Category: Anime Reviews

Originally I didn’t intend to watch this movie, but many people pointed out that Macross – Do you Remember Love (which followed the original Macross series) deserved to be watched. Now that I watched it, I agree that it’s more than just a recap-movie, and actually a bit of an alternative retelling whose story is very similar to the original.

My big issue with recap movies is when the creators do nothing but copy and paste frames or storylines directly without any form of editing. Thankfully, this is not the case for Do You Remember Love: the creators made conscious decisions of what storylines to focus on, they actually improved the storyline to get rid of some of the plotholes of the original series, and the entire animation is redone. And how! This is 1984 we’re talking about, and the animation looks its time far ahead. This movie, along with Nausicaa is responsible for introducing anime to the big budget era, showing the amazing things that you can do with it. During its time, I’m sure that it revolutionized the animation industry. Even today, it’s still a beautiful movie, and a great recommendation for those who want to get into the look of the eighties and have only watched shows from the past decade. But how does the rest of the movie hold up?

In the end, however, I like Do You Remember Love less than the original TV-series, simply due to the inevitable: the characters and storyline have far less depth, and the storyline just isn’t paced well enough for a movie. Of course a lot of time is spent on the invasion of the Zentradi and their giant cactus that forms a threat to earth, but the main focus, especially in the second half, turns out to be the romance, and the love triangle between the three lead characters. Hikaru and Misa are fine, but I really didn’t like what happened to Minmay: her development is cheesy and angsty, wasting lots of precious time, and her romance comes from nowhere, and feels rather forced and unbelievable.

And, while the new storyline does fill in a few plotholes from the original TV-series, it also creates a lot of new ones. Why did Misa know the Zentradi language? Where did the ancient cities come from? How much of the movie actually happened in canon with the tv-series, and where did Minmay’s brother suddenly bugger off to? Seriously, for such a seemingly important character in the first half he completely vanishes without any explanation whatsoever during the second half. But yeah, those are minor issues. My biggest issue with the restructured plot is that it completely lacks depth as a standalone movie: you NEED to have seen the TV-series in order to fully understand its context, and the very few extra bits of depth it offers just don’t make any impact.

Nevertheless, whenever Minmay starts singing, you really forget about all these flaws. I’ve seen Macross being described as a music video, and after watching this movie I can understand: the singing scenes are without a doubt the best parts of the movie, where both the music and the animation excel beyond belief. It’s really there where this movie shows its true colours, and it’s somewhat a shame that Minmay doesn’t sing often enough.

To continue the experiment: how about this: a short blurb on each of the categories?

Storytelling:	7/10 – Did a nice job of stuffing 26 episodes in only two hours, but didn’t manage to catch the essence of the TV-series.
Characters:	7/10 – Shallow compared to TV-Series
Production-Values:	9/10 – Gorgeous, the best of its time.
Setting:	8/10 – Managed to stay in canon with the TV-series with also adding a bit here and there.

The past autumn season may not have been the best, but did stand out in one thing: more than one actually good hentai game adaptations. 11Eyes at first looks like your average harem, with cheesy character-designs, stupid characters, and an incredibly lazy execution. And yet it already proves you wrong during the very first climax.

11Eyes is finally another one of those eroge adaptations that has a good story that’s fleshed out throughout the entire series, rather than the final two episodes, it has well fleshed out and developed characters, and a pretty solid direction during the climaxesEven the smaller side-characters aren’t cardboard cut-outs for once, but actual characters with their own issues, strengths and weaknesses.It’s a really great transition from its original source material and how notorious these have become over the past decade.

11Eyes is not without its problems, though. The voice acting is a bit unrealistic at times, especially the male lead suffers from this. And while the direction is impressive, the animation and visuals themselves don’t often stand out. Also, as the story goes on, a really weird love triangle pops up that is forced, doesn’t make any sense and is way too underdeveloped and forced for its role in the storyline. The big reason for that is the female lead, Yuka, who seems to believe that whenever a guy touches another girl he’s immediately in love with her.

So yeah, ultimately it’s the side-cast that brightens up this series, but they do so pretty well. 11Eyes is in no way the perfect series, but it’s solid entertainment and comes with a pretty good story and characters that will keep you interested. As for the ending… it has some pretty creative elements. I’d label it as a pretty good ending if it wasn’t for the blatant Deus ex Machina at the end.

(In case you’re wondering what happened to the rating categories I usually put here, I’m experimenting whether I should not show them alltogether. Or is there something else that I could put here?)

Now this is really why I love anime: it is really one of the very few animation styles that can get away with stuff that’s entirely meant for adults. I’ve seen quite a few comments that the Third Patlabor Movie (which was produced ten years after the second movie) didn’t live up to the standards that were set by the TV-series and the first two movies. Now let me say that I can understand why, but there’s enough that makes this movie worth watching.

Before I list the good points of this movie however, I do want to say a few things about something that probably turned off a lot of fans of the Patlabor franchise: the decision to swap main characters with two completely new characters. Let me say that I do like this idea a lot. It shows that Captain Goto and his team are mere cogs inside the Patlabor setting: they just do the job they’re supposed to do, while others do theirs. It’s a great way to flesh out the setting a bit more. However, when you make such a decision, you do need to take care to give these new characters a good personality and background, and that’s where this movie never really delivers. At the end of this movie, I still don’t have any clue who these people are. How did they become detectives, what drives them, what are their quirks? They’re huge mysteries. For a franchise that stood out with its rock-solid characters, it will be a bit difficult to get used to the two of them.

The good thing of course is that this is really the most accessible of the Patlabor movies: you can really watch this even if you haven’t watched anything of the Patlabor franchise before. The thing that I loved about it was how composed it was: it knew exactly what story it wanted to tell, and it does so with conviction. The pacing is really slow to really allow everything to fall in place, and the exposition is very well balanced so that it’s neither dull nor techno-babble.

The movie really excels in its smart and realistic build-up that really pays off in its climaxes, and while there are a few coincidences here and there, it doesn’t attempt to introduce cheap plot twists at the crucial plot points. While the two lead characters lack in strength, the two main villains do receive a lot of depth, which really culminates in a great ending.

Quiet movies like this one of course have their share of setbacks: if you’re not caught in by the build-up, you will be bored. But I really find that these movies have a unique charm in their maturity, where they show that you can also create a good and exciting stories without the over-the-topness that you usually see in anime aimed at teenagers. In fact, realized that the hit to miss ratio of adult movies for me is much higher than the stuff for teenagers. Out of the three Patlabor Movies, I still like the second one best, but WXIII comes in as a close second.

Storytelling:	9/10
Characters:	7/10
Production-Values:	9/10
Setting:	9/10

It’s movies like this that really show that the harem genre isn’t inherently bad. There just are a lot of harem shows that are badly executed. I really like how every different installment of Tenchi Muyo so far has chosen three or four characters to flesh out and give depth. The first Tenchi Movie may have a bit of a misleading title: none of Tenchi’s romances are really developed here. Instead, we get to look at his parents. And it turned out to be a great family movie.

The charm of this movie is that it just gets better and better as it goes on. The transition from a silly story of harem hi-jinks to the more serious tale of Tenchi’s parents is really smooth, and well built-up. The former is a bit tedious at times, but it’s fun and innocent enough, while the latter is simple but effective.

The animation during the action-scenes is also exceptionally well done, and really shows the great things that can be done with traditional Cell animation. It’s smooth, it’s imaginative and powerful, and it makes something that would have been a cliched end boss into something really threatening. Seriously, it if wasn’t for the great animation, this guy would have made far lesser impact. Anime has enough badly animated monsters as it is already.

I wouldn’t exactly label this movie as one of the best movies ever, but what it does, it does pretty well, and it is a great way to spend an hour and a half. For me, it loses a few points with the exposition, which for the most part isn’t that interesting, and the harem hi-jinks, while not bad, were done better in the OVAs. Where this movie excels over the OVAs is the animation, storyline, balance and the action. Plus, it makes well use of the fact that the characters have already been fleshed out.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	8/10
Production-Values:	9/10
Setting:	8/10

Despite being produced only four years ago, the Glass Rabbit is a movie that completely flew past the radar for some reason. Now that I finally managed to find it and check it out (in raw, I didn’t manage to find a subbed version) then yeah, I have to say that it’s pretty mediocre for a WWII-movie. If you’re interested in the themes of the Second World War portrayed, go for the ones that were produced in the eighties and nineties.

And sure, the movie is solidly told. I’d have no problem with it if it wasn’t such a complete rip-off of Ushiro no Shoumen Daare. Events and characters are rearranged a bit, and I guess that the protagonist is a bit older, but apart from that, it’s the exact same formula, but without the personality, charms, animation or themes other than “war is bad”. Any part in this movie that doesn’t come from Ushiro no Shoumen Daare has been taken from another movie, like Barefoot Gen or Chocchan’s Story. It never really shows something of its own. The only really original parts that I managed to find was the ending, at which all of the characters come together and spoon-feed the movie’s cheesy morals about how war is bad, like those cheap saturday-morning cartoons. There’s a reason why all the other WWII-movies didn’t do that!

Of course, I’m not blaming the person who this series is based on I’m sure that she went through hell, and I have a lot of respect for her for that. However, my criticism go to the creators of the anime: what was the point they wanted to make by creating this movie, more than ten years after Ushiro no Shoumen Daare was created? It couldn’t be to give this classic story a coat of modern graphics, because it actually looks much worse. The budget is clearly limited, and for some reason the animators tried to recreate the character-designs and art styles of the early nineties.

Of course, if you haven’t seen Ushiro no Shoumen Daare, this is a very serviceable movie that will keep you interested. However, it simply is inferior to the movie that it tries to rip off: the lead character is a bit too one-sided: she’s constantly made out as a strong girl and there’s just too little variety in her character, not to mention the incredibly stereotypical way in which the Americans are portrayed here. Some of the slice of life moments are nicely done, though.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	7/10
Production-Values:	7/10
Setting:	7/10

From the creators of Vexille, TO is their next work as they adapt two stories from the 2001 Nights manga. This manga was a collection of stories (most of them unrelated) that chronicled the challenges of humankind as they ventured into outer space. The two episodes of TO are completely unrelated, and so they can be watched completely individual from each other. Like Vexille, these OVAs are also shot entirely in 3D CG, and unfortunately, they didn’t escape the big weakness of 3D-movies: the botox-faces. But apart from these botox-faces, how do they hold up? As a very mixed bag, actually.

The first story is Elliptical Orbit, and for the most part it’s just average: average action, average, characters, average story; it all feels like it’s been done before. While I do appreciate that one of the lead character is an actual grown up male (somewhere in his forties, I guess), there just hardly is anything interesting or noteworthy. The bad guys are stereotypical bad guys who are evil because they’re evil; the kind that want to blow lots of stuff up and kill as many people as possible.

There is one spark of light in here, though. The twist at the end of this episode is one I really, really liked: it’s creative, and adds quite a bit of depth to at least the main characters. Throughout the average action, the build-up at least came together quite nicely in the end, and so this is a story that left me with a good impression.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the second story, Symbiotic Planet. The episode should be applauded for its background art, and design works, which are absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, the rest of the episode isn’t just average like with Elliptical Orbit, it’s just outright bad.

The story is stupid, it centers around a silly love story between star crossed lovers (since their parents hate each other and want to blow each other up for badly explained reasons). The build-up of tension is ruined by very one-dimensional characters who only seem to have one character-trait and nothing more. The real disaster is the climax, though: it’s full of lazy plotholes, deus ex machina, storyboards that just don’t make any sense (about a dozen of people completely vanish at one point, with no explanation of where they went; which is a bit unnerving because they were just infected with a dangerous space virus) and the ending itself is just such an incredibly cheap knock-off that it completely destroys any sort of build-up that still remained.

So overall, Elliptical Orbit has its charms, Symbiotic Planet doesn’t. However, the manga of 2001 Nights has already been adapted once before: in 1987 a movie was created with some of the other stories. Even though it actually has less airtime than TO, it’s a really good story and really well told, giving you a great idea of some of the basics and challenges of space travel. If you’re interested in this story, check out that one before trying trying TO. Unless you’re looking for nothing but action or botox people, I guess.

Storytelling:	6/10
Characters:	6/10
Production-Values:	8/10
Setting:	7/10

The coming weeks, I’m planning to hold another movie spree, so you can expect a lot of movie reviews. I’ve been meaning to check out Five Star Stories for quite a while now, but I could never find it. Since a whole string of releases recently became available, I decided to check it out, but ultimately I had to be disappointed. This is another one of those movies that try to put way too much in way too little time.

But let me first give credit where credit is due: the art in this movie is absolutely gorgeous. The characters are incredibly detailed and well animated. And sure, some characters may look a bit too ridiculous, but you can see that nearly every character and mecha is drawn with a lot of imagination, I can’t think of any other anime that looks quite like this.

But yeah, the manga for Five Star Stories consists out of twelve volumes. The creators tried to stuff this into only one hour. There’s no way that fits, not to mention that only the first two manga volumes were released at the time that this series was produced. It seems like only the first volume got animated or something, which leaves HUGE plotholes behind.

As an example, we have this bad guy, who everyone says horrible things about, and yet we never actually see him do anything illegal. Sure, he’s a bit of an asshole, but in comparison, the good guys of the movie are much worse: they keep talking about morality and justice, but they also don’t resist to kill innocent people, they turn little girls into war machines and the president of a country somehow manages to leave his post for TEN WHOLE YEARS, doing God knows what in the process.

The setting does have potential: you can see some imagination in the political system for this story, the link between mecha pilots, and how these people fit into society, but it’s never really used well with the very limited scope that this series uses. Right now, the good guys do nothing but flaunt their super awesome mega powers, while the bad guys are simply being stupid assholes. There’s hardly any depth to the characters, other than the father of the girls, maybe.

Storytelling:	5/10
Characters:	6/10
Production-Values:	9/10
Setting:	7/10

Interestingly enough, Hashire, Melos! has already been adapted into an anime once before (twice, actually, but here I’m focusing on the 1992-movie), so while waiting for the final instalments of Aoi Bungaku, I figured that I might as well check out a completely different interpretation of the classic story by Osamu Dazai. It of course isn’t as good as Ryousuke Nakamura’s version, and it even seems that the entire part of the author writing this story was completely new. But nevertheless, this movie shows that even the original story without this interplay between author and fiction had a lot of potential.

Because of the different ages, direction, themes and focuses, you really end up with two completely different stories that just happen to have some of the same characters. The dialogue in the movie isn’t as complex as the Aoi Bungaku version, nor is it an as big of an emotional roller-coaster, but it does allow for much more time to flesh out Melos and Celine, the two lead characters. And it’s in these two that the power of this story lies.

They’re both two men with their own strengths and weaknesses, and my favourite part of the movie were their reasons for doing the seemingly stupid things that they did: they’re well-backed up and powerful motivations. The ending is a bit rushed and predictable, but it’s not what’s important to the story at all; heck, even the movie realizes this by telling how the story ends right at the very first scene.

The music isn’t anything special, but the animation is really what you’d expect from a movie: very smooth and detailed with a real minimum of still frames. Despite again, this animation being not as expressive as Ryousuke Nakamura’s version I still very much recommend this movie because it really has its own points where it shines, and despite my rather repetitive complaining, I didn’t feel like watching a copy of something that I already watched once before at all. This movie adds quite a bit of depth and colour to the already interesting characters of Melos, Celine and Dionysius.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	9/10
Production-Values:	8/10
Setting:	8/10

Those who have been reading some of my past mecha series reviews will probably know that I’m not the biggest fan of the Gundam franchise. These series often degenerate in strings of random fights that hardly ever resolve anything, and the storylines are way too often taken over by angsty and emo teenagers (or in Gundam 00’s case: angsty and emo young adults). However, this isn’t the case for Turn A Gundam!

I’m really glad to see that Turn A Gundam, directed by Tomino himself, manages to keep a solid direction and focus throughout the series. Okay, it’s a bit of a flawed direction here and there, but at least the plot is continuously moving. Something very impressive considering the complex, detailed and imaginative world that this series has to work with.

While on one hand, Turn A Gundam doesn’t escape some of the big clichés of the mecha-genre (a teenaged lead-character who just “happens” to find the “superpowered mecha of awesomeness”; “fighting is bad, so I will fight for these ideals!”), it makes up for it with its attention to detail: the cast for this show is huge, but Tomino manages to create lots of different fractions, all with their own ideals and morals. It has a carefully constructed setting, and the attention to detail for each of the mechas, airships, hovercrafts and spaceships is very impressive. I personally loved how at random times, Tomino liked to subtly flesh out random nameless soldiers, as they reported some news right next to a very important queen that everyone looks up to.

The large focus on politics is also one of the highlights of this series. While there are of course plenty of mecha-battles, a major theme of this series can also be found in the continuous peace negotiations, and how things like this that are so seemingly easy and obvious can be hampered by bad luck, just two or three people, or just plain bad planning and coordination.

As the show moves into its second half, it does lose a bit of steam, though. While definitely not bad, the second half of Turn A Gundam is inferior to the first. For that, I blame the series’ major villains: Agrippa has just way too little airtime and therefore makes no impact, while Gym Ghignham is just a plot device who continues to shout cheesy one-sided ideals. The two of them really put an evil side (and subsequently turn the lead characters into somewhat stereotypical good guys) to a series that had such a fine blur in morality, in which nobody really belonged to the good or bad side, and drag this series down.

Because of the lesser second half, I can’t quite call this show top-notch, but there is a lot to like in it nevertheless. Yoko Kanno has really worked her magic on the soundtrack, and the direction is strong under Tomino, with his trademark fast-paced dialogue that will keep the viewer on his toes. I’ll continue to raise eye-brows at teenagers who somehow end up piloting the most important military weapons in a single war, but hey: the rest of this show has enough other stuff to offer.

Storytelling:	8/10
Characters:	8/10
Production-Values:	9/10
Setting:	9/10