Princess Mononoke, where Ashitaka and San fall in love despite having spent five minutes with each other and doing nothing but getting their asses kicked by Irontown.
This fixation on going through the motions of a story whether the characters are developed enough for it to make sense drives me up the fucking wall. If the audience (once again, me in this case) can't empathize with or at the very least understand what the characters on screen are feeling, why should we care about them? Never mind that plot details aren't explained, or that the ending is atrocious, or that the world building makes no sense; the real issue I have with The Boy and the Heron is that it glosses over the journey in favour of the end goal. "But cosmicturtle0, how can you say that when the movie is LITERALLY about a journey!?" Because I only saw Mahito and friends moving through the world; nowhere did I feel them moving closer to an emotional resolution, until it was giftwrapped and shoved out the door at the end.
I am 99% sure there is a good movie here. It just isn't the one that I saw. That said, you may enjoy it for what it is, even if I didn't.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Jun 10, 2023
Last Exile is dog water. It's a half-baked mess of CGI and shitty worldbuilding topped off with some of the most boring characters ever created and a story that I'm convinced was written by a five year old.
Before I get into it, let me be nice for a second. This show has a great soundtrack. No one track really jumped out at me, but I thought it fit the intended mood really well and was really solid throughout.
Now for the bad. Where to begin?
The CGI is a disaster. I understand it's from 2003 and I understand there were limitations with the technology in those days.
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Maybe this is too harsh of me, but I really don't care. If the technology isn't there, don't use it. Now, it's a show about flying ships, and if those ships are created using CGI then obviously it's going to be omnipresent. It isn't something that grated me every time it was on screen. But without a doubt it kept me from getting completely invested into the show. If you have a high tolerance of CGI I am truly jealous of you, but I don't and unless it's at the level of 86 I'm not going to like it.
Now I'm almost certain you're thinking that it's unfair for me to hate a show solely because of it's CGI, and you're right, it is. So let me make it better by saying that the traditional animation is also garbage. The character designs are completely bland and uninspired, and the characters move like janky blocks with weird-looking faces. Pretty much every location except for Delphine's ship and the Urbanus is just as boring with nothing really standing out in any particular place. It's just not an attractive art style. Some characters, like the Guild, and even Vincent, Alex and Sophia to some extent, are pretty cool-looking. Nothing really special, but passable. The rest of the cast looks like they were made with an NPC generator.
Then we have the dialogue. Sweet Baby Jesus. Now to be fair, I watched the English dub, so I can't comment on the original. But whatever beta-ass version of ChatGPT that wrote this script needs to be fired into the sun. Last Exile contains the most boring dialogue I've ever heard. In most shows, characters will speak for one of two reasons: 1) to reveal information about the story, or 2) to reveal information about the characters. It seems like the dialogue in Last Exile doesn't do either of these things. Characters are either cracking lame jokes and cliches or wallowing in their melodrama which leaves no time for any actual development to happen. It isn't fluid, it isn't natural, and honestly it just makes me hate every character in the show, even ones I wanted to badly to like, like Alex and Vincent.
This trash dialogue goes hand-in-hand with the shallow, two-bit characters that plague this series from start to finish. Some characters, like Claus, Lavie, and Alex, have understandable goals pushing them forward. Everyone else is kind of just there, floating around the Sylvana and other places waiting for the plot to happen. What is Sophia's motivation? Or Mullen's? Tatiana wants to be a great pilot. Wonderful, but why? Could it have something to do with her leaving a rich home that was mentioned once and then completely forgotten for the rest of the show? Actually, I think forgotten is too kind of a word. A better one would be ignored.
Because that is Last Exile's true problem. Everything in this show is half-baked. Whatever semi-interesting character moments are sprinkled throughout are overshadowed by the absolutely abhorrent character interactions that tell the viewer the exact same thing for the twentieth time. Clause and Lavie want to fix their dad's vanship? You don't say? Good thing Character X mentioned it again, I almost missed it the last thirteen episodes.
By the same token, the plot is atrocious. Things just happen with no explanation and for no reason. Sophia being the Princess of Anatoray might have been an interesting plot point if it wasn't a deus ex machina to get Anatoray and Disith on the same side. The entire purpose of the reveal was basically for her to tell the Disith commander, "Well, we shouldn't have been fighting in the first place, anyway." And my man just goes, "Yup, true say," and HANDS OVER A MAP OF THE GRAND STREAM. WHAT.
Another example of this god-awful writing is Dio's brainwashing near the end of the show. Someone please explain to me the purpose of this twist. This dude is brought into a magic room and has his entire personality off-screened. How does this happen? Who knows! Why does it happen? Who cares! All we as dumb little viewers need to know is that it does happen, and please be entertained by it. But maybe this was a bad example because Dio is already a shell of a character.
But the absolute epitome of this series for me is at the end of Episode 13, when Claus and Tatiana return from their little excursion. We're shown Lavie and Al, who are excited over Claus coming back, and we as the viewer expect to see a happy reunion and just a bit of payoff after the two of them are separated for the first time. But what do we get instead? Claus dropping, completely out of nowhere, that their hometown had fallen to the Disith. Like...what? When did this happen? When did Claus learn this information? And most importantly, WHY WERE WE NOT SHOWN ANY OF IT? This series literally goes out of its way to create confusion for the purpose of mystery and tension, but every single iota of it is fake and manufactured purely on the surface. So Norkia falls to Disith. Wow, so Claus and Lavie are heartbroken, right? They spend the next episode dealing with this new information, don't they? Of fucking course they don't because we need to have the Days of our Lives aboard a flying fucking ship and deal with romantic feelings that weren't mentioned before this incident and are never brought up again.
I'm not even going to get into the fact that Al's powers are completely unexplained, as is the Exile needing four poems to unlock it, as is why there are four and not five or three or twenty-seven, as is how the Guild became the Guild, as is Claudia, fluid, as is why Delphine is evil, as is how the fuck Exile transported people to Earth, as is why the fuck they went back to Earth at the end, as is why Mullen is alive, as is Alex turning into a fucking tree for the last five episodes lmfao.
Oh well. Whatever.
This show sucks ass.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 8, 2023
*SPOILER-FREE*
The original Gundam, the inventor of the "Real Robot" genre, thrived on a gritty, human depiction of what war might be like in the future, and it was so damn good at it that Sunrise spent the next 40 years trying to replicate and build off that success. Now I'm here after having watched all of the Universal Century (Gundam's main timeline), so obviously it's my cup of tea. But I don't blame anyone for not wanting to explore such a daunting franchise, especially when the entry point is 49 episodes of outdated 1979 animation.
Over the years, Sunrise has tried with varying degrees of success
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to create one-off shows that appeal to current anime tastes, which has sometimes worked (Gundam Wing, Seed, 00, and Iron Blooded Orphans all had their 15 minutes of fame). But all you need to do is check out the Mobile Suit Gundam page and take a look at the spin-offs the franchise has attempted over the past twenty years to see the types of stories it has insisted on telling. Hint: every single one has the word "war," "coup," or "revolution," in it.
For some people (me), it's an awesome thing. Giant robots fighting space wars--who could ask for anything more? But for the average anime fan who looks at upcoming shows and thinks, "hmm, what would I like to watch this season?", the thought of sinking your teeth into a full-blown political conflict with the weight of the Gundam name attached to it is a bit much to handle.
Enter the Witch from Mercury, a show that takes everything tired and stale about Gundam and tosses it out the window. Gone are the simple days of the Earth Federation vs. the Principality of Zeon, the enemy-of-the-week types of wars of the past, and in their place comes a modern story involving mega-corporations, political factions, revolutionary technology, and a school setting. It's a breath of fresh air for Gundam and for anime as a whole, because while this show does away with a lot of old tropes and repurposes them into something new, the core of what has always made Gundam great is still there: character drama in times of conflict. It's just that the franchise has decided to tell this story in a more modern way by leaning into current anime convention. And this is what make this show stand out
Nowhere is this clearer than in the characters. All the modern stereotypes are accounted for: the tsundere, the loud one, the shy one, the cute one, the popular kids, the losers-who-are-not-actually-losers. And of course, Suletta Mercury, not only Gundam's first female protagonist but also its first with red hair, and its first with a stutter.
Suletta has the tragic backstory of a typical Gundam protagonist, and just like her predecessors she's involved in something greater than herself, something she doesn't really understand. But by making her a nervous girl who wants nothing more than to be liked at school, the show is really able to explore both sides of its story: the school and political worlds. Both are blended together within her, as they are within every character. Because while Gundam has always made it a priority to explore its characters, pinning these modern, conventional stereotypes up against a background of space politics makes them into real, believable, honest-to-god people who feel like a product of their world, and of our current times. And this creates, as the original Gundam did, a future that we could actually see.
Because that's what Gundam is: it has something to say. It doesn't cheap out on its characters, or its stories, or its themes just to appeal to the mainstream (at one time, it was the mainstream). But what the franchise has seemingly had trouble accepting over the past twenty years is that that isn't the case anymore, and even though I'm a big fan of the Witch from Mercury and the direction that its taken, I have a hard time seeing it ever reaching those former heights. But that's fine. Gundam already revolutionized anime once, it doesn't need to do it again. What it needs to do is to tell the best story possible for the times we're living in.
The Witch from Mercury has figured it out. And hopefully, it shows people just discovering the franchise what its fans have always known: Gundam fucking rocks.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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