Out With A Bang

This is my final review, the last hurrah.  This has been an interesting exercise in writing and ego but now I must go.  Let us come full circle and end The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre with a review of an anime, and not just any anime but an anime film I had been waiting to see for ten years before it was finally released on DVD in the US for the first time at the beginning of the month.  Will it live up to my expectations and hopes?  Let's find out as I review

1987

Directors: 

Katsuhiro Otomo 

Atsuko Fukushima

Koji Morimoto

Hidetoshi Omori

Yasuomi Umetsu

Hiroyuki Kitazume

Mao Lamdo

Hiroyuki Kitakubo

Takashi Nakamura

Yup, as you can see from the list of directors above, this is another anthology film involving Akira director Katsuhiro Otomo.  You know the drill; time to go short by short.

Opening:  This is a clever little bit to introduce the main title, seen above.  I'm not going to give away what happens, you'll have to see it to believe it.  It is cute, hilarious and deadly frightening all at the same time.  Kudos!

Franken's Gears: A mad scientist tries to create life Franken-style, only with a ROBOT.  Goes as well as you'd expect.  This is one with no dialogue (the opening technically had dialogue but it was all in gibberish) which works fine (quite a few of the short films in Robot Carnival have little or no dialogue actually, which I can see made it ideal for importation to the West and explains its subsequent popularity on TV over here in the early 90s).  This short is merely OK, nothing special but nothing putrid either.

Deprive: This is standard 80s anime fare, which is not standard for this movie.  It involves a loyal robot rescuing a girl from alien invaders but the plot is meaningless as you are supposed to marvel at the action on display.  I have seen enough of  this type of stuff that all this short provoked from me was a ho-hum reaction.  Easily the weakest segment of the film.

Presence: An inventor creates a robot girl but destroys her when she actually starts to think for herself.  Years later his guilt catches up with him.  Everyone else seems to love this one (it's also the longest part of the movie).  I don't.  The story itself is merely okay but the character designs are creepy, the animation is fluid but unnatural (something I forgot to mention by the way: most of the animation in Robot Carnival is done at a full 24 fps, which is very rare in anime) and the protagonist is not sympathetic at all.  Oh well.

Star Light Angel: A girl goes to an amusement park, gets her heart broken then has an encounter with a romantic robot.  This one is the opposite, people seem to hate this one the most but I actually kinda like it.  It looks like an anime music video; all it needs to complete it is a J-Pop song.





Cloud: The *artsiest* short here.  It's a robot boy walking in front of changing cloud formations.  That's it.  And yet, it becomes more than that.  Subtle, meditative and beautiful, this is what anime should aspire to be every once in a while.

A Tale Of Two Robots: This is my personal favorite.  Two robots, one Japanese and one European duke it out in Tokyo.  Because it is the 19th Century however the results are hilarious.  This one comes off as both a parody of WWII Japanese propaganda and of giant robot battles in general.  It also has (in the Japanese version) the European antagonist speaking his lines in English and it alone is worth the price of admission.


Nightmare:  Imagine Fantasia's "Night On Bald Mountain", only in Tokyo and with robots.  It's okay but the influence is obvious.  Come on, guys.

Closing:  Like the beginning also cute, funny and frightening.  A perfect way to end this movie.






In the end as with all anthology movies Robot Carnival is a mixed bag.  Overall I would say that it is an above average effort, thanks to a few really good shorts and a consistently great level of animation.  I'm glad I got it even though it wasn't the revelatory experience I was hoping for (it's not as good as Labrynth Tales or Memories).  It was a fun watch.  And even the failures are interesting failures (most of the time anyway).  This movie represents a time back in the eighties when Japanese animators would actually experiment with stuff like this.  Those days are mostly gone, although Otomo did release his newest anthology movie Short Peace only a couple of years ago and it is pretty good so there is still hope.

Well, I must now sign off and say adieu (or is it sayonara?).  It has been an interesting six years, and I hope in another six I will be doing something more productive than writing movie reviews on the internet.  But who knows?  The future is always fluid but for now, for right now for The Pharonic Fantasy Theatre this is the

Handing In My New Year's Catch-Up Work

Before I get too far into the new year I want to take a quick moment to briefly cover some of the stuff that I watched last year but wasn’t able to review for various reasons.  And by “stuff” I mean anime, since all three of the items below are Japanese and animated.  Shock upon shock!

Planetes (TV Series, 2003-2004) This show details the day-to-day trials and tribulations of a bunch of garbage collectors – the catch being that these are trash disposal workers of the FUTURE, and the waste that they are handling is orbital debris.  This is the science fiction show with the hardest *science* that I have ever seen – things move in microgravity the way they really would (I think… I have never been in space myself), physics are actually respected… the whole thing feels so real.  It’s no wonder that people at NASA reportedly love this show.  There is a real story happening in Planetes, though, so it’s not all real physics and garbage disposal – and the core story is a touching and emotionally involving one.  The only downside I can think of is that there are one or two moments of glurge, and it does get a little to over-the-top dramatically at a few points.  Other than that this show is a winner, with solid animation, good acting, and an intriguing story that is optimistic without being naïve.

Labyrinth Tales (Film, 1987) This is another animated anthology film involving Katsuhiro Otomo (wow… this guy likes these, doesn’t he?).  Three short films are presented: “Labyrinth” (directed by Rintaro) is the framing story, telling of a little girl and her cat who wind up at the titular labyrinth and its circus.  The next tale (“The Running Man,” by Yoshiaki Kawajiri) shows us a future where a deadly car-racing sport “Death Circus” is popular and the current champion will do anything to stay on top for his last race.  Otomo directs the last segment, “Construction Cancellation Order.”  In this story – the longest of the movie – a Japanese corporate drone is dispatched to a South American building project to halt construction after a government coup.  The problem is that the worker robots there don’t want to stop construction….  Labyrinth Tales, like Memories is a film that shows what anime and animation in general can and should be: intelligent and entertaining all at once.  “Labyrinth” is artsy and beautiful, “Running Man” is shallow but spectacular (my god, the animation!) and “Construction Cancellation Order” is smart and funny.  The only thing I can think of that might bring this title down a bit is the short running time (a total of 50 minutes).  No, you know what?  The running time doesn’t matter.  This is the perfect length for this – a nice short snack of anime instead of a large meal.  Sometimes you just need a snack.

Note: ADV released this on DVD in the US under the title Neo-Tokyo, presumably to cash in on Akira, even though this has nothing to do with Otomo's most famous work.  I decided to use the original Japanese title (you know, the one that's actually in the film's actual titles).  Also note that due to an encoding error the DVD is presented in 4:3, even though the movie is 1.85:1.  Basically what this means is:  if you are watching on an old 4:3 display the image is skewed and you're screwed, and if you're watching on a 16:9 you should stretch the picture to fill the screen. 

Giant Robo: The Day the Earth Stood Still (OVA, 1992-1998) I have to confess that the reason that I didn’t review this one wasn’t because of computer problems like the others but because I wasn’t sure about my feelings while watching it.  See, I was a little stressed out with various stuff when I watched this and I couldn’t focus on it a lot while watching it – I was too distracted to fully get into it.  I guess this is kind of indicative of its quality – that it couldn’t fulfill its basic function of entertainment (after all, what is entertainment for?).  Or maybe it’s just me.  Anyways, I couldn’t get into Giant Robo.  The animation and music were very nice but the story left me going “meh.”  I get what director Yasuhiro Imagawa was trying to do – combine every one of Mistuteru Yokoyama’s manga into one big homage – but it just didn’t click for me at all.  The biggest problem I think is that it’s so sober.  Oh, there are some light moments, but overall Giant Robo takes itself way too seriously for what it is and is way too operatic and heavy for a series that mixes giant super-robots with ancient Chinese wuxia characters.  Maybe one day I’ll watch it again when I’m in the right frame of mind.  Maybe.

 
I did enjoy the side-story OVA Ginrei Special though.  Seriously, it was way more fun than the actual show - this is what Giant Robo *should* have been.  And I guess Imagawa made up for Giant Robo by giving us G Gundam, which I will be reviewing at a later date.


And with that thought, this post is at an end.  Next time I think I'll review something positive and happy to fight off the mid-winter blahs.  Have fun!

Short Films, Short Reviews

This is going to be a short review (Promise!) because I’m tired out from work and other stuff.  Today’s movie is an anthology film, made up of three separate short stories.

Theatrical Film, 1995

Directors:  Kōji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura, Katsuhiro Otomo

The Story

Magnetic Rose:  A deep space salvage crew runs across a distress call coming from a ship in the middle of a dangerous magnetic field.  After investigating, they find that the ship is one big shrine to the life of an opera singer of the last century.  Both delights and dangers await them as they explore the memories and psyches of both the diva and ultimately themselves.

Stink Bomb:  A bumbling Japanese lab worker accidently swallows some secret pills thinking they are flu medication.  Hilarity ensues as he starts emitting a poisonous gas killing all around him with him completely unaware of what’s going on.  Determined to get to Tokyo to deliver the pills to his company’s headquarters, he finds himself mysteriously under attack from the military.  Will the Japanese SDF be able to stop this human biological weapon from reaching the capitol and killing untold millions of people?

Cannon Fodder:  In a town where all the buildings are topped by enormous cannons the citizens are always at war.  The people exist only to load the guns, fire the guns and strive to win a war against a foe they never see.

Review

This is a very good movie.  It’s movies like this that show the true potential of anime and of animation in general to tell stories and elevate the medium to true art.

Magnetic Rose:  This is the longest of the shorts, and could have easily have been its own movie.  It kind of struck me as being a Japanese Twilight Zone meets The Shining.  I don’t think it’s quite the absolute masterpiece that everyone else who’s seen this movie says it is, but it is very good.  It's very atmospheric, and the music (courtesy of Yoko Kanno) is very good as well as very fitting.  The characters are well fleshed out and easy to relate to, which is quite a feat considering this is short film with only 45 minutes to have character development in.

Stink Bomb:  This is a hilarious satire of human stupidity.  Not only does it ridicule the standard subjects of satire – the government and military – it also takes on the Japanese corporate mentality and human obliviousness in general.  Nobuo is not only so stupid that he can’t put one and one together to realize that he’s causing all of the death around him, he’s a complete unthinking corporate drone to boot.  The Japanese are known for being fiercely loyal to whatever company they work for, and this is riffed on stupendously in “Stink Bomb.”  Nobuo will not let anything, not soldiers, not tanks, not helicopters, nor even his own grandmother stop him from reaching Tokyo.  And the government is just as bad, trying to kill him as a first option instead of just dropping a note to explain the situation to him.  Truly a tales to warm the cockles of your heart.

Cannon Fodder:  This is always painted by others reviewing this movie as solely a portrayal and satire of fascism, but I think it’s a metaphor for life itself.  I think that it is more specifically a metaphor for the life of drudgery that a majority of the world’s population endures – the poor souls who get up everyday, trudge into their job and do monotonous work all day before going home to repeat the cycle all over again.   Anyone who has worked in the fields, in a factory or even in retail or at a restaurant… anyone who works as a tiny cog in a soulless machine – especially in a soulless machine spouting bullshit propaganda (whether government or corporate) – anyone who doesn’t get to utilize any sort of creativity or true intelligence or passion in their work… anyone who endures that will be able to relate to this film.

This film is highly recommended.  Not one of the absolute best movies ever made, but very entertaining and unlike 99% of the movies out there will actually make you think.

Screenshots

 (Sorry, no funny captions for the movie this week.  Not enough energy)

Next Week:  I have no clue.  I haven’t planned that far in advance yet.  I’m livin’ for the moment, baby!