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2 people found this review helpful
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1 episodes
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_Fuse_ is an odd duck. Overall, I endorse Theron Martin's ANN review of it.
The main appeal of the movie is its gorgeous depiction of Tokugawa Edo: the vast city with its teeming throngs and characters, lovingly depicted from the spear carriers of daimyos to the firefighting bridges and their tactics of pulling down buildings to halt fires to the popularity of woodblock prints to grandstanding actors playing to their crowds even to less pleasant aspects like teeth-blackening (which is often omitted because let's face it who wants to see pretty actresses with black teeth?). There are many little touches I enjoyed a great deal, like the cat looking in astonishment at Hamaji walking on a fence like a cat or the conversation between Hamaji and her friend while a craftsman makes colorful banners. This is a movie you'd enjoy watching and rewatching with a commentary & Wikipedia at hand.
The character designs are effective and Ghibli-esque; Hamaji could hang out with Nausicaa and Princess Kushana without skipping a beat, and the director clearly worked with Studio Ghibli in the past. This means the characters are not conventionally attractive, but they are memorable and fulfill their roles, and by verging on caricature, one can't deny - the old boat man certainly does look like a shriveled old man, the shogunate does look like a feeble young man, etc. (One dishonorable exception is the Fuse courtesan who is simply bizarre and looks for all the world like a parody of American greasers from the 1950s or something with what literally looks like a blonde mohawk.)
The plot... is a bit of a mess. The Fuse hunt initially seems to be the main plot, but is it trying to justify fuses or humanize them? Except it does a bad job of that (they are pretty heavily implied to have not limited their hunting to self-defense, and is it really self-defense when they're after you for previous murders? and almost all of the Fuse are dead before the story even starts) and it wanders in focus from the hunt to other topics like Hamaji's ne'er-do-well brother (who one wonders how much he actually likes her given he only calls her to Edo to use her in hunting Fuse) or the shogun (whose own subplot makes no sense even by the end, as we never find out how he's an imitation, what his connection to the Fuse is, or how he apparently channels the grandfather of the Fuse) or Bakin's writing of the Hakkenden (another issue, there's clearly supposed to be some sort of meanignful connection between the Hakkenden and the 'real' story of the Fuse but we never understand what Bakin was trying to do as the story of the Hakkenden could hardly justify or spin the Fuse's murders). The courtesan Fuse's character hinges on her son, who is never seen and his death is mentioned almost as an afterthought. As well, Hamaji seems to be often dumb as a box of rocks: she never seems to think 'oh, that strange white-haired guy who murdered a bunch of people in front of me and transformed and jumped around is one of those Fuse my brother is trying to kill' and has to ask Shino's name though I'm pretty sure he was named twice before in her presence, and the final pairing of Hamaji & Shino hardly makes sense either. And what does any of this have to do with dogs, anyway? By the end, I was left nonplussed.
Enjoyable and worth watching, but the story is too peculiar for _Fuse_ to become more than the sum of its parts and be classed along with the best anime movies.
The main appeal of the movie is its gorgeous depiction of Tokugawa Edo: the vast city with its teeming throngs and characters, lovingly depicted from the spear carriers of daimyos to the firefighting bridges and their tactics of pulling down buildings to halt fires to the popularity of woodblock prints to grandstanding actors playing to their crowds even to less pleasant aspects like teeth-blackening (which is often omitted because let's face it who wants to see pretty actresses with black teeth?). There are many little touches I enjoyed a great deal, like the cat looking in astonishment at Hamaji walking on a fence like a cat or the conversation between Hamaji and her friend while a craftsman makes colorful banners. This is a movie you'd enjoy watching and rewatching with a commentary & Wikipedia at hand.
The character designs are effective and Ghibli-esque; Hamaji could hang out with Nausicaa and Princess Kushana without skipping a beat, and the director clearly worked with Studio Ghibli in the past. This means the characters are not conventionally attractive, but they are memorable and fulfill their roles, and by verging on caricature, one can't deny - the old boat man certainly does look like a shriveled old man, the shogunate does look like a feeble young man, etc. (One dishonorable exception is the Fuse courtesan who is simply bizarre and looks for all the world like a parody of American greasers from the 1950s or something with what literally looks like a blonde mohawk.)
The plot... is a bit of a mess. The Fuse hunt initially seems to be the main plot, but is it trying to justify fuses or humanize them? Except it does a bad job of that (they are pretty heavily implied to have not limited their hunting to self-defense, and is it really self-defense when they're after you for previous murders? and almost all of the Fuse are dead before the story even starts) and it wanders in focus from the hunt to other topics like Hamaji's ne'er-do-well brother (who one wonders how much he actually likes her given he only calls her to Edo to use her in hunting Fuse) or the shogun (whose own subplot makes no sense even by the end, as we never find out how he's an imitation, what his connection to the Fuse is, or how he apparently channels the grandfather of the Fuse) or Bakin's writing of the Hakkenden (another issue, there's clearly supposed to be some sort of meanignful connection between the Hakkenden and the 'real' story of the Fuse but we never understand what Bakin was trying to do as the story of the Hakkenden could hardly justify or spin the Fuse's murders). The courtesan Fuse's character hinges on her son, who is never seen and his death is mentioned almost as an afterthought. As well, Hamaji seems to be often dumb as a box of rocks: she never seems to think 'oh, that strange white-haired guy who murdered a bunch of people in front of me and transformed and jumped around is one of those Fuse my brother is trying to kill' and has to ask Shino's name though I'm pretty sure he was named twice before in her presence, and the final pairing of Hamaji & Shino hardly makes sense either. And what does any of this have to do with dogs, anyway? By the end, I was left nonplussed.
Enjoyable and worth watching, but the story is too peculiar for _Fuse_ to become more than the sum of its parts and be classed along with the best anime movies.