Media Diary: Utena Interlude

Here's some more stuff I did instead of screencapping Utena.


Star Driver has some of Utena's campy charm, but inherited almost none of its strengths and actually managed to worsen its flaws. Takuto is an even more one-dimensional and boringly invincible protagonist than Utena: once you get used to the Zero Time set design the fights stop being interesting to look at, and his constant victories feel completely unearned. Forget physical danger, he's never even in emotional jeopardy. The supporting cast can't pick up his slack either, there are so many characters fighting for screen time that people vanish for long stretches of the show, or get written out entirely if they threaten to become too interesting. Sugata in particular is just criminally underwritten, which actually totally sabotages the ending.


I enjoyed the pirouetting robot kiss through the glass goofiness for a good long while, but the show lost all goodwill during the final stretch, when it went into serious business mode without bothering to build to a climax or shed any light on the cryptic backstory or jargon, and actively going out of their way to avoid having a final villain with any kind of dramatic weight. You can't expect me to care about characters you forgot to characterize, guys. This show plays out like a first draft, and I got annoyed watching it just flounder around bungling basic story beats until we hit episode 24 with characters and plot that'd barely progressed since episode 4. I was fine with Star Driver not having a brain, but it turned out to not have a soul either. I expected better.



On the other hand, I had much lower expectations of Afterschool Nightmare, and ended up pleasantly surprised; I can see why this was a darling of the manga-friendly comics blogosphere. This one also brought Utena strongly to mind, with its highly symbolic fight scenes, deeply damaged characters, and sex & gender fluidity; the main character is intersexed, and the center of a love triangle between a boy and girl attracted to opposite sides of his/her nature. It also shares one of Utena's primary flaws, in that the protagonist is the least interesting character in the entire story. I like Utena herself fine, but Mashiro here is really more interesting as a piece of symbolism than a protagonist.

I want to kind of damn this with faint praise; the story tends to stay within the bounds of heart-tugging shoujo melodrama, but manages the occasional genuinely nasty moment. Similarly, the art is not especially great on the whole, which makes the more imaginative visuals all the more striking. So overall, there were just enough interesting bits to keep me reading through to the end, which is where Mizushiro really steps up her game, and manages to explain just what the hell was going on in a way that makes perfect sense of everything. Afterschool Nightmare isn't going to be one of my all-time favorites, but it does have that special something that keeps it on my mind, even if I'm not entirely sure why. Check it out.

Dororon Enma-kun

When I saw the names Go Nagai and Yoshihiro Yonetani together, I figured they'd produce something absolutely batshit.
Was not disappointed.

I'd seen the recent Enma-kun OAV, which was a fairly disastrous attempt to gritty up the property; Yonetani, naturally, embraces Go Nagai's penchant for cringe-worthy humor with such gusto that I found it hard not to laugh, even when the heroine is doing a pee dance, or the old lady at the sento is swinging her tits around. And the monster of the week spawning a giant metal cock for Enma to sword fight is pretty much awesome by any standard.
Objectively, this is not at all a good show, but the unique energies of these two madmen seem to feed off each other fairly well; if the opening above gets you wet, then FUCK, watch it.

We also checked out the first episode of Tiger and Bunny, which was fun; let's hope they don't hit the workaholic dad has no time for his kid cliche too hard, because the corporate sponsored heroes working for points on a reality TV show premise is working for me better than I expected.

Media Diary, "Reminded of Better Shows" Edition

Not much I've seen lately excites me enough to muster a real post, but let's do a quick rundown to keep the blog from getting any dustier.


Peacock King (aka Spirit Warrior) is far duller than you'd expect from a show where Neo-Nazi black magic cultists discover they are actually robots with false memories of being human. Possibly because at least half of the first episode is wasted on tedious mumbo jumbo made up mysticism plot exposition, and then episode two slams through about 3-4 episodes' worth of plot and apparently ends with the hero sacrificing himself to restore world peace. You would wonder how there can possibly be another three episodes, and the answer is "by pretending the first two never happened and starting over, with a lower budget." Overall, I'd say any jones for watching Rintaro-directed magic dudes blowing shit up would be better satisfied by X, even the hilariously abridged movie version.


I was hoping STRAIN might be entertainingly bizarre thanks to the "vaguely based on A Little Princess" thing, but it ended up as yet another smoking wreck of wasted potential. All the ingredients for a decent show are here, but that show is called Gunbuster. I did think GB was a bit rushed at 6 episodes, but Strain spends most of its 13 just spinning its wheels; the situation and character dynamics are set into place fairly early on, and the show basically wraps up the way you think it will. On top of that, the nasty GONZOish CGI mecha ruined the fight scenes for me, and the interstellar telepathic hivemind of naked little girls makes me want to bang my face into a desk forever. It is also probably not a good idea to name your main antagonist "Ralph" if you want to give him any gravitas at all. I kind of respect the show's perverse commitment to making the heroine completely PTSD and unlikeable, and the blank-eyed doll constantly staring at her during the space battles is sort of hilariously creepy, but on the whole this is a very skippable series.

Geobreeders is sadly not as good as I remember it being. The characters are still pleasantly eccentric, but the run-and-gun-and-explode action is only OK (and they sort of forgot to put any in the sequel). Perhaps my bar for breakneck setpiece silliness has been raised since the '90s.

Evangelion is awesome as always, glad I waited to see 2.22 on blu-ray, blah blah blah. At this point there's just not much left to say about Eva that hasn't been rehashed over and over since 1995. I am a little annoyed that people are praising this movie as an unprecedented emotional lightening of the series and not remembering that its happy characters and awesome robot fights were pretty much all already in the TV episodes it's riffing on (admittedly with a lower budget, but still pretty great-looking), but that's nothing new either. I do wonder what Mari's deal is, but there's just not much to go on; she barely appears in the movie, and most of her scenes rehash things Asuka or Kaji did originally. I suspect she may be some kind of subtle taunt to the Shinji-haters, since she's pretty much his direct opposite but her hot-blooded piloting style fails completely (and in ways that directly reference two of Asuka's notable failures).


Actually, I probably can get a whole post out of Key the Metal Idol, I mainly just wanted to post these screengrabs while I still thought they were funny. It is a pleasing strain of David Lynchian crazy, even if JP Meyer hated it. Just watch out for all the talking in that first movie.

Alien vs Ninja

Exhausted after work, beer in hand, browsing Netflix for something crap to watch, I found this. Wasn't expecting much -- was pretty sure Joe had actually given it a negative review here a few months back -- but man did it ever entertain.
Particularly the Japanese Sean Bean.

Not a good movie -- all scenes with talking are so bad they're funny again, and the dub actors not being able to decide if the lead chin beard is Yamada or Yamata just adds to the 'fun' -- but the action scenes are all pretty fucking great. Very much hits that sweet spot of stunt actors in the woods with props made of tinfoil making the movie they always fucking wanted to be working on. As much as I'm looking forward to it I doubt Sucker Punch will contain anything as gleefully over the top as the bit where the token girl ninja fist fights the alien with tin foil gauntlets.

Kabukimonogatari

Mayoi Kyonshi.
So, Hachikuji Mayoi on the cover.
Um.
One would expect she might be in it, right?
NOPE.
I was honestly wondering if they'd swapped manuscripts with Shinobu Time somehow. After all, 99% of this book is Araragi and Shinobu fucking around with time travel.
For the glorious reason that he has not done his summer homework, Araragi and Shinobu travel back in time.
And try to stop Mayoi's death.
And return to the present to discover the world has been destroyed by a zombie apocalypse.
It was about this point that I realized I have absolutely no fucking clue where the book was going, and began to enjoy it quite a bit. He pulls a genuinely great ending out of his ass, too. I won't say the first half wasn't meandering and pedoriffic, but if he could just focus a little, I'm pretty sure Nisio could still write some genuinely great books.

An amazing turnaround, but still too little too late

So I was watching Alien vs Ninja, and not even planning to post about it since it was so
mediocre, and then all of a sudden this happened.


So yeah, unless you've already gone through all the Nishimura and Iguchi you can I wouldn't recommend seeking this out, but if you do, definitely just skip ahead to about the 56-minute mark. I am interested in seeing if Seiji Chiba can make a flick that's ninety minutes of buried-the-needle stupid/awesome instead of 30, though.

Actually, the very best thing on this disc was seeing a trailer for Mutant Girls Squad, so hurray for a hopefully speedy release.

Nominated for the 2011 Gendou Ikari Memorial Excellence In Parenting Award

Out Of Context Theater Presents

From the first volume of sexy pseudomedical thriller Ray.

Setsu

Kiba Kouichi is something of a legend in my mind, and it was not too long ago I was writing about how sad it was that a talent like his had vanished into the wasteland of the unappreciated and unemployed. But it turns out he did have a job at last, serializing this Olympic Gold Medalist track star becomes a cop manga.
So, um, yeah. It's not particularly memorable, sadly. Something I never really thought I'd say about a Kiba manga. It very much feels like him playing it safe, and trying to get something just mainstream enough to not get canceled. As far as I know it still hasn't been, so yay? The premise is decent enough, and he certainly has the artistic dynamism to sell her breaking into a run. But the first three stories feel like really cookie cutter cop plots with only a couple of oddball notes added in. The moments of forced comedy tend to undo whatever hope the weird moments create.
The only thing that keeps me buying the second volume is the fourth story, which features a seriously amazing moment where a smarmy politician's son (the mythical type of politician's son that the police can't even attempt to arrest even when he's running over policemen in the streets for shits and giggles) puts his arm around her and she projectile vomits in his face. In a two page spread. I can't say this was a moment for the ages, but at least it didn't feel like something any other manga artist could have done.

Ben Tou

Late in the evening, supermarkets across Japan reluctantly mark unsold bento down to half price. The moment that discount sticker goes on, an army of hungry, penniless students descends, battling fiercely for the glory of a cheap meal.
As the ludicrous premise suggests, Ben Tou is primarily a comedy, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it neatly avoided a lot of light novel comedy traps. The author's note suggested he'd never tried his hand at comedy writing before, so the more dramatic scenes have a nicely understated naturalism to them, a more effective yang to the comedy yin than the usual overwrought melodrama (see Kore wa Zombie desu ka, which shits itself to hell the moment they stop with the jokes.)
This is a book where the male lead is neither a sarcastic Kyon clone or a personality free stand in for the reader to project his fantasies on. He's certainly a wise ass, but always motivated by an excess of enthusiasm. He describes the onigiri he's eating as "A classic Yamato Nadesico, her black seaweed underwear peeping out from under her sexy cellophane clothing." He makes a reference another character misses, and comments, "Oh -- she'd never read Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. She was missing out on 30% of the joy in life." Every attempt at thinking hard results in lengthy tangents about his father's retro gaming hobby, horrible things he did to a classmate in junior high, or completely non sequitors like his impromptu desire to become a true jazzman.
The three other major characters are all girls, of course; and each of them initially seems like a standard light novel type. First impressions tend to be misleading here. I'm not sure the violent (possibly lesbian) student council president ever developed into anything believable, but the narrators inability to resist gleefully pushing her buttons was much more relatable than the standard "accidental" misunderstandings. The cover girl is introduced as a tsundere, but quickly sidesteps either half of the term and becomes an altogether more likable mentor figure. The third girl ended up being the most entertaining of the three; she initially seems like a standard doormat, shy, totally insecure, and stammering a lot. Then she approaches the bento battles by role playing as a macho cop. Then they find "Muscle Cop", the hard core yaoi rape novels she's writing based on each battle. And the reactions to that are just different enough from what I've come to expect that I wound up impressed despite myself.
Ben Tou stumbles a little in the final act -- in search of an ending, he winds up setting up a choice so obvious the main character's hesitation just makes him seem embarrassingly dense -- but I came away feeling like this is the next big thing. Hopefully it'll get an anime that understands the material.

Mamoru Oshii Bores Again

So there are these four people who play an MMO about shooting sandworms in the desert, right? And one day a game master suggests they should team up to take out the boss of the zone. So they think about it for a while, and eventually they do.

That's it. That is everything that happens in Assault Girls. It loses nothing in the telling.


I just don't understand this movie at all. I don't understand why it was made, or what Oshii meant to convey. It's not exciting and it's not interesting. I don't understand why it seems to be in continuity with Avalon, and I don't understand why 90% of the dialogue is in Engrish. I especially don't understand how this failed to make the movie more entertaining.

This movie is barely an hour long, and had to be padded out with pointless, wordless desert montages and glamour shots of snails to get there. Also, no basset hound present, but there is an Akita, and a surprise cameo by Sontoku Ninomiya. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Reading list

With my lengthy bus commute giving me tons of time to read but no time at home I'm not exactly up for full reviews of anything these days. Time to bust out the media diary format again.

Town of the Noisy Dead
Sequel to Gentle Purgatory, a collection of mystery short stories by the author of Crest of the Stars, set in a virtual reality populated by the backed up memories of dead people. While Morioka seems quite keen on the idea of the world itself changing significantly between each story -- crime is made possible in the latest patch just before the beginning of this volume -- and he adds a new character halfway through in a game attempt to compensate for the lead's total lack of personality, ultimately this series just isn't particularly memorable.

Labyrinthine Linkage of Maze-Prison
I'm on a bit of a Kadono kick now (already onto Repent Walpurgis 3) and this is the third book in his Soul Drop series, about a pair of insurance investigators (one a robot) on the trail of a mysterious killer who steals utterly insignificant items that happen to be more valuable than life itself to their owners. I continue to be surprise that having a robot detective is not the selling point but merely an extra bit of nifty in stories that are already extremely compelling on their own. This one involves the ghost of a prisoner helping a young runaway run a con job on the insurance company and two branches of the rich and powerful family backing the insurance company.

Dulalala x8
An extremely satisfying book considering it failed to resolve even the actual plot of the volume, and seemed to be trying for some sort of record as far as setting up entirely new plot threads to carry the series forward forever. Narita is going to die without wrapping up a single series.

I'm also watching anime again this season. Largely Guder's influence.
Gosick
I have a vested interest in this, having translated the first two novels. There are some books that just can't be made into a TV series, and I'm not sure this is one of them, but the anime staff certainly didn't figure out how to do it at all. The pacing is just a mess, and none of the beats are given room to play out properly. Shame, since the actress playing Victorique seems to have landed perfectly on the fine line between Victorique's character and what anyone would actually want to hear that design sound like. I assumed the first episode was rushed to get to the meat of it. With the second episode I can only assume they're doing some sort of Cliff Notes version of the story. Can't recommend.

Madoka Magika
The first episode proved way more entertaining than I'd have expected. Something about the way she woke up from the opening nightmare made me crack a joke about how it was her brain dealing with the trauma of sexual abuse. The actual fights with witches are then accompanied by imagery more commonly associated with psychotic breaks than magical girls, as if Terry Gilliam had taken hostages in the Shaft control room and insisted on animated half each episode himself. I suspect in the long run it will just be a decently written show in a genre I'm not big on, and I'll be skipping ahead for the witches.

Level E
I'd read and liked the manga, but also totally forgotten it, so this was a pleasantly awesome surprise. Far and away the best show this season.

Fractale
I had some hopes for a Noitamina original sci-fi show from the director of Haruhi so why was the first episode one cringe worthy characterization cliche after another? I gave up halfway, convinced Noitamina has completely lost their way.

Kore wa Zombie desu ka?
This is not, by any means, a good show. One could even call it a text book case of everything wrong with anime (or at least a collection of the symbols of what is wrong with anime, rather than the actual problems seen in shit like Fractale) but somehow it manages just enough laughs to keep me watching. Second episode far less successful but the breakdancing bit was still the hardest I've laughed in a while.

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva
Anyone who's played the games knows they've managed some impressive writing and animation, but I didn't expect them to hit the same levels in a 98 minute feature film. But the result was pretty fucking great. Some nice nods to the games, particularly musically (hearing the title screen music segue to a full orchestral surround sound version was particularly bad ass) and the climax features Layton engaged in a sword fight on top of a giant robot while solving a puzzle. I think this could actually be a cross over hit if someone positioned it correctly; particularly lined up with the fourth game's release (which they haven't even announced yet, so...)

The Devil Asks 100 Questions

Virtually all of Kadono Kouhei's books have had a healthy dose of philosophical meandering buried somewhere between the supernatural stuff. It was only natural he'd eventually find the time to explore that side of his writing in a little more depth, but I'm a little bit shocked how well the book turned out.
Kuzuha Momiji becomes internet famous for basically no reason -- her corrupt businesswoman mother is being hounded by the press after a particularly splashy failure, and Momiji happens to snap at the reports on live television. Shortly after, her mother comes to her with an offer -- they've got the best fixer in the business ready to bail her out, but only if Momiji agrees to talk to him. A man they all call The Devil -- Shaman Simpleheart. Who never once speaks to Momiji, or even seems aware that she is there. All interactions she has with The Devil are through a marionette named Hazure-kun -- a marionette who it is increasingly hard to believe is really being controlled by the man.
Hazure-kun insists he doesn't want to talk to her at all. He's being forced to do so by his masters. He doesn't expect much out of her, really; he just wants her to be stupid, to be the kind of useful idiot who can ask a simple question that inadvertently leads a genius like him to a breakthrough that can change the course of human history. For the rest of the book, he peppers her with questions -- one hundred in all, helpfully laid out for us in the table of contents -- and she tries to answer some of them, is utterly baffled by others, and angrily ignores even more. Sure, occasionally buildings catch fire, drug dealers are beaten half to death, and Momiji accidentally stops a madman from turning a wedding into a bloodbath, catapulting herself from internet famous to actually appearing on TV regularly, and a few guest characters from other Kadono series pop in to make the ending totally batshit for anyone who read this book first, but the core of the book is two people attempting to discuss the nature of the universe, and more often than not failing to understand a thing the other says. Yet this is somehow fascinating.
It's easy to talk about the slightly off-kilter sensibilities that make Kadono such a unique writer; occasionally it's nice to be reminded that there's quite a bit of craft supporting that.

Guardian of a God/Nekomonogatari

Double volume double review time.
The fifth and sixth volumes in the Moribito series, Kami no Moribito sort of flips the first novel, with Balsa looking after a girl possessed by a spirit that actually is evil, and pursued by people who want to kill the kid for it. While the Balsa bits were as gripping as ever, the cut-aways to the court brought the novel to a screeching halt and it wound up not really justifying the double length...and she never quite conquered the been there, done that feeling revisiting her earlier storyline brought. This isn't to say the books aren't pretty damn good anyway; they're only disappointing in light of what she'd accomplished before this.
Nekomonogatari may be more of a test of Nisio Isin's powers than additional volumes prompted by the blinding success of the anime really should have been; Nisemonogatari, while fun, was significantly less substantial than the first three books, and the more he insisted he was just having fun with them the more they felt like a cheap cash in. Nekomonogatari Black, like Kizumonogatari, is a prequel, revealing the events of Hanekawa's first encounter with the cat over Golden Week -- which have been hinted at from like, page five of the original novel. So you'd think he'd have had more of a plan.
Nekomonogatari Black is sort of a trainwreck, though; the entire first third of the book is wacky comedy hijinks with Araragi and his sister discussing the pros and cons of different underwear colors; it has its moments, and Araragi's attempts to figure out if he was actually in love with Hanekawa were the one moment in this volume that felt genuine. Once Hanekawa herself shows up things just fall apart completely. Nisio clearly decided he'd run out of things to say about her, and decided to get meta and explode the doormat archetype. This leads to a somewhat unconvincing series of tiresome speeches about how her perfect niceness is actually deeply terrifying, instead of merely really dull. The spectacular ending, where Araragi wins by hiding a fucking sword inside his own body so she cuts herself when she chops him in half, almost redeems it, but it's objectively the weakest book in the series.
So I started Nekomonogatari White with fear in my heart, but the first damn line proved singularly reassuring -- Hanekawa narrates. By moving things away from Araragi's increasingly cartoonish point of view, he manages to make Hanekawa into a real character again, and actually SHOW us all the things he was vainly trying to tell us in Black. He very smoothly fleshes out her character in ways we haven't seen, and then makes the plot of the book hang on her finally coming to terms with her own fractured personality. Having this narrative happen at the same time as the next few books in the series while cheerily omitting several dozen chapter numbers that cover events from those books is a neat conceit; hopefully he hasn't written himself into a corner. Having a decent chunk of the book narrated by the fucking cat was definitely on the painful side (meow) and Hanekawa's baffling decision to write a twenty page letter of rambling exposition right when the story seems ready to take off was definitely him showing the weaker side of his style, but for making me like the least interesting character in the series again, and for totally nailing the ending, I wound up really happy with White, and extremely hopeful for the remaining five books.

Gosick trailer released

So a trailer for Gosick has been released on the webbertubes:



It... kinda makes it look like boring crap. I hear Gosick's supposed to be great, though. Andrew had lots of good things to say about it, so maybe he can predict whether the trailer just sucks (like most Japanese trailers do) or if the anime seems to be missing the point.

Stabbing, shooting, and carving turkeys

Welcome to Round Two of Funimation x Yoshihiro Nishimura, this time reunited with Machine Girl director Noboru Iguchi to tell a story of arts, dance, tengu ninja squads, cybernetic sibling rivalry, and buildings full of blood.



(I love that they used part of the temp voiceover on the title drop)

Like most of their movies, RoboGeisha is kind of review-proof; you probably know if you're in the target audience after seeing the trailer, although it is worth noting it's much less malevolently warped than other Nishimura posse joints. This is a definitely a camp comedy with oddball special effects, as opposed to a full-on fake-blood extravaganza, and the over-the-top inane dialogue is usually as or more bizarre than the SFX work.


I admit I was hoping for another full-on brain-buster like Tokyo Gore Police, but taken on its own merits RoboGeisha's Inspector Gadget vs Terminator vibe is fun too, and I think stronger overall than Vampire Girl, or at least odder, which is really what I'm looking for. Joe Bob says check it out.

(though if you are are looking for something that will befuddle and revolt you, I recommend Bad Biology.)

Several Layers of: Wait - What?

Apparently Battle Royale is getting a 3D make-over for it's 10th anniversary, and it's finally being licensed for the US.

It hadn't been released already? Even the book came out here.

3D? Really? How is after-market 3D going to be anything other than an excuse for a re-release?

And holy shit, it's been 10 years already? Insane. I still remember how excited we all were when we first saw the original movie. It really was incredible...

Now I just feel old.

Twitch Film

Revenge of the filler post

Ugh.

Another luscious-looking film from Makoto Shinkai

Makoto Shinkai (of Voices of a Distant Star and Place Promised in Our Early Days fame) has a new film coming out and a trailer's been released:


As expected, Hoshi o Ou Kodomo (Children Who Chase Lost Voices from Deep Below) looks gorgeous. The backgrounds and environments are alway stunning on his projects.

He's also a master of atmosphere, but can sometimes be a bit lacking in an actual plot. The trailer hints are more action than is typical for his work, and the character designs seem much more polished, moving past his sometimes-charming amateurish style.

I'm hoping that suggests this one will be a bit more of a complete package, instead of just an incredible and immersive atmosphere with a very thin story.

Anime News Network : YouTube

Raging Phoenix

Most of us here were pretty big fans of Chocolate, so the second starring vehicle for that actress (they should really settle on a name for her one of these days) has been on our radar for a while.
This is very much a movie of two halves. The first half is a highly entertaining plotless drunken capioera/break-dancing kung fu show reel, and the second half is the most embarrassing implosion into nightmarish suck since Dog Bite Dog.
They had a good thing going with the minimalist plot; after being targeted by kidnappers, a girl reinvents her ruin of a life by joining forces with a group of drunken fu dancers who are out for revenge. Had enough of a character arc on her to make us buy in; a touch of comedy, a touch of backstory for the guys, and a lot of really entertaining fighting.
Then the plot demons set in, and it turns out some women give off a pheromone so powerful it makes people obsessed with sex and the kidnappers have sniffers on the street to target women with this pheromone so they can make them really sad and harvest their tears to turn into perfume. Sex perfume.
Not content with jumping the shark the movie then gets eaten by the shark, in a dizzying whirlwind of CG brick slides, sets from National Treasure that make no sense and don't even work well as settings for increasingly boring and incomprehensible fu fights, and a villain doing her best Grace Jones imitation, in tights that make it painfully obvious when her stuntmen take hits for her.
At one point during the meltdown I yelled, "Fuck you, Thailand" at the screen, and meant it. Fuckers didn't even have the courtesy to include a god damn outtake reel.