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- BirthdayMar 2, 1995
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Mar 26, 2022
I think I was 16 when I first realized that shonen jump made content capable of
making my heart skip a beat in that embarrassing to talk about kind of way.
It was Nisekoi, in case you're curious.
A silly little manga about two kids who kind of hated each other in that late
2000s mutually-assured-tsundere kind of way. Cheesy, repetitive, fairly horny
(for the time). I fucking loved it.
Loved it in the past tense, of course. I was their age back when I read it, and
...
every time I try to read it now it's just creepy and off-putting to me, which
sucks, to be honest. I've got super fond memories of that genre; the kind that
makes you feel like you're infringing upon your own masculinity for sitting
with baited breath hoping to god that the soap-opera doesn't end on 'this much
of a cliffhanger.' A disciple of Komi Naoshi went on to make Bokutachi wa
Benkyou ga Dekinai, which is a less subtle, far hornier series that sits
slightly north of Nisekoi, yet far south of everything they've let Kentaro
Yabuki publish. I remember liking it, but it never really made me feel what I
felt when I read Nisekoi; it felt almost too erotic for that. Jitsu Wa Watashi
Wa got close, but it felt like it was stirring more of a comedic stew than a
persistently romantic one. Kobayashi's Dragon Maid definitely hits the
emotional bells loudly enough, but it doesn't exercise those inexplicably
sensitive emotional strings that men like me feel like they have to pretend
they don't have when they read manga about healthy and loving relationships.
Then, I saw that chapter one of 'Even If You Slit My Mouth' came out.
At first I thought it was going to be a twee variant of Mieruko-Chan,
juxtaposing gorey horror shots and bored straight-man routines to invoke
comedy. To be frank, I never got the appeal.
One page in, we get our first rug pull. This ain't no horror manga, this is a
good old yokai dating sim! Er, I guess there's kind of novelty there. It's
Jump, so we know it won't be Monster Musume 2.0, and I also had a feeling it
wouldn't have that mild air of awkwardness that Demi-Chan did from a while
back. It seems to me it's a tsundere focused high school drama with an intimate
fixation on emotional tension and the stigmas of marriage and relationships.
This, my friends, was something I could get behind. I've always loved these
kinds of Manga, but I'd never seen anything outside of Josei or Shojo actually
manage to nail this kind of setting in a way that was explicitly aimed at the
male heterosexual sensibility, without the stereotypical air of homoerotic
undertones. But there's none of that here.
By the end of chapter 2, I start noticing the things that were there, rather
than noticing the things that weren't there. It was faint, but that vibe of
adolescent secondhand emotional embarrassment had finally returned.
We came for the cute yokai wife, and we stayed for the drama. I'm in.
After a few chapters, as our cast of characters grows, we get the
meta-commentary that I didn't know I needed. Commentary on how the power
dynamic of these kinds of asymmetric relationships play out, commentary on what
it means to love somebody who's older than you and how screwed up that can be,
and what it can eventually mean to love somebody who you know for certain will
outlive you.
There's a very, very subtle arc that builds in the background of this manga for
10 chapters or so. This passive storytelling was so successful that I didn't
even notice it was happening until it delivered a punchline about a side
character that hit me like a cement mixer dropped from space. The romantic
depictions of love in this manga are so well executed that I can't name many
other manga that are comparably weighty while also maintaining such an
unwavering commitment to optimism and levity.
This manga is truly something special.
I love it, and so will you.
At time of writing, in the USA, you can read the whole thing, legally, for free,
on Mangaplus.
Please go read it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Dec 26, 2020
I read three chapters of this manga, shut down my computer, and called my Mother
to say hello for the first time in too long. If you're as lucky as me, you'll do
the same.
It is good when a piece of fiction that's rooted in the fictional concept of
rebirth acknowledges the importance of "family" in the development of character.
This is rare in Manga. Oda once said something along the lines of "Good
parents don't let their kids grow up to become pirates" and can you really say
that's inaccurate? I can't.
...
The sense of childlike wonder in the romance of adventure is synonymous with the
concept of premature independence. Link's a child who's probably too young to be
saving Hyrule, and Miyamoto was probably too young to be exploring the
countryside on foot collecting bugs, which inspired The Legend of Zelda in the
first place.
Immaturity and naivete are necessary to healthfully consume young-adult fiction;
at least it is as you begin to grow older.
Consequently, I'm not sure if the growing popularity of Isekai says something
about the maturity of aging fans of Japanese media, or if it says something
about the desires and fantasies that these fans hold dear to themselves.
I expected just another one.
Another light novel adaptation with okay art.
Another protagonist who's tired of it here on this plague infested planet, lucky
enough to escape to a fantasy world with a unique and privileged set of
challenges granted to him by a benevolent, fiction-crafting God.
Then we met William. Saw William. The art is beautiful.
He introduces us to his family. They're the only plot in sight.
"It's hardly a Manga at all" I thought to myself.
"There's no substance except for the Mistborn-esque magical rule explanation."
I'm bored already.
Then there's a simple secret. Everything is simple. It's so juvenile.
Then... a church. Religion? Non-trivial acknowledgement of the ethics underlying
reincarnation?
Chapter 2. This is what I was expecting. I've read four dozen Isekai that start
this way, and I hate them all. I hate the protagonist... Wait, the protagonist
also hates the protagonist.
"Maybe this is another one of my punishments..."
His mother takes him outside, a baby no more than a few weeks old.
The scenery is beautiful and overwhelming.
"After living in such a hopeless vague manner...
I had though that waking up in this world was my punishment for not being filial
and retribution for looking down on life.
However, this is by no means a punishment.
This is forgiveness.
The thing that I had carelessly thrown away was granted back to me by someone."
Here's where you know it's a different kind of Manga.
William is, for lack of a better word, blessed. He's dutifully being raised by
a capable, knowledgeable, and passionate family. They forgive his faults,
nurture his curiosity, and, barring the occasional uncharacteristic hostility,
are kind to him.
There's really, honestly, nothing in the slightest wrong here. There's no plot
and you don't understand why you're okay with that.
You're told by the parents that there's a "lot going on" and you believe them.
You're certain that whatever it is, everything will be okay.
Will is living this Manga with the exact same vision that I have while reading
it. An adult "inhabiting" the life of a younger person and trying to make the
most of it.
To me, as I read through the lovely, comfortable, and masterfully crafted
atmosphere woven for me by the first few chapters, I found it asking me
questions.
I forget these questions.
As we age we attempt to comprehend the emotional states of our parents.
First they protect us, and as we age we come to better understand them.
I don't know how old I was when I first realized "Oh, my parents are mortal and
have flaws and weaknesses just like me" but I think it was however old William
is in Chapter 3.
The plot has been there all along. You still can't put your finger on what the
plot is yet, but you finally realize it's there.
You're not reading this any more to solve a mystery.
You're reading this because, just like Will, you want to understand what Wills
parents are saying, doing, and feeling.
The narrative continues. It focuses on Will. His teachings from his Father and
Mother grow more involved, and the teachings from his uncle grow increasingly
unreasonable and hostile.
You don't know why. It doesn't matter.
I've beaten this bush enough. I recall my question.
... What the hell is wrong with you? Yes, you. How can you consume this genre?
How fucking dare you think that you'd be okay after being forced to leave behind
everyone who's ever loved you?
How fucking dare you so easily accept fiction reliant on your identification
with self loathing, self hating, regressive, and distraction obsessed main
characters?
Saihate no Paladin understands these questions.
They form the cornerstone of the first arc of this Manga.
When you're young, it never once occurs to you that the people who raised you
won't be with you forever.
The time comes when Will is at his weakest. He's old enough to learn what his
family is and what his existence means. His existence is born of a malevolent
scheme that exploits the fundamental goodness of his family, and they may be
killed for having raised him.
The restraint I show by keeping this review free of spoilers is causing me
genuine anguish and suffering.
I found myself incapacitated by a piece of fiction I was reading.
Under the weight of having learned the harm that he did by merely existing, he
utters aloud the words "... It's all my fault."... And the way that his parents
repair his emotional well-being is just... Peerless. Un-Improvable. World-view
altering.
I've frozen at this impasse in the review for four months now.
Eleven thousand words and I can't find a single combination of them that
satisfies me.
Every time Will cries in this Manga, I do too.
This is no mere sympathy, but empathy.
You can't relive life, and you can't truly reread this.
I've tried. It injures me every time I do. Every time I reread this, the feeling
of childlike wonder I felt never returns. The realization Will lacks until
adulthood, that the lives of those he loves are fleeting, haunts me and prevents
me from suspending disbelief. How can I suspend disbelief? This isn't fiction
anymore.
This is a beacon of what fiction is capable of.
Will is tormented by his memory for failing to express his love when he
could. In whatever feeble way this is, I will make that mistake no longer.
Read this in any form you can. I can say the Light Novel is just as astounding
as the Manga, and neither is better than the other. The correct answer is to
read both, and then tell me what you thought of it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Sep 4, 2020
There is something profound about this one. Almost feels wrong to review it so soon.
It's usually bad form to write a review of something before you've watched all of it right? We wait for series to be cancelled then write lengthy reviews justifying our paradoxical opinion that it was a 7 out of 10 but we still somehow don't think it should have been cancelled after 51 chapters?
Cue sentence complaining about a rushed ending.
Move onto the next one; read illegally of course.
Fuck me it's okay folks. I mean hell how do you think I read this one? Legally? I tried I really did.
I know
...
the author's good so when I finally got around to seeing what he was doing next I went looking.
I saw that the author made something good via his twitter and two google searches later I laid eyes on the artwork.
I think I felt like I was reading Voynich Hotel but it was also Umi no Cradle but also Sheriff Evans Lies but also Golden Kamui?
The art is appropriate and restrained.
The layout is expressive if not traditional and ... unimpressive?
I don't know how I feel those last two sentences while also feeling so absolutely enamored by these characters. There's something like... I don't know the word dissonant?... about how the tone can be both simultaneously so uplifting and optimistic but also so ungodly morose.
... Wow... the description of the tone of the whole manga is also the description of the main character herself. Ladies and Gentlemen I think that's why I like this manga so much.
There's only seven chapters that I've laid eyes on but it was enough for me to cough up for all three volumes on amazon that are currently out right now in Japanese, a language that I'll surely speak eventually at this rate.
This author has done something special.
It doesn't feel like a stretch to imagine a manga like this being made. You don't need to go very far back in history to find compelling slots in historical narratives to tell stories in.
I didn't expect the tone or the narrative structure though, and that's what I'm extremely impressed by.
In ten chapters we could be in Oregon, or Canada, or still troupsing around Gangs-Of-New-York era New-Amsterdam, and it would feel right on track. It's really miraculous how sucess feels both impossible and innevitable at the same time. Amelia is one hell of a character.
I pray that enough people saw what I saw and bought the volumes to keep the spirit alive in these times.
"Young girl chases dream in America in the wake of a deadly disease destroying her future and ripping her aging family from her arms."
I think we'd all hope a story like that ends well, wouldn't you say?
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jun 8, 2020
This is the best manga I've ever read.
I've waited almost two years to share this opinion.
I was certain my feelings would change, but they didn't.
I couldn't just throw under silver every single manga that had raised me since I was a boy
over a mere couple of chapters... but that's what I'm here to tell you I've done.
I think I found this manga when the second chapter was posted on reddit and it ripped away the sleep I was
going to get that night. I was certain I'd seen something like it before. The art, the story, ANYTHING--
but I hadn't. It was perfect. Uplifting.
...
Optimistic. Everything I needed in my life.
I was certain I'd lost my mind.
Me: "There's this manga that looks better than anything I've seen since Made In Abyss but... it's happy?"
Friend: "What do you mean it's happy?"
Me: "It's about a man whose wife is dead and the world has ended and everyone he meets is
doomed or in trouble and-- it's the first time I've felt this happy in months..."
My friend had no good response to this.
He thought I was confessing depression to him.
He was worried about me.
I was worried about him.
I had good reason to be worried about him.
He hadn't yet read Marry Grave.
I was so enraptured by this series that I was certain that the artist was a veteran.
Didn't even bother researching who he was at first. There's no way he was new.
I was certain I'd read something by him before.
"What IS this artstyle?! Where the HELL have I seen this why does it feel so familiar?!"
Look at what we see in chapter one.
- Highly adept usage of negative space.
- Impeccable layout and blocking
- Refined usage of screentones
- "Oda-boxes"
- Creative usage of perspective for dramatic effect.
--- Comedy, videogame homage, creative usage of bubbles interacting with panel borders,
complex light sources, opulently detailed Gothic architecture, effects, multiple unique creature skeletons,
weather, masochistically detailed props that are going to have to be drawn on the main character
MANY DOZENS OF TIMES PER CHAPTER.
"... Why does this feel like Oda and Mashima made a manga starring Vash the Stampede?"
"... Except that's impossible because neither of them had an eye for this much detail
until they had at least five assistants--WHO THE FUCK MAKES THIS?!"
Chapter two.
"HOLY FUCKING SHIT THIS IS HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL!"
Look at panels one through four on page two. The torch light literally occludes the darkness.
Look at panels three and four on page eight. Notice how he looks down and to the left in 3,
and THEN panel 5, which is obscurely tall ONLY to facilitate the hilariously long scream-bubble,
is used to pull our eyes back up to the top to continue a third column. Three column single pages
are also relatively rare and extremely rarely done this thoughtfully.
Look at ALL of page 14. He exudes discomfort and claustrophobia in several ways. Riseman is hunched over.
He's looking at the clock. He's looking back at the mother cooking. All we hear is the sound of a
ticking clock... and boiling water. And most importantly, both walls and the ceiling are in frame.
Look at panel two on page 17. I can't remember the last time I saw someone use this POV in a manga.
Page 19; illumination by lightning. What a gloriously underutilized trope in modern times.
Page 20; post revelation. See the telephoto perspective shot is back for the moment of clarity.
(Think Evangelion. Now stop.)
Page 23: The warped perspective pays off. The lines all swirl together. The slime is revealed.
I've caught up.
There's no more.
I hadn't been this eager to read another chapter of manga since One Piece 399.
I was 12 years old.
Weeks pass.
Every chapter is better than the last. I spend months and months making a youtube video trying to
explain to people why I love this manga so God damn much.
I get more and more technical, but with every week, so does Yamaji Hidenori,
a 32 year old man who's published 15 chapters of one other manga called Atlantid from 2014-2015,
and that's it.
This wasn't experience under the guise of youthful energy; this was God given talent, and passion.
Every chapter creates another multiple pages of script.
I've seen so many manga that I love get canceled because nobody reads them.
Psyren, Iron Knight, Stealth Symphony, Samon the Summoner; fucking NONE OF THEM scratch the skin of
what Marry Grave makes me feel.
I get distracted.
I get busy with life.
Before I know it it's got three chapters left.
It's cancelled.
I've just illegally read the first piece of art in half a decade that made me unquestionably
certain that human beings were amazing and that everything was going to be okay.
I didn't email Viz or Dark Horse or Seven Seas or Kodansha or
Yen Press or Vertical and beg them to let me purchase it.
I did nothing to stop it from dying. That hurt me.
I was applying to jobs when that second chapter came out.
On December 13th, 2017, I was at the lowest point of my life, many months into a
hopeless search for any kind of work related to my college degree.
Marry Grave was perhaps the largest sliver of optimism and hope that kept me turning the crank
in a basement devoid of sunlight, throwing resumes into the ocean hoping somebody would send me a raft.
On January 16th, 2019, I was sitting in the first apartment I'd ever owned, after work at a dream
job I thought I'd never in ten lifetimes be lucky enough to land, weeping inconsolably at the most
perfect "rushed ending" I'd ever seen.
(A few weeks later I spent two weeks disposable paycheck buying as many volumes as I could,
feebly attempting to mask my guilt that it was too little too late.)[https://imgur.com/a/No8p7wC]
Hidenori had no interest in an open ended conclusion, despite the fact that his universe was ten times
more vast than manga that have run for hundreds and hundreds of chapters.
In an act of inexplicable kindness to us, Riseman and Rosalie would get their happy ending.
Marry Grave's universe would get its explanation.
We would get our catharsis.
To those of you who have read the first chapter, this not a spoiler but rather a confirmation of will.
Yamaji Hidenori's devotion to conveying his fiction to you is a force of nature.
His comprehension of this medium is almost without peer and his success ought be inevitable.
Two years has not been enough time for me to imagine praise in the English language that
can convey to you how I feel about this single piece of fiction he's created.
Please read it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jul 6, 2019
A Review of Promare:
Six thousand people sat and stood in wait for twelve hours for this movie. They got more than what they came for.
When the movie started I remembered just how good Kill La Kill was; not overall, but at the beginning. You know, the first five minutes where the entire setup and exposition of the show just blows the skin off of your face and you fly backwards down a giant obsessively beautiful mountain of detail all to fly forward on the ground into a close up of Ryuko's face...
Ryuko: "So this is Honouji Academy..."
Audience: *gargling noises*
That was pretty good... Promare made
...
me feel like that again about 20 seconds into the movie... then it kept going... wait what do you mean "keep going" you already have me hooked. I'm interested. I like the premise you just established you wanna move on from OKAY SO YOU'RE GONNA SHOW ME THE COOL THINGS HAPPENING OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD THAT'S NICE WE'RE 50 SECONDS IN NOW YOU THINK IT'S TIME TO LET OFF THE GAS A BIT AND LET US TAKE THIS SHIT IN?!
Hiroyuki Imaishi: "... Nah bro check this out--"
– and so fourteen minutes later, the entire audience sat there, mouths agape, vocal chords sore, eyes dry; contemplating when, if ever in our brief existences, we had ever witnessed a work of visual media with a higher "awesome per second" ratio.
We had not.
My friends, the movie industry has lost its way. I think the anime industry has also lost its way.
I know that's a bold statement to make.
I believe that this is the best that animation has ever been in every sense of the word "best." The average animated television show is better than it ever has been, and the best shows of each year are almost always better than the best shows of the previous year. The size of the anime consuming market in the US and around the world is growing at an unclear but certainly substantial rate. Who the hell am I to claim that this artform is doing ANYTHING wrong?...
... I'm a dude that just saw a single 90 minute movie have more fun than every show and movie in the last three decades combined.
Fast forwarding to about six hours after the movie ended, I realized that this feeling was one I had felt before. When the videogame "Doom (2016)" came out, everyone kind of had a "come to Jesus" moment. We realized that we didn't need a philosophically engorged cutscene to tell us why we were going to be shooting demons, we needed some demons to terrorize, enough ammunition to out-lead-poison the most illiterate US state, and a soundtrack to keep the blood seeping from our eyes from running dry. A videogame... that's "fun" first... good idea... when exactly did we forget about it? I don't know, but the fact that it was a big deal to remember it is proof that we did, right?
Well... here we are. Promare felt fun like nothing I'd seen in years, if ever, and that's proof that we MUST have forgotten what it means to be "fun" first.
I didn't like this thought. There's no WAY that that can be right. OF COURSE anime movies are "fun" I thought to myself.
I mean just LOOK at all these anime movies I can think of that are fun from start to finish that were critically acclaimed.
Let's go down the list:
- Your Name
- A Silent Voice
- Night is Long Baby Walk On Girl
- In This Corner Of The World
- Liz and the Blue Bird
- Anthem of the Heart
- Giovanni's Island
- Boy and the Beast
SEE! SURELY ALL OF THESE MOVIES ARE "FUN" RIGHT!?...
... I... no they aren’t... At least not first?... Beautiful, serene, provocative, inventive, colorful, cathartic, sympathetic, heart-wrenching, 'moving'; absolutely, but "fun"... I don't know.
Fun is going down a waterslide.
Fun is throwing a water balloon at someone then circle strafing around a picnic table with adults at it so they can’t hit you with theirs.
Fun is that thing that we're supposed to have had surgically removed at the age of 17 to be hopefully replaced with concerns about the economy and thoughts of financial independence.
I think I thought that Art, if it wanted to be taken seriously, couldn't JUST “Put Fun First.”
I don't think that anymore.
Promare is the most fun I've ever had in a movie theater. This movie pulls you through a seven-year-olds imagination at speeds that would pull the skin from your skull, but sometimes it stops, jarringly To methodically contrast something important to you and to the characters. The film goes fourteen minutes before hitting you with the concept of moral relativism. It hammers that gong HARD and meaningfully over the course of the film. It goes half a movie before ripping the proverbial carpet out from under the universe that it built for you. By the time the movie is over, it's committed so many narrative faux pa's that I'm surprised nobody in the theater laughed at any of them. Until something absolutely fucking glorious happens.
The movie exhibited a level of self awareness that I'd only ever seen rivaled by other anime also directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, AND THOSE HAD BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS THAT PREVENTED HIM FROM SEIZING THE MEANS OF KITCHEN SINK PRODUCTION, AND LIFTING AN ENTIRE KITCHEN SINK FACTORY TWENTY THOUSAND FEET INTO THE AIR AND DROPPING IT ON A THEATER FULL OF UNSUSPECTING FANS.
There is a "noun" that will not be spoiled here that is canonically named "Deus Ex Machina"… that leads us into the final God Damn act. Every man, woman, and (man)child that made this movie must have been having the times of their fucking lives. This is Studio Triggers first movie, y'all. I didn't really realize what that meant until after the movie had ended and Imaishi rolled onto the stage from underneath a table.
Imaishi said "This is the first thing I've actually fully owned and directed since Gurren Lagann, and I don't even know how many of you really remember that one."
... The entire crowd cheers loud enough to not need a translator for him to get the point. About half that cheering came from me but this isn't the point. The POINT is that this man has been waiting twenty some odd years to have complete, unhinged, unfettered creative freedom. He finally got it, and all we got out of it was the most spectacular looking movie I've ever seen.
It's not just pretty. It's optimally pretty. The aesthetic of this movie optimized the studios ability to pump as many frames and as many details into every single frame as possible. Studio Trigger has always had some of the best animators in the world do some of their best work on their products, but this is the first time I've seen an art direction be this considerate of what actually matters; GETTING RID OF DETAILS THAT CAN'T BE FUCKING "ANIMATED." LOOKING AT YOU, COMIXWAVE!!! YOUR LANDSCAPES ARE BEAUTIFUL BUT THEY DO NOT DANCE A JIG FOR THE CAMERA!!
In the hands of ANYONE ELSE, this art style could have been viewed as "ugly" or "stilted" or "other negative adjective here" but these fuckers decided to go PEAK modern art on our asses and take animation back to geometry 101 and high school art and English classes.
One side of the conflict is made up of squares, the other by triangles. One side is blue, the other is pink. One side is cold, the other is hot. Every silouette is optimal. Every character design, robot design, vehicle design, and their corresponding color palates are unrivaled in their simplicity and their clarity, which I imagine only happened naturally as WHEN YOU NEED TO ANIMATE TEN MECHS SUMO WRESTLING WITH A FIRETRUCK, A HELICOPTER, AND A BATON WIELDING MAN MADE OF FIRE, THEY PROBABLY HAD TO ITERATE ON THINGS UNTIL LESS THAN HALF THEIR FOCUS GROUPS WERE FROTHING AT THE MOUTH FROM EPILEPTIC BRAIN ANEURISMS AFTER THE FIRST THREE AND A HALF MINUTES.
I'm writing this review the day after I saw the movie. I could barely sleep because I was still thinking about it.
You see, I had to miss this day at the convention anyway because I had to go home and check on my apartment because there WAS A FUCKING EARTHQUAKE YESTERDAY!!! OH YEAH, GET THIS. In the movie, and sure spoiler alert but you could have basically assumed this would happen from the rest of the review so not really. There's a time in the movie where a giant robot punches the ground and causes the earth to shake. Fifteen mintues later, there was an actual fucking earthquake in los angeles. Hiromi Wakabayashi, Hiroyuki Imaishi, and Masahiko Otshuka are on stage talking about the development process at this point where the lights on the ceiling start swinging like pendulums and the entire audience goes silent; naturally a bit concerned about the 7.1 earthquake that just happened. After a few seconds, Imaishi giggles a bit and says something to Wakabayashi. Wakabayashi smiles and nods his head a little bit and then goes back to talking. If I was a betting man, I'd bet that Imaishi made a joke about how their movie caused a fucking earthquake... to me, it may as well have.
I give this movie an unreadable Babylonian symbol out of ten.
To compare this film to other films that have the vaguest concept of giving a shit about what academics have to say about it is an insult to the intent of the creators.
I will woefully depart from the opinions of the masses here. I will throw myself into a clown costume and proselytize until tranquilized. This is a hill I will die upon. I pray for a future where this is the most influential movie made in the last ten years.
Buy it. Watch it. Gift it. Listen to it.
Tell me what you think about it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Dec 28, 2017
Inexplicably wondrous and enchantingly beautiful.
If you've ever seen an episode of Mushishi, you probably have felt some of what this manga will make you feel.
If you've ever read Omoide Emanon, you probably have felt some of what this manga will make you feel.
I can fathom no way to improve it, other than that I want to feel more of what this series made me feel.
A perfect series can end one of two ways. It can end with all ends tied and all arcs closed, or it can leave you with a longing to erase your memory of the series so that
...
you can read it for the first time again. This is the latter, and by God... what I would give.
Read it. it will improve you.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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Jul 3, 2016
Review of "Your Name."
Directed, Written, and Created by Makoto Shinkai
"Your Name." is, in a word, a journey. A journey into what will surely be the future of cinematography, as well as a journey on a grand emotional roller coaster.
Technically speaking, labeling this film a "masterpiece" is an insult by omission. Given that Shinkai is a master, anything he makes is obviously going to be a "masterpiece," but among silt there is gold, and among gold there may be diamonds. This movie is a diamond, easily the prettiest feature length film I've ever seen; more so than even fetishistic attempts to be just
...
that such as Samsara.
Feats of the cinematography include impossibly vibrant and dynamic crowds, animation that is outstanding even among his other works-nay-ESPECIALLY among his other works, match cuts that would make Kubrick jealous, impeccable blocking, usage of the golden ratio in memory of Akira Kurosawa, domicile camera work reminiscent of Yasujiro Ozu (and Tokyo Story in particular), and ellipses reminiscent of the late Satoshi Kon. I'd also like to add that this film featured GENIUS uses of animation to do what I can only describe as Buster Keaton esque "impossible gags" and I am CERTAIN he must have spent many months studying the godfathers of cinema to have POSSIBLY seen the seeds for this type of genius cinematography.
Worthy of particular praise is the editing, and ESPECIALLY the sound design. Immediately, I was slammed by how immersive the atmosphere was. The music is so successfully integrated and the sound so visceral that you can't tell where your internal pace starts and where the score starts having its way with you. As the film progresses, the movie integrates full, soulful rock songs by the Radwimps (my favorite Jrock band, btw). Appearantly, Shinkai and the Radwimps worked together for more than 18 months as they constantly modified and worked on the audio of the film, as early back as letting the cuts and rythym of the storyboards dictate every aspect of the COMPLETELY ORIGINAL SCORE.
Make no mistake in correlating beauty and technical marvel with lack of emotional range, as this is Shinkais funniest film to date by A HUGE MARGIN, as well as the saddest, happiest, most dramatic, suspenseful, philosophical... this film is a superlative in every sense of the word.
Now, on the topic of the plot, it is not that I won't spoil the movie for you, it is that I genuinely cannot. Much like how Inception cannot truley be summarized, this film cannot truley be summarized. It contains complexity exceeding that which I thought truley impossible while maintaining any kind of narrative. And it not only maintains narrative, it DRAGS you nose first on the wildest emotional journey I've ever experienced. And it does so using an unprecedentedly real approach to subject matter too long fixtured to the perverse and otherwise absurd. I never thought the plot device he used was even capable of being used classily, but holy CRAP I was wrong.
The story is full of foreshadowing, "Iceburg effects", and such personal and visceral tradgedy the likes of which I've only seen described by Shakespeare.
The Wachowski's "Cloud Atlas" was a similar film to this one in a few regards (AND ONLY A FEW). Both have unprecedented scope, the likes of which are so human and so emotionally intimate that one would think the story doomed to the uncanny valley of unsympathetic characters. "Your Name." Succeeds where cloud atlas failed.
Layers of meta narrative and copious amounts of immersive shoehorning will glue you to your seat like an unblinking tear fountain.
Before the film, Shinkai said to the audience "I finished making this film 4 days ago" and I believe this absolutely. Not because the film felt rushed (because it didn't), but because I genuinely believe that there is nothing left he could have done to improve this movie in any way.
-10/10
-Five Stars
-Perfect Score
-40 minutes of my convention time compulsively writing this review
-The TOP of my reccomendation list
You get it all, Mr Shinkai. You earned it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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