A Little Taste of Anime (Brought to you by grape drink. Yum.)

Welcome, welcome! I am your host, Kevlar, and in the future we'll be taking many a magical and wonderful ride together, should you choose to stay and read my reviews.

Now, a few things to note really quick before I get to the meat and potatoes of this thread:

1. Please do not post in this thread for any reason unless you are me. If you are not me, don't post here. Look in the mirror anytime you feel the urge to post here. Check to see if you are, in fact, me. Odds are, you aren't, so be a doll and PM me about any issues or suggestions, yeah?

2. I am going to swear. A lot. I admit it, I am a foul-mouthed person, so if you aren't willing to subject your poor optical receptors to the vulgarities of the English language, well, I'm sorry, but maybe you should review the movie for yourself.

I may add more as they strike me.

Anywho, without further ado, there will be reviews added here as I watch stuff and feel like writing about it.

Mind Game: My Thoughts

I went in thinking I was about to watch something that would cause my brain to leak out of my ears. I was very right. What I also got from it was a strong message to make the most of one's time on earth.

Robin Nishi, main star for the movie (and also the name for the chief scriptwriter for the movie) is a young man with little going on in his life that we're given to know. He's in love with this girl Myon, who has impossibly large breasts, but I'll get to that. When the movie starts, we're given this bizarre segment in which these messages are being sent to Myon's house, but these dudes are trying to beat down the door to get to what can conceivably be her and her family. Sometime around this part, we see Myon running from them in a subway station. She runs into a relatively empty subway car and gets her ankle caught in the door to the train, letting Mister Muscle Man who is chasing her get on too.

So, then it cuts to this scene where Myon and Nishi are walking back in the rain. Nishi almost has this moment where he tells her how much he loves her, and she accepts and they live happily ever after, but he doesn't have the balls. No, the little manga artist instead tries to express his love in a much more clumsy (and what I suspect they're communicating as effeminately) manner. She turns him down, saying she's getting married to this dude, Ryo.

Sounds like a pretty typical drama at this point, right? Some Yakuza action? Some love triangle thing? Yeah, let's move into the plot a bit.

So there they are at this bar run by Myon's family, which at this point includes her sister, Yang, and her father. They go in, see Daddy, and have a great old time as he talks freely about his love affair with this woman Yang's age. Suddenly, that hulking Yakuza dude from the subway station thing busts in with his slimy looking buddy and take a seat. Daddy slinks under the counter to hide. They ask Yang if she's seen him. She feigns ignorance. So, eventually, Big Man gets mad and goes to screw with Myon. Her boyfriend, Ryo, masculine sign of manliness, goes to stop her heroically, and gets his shit kicked.

Here's where things get graphic. Nishi, who's cowering on the floor, watches as the dude begins to molest Myon. He's got a gun and isn't afraid to use it, as he demonstrates on the bottles around Yang. Nishi here isn't happy with this, but his balls have apparently receded into the deepest depths of his soul and he just wimpers. Muscle Man decides perhaps Nishi wants in on some of Dat Ass. He walks over, push comes to shove, Nishi almost gets a pair and does something, and suddenly he's got a bullet in his ass, literally.

And here's where the weirdness really begins. Suddenly, he's in this dark pit where nothing else is and then there's this screen showing him dying and then another screen showing the same thing till he's surrounded by them. Then he sees it all happen in 500 foot high polygons. That's extreme. Then he meets the quick-shifting God, who wants him to go and disappear forever. Nishi decides fuck that shit and runs back to life. A tiger, who I assume was God, encourages this and tells him he's on Nishi's side. Cool shit.

So, back in real world, Nishi's back in time to just before Muscle Man goes nuts. When the gun is put to his backside again, he instead whips it around and pops a couple caps into Muscle Dude's face. Bam. Then he steals a car and drives it off a bridge and gets eaten by a whale.

No. Really.

That happened.

There's a whole bunch more after that, but I don't want to spoil the ending. What really struck me about this movie was its quirky animation style. Studio 4*C (Too lazy to find the degree symbol) famous for things like Tekkon Kinkreet and The Animatrix, does this production, happily throwing weird plot wrenches in to mess with your head. To make matters worse, the Director is Masaaki Yuasa, a big advocate of HOLYSHITMYBRAINISGONE style anime. He did Cat Soup. Cat Soup is about this cat who goes to save his sister's soul, or half of it anyway, from Death. I think. I'm not too sure really. There's no dialogue in the whole thing.

Anyway, you're watching, and nothing's making sense every so often, and that's cool, because you know what also makes this great? The really epic animation style. Everything's really sketchy to begin with, as expected from Studio 4*C, but it's better when they use CGI to toss in some still-frame live action textures to spice things up. Every once in a while, the characters look like actual Japanese people. It's weird. Also, the whole movie is done with this light-dark motif going on. Sometimes its warm and brown and happy, then it's grey and grainy and morose. The contrasting styles, and the constant shifting, really just has you on the edge of your seat the whole movie. When Nishi does his car chase, his face is distorted and stretched, his voice loud and proud. He's a boss there. When the montage of escaping the whale comes (cause they gotta get out, y'know) it's more manly than Kamina or Kittan or Simon ever was. I mean that. It was seriously so GAR I had to stop for a second and breathe.

So, yeah, the movie is awesomely quirky, I say, but you're sitting there going, what's my reason to watch this if I don't care about that crap? Well, dramafan, here's how this works. See, Nishi needs to grow a pair, and he does, and you know what he does with that pair? He uses them to grow another pair and give them to you. He's been frittering away his existence until Monstro comes and eats him. His determination is not only admirable and inspiring. It's downright insanely infectious. The man runs so hard because he wants to live his life his way that he can run on water. Yes, that's right. He's so determined, he gets to be Jesus.

So, let's see, superior manly moments of manliness? Check. Quirky weird shading and art? Check. Trippy effects? Check. Life lessons to be learned? Check.

My ratings overall?
Sub - 2/5 - Things were not terribly well subbed. The quality I got was bad, but it was all I could find. the subbers also tended to sub some lines particularly nonsensically, which was fitting for this movie, but it detracted, I felt.

Visuals - 4/5 - If you can get over the extremely rapid shift between CGI textures and standard drawing and the fact that no one's face has any bit the right proportions, the animation is downright cool. When Nishi is doing his Jesus bit, you can feel every muscle straining as you watch.

Music - 4/5 - There were some cool tracks in there. When Nishi and company are in Monstro the Whale, there's this weird steel drum beat that's slowly counting time in the background, subtle and mood-setting. When they're running, it's this epic drumming frenzy. It's just a cool atmosphere.

Plot - 3/5 - It's a Yuasa production. The plot is going to be thin. While I felt it was good overall, the plot really doesn't make this movie, but then again, Yuasa isn't about plot. He's about exploring things and ideas, so it doesn't subtract from the movie either. It just kind of is a vessel for the message.

Overall Appeal - 4/5 - This was a good choice for movie time. If you've got an hour and forty-five to spare, and you don't mind crazy action brain-defying movies, give this one a go.

Oh, and Myon's boobs prevent her from swimming as an adult, to answer that question.

So, today, or well, really early this morning and then several hours later, I watched Vexille: 2077 Nippon Satoku. For those of you, like my own self, who require a translator, that means "Vexille: 2077 Japanese Isolation" or roughly thereabouts. I don't remember what inspired me to put this on my to-watch list, but having seen it, I'm glad I did.

So, first thing I'll say about this movie was it was damn beautiful. I mean, holy fucking shit this movie had some pretty scenery. The Japanese have always shown me some quality CGI when they do it, and this movie did not disappoint me there. It is reminiscent of Appleseed, an earlier CGI movie of a very similar plotline. (which I have yet to see but know enough about to say something here in reference) Having done a little bit of research, as I tend to do when I find a cool movie, I discovered that the director, editor, and writer of this particular film, Fumihiko Sori, was one of the producers of Appleseed. This in mind, I imagine he was somewhat inspired by the previous work.

Alright, so there's a ton of CGI and rotoscoping, which is where you trace the animation over live footage, typically for accurate character reaction shots. This contributes to a pretty movie, but of course, graphics aren't everything. Today I'm going to get to plot towards the end because its a little vital to speak about the strong points of the movie before the weak points. I think it softens the blow to the reader a bit. Anyway, the music is done by Paul Oakenfold, a UK Trance DJ and producer. He also did the soundtrack for Appleseed, so there's another loaner from the previous film. You might recognize the song Ready Steady Go by him, since it was included in the likes of Saab commercials, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2003, Juiced, NASCAR, and (probably a bit more obvious to you readers) DDR Ultramix for the XBOX. His music is pretty popular, from what I can tell, and he's done a ton of remixes over the years. What I will say about his work on this film is that I think his music contributes quite well to the atmosphere of the movie. When the bustling slums of Tokyo, discussed in a bit, come into the movie, there's a dance-y techno song playing at virtually every scene.

I did read somewhere that IGN thought his score contributions were a little trite, but to I say, "Fuck that shit." While his work wasn't terrific so far as movie soundtracks go, it was intense when it needed to be and quieter when things got less worked up. The action sequences called for the trance artist's knowledge of techno music, and he got the job done. It's like this German film out there called Lola Rennt, where all the music was pretty much just trance music meant to simulate her runs throughout the movie. I heard the soundtrack and knew what I was stepping into as far as the movie went. In Vexille, the futuristic vibe was helped tremendously by Oakenfold's choice of tracks.

Now, the movie's plot was pretty lacking, I felt, overall. It was okay, but the opening had me lost. Here's basically what I got out of it. In the 2060's-ish years, technology has gotten sufficiently advanced enough to allow cybernetics and robotics to take a forefront, but, like nukes in the Cold War, the potential for abuse of these technologies is too great, so the UN goes and bans any further research into robotics and cybernetics. I should note here that the movie seems to plant an anti-machine ideal early in the movie, but it doesn't really touch upon this very much later. The message I thought they were going to be sending ended up being vastly different from what they portrayed. Anywho, Japan doesn't like that the UN was against them being cool with their advanced tech, so they decide they're going to cut themselves off from everyone. They have this electromagnetic field that makes them practically invisible to any kind of photography or digital detection of any kind. It's like there nothing there when you look from a satellite, which is crazy cool, and then they have this field around the country that detects incoming ships and shit and tells the country, "Hey, guys, some people are knocking on the door. You should shoot them with your guns." Invariably, shooting them with guns is the case.

So, with this in mind, there's this meeting up in the mountains in what I later read to be Colorado where some dudes from around the Earth came to talk to this Japanese dude because no one's seen Japan in ten years at this point. Okay, following things so far? Good. So, they're talking and shit, and next thing you know, Saito, this Japanese dude, has poisoned them all. So, he goes to leave, but the Americans, spying on things like they do, send a sweet elite team of armored soldiers to get his ass in custody. The American soldiers are armed with their "fighter suits," these small Gundam-style powersuits that reminded me of medieval suits of armor and the Elemental from Mechwarrior/Mechassault. So, they go to get him, cool shooting scenes, people running places, and then they get up to Saito's room, where Saito mocks them and then leaves via an airplane wing that rams through the room. Yeah, that took some planning, I imagine. Think about if the pilot fucks up by being two feet lower than necessary for Saito to grab the handle. Ew, skewered Japan dude, movie over.

But so he escapes, right? And Vexille, our titular main character with a totally not American name, goes after him, flying up to him in her suit. So what does Saito do? Kick her? Shoot a gun in her face? Nope. He cuts his fucking leg off with a knife. Right there. Without so much as a grunt in pain. I was watching and I was all, "Wait, did that really just happen?" It was a bit of a narm moment. There were a few of those. Anyway, so they keep chasing the dude out to sea, executing this plan to get through the Japanese barrier and bring some light to the maps. They get in, but not before Saito tries to blow their brains out with large guns. So, Vexille and her some-kind-of-relation-I'm-not-sure-what Leon go out there and Leon and his buddies guard the front line while Vexille escapes, because she's got the secondary transmitter thing that ruins the Japanese field veil thing. The first one broke, by the way. So, she gets tossed out into the ocean and things and wakes up in this shantytown place, a regular Hooverville, man. She's all confused and runs out and there are Japanese people all around and a big wall ringed around all this.

Warning. Spoilers. Right here. Super big. Right now. Don't read this if you don't want them. I've spoiled a bit above, but this is vital.

Turns out she's in what's left of Tokyo. The whole nation of Japan is a flat desert wasteland overrun by giant metal worms that devour any metal left outside the walls of the city. Did I also mention that Daiwa, who this Saito dude was working for and who put up the barrier, made everyone in Japan into cyborgs that are soon to be androids? Yup. Apparently the worms are this cumulative mass of dead android people that just hunt for scrap metal. As time passes, each Japanese person turns into this robot thing and dies in a horrible angry seizure. It's weird.

So, Vexille meets Maria, and Maria's part of this group that wants to bring down Daiwa before everyone in Japan left becomes a heap of slag. Daiwa's hidden out on this island away from Tokyo sealed off by this ceramic tunnel thing. The plan is to get the Jags, those giant metal worms, to get into the tunnels using really long spools of metal cable. Assuming this works, the Jags will tear Daiwa apart.

So, I'll not spoil the ending any more than I have, but it's kind of meh. The message of the movie ended up being that no one can take away the human spirit, even if everyone is a robot. I was all, "Okay..."

A couple of things got me throughout the film though. Why did everyone speak Japanese? That didn't make sense. It would have cost Sori a bit more to find some decent English speakers and sub that part of the movie, a la Moscow on the Hudson starring Robin Williams, but it would have improved vastly. At the very least, he could have explained why everyone feels the need to speak Japanese to one another when the country has shut off communication with everyone else for ten friggin years. I dunno. It was kind of dumb. Beyond that, the plot was a little predictable, which wasn't bad, but wasn't great either.

Alright, then, summary time:

Sub - 5/5 - The sub group I got mine for had exactly one error in the whole movie. Good job, guys. The dialogue didn't feel out of place and really characterized everyone for me.

Visuals - 4/5 - Holy shit was this movie beautiful. There's very little I can comment on aside from perhaps a lower framerate at times and a cheesy use of slow-mo.

Music - 4/5 - I liked the theme that Oakenfold used for the movie, and even though it was a bit repetitive, it did the movie well.

Plot - 3/5 - Let's be honest, the idea of a single, super-powered female character going in to fight robots seems a bit done, doesn't it? Hmm, what does this remind me of... Ghost in the Shell? Anyway, the plot wasn't great, but it was alright, I suppose.

Overall Appeal - 4/5 - It was a pretty good action movie, I think. The dramatic dialogue was cheesy but the swirling metal worms of terror and the dramatic reveal partway through made it better than expected.