This was, of course, a show I had thoroughly PSHAW’D when it first appeared. Anthropomorphised countries? WWII? It sounded like a dreadful idea.

However, while writing the piece on Wonderful, I decided I ought to check out the big modern gag anime that I hadn’t already seen. Namely, Lucky Star, K-On and Hetalia. While Lucky Star and K-On don’t really work for me in the form they are in, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying Hetalia.

Despite what the loudest, most obnoxious parts of its fandom might suggest to you, it works on a variety of levels, not just that of pretty boys in uniforms. In fact, the pandering innuendo is probably the weakest aspect of its humour, which unfortunately becomes more of a crutch for the series than is in evidence during this first batch of episodes.

What the show is strongest on is the historical humour, often delivering jokes that are arguably too clever for their own good, due to their reliance on very specific historical and cultural events (what other anime is making Busby Stoop Chair gags?). I’m a big fan of overly specific humour and parody, but I can see how the need to research the history to get some of the jokes would be off putting. And to it’s credit it doesn’t overuse them, often using them a starting point, spinning the humour off the historical reference by using it’s main comedic weapon.

Namely, national stereotypes.

Now there certainly is the potential to be truly offensive here, and it’s easy to assume it would be by the description. Or indeed the name. However, from my point of view, it’s no more offensive than ‘Allo, ‘Allo and it’s probably about the geopolitics of WW2 to the same extent as that erstwhile British sitcom. Of course people complained about ‘Allo ‘Allo, so it’s not surprising that Hetalia has its critics too.

Where the series mainly confines its use of anthropomorphic geopolitics is in the non-WW2 sections, particularly the Chibitalia segments set during the Holy Roman Empire. The WW2 era is wisely left more for the broadest gags based on national stereotypes. Because some of those gags are very broad, it’s worth avoiding watching too many episodes in a row. There’s only so many jokes about Italy being obsessed with food and surrendering you can watch in one sitting, even if they are interspersed with sketches about historical border changes in Central Europe.

The writing is so all over the place and the animation functional but consistent, that it won’t rank up there with all time classic gag anime, but it’s not as dumb as it looks on the surface. Well, OK, it is that dumb sometimes, but it’s also too clever for its own good at other times. And the timing and editing is very good, light years ahead of the likes of Lucky Star and K-On.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

This is the third of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Luke and Professor Layton find themselves in a puzzle contest promising eternal life.

This film is not going to disappoint fans of the Professor Layton games, and there’s likely enough of those fans that it won’t need any other audience.

That being said, there’s only a couple of instances where familiarity with the games is intended, and frankly if you’ve only played the English language releases, they’ll likely leave you similarly non-plussed as the non-fans. You see, this film takes place after the fourth game in the series, part of a prequel continuity set before the games we’ve had translated so far.

That means there are a handful of characters it assumes you are familiar with, such as Layton’s other assistant, Remi Altava and Inspector Grosky, the ridiculously manly Scotland Yard detective, whose chest hair is always trying to escape his shirt. You won’t have met them yet unless you’ve played Professor Layton and the Spectre’s Flute, but with one exception you can easily grasp their characters within seconds of their introduction.

Otherwise, it’s easy to grasp what’s going on in the story, no matter how preposterous it gets. And it does. It is Professor Layton after all. However, like the writing on the games, it does such a good job of drawing you into Layton’s world, that it is still completely possible for you to guess the final reveal, even though it is completely outside of our reality. It makes complete sense given what you’ll have seen up to that point and it plays fair in giving you clues to that reveal. The Sherlock Holmes influences in the characters and the Lupin III influences in the game’s OTT set pieces, means it all transfers very well to the screen. Even the puzzle sections work well, and they even find a way to fit the games typography organically into the film.

Visually it continues the look of the OLM produced cut scenes and Level 5′s character design. This means you get a cast full of big headed grotesques and weirdos, who move in a very pleasing manner with some strong camera movements. I really, really like some of the running sequences in both the film and the game cutscenes. They are just so full of character.

Layton himself is probably the weak point, the would-be iconic nature of his design and particularly his dot eyes, leaves him rather plain in terms of expression when placed next to plucky Luke, the boisterous Grosky or the ass-kicking Remi. Though that might be just because he’s a British Gentleman as the script continually reminds you to comic effect. Though apparently being a British Gentleman means chatting during an opera performance and blocking the view of the people behind with your big top hat. He does get an action scene of his own near the climax that is quite fun despite the limitations in his character design.

Definitely a must see for fans of the games, but certainly worth a rental or visit to a screening when it becomes available whoever you are.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

This is the second of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Sci-fi take on a traditional children’s adventure yarn, told with humour and an imaginative line in aliens.

Welcome to the Space Show is a project from the “Besame Mucho” team of director Koji Masunari, writer Hideyuki Kurata and producer Tomonori Ochikoshi, along with their Read or Die collaborator, character designer/animation director Masashi Ishihama.

It tells the tale of 5 children who get whisked off into an adventure in space during their annual holiday in the countryside. “Five Go Off To Space” if you like. It definitely adheres to the unsupervised nature of popular children’s adventure fiction. There’s even a dog and evil smugglers!

What weaknesses there are, seem to come from Kurata. The story is too long, caused by there being a few too many elements that needed to be set up to get to the ending. It’s not that it really lags, it’s just that it feels like there’s just a litle too much of it. It really pushes the number of “Chekhov’s gun” moments you can have in a story. On top of that, the villains are sketches rather than fully drawn personalities and lack fleshed out motivations. That’s something that you could see in the team’s Read Or Die projects too, a focus on the mechanics of the plot over clarifying the actual reasons it was all happening.

However, Kurata is also great at writing gags and likeable heroines. The comedy in the film is one of the film’s strongest points, full of genuinely amusing lines and situations. And the central conflict isn’t really the one between the heroes and the villains, but between two cousins who have fallen out over a lost rabbit. That totally human dilemma grounds the sci-fi lunacy that surrounds it, and allows the film to get away with leaving its villains with motives that are only hinted at.

The other overwhelmingly strong aspect of the film is the visual inventiveness, particularly in terms of creating the sense of a universe teeming with diverse life forms. In the Q&A after the screening, Masunari said there were about 400 different alien designs used through the film. Personally it took me back to some of the brief insane crowd scenes you’d get in Urusei Yatsura, where they’d populate a crowd with characters from earlier episodes. Except in Welcome To The Space Show, this was happening for most of the running time of the film. It avoids being a distraction, instead it works more like the little incidental gags you’d get in the What-A-Mess books. I suspect rewatching will pay dividends as extra visual gags reveal themselves.

Of the three films I saw at the BFI Anime Weekend, it was easily my favourite despite its flaws. While not a classic, it’s a good family film. More importantly it’s more talent making the leap from TV/OAVs to movies, and it’s a strong debut feature for Sony’s A-1 Pictures. Would love to see them get Kazuki Akane & Hiroshi Onogi (Noein, Birdy The Mighty Decode) to create an original film too, so hopefully this one is a big enough hit to make them continue on the feature film route (Welcome To The Space Show is yet to be released in Japan, this was the second screening in the world so far).

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

This is the first of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Boy, oh boy, were there ever some nerds in the audience for this one. Possible the most heightened air of nerd excitement I’ve felt in a room. Even the sugar rush costumed kids of the MCM Expos don’t get as excitable and fidgety as a room of Evangelion fans, most of whom had just sat through the first of these “remakes”.

They liked it a lot, giving it the most applause of the three films I saw.

I’m not so sure about it. It felt a lot like Peter Jackson’s Two Towers, in that there’s a lot to admire visually, but in terms of story, it’s all middle and it goes on too long. There are elements, like the new pilot character, that you are going to have to wait until the next film to get some feeling of whether they were worth including in this film. I liked the character, but at the same time, her presence in the film did little but add two fight scenes that were arguably two too many. Even if one of the fights was one of the better sequences in the film, I was getting burnt out on robot action by that point.

The other elephant in the room is the film’s nature as a reworking of material I’m already familiar with. That makes it hard to judge as a piece of work on it’s own in the same way that the film version of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy gets judged against the radio, TV and novel versions. Or the Red Dwarf film would if it ever got made. Or Michael Mann’s Miami Vice film was against Michael Mann’s Miami Vice tv series (or to a lesser extent Heat & LA Takedown). Not to mention the multitude of BBC comedies that leapt from Radio to TV as I was growing up and would disappoint me with either changes in cast or straight recycling of gags. And once you move away from projects where the original creator was involved in some way, then the list gets ever bigger. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Evangelion gets reworked in this way, it’s more surprising that we don’t get more projects like this based on popular anime or manga. Which we probably are. I don’t have the time to plot remakes against time today.

For this particular film, the thing that bugged me was that there are elements in the film that go so far in the opposite direction from original TV series that you wonder if they are doing it because it’s right for the story, or because it’s a surprise for established fans, or because we’re going to get an ending that somehow unifies the whole Evangelion canon.

The way it ends suggests it will only take one more film to retell the remaining portion of the series and/or End of Evangelion, as they had originally indicated. So what is that fourth film with supposedly all new content going to be, and will it add extra meaning to the changes in the same way radio adaptations of later Hitchhiker’s books had to make sense of the conflicting book and radio continuities? The thing that really struck me about the changes was how positive some of the outcomes are to situations that went really badly in the TV series. Is that just a change in mood that the new character also seems to reflect, or is it something else? What about the visual elements cribbed from End of Evangelion rather than the TV series? Is that just because they are neat or are they trying to suggest something else?

Due to the nature of the original series, I’m left with this nagging feeling they are deliberately trying to be tricksy, and that they are going to end up disappointing me by trying too hard. In fact, even if they aren’t being tricksy, the fact that I suspect they are, might mean they’ll end up disappointing me anyway.

The counter-evidence to those continuity swerves is that, like the first film in this remake sequence, they have stripped a lot of the ambiguity of the plot away by putting it into focus more than the original did. You get much more of a sense of the political chicanery in the world and a clearer view of the arms race going on between NERV and SEELE. Where the TV series focused on the people, this series of films focuses more on the events. That may be what they are going for and everything else is just phantoms created in the mind of viewers already familiar with the material.

So, odd film and indifferent review. Which is about how I feel about the original series too. It’ll probably take someone with no Evangelion baggage at all to get a clear view on how well it works as a film, rather than as a pop culture ouroboros.

—

And now a short aside.

I don’t know if I’ve just become hyper aware of it, or simply that I’ve seen UFO on ITV4 in recent years, but in the first half, maybe two thirds, the Gerry Anderson influence seemed even stronger than the TV series. Particularly the fly past the SEELE moonbase, the shots of Tokyo-3, the whole visit to the aquarium sequence, the strobe effects in the Entry Plug and the personality differences in Rei. She really reminded me more of Marina from Stingray here than she ever did in the TV series.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Cars are raced. Things blow up. Friendship and love.

Animation work by Takeshi Koike is a rare enough occurrence to make it a big deal. Well worth dropping the £30 to go to the Sci-Fi London “Manga All-Nighter” and setting aside two days to recover from sitting in a cinema all night. So it was good to learn that Redline lived up to the hype that my brain had been feeding to itself for the past three years or so.

I could have done without the sound problems we endured for the first ten minutes or so, where they somehow lost one channel on the left hand side. The channel with dialogue and small sound effects in. Nothing important, you know? It was incredibly distracting, making it hard to get into the movie and started the evening on a sour note. Not sure what was responsible for it, the cinema or the digital copy being shown as none of the other films had the same problem. In the end the sound got jiggled around, and while we still appeared to be missing one channel, we didn’t seem to be missing any actual sound.

Amazing how actually being able to hear what is being said and having all the sound effects really helps a film! Particularly one that is charging straight at you, screaming its head off like Redline.

The trailer released last year gives you a good taste of the film, though I don’t believe that, beyond the title animation, any of that footage is actually in the finished film. There are scenes that are similar, possibly even containing some identical key animation, but there’s significant differences in the setting and events portrayed in the trailer and the finished product.

The story that the film hangs its over the top cartoon racing action on is the tale of Sweet JP, a a talented racer fallen on hard times, forced to fix races due to the mafia debts of his best friend. Despite that, due to events in the pre-credits opening race, he accidentally finds himself placed in the top race in the universe, Redline.

Redline is to be run through Roboworld, a planet whose ruler is none too pleased to have the media circus show up on his planet as he doesn’t want his secret violations of peace treaties being shown across the universe. Which will be kind of hard to keep secret as the Redline course is due to go through his secret military compounds.

Finally, JP is falling for “Cherry Boy Hunter” Sonoshee, the racer who beat him in the opening race and who had inspired him to turn pro back when they were younger.

So you’ve got love, friendship, war and really loud cars going really fast – what more can you want from a film?

“We really want non-Japanese to see and appreciate this work”, Koike said in an interview. He doesn’t have too much to worry about there. The character design is varied, expressive and accessible. Just having your characters have lips is often enough to get people over their “I don’t like anime” position. The setting and action calls to mind obvious reference points like Speed Racer, Cannonball Run and obviously Wacky Races. The Wacky Races comparison is worth dwelling on. For starters, Wacky Races is very popular in Japan, so I don’t think appealing to non-Japanese is necessarily going to have negative effect on domestic performance. Secondly, it’s not afraid to go for blatantly Wacky Races style gags amidst all the sci-fi chaos. So fearless is it, that its conclusion is one such gloriously perfect gag.

But there’s other influences there too. You’ve got European sci-fi comics influencing some of the grander sci-fi designs, where Roboworld have apparently designed everything with inspiring awe in mind, rather than practicality. And there’s a Jamie Hewlett influence in there too, most obviously in the Booka-like Trava (returning from Koike and Redline collaborator Katsuhito Ishii’s Trava Fist Planet), but also there was a forgotten Hewlett strip called Fireball that also dealt with a sci-fi take on Cannonball Run / Wacky Races. There’s even some Mike Judge in there with Johnny Boy, the Beavis-looking sidekick to the Batman-styled bounty hunter Lynchman. The breaking down of Koike’s visual influences could easily be a post in itself, needless to say having a frame of reference beyond other anime is a great boon.

Most importantly, it’s a cartoon that’s not afraid to be a cartoon in the loudest, most over the top manner possible. It doesn’t have much more to say than that friendship and love are awesome things, but that’s perfectly OK as it’s saying it in a way that is just as awesome. It’s the first anime since FLCL that’s really clicked with me on a visceral level. If they’d offered me a VHS copy for £100 immediately after the film ended, I’d probably have bought it.

I hope this gets a UK DVD release sooner rather than later, but in the meantime I’d be happy just to see it in the cinema again. So don’t miss out if it you get the chance to see it.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

The following will spoil your enjoyment of One Piece and your “enjoyment” of X-Men Second Coming. You have been warned.
Read the rest of this entry »

Be Sociable, Share!

•