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Anime
Mar 22, 2020 10:23:47 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Mar 22, 2020 10:23:47 GMT -8
I think at one point in time I used this to do some catch-up on manga as well so....
The pandemic has had me picking up another SJ title, Kimetsu no Yaiba / Demon Slayer on the recommendation of a couple of different webcomic artists I follow. Shonen to me at this point is basically a form that I see and interpret variations on, and I'd say that Kimetsu no Yaiba reminds me most strongly of the ill-fated, long-prolonged D. Gray Man though it's hard to say precisely why without seeming sloppy in the comparisons. DGM took place in an alternate Victorian England, KnY in an alternate Taisho era Japan, so chronologically they're similar. Both have the usual shadowy organization used to combat evil and an equally shadowed organization causing the evil, manipulated by an especially dapper fella. The weapons at least differ, with DGM offering some range and KnY sticking to swords and elemental / nature-based techniques used to fight the monsters. Much different, much similar, but there's a bit of granular difference in the antagonists. The origin of the akuma in DGM was a source of visceral horror at what could become of those suffering losses, where it effectively destroys and torments theirs souls, whereas the oni of KnY are tame by comparison, most strongly resembling the vampires of western fiction save that they have an array of superpowers that come from their blood. However, where KnY deviates is that the oni / vampires retain an element of their humanity which often comes out in death, when they recall their life as a human and what brought them to that point which is otherwise typically lost in their subconsciousness. It's also in this that they make use of the protagonists differently: Both are hard-headed (Tanjiro, literally), but immensely sympathetic to their enemies, in Tanjiro's case, because his sister became an oni after his family was attacked and remains by his side, perplexingly without the blood cravings or usual hostility towards humans. The relationship between Tanjiro and his sister Nezuko, always scrutinized, and their campaign against the oni that don't fight purely out of malice, makes the whole enterprise feel different enough.
The art style is also... it seems like a throwback to the earlier era of Tezuka etc and not at all of the style prevalent now. Faces of minor characters, or even major characters when zoomed out, can be hilariously undetailed, which adds some levity in otherwise serious moments. However, the more you read of it the more you reailze that it's not for lack of technical skill, and Koyohaga Gotoge is quite capable of ornate patterning or architectural design, it's just a deliberate aesthetic choice to scale back the features and play them against some super-deformed effects.
I've read 50 chapters so far and will probably catch up with the near ~200 shortly. One deviation that I am fond of is that there's no super smart but low-key evil or untrustworthy prodigy character, even if the main character's mentor is an aloof bishi type.
Edit: I'm deeper now and have notived another motif that I appreciate, which is that nearly every character laments the limits of their strength (common shonen trope) BUT it's made clear that even those who don't serve in battle have their roles and are respected for it. Maybe it's hitting me harder because I've been reading / teaching a bit of Milton lately and remember "They also serve who only stand and wait."
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Anime
Mar 25, 2020 19:37:18 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Mar 25, 2020 19:37:18 GMT -8
I typically prefer my anime to be English-dubbed (being a commoner and all), but this week I watched Millennium Actress in all its original Japanese glory. That's right, Bong Joon-Ho, I've begun to scale the one-inch wall of subtitles separating me from foreign filmdom.
Anyway, it's quite a good film, with some inventive staging and animation (particularly in the way the journalists are literally swept into Chiyoko's flashbacks), though it does lose the thread in its middle act. It feels like this film is made for people familiar with the history of Japanese cinema (including the war propaganda and monster movie eras), a group I cannot count myself among.
Apparently there are two English dubs of this film? Wow. That makes me feel extra-special for watching the original version.
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Anime
Mar 26, 2020 1:55:51 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by ThirdMan on Mar 26, 2020 1:55:51 GMT -8
I was wondering what Japanese film you were referring to on Twitter. I thought maybe you'd hunkered down to watch some Kurosawa flicks, or something. Heh.
Anyways, for something live-action and relatively recent, you might want to give Shoplifters a look. It's on Netflix in Canada, so it may be in the States as well.
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Anime
Mar 26, 2020 12:03:35 GMT -8
via mobile
Post by guttersnipe on Mar 26, 2020 12:03:35 GMT -8
Millennium Actress is one of my all-time favourite films, but I can totally see why you might feel a bit distant from it given that Chiyoko is almost a vehicle for a whip-crack run through Japanese cinema history. I especially appreciate how the film's style replicates the angles and shot composition of shomingeki, kaiju films, etc - I always loved the imitation of early handheld in the action picture early on. The Sengoku-set film is especially rewarding for cinephiles as it's mostly riffing on Ran, but borrows the hail of arrows and witch from Throne of Blood.
Some parts even evoke other elements of J-culture, such as the three geisha observers and Chiyoko sitting slightly off-profile, which are practical replicas of ukiyo-e woodblock prints - anime is arguably more indebted to these and manga than Western animation is to the comic book. (Though Belgian comics (Tintin, the Smurfs etc) are rather influenced by Japan, as I recently discovered in Brussels.)
Perfect Blue has a similarly dreamlike, unreliable narrator feel, though that might be more grisly than you'd like.
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Anime
Mar 26, 2020 14:36:22 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Mar 26, 2020 14:36:22 GMT -8
Yeah, it struck me as the sort of film you'd like, what with all the send-ups to old cinema. I'm still sorely lacking when it comes to Japanese pop-culture; the only Kurosawa film I'm really familiar with is Rashomon (though I did recently learn about Ran through a pun about a guy who rushes to a Kurosawa film that is too dumb to repeat here).
Anyways, for something live-action and relatively recent, you might want to give Shoplifters a look. It's on Netflix in Canada, so it may be in the States as well.
It's not on Netflix US, but it is on Hulu, which I am occasionally subscribed to. Most of the Japanese content on our Netflix seems to be anime.
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Anime
Mar 28, 2020 10:56:16 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Mar 28, 2020 10:56:16 GMT -8
Speaking of Satoshi Kon, one of the things that the pandemic did away with was a theatre release of Tokyo Godfathers, which I had planned on going to. It's probably his most accessible film and not densely psychological or weird in the way that Paprika or Perfect Blue or Paranoia Agent can be. Instead it's a madcap Christmas movie starring a bunch of societal outcasts taking care of a baby.
-----
Wrapped up Kimetsu no Yaiba not realizing that when people were talking about it being the last arc, they meant it. I feel as if it was rushed towards the end (tonally, the jump from the swordsmith arc to the final arc is a big one), but not bad as a result of it. The climax fight is giving me Fullmetal Alchemist vibes, quite intensely, but I think that it's good because it's complementary of the series' thematic references. What's interesting to me formally is that they've done all of this "everyone contributes and the group is stronger because of it" without invoking the traditional "nakama" dynamics of shonen, and in some ways they can't because Nezuko is a silent partner, Zenitsu is a coward, and Inosuke is delightfully, hilariously dimwitted (probably my favorite character, "PIG ASSAULT!")
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Anime
May 26, 2020 15:01:42 GMT -8
Post by Jay on May 26, 2020 15:01:42 GMT -8
Demon City Shinjuku (1988)Prime has been adding staples of the first era of imports to America, so I decided to take up Demon City Shinjuku as a seminal work that I'd never bothered with, having gotten into the stuff in the early days of fansubbing. The plot is also distinctively 80s in its apocalyptic nature, somewhere between Escape from New York and Highlander. Opening with two rival sword-fighting, we find out that the good guy's loss has brought on an earthquake which separates a major Tokyo neighborhood from the rest of the city and has invited demons in from the netherrealm but nevertheless no one else in Tokyo seems to feel much like moving out or warding off the region. The hero is the son of the dead swordsman from the beginning and soon is recruited into a scheme of global importance as the World President has been afflicted by a terrible curse and there needs to be a bad enough dude to rescue the president. Joining him, though not necessarily with his blessing, is The President's Daughter (who is extremely proper and teaches him about love?) and a scamp that reminded me of Flim-Flam from The Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, which was kind of a stock character for the era. If they fail, then the evil guy whose features rather resemble Clancy Brown gets to unlock the gate to hell and invite the demons to play.
I read a bit of Wikipedia criticism describing it as "only vaguely interconnected action scenes punctuated by some rather dull talkiness." It's an ungenerous take, but I can see where it's coming from. The OVA was adapted from a whole novel and has the feeling of something that's been chopped down to fit a constricted time frame. No one has a backstory or grand cause for doing what they're doing and there's more that's alluded to than shows up for a lot of them, particularly in the "demon? not demon?" helper character that claims neutrality in the matter despite bearing the name "Mephisto." Most of the henchmen deployed against the hero don't even have proper name. But it's not something where you're missing a whole lot of connections either as the plot on the most basic level is the hero going into the city and trying to finish what his father failed to. I think that there are some bits, such as the playground sequence, that may read more fluidly to someone with a background in Japanese folklore, but it's not impenetrable. It's merely not trying to do too much in the first place. At worst, I'd say that the trouble with the action is more that all the fight scenes feel like they have about equal narrative weight and don't form a convincing arc for the protagonist, unless you want to take the film at face value and claim that it was the two leads love for each other that made the difference.
The dub is easily the part of it that has aged the worst. It's still somewhat of a risk now, since there is no real parallel in American English for say, an Osaka accent, and every attempt to find an equivalent has failed. Yet, this one is noticeably bad and serves as a representative of a dark era for dubbing. The protagonist is supposed to be somewhat rough and ready, so he drops F-bombs left and right. His love interest is prim and proper so they gave her a British accent. The juvenile delinquent / scam artist with a heart of gold is given a Mexican accent and sounds like someone doing a bad Cheech Marin impression. Various other class or status signifiers come through this same shorthand and after a while you just wish that any one of them could actually act.
Still, I could easily exhaust myself pointing to all the spiritual descendants that seem informed in some way or another by it. Blood Blockade Battlefront would be a big one, Gungrave would be another, and I'm not actually sure that I can easily come up with a shonen anime that I've watched that doesn't involve the protagonist abruptly discovering how powerful his father was and how he needs to surpass him. It's useful for background knowledge, but nothing I'd care to recommend on its own merits.
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Anime
Jun 5, 2020 16:04:58 GMT -8
Post by guttersnipe on Jun 5, 2020 16:04:58 GMT -8
I watched Shinjuku a few years ago, roughly around the same time as Kawajiri's vastly superior Wicked City and was hoping for something of equal merit, that film being more engrossing, inventive and "alive" than the subject matter would normally warrant. But like you, I walked from Shinjuku a bit "eh" over its cookie-cutter sub-Go Nagai treatment.
One overriding thing that I recall from it was that it fell neatly into that typical '80s anime trope of trying to scare the audience simply by featuring milquetoast and innocent characters wandering around empty, wrecked streets between completely nondescript buildings - until they invariably encountered some hyper-violent monster, probably with rape on his mind. Akira notwithstanding, it seems like the most terrifying notions searing the Japanese brainpan in this period were featureless walls and a suddenly-sparse population.
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Anime
Jun 27, 2020 17:06:19 GMT -8
Post by guttersnipe on Jun 27, 2020 17:06:19 GMT -8
Miyazaki knows like no-one knows that the point of animation is to make pigs fly. So I picked up the latest issue of Sight & Sound (been many years since I read any magazine regularly) because it was double-sized to allow for a hefty anime special, including a Top 50 films list. Now I read the list in reverse-order (50 to 1) and it was honestly a while before I realised they weren't actually ranked but rather a compilation of works of importance in chronological order, as I began to wonder why most of the best stuff was clustered around the middle: 1. The Spider and the Tulip 2. Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors 3. Panda and the Magic Serpent 4. Saiyuki 5. Little Norse Prince 6. The Wonderful World of Puss 'n Boots 7. A Thousand and One Nights 8. The Flying Ghost Ship 9. Belladonna of Sadness 10. Ringing Bell 11. Taro the Dragon Boy 12. Arcadia of My Youth 13. Barefoot Gen 14. Night on the Galactic Railroad 15. Angel's Egg 16. Arion 17. Wings of Honneamise 18. Robot Carnival 19. My Neighbour Totoro 20. Grave of the Fireflies 21. Akira 22. Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend 23. Porco Rosso 24. Midori 25. Ninja Scroll 26. Whisper of the Heart 27. Memories 28. Ghost in the Shell 29. Princess Mononoke 30. Perfect Blue 31. Neon Genesis Evangelion: End of Evangelion 32. Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade 33. Revolutionary Girl Utena: Adolescence of Utena 34. Metropolis 35. Voices of a Distant Star 36. Tokyo Godfathers 37. Ghost in the Shell 2 - Innocence 38. Mind Game 39. Tekkonkinkreet 40. Summer Wars 41. Mai Mai Miracle 42. The Tale of Princess Kaguya 43. Giovanni's Island 44. The Case of Hana and Alice 45. your name. 46. A Silent Voice 47. The Night is Short, Walk On Girl 48. Liz and the Blue Bird 49. Our Sound 50. Promare There's quite a bit of detail expounded on each entry (which is just as well; I've only seen just over half of these myself) and a number of supplementary articles interspersed therein, detailing overseas productions, women's overlooked hand in anime history, non-traditional animation techniques and how the cheapness and speed of TV series and OVAs has helped to form a bedrock for ambitious features. I'll be quoting some of this down the line, I'm sure. (Only a brief mention of Patlabor 2 is absolutely bananas, though.)
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Anime
Aug 7, 2020 14:09:40 GMT -8
Post by Incandescence 112 on Aug 7, 2020 14:09:40 GMT -8
I enjoyed the first season of One Punch Man so much that I changed my avatar to it. This is shonen anime at its finest. The writing was incredibly smart and well-thought out for a super-hero parody. For example, there is an organized method in the way heroes protect the city and minimize civilian casualties. The heroes are divided into different classes based on how skilled/powerful they are. Hawk-eye would never be sent to fight Thanos. The art direction was stunning as well. It just overall really succeeded my expectations as a gentle poke at the genre by never dipping its toe into trite sentimentality (hello Deadpool).
Of course, we don't talk about Season 2.
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Anime
Aug 9, 2020 10:50:28 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Aug 9, 2020 10:50:28 GMT -8
Of course, we don't talk about Season 2. I follow the manga but not the anime, so I'm curious, did they deviate from the storyline or what in particular was wrong with it? One of my favorite takes on the series (I think this came via cartoonist KC Green?) was that any one of the S-class heroes and at least one of the A-class heroes could be the protagonist in any other manga series. That's part of what makes it fun: Saitama is great and all but his skillset can't carry the series, so he has to be absent-minded and frequently neglected in order for anything interesting to happen.
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Anime
Aug 9, 2020 12:03:55 GMT -8
Post by Incandescence 112 on Aug 9, 2020 12:03:55 GMT -8
Of course, we don't talk about Season 2. I follow the manga but not the anime, so I'm curious, did they deviate from the storyline or what in particular was wrong with it? One of my favorite takes on the series (I think this came via cartoonist KC Green?) was that any one of the S-class heroes and at least one of the A-class heroes could be the protagonist in any other manga series. That's part of what makes it fun: Saitama is great and all but his skillset can't carry the series, so he has to be absent-minded and frequently neglected in order for anything interesting to happen. From what I understand, it sticks pretty closely to the manga's story. The problem is, it's not made with anywhere near the same level of craft and care as S1. That was the great thing about S1. Saitama could realistically solve every problem. It'd get old fast. Hence why S1 of the anime pushes other characters heavily to the foreground, and they, as you say, were interesting on their own merits, enough so to carry their own spin-offs. And the fact that he spends most of the season mired in the C-tier.
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Anime
Jan 12, 2021 17:45:45 GMT -8
Post by Jeremy on Jan 12, 2021 17:45:45 GMT -8
Didn't mention it on the main film thread since I was saving it for this one, but I watched Grave of the Fireflies recently. I was worried the film would feel manipulative (especially since - while I went in spoiler-free - I could see the ending coming a mile off), but it was actually quite heartfelt and poignant. The writing, music, and animation all work together very well, and produce a film that is uncomplicated yet very effective.
Obviously, the film has a lot on its mind in regards to war and its devastating effects (no strange themes to Ghibli), but I was taken aback by how direct and cutting it was when discussing youthful innocence, and how easily it can be lost. Miyazaki's films tend to embrace the sweetness and wonder of childhood, but Isao Takahata twists that innocence with a knife in the heart. Never did I think a metal candy tin would make me so depressed...
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Anime
Jan 13, 2021 11:07:56 GMT -8
Post by Incandescence 112 on Jan 13, 2021 11:07:56 GMT -8
Didn't mention it on the main film thread since I was saving it for this one, but I watched Grave of the Fireflies recently. I was worried the film would feel manipulative (especially since - while I went in spoiler-free - I could see the ending coming a mile off), but it was actually quite heartfelt and poignant. The writing, music, and animation all work together very well, and produce a film that is uncomplicated yet very effective. Obviously, the film has a lot on its mind in regards to war and its devastating effects (no strange themes to Ghibli), but I was taken aback by how direct and cutting it was when discussing youthful innocence, and how easily it can be lost. Miyazaki's films tend to embrace the sweetness and wonder of childhood, but Isao Takahata twists that innocence with a knife in the heart. Never did I think a metal candy tin would make me so depressed... Well, that is why the ending is shown in the first 5 minutes, after all. Thus, I don't find the more 'happy' scenes manipulative. You know what's going to happen from the beginning--the rest of the movie is basically a funeral march.
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Anime
Feb 15, 2021 21:59:40 GMT -8
Post by Jay on Feb 15, 2021 21:59:40 GMT -8
I'm not usually one to post about series I'm intending to abandon, nor abandon them in the first place, but as part of my continuing if perfunctory interest in topical shonen, I started watching the Fire Force anime, which had formerly failed to leave much of an impression on me in half of an episode. I've now watched three in their entirety and that still basically holds true, if unexpected with a premise of "there's spontaneous human combustion and the MC has an involuntary rictus." It's bold in some ways to narrow the focus on fire specifically as the core of all abilities, but watching the first episode, my basic impression of it was "Oh, this is a shonen version of Witch Hunter Robin, with all the attendant character dynamics and fanservice." This isn't to say the WHR is good particularly, but its muted emotion and focused nature as a series not adapted from a manga gave it a particular tone and a way that it could meditate on its subjects, so to see a similar premise done with all the familiar excesses and tropes has a funhouse mirror effect on the whole thing. I'm sure I would be more receptive reading it chapter by chapter, but it's not doing it for me: The major beats seem, even by introductory standards, a bit too sudden and a bit too obvious. Curiously, I discovered this evening in hopping around the series wiki (a vice I'll admit to) that the creator also did Soul Eater, another abandoned series which I thought was novel in concept but meh in execution and also featured prominent characters with too-sharp teeth.
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