Category: Anime Reviews

Nagagutsu Sanjuushi is the second movie that Saiei released recently. It too dates from the time when there was no Studio Ghibli yet, and anime still tried to be like Disney. So, what does that mean? Talking animals, of course! Nagagutsu Sanjuushi is a western with a cat as main character. Unfortunately, it’s a lot less fun than Andersen Monogatari.

While it originally has the potential to become a good family movie, but it’s bad writing that got in the way here. This movie hardly takes any time to explain what the heck is going on. Often, characters do completely random things that make no sense at all, just to keep the story going. There’s hardly any time spent on explaining the how and why of things. In fact, this goes on so badly that NONE of the characters received any important background whatsoever. We never get to know who these people are, or why they’re doing the things they do. Especially in the case of the main character this is jarring: he’s just… there, without any possible explanation what he’s doing here or why he involves himself with the plot.

So overall, we’ve got a movie that’s a lot of bark and no bite. It’s badly written and the creators don’t care at all about continuity, and the endless stupidity of the characters doesn’t help either. Sure, I know that it’s a children’s movie, but even then you shouldn’t have characters with the intelligence of a baboon’s backside running across the screen. The only merit this movie has is one fun, but completely non-sensical chase scenes.

Saiei is of course a great source for the raw watcher who’s interested in ancient gems that nobody’s heard of. They recently added three new movies, among which is Andersen Monogatari. Having never heard of the movie, I expected to see some WMT-esque kaleidoscope through Hans Christian Andersen’s most well known stories.

What I got… was something completely different.

For those who thought that anime in its infancy has no creativity whatsoever when compared to today’s standards…. this movie is here to prove you wrong. The movie was produced in 1968, and seriously: it’s one heck of a crack job. The movie somehow features Hans Christan Andersen as a ten year old boy, and we see his childhood through all sorts of references to the stories and characters that he later was going to write, helped by… a bratty cat, a bunch of mice and a very weird old guy who flies with an umbrella. I wouldn’t be surprised if the creators were under influence of god knows what sort of drug when they wrote this.

Ultimately though, despite all of the weirdness it’s a pretty good fantasy movie, and especially the kids will love the singing and all of the random ideas and fantasies thrown at the screen. As for the more older viewers, it’s obviously going to be a matter of taste: it’s not for everyone, but if you’re into the childish stuff (and don’t care how childish you can get) and happen to locate this movie, then it’s a pretty good recommendation. The animation is also its time very far ahead for an anime that was produced in the sixties. As for myself, there were some particular scenes where I really burst out with laughing (that dog was awesome), and the few serious parts are also really nicely integrated with the randomness of the rest of the movie. Just don’t expect any common sense in this one.

I’ve got quite a big backlog of movies built up, so I hope that I can clear that one in the next couple of days. First up is the follow-up movie of Nasu – Summer in Adalusia: Suitcase no Wataridori. They’re both movies about professional cycling (like, the real thing, not a bunch of teenagers racing against each other), and follow the lead Character Pepe as he tries to win some races. Suitcase no Wataridori shows a race of his and his team mates in Japan. If you liked Summer in Andalusia, then you should check this one out as well, because it’s superior in nearly every single way.

Suitcase no Wataridori is a really balanced movie, it’s got a bit of everything: there’s excitement, action, romance, comedy, tragedy, a character-study, all packaged together quite neatly in a one-hour movie without any of the parts featured too little or too much. The Cat ex Machina that was rather annoying in the first movie is also gone as well, and the events flow much more naturally this time, and this overall makes this a very fun movie to watch, making you care about the different characters. Even the romance doesn’t feel out of place and is really nicely done.

The graphics have also received a major boost. The CG is much less apparent and blends much more with the 2D graphics. And the Ghibli-esque animation really works! It adds great expressivity to the different characters, it definitely was a visual feast and a movie budget well used.

So yeah, that’s pretty much why I’ve given this movie such a high rating: it pretty much did everything it was supposed to do, without feeling rushed or anything. Most movies suffer from a rushed or oversimplified plot, but everything was really balanced for Suitcase no Wataridori. Overall, the two movies complement each other pretty well. While Suitcase no Wataridori is superior in technical terms, Summer of Andalusia does provide some valuable background on Pepe, and together they form a pretty nice recommendation for if you like quick sports anime, or want to watch some cycling but don’t have the patience to sit through five plus hours of a real-world cycling tournament.

Well, I guess it’s time for me to check out another one of Hiroshi Watanabe’s works. Tactics can easily be viewed along with Suteki Tantei Labyrinth and Matantei Loki Ragnarok as his “supernatural detectives”-trilogy, featuring Shinto, Post-Apocalypse and Norse Mythology respectively. Out of the three, Tactics has the least original premise (after all, how many series about Shinto are there already out there?), it’s still a pretty decent series.

This series is actually pretty un-typical of Hiroshi Watanabe: his series usually are a very strange combination between really good and really bad, but Tactics instead is a pretty solid series. Whereas Suteki Tantei Labyrinth’s cases were really crazy at times, the cases that the lead character of this series needs to solve are well built up, logical, genuine and not really stupid at all.

The cast of main characters also is pretty interesting for a shoujo series. For once the lead character isn’t a teenager, but instead a folklorist, who has been properly schooled in the occult and happens to be able to see youkai. It makes sense that the guy would then try to make his money with exorcism. The rest of the lead cast complements him really well: no two characters feel the same, and they make up for quite a varied and enjoyable cast.

So, why the relatively low rating? Well, it’s pretty much a case of wasted potential. What we have here is a series without any major flaws, but which also lacks any major highlights. While Suteki Tantei Labyrinth was memorable for me because you’d never know what kind of stupid plot twists it would pull, Tactics for the most part isn’t memorable at all. The different episodic stories do the job of not getting you bored, but they don’t make any impact either. I really feel that the creators could have gotten so much more out of the lead characters than what they showed in this series.

The bad guys this series are also pretty pathetic. They hardly receive any development, their reasons for being evil are even shallower than your average bad guys, and they suffer from the “I’m about to kill you but I won’t because I want to see you grow stronger”-syndrome. Characters as Rosalie also appear way too late in the series to make any real impact.

Still, while this series isn’t your typical Hiroshi Watanabe-Trainwreck, it does have one very typical element of his series: a surprise ending. Like usual the episodes leading up to the finale are a bit too stuffed with angst, you’re about to give up on the series, and then it suddenly closes off with a really good (or surprising) ending. The ending of Tactics made up for a lot of the balance issues that I had with this series. It was really good and the only big highlight of this series for me.

So overall, this series is wasted potential, but it’s good to see that Hiroshi Watanabe is also good at writing solid story-lines, without the usual stupidity that you can find in most of his other works. Out of his supernatural detectives trilogy, I’d still prefer Suteki Tantei Labyrinth, but if you’re stuck with this series on a rainy day, then you’re not going to get bored.

Whoa. I really thought that I’d be handing a higher rating for this series when I first started watching it. I really liked the original Mobile Suit Gundam, and this one promised to be even better. With much more solid production-values, an epic plot and all the elements that the modern Gundam series have as well, I really thought that I’d love this series, but in the end I enjoyed this series a lot less than I thought I would.

But first things first: every Gundam-series I’ve seen so far has its own parts where it’s excellent at. For Zeta Gundam, it’s its sense of location. It takes place in a setting where vehicles have yet to be able to breach the speed of light, and so it takes a while for people to get from A to B. Battles are also highly dependant of their environment, and so battles in the middle of a bunch of mountains are going to be completely different from those that take place at sea, inside a city, in outer space, etcetera. Especially the first half of this series has many varied battles, that make you want to keep watching because of this.

The problems with this series stem from the fact that it too suffers from the flaws that plague every Gundam Series, only here they’re much, much worse and much, much more stubborn. The adult side characters of this series are pretty interesting, but the teenaged male lead Kamille just keeps on whining over and over: he keeps poking his nose in other people’s business, hardly ever stops preaching his cheesy ideals and yet he’s an awesome pilot and mecha designer due to the simple excuse of being a genius Newtype.

And even when the guy does shut up, the creators make sure to replace him with yet another impulsive teenager who ignores orders and refuses to listen to others. In the second half, this becomes so bad that the teenagers literally take over the show, and the plot nearly stops moving because too much airtime is focused on all the different teenagers in this series (what happened to the adults anyways?) getting angsty and emo over each other.

This series really doesn’t have much to offer otherwise, unlike other Gundam series. The politics are pretty basic. We’ve got a bunch of sides who oppose each other, but hardly any time is spent on fleshing out the different sides. The character Quattro, for example. He’s a pretty important character in this series (the most important non-teenager one, in fact), and his political views basically are that he wants to get people into outer space. After fifty episodes, however, I’m still not sure why the guy feels that way, and what made him support these views. We are hardly given any insight into his motivations, nor the situation of the people on earth.

As usual, the anti-war themes are also prevalent in this series, but unfortunately in the end, the message simply turns into “THOU SHALT NOT KILL”, without the creativity and complexity that I’ve been used from other Tomino works. The major themes in this series were already overdone at the time when the series aired, let alone right now.

I’m not really sure what happened here. While this series must have been “the bomb” when it first aired, I think it didn’t age too well, or I simply didn’t like it as much as other series. And this isn’t coming from someone who only likes anime from after 1995: I personally loved the original Mobile Suit Gundam, which looked much older than this one, and now that I’m looking back at it, the flaws I mentioned here when I reviewed it seem pretty insignificant right now, and it’s a great example of how a great mecha series should be done. It really captured the essence of the despair that you can feel on the battlefield, while Zeta Gundam… just features a bunch of people fighting for fifty episodes. It’s a good show; some of the adult characters are really nice to watch, but the series isn’t that good.

It was really hard for me to start watching this series. The 1984 version of the series was really bad, and I wasn’t looking forward to the same bad execution for 51 more episodes. Still, I’m glad that eventually I did give this series a chance. This isn’t simply a case where the new creators improved the show at certain areas. What we have here is two versions of the same story, where one of them is utter crap, while the other is downright awesome. This really shows what good execution can mean for the overall quality of a story.

Especially when you’re making an anime about a talented actress, you need to be extra careful to fully understand what you’re adopting. The creators of the 1984-series clearly didn’t, and turned the lead character (Maya) into some sort of hopelessly over-acting Mary Sue, and they failed to emphasize that Maya was just a frail little girl, and that her talents came not from being incredibly talented, but rather her one-mindedness and ability to completely shut herself off from the outside, which was perfectly portrayed in the 2005 version.

The new voice actress also really helped: Masako Katsuki as Maya was one of the biggest miscasts you could imagine (think in the order of magnitude of putting Norio Wakamoto in the role of a young school-boy). Sanae Kobayashi however, does a much better job at portraying Maya, and that’s an understatement. Both when she’s on stage and when she’s herself, her voice captures the right nuances and makes for a believable and captivating actress.

The biggest strength of this series is its cast of characters, and then especially Maya and Ayumi full well-rounded characters at the end of the series. The rivalry that develops between the two of them is definitely memorable, and a unique take on the “hard work versus talent” theme: for once, it’s the lead character who is the talented one and the main rival who achieved her successes by working very hard. This series has 51 episodes, and they make optimal use of this long length to fully develop the bond that develops between the two of them.

But also the rest of the cast is great to watch. With perhaps the exception of some of the very minor side characters who are jealous of Maya’s successes in the beginning perhaps, every character has a clear purpose, and evolves along with this series. My only complaint here is Tsukikage, and especially her heart problems, which feels like a simple plot device. This is up to the point where you find yourself able to predict exactly when her next heart attack (or whatever it was that attacked her) is going to happen.

For a 2005-series, the animation of this series isn’t anything special, though I do want to applaud the creators for going with down-to-earth character designs, rather than the overblown shoujo-ones of the 1984 series. Especially Ayumi’s character-designs changed from the look of a stuck up princess to someone with simply good looks, nothing more and nothing less. And while most of the animation of this series isn’t that much to write about, the show does have a number of very artistic and good-looking shots of the different characters. The soundtrack for this series is also awesome, but this is where I’m really biased, since the composer also created the soundtrack of Mahou Shoujotai. ^^;

Overall, I’m glad that I listened to Hashihime and the other fans of this series, because the 2005-version really makes up everything where the 1984 version went wrong. After watching this series, I’m definitely going to look at acting in a different way, and that’s something that should be the case with every anime that’s about such a focused subject as this one.

Note: this is a rant, and a pretty big one. Mushrambo, or Shinzo as it’s also been called, is one of the guilty pleasures that I watched when I was still in my early teens, back when Dutch children’s television had yet to descend into utter crap. My taste was pretty bad at the time, but I loved catching the latest episode on television despite the series’ very obvious flaws (the two biggest fights took up 6 and 10 (!) episodes respectively and the plot suffered from some pretty bad inconsistencies (what can I say, my taste was pretty bad at the time; I was fourteen…)). So when I learned about a remake of this series on movie, by none other than the director of Mononoke, I obviously got excited to relive my teenage memories.

Well, I’d like to thank this series for completely destroying them. The movie became nothing but a freaking recap. And a very bad one as well. It’s clear that there went absolutely no budget whatsoever in this thing, and I have no idea what the director of Mononoke was thinking here.

The problem with recap movies like this one is that they take series that have a slow pacing which they use to build up their characters for A REASON. Ultimately we now have a cut-and-paste job of the best scenes of the series that move way too bloody fast to prove any sort of credibility. It’s here where a capable writer manages to condense the story so that it can create a proper story within ninety minutes, but either the director had a really bad day when he wrote this series, or the producers were sleeping through the production process and only realized that nothing had been done a day before the deadline (because really, this is the kind of movie that you can easily make within a day, and I’m really not exaggerating here).

Nothing is explained whatsoever for the ones who are new to the premise. In fact, at one point it’s so bad that the characters look back at events that NEVER EVEN HAPPENED IN THE MOVIE. At one point in the series, for example, the lead characters get an upgrade in power. This upgrade is completely skipped in the movie, and yet the characters costumes magically changed themselves.

One of the things I hoped for in this movie is an number of very sweet graphics (because despite the clichés, I remember how a lot of very nice ideas were put into the setting and it would be awesome to see what they’d look like with a movie budget), but to my despair, the graphics look even more horrible than I remembered them. It’s one thing for a movie to simply look the same, but this movie actually looks and sounds WORSE than the TV-series. WHAT!?

If I had to mention the worst part of this movie, then it’d be the voice acting. If there’s anything that comes close to downright abysmal, then it’s the voice actors of the lead characters. These guys did the impossible: they made Dutch voice-actors sound awesome. I never knew that depths like these existed.

Overall, I watched this for the sake of nostalgia. There’s no possible reason why you should torture yourself with an hour and a half of this thing. I can’t believe that Toei put Mononoke’s director on such a large piece of crap when there’s so much potential left in the guy. I know that the original series wasn’t exactly good, but it was still pretty successful in terms of its entertainment value and it had some really neat ideas for a shounen series; it was nowhere near the levels of crap that the movie explores. I’d almost say that this is some kind of rickroll, but why would someone go through the trouble for such an unknown series, let alone find its raws?