Star Crossed Anime

Back in the sixties and seventies, before the age of Ghibli, Toei still had the ambitions to become the “Disney of Japan”, and was enthusiastically competing with Nippon Animation for that title. It’s not much of a surprise of course that a movie of the Swan Lake once was made. And I’m pretty impressed, actually. It’s obviously a children’s movie, but if you like this sort of stuff then Swan Lake will have you entertained.

The music for starters is fantastic. But really, how can you go wrong when you have Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as your soundtrack? With some of the best parts of this classical masterpiece, this movie truly is a feast for the ears and it creates a great atmosphere to work with.

Well then, the story itself is a bit unrealistic at times (romantic love story between a prince and princess who happen to meet each other and fall in love. Oh, and let’s not forget the two squirrels who somehow make themselves into important characters…), but it definitely has its charms. The story is well paced and makes well use of its airtime. Although there’s one particular Big Lipped Alligator Moment with ballet-dancing eggs. No, really.

In any case, what made me like this movie the most was the villain: Rothbart. His motives are just plain wrong, but he’s such a fun guy to watch. The characterization for him is just excellent and he’s the one who manages to carry this movie from the moment he first gets mentioned. Now here’s a movie that manages to create a really enjoyable character. The rest of the cast is also pretty enjoyable. Odette may be a bit useless, but it doesn’t stand out too much because of Odin, the Prince and the squirrels (yeah, these two oddballs really have their charms) have their own colourful personalities.

Let me take a bit of time to talk about the ending, though. The progress of this movie is fairly linear and modern fairy-tale-like, but solid. At the end, there’s this big battle between good and evil, which is actually pretty engaging… until the creators suddenly decide to pull a completely random twist that comes right out of nowhere, makes no sense whatsoever and isn’t explained in the slightest. Seriously, there are Deus ex Machina endings, and there’s this. You really have to try to be that bad.

Nevertheless, I like kids stuff once in a while, and this movie perfectly satiated my thirst for them. That ending was just… weird, but the rest of the movie was very enjoyable. This obviously isn’t the movie you want if you’re looking for maturity, but if you like innocent and likable characters, then this movie has them.

So I was told to check out Garzey’s Wing. I can see why. It’s hilarious.

For all of the wrong reasons, though. Especially with the English Dub on, it’s just one of those shows that are so bad that they become hilarious. There’s no way that I’m going to rate this high, but it is an hour and a half of solid entertainment.

It’s basically just another one of those stories in which a teenager somehow gets warped up to a different world and somehow turns out to be the holy warrior who is the only one who can save the day. There are really tons of shows with such a premise, but this is really a particularly badly executed one. The pacing is just so incredibly erratic that 50% of the cuts don’t make any sense whatsoever. This OVA leaves no time to catch a breath, and the amount of plotholes that come out of it is just huge (the good guys, for example, for a bunch of people who are mere slaves, they surely collected quite a bit of ammo and supplies).

The dialogue is… just abysmal. The English voice acting in particular just way too stiff and camp. Seriously, I have no idea who was behind them, but while watching this, I could almost imagine the voice actors yelling all of their lines in an over the top manner. I have no idea who wrote the English dialogue, but it makes no single attempt to come across naturally. There are hilarious parts in which characters stop mid-sentence because the original Japanese dialogue was much shorter. It also leads to some absolutely priceless one-liners.

I’m not one to usually enjoy bad shows, but what sets Garzey’s Wing apart from most of the other really bad series is one person: Yoshiyuki Tomino. While this was his biggest failure ever, he at least tried: the movie’s concept is at least creative, the animation is at least good (save for a bunch of really obvious shortcuts) and the pacing at least doesn’t drag or become boring.

I respect Tomino a lot: this series really shows how bad his depression was, and it must have been horrible for him to go through this for around ten years, and I have respect for this guy for pulling himself out of it. He very neatly produced the good version of Garzey’s Wing with the Wings of Rean, which was a genuinely good OVA.

But Garzey’s wing was just crap.

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?

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.

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.