More Reviews

Monsters Inc.
I saw this in its 3D re-release. I hate 3D and this was no exception, but I hadn't seen the movie in a while. I think it and the Incredibles are my two favourite Pixar movies. I don't generally find their movies that funny (although this one does have some good comic moments) but I really admire their tight, disciplined story structures. The plot hits its various peaks and valleys like clockwork, and every single line of dialogue is either a payoff or a set-up to something else, which is always said to be the goal in screenwriting books. I also love the Muppet-like designs and the door-hopping climax is pretty cool. Plus, John Goodman.

Patlabor 1 the Movie
The placement of the "1" in that title bothers me. Anyway, I watched this and a bit of the TV series, mainly to have some context for the second film, which I've heard is great. 'Giant robots' isn't an anime genre I'm especially interested in, but I like how Patlabor takes a realistic, plausible approach to the idea, in which the mechs are mainly just used as construction machines. The movie was a pretty enjoyable, if forgettable, detective story with a sprinkling of trademark Mamoru Oshii philosophy. Any time I get to hear Toshio Furukawa doing his Ataru voice, I'm happy.

On a related note, I watched Gosenzosama Banbanzai fairly recently. It's another Oshii work-- a strange OVA series from the late 80's with a writing style that seems to ape some form of traditional Japanese theater. Not being familiar with the style, I don't know if it accomplished what it was trying to do, but I really liked it anyway. It's definitely not for everyone, as it's full of jarring product placement and long, mundane soliloquies, but there's also hilarious slapstick and a lot of work by amazing animators like Tatsuyuki Tanaka and Shinya Ohira. The voice cast is almost entirely made up of Urusei Yatsura regulars, including the aforementioned Furukawa in another lead role. To top it all off, it has an interesting abstract opening by Koji Nanke (the indie animator who did all the Urusei Yatsura openings) with a catchy song.


Macross Plus
This was praised extensively on ANNcast's "Best of the 90s" episode, so I was excited when I found it pretty cheap on Boxing Day. After watching all four OVA episodes, I wasn't particularly impressed. It seemed fairly generic. The music by Yoko Kanno was good, and it's hard to go wrong with Bryan Cranston and Richard Epcar as the main characters' dub voices, but other than that it didn't do much for me.

I'm still eating up the Funimation dub of Shin-Chan, now that I've managed to fill the holes in my collection. I wish that more of the early seasons had been translated, as that mid-90's period where Masaaki Yuasa was working on the series is the stuff I'm most interested in seeing. There are a few of those episodes in these sets, but not enough! And I'm still sad they only used three seconds of the hilarious theme song.


Finally, I started watching Breaking Bad and obviously it's awesome, but I have nothing to say about it yet that hasn't already been said elsewhere by better writers. So that's it for now... Happy New Year, everybody!!

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Rambling Reviews

Time for another round of my thoughts on things I've watched lately.

Paranorman
Despite the main character being annoyingly passive and whiny for most of the film, I liked it a lot. The designs are great, both in the characters and their environments. They're full of unusual shapes and angles, and the result is a film with a really unique look to it, which is rare. The story and characters felt pretty familiar, but the filmmakers did throw in a couple of clever twists. The ending sequence was genuinely creepy, and featured really impressive animation. Overall Paranorman was truly a breath of fresh air in American animation. I'm now interested in what else Laika has done, which means I'll have to finally see Coraline.
 
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Directed by Rintaro, this OVA from 1992 has impressively loose, wild animation. Yoshinori Kanada did the character designs, as well as some animation. It also has some amazing Tatsuyuki Tanaka scenes, which are what made me want to track it down.Unfortunately this thing is ridiculously obscure-- it's never even been released on DVD in Japan, let alone translated into English. And obviously the name makes it difficult to look it up online. So I couldn't understand most of what was going on in the story, but it was very enjoyable.

Neo-Tokyo
I may have covered this late 80's anime anthology before on my blog, I can't remember. But anyway, here's what I thought upon seeing it again recently-- I absolutely love the first segment, "Manie-Manie" which is also by Rintaro. It's probably one of my favourite animation pieces ever. It's packed with neat ideas in the designs, the direction, the animation and the sound work. Too bad it ultimately doesn't seem to have any real point. "The Running Man" has lots of great FX animation but again, there's not much of a story. This one feels longer than it is. The final segment by Katsuhiro Otomo, "The Order to Stop Construction" feels a bit like a warm-up for Akira. It's pretty fun. All three shorts work better as mood pieces than as narratives, in my opinion, but they all have great visuals. I'd say it's worth seeing.

Samurai Champloo
I'm only up to Episode 9, which has the Masaaki Yuasa animation sequence, which was just as amazing as I'd expected. Overall I like the show, but it's not quite as absurd as I hoped. There are some hip-hop elements and some funny moments (my favourite example of both being the vomit scratch-cut in Episode 6) but neither the hip-hop flavor or the comedy are as prevalent as I'd expect from a series that bills itself as "samurai/comedy/hip-hop." So far it's mostly just been a bizarrely anachronistic samurai series. I do love the main title sequence though.

Shin-Chan Season 1 Part 2
I picked this up cheap and I'm really enjoying it. Up until now I'd been avoiding the English dub because I didn't think I'd like all the extra dirty jokes they added, but it turns out I do like a lot of them, and I already knew I liked the original series so this is turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm now trying to get the other volumes at a decent price. The English voices are surprisingly close to the Japanese originals. My only problem is that they cut the great opening theme short.

Yellow Submarine
Every time I watch it I feel the same way-- there are a ton of cool visuals, and obviously the music is spectacular, but the script is a jumbled mess and I find it hard to watch the whole thing in one sitting.

Tenguri
(a late-70s one-off short by the staff of Lupin III)
The story is ridiculous and childish but the Miyazaki-animated scene near the end is fantastic. Between this and his epic battle scene in Animal Treasure Island, he's become one of my favourite animators. His animation work is a lot more cartoony and wild than I'd have thought from his directing style.

Roujin Z
Written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, soon after Akira. The budget is noticeably lower but there is some very good animation in certain scenes, and it's generally a well-told satire about how society treats the elderly, with a wacky science-fiction bent to it. I like the character designs, even though they're not as caricatured as the stuff I usually prefer. They don't really stand out that much but there's enough variation within the characters to keep them interesting. The ending theme has been stuck in my head for days now.

I also re-watched Shin-Chan - The Adult Empire Strikes Back and Urusei Yatsura - Beautiful Dreamer which are both still great.

In other news, I'm back to school for my final year. It's going pretty well so far. I'm also working on Scout Raskin's Bakerman and the Bunnymen short, coming up with ideas for another project and working on designs for Fester Fish t-shirts. The shirts should be available soon, I hope...

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More Mini-Reviews

Here are my disorganized, sloppily written thoughts on movies I've seen recently. I'm very busy with schoolwork, my next Fester Fish cartoon and another project I've been hired on, so obviously this blog, which is meant to just be a place to post my own work, is taking a back seat at the moment.

Crayon Shin-Chan: The Adult Empire Strikes Back
So great. What I've seen of the Shin-Chan TV series reminds me of a Japanese version of South Park or the Simpsons. But this movie is a lot more dramatic than the show normally is. There's still plenty of comedy in it, and a couple of fantastic, silly action scenes, but there's a depth to the characters that I wasn't expecting. Funky designs and nice animation, a lot fuller than I was expecting.

Anatomy of a Murder
Surprisingly light and occasionally funny for an acclaimed courtroom drama about rape and murder from the 50s. George C. Scott is amazingly slimy and creepy, and Jimmy Stewart is great as always. It's three hours long, but it goes by really fast.

21 Jump Street
Wasn't expecting to like it until I found out it was directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the guys who created Clone High and directed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and co-written by the guy who wrote the script for the Scott Pilgrim movie. I never found Jonah Hill that funny before, but he does a good job in this. Channing Tatum is the real surprise though, he's actually very funny.

Three Days of the Condor
I'd heard good things about this 70s paranoia thriller, and I usually love that type of movie, but this was disappointing. It was confusing and overly complicated, and the big reveal at the end (spoiler: it's all about oil) is underwhelming. This would be forgivable if the movie had some good suspense sequences, but there were really only a couple of memorable moments.

Urusei Yatsura Movie 4: Lum the Forever
This reminded me a lot of UY Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer, but it’s not nearly as cohesive or satisfying. While it manages to be quite atmospheric, and enjoyable as a series of bizarre vignettes, by the end the lack of any clear narrative drive becomes annoying. It’s telling that not even the director Kazuo Yamazaki can properly explain what it’s about. It does have some neat sequences though, and is worth a watch as it’s the final work of the crew from the actual TV series.

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