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Jun 21, 2022
Macross: Do You Remember Your Annual Sexual Harassment Training?
There was a time when this was the go-to anime movie standard. Those days have long-since passed, but it's interesting to think of all the IRL anime fan stereotypes who watched this and saw themselves reflected back in the aliens who can't comprehend culture or women. Who see the depiction of either as immoral. Who see displays of affection as unthinkable as they do titillating. I'm sure someone has hit this angle harder than I care to.
But, yeah, our heroes are, broadly speaking, men directly out of the 70s and they don't want to let you forget
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it for even a second. There's a scene where they ambush the main character to congratulate him for having sex with Minmay while they were isolated because that's manly and turn around to scold him because he didn't actually do that manly thing. It belongs at the start of a curriculum on the masculine desire of femininity, unironically. The scenes like that, which are front-loaded, feel nasty, but since the ending is literally destroying The Patriarchy(TM) and choosing a partner based on personality instead of idol worship (however underdeveloped that was)... It earns its pass.
Also, y'know. In any hobby, you spend most of your time on the hum-drum. "That's cool." "That's shit." "How neat." "Why do I even do this?" And then you encounter something like the chorus drop in "Do You Remember Love?" and it makes every second of it feel worth it all at once. That first "Oboeteimasuka" as the battle rages on brought a tear to my eye, it was so good. Of course, they also decided to immortalize that guy getting his head cut off with that sequence, but The Realities of War or something. Anyway, wow. Anime. Movies. Anime movies.
Good times.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jun 16, 2022
Available officially in America for the first time, I went to see it without having seen anything "Macross" aside from vague memories of "Macross Plus" and "Robotech".
I liked it quite a bit as a faux-jukebox musical. It's not my favorite example of any of my favorite genres, but it is an example OF a fuckton of my favorite genres all at once. Songs, cute girls, mechas, a little romance, some intrigue, some comedy, a side-hustle montage... That's the good stuff.
It's kind of a shame that it's held back by its obsession with one-sided, increasingly obnoxious objectification of all the girls. Even the side-cast girls who
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have no characterization at all in this version of events. It's all the more apparent when they "try" to be equal-opportunity by giving the main dude, Alto, a shower scene. No ass, No titty, No credit.
The movie's age also shows in how fast the action is. When they were able to go to full-CG mechas, a lot of mecha shows took the bewildering step of trying to animate everything as if it was happening in real-time rather than in a cartoon. You cannot see shit in this movie's action scenes.
And that's kind of an issue, too. As it was playing, I was having a lot of fun with it. But trying to discuss it with my friend as we were leaving... It's like empty calories. There's not a bunch there.
But it is an extremely complete-feeling movie for a (mostly) compilation film, which was refreshing. It's a neat story worth a watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 2, 2022
The first 30 minutes of "#Bubble" are so pretty and so fucking vapid. Completely devoid of content. A Special Boy and a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. It's written by Gen Urobuchi, so I'm expecting a twist, but... Like, the set-up of Madoka was interesting before the various reveals about their powers, y'know?
And the twist is that this is some kind of pastiche on "The Little Mermaid" novel, which, OK, but it never coalesces into a film. None of these characters has any depth to them. The team set up as cheating bad guys with some other kind of significance are actually just Fellow Competitors. It
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just keeps on playing that same God-awful "hahahahahaHaha" clip over and over and over. And while I'm shitting on it, no movie needs an OP simply because it's anime. This is not James Bond. This is a shitty anti-romance.
And the visuals. When it's simply doing 2D animation, it looks really good. I hope it wasn't a labor rights violation, but it looked good. But they made the movie about motherfucking parkour, and not like in a sports anime sort of way. The characters just do parkour to move around and it's so forced and bad. Characters flipping around as if it's supposed to be impressive at best, characters sliding across the screen with 3D backgrounds implying movement at worst. Then there are the close-ups of Uta's face that look like they took "Sol Levante" seriously and tried to make "Ultra HD Anime" happen. No. Fuck you. I will accept anime that looks pretty and shiny, but anime SHOULD look like dogshit and cheap because that's where the pulpy genius comes in.
It fails to deliver on any level other than visual (most of the time), but it's not a VISUAL movie, per se. I went in with very few expectations and I still feel disappointed by it. I'm not even sure where I would begin suggesting IMPROVEMENTS to it, the concept is so completely devoid of life or charm. Again, I hope they at least didn't hate making it. I hope that part was fun. Watching it? No sirree.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Apr 28, 2022
I'm just now watching "Mirai", the anime movie nominated for the Best Animated Film Oscar as an apology for snubbing "Your Name" the year before. This... This is "We have 'Your Name' at home" energy. Which is a bad sign because I thought "Your Name" was just, y'know, fine.
This is 90 minutes of kids screaming because they're being in turns unreasonable and emotionally abused. The kids being unreasonable part I can understand, because they are especially little and little kids can get quite loud. But the main kid just screams So Much, and his parents largely ignore his feelings. Which is where this goes into
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shades of emotional abuse, what with the mom frequently threatening him with over-the-top punishments in response to temporary inconveniences. That's just a recipe for inter-generational trauma and, to the movie's credit, we find out that it is exactly that because her mom treated her that way.
Mostly, I thought the movie was trying to use its time and family themes to say a bunch about how we're connected to our ancestors, but it didn't land for me. The time travel cutaways just had no rhyme or reason to them and they began to run into each other. That said, one of the only times the movie really did work for me was near the climax where we got to see the individual family stories and lore play out. The great-grandparents' engagement because the grandmother decided to lose a race to the grandfather with a war-busted knee was especially good.
But as a whole? Frustrating watch.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 21, 2022
Admirable message that fits well into the New World, post-timeskip "One Piece" narrative, when the series has firmly become a four-dimensional chess game with a million characters. Had myself a good giggle when the cover of "Remind me of who I really am" by Nickleback was followed by just straight-up "I don't give a damn about my reputation" by Avril Lavigne. So poignant.
The action was good for the most part. There were points when it was trying too hard and the 3D effects made it look ugly, see Zoro's final fight with the woman. But I still liked it.
The gimmick of this movie, aside from
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having an episode or two of the anime lead into it (haven't seen, may one day), is that Nami, Robin, Chopper, and Brook get de-aged. I... They could have just skipped the joke about Sanji wanting to watch Nami grow up because it would be hot. I'm sure there's wholesome joke material in that premise. Maybe Sanji is just a completely stoic of young girls on principle. Maybe he's fair more taken with Robin as an 18-year-old. I dunno. Pedophilia was not it.
Speaking of which, I feel like this is perennial with all the One Piece characters after Alabasta, but they just do not utilize Robin, Frankie, or Brook enough at all. They each get like one laugh line and onr fight scene moment each. I'm less interested in Frankie and Brook, tbh, even though I would appreciate the improved storytelling if their involvement increased. But it's really a crime that Robin rarely has anything to do in these.
Like, they de-aged Robin so they could have her do "sexy" dancing, but she still contributes less than Nami as a child. And can we talk about how obnoxiously horny "One Piece" got after the timeskip? The switch to the busty character designs was one thing—people come in all shapes and sizes. But the boob jiggle and close-up shots of Nami's and Robin's BODIES ballooning up into adulthood. Literal fetish stuff and completely objectifying them, as we don't see their faces.
But I liked Z. I liked how his story incorporated the marines into the plot without falling back on them being a nebulous enemy. All of the marine characters know Z and have an emotional investment in him, and that comes across.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Apr 19, 2022
Really nice semi-hard science romp with a sci-fi tech upgrade. All of the characters who get fleshed out are endearing. Pretty much all of the setups pay off. And, as any good mystical sci-fi story should, it goes completely off the rails in the final act. Good times.
I don't have much to say about its themes, because it sums up to kind of a fantasy solution to climate change and those just can't move my shriveled heart as much as they used to. But the earthers and moon children learning to trust each other across their hostile culture gap was classic and fun, with "Dennou
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Coil"-esque robots there to spice it up further.
I think it's a mistake to read Seven's plan as Malthusian, though. Humans going to space to spread out more is an OK solution to "overpopulation" in a sci-fi setting (although, in real life, there is WAY MORE open space than people expect that could be used for denser housing). The caveat is that a space-faring humanity will need to have conquered the capitalist dragon before attempting anything like this. Space capitalism is what leads to "The Expanse". It leads to the suffering of untold future billions. And, judging by the (obnoxious) fake product placement and the business structures mentioned at the end, this Earth has not done so. I hope things work out for them, I guess.
And, on the other hand, John Doe's plan is closer to Malthusianism, but only because they're so dead-set on following the prophecy. In effect, it raises the same dilemmas of Malthusianism, namely "who is the third of humanity you want to die? Is it the Black people? It's the Black people, isn't it?"
And although the overall aesthetic of the show's technology was cool, I'm sorry, but the "smart" panels that they use are just a disappointment. It's literally an iPhone on the back of their hand with no other evident improvements to the UI. Are we still to be beholden to the bad design decisions of Steve Fucking Jobs in 2045?
I do like me some "My God, it's full of stars" stuff, though.
Mina is an icon. Chase that bag.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 8, 2022
Yet again a significant improvement on the series because it's more focused. But, again, polishing a turd.
The best part of the show was the heroes being friends and there's a bunch of that strewn throughout, so that's nice. Fire Emblem's piece exploring the childhood trauma of growing up queer in a hostile world was fantastic and the whole reason I bumped this up to a 4. Such a great payoff at the end. Obviously, his declaration that being gay (and trans-spectrum) is powerful was the climactic moment. But I also adored his little laugh over how he'd become self-conscious of himself at all after he
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had long ago accepted himself. Wonderful.
Alas. The additional characters really only affected the hero side of the show, which meant that every time they were on-screen they were distracting from the show's strengths. I'm sorry, HeroTV just isn't a good framing device, even for its satirical intentions. It exists only to say that the heroes arbitrarily can't do things. That's true of real companies as well, but it's not interesting. It's boring. And Golden Ryan being a pure heel version of Barnaby from the beginning of the show is just boring, too. Ugh.
There were stabs at trying to make Fire Emblem's story's theme relevant to the other characters, such as Sky High becoming self-conscious about his perpetual Captain America voice. But, as you can guess from how that is not a real problem people have, that fell flat. They didn't even do the obvious thing that might have been good and continue to have Dragon Kid question her/their gender.
It's a sequel movie to a bad show that only gets worse if you think about alongside the show, really. Blue Rose's crush on Tiger is still fucking creepy. Barnaby and Tiger being incommunicado for most of this is a setback for their relationship that doesn't feel earned. Why the hell are they still going on and on about how old Kotetsu is when he doesn't look any older than the others?
"Tiger and Bunny 2" has better be a surprise Fire Emblem spin-off or I don't give a fuck, frankly.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Apr 7, 2022
This is a much better version of the first two episodes of the series, but it's polish on a turd. By cramming all the backstory elements into the beginning—where they should have been all along—it managed to set the series up better in 1 hour than the series itself managed to in 10.
It also paused to answer questions that should have been answered in the show itself. "Why doesn't Sky High fly to solve all their problems? If flying is his power, why does he have a jetpack?" (His power is just floating.) "When did Barnaby train to become a hero if nobody had ever
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heard of him?" (He actually went to the Hero Academy that we saw in the show and was Steel Samurai's classmate.) "Why did the villain with the crazy eyes suddenly decide to attack during the show when he'd been stewing for decades?" (He saw Barnaby on TV going purely for points and not helping people.) "What the fuck even is Rock Bison's power?" (He can harden his skin and have super strength. This is completely obscured by his costume in the show and here, so they put a little moment in where he used it on Kotetsu.)
It also showed the heroes being less than co-workers for once. In the show, they're basically always shown as friends and we are informed that they are not actually friends. Here, they are much more explicit about being rivals only.
And the resolution of the original story in this is a much more direct reason for Barnaby to start softening towards Kotetsu than anything the show offered.
This all should have been in the show. But it wasn't. And an hour and a half is only enough time to fix the first two episodes, so knowledge of where this whole thing is going kind of puts a damper on it. Especially since these characters don't have what little development they got during the show yet, and most of them were dysfunctional at this point in the story.
But that leads to the worst part. Although they gave each hero at least one moment where they showed a personality. Fire Emblem's moments (plural) were gay panic sexual harassment. I remember that early on he appeared to be a bit of a gay (perhaps trans-spectrum) stereotype, but I watched the show dubbed and he gets SO MANY great moments where he's just a character who happens to be gay, including one or two that accentuate him being particularly BLACK and gay and perhaps trans. I don't know if those were changed for the dub, but there is none of that energy in this movie. It's a character assassination.
The last thing I'll say is that the Hundred Power is literally the worst power in the show and it's just absurd that they even let Kotetsu be a hero, let alone Barnaby. Every other character has access to their powers permanently, and those powers are way stronger. The joke characters from the Superhero Academy episode during the series had better powers. It only lasts 5 minutes and takes 1 hour* to recharge? Fuck outta here.
*or whatever suits the plot
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Apr 1, 2022
Feels like a crack about the director's own upload history, but WHEW. I did not see that coming. The lovingly detailed gore foreshadowed only by the lovingly detailed way the loli girl's hair rustled while she worked on starting the chainsaw. Like, more than even the other extremely gory and explicitly zombie-themed shorts made by this person, this one feels like violence. Which, again, is an incredible achievement in making claymation feel like realism. Wow.
I've seen most of what I care to of this director's works (Pussycat will be the finale for me), and they have a lot of great reasons to be proud of
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themself. Regardless of how unprepared MAL's main demographics are to appreciate these things, they're masterworks. Even his earlier ones, but especially his later works.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 1, 2022
It's hardly more "from the perspective of Daiba Nana" than the series itself, and its compilation film presentation leaves us with less to chew on than the main series. Some parts are presented differently in interesting ways, like the abridged depiction of Mahiru becoming unhinged because Karen stopped paying as much attention to her. But most of it is like the show, which is spectacular, especially in light of the second movie. So, even if this is a step down from watching the full 6 hours or so, it's still really good and the extra stuff in there for Nana *is* good, and it sets
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up the motif of the second movie at the end. It's worth a watch.
Also, the credits song is one of the best tunes in the franchise, IMHO.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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