Author: psgels

Oh my god… I’m amazed by this small OVA called Hitsuji no Uta. After watching 3×3 Eyes and reading the premise, I expected this to be another one of those action-flicks. “Boy lives random normal life, but then meets his sister and discovers he’s a vampire and together they bust up crime with lots of action”, or something similar. Heh, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The only “action” for Hitsuji no Uta takes place in the character’s minds.

It’s easy to hate this OVA, though. The animation ranges from mediocre to downright abysmal. There’s a huge amount of reused cells, and at times the animators just get too lazy to even move the characters’ lips when they’re talking. There’s one particularly ugly shot of the main character in the first episode that’ll have every cynic press the x-button as soon as it gets repeated for the third time. But seriously, the scriptwriting more than makes up for this.

First of all, this “vampire”-ability is nothing more than a disease. None of the characters have any superpowers. This is just a story about two siblings with an incurable mental disease: they freak out with a lust for blood. Hitsuji no Uta is how not only the brother and sister deal with their disease, but it’s also about the people around them. The few that wish to involve themselves to try and take care of the siblings.

The animators may have been just a bunch of monkeys, but the writers of Hitsuji no Uta are brilliant. They make sure that every single character is fleshed out and developed. They make sure that the dialogue is smart, that the characters feel more than just a bunch of idiots. The two main characters may have a mental disease, but that doesn’t prevent them from rational thinking. Even though they’ve been living apart for more than ten years, they feel drawn to each other because of their similar fate and blood-relation. And the writers did an excellent job in conveying this to the audience.

One thing I absolutely love about checking out these random series, movies and OVAs is that you never know when you hit an unknown gem. Hitsuji no Uta is one of these gems, when it provides an engaging realistic character-study about a curse-struck family. While it’s easy to label it as an emo-fest, those who look beyond it will be rewarded with two hours of excellent drama.

So since nearly every series is going to take a break for the Christmas Holidays, I decided that it would be a good time to watch a lot of movies and OVAs. 3×3 Eyes is an action-OVA that got released around fifteen years ago. It consists out of two parts: one four-episode release, and the continuation, consisting of three episodes. Unfortunately, both parts have their problems.

In the first part, the storytelling is all over the place. Especially the first and third episodes are a mess of random Deus ex Machina and convenient plot-twists that don’t make any sense. The main character is also one of those teenaged boys that meats a beautiful and special girl for a very weak reason. Still, despite all this the first part has one big advantage: it’s fun to watch.

Then the second part comes, which was released about three years after the first part stopped. It indeed does fix the storytelling-issues, and the story flows much nicer. But in exchange, it ends up taking itself way too seriously, not to mention that every single character that made the first part so fun to watch either just disappears, or in the main characters’ case develops into rather dull stereotype. The main female lead was fresh, strong and likable in the first part, but the second part turned her just into a boring damsel in distress. There is a lot of angst and sadness, but when the characters fail to connect it only ends up working against this OVA.

Still, 3×3 remains incredibly stylistic, and the first part offers a pretty nice blend of comedy, action, drama and romance. It also isn’t afraid to show the darker parts of action, and the villains don’t hesitate to use the most dirty tricks to overcome their enemies, with the best being episode two. The second part is also well-crafted and built-up. It’s just a shame that the characters don’t work when they take themselves too seriously.

For me, Blue Drop was one of the major series to watch out for for the Fall-season. In the end, I can’t really say that this is among the best series of the season, but yet there are enough reasons to give this one a shot. It’s basically about the captain of a ship that’s part of an alien-invasion who is on a reconnaissance-mission on an all-girl high-school, and the people she makes friends with.

The best thing about this series is definitely the cast of characters. The overall pacing is rather slow for a thirteen-episode series, but because of that it has enough time to not only flesh out and develop the main characters, but also the side-ones. At the end of the series, it feels that every character on the good side has gotten enough attention to be more than just a one-dimensional cardboard box. There’s a lot of angst in this series, but because the characters are fleshed out so well, it really works turning this series into an excellent tragedy.

I wish I could be so positive about the alien-subplot, though. It lacks fleshing out and explanation, and for some reason one huge outer-space-battleship can be piloted and maintenanced by just one person, which doesn’t really sound that realistic to me. Most of the aliens and especially the major villain also seriously lack development and aren’t fleshing out enough. In the end, it just feels incomplete, and the only positive thing I can say about it is that it provides enough dramatic tension for the characters to work with.

Thankfully, the characters don’t get dragged down along with the alien-subplot, though it remains a nasty thorn for this series. The music, while alone not that spectacular, does fit the overall mood perfectly, and there’s also enough eye-candy in this series. The ending also doesn’t leave a bad taste, so there are enough good points for this series. Too bad about the bad ones.

Tokyo Godfathers was recommended to me by Wyrdwad. According to him, it was a great movie to watch for Christmas. I originally planned to watch other movies first, but on the other hand Christmas only happens once every year, so I figured why not. So now that I’ve seen it, I must say that not only is this the perfect movie to watch during the Winter-holidays, but it’s also one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Satoshi Kon is a true genius.

The brilliance of this movie already begins with the setting. I think it’s safe to say that no other anime features a bunch of homeless people as its main characters. This is probably also one of the first times where a homo gets a role beyond just comic relief outside of bishounen-series. The characters are all realistically drawn, in Satoshi Kon’s trademark. And yet, despite the dark and realistic setting, there has been lots of hilarious comedy inserted.

My major problem with a lot of comedy-series is that they tend to forget that a plot is important too. They either force some kind of overall storyline in, or forget about everything plot-related all-together, until the final moments of the series where a forced dramatic climax ends the anime with a bad taste in your mouth. Tokyo Godfathers is different, though. It’s got an excellent combination between plot and comedy, and Satoshi Kon really uses the comedy and quirky dialogue to flesh out the different characters. There is no single moment that feels annoying because of this, and during the later half of this movie I found myself crying over and over again, even though this is far from an angst-movie.

It seems that there’s one sacrifice that Satoshi Kon had to make, though. In order to keep the movie interesting and perfectly paced, we often see rather convenient coincidences here and there. But still, because of the quality of the rest of the movie, this will hardly form a problem, and I like how an attempt to explain them is given with the help of Kiyoko’s “angelic abilities” (note how I put this between quotes, you’ll understand after watching the movie).

Overall, this is just a must-watch. The fact that the characters are homeless immediately gives them interesting stories, and Satoshi Kon makes sure to show the viewer enough of it. The characters are fleshed out perfectly; all have plenty of background and are actually developed a bit through the hour and a half airtime of this movie, something that every movie should have. The side-characters too are all fresh and interesting. On top of that, the storytelling is amazing. What more could you want?

I must say, I’m impressed. From all the stories I heard about this movie, I expected it to be filled with mainstream action, emo and screaming. After the public rage against the two rather weird final episodes of the series, I thought that Anno Hideaki would play it safe to please the fans, and go with something mainstream. Instead, he went along with the public for episode 25, but then happily decided to make the twenty-sixth episode into what the original end of the series would have been if it was given enough budget: strange, absurd, confusing and a work of art.

Let me get one thing straight, though: the End of Evangelion is very flawed in terms of storytelling. Almost nothing is explained, and some major scenes hugely lack in coherency. Don’t expect anything in the second half of this movie to make sense. The bad guys never get any explanation about their actions, and neither do we know where these other eleven angels came from. Episode 25 also starts out really disappointing, when it basically shows all of the new scenes of Death and Rebirth once more, making me wonder about the point of that movie in the first place. It then continues with the usual action-plot that just couldn’t grab my interest, with your occasional disturbing graphical scene and a bit of screaming here and there.

This movie starts to get really interesting with the arrival of episode 26 though, when the characters start talking to each other. It’s here where everything of the series comes together and this series slowly turns into a piece of art. A lot of things will end up not making any sense, but it turns into quite an interesting watch, that in my opinion beats the original finale of the series. The storytelling for this series may be messed up, but the dialogue between the characters is excellent.

Overall, if you hated movies like Tamala 2011 or Cat Soup, then you should stay away from this series, but otherwise the End of Evangelion served its purpose to give a satisfying ending to the original series. I feel that if this would have been a major action-packed ending, it would have failed, since Neon Genesis Evangelion was supposed to be strange and complex to begin with. Episode 26 fits Neon Genesis Evangelion perfectly, although it will be annoying to get through episode 25 to get there.