Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 30 · 10:44pm Apr 5th, 2022
Still holding steady, as the two featured spots this week get taken by something I just watched since the last blog. Two movies this time, one very new (Belle) and one a little old (Mai Mai Miracle), after the break, plus reviews of 6 other items, including one that just finished last week.
Belle came out last year to quite a bit of acclaim, and I've been looking forward to watching it. It's yet another take on Beauty and the Beast, but it's more of a cosmetic and circumstantial twin to it. The plot takes some very wide liberties with it, which is a good thing. We don't need another retread. This was refreshingly original.
High school student Suzu has been haunted for years by her mother's death, so one of her few friends suggests she seek some escapism in the new online community of U, something similar to Second Life, though with a bit of Sword Art Online thrown in, at least as far as it does transfer you into a virtual reality version of your interactions there. The disconnect allows Suzu to overcome her hangups about singing, and though she gets largely ignored at first, some remixes of her songs get popular, which are traced back to her, and she becomes an instant celebrity. Only the one friend knows who she really is.
One of her concerts gets interrupted by someone tearing through the place. He's known as "The Dragon" and "The Beast," and some self-appointed cops try to chase him down. It's one of the film's few weak points: I don't know how these people gained any authority or the ability to reveal people's actual identities, but they have a mission of unmasking Beast. Suzu, as her alter ego Bell (later changed by the public to Belle), becomes fascinated with him.
Of course there would be a Beast, but the movie takes a very different direction on how she interacts with him. It still bears some similarity with the source material, but one of the tenets of U is that you can't design your own avatar. One is created for you based somewhat on your appearance and a lot on your personality and character. So the fact that he's a beast says something about him. Suzu has to know what makes him tick.
The story skillfully weaves between this and the kinds of real-life things Suzu has to deal with when she's offline, and I appreciated the way that kept things from getting in a rut. The virtual world is done in a very CGI manner, and the real world is drawn with more traditional animation, though on top of photographs of real places, which creates an interesting effect. I very much appreciated that the two worlds were given more than just appearance as a difference.
By the end, there's a nice message about being who you are, and it kind of sidestepped most of the romantic possibilities, though depending on your tastes, that may be a good or bad thing. Art was great, and the music was wonderful—not surprising, since it's based on something commonly done as a musical, though the director knew he couldn't get away with a full-out one. Speaking of which, the direction was fantastic, knowing just what pacing to use and judicious about what detail to include. Those genes from Disney... well, the CGI parts kind of had a Disney feel for me, and a couple of Disney folks did work on it. Plus Cartoon Saloon did backgrounds for the virtual world, and I've liked the visuals on everything I've seen by them.
Rating: excellent.
Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime (The Dragon and the Freckled Princess), movie, relevant genres: drama, fantasy, romance.
Mai Mai Miracle has been compared to My Neighbor Totoro, and I understand where they're coming from. Where the comparison fails is that much of Totoro was driven by the whimsy of the supernatural aspect, which this movie has none of at all. What they do share are the same themes of children trying to make do in an unfamiliar place and feeling lonely amid mostly absentee parents.
Elementary school student Shinko lives with her mother and grandparents in a rural farming area, but one rich in history, as it used to be a provincial capital. Her grandfather is a retired history teacher, so he loves to tell her all about what life used to be like there, and as she walks around, the animation frequently shows her imaginings of the denizens from a millennium ago. It's pretty charming.
Then a new student shows up at school, Kiiko, who's very much different from anyone else there. She's from Tokyo, she dresses fancy, wears perfume, and is very clean. Her father is a doctor, and her mother died years ago. She's very much a fish out of water, but Shinko immediately takes a liking to her.
They soon become good friends with several other classmates and a couple of older boys, and it was interesting to see how Shinko hadn't been involved with them before, implying that Kiiko is quite the catalyst for friendships. A lot of the rest of the movie just covers the kind of antics they get up to around town, but there's also another thread of Shinko and Kiiko finding out the provincial governor from long ago had brought his daughter to live there, and there wasn't anyone her age to keep her company. So they both get about imagining what life was like for her and dreaming up playmates, maybe psychically making her happy in the past somehow. Though Shinko is much better at imagining than Kiiko, so it's a learning process for her.
Then toward the end, a rather adult situation does come up (nothing tawdry) that throws a huge stumbling block in how these kids relate to each other. I do feel like a couple of the plot points toward the end were rushed. Two things happen to Shinko within the last few minutes that seemed kind of pointless in covering them, since they didn't change anything, except... it could be that how Kiiko deals with it does show that she's grown enough as a character that she can be independently happy now? I don't know.
I still thought it was a sweet story, but a lot of it is so slice of life that I could see it boring people averse to the genre. Character art was good, and the backgrounds were very detailed. I loved the music, mostly quirky but fun, and the closing credits song was really good. Though there's an awfully sappy rendition of the pop song "Sing" just before that.
Rating: very good.
Movie, relevant genres: slice of life, drama, coming of age.
To the actual Cannon Fodder!
Inari, Konkon, Koi Iroha (10 episodes + 1 OVA)—there's a lot to unpack in that title. Inari is the main character's name, but it's also the name of a famous shrine in Japan. She was (mostly) named after it, and from a young age, she always felt drawn to the place and hung out there. She's got a crush on a boy in her class, but she gets incredibly klutzy when she tries to talk to him, making him afraid to be around her. When she sees him in a close discussion with another girl, she gets distraught. And as usual, goes to the shrine. Only she finds a fox pup about to fall in the river, and when she rescues it, the goddess of the shrine (Uka) says it's one of her familiars, so she rewards Inari with a wish. This fox is named Kon, and that plus the way Japanese sometimes playfully doubles syllables results in the Konkon part of the title (along with it being an onomatopoeia in Japanese for the sound a fox makes). And the last part, Koi Iroha, means "the ABCs of love." So Inari makes her wish: she wants to be the girl that was getting all her crush's attention. Of course none of this turns out as intended, and I was ready for this to be a pretty tense piece about losing one's identity. What happens to the girl she wants to replace? Does she disappear? Are there two of her? Do they switch? Alas, it barely stayed that way for half an episode before Inari returned to the shrine to say she didn't need to be the other girl anymore, and it was implied there were two of her. Which... really, I wish it had explored that question. She didn't say she wanted to impersonate the girl—she said she wanted to be her, and I think that's a stark distinction that could have had a lot of power to it. Uka can't grant her another wish, but she can grant some of her divine power, giving Inari the ability to transform into whoever she wants (Inari, Konkon also being part of the phrase she uses to activate it). And of course that also goes awry in several ways. There are some B plots about a couple of other romantic entanglements, but none of them ever go anywhere. They do in the manga, and if this series grabs your interest, I'd recommend reading the Wikipedia page, which does briefly fill you in on those other plotlines. Or, y'know, read the manga. Like one of those things is about Kon. She can transform into a human girl. It never happens in the series, except in the OVA, and like most OVAs, it's a one-off plot with little to no impact on the rest. So why show her human form in the credits only to never use it? That was an odd decision. Though I guess it's not unusual for animes to have weak endings when the manga is ongoing. I much prefer when they wrangle it to be some self-contained plot rather than leave you hanging. Anyway, they do take you through the resolution of Inari having this divine power and the negative effects it creates. I particularly liked the way Inari had to lie once to protect her secret, and in a way that made her look worse than what she actually did. Oh, and another drawback: Uka lives at the shrine instead of with the other gods because it's the only place she can keep her brother out of, who has an obsessive romantic interest in her. Anime, please stop doing that. Art was very good, and the music was also pretty good, though not much beyond the opening and closing songs. I really liked the peaceful style the composer used in the Aria series (which I'm not finished with), but this was a lot different. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, comedy, supernatural.
Memories is an anthology film with three parts to it, and as they're unrelated to each other (and of greatly varying quality), I'll deal with them separately.
Magnetic Rose is a very effective horror story, and it had some powerful contributors, Satoshi Kon for the screenplay and Yoko Kanno for the music. It starts out showing a salvage crew recovering whatever of value they can from some spaceship wreckage, then returning to their own ship, only to detect a distress signal. Law dictates that they have to respond, so the away team grudgingly gets back in their small work ship to investigate.
They find a large field of wreckage, and it seems to have coalesced into a mass at the center, where the signal originates. But it's coming from inside, so the away team have no choice but to get out of their ship to explore. The interior appears to be habitable. Initially, the place looks as expected: heaps of metallic junk everywhere. But after going through a large door, they find an area that looks like an opulent European palace. And there are portraits everywhere of the same woman.
They quickly become unable to tell what's real and what's illusion, while the other two crewmembers try to guide them remotely from the mothership, but it's having its own problems, as the area is putting out strange and powerful magnetic fields.
You can probably guess how the rest goes, but it was well done, with good art, smooth animation and great music (not all of it by Kanno, as some of it is famous classical pieces). It's the kind of horror I like, driven more by suspense and fear of the unknown than confronting actual monsters or seeing gore. Really, my only complaint is that it's outlandish how this place even came to be. I can't believe the person at the center of it was capable of setting it up, so the basis falls apart a bit if you think about it much.
Rating: very good.
Relevant genres: drama, horror, thriller, sci-fi.
Part two is called Stink Bomb, and it's about a guy who works at a medical development lab and accidentally takes a drug that makes him deadly to everyone around him. I can't say I liked it. The art and music are a step down, and given that he's supposed to be a smart medical professional, I can't believe he's so stupid that he can't notice everyone drops like flies wherever he goes and nowhere else. He's the carrier of one of the biggest idiot balls ever, and it completely ruined whatever enjoyment I might have gotten out of it. Plus the "resolution" at the end was dumb. I have no idea how that would have happened; the people who went in after him would have no reason to bring him out that way. I have to think they died and it was his choice, but then I have no idea why he'd think it was necessary for him to use their suits, since he'd had no reason to think he needed to. It reeks of plot convenience.
Rating: meh.
Relevant genres: dark comedy?
And third, we have Cannon Fodder. The animation style here is very different, and I think it's supposed to evoke some old eastern European style. There's an entire self-contained city with the sole purpose of bombarding an unseen enemy. Cannons dot the roofs of nearly every structure, though I get the sense most of them are decorative. The story focuses on one family: the mother works at an ammunition factory, the father is on a crew who loads one of the cannons, and the son goes to school where the kids learn math to calculate trajectories and chemistry to make gunpowder, among other related things. There's even a few examples of Nazi imagery that show up. It's incredibly slow paced, to the point it bored me, as it shows in nauseating detail every minute step it takes to load and fire a cannon. I get the point, that it has a message about the pointlessness of war (the nightly news lauds how many shots were fired and what hits were scored, though none of this can be visually verified by any of the citizenry, and no return shot ever comes). Even that plodding feel is part of the intended effect, no doubt, but still, it didn't keep my interest well for being only 20 minutes long.
Rating: decent.
Relevant genres: drama, allegory.
NieA_7 (13 episodes)—NieA (pronounced NEE-ah) is one of the main characters' names, and the title is meant to be read as "NieA under 7," where the underscore often has the word "under" on it in the graphics, and it refers to her social caste rank, which is at the bottom. Some years ago, a ship full of aliens crashed in Japan, and the aliens mostly still live in and around the impact crater. They look like humans, except they have pointy ears, and most of them have an antenna of varying shape. Main character Mayuko is a poor student attending cram school to get into college while working as a restaurant delivery worker and helping out at a bathhouse in a rural town. She lives upstairs at the bathhouse with NieA, who apparently had been living in the closet before Mayuko moved in. Mostly, this is random comedy and slice of life, and it was pretty amusing for that. NieA's a wacky type who constantly gets into trouble and crusades against discrimination directed at her (she doesn't even have an antenna), and Mayuko is straight-laced, just wishing she could have an untroubled life. I watched this because I'd really liked Haibane Renmei, and this is another series based on that author's work, though while he did start the comic of this series and do the character design, he didn't write the anime. Basically, after the heavy philosophy of Serial Experiments Lain, the staff were invited to collaborate on another project that would be much more lighthearted. This is pretty fun, but at about the midpoint, it picks up some more serious plot elements. Mayuko is starting to question what she really wants out of life, and NieA begins to hear voices from the ever-present silhouette of the mothership on the horizon. By the final episode, everything's back to wackiness, though. I really liked the characters, and in such a small package, they really did have a large cast of likable characters. Art was pretty good, with Yoshitoshi Abe's distinctive design, and the music was good, too, particularly the closing song. I didn't really like the opening song, but that's more a personal taste thing. Not bad for a studio blowing off some steam. There's a live-action segment after the credits of all but the final episode containing some "educational" piece of information about India. Rating: good, relevant genres: comedy, slice of life, random, drama.
Police in a Pod (Hakozume: Koban Joshi no Gyakushuu, 13 episodes)—I guess the title is a play on "peas in a pod"? The tags this carries can vary a lot by source: Wikipedia only says Comedy, while the site I watch a fair amount of these shows on (which also has some more specialized tags) has Action, Police, and Slice of Life, but no Comedy. Really, I think they all apply. Officer Kawai (not quite kawaii, but close) only took the job because her dad implored her to be a government employee, and it was the only such thing she could qualify for. But she's become very disillusioned on the job and is on the verge of handing in her resignation when a new sergeant shows up. Kawai takes a liking to her, one of the few female officers around, and one who can be very intimidating to the men. Mostly, the series follows them through their daily routine, along with two male officers who team up with them frequently, as Kawai learns the ropes and investigates some cases. A lot of it is played for situational humor, though a couple of the cases they take on are quite serious, including one sexual assault investigation which spans the last several episodes, whereas most episodes contain two short arcs each. I've complained before about how many characters who are supposed to be ugly or plain looking are still drawn cute, but they do a good job of making Kawai look pretty ordinary. I hadn't seen a series before that looked more at the daily routine of the police, and I enjoyed this. The art was rather good, and while there wasn't any background music to speak of, the opening and closing songs were both good. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, drama, comedy.
Smiles (Egao, short film)—there's a 5-minute program called Everyone's Songs (Minna no Uta) that just airs some cute animation along with a song, and Makoto Shinkai contributed this for one of their episodes. It's also another one about a pet/owner relationship, which he likes to do. I wasn't sure whether the song was from the pet's or owner's perspective. It could work from either, though given Shinkai, it's probably the pet. It sure seemed like a hamster, but by the end, it's quite large compared to the girl for one, so... a guinea pig maybe? I don't know. Just a bit of cuteness, and only 2 1/2 minutes long. Rating: decent, relevant genres: slice of life.
Other Worlds (Toi Sekai, short film)—this is another short film by Makoto Shinkai, and it's really short, about 90 seconds long. You're really not going to be able to tell much of a story that quickly, so it's just a snapshot scene of someone who appears to be insecure about love. I liked the art style, and the music is by a composer I usually like, so this was fine, and for that length, it's not going to waste your time. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 20 here
vol. 21 here
vol. 22 here
vol. 23 here
vol. 24 here
vol. 25 here
vol. 26 here
vol. 27 here
vol. 28 here
vol. 29 here
If they're gonna have incest, it between two gods at least has precedent. <.< But yeah, agreed.
Ah, Magnetic Rose is a classic, though I only know it from a top-tier old school AMV. :O
I think Magnetic Rose makes a bit more sense if you kinda squint at the idea that the place is actually haunted, Kinda like a poltergeist, although granted, it's been years since I saw it. Did you see Kaneda from Akira riding his motorcycle in it?
As I told you a bit before, I think Canon Fodder is more admirable in the way that it's filmed than anything else. The message about war is okay, and also about fabricating enemies where there are none, something we've seen explode again in the last few years. But the detail and also the way they filmed it was the main thing... it's kind of like Robot Carnival.
And yeah, Stink Bomb was the least interesting of the three, although it does remind me of certain individuals willful ignorance not too long ago exacerbating a potentially lethal situation world wide. So, somewhat relevant still?
NieA_7 I hadn't heard before, but the title reminded me of NieR XD so I might watch it.
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Ha, it's nothing like that game's aesthetic or plot, but I thought it was a pretty good series, especially if you like that artist. It's a bit of a weird mix of serious and random comedy, and the comedy part even makes use of old Hanna-Barbera-type sound effects at times. What I liked most about it were the large number of interesting characters who round out the cast. The elitist alien, the UFO-obsessed college friend, the control freak bathhouse manager, the boiler operator who likes fire a bit too much, the precocious little girl who does a better job managing the restaurant than her father... they were all fun.
5648888
AMV is an unusual way to encounter that. At least as far as I'm aware...
I might have to watch that Belle one.
5648888
You mean this one?
5648934
Weird thing about Belle: the site I watched it on had the actual English dub, but it was an obvious theater rip. It had Polish subtitles, but only for the song lyrics, and the sound quality seemed echo-y. I'm probably going to buy a copy.
5648934
yeeeeaaaaah :D
5648935
Huh. Well, that's... interesting.