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Anime
Nov 25, 2018 18:05:05 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by Zarnium on Nov 25, 2018 18:05:05 GMT -8
Started watching Texhnolyze. So far, my impression is mostly just that the opening theme music sounds like the title screen music for Vectorman on the Sega Genesis.
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Anime
Dec 3, 2018 18:24:33 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Dec 3, 2018 18:24:33 GMT -8
I will report back with my findings, but one show that has wound up on my radar is Gaikotsu Shotenin Honda-san. It's about the misadventures of an enthusiastic clerk in a bookstore's manga department, Honda-san, who is also a skeleton.
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Anime
Dec 25, 2018 12:00:43 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Dec 25, 2018 12:00:43 GMT -8
Merry Christmas from Azumanga Daioh and specifically Chiyo's dad
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Anime
Dec 27, 2018 8:46:52 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by Zarnium on Dec 27, 2018 8:46:52 GMT -8
Finished Texhnolyze. It was pretty good, a very cerebral, thematically-driven show that does "show, don't tell" very well. These sorts of cyberpunk/transhumanist stories can easily veer into being too esoteric and inscrutable for their own good, but Texhnolyze avoids this by being pretty simple, plotwise, and conveying emotion and character interaction very well without any unexplained plot elements getting in the way. Compare to Ergo Proxy, which is very confusing because it's not clear how the characters are supposed to relate to the world they live in or how it affects them.
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Anime
Dec 27, 2018 11:07:03 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Dec 27, 2018 11:07:03 GMT -8
Hmmmm. Well I was tempted at the mention of Vectorman but I'm willing to give it a shot now. I like those types of narratives-- I think that Ghost in the Shell as an anime series usually handled them well (less so the original movie)-- but I feel like there's a substantial risk that it drifts into a preachy version of the "what if I put my brain inside a robot body?" episode of Sealab 2021 and I find the philosophy more interesting than the agenda, which seems specious to me.
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Anime
Jan 7, 2019 16:19:15 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Jan 7, 2019 16:19:15 GMT -8
Not sure if you guys want to shift to a 2019 thread, but I'll just pop in to say I watched My Neighbors the Yamadas. I get where Guttersnipe is coming from in comparing it to Tracey Ullman-era Simpsons shorts; the film is crudely animated, featuring a series of only vaguely connected vignettes with consistently acerbic humor. (The English dub has even more Simpsons DNA, with Tress MacNeille doing a pitch-perfect replay of her Agnes Skinner.)
Note that when I call the animation "crude," it's not meant as an insult - the unfinished lines and light watercolors can be quite fun to look at. (I got an Ernest and Celestine vibe from the film's visual composition, although that film boasts more detailed animation overall.) The character's mouth movements are particularly fun to watch, as they're allowed to be wild and expressive without going full Looney Tunes.
This does get a little tiresome at points, though. As with a lot of Japanese comedy, the film seems to exaggerate its characters' expressions to the point of distraction. And some funny lines are hurt by over-the-top visual responses, which seem inserted to ensure that the audience Gets The Joke. (There's also a pointless and overlong fantasy sequence near the end of the movie that really tried my patience.)
Still, a charming film, and definitely not what I expected from Studio Ghibli.
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Anime
Jan 28, 2019 20:28:20 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Jan 28, 2019 20:28:20 GMT -8
As I'm writing this, When Marnie Was There is the most recent Studio Ghibli film released to the public. (It premiered theatrically in 2014.) And I'm really hoping it's not SG's curtain call, because (despite the gorgeous-as-usual animation) this is kind of an unspectacular note to end things on.
The underlying problem isn't that there's very little going on in this movie - although, suffice to say, there is very little going on in this movie. No, the issue is more that the film's central relationship - between two lonely 12-year-old girls who happily befriend one another - isn't communicated all that clearly. Sometimes it seems like the film wants to explore the bonds of childhood friendship; other times, it... seems to depict a story of young gay love?
I'm not making a conscious effort to read subtext here. I genuinely spent half the movie thinking - due to the way these girls act and talk about one another - that the story was building to some kind of "forbidden romance" climax. (One of them gets jealous when she sees the other chatting with a cute boy. How else was I supposed to read that?) But as it turns out... nope. The Japanese just apparently have a really intimate respect for friendship. Wow. I can't remember the last time I misread a film so badly.
Anyway, beyond my personal embarrassment, Marnie is.. okay. It's a sweet film with good voice-work (Hailee Steinfeld and Kiernan Shipka play off each other well) that piles on way too much pathos in its last 10 minutes, and its final twist is both predictable and kind of silly. A merely decent film from a better-than-decent studio.
Cripes, I still can't believe what an idiot I am.
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Anime
Mar 9, 2019 9:58:17 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Mar 9, 2019 9:58:17 GMT -8
Relevant to interests around here, but MAL sent me a notification that Psycho-Pass 3 has been announced, they just don't know when. Lots of directions they could go with it, but mainly I'm hoping that the villain isn't feeding babies to mutated puppies this time around.
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Anime
Mar 9, 2019 14:11:34 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by Zarnium on Mar 9, 2019 14:11:34 GMT -8
I lost track of the series after season 2 continued practically none of the plot threads from season 1. There is a movie that involves Kogami that I haven't seen, though.
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Anime
Mar 23, 2019 22:13:57 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Mar 23, 2019 22:13:57 GMT -8
I've decided to pick up Dororo, which is currently streaming on Amazon Prime after it airs in Japan / is subbed. The premise is weird enough: Warring States era Japan, a feudal lord makes a deal with a dozen demons (48 in the original manga) to grant him power to rule over his region, in exchange taking the same number of parts from his infant child's body. The child is set adrift and found by a shaman who is able to restore some functionality via prostheses and the child grows up to be a samurai on the hunt for the demons that stole his body. Also his sidekick is a young orphaned thief named Dororo. Yeah. The series isn't even titled after the one you'd think is the central character.
So, perhaps the oddest feature of it (what, you're still reading?) is that this isn't new material but in fact a second adaptation of an anime series released FIFTY years ago as an adaptation of a manga by Osamu Tezuka. I had to look it up because I'm not the best at retaining Japanese names, but Tezuka? Same dude who gave us: Astro Boy, Black Jack, and Kimba the White Lion, which some argue was ripped off by Disney to create The Lion King. The new adaptation doesn't have Tezuka's iconic style because .... honestly I don't know how it would have matched so gruesome a premise to begin with, but there are enough WTFs just reading about the series and who created it that I feel like it could be a valuable cultural history thing, and besides, I haven't picked up a new anime without a corresponding manga I've been reading in ages.
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Anime
Mar 25, 2019 3:04:46 GMT -8
Post by guttersnipe on Mar 25, 2019 3:04:46 GMT -8
Not sure if you guys want to shift to a 2019 thread, but I'll just pop in to say I watched My Neighbors the Yamadas. I get where Guttersnipe is coming from in comparing it to Tracey Ullman-era Simpsons shorts; the film is crudely animated, featuring a series of only vaguely connected vignettes with consistently acerbic humor. (The English dub has even more Simpsons DNA, with Tress MacNeille doing a pitch-perfect replay of her Agnes Skinner.) Note that when I call the animation "crude," it's not meant as an insult - the unfinished lines and light watercolors can be quite fun to look at. (I got an Ernest and Celestine vibe from the film's visual composition, although that film boasts more detailed animation overall.) The character's mouth movements are particularly fun to watch, as they're allowed to be wild and expressive without going full Looney Tunes. This does get a little tiresome at points, though. As with a lot of Japanese comedy, the film seems to exaggerate its characters' expressions to the point of distraction. And some funny lines are hurt by over-the-top visual responses, which seem inserted to ensure that the audience Gets The Joke. (There's also a pointless and overlong fantasy sequence near the end of the movie that really tried my patience.) Still, a charming film, and definitely not what I expected from Studio Ghibli. Oh man, I've really got to drop in here more often. I agree that it does strain slighty given its structure, or lack thereof - it's based on a yonkoma (four-panel) manga series which obviously doesn't lend itself terribly well to feature-length. Indeed, it's perhaps telling that it was later adapted into a TV series which is probably better suited to reimagining what are essentially vignettes. Beyond its un-Ghibliness, its watercolours are notable for pre-empting the kind of animation style later used for Takahata's swansong The Tale of Princess Kaguya (actually his only major subsequent work) and for its cultural touchstones (Hokusai woodblocks, finding their child in a bamboo shoot (also an aspect of the source material for Kaguya) and Moonlight Mask), which actually render it somewhat esoteric for Western audiences in spite of the Peanuts and Ullmann-Simpsons parallels.
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Anime
Mar 25, 2019 15:00:23 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Mar 25, 2019 15:00:23 GMT -8
Wait, there's a TV series? Haven't heard that (and can't seem to find any info on it).
I'll get to Princess Kaguya soon, although... 137 minutes? It may be be the longest animated film I can think of.
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Anime
Mar 27, 2019 13:13:31 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Mar 27, 2019 13:13:31 GMT -8
Pop Team Epic capitalizes on a rather traditional comedy formula of there is The Short, Angry One (Popuko) and there is The Tall, Stoic One (Pipimi) and together they get into Situations. Everything else is... somewhat off the grid. It's not entry-level anime, but unlike series like FLCL, Monogatari, or Pani Poni Dash!, the mode is more to do one-off skits where the main characters, sometimes self-aware but often not, find themselves within the trope template of another form of anime, manga, or video game, and it sometimes requires a bit of back knowledge to figure out what's going on to begin with. The manic nature of the show is somewhat encapsulated in its chirpy, electronic intro...
... but even this doesn't quite prepare you, nor is it intended to. In fact, the first episode's intro isn't a traditional OP at all, but instead a fake-out for an undeveloped (or underdeveloped) series that revolves around the anime cliche of someone secretly being a pop idol, a series which nevertheless has false episode previews rounding out each string of credits and is perpetually threatening to become real. At the same time, you have a feature uncharacteristic of most parody shows. You get the sense that the creators actually love the material they're lampooning, predictable as it is. This isn't a scoffing that you get out of western animated sitcoms like Family Guy or South Park, where other media are ridiculed and felt to deserve that ire. Bkub (the creator) is observant of the flaws, but also playful about them.
It's hard to locate any one skit as being representative. Surely, there are a bunch of longer ones at the start of every episode. A few favorites: One features the oh-so-Japanese bit of younger high school girl falling in love with senpai with the twist of her father being newly remarried. Well, it being a PTE sketch, her "father" is Pipimi with a poorly-drawn goatee and her new stepmother is Popuko, who also happens to be the mother of the beloved senpai. The two straight characters play their parts and meanwhile Pipimi and Popuko waste all their money in pachinko parlors, put on bizarre puppet shows outside the window while their children are trying to study, and gundam dance while they're trying to sleep. Another favorite was an episode where Pipimi claimed to be daydreaming of a fictional rock star (Hellshake Yano!), only to have the next episode be a feature on the same fictional rockstar, which is something I don't think I've seen since early Upright Citizens Brigade. Better yet, the animation on the rock concert is entirely done on flip-over paper panels with two men in lab coats acting out and voicing the parts as they choreograph the imagery.
Sketch comedy inherently has its ups and downs. It's hard to consistently put together good ones no matter how weird you're trying to be. If I'm pointing to flaws, there's a recurring one that comes up almost twice per episode called "Bob Epic Team" where the characters are very poorly voiced and animated on purpose and the intent is more to unsettle than to amuse. Sometimes it becomes funny, but others it slips into an unintentional anti-comedy. There's also the quirk of the formatting which is that each full-length episode is two halves where the same scenes are replayed with different voice actors and improvisations. It's not bad as such as there's added comedy from one or both of the girls suddenly performing the same script in a deep masculine voice, but otherwise you're waiting on the improv to switch up and little else kills comedy like repetition of its successes.
PTE is ultimately a master's class in the genre and definitely not for beginners, but when it gets to you, it hits hard and there's no possible way of explaining to anyone else why you're laughing as much as you are.
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Anime
Apr 6, 2019 4:14:08 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by guttersnipe on Apr 6, 2019 4:14:08 GMT -8
Wait, there's a TV series? Haven't heard that (and can't seem to find any info on it). I'll get to Princess Kaguya soon, although... 137 minutes? It may be be the longest animated film I can think of. I doubt it ever found sufficient audience for export; I'd only heard of it myself thanks to an aside in a Ghibli book a friend bought me many years ago. And I don't believe I've ever really thought about it before, but it turns out Kaguya is the longest animated film I've seen, too (Final Yamato is apparently the longest ever). For me this gets a bit confusing because way back in the day the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) often showed anime miniseries like Cyber City Oedo 808 in a single evening without clear episode breaks, suggesting they were, in fact, movies.
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Anime
Nov 30, 2019 18:44:24 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Nov 30, 2019 18:44:24 GMT -8
I'll blame Snowpiercer partly for this, but I felt compelled to revisit a not-so-amazing media choice of my past in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress, this time watching the movie, The Battle of Unato. The premise here, as in the series, is that there's a virus in the industrial era that turns people into bloodthirstty monsters with iron-hard skin and glowing molten hearts. Humanity's remnants are either in fortresses or on moving fortified trains that transport goods and people between safe zones, with no surefire means of defeating their enemies until around the start of the series. Since the protagonists are partly these monsters themselves, an ungenerous comparison might be "This is a steampunk, zombie apocalypse version of Tokyo Ghoul." I'm not sure how much generosity the series deserves, honestly.
When I first watched it, I think one of my complaints was that it was too self-conscious of becoming a franchise. The production values were high (good animation and music), the character designs passable, the concept interesting, but the characters were only typical and the plotting not especially strong, with many events happening for maximum impact. Also everyone wants to be in a relationship with everyone else so, drama. The foes are strong enough to be terrifying, but much of that horror is dissipated by multiple of the good guys being able to slice and dice their way through and look cool doing it. What you're ultimately left with is a clash between sides that are the white of the good guys who are rarely wrong or have to make challenging decisions or the black of the monsters or the humans whose attitudes and prejudices lead to greater casualties. In this, a kind of cool premise falls apart because of limited characterization and even less tension built into it.
Nothing much has changed in the movie, except that what feels like half a season of arc is condensed down into ninety minutes or so where everyone is always in the right place at the right time for everything to happen.
Okay, good talk.
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