For a tale about young people Grave of the Fireflies is anything but cheery and childish. It pulls no punches in its depiction of life in Japan around the time of the end of the Second World War. Based on the novel, Hotaru no Haka by Akiyuki Nosaka, the story's main characters are Seita, a teenage boy, and his younger sister Setsuka. It is a story of human courage and struggle against the adversity of poverty and war.

I am not a person who generally gets a lot out of "War Films", but this is a film of human interest that just happens to be set in wartime. It has a civilian perspective so there is little violence and no tactical drama that other depictions of war often give. It is perhaps more similar to films like Empire of the Sun. There is little need for Bad Guys for the plot to have an antagonistic element. I think that people who appreciate a view of realism may like this more and as a result I think it may be more popular with older viewers.

This type of story is one that the Americans will have seldom seen before as non-comedy films with more adult characters, such as Ghost in the Shell or Perfect Blue, which might appeal to older audiences, are tempered with a fantastic unreality. Another reason that it may not be accepted well in America is that it is the Americans who are bombing the main characters. Thankfully emphasis is not put on "the evil people doing this" but more on the stresses that the poverty of war puts on normal every day people, and the evil of people under such stress.

Grave of the Fireflies tells of what can happen to real people caught in the crossfire of a war. As a result, otherwise light moments in the film, such as a little girl playing on a swing or making a flower garden, seem fragile and heart wrenching. The backgrounds are in some cases startlingly beautiful and serene in contrast with the woe that the characters face.

The animation is good. Simple movements such as a small child playing have been fully explored. A peculiarity I noticed in the opening frames (which is in fact mentioned in the production notes on the DVD) is that the lines are not the solid black lines most animé viewers will be used to, but softer brown lines with much more detail. This gives an added grittiness to the production lending realism while making the whole thing seem dirtier.

My personal preference is generally to watch animé in the original Japanese audio with subtitles. I started watching bits of this with the American dub, but something seriously grated as our main characters hid in a shelter from the American bombs while sounding like the enemy....

I don't think that the experience of watching this film was entirely enjoyable, but it certainly was believable. It is useful to occasionally watch films like this to bring our own lives back into perspective. It is humbling to realise that some people still have to fight for shelter and food. I think that unfortunately most of this will be lost on a young audience as it has little glamour and the emotional impact may be brushed of as sissy.

Show this one to your mother if she thinks that all animé consists of is Pokémon.

Overall Rating: 7
Animation:8 Plot:7 Humor:4 Sound Track:7
Weight: 40
Date: 01/30/2003 11:26:12 pm PST

Replies: 0

Bipedal robots are always the last line of defence.

Before watching Gasaraki I had heard a lot of things about it. Unfortunately most of these seem misleading. Some people may draw similarities between it and the Gainax series Neon Genesis: Evangelion, but to my mind the similarities were few and far between.

Gasaraki is a story about political upheaval. A middle-eastern crisis is the platform for the first field tests of a new form of weapon, bipedal armoured robots, and in the mean time a flagging clan in Japan struggles to regain the political power it once held over that country's government. The writers of the series seem to have struggled to remove the cheese from the derivative and dated (or some would say classic?) giant robot genre. They strive to tell a story of political intrigue, duty and spiritual awakening.... to my mind, they fail.

From start to finish, Gasaraki seemed to me to be a story told more for the benefit of the storytellers, than the audience. The plot, for some, seemed difficult to understand and get into and for others (myself included) moved painfully slowly. It surgically removes the melodrama and ridiculous premises that have been associated with mecha series in the past. However, it seems that in an effort to capture realism the audience gets bogged down in waves of military jargon, combat strategies and unexplained scientific mumbo-jumbo. It is unfortunate that there is very little exposition, because most of the theory is very sound, just not very interesting.

The movement of the story suffers from pacing that had me on many occasions literally falling asleep. It is only when I compare this series to other serious animé such as Jin-Roh or Grave of Fireflies that I realise what generally makes a purely serious show worth watching; the characters.

Unfortunately Gasaraki has very few characters that an audience can really relate to. The plot is so cerebral that characters seem to act more as plot devices than people, and you seldom understand their inner workings beyond a few basic desires. In ways it seemed that there were parallels between Neon Genesis and Gasaraki when it came to the inner struggles of the mecha pilots, but I felt there was no real sense of growth and change. I found myself craving a dramatic epiphany but was left wanting. It was interesting to note that the motivations for many of the characters were so superfluous that it made little to no impact on the storyline when their dialogue and motivations had, in places, been completely changed from the Japanese version to the English dub.

The art in the series was lovely. I liked the character designs, which were simplistic and yet fairly easy to differentiate. The colours were well done and the animation was fluid. CG components were integrated well. Personally I find bad CG integration spoils the look of animé but in Gasaraki the CG at least was the right colours to work with the traditional animation.

The only gripe I had with the soundtrack of this series was the familiar soundbites for all the computers (which reminded me continually of video games I had played). For a series with such high animation quality I find it surprising that they didn't seem to have time to record new beeps and buzzes for their computers, electronic doors and machines. Otherwise the soundtrack is brilliant. The music is memorable and the only thing that kept me conscious in some of the more bogged down moments. I think it worked, though in places it felt like the music had been written for a slightly more stereotypically melodramatic series.

In overview, I think anyone with grounding in sciences and military drama would probably get a little more out of the series. I found the storytelling was boring and the pacing was slow. It was interesting that there was a section of the story told in historical flashback, but some of the animation from this section was cheap and needlessly artsy. I was left feeling somewhat disjointed from the plot as there is no clear indication of the beginning and end of the flashback. The whole experience felt like an exercise in self-gratification on the part of the writers. It was more like they were playing with their own ideas than trying to convey a story to an audience. For the most part however the plot was believable, except for some glaring plot holes at the end of the story. If you feel like watching the series, do so with friends... they can prod you if you fall asleep.

Overall Rating: 5
Animation:7 Plot:4 Humor:3 Sound Track:7
Weight: 40
Date: 01/28/2003 07:57:47 am PST

Replies: 0

Spriggan is an animé action film of extreme proportion. With production supervised by Katsuhiro Ôtomo (director of Akira), this is not surprising. Our main character is Yu Ominae, a 17 year old special operative, code named Spriggan. The story is one of warring covert government factions as they race to take possession of "Noah's Ark", an ancient artifact with immense power.

All this seems simple enough. Yu is the stereotypical action hero; he catches swords with his bare hands, dispatches "bad guys" without flinching, sustains near mortal injuries and still manages to hurl abuse at his oppressors, and yet, still swerves to avoid hitting innocent pedestrians. Our bad guys include a big guy with body armour and replacement cybernetics with a very, very large gun, a small guy who is fast and also cybernetically enhanced, and a mysterious, small boy.

Spriggan is based on a comic that ran in Shonen Magazine in Japan between 1989 and 1996. As such it has a following in Japan, but in the west (where it was known by the title "Striker") it has very few fans, as distribution of Japanese manga and animé is only now beginning to pick up.

As far as production values are concerned, Spriggan is a showcase of modern cinematic animé. Huge rotoscoped panoramas form gorgeous backdrops for scenes such as a car chase through the streets of Turkey and you feel a true sense of immersion in flurries of mountaintop snow. What little CG there is, is integrated fluidly and adds to the film, unlike in many other productions where it may distract the viewer. The score is brilliant and the 5.1 surround mix caught me off guard. A couple of times I caught myself turning to see if there was someone behind me.

I am generally a fan of subtitled animé, so I watched it in this form first. It is interesting to note that in most animé the character animation is done before the voices are added. However, in this production (as it was a cinema release), the voices for the Japanese tracks were recorded first and then the animation was made around those tracks, much in the same way Disney movies are made. Now this may bode poorly for the English dub, as the mouths instead of flapping open and closed are actually forming the shapes of words, yet great care and attention has been put into the English dub. In places the English track is a lot more plausible than the Japanese... it makes more sense that folks at the Pentagon sound like Americans. Had I my way I would change languages tracks part way through so that the English stuff is in English and the scenes set in Japan were in Japanese (more like in Blood: The Last Vampire) but that is just me being finicky. (If you get a chance to see the DVD you may want to check out the ADR team's commentary.)

I feel that Spriggan is a film that has used mythology from other cultures and Christianity (in much the same way as Neon Genesis: Evangelion) to make the plot seem more interesting and arcane to a Japanese audience. The word Spriggan describes a faerie from Cornish mythology, with an ugly visage, large head and small body, and a penchant for stealing babies and replacing them. This draws some symbolic similarities to the main character as he is a character of power in a small body who was "adopted" by his organisation at a young age. I don't know how readily Americans will receive this film, as it portrays the American government in a bad light and says blatantly that the Christian Bible is wrong.

Spriggan has a running time of 90 minutes. The first 60 of those play pretty much as a stereotypical action/adventure flick, but at about 60 minutes it starts getting weird. All of a sudden the plot moves from high action to metaphysical stuff and that may leave the viewer behind or feeling a little disjointed. During this section are some pretty cool visuals but to my mind the plot falls flat on its face. It seems that the film has fallen into the old animé trap of freaky villains and blood-spattered heroes yelling at each other for a bit, having their final confrontation, barely tying up the loose ends of the plot and then the bad guy threatens that there will be a sequel.

In overview, I'd say that this is a technical film enthusiast's dream, not for kids, a good film for action buffs and a poor one for people who like good drama. So, to quote Douglas Adams: "Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking".

Overall Rating: 6
Animation:9 Plot:4 Humor:3 Sound Track:9
Weight: 40
Date: 12/23/2002 10:49:31 am PST

Replies: 0

Ghost In The Shell is proof once again, to the western community, that animated productions are not just for kids. Set in a dark future, with gritty realism, this production tells us of a world where our bodies can be altered with cybernetics, allowing us to be faster, stronger, invisibly cloaked with light-altering camouflage or linked telepathically to computers.

The main characters of GITS are members of a special intelligence unit. The protagonist is Major Motoko Kusanagi, a woman with a cyborg body. She is the perfect vessel for the message "how human is human?" a theme continually re-iterated in the cyberpunk genre. Cyberpunk is a type of science fiction that was, for the most part, created by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. A large portion of the science fiction animé released in the west, seems to be cyberpunk, a trend that appears likely to continue with the new interest in the genre spurred by the popularity of action film "The Matrix" and increasing popularity of the internet.

The story works on many different levels. It addresses the Major's personal struggle to understand who she is and what makes her human. It introduces the concept of the human soul or "ghost" and the concept that humans' personality and memories are as fragile and transitory as their bodies. It asks the question, "can a machine be alive?" There is a web of political intrigue and deceit which reinforces the theme of the search for truth and identity.

Adapted from the comics by Masamune Shirow, fans may be disappointed that the art style does not mirror that used in the paper form. Instead a more "realistic" approach has been taken to the animation which is drawn in a very destinct style. Backgrounds have been adapted from footage of real Japanese streets and time has been put into how the light falls and backgrounds move to generate 3D effects. Careful attention was paid to getting gunfire effects realistic in both sound and look, and something most viewers will miss, is that the zeroes and ones covering the screen in the opening titles are in fact a binary representation of the words in the credits.

As with most science fiction plots this will not appeal to all people. If you have previous understanding of the cyberpunk genre it will be easier to comprehend or anticipate what happens. There is graphic violence. There is some nudity in the film but it is functional and not designed to be titilating.
That said, this is not a film that will go over well with most kids... or at least not their parents. It is a film that is rated M (15+), for good reason. Young children will probably not understand the mature themes of the movie any way; get them My Neighbour Totoro instead.

Overall Rating: 8
Animation:9 Plot:8 Humor:5 Sound Track:9
Weight: 40
Date: 12/22/2002 01:20:19 am PST

Replies: 0

Shadowskill is a series of two parts; an OAV and the epilogue. The OAV is also known as "part one"

It tells the story of a Gau, an orphaned boy who is adopted as younger brother of a beautiful young martial arts master. Yet again, this isn't a cartoon for the kiddies, as it is a martial-arts drama containing graphic violence.

The opening of the story comes across as a hotchpotch of parts as it explains the formation of the group of main characters. This probably comes across as disjointed because of the story's origins as a Bumper Comic, originally published in short instalments.

Confusingly, the main characters fight a series of monsters with loosely explained premises. This is all well and good if you just want to see some action, but not easy to take seriously.

The second half of the OAV is the only part of the OAV plot that I find really interesting. It deals with a fight between two dear friends who have been turned against each other. I feel that this addresses the issue of obligation and honour more clearly than the earlier part of the story, but yet again I feel like the background is somewhat glossed over. Perhaps it was felt that a superficial storyline would less interfere with the pace of the action. I don't know if it pays off, but a bunch off blustering people throwing around glowy fireballs isn't my idea of action any way.

Some of the art is appealing but for the most part the plot lets it down. I think that Shadowskill suffers from tenuous character development and melodramatic nonsense, though I am not really a big fan of martial-arts drama stories. The animation of the fight scenes is not too bad, though it seems to be needlessly bloody. I don't feel that waves of blood add much to the plot line, or the realism of the fighting.

Westerners may find some of the devices of the story confusing. In a way that is becoming increasingly familiar to animé fans (primarily due to the advent of Shoujo animé like Card Captor Sakura) magic is cast from cards, or more technically "Ofuda". This is a Shinto concept. Unfortunately this will probably seem weird to most people especially as the cards have to be subtitled because their names are in Japanese kanji. In the Madman release of this production this subtitling is done with glowing green subtitles, which looks kind of cheesy.

It is amusing to note that though the OAV and the epilogue share the same name, they are produced completely differently. From one to the other new characters have been introduced, and the personality of already established characters has changed. One of the main supporting characters is recognisable only by her attire and the mole that she has on her cheek; in the first production having short blue hair and in the second having long brown hair.

The epilogue has more comedy and more attractive art. The production quality comes across as higher, from the story telling to the pacing and the soundtrack. The animation is well done, though, as is fairly common with this sort of animé, the action comes across as far-fetched and fantastic. It is not uncommon to see parts of the scenery exploding with the ferocious blows of our protagonists, and a training battle in the middle of a rockslide has to be seen to be believed.

I can see this being popular primarily with guys aged 15 to 20, or younger, if they can get it past their parents. The plot isn't very deep and there is some "fan service" (though not much). Personally I'd give it about a 5/10; I could watch it again, but I will probably have better things to do.

Overall Rating: 5
Animation:6 Plot:4 Humor:4 Sound Track:7
Weight: 40
Date: 12/22/2002 01:14:03 am PST

Replies: 0