Stooges, Lupin and Genius Party

I've been working hard on my student film, the freelance gig and the next Fester Fish short (which I'll be posting some work from shortly). But as always, I've also been watching things. Specifically...

The Three Stooges
I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm a huge fan of the original shorts (at least the Curly ones) and I knew it was a passion project for everyone involved, so I wasn't worried about the intentions behind the movie. It just seemed like such a terrible idea-- a full-length movie with one-dimensional characters created for shorts over 50 years ago, with new actors? Another factor was simply that modern life isn't as physical as it used to be, so there isn't as much to work with in coming up with physical comedy. I thought it might just regurgitate old jokes or feel out-of-date. But I was pleasantly surprised.
First of all, it was very funny. I couldn't stop laughing throughout the entire movie, and it was all original material! No jokes were recycled other than the general eye-pokes, double-slaps and Stooge shtick. Secondly, the impersonations and likenesses of the characters were spot-on. Third, it didn't feel too out-of-date or striving to be timely, except for a cameo by the Jersey Shore cast. But almost all of their screen-time consisted of them getting physically abused, so I didn't mind. I had a great time with this movie, and if you like the Stooges, or slapstick in general, you will too.


Lupin III: A Woman Called Fujiko Mine
I like this new series for the most part, although there's not enough comedy so far for me to agree with the people saying this is the closest the anime has ever come to the Monkey Punch comics. I still think the Yuzo Aoki stuff came closer, but this series does capture some other aspects of the early manga very well.
It has great exaggerated designs (although a little over-detailed for my taste; as an an animator I prefer less pencil mileage). The music, while not as memorable as Yuji Ohno's work, is fitting. I do love the opening theme, a sort of neo-classical/ 60s psychedelic piece called "New Wuthering Heights." I hate the visuals that accompany it though, and that's actually my biggest problem with the series-- way too much nudity. I don't mind a little bit of fan service, but Fujiko is naked almost half the time in this series, often for no discernable reason in the story. It just becomes embarassing to watch after a while. I'd have trouble recommending the show because of this, but if you can get past the nudity, it's pretty enjoyable so far (only the first three episodes have come out). There are talks of the production falling seriously behind schedule, which is worrying. The third episode did look pretty poor compared to the other two, but hopefully this is an isolated incident rather than a sign of things to come.


Genius Party & Genius Party Beyond
A few months ago I watched the anime anthology Genius Party. Yesterday I finally got around to seeing Genius Party Beyond, which I liked overall a lot more than the first one. I was slightly disappointed with the first GP film as a whole, but since all the shorts were all created as part of one big project rather than two separate anthologies, I prefer to look at it that way. It was pretty uneven, as most anthologies are, but I really enjoyed Happy Machine, MoonDrive, Wanwa the Doggy and Tojin Kit.

Here are a couple of screenshots from MoonDrive. All four of the shorts I listed had really great art and animation, but I think this one translates the best into still images. For instance, a picture of Wanwa wouldn't even give a hint as to what makes it so amazing.
Anybody who's interested in animation should find at least one short they really like in the Genius Party films, given the huge variety of art styles, subject matter and storytelling techniques.

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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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New Lupin III TV Series Looks Great

They're making a new Lupin III TV series for the first time in over 25 years. This project is going to be aimed at an adult audience, like the franchise originally was. They've got some of the industry's top talent and a lot of fresh blood working on this, and after all those formulaic, redundant TV specials done on autopilot, it looks like they're finally getting it right again.

It's apparently focused more on Fujiko, which is the one aspect of it I'm not that excited about.

But I can't wait to see it, because they're actually going a lot closer to the original, crazy look of the manga. I'm excited by the Monkey Punch look of these promo pics.



The second one is part of an elaborate website background, which is why it has such a weird composition. But I'm really liking the way the characters are being drawn here.

I never would have guessed they'd even consider doing Lupin in a style like this again. They've been desperately pandering to a mainstream anime, all-ages audience for so long I thought they'd never break out of it. But it seems that they have.

Starts airing in Japan April 4. Hopefully it'll be streaming on Crunchyroll or something so we can see it over here too.

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Urusei Yatsura is So Good

I've been watching more Urusei Yatsura, although not in any particular order. I just got Vol. 22 and 31, although I haven't watched any of the latter yet. Vol. 22 is probably the funniest set of episodes I've seen so far. In particular, episode 83 "Big Battle! Ten vs. Ataru" has a ton of insane animation, and a simple premise that leaves lots of room for crazy gags. Basically the plot is that Jariten (Lum's baby cousin) and Ataru have a fight.

This episode is drawn in a much looser, gag manga-like style than the others that I've seen. It starts off with some Road Runner/Coyote-style gags, with Jariten as the coyote.



And then there's this face. It will haunt your dreams.





The writing and direction are fantastic, full of hilarious reveals and bizarre ideas.



This sequence with Ataru trying to open his lunchbox in class with a bandaged hand is amazing. It's actually fully animated, and chock-full of crazy, distorted drawings and wacky poses. I also find it funny that throughout the sequence, the guy behind him is frozen with his mouth wide open.

And then his teacher transforms into a pig.

...Of course.


None of the other episodes on this disc contain as much funny animation as this one, but they're all pretty good anyway.

From an episode that's basically Hitchcock's The Birds only with potatoes attacking instead:




In the next one, a giant robotic chalkboard eraser, who used to be Lum's space-elementary school teacher, returns to punish her and her friends for pranks they pulled on him as kids.



Then the last episode on the disc has the characters travel back in time to figure out why one of them is claustrophobic.












...And this is from the preview for the next episode. It is now my civic duty to buy the next volume and see this in full:


I used to prefer the early episodes of the series because I felt they were more pure comedy-oriented, whereas the later ones that I'd seen featured weird attempts at serious drama. Turns out that what I'd seen was unrepresentative of the majority of later episodes. I'm glad I've started watching them now-- I can see why people called these later Mamoru Oshii-directed years of the show its golden age. The early episodes really are a lot cruder compared to these ones, in just about every respect.

One thing I noticed on this volume is that for no particular reason, the show keeps using a version of "Your Mother Should Know," done in the usual primitive-synthesizer style, as background music. I have no idea how they got away with this. I've also heard them use "Magical Mystery Tour" in another episode.


School and a freelance animation job are taking up most of my time at the moment. Apart from those, I'm mostly working on the third Fester Fish cartoon. Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to record the dialogue yet, so the number of shots I can animate at the moment is limited. While doing clean-up and colouring, I've been listening to my new favourite podcast, "Dynamite in the Brain," which is anime-themed and hosted by Brian Smith and Anthony Askew. Brian's blog Awesome Engine is what got me onto this current Urusei Yatsura bent, since he's written reviews for the first two-thirds of the series.

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Mamoru Hosoda's One Piece Movie 6

I haven't seen a lot of One Piece. I think I caught a couple of episodes on TV once, and I know the basics of the show and characters, but I haven't seen anything that really made me want to seek out more. The series has some aspects I like, but they aren't the primary focus and it's too frustrating to see those elements perpetually sidelined for typical shonen fights. However I recently watched the sixth One Piece movie, Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island since it was directed by Mamoru Hosoda. While the story was nothing to write home about, the direction was great and the animation was fun. At times it was almost like a cross between Hosoda's other films and Masaaki Yuasa.

The character designs have been simplified enough that they can easily be animated, much more fully than most anime (including most of the other One Piece animation that I've seen). Compare this shot of the characters as they appear in this movie...

.... To this picture of their designs elsewhere.

I've seen people refer to that usual One Piece art style as "very simple," presumably compared to other anime, but to me it looks just as bogged down in individual hair strands, muscles and fabric wrinkles as almost all anime and manga these days.

Anyway, in this movie they're handled very loosely, and heavily stylized. The exaggerated perspective is probably one of the main things that reminds me of Masaaki Yuasa.


As with lots of anime over the last decade, it does suffer from some incongruous CGI like the giant fish in the above image... Other than this instance, it's mostly just used for moving backgrounds though.

And of course since it's a Mamoru Hosoda film, it's full of wonderful deep compositions and many scenes with nice muted colours.



The original character designs for the movie are also pretty fun:



I have a feeling the story would have had more weight if I were already invested in the characters from having watched the TV series, but even with my limited knowledge and no emotional attachment to them, it was still a pretty fun 100 minutes.

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Some Anime I've Been Watching

I keep meaning to post about various anime shows I've watched over the past few months but I haven't had time until now. So here's a big Frankenstein monster of a post, stitched together from half-written ones from months ago.

I watched Mind Game director Masaaki Yuasa's pilot episode for the series Vampire Kids, or "Nanchatte Vampiyan." His pilot film is much darker than the series itself eventually turned out, both literally and in terms of mood. I love these backgrounds from it. They have a great sense of atmosphere. It would be fun to work on something in this style, with limited pastel colours and distorted perspective.








Yuasa injected some of his usual idiosyncratic style into the film, although it was so early in his career that not all of his recognizable directorial traits were fully in place yet, and most of his input was abandoned when it became a full series. Some of the more extreme character animation, camera movement and non-sequitur gags give his presence away though.

I've also been watching some of Mamoru Hosoda's work. I really like the way he dispenses with shading on the characters. Most modern anime emphasizes heavily shaded, detailed drawings with very little movement, but he does the opposite. It creates a striking, somewhat flat look, contrasted by his extreme (for animation, at least) use of depth in his compositions. And of course it allows the animators to focus more on the action.







Like just about everybody else, I was introduced to Hosoda's work in the 90s, watching Digimon. The single episode of the series that he directed, somewhere around episode 20 I think, had a completely different feel than the rest of the show-- much more low-key and contemplative. And of course, being set in the real world for once, it was much more based in reality.
Watching that episode when it came out (and even more so the two theatrical Digimon films he directed), I was fascinated by seeing these familiar fantasy characters engaged in relatable real-life situations rather than fighting some giant monster-of-the-week, which was starting to bore me even at that age. I particularly liked Hosoda's attention to mundane details, like kids running around their home in their socks rather than shoes. It sounds obvious, but most cartoons don't pay attention to that kind of stuff and I found this very refreshing as a kid.

More recently, I got to see Hosoda's films The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars. Both of them retained what I liked about his earlier work.

I think my favourite work of his is still those two theatrical Digimon films though, maybe just for nostalgic reasons. They were some of the first anime I saw with decent animation, after being used to cheap stuff like Sailor Moon, Pokemon and Dragon Ball (although that one did at least have fun designs early on, before it started to take itself seriously).

Obviously I also like Hayao Miyazaki (because who doesn't?), but I think he's a little over-rated. I could name lots of other anime directors I like just as much as him. I think the main reason for his fame is simply that he's done so many family-friendly films and created an instantly identifiable Studio Ghibli brand. Generally, anime directors only get to do a handful of original films if they're lucky, most of the time being stuck working on existing franchises. Miyazaki did spend a lot of his early career on Lupin III, but because he was there right at the beginning, he was able to put a lot of his own ideas into it. Even today, the Lupin III anime is heavily based on what Miyazaki did with it early on.

Mamoru Oshii is one of those directors who was stuck slaving away on a series for a long time, and it happens to be another one that I like -- Urusei Yatsura. Based on Rumiko Takahashi's first manga series, the anime version was helped immensely by Oshii's presence; he often gave the show a surreal dream-like feel, and brought a sense of depth to the repetitive throwaway plotlines and gags of Takahashi's original comic.



If the show's humor feels a little bit cliched, it's because this is the series that invited most of those anime cliches. It's hard to imagine a time when 'face faults' were unexpected and fresh, but that is literally how influential this series was. Just about every aspect of it was copied in some way. For instance, the female lead Lum's shtick of giving people electric shocks when she's mad was ripped off by the Pokemon anime.

The series never had a chance to become really popular in North America-- it was already pretty old by the time anime started to become popular here, so a lot of people ignored it. Furthermore, a lot of the verbal humour doesn't translate well, because it's full of Japanese wordplay. Probably because of this, there's never been a successful English dub of the series. It would be almost impossible to reproduce the energy of the original vocal performances anyway. Some of the screaming on this show is hilarious-- sometimes louder really is funnier.

...Anyway, Mamoru Oshii's contributions to the show were summed up perfectly by his final work on it, Urusei Yatsura Movie 2: Beautiful Dreamer. He provided the original story for the film, and was thus finally able to delve completely into what he found compelling in the series. The result was an unusually quiet, atmospheric film in which the characters find themselves caught repeating the same day... nine years before Groundhog Day!



As a longtime fan of the series, it was interesting to see the characters thrown into a more somber, lyrical story. Later on, Oshii became better-known as the director of Ghost in the Shell, which is a pretty amazing movie, but I prefer his lighter, earlier work.

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