CX anime reviews

[CX]

Maximum Weeaboo Omake #1 - Hakko Learns to say "I Love You"

Recently we've gotten the idea to actually edit together some of the random humor that pops into our heads when we watch something.

First up is something from the anime Canaan. Those of you who watched this anime will probably find this a lot more entertaining than those who haven't. Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

You also might be interested in the blooper from the Gunsmith Cats review we posted a short time back.

We'll be posting things like this from time to time.

[CX]

Wonderful Days/Sky Blue
(2003 movie)

Man, I really wished some of these shows would just keep the same title. I actually watched this under the title "Sky Blue", but Wikipedia has informed me that it's actually supposed to be "Wonderful Days". Whatever. Wikipedia has also informed me that this animation comes to us from South Korea, which is actually where a lot of animation is done for both Japanese and American companies. Of course this is also where movies like Diatron-5 comes to us from, which is basically Korea's attempt at doing anime. I'm not saying Sky Blue is that bad, though between the CGI (used for basically everything but the characters) and the story, it does remind me an awful lot of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which isn't really a good thing either.

The story, such as it is, takes place in 2142 in some unspecified region of an environmentally devastated Earth. There's mention of global warming, and toxic rain is supposed to be responsible for the barren landscape, so, as you might guess this, this movie has a very heavy environmental message. About the only thing going for it there is that its only about as heavy-handed as Ghibli's Castle in the Sky, as opposed to some of his other movies, just to give you a feel for what you'd be into for this movie. As in Castle in the Sky (and Avatar, for that matter), the story follows two star-crossed lovers who are somewhat awkwardly made to share the protagonist spot. What I mean by that is that Jay, a rather attractive female security officer in the "living" city of Ecoban, seems like she's the protagonist early on in the movie, as she not only narrates, but the film follows her perspective for the most part. This changes when we're introduced to the male lead, Shua, who's an environmentalist terrorist bent on messing up Ecoban's power core. He's also later revealed to be a former citizen of Ecoban and the boy Jay totally liked when they were kids. Point being that Shua takes up most of the movie's focus from the point he's introduced, with Jay being relegated to more of a supporting role. But then this movie isn't really what I thought and hoped that it might be from what the opening of the movie teased me with.


What can I say? I like 'em with short hair.

You see, I was lead to believe that Jay would be the protagonist, and the movie was even kind of setting her up as the type of strong female protagonist that I like seeing, mostly because that isn't a type of protagonist that is seen very often. She informs us that it's been raining for a century, and that Ecoban is not only the last hold-out of humanity, but that it's also a living city. Of course it's only almost always cloudy, not always raining, and only the computer/power core of the city is "living" in the sense that it's neurally-based and happens to be shaped like a flower bloom. Of course Jay turned out to not be all that strong, or the main protagonist, so it shouldn't be hard to understand why I was disappointed by this movie.

The thing is, this movie is pretty predictable, and not terribly compelling on top of being somewhat boring. Right off the bat, we're given underdogs to root for, as survivors of the environmental apocalypse mentioned in the opening are basically used as mistreated labor to do all the dirty work of digging up the resources Ecoban needs to run, somewhat similar to what was depicted in Battle Angel Alita and in Star Trek's "The Cloud Minders". Within the first few minutes of the movie, we're shown not only the bigoted way that most of Ecoban's residents treat the people they call diggers, but the way they abuse them. Apparently Ecoban is powered by carbonite (no word on if they use it to freeze people, too), and they use these diggers to, well, dig it up for them. So the opening consists of Jay, the one non-bigoted person who lives in Ecoban, heading out to an oil-rig looking mining platform, just in time for it to start falling apart and to show the complete disregard the Ecoban foreman, Commander Locke, has for the diggers' lives by not only ordering the part of the platform that's falling apart on its own to be cut loose into the ocean, but by shooting the digger foreman when he refuses to do so and threatens a mass strike if Locke gets someone else to do it anyway. Of course this doubly serves to introduce the main antagonist to the audience. And that being done, Jay goes right back to Ecoban, Commander Cade is introduced as her boss and the guy who wants to bone her, and Shua sneaks in, kills some poor security guard, and hacks Ecoban's computer for his boss, Dr, Noah.


Sadly, no. (Photo Credit: Memory Alpha)

Dr. Noah, who not only used to be a citizen of Ecoban but designed its computer system, wants to do some kind of an energy release that will supposedly clear the entire planet's atmosphere, making sure to note that the only "harm" to the citizens of Ecoban will be that they'll have to use solar energy (because I'm real sure that's developed a lot under a sky that's constantly cloudy) and have to do some hard work themselves, because, you know, the diggers are the underdogs who do all the work while the Ecobans are bastards who live like rich people and do no real work themselves. Class warfare, basically. It's also at this point we're given some brief background on Shua and Jay, as Shua also used to be a citizen of Ecoban, and he and Jay were totally into each other even as kids, apparently. We're also introduced to Woody, some little orphan kid Shua adopted as a little brother to show us he's totally domestic material, and to the comedy relief thugs that Woody hangs out with, and who naturally turn out to nobly sacrifice themselves so Shua can get laid- I mean so he can win the day and get the girl in the end.

The conflict of this movie is also quickly set up, not only between Ecoban and the diggers, but between quite a few of the characters. Locke and Cade are set up as political rivals, with Locke being more militant and Cade being more moderate. Cade is also an antagonist, though he's made much more ambiguous than the straight-up black hat wearing, mustache-twirling (if he had one) antagonist that Locke is, at least in every area than one – Cade totally wants to bone Jay, and has been jealous of Shua since they were kids. Shua brought Jay outside Ecoban at one point to show her a brief break in the clouds, but Cade tattled on them, as the area they were in was supposed to be off limits. The guard was a real prick himself, and went really overboard on Shua. Naturally Cade was all for that, but when the guard turned his attention on Jay, Cade tried to pull him away from her. Cade tried to stop him at that point, and in the ensuing struggle his foot knocks knife out of the guard's belt and he uses it and to stab the guard in the back. Then, being rather forward thinking for a kid, Cade not only frames Shua for the guard's murder, but does his best to kill Shua so he can't be around to defend himself, as Jay was conveniently unconscious at the time. So as you might guess, the conflict between Cade and Shua is made to be the main conflict of the movie, rivaling even the plot's main conflict, which is Dr. Noah's plan to screw Ecoban so the sky can be magically cleared.

Naturally, everything turns out exactly the way you would expect, with the underdog terrorists succeeding at Dr. Noah's plan at the cost of all of their lives, with Shua and Woody being the only survivors out of them so that Shua can hook up with her and the two of them can adopt Woody. Cade actually turned out to be the most fleshed out character of all of them, as he actually stopped short of killing Shua, instead sacrificing himself to save Jay from Locke. Of course, everything was very melodramatic during all of this and I couldn't help but roll my eyes. There's also the reveal that the mythical "Gibraltar" Shua had been going on about having a blue sky all the time was actually where the entire story took place.

I mean, this isn't a horribly bad movie or anything, but it's just so thin in story and characterization, and the plot is very basic. I suppose if you enjoy basically anything that has class conflict, star-crossed lovers with a love triangle, and an environmental message, you might be able to just turn your brain off and enjoy this movie. As for myself, I found myself bored and disappointed. Really the only entertainment I got out of this movie involved all the names of characters which just also happened to be the same as characters from other shows or movies, all the flaws in logic the movie had, and just how transparently manipulative this movie tried to be. I also couldn't help but see some similarities with Ergo Proxy, which I totally would have made a crack about, except that Ergo Proxy came out about 3 years after this movie. Well, Ergo Proxy may have borrowed from this movie, but it was definitely a better show and far more entertaining. Other than that, while there are a few enjoyable moments, and it has some pretty visuals here and there, I can't really recommend this movie to anyone. 4/10.

[CX]

Appleseed
(2004 movie

This is actually one of the first animes I ever watched back when I first started putting a list together, but before I was driven to start writing reviews, which some of you might recall was started by Blue Gender. Since I've mostly been watching things alphabetically, you can kind of guess that most of the shows that start with "A" were either done from memory or were watched since I started writing reviews. Appleseed is one of a few that I've decided to rewatch prior to writing reviews for them, so I can refresh my memory about them. I have to admit that when I first watched Appleseed, I actually liked it quite a bit, enough so that it was actually the first anime I bought once I'd gotten all the Ghost in the Shell stuff. But, much like Elfen Lied (and Higurashi, incidentally), Appleseed has not aged well for me. I honestly don't know if this is because my tastes have changed or if watching more anime since has diminished my tolerance for certain clichés, but I'll try to be as fair as I can be. As for the 80's OVA that's based on the same manga as this movie, and the sequel to this movie, I remember being bored by those when I first watched them, so it's debatable as to whether I'll sit through them again, so I might not review them.

Anyway, what brought this on was recently watching Vexille, thanks to my roommate who bought the DVD for it on sale. The DVD cover brags about Vexille being brought to us by the same people who made Appleseed, which is the reason my roommate even bought it. Of course Vexille turned out to be horrible, lacking a coherent plot, well thought out characters or story, or an antagonist with a clear motivation. Instead, it mostly consisted of a series of action scenes that were very loosely tied together. I expressed my disappointment with that movie by comparing it to Appleseed, which I remembered having a much more coherent plot and better characterization and pacing. Apparently I was remembering through rosy-tinted glasses or something, because while Appleseed is better than Vexille, that really isn't saying much.

Appleseed apparently takes place at the tail end of a devastating world war, which has left most of the world a desolate wasteland that leaves one wondering where the combatants who are still fighting get their supplies from. The story follows protagonist Deunan Knute, a rather good looking female warrior with short blonde hair.


*sigh*

The movie begins with Deunan and some other poor saps following her as they fight it out with some robots or guys in mech suits (it's never made clear) and an eight-wheeled armored car that has the gun from the A-10 mounted on top of it. As you might guess, a bunch of light infantry packing rifles and RPGs don't stand much of a chance, though Deunan is blessed with the ability to defy physics and guns that actually do something against her robotic aggressors. She's eventually cornered and surrounded in a way that makes me wonder if they were trying to capture her, even though they sure seemed to be trying their hardest to kill her just seconds before that. Fortunately for her, what looks like the love child between a C-130 and a V-22 comes along and drops off what we later find out to be guys in mech suits and kill the tanks and robo-dudes. Of course since they never bother saying anything to her along the lines of, "we're here to help," or "come with me if you want to live," Deunan does what most anyone would do and tries to get the hell out of dodge, only to be taken down by large metal crosses fired by their guns. Incidentally, these are actually real things, which much like bean bags fired from shotguns are designed to be a non-lethal weapon against crowds, and work by knocking the wind out of the person they hit, which unfortunately also tends to break bones and cause internal damage. In Deunan's case, however, they apparently just deliver tranquilizer, as explained by a very out of place and much too chipper Asian chick named Hitomi, who comments on Deunan's beauty.

This all happens at a very brisk pace, which the movie keeps up for the majority of its run. Soon after, we're introduced to Olympus, a shiny happy city in the middle of the ruin, which is described as being a "utopia". This is also where the problems with the pacing and focus on action rather than character start to become a lot more obvious, because after the title sequence is where the story is supposed to really begin, only the quick pacing kind or prevents a proper set-up. This is where my disappointment really comes in, because Deunan seemed like she could have been an interesting character, but she is never really explored beyond being shown to be a much better soldier than anyone in Olympus. We're very quickly introduced to other characters, to the city, and to the plot, with Deunan basically being made to be unrealistically resilient to being plucked out of a battle zone that's been all she's known for most of her adult life and placed in this pristine city and given a new problem to solve beyond her basic survival. All of this while being hit on by another woman who turns out to not actually be human, and being confronted by the fact that her boyfriend, Briareos, who she had presumed to be dead, was now sporting a fully robotic body that didn't even resemble a human being. In fact, she accepts everything very quickly, even though she really has no reason to do so. And the only real indication we're given that she's effected at all by the quick transition is a nightmare she has on her first night in Olympus and the fact she can't sleep on a bed, and even this is quickly brushed aside, much like we never really find out who was attacking her at the start of the movie or what their objectives were.

Anyway, the plot, such as it is, revolves around tension between bigoted humans and the bioroids that now run the city. Bioroids, as the name suggests, are artificial beings that have been designed to resemble humans while being programmed to act a certain way, but are biological in nature rather then mechanical as an android would be. The "utopia" apparently sprung up out of no where, thanks to the efforts of Deunan's mother and father, who also helped to create the bioroids. Bioroids are to help humans in addition to apparently being responsible for most of the administrative tasks of the city. As you might imagine, this doesn't sit well with many humans, but we're informed that because a bunch of old guys are interfaced with a supposedly infallible computer and that humans run the city's military, that everything is somehow "balanced" and everyone should just be cool with that. Of course I can see right through that, and since there's as much condescension as any early episode of TNG to go along with this exposition, so should everyone else. But then, there are a lot of silly things about this movie and its characters, such as how there seem to be an awful lot of Greek names being used, and how the majority of them are actually apt to the characters who bear these names. But then I guess this is easier than establishing and developing characters, so why not name the bad guys after the Greek god of the underworld and the father of the Titans, and while we're at it, let's name the computer after the Greek goddess representing Mother Earth. Of course Uranus and Gaia mated with each other and had many children together (the Titans), so there once can't really make many parallels off of the names. If anyone knows who Uranus is, they might remember him for eating his children, so I'm guessing that's why the big bad general who wants to kill all the bioroids has that name, and Hades is the god of the underworld, so that's bad, right?

I guess the main problem I have with the antagonists we're given not long into the movie, aside from the fact that they turn out to be red herrings, is that they and every other bigoted human like them are made to be ridiculously over the top as far as their bigotry goes. This conveniently lets the movie overlook what might otherwise be a legitimate gripe humans might have with bioroids making up basically their entire government, in what is essentially an authoritarian oligarchy. So rather than forming a rebellion to overthrow the government, they take the genocide route by destroying the one building that apparently not only make all the bioroids, but also contains the special genetic material existing bioroids need to periodically have maintenance done with to keep living, uh, somehow. Conveniently, Hitomi missed her scheduled oil change, so now there's artificial tension to get the "appleseed" the title refers to. This is actually secret information Deunan's mother developed which would somehow allow bioroids to reproduce on their own, and thus now represents the only way bioroids can continue to exist. Apparently by this point we were supposed to have forgotten that all the bioroids are actually genetically siblings, because all of them are based off of DNA from Deunan's father. But aside from that, the information on how to make bioroids should not be gone, so really according to the way everything was established, it should be as simple as using another DNA sample from someone else and rebuilding the production line, but whatever, Deunan really likes Hitomi and actually cares about the bioroids even though they've done nothing but talk down to her about humanity's "nature" and all Hitomi has done is talk about how hot Deunan is and how much she wants to have human emotions. Of course the movie seems to give up at this point, so whatever.

Deunan finally finds out what happened to her mother, who died when she was young, but this has a rather anti-climactic ending, because while the military kills the rest of the ESWAT squad Deunan is with (and we never got to really know anyway), Deunan still gets away with the appleseed they wanted to destroy and the military surrenders immediately afterwards. This is the point that we find out who the real bad guys are – the old men hooked up to the city's computer. Anyone who hadn't seen that one coming shouldn't feel too bad, though, because to be fair the movie never gave any clue to this before this, instead throwing out multiple red herrings to distract the audience with, only to throw basically everything the start of the movie established in a pathetic attempt to create a crisis. For instance, the "D-tank" we were informed is a safeguard for humanity to use against the bioroids by infecting all bioroids with a deadly virus should it ever be broken, is at the end of the movie stated to contain a virus which will make all humans sterile, because the old guys have decided that humans are bad, m'kay, and bioroids should inherit the planet because they'll treat it better and stuff. Of course whoever wrote this selectively remembered that the very logical computer had to be in complete agreement with the old guys for the option to release the virus to even be available, so we're quickly informed that they fooled the computer by actually making it possible for the attempted military coup to take place, thus convincing the computer to go along with the plan to make humans sterile, eventually making the species go extinct. Not two minutes later, the newly recovered Hitomi stumbles through the door, and explains that the computer wasn't fooled so much as the old guys turned it off and have been doing everything on their own, even though this will kill them, too. Since the big red button to unleash the virus is disabled by being shot, the old guys decide to have the giant insect-like tanks guarding the city from the outside world make their way to the building with the D-tank to just shoot it at point blank range with their giant rail guns. As you might expect, this plan does not succeed, and as an added bonus all the old guys die so there's no need to deal with them in any way in the rushed resolution.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I didn't find the story or characters all that believable, and that the plot seemed rather forced and rushed along to me. Pacing was far too quick for characters to be fleshed out or given believable motivations for what they were doing, and what little story there was seemed to mostly be there as filler and exposition to set up the many action scenes. The soundtrack didn't do this movie any favors either, as it consisted mostly of some kind of J-rock/dance club music that was probably meant to get the audience's blood pumping but instead served mostly to distract, at least in my case. The animation is ... different. Everything is computer generated, much like the Final Fantasy movies, but rather than going for a more photorealistic look, everything was given a kind of animation cell texture in an effort to make it look more like traditional anime. I also found this to be somewhat distracting at times, mostly because while the main characters used motion capture from real actors, most of the characters tended to move very unrealistically, and I couldn't help but feel like I was watching the cut-scenes for a video game.

I don’t want to make this movie out to be all bad or anything, and to be fair, if you like action that involves a lot of gunfights and mech suits, you'll probably like this movie. Mainly I'm disappointed, because there was the basis for a good story here that just never got realized. It would have been a lot more interesting to me had there been more focus given to Deunan's character and how she dealt with the war she had been fighting for most of her life was pointless and yet still going on, how she'd basically been denied a life in the pristine city her father and mother had helped to create until the creepy old men and the bioroid governor running the place decided they had a use for her, and how her boyfriend she thought was dead was actually still alive, had been allowed to live in Olympus himself and become a leader of the elite police ESWAT, but never came to her rescue until told to do so by the aforementioned old guys and bioroid governor. Hell, just dealing with the fact that her boyfriend was a robot would have been interesting, especially if she found she couldn't deal with this change and between that and never coming for her, decided she wanted nothing to do with him. I guess we're just supposed to be excited by the idea of Deunan riding his robo-dick or something.

In any case, you can probably guess that I'm not going to be rating this very high. It isn't horrible, but it's not really what I'd consider good, either, as it lacks in plot, character, and story. Instead, I found myself rather bored while watching this, even during the action scenes, making the movie very "meh" in nature, in my opinion, anyway. If all you're looking for is some action, you might like it, but if you're looking for anything more than that, you'll probably be disappointed the same as I was. 5/10.

[CX]

Vexille
(2007 movie)

This movie was actually the imputes for me to go back and rewatch Appleseed to see if it still held up or not. Why? Well, aside from the cover of the DVD bragging about it being from the same people who brought us Appleseed Ex Machina, it also reminded me a lot of that movie, and not just because it was made using CGI with animation cell textures, but because these movies mostly consist of long, drawn out action scenes that actually manage to be boring, joined together with filler scenes consisting mostly of exposition and attempts at making the audience care about the many characters filling them. I had thought that the 2004 Appleseed movie had done a better job at combining action with plot, but since I reviewed that movie before this one, you should already know if my memory held up over the three years or so since I'd last watched Appleseed (spoiler: it didn't).

As I did a little research on this movie before reviewing it (reading the Wiki article = "research"), I noted that this movie had actually been somewhat poorly received by the action junkies that normally watch this kind of movie, but about the only point of agreement as to why this movie kind of sucked was that the action scenes were kind of boring. At the risk of being a bit repetitive on that point, there aren't many movies that managed to make me bored during its action scenes, but this movie is one of them. Mostly I think that's because the scenes tended to go on for so long and lacked focus in its effort to cram so much going on with so many characters. The many clichés didn't help, either, although they did make for some laughs on occasion.

I'd also say that it's entirely fair to call this movie derivative. Apparently others have made comparisons to Resident Evil, although I'm not sure if they're referring to the games, the CGI movie, or the ones with Milla Jovovich's nipples. Having only seen the movies, I can say that I can kind of see some resemblance to the movies that prove women don't need large breasts to be hot, but only in the sense that there's an evil corporation and a female lead with short hair.


At least I'm not the only one that appreciates short hair on women.

Really, though, I think I'd compare Vexille to the 2004 Appleseed movie. Aside from there aforementioned short-haired female protagonist, said protagonist is part of an elite paramilitary group, in this case a US Navy group called Sword, and is made out to be an especially skilled warrior. She has a relationship with the stereotypical strong silent dude who is apparently keeping secrets from her, though in this case in involves another woman, so there is that. Anyway, she's sent on a special mission that involves the potential extinction of humanity, is essentially hung out to dry, but manages to save the day and her boyfriend in the end. Yeah, that's kind of superficial, but then so is the Resident Evil comparison.

The other point of criticism mentioned on Wiki was the soundtrack, and I'd almost say that I agree, but really I don't because rather than just missing a few notes, I can't say I cared for any of the rock/dance club music in this movie, because it always distracted from what was going on in the movie. It's like whoever made the soundtrack choices for these movies completely lacks the ability to match up music to what's going on in a way that will add to it rather than shoulder its way in and demand attention all on its own – like they were more concerned about selling an album than giving the movie a soundtrack. An especially jarring example was the use of Dead Can Dance's "The Host Of Seraphim", though to be fair this is partially because I'd already seen the movie The Mist some time ago with my friends, and that movie features the same song very prominently, and more importantly in a way that actually adds to what's happening on screen. Of course that song has also become something of a running gag with us, usually being played whenever a heavy fog rolls through the area. As you might guess, when it was used in Vexille, we all busted out laughing. This wasn't helped by the fact that the scene it was used for was itself very out of place from the rest of the movie's narrative, essentially being a cheap attempt at making the audience feel bad about the death of a character that was never really developed anyway. The scene that followed went right back to the action "plot" and made for some nice mood whiplash.

As for what is laughingly referred to as the "plot" in this movie, there really isn't much to talk about, and its mostly pushed forward by unnatural exposition, which starts before anything even appears on screen. The opening narrative and set-up actually sound like wank material to the types who want Japan to be the world's greatest economy and completely isolationist at the same time. They even come up with some kind of technobabble bullshit that would make Berman and Braga proud to make that possible in the modern and near future world with things like satellites. Of course the fancy shield cutting Japan off from the rest of the world is said to be so sensitive it will be set off by even micro-probes. Kind of makes me wonder how it doesn't get set off by birds or fish, or even just by the movement of water in the oceans, for that matter, or how everything under the shield is completely blurred from the outside, but allows the sun and clouds to be seen from the inside. Wouldn't rain set it off, too? Eh, whatever. Really the shield is just a plot device that keeps our main character, Vexille, isolated from the outside and completely dependant on the group of rebels she finds in what's left of Tokyo. As it turns out, cutting Japan off from the outside world was all part of some evil secret plan to turn the entire country into a petri dish for turning humans into androids using bullshit. I had to shake my head at the explanation of "bio-metal", but then I had to remember that in the movie's opening they showed people falling out of a helicopter hundreds of feet up in the air without any means of slowing their decent, and a plan plowing its wing through an old brick and masonry mansion without, you know, losing it. I'd wondered why they hadn't used another artificial material that might sound more plausible, but really it's because of these things:


I'm not even going to dignify this with the usual Dune reference...

They kind of resemble the weird tornado from Mission to Mars, but they're made of random metal junk, and are apparently what happens when the bullshit bio-metal virus "goes wrong". Don't put too much thought into that, because the writers obviously didn't. It's also never explicitly stated (that I can recall), but it is hinted at that they are the reason why all of Japan looks like North Dakota without any plant life. I have no idea how there are any of the Japanese android people left since apparently even Tokyo has been leveled, or where the massive ceramic wall came from and why the metal worms can't borrow underneath it, or why the metal worms can't swim, other than because the plot demands it. Oh, yeah, the metal worms are important to the climax and dénouement of the movie, you know, so the bad guys get theirs in the end. This is after the predictable misdirection that makes it look like the good guys have failed in their mission to fly down the exhaust ports to the central core of Daiwa Heavy Industries, because apparently the metal worms can't jump when the plot demands that they can't.

And all of this over the UN banning the development of androids, because that's what the intro explained was the reason Japan isolated itself over, because Daiwa had the Japanese government in its pocket, and corporations are evil, don'cha know. The big evil secret plan involved turning the entire human race into androids that bleed motor oil and are complete slaves to the corporations (corporations are evil). The big bad even spouts the usual shit about evolution, apparently forgetting that evolution is the process through which a species perpetuates itself, which can't happen when there's no reproduction. Whoops. The main question here that keeps coming up is "why?" Why would this man suddenly decide all of humanity would be better of as androids? Why would his company and the Japanese government go along with his insane plan that involved turning all Japanese people into androids against their will, and ultimately lead to the destruction of Japan as a country and a land mass. Why? Well, because... Because...


Muhahahahahahahahahaha! That's why.

What, you were expecting more? You’re watching the wrong movie, pal.

Honestly his rant just had so many logical flaws and holes that I was pretty much just left staring blankly at the screen. For instance, his argument that being an android is so much better than being human is somewhat negated by the fact being made out of metal apparently isn't enough to make a human-turned android immune to bullets, while he, hypocritically still human, somehow manages to live through being strangled by and android, shot in a helicopter with a high caliber machine gun, and crashing said helicopter.

Of course there are a few other loose plot threads, like how everything was being set up for an I, Robot style robot revolution at the beginning of the movie, and like how an American politician was somehow replaced by an evil android double in order to start positioning the US into becoming the next place to be turned into a giant android-growing petri dish, but when the movie limped into its finish I really didn't care all that much anymore. I guess they could have been sequel baiting, but considering that I, Robot was a better movie that this one, I really hope there's no Vexille Ex Machina.

So as you might guess, my overall conclusion is that this movie kinda sucks, just not as much as other movies out there. It has some added bonus in that it's pretty riff-able, but that's about the only reason I might recommend watching this movie. Well, that and if you just like mindless action and don't care about plot in the least. As for me, the lengthy, boring, physics-defying action strung together by pointless filler and exposition, combined with the lack of any character development make this movie rank pretty low on my nebulous scale of good. YMMV. 4/10.

[CX]

Appleseed
(Single episode OVA)

I originally watched this 1988 OVA not terribly long after I first started on this odd mission of mine to basically watch any anime that seemed remotely interesting after reading about it on TV Tropes and Wikipedia. That was about 2009 or so, and I've become a lot more seasoned, not only with anime but toward story-telling in general. That being said, I didn't remember much from this OVA aside from being rather bored while watching it originally, so I decided to give it another chance and re-watch it. Looking at this OVA with fresher eyes, I can't really say as my original opinion was all that far off – it is rather boring, but this is mostly owing to how the story was told.

The major problem this OVA has is that it focuses its attention on the wrong things. To be fair, there was an interesting premise here, it's just that pretty much every bit of story that sounded like it might be interesting to see was instead told to the audience through exposition that seemed to be aimed at rushing the story along, which is pointless considering that the plot moved along at a snail's pace. The story itself follows both the familiar protagonists of Dunan and Briareos, and the main antagonists, a human police officer named Calon Mautholos and a cyborg terrorist named A.J. Sebastian. The thing is, none of these characters or any of the supporting characters are established very well, not only as to their backgrounds and what they're doing, but why they're doing it, especially in the case of the antagonists, because it's later revealed that the two of them don't even know each others' names. Motivation is lacking in general when it comes to the story, which goes hand in hand with giant leaps in logic that happen so the story can move along. I'll get into that more a bit later.

There actually is a serviceable plot here, it's just that, like everything else about this OVA, it's executed poorly. Basically, the set-up is the same, with many humans feeling powerless and resentful toward their situation in Olympus, the supposed "utopia" and last chance humanity has for survival following a non-nuclear WWIII that was somehow still so devastating that humanity actually was at risk of extinction. The thing is, Olympus is controlled by a computer named Gaia, and administered by unelected "biodroids", artificial humans designed specifically for whatever role they end up serving, only supposedly without any negative emotions. I say supposedly, because when shit starts to go down, the biodroids in control of the city sure do act rather angry, and frankly Athena, the city's highest authority, acts ever bit the dictator she's accused of being. Unsurprisingly, a lot of humans, most of whom have been "rescued" from the outside world and rehabilitated to live in civilization again, are resentful of their artificial leaders and the artificial environment they've been placed in, and react by either lashing out or offing themselves. The main antagonist, Sebastian, is one of the former, attacking Olympus as a terrorist, and ultimately seeking to destroy Gaia, the city's computer, in an effort to allow humans to regain control of their surroundings. Then there's Calon, a police officer who is a member of ESWAT, and Sebastian's inside man. Seems Calon's wife killed herself because she saw Olympus as a cage with no way out. Following this, a depressed Calon was dragged into a lab by Olympus officials (and probably biodroids, though never stated), strapped to a chair, and mind-raped by a computer in an effort to discover why this woman killed herself. So it's pretty easy to see why he'd have it in for Olympus and biodroids. So both he and Sebastian are working together to disable Gaia so they can take control of a giant beetle-looking tank and blast the hell out of the physical computer to destroy it for good.

As you might have guessed, I actually kind of side with the terrorists on this one, and it became harder and harder not to thanks to how Athena and her ilk were presented, and in how they treated Dunan and Briareos, when they were trying to stop the evil secret plan from coming to fruition to begin with. This is helped even further by one of the positive aspects of this show, because while the characters and their motivations aren't established very well, they are presented as being more than one-dimensional, and Calon in particular is shown in a sympathetic light. For instance, when part of the plan calls on Calon to kill Dunan and Briareos, he can't bring himself to do so. Sebastian, on the other hand, is pretty much just a cold, pragmatic asshole, who thinks nothing of killing his fellow humans if there's even a small chance they could interfere with his plan, and thinks nothing of causing any collateral damage even if his stated aim is to enable humanity to stand up on its own again, which is kind of hard to do when he keeps knocking down buildings full of them.

Unfortunately, the slow pace and almost casual way the story handles the plot has a way of bringing down the show overall. It almost comes off as a standard '80s police procedural, complete with a montage of Dunan and her robot boyfriend hitting the streets in plain clothes and violating the rights of a bunch of people in an effort to hunt down Sebastian. The darker aspect of that which seems a little glossed over here is that it's so they can essentially gun this guy down on sight without the benefit of a trial on the orders of their city's leader. Of course the way it's played, this story could be taking place in modern day New York City, at least if it wasn't for Briareos looking like a giant mechanical rabbit.


"Annnhh... What's up, doc?"

Eventually, Dunan and Briareos discover that a fellow cop is involved in this terrorist business, which they are able to very quickly put together involves Hitomi, the biodroid who has pulled many humans in from the outside world, including our protagonists, and is apparently considered a friend of many of them (she also apparently likes to get drunk and have casual sex with some of them). I'm not sure how they do that with the information they have exactly, or how they predict that they are going to need to weather a gas attack, but the story demands it, so they do. Apparently Hitomi has some kind of special DNA or something that makes her a kind of special "key" which will disable Gaia, just by walking into one of three computer terminals located around the city. So Calon kidnaps Hitomi while Sebastian sets out to hijack the giant beetle tank thing. Dunan and Briareos try to stop Calon, but he's running around in a mech suit, so he isn't exactly easy to stop. They do almost manage to do so, but thanks to Athena being a complete bitch, they're arrested by other ESWAT officers who are also running around in mech suits.

It seems that, for reasons that are never really explained, Athena seems to think that Dunan and Briareos are working with Sebastian. She tries to make the case that he got away at the beginning of the show while in their custody, except that he didn't, he got away by killing some random cop whose custody he was in. There was also the part where Dunan blew the head off of the mech that Calon was operating in an attempt to stop him from running off with Hitomi only to be stopped by ESWAT. Athena then tries to make something out of Briareos having some humanity in spite of looking like a robot by preventing ESWAT from simply pulling a spray and pray on Calon while he was holding an unconscious Hitomi. Of course Athena is a bitch, so she sees Hitomi as a replicable piece of hardware, which is pretty good considering that Athena is a biodroid herself. Dunan and Briareos are able to make the case that they had a lead on who the police mole is, however, only the informant that had clued Briareos into this was very much dead at that point. But rather than slap the cuffs on our heroes again, they are still allowed to rejoin ESWAT actively and participate in the attempt to keep Gaia from getting shut down.

This is where even more stupidity makes itself known, because rather than say, cutting the wires at all three terminals, making it impossible for them to be used, and setting up observation at all three of them in case Calon shows up, they blow up twp of the terminals and set up a huge police blockade at the one remaining terminal, which Calon manages to crash through. It does end up costing him his life, but in the end Hitomi is pushed into the terminal and Gaia is shut down anyway. This releases the giant beetle tank, and Sebastian makes a real nuisance of himself. Apparently the only way to stop this and restore Gaia's control is to shoot some circuit which just happens to be shaped like a bull's-eye target. So while Dunan was actually doing this, I couldn't help but think about how absurd it was that she had to hit the thing exactly in the center, because computers and bullets generally don’t get along very well, or as Marko Ramius put it, "mosht of the thingsh in here don't react well to bulletsh."

Hey, that'd be cool – anime Marko Ramius.

Anyway, Dunan manages to succeed at the last second, as the cliché demands, which makes Sebastian's day end very badly for him. Afterwards, Athena waves at Dunan as she passes her on the street, so apparently this means she isn't a bitch anymore, or something.

Overall, this OVA really didn't have a lot going on for it. It was rather drawn out and boring for most of its 70 minute run time. It wasn't hugely bad, though, either. If anything, I'd say that this version of Appleseed is fairly average and representative of anime from the '80s, at least of anime that didn't completely suck, anyway. I'm not just referring to the dated music, either, because it has a lot of the cool things I actually like about anime from this era, mainly in the amount of detail they were able to work in, and the mindless violence that reminds me of watching something Paul Verhoeven made. Even the visual design has a certain kind of charm to it. There were also plenty of the things I like to make fun of about anime from this era, like all the misspelled English words (Olumpus, alart, etc.), the English dub itself (which apparently based its pronunciations on the Engrishy Japanese dub), and yes, even some of the clichés being played straight.

That being said, I wouldn't recommend this OVA to someone who is new to anime, but I might to someone who likes older anime for the reasons I listed above. 5/10.

[CX]

Appleseed Ex Machina
(2007 movie)

You know, this movie is going to be something of a rarity for me. Usually, when I rewatch something, it seems like I don't like it as much as when I first watched it, but in the case of this movie, the opposite is true. I'm not saying this movie is especially awesome or even partially good or anything, but I'm glad that I gave it another chance now that I've actually bothered to watch the whole thing. See, the thing is, when I first watched this movie, I was completely turned off by the opening action scene, which basically consisted of our main characters, Deunan Knute and Briareos Hecatonchires, doing some kind of a weird dance as they unnecessarily twirled around each other as they gunned down the bad guys arranged in a circle around them with automatic gun fire. This after Deunan pulled off a bunch of physics-defying acrobatic feats that Batman only wishes he could pull off while she infiltrated a giant cathedral. At the time, I was frankly bored by this, so I just rolled my eyes and turned it off. Now, with quite a bit of anime under my belt, I basically just laughed at this scene and made fun of it, punctuated by John Woo's name appearing on screen followed by a flurry of white doves, and just so many other things one associates with John Woo's direction style. So really, enjoyment of this movie depends entirely on the mindset you happen to be in, because really it's just a lot of action schlock.

A few things about this movie I have to get out of the way, though, is that this is, overall, a better movie than the movie it claims to be a sequel to. It has better pacing, a plot that is fairly straight-forward and makes some amount of sense, even if it is derivative, actually manages to have a little character development, and the CGI looks a lot better. Of course it balances this out with heavy doses of cliché, having characters make decisions and take actions that don't really make sense, having a story like something out of a video game, ripping off the Borg from the Star Trek franchise, and living up to the "Ex Machina" part of its title in order to have the good guys win in the end.

One of the other things about this movie is that it isn't really so much a sequel as a reboot. Sure, it tries to say it's a sequel, but not only does everything look completely different, but it feels different, too. What I mean by that is that in the first movie, Olympus represented the only bastion of civilization for humanity, which is why the big evil secret plot revolved around the release of some kind of virus from the "D-Tank" located in one of the donut buildings. As silly as the plot and its reasoning was, it was still plausible as a threat to all of humanity if pretty much all of humanity was located within Olympus. However, in this movie, Olympus is basically the United States, and we learn that there are other city-states around the world, such as the European Union and the fictitious Poseidon, which seems to be based in Asia thanks to the stereotypical Chinese dress the leader or representative from Poseidon wears in all of her scenes. This change kind of makes the plot of the first movie even sillier, and since nothing in this movie is dependant on anything from the first movie, it makes more sense to view this movie as being another adaptation rather than a sequel to the 2004 movie.

Something else I have to make note of is the fan service, not only in this movie, but in the 2004 movie, the 1988 movie, and by extension of its producers, Vexille, is the very tame nature of it. It's kind of an oddity for anime, at least in my experience, which makes it both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, in some ways. On the good side, it's nice to see some restraint from the completely ridiculous levels of jiggling woman flesh on display one might see in a lot of other anime. Of course that's not to say that there's no fan service, as this movie in particular has a love affair with Deunan's ass.


Every shot of which managed to stop me mid-sentence from my riffing, because, damn...

And you know, between this and how Hitomi kept going on about how beautiful Deunan was in the first movie, I actually could have went for seeing the absolutely gorgeous short-haired blonde in all her naked glory, but then I'm a perv, so I can hardly fault the filmmakers for showing a little restraint. Of course, they also tried to balance it out a little by showing off Briareos's and Tereus's, his bioroid clone, asses in skin-tight plants far too often for my tastes. This also only briefly distracted me from noticing that Deunan is apparently the only female officer in ESWAT, which makes ESWAT a total sausage festivaaallll.....



What was I saying? I kind of lost my train of thought there, so I guess I'll finally get around to the story and explaining just who the hell Tereus is.

Okay, so the opening scene I mentioned happened, and the set-up is basically that a bunch of cyborgs have kidnapped some EU officials, apparently to keep them from going to some important meeting, and is holding them hostage. Deunan rushes in and does her thing, followed by her robot boyfriend, Briareos. They gun everyone down and save a very Harrison Ford looking hostage along with a few others. Unfortunately for them, one of the cyborgs took a cue from Predator and sets off a bomb as Briareos tried to interrogate him. He shields Deunan from the blast, but is messed up pretty badly himself, so we get that clichéd attempt at dramatically calling out the name of someone who's been hurt or killed. Surprisingly, this doesn't work so well with a name like Briareos. However, the point of this is basically to split up Briareos and Deunan as police partners so that Tereus, the son of Ares and clone of Briareos, can become her partner, and to set up Briareos to get screwed by the antagonist later on.

The big bad, sort of, is basically a grey-haired doctor that made me think of the doctor from Team Fortress 2 every time I saw him. Doctor Richard Kestner is apparently pretty popular with cyborgs, which kind of sets him up to be behind the big secret evil plan, though really he ends up just offing himself and the big bad is revealed to be a computerized collective consciousness, and all because Doctor Kestner is upset about his wife dying in an accident, and because Poseidon shut their company, Halcon, down because of it. Oh, and as an aside, I couldn't help but think of Calgon from the MST3K'd Space Mutiny. Incidentally, Halcon is a real company, which manufactures firearms. Anyway, as you might have guessed, the evil secret plan is to make everyone part of the Borg-I mean Halcon collective by somehow infecting them with machinery from the iPhones of the future, something called a Connexus that is worn on both ears like two Bluetooths and projects a holographic screen over the eyes of the user.

Essentially, the build-up to this is that Athena, the prime minister of Olympus, has reformed the UN in order to brow-beat all the other remaining countries around the world into letting Olympus control all of their satellites, uh, because. Honestly, they gave some reason, but I forgot, mainly because the big UN meeting takes place in a big glass dome in spite of the security risk, and Athena goes as far as to refuse to let anyone leave even as the building comes under attack from people who have been hacked/assimilated by the Connexus. There's an attempt at drama here, as a character who possibly could have been cool if he'd been allowed to be developed, ended up being one of those assimilated, and Briareos ends up being forced to kill him to stop him. Briareos himself is also infected with this nanovirus in order to further the plot along, as well as to make it more difficult for Deunan to help him so they can figure out what's going on. Briareos does figure it out, and Doctor Kestner is even kind enough to exposit how he thinks all of the world's problems would be solved if only humans weren't allowed to have different thoughts. The Borg similarity is pretty easy to see, and the black vein things that sprout out of the Bluetooths just cements it as a rip-off.

Tereus's role in all of this is to basically constantly throw doubt as to what side he's on, because he is played both as an honest person, and as having an unreadable, possibly sinister side, since he's a clone and clones tend to be evil in media. There's also a very disturbing aspect to his existence that the movie didn't seem to realize, because while they did touch on how disturbing it might be to have a clone of yourself, they passed completely over the Orwellian horror aspect of having a genetically engineered clone of yourself made without your permission in order to serve as the basis for a new line of artificially made, genetically engineered police force. But I guess the filmmakers thought a better use of their time was to suggest mannerisms are genetic and to make it out to be cute that Tereus and Briareos act a lot alike, even if they apparently kind of hate each other. This is at least partly due to the fact that the movie kind of makes Deunan out to be attracted to Tereus and somewhat tempted by the prospect of having a flesh and blood tubesteak to enjoy instead of whatever Briareos is equipped with now. Can't say as I really blame her all that much, especially since Tereus is made out to be so much like Briareos, and Briareos himself is rather moody for most of this movie. But since there's not much more character development than the 2004 movie, this doesn't really go anywhere by movie's end.

The climax of the movie takes place in a floating city made out of Borg cubes, which is described as being Halcon's "abandoned" headquarters. I mean, if it was abandoned, why was it just left to float there, where it could come crashing down at some point? Eh, whatever. The important thing is that there's an epic aerial mech fight that leads to our main characters meeting the Borg queen, who turns out to be a Borg-ified Dr. Elizabeth Xander, who was the dead girlfriend Doctor Kestner was whining about earlier in the movie. That and that she's covered in robotic tentacles.


Seems pretty obvious where the animator wanted to go here (don't blame him).

As you might guess, this involves multiple penetrations and the excretion of a fluid into the violated bodies of our protagonists, all three of them, but it's nanovirus through their skin, you dirty perverts.

I should also probably mention the anti-nano-virus one of the Q-like (Bond, not Star Trek) characters came up with our of thin air, which only works temporarily. This was used to stop Briareos from freaking out so they could get to the climactic battle, but even though our main characters are being assimilated by all these robo-tentacles, this isn't used to stop the assimilation process or anything. Instead, Deunan is able to summon some kind of main character immunity and come out of the assimilation all on her own, as is Briareos so he can toss her the last vial of the stuff so she can inject the Borg queen with it. This deus ex machine rather anti-climactically ends the battle, which was already kind of going that way anyway since all of the characters had been assimilated very quickly after arriving in the Borg queen's chamber. Anyway, zombie Dr. Zander, briefly free of the Halcon collective's control, sets the floating factory's self destruct, and the movie ends in the second most clichéd way possible. Really the only thing that kept it from ending the way I thought it would is that Tereus survived his attempt to make a heroic sacrifice.


Threesome anyone?

So, like I said, it isn't really an especially good movie, it's just that it was a better movie than the one it was supposedly a sequel for. The main things it has going for it are that it's well-paced, and actually fairly entertaining, in part due to its riff-ability. There are also a number of character appearances that make it a little fun to spot, such as a Hitler and a Lincoln look-alike, and the Harrison Ford look-alike I mentioned before. I'd recommend it on the basis of mindless entertainment, but that's about the size of it. My main regret is that no one making any of these movies seems to know how to do any character stuff, because they're too obsessed with action and showing off Deunan's ass, god bless 'em. 6/10.

[CX]

Actually it could almost be a drinking game - take a drink every time you see Deunan's ass in some skintight pants.

[CX]

Scrapped Princess
(24 episode series)

While I’d initially decided to pass on this series for whatever reason, it just so happened that my roommate had it on his hard drive, and we decided to watch it out of boredom if nothing else. We were both pleasantly surprised by the series, and liked it so much that we ended up marathoning it over the course of the next week. While it has a somewhat confusing beginning, a somewhat annoying protagonist, and a rather contrived resolution, overall I found the series to be quite enjoyable, with a complex, well-paced story, interesting characters, and enough drama to draw me in and keep me watching – the cliff-hanger ending to the majority of the episodes helped that along, too.

The story starts en media res, introducing us very quickly to protagonist Pacifica Casull, and her two adoptive siblings/bodyguards Shannon and Raquel. Not long afterwards, the three are attacked by forces of their Kingdom, Leinwan, and find themselves pursued by a member of the kingdom’s special forces, Christopher. Eventually the backstory of the story is explained to the audience, and it sounds a lot like a Greek tragedy. The story itself seems to take place in some kind of Medieval fantasy world, given the level of technology displayed and the use of magic by Raquel and other wizards. Pacifica is actually a princess of Leinwan, but when she and her twin brother were born, a prophesy from the Church of Mauser predicted that when she turned 16, she would cause the end of the world. So the King ordered that she not even be given a name, and that she be dumped off of a high cliff to be killed, Spartan style. Like a lot of anime, they felt the need to use some other word to describe this, so they call it “scrapping”, because I guess “death by exposure” sounds too cool and “throwing a baby off a cliff” sounded too on the nose. But I guess they had to call the series something, so there you go. But luck was on baby’s side, because her mother and a court wizard conspired to save her, and the wizard adopted her as his own, naming her Pacifica in the hopes that it would somehow make everyone she met like her. No, really, they made a point of bringing that up more than once. But even in Medieval fantasy land, it’s difficult to keep secrets from the government, and Pacifica’s adoptive parents were both killed defending her, leaving her adoptive siblings to protect her as they live a life on the run, though it’s never made clear just where they were hoping to run to.

Pacifica is actually a fairly sweet, if spoiled, character, which makes it actually somewhat humorous in how much everyone ends up hating her after they find out she’s the scrapped princess.


Truly, the poison that will destroy the world.

Actually, for the most part I sympathized with her. The main drawback to her character, aside from being almost practically useless when it came to her defending herself and occasionally showing how pampered she was, was that she really had a tendency to whine and be very Shinji-like in doing so. At one point Shannon even offers to kill her if she’s so damn bent on blaming herself for the deaths of those who were either trying to protect her, or were otherwise just caught up in the zeal of those trying to kill her. Not exactly something she could be blamed for, but she sure insisted on doing it a lot. Oh, and then there’s the semi-incestuous attraction she has to her adoptive brother Shannon, but fortunately he insists on telling her off every time she bring it up.

The three of them meet plenty of other characters along the way, including a small dose of Moé that later goes on to try to kill them, and to varying degrees they are somewhat interesting, though admittedly, even the main supporting characters, Shannon and Raquel are somewhat bland and stereotypical. Fortunately as the series climaxes, most of them improve as they are taken to their breaking points, but while I like the series overall, I have to admit that this is something of a weak area.

Admittedly, my reviews can be somewhat spoiler heavy, but I’m also feeling a bit lazy, so I’m not going to go into too much detail with this one as far as the story and the plot. I will reveal that the setting actually turns out to be in a post-apocalyptic future, following the defeat of humanity to an alien force that is never seen or identified. This is thanks in large part to some AI-controlled weapons humanity developed to protect them, as these weapons were talked into betraying humanity on the grounds that they’d actually be preserving humanity in the end by making a quick defeat possible, and by watching over them to protect humans from themselves. They apparently elected to do so by trapping humanity in a perpetual Middle Ages setting for 5000 years, limiting them both technologically and in the area of the world they can occupy. As you might expect, this eventually leads to giant robots fighting, because it’s anime and there has to be giant robots in some form, unless it’s cheesy slice of life, rom com, or magical girl anime, anyway. The contrivance I mentioned at the beginning of the review actually has to do with a convoluted plan that was apparently started 5000 years prior to when the story takes place, which all comes together so that Pacifica is immune to the hypnotic control of their robot overlords (at least two of which have rather nice racks, by-the-by), which she can pass on to others in an uncontrolled fashion when she’s under a great deal of stress, and so she has people who are apparently genetically predisposed to protect her. Only a couple of those characters really seem troubled by that last bit, though, and they eventually just kind of let it drop, partly in light of the special forces who at one time were trying to hunt down and kill Pacifica decide to protect her and fight on her side of their own free will and sense of justice.


I, for one, welcome our robot overlords.

The biggest problem I had was with the resolution, though, mainly because it’s quite clichéd and involves the use of the often-used reset button, which also serves to fully exposit the backstory, bring at least two characters back to life, instantly resolve all the fighting going on, and end humanity’s caged, controlled existence. As an added bonus, there’s a weak attempt to explain why the age of 16 is so important, apparently right down to the hour.

While the ending was rather frustrating, and the main character could be rather annoying at times, the story was still interesting enough to keep me watching, and the drama was also fairly effective, though at times the comedy relief could get in the way of that. Still, there were a few moments that managed to tug at what few heart strings I have left, so there is that. Overall, while it may not be the best series I’ve seen and it had its flaws, it was still a pretty good series and I’d recommend it to anyone with an interest in sci-fi and fantasy. If you liked Trigun or Claymore, you might find Scrapped Princess interesting, though the tone isn’t nearly as dark as Claymore. 7/10.

[CX]

Ramen Fighter Miki
(12 episode series)

When I first saw the trailer for this series as a suggestion for my friends’ anime night, I pegged it as being somewhat along the lines of other comedy fighting anime like Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple. Having seen it now, I can’t say as I was very far off. I typically don’t find this kind of anime very interesting, but whereas Kenichi was very predictable and focused on typical high school crap that I couldn’t care less about, and in the protagonist hooking up, Miki simply focuses on the antics of a 20 year old woman working as a waitress and delivery girl for her mother’s ramen shop, and the antics of those around her. In essence, its simplicity is what makes it at least somewhat enjoyable for me to watch.

This series is very episodic in nature, without much in terms of continuity beyond when it introduces characters. It also doesn’t take itself even remotely seriously, having fun with its premise, and taking the opportunity to reference other anime and movies many times throughout its run. It also tends to make fun of various anime clichés, though at times it can seem like they’re trying to have their cake and eat it, too. In any case, there is no real overall story, with each episode being split up into two sub-episodes, the way Panty & Stocking was, with each sub-episode typically having a theme of some kind. There are also recurring jokes, such as everyone thinking that one of the characters is actually a vengeful ghost, going so far as to directly reference The Ring (she’s actually a stressed out teacher). The series also likes to play clichés up, only to turn them on their head throughout its run.

The characters in this series are both its strength and its weakness. They are never really fleshed out all that much or all that well, beyond the fact that the majority of them like to fight the title character out of revenge or out of a simple dislike of Miki. The only exceptions are the grocer next door to the ramen shop Miki works at for her mother, and Miki’s mother. Most of the characters are childish in some way, the only exception being the teacher everyone thinks is a ghost, though she has her own quirks. As most of the focus is on cartoonish, over the top violence, my expectations weren’t very high in this area, and I wasn’t disappointed or surprised. Admittedly, I did actually find some of it to be kind of funny, though as I said before, this isn’t really my kind of thing. The series is somewhat aware of itself, however, as it is revealed that the main reason the ramen shop is as popular as it is doesn’t have to do with the quality of the food so much as the violence that is a daily occurrence there, with the customers viewing it as a violent sitcom.

Overall I found this series to be … okay. It wasn’t really something I looked forward to seeing every week, but it wasn’t really bad, either. You have to keep in mind my own tastes and biases, however, so if you like shows along the lines of Kenichi, there’s a good chance you’ll like this show, too. That being said, the score I’m giving this on my nebulous scale of good reflects my own tastes. 7/10.

[CX]

Gun X Sword
(26 episode series)

I found this series thanks to a DVD sale from Crunchyroll, which put 30 random volumes of anime into a box you paid $15 for. The vast majority of the anime they sent sucked, but as it turned out, Gun X Sword (or Gun Sword in some listings), was one of the few that actually looked interesting and worth watching from the beginning. This is pretty good, considering that I started it in the middle of the series. While I had no real context to what was going on in the series at that point, it seemed pretty focused, with a main character named Van on a quest for revenge against an antagonist named The Claw for killing his wife just after they’d been married. Very Kill Bill –like in theme, though my first impression was that this series really wanted to be Cowboy Bebop, which was helped by the fact the English dub actor was doing his best impression of Spike Spiegel. This impression wasn’t entirely on the money, but that’s mainly due to the actual plot and overarching story of the series. The way the characters were played, especially Van, definitely gave a very Bebop feel to the series.

This series takes place on a planet called “The Endless Illusion”, which is very Earth-like in size and atmosphere, as well as in having a single moon. It’s made clear that this isn’t supposed to be Earth fairly early on, in spite of the anachronistic technology leaving me with the impression that this was similar to Scrapped Princess or some other post-apocalyptic show. Instead, it’s revealed that this oddly named planet was actually the space version of Australia, starting out as a penal colony, but eventually becoming the last remnant of Earth as Earth was apparently destroyed by something that is never stated. So, really in some ways this series is more like Trigun, except that the main character is kind of an asshole, and has no problem with killing people in the least, while the antagonist is actually kind of nice, in a creepy, cult leader kind of way.


Isn’t he just the friendliest looking bad guy you’ve ever seen?

This being a giant mecha series, this planet’s status as a penal colony is the excuse given for the “original” mechs, which were originally used as guards in orbiting satellites until the unspecified apocalypse befell Earth. Incidentally, this is one of the few sci-fi outings I’ve seen that actually remembers that there’s no sound in space. That isn’t hugely important to me, but I think it’s worth noting when it’s done. And given my feelings toward giant mecha – they aren’t really my thing, but I’ll tolerate them if the story is good – that kind of attention to detail goes a long way toward me tolerating them. Well, that and the comical way the mechas are treated in this series.


Probably the first stripper pole-operated mecha I’ve ever seen.

Like Bebop, this series is somewhat episodic in nature with its overarching theme in the background for the most part. Van, the main protagonist, is out for revenge against the main antagonist, The Claw, for killing his bride just after they’d officially tied the knot and were literally still standing on the altar. This plot drives the overall story, with Van basically wandering around, looking for leads to track down The Claw, and picking up supporting characters along the way. The opening credits actually let you know this right off the bat, with characters remaining in silhouette until they are introduced in the story. However, each episode tends to be its own isolated story, with Van’s wandering taking them to a new location each time in his search. In the first episode, Van meets Wendy, who looks just like an anime version of her fast food namesake, as he wanders into her village, which is under siege from bandits. She ends up joining him in his quest, as her older brother was kidnapped by agents of The Claw, and so she wants to track him down and bring him back home. So about the first 2/3 of the series consists of Van and Wendy looking for information in some new location, getting involved with the locals in some way, and moving on. Eventually, all the supporting characters join up with Van and Wendy to help them in their quest, whether out of feelings for Van, a sense of loyalty toward Van, or a mutual interest in tracking down The Claw, even if it’s just to stop his plan to either destroy the planet or “reset” it somehow in his insane quest for world peace.

Incidentally, this is now the second anime series I’ve seen that involves a moon that isn’t really a moon, which spells potential doom to the inhabitants of the planet it orbits.

While the resolution to the main plot is satisfying enough, and there wasn’t quite the ass-pull like Scrapped Princess’s resolution, there was one hanging plot thread that kind of bugged me – just what the hell happened to Earth? This isn’t actually important to the story at all, but it does kind of bug me. Probably the best thing about the resolution, though, was that when Van and The Claw were finally face-to-face after the climactic battle, it was over fairly quickly, without an additional fuss, which would have just been melodrama at that point. And while the series kind of ends on a downer note, there’s a final scene which effectively undoes that.

Which reminds me, there is a romance subplot between Van and Wendy which is also resolved at the very end, which itself is part of the harem aspect of the series. I tend to loath harem series, but fortunately this series is good enough that you almost don’t notice that aspect of it, almost. Thankfully, it’s resolved, if somewhat awkwardly, by one of the women simply admitting she had a thing for Van and moving on, another woman simply being rejected and dealing with it, and Wendy likewise just dealing with the fact she and Van never hooked up until literally the last minute of the series, at which point she is thankfully an adult in order to avoid the loli aspect of their ‘ship. Given the way the series sets them up, though, it’s kind of a forgone conclusion, so I make no apologies for spoiling that for anyone. Besides, my reviews tend to be very spoiler heavy anyway, so count yourself lucky I’ve been restraining myself as much as I have.

Moving on, the characters in this series are one of the better aspects of this series, even though they’re kind of a mixed bag. Van, for instance, is something of an anti-hero, which can be somewhat whiplash inducing given the way he’s mostly played for humor for the majority of the series. So while he mostly seems laid back, and has an odd obsession with putting large quantities of every available condiment on his food, he instantly becomes an asshole whenever something about The Claw comes up, to anyone and everyone, including all of his friends who are there to support him. He’s every bit as obsessed with The Claw as Khan was with Kirk in The Wrath of Khan. At times, I had to wonder why people stuck with him. This is contrasted by The Claw, whose real name we never learn, who actually seems like a calm, friendly person, who only ever loses his cool in the climactic battle with Van. He actually seems to regret any loss of life, to the point that I actually began to doubt he personally killed Van’s wife, along with another supporting character’s wife, except that he admits to doing so in the name of his “dream”. At one point he seems to accidentally hug one of his mooks to death.


“I will love him and pet him, and call him George.”

That last point actually brings up another – why did he wear a razor sharp claw hand? He was shown to have a much more normal-looking prosthetic when he was first introduced, so why the claw hand (other than his name, obviously)? This actually leads me to settle on him actually being evil, even if for the most part, he doesn’t seem like it. Well, that and the whole destroying the world part, even if he seems convinced everyone will not only be fine, but will also be shiny, happy people, who all love one another in a world that is totally at peace. And all through a fake moon and giant mecha that has a face for a torso.


Seems a little familiar somehow.

There are also some strong female characters, like Carmen 99 (supposedly her bust in cm as well as the number of gadgets on her person), a very Faye Valentine-like character, and Priscilla, the moé -est and most capable mecha pilot you ever met. There’s also a group of older men that call themselves the El Dorado Five, who are clearly meant to parody the Power Rangers (or whatever the original Japanese name is, to those weeaboo out there blowing a gasket right now ). One of their running gags is that one of them always seems to be asleep.

Overall, I’d say that I thoroughly enjoyed this series, and I’m glad the Crunchyroll box of random anime deal introduced me to it. It has an interesting plot, very watchable stories, and compelling, complex characters. It could be somewhat trying at times, at least with someone of my tastes who doesn’t really get off on constant mech fights, but the story made up for that. If you liked Gurren Lagann, Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, and/or Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll like this series as well. I found it to be exceptional, even if it isn’t one I’d rank higher than 8/10.

[CX]

Daily Lives of High School Boys
(12 episode series)

This is one of the few high school/slice of life series that I actually managed to enjoy. Usually I have a hard time getting into any kind of slice of life show, simply because, for me, a show has to have some kind of a point, aside from just being funny. I also typically can't stand high school shit, simply because I already lived through high school once, and I don't care to live through it again, not to mention the "average high school student" trope that so many animes seem to use. On the other hand, here we have a series that doesn't take itself seriously in the least. I guess the same could also be said of a series like Lucky Star or Azumanga Daioh, but at the same time it would take a lot to get me to watch either of those series due to my own biases. Incidentally, while most series like this focus on high school girls, and how totally awesome their lives are, this series focuses on high school boys and how utterly ordinary their lives are, except of course for the random shit they do to keep themselves entertained. Also, this series tends to make fun of other anime of this genre, and often indirectly breaks the fourth wall.

It's true that anime that makes fun of anime tropes isn't exactly unique, so it might be kind of tough to sell this series, especially since I mentioned how this show is about how boring the titular daily lives of these high school boys are. But the fun mostly comes from the antics of the three friends this series follows: Tadakuni, Hidenori Tabata, and Yoshitake Tanaka. They and most of the supporting characters around them tend to be nerdy, though there are a few who are "normal." Incidentally, one of the first things they do is imagine a stereotypical giant mecha/alien invasion anime, and mention it as being a collaboration of Square Enix and Sunrise, which Daily Lives of High School Boys actually is. Their adventures are completely random, following their active imaginations, and the trials and tribulations of their lives.


Such as Tabata's struggle to live up to a fangirl's expectations while trying to avoid a relationship with her for some reason.

The series itself is structured as a series of skits within each episode, which occasionally share a theme. These range from things like the main trio trying on Tanaka's sister's underwear only to get beat up for it, to the mysteries of dealing with the opposite sex, to dealing with rival schools and the like. Along the way, the "editors" add bits here and there, such as text in the commercial interrupt, and the beginning and end screens of the series which reveal something about the series, the characters, or just to advise fans that if they want to send chocolates to be sure to send them to the studio rather than the TV station. There are also touches here and there, such as how Tadakuni was introduced as the "main character" only to end up having the least amount of screen time, as he's the straight man of the trio and is thus cut to save time so the series can follow the other, "more interesting" Tabata and Tanaka. Oh, and then there's the last episode, where they do everything backwards from the way they usualy do, including by using the closing theme as the opening theme.

The end of most episodes also features a skit called "High School Girls are Funky", which both satisfies typical high school tropes as well as turning them on their heads, often comparing and contrasting the trio of female high school students it follows: Yanagin, Ikushima, and Habara. They're essentially the female versions of the main characters, though they also occasionally show up in the main "High School Boys" skits, but usually without eyes, as most of the "unimportant" characters are usually illustrated, which includes Tanaka's sister. This also has the effect of making these characters somewhat more sinister, as well as hard to read, usually as a set-up for comedy.

Damn, I am not selling this series very well, am I?

It's somewhat difficult for me to explain what the appeal of this series was to me, other than to say it was the odd, random humor, and the antics of characters that somewhat reminded me of my own group of friends. As such, it's kind of difficult for me to recommend this series to anyone, simply due to being unfamiliar with the genre. However, I did enjoy the series quite a bit. The characters and their antics were interesting to watch, so I would recommend it on that basis alone if nothing else.

Here's a link to one of the skits to gauge your interest. It's one of the more "normal" skits. For another example... It's kind of tempting just to show you the whole series, really.

I'll just reiterate that I really enjoyed it, and found it pretty accessible despite the lack of an English dub. Which, speaking of, it wouldn't surprise me either way if it ended up getting localized, or if it ended up getting ignored in favor of the cutesy, moé, shit that generally gets all the attention these days. In any case, I think I'll rate this an 8/10, mostly for the enjoyment and parody factors. To be honest, though, it's kind of hard for me to rank, even on my nebulous scale of good that only tries to be objective.

[CX]

Heat Guy J
(26 episode series)

I won a copy of this series at a panel in ValleyCon 2010, which was honestly about the only halfway decent thing ValleyCon had going for it. It then took me over two years to actually watch it, and having finally gotten through all of it, about all I can really say is that it wasn't a disappointing series.

The story follows Daisuke Aurora, a young police officer in the "special services" division of city security, and his android partner, J. Androids are actually illegal in the city of Judoh, where this series takes place, set in the future following an apparent global calamity that has resulted in the end of nation-states and given rise to isolated city-states. For the most part, the series is largely episodic, consisting of Daisuke, or Dice, as he's nicknamed, and J foiling various schemes of mob boss Clair Leonelli, who, to put it lightly, is nucking futs. Keep in mind that in the first episode, we see Clair pull a grenade and try to set it off at his father's funeral. Which, I guess, is why most of his schemes don't make all that much sense to me, as most of them involve causing damage to the city, seemingly for the hell of it. At first it seems like this is going to be how the series as a whole is going to be, but then it goes and develops a story arc as the series gets closer to its end.

My impression of it is that it seems somewhat tacked on, though to be fair, many of the elements of the series that were a part of the various stand-alone episodes actually served as set-up for the big secret evil plan Dice and his friends have to foil at the end of the series. Incidentally, I had a hard time paying much attention to that, because I was busy being horrified at what I saw as a dystopic setting, where civilians were banned from owning firearms and even the police were limited to four rounds of ammo when they were actually authorized to carry a gun for specific missions, freedom of movement was severely limited, and convicts are punished by being turned into furries.



It was admirable that the overall story arc was planned out as well as it was, even if it wasn't executed all that well, and couldn't avoid some major clichés. The planning is also only apparent in retrospect, which really could be argued to be both a good or a bad thing. I'd say that it seemed somewhat tacked on, though, mainly because the audience is asked to believe that, oh, by the way, Dice's super serious older brother/boss is actually evil and has been all along. This in spite of an episode seemingly tailored to make the brothers bond at least somewhat, given their more typical antagonism toward each other. It also doesn't make much sense given that he ordered Dice onto investigations that eventually led to him uncovering the big secret evil plan. The resolution of this is probably the most disappointing aspect to the storyline, and not just because it involved the mob ending up becoming the good guys in the end. Just as I mentioned in my Gurren Lagann review, betrayal doesn't really sit well with me, and where I come from, if someone tries to kill you, you try to kill them right back.

The characters are probably this series's area of greatest strength. It has a diverse set of supporting characters, both in terms of allies and/or enemies of Dice. Dice himself was, in my opinion, probably one of the weakest characters, though. He was portrayed as being very laid back, and a "fly by the seat of his pants" type. I guess he could be considered a somewhat typical rebellious main character, but my biggest problem with him is that he didn't seem to have much depth, especially when compared to the faux main antagonist, Clair. Clair, his bodyguards, and his manservant all have tragic, compelling backgrounds which shaped them to become what they were, but the thing that characterizes Dice most is that he forgives his mother for abandoning him and his brother following the death of their father. This is apparently the key difference between Dice and his brother. J was kind of interesting, but again, there wasn't much to him, as he mostly just followed orders, saved Dice, spouted off canned words of wisdom about what a man should or should not do, and vented steam.



Normally he has skin and looks like an old man with a grey pony-tail dressed in a trench coat and fedora, but it seems someone on the show really liked Terminator and decided to make their own version made out of exhaust pipes. I was never really taken in by this design, though, mainly because pipes and valves don't really make my socks go up and down (unlike some people).

Fortunately this series narrowly avoided harem territory, though this was by having love triangles instead, with Dice having the hots for the hot scientist who created J, Dice's boss Kyoko, having a thing for him (after getting over his evil brother), and three hookers also having a thing for Dice.

Speaking of Kyoko, it was somewhat refreshing that she actually got to do something toward the end of the series, as most of it she mainly just sits around and bitches at Dice for being late to work and being too lazy to file activity reports.

As for the more technical aspects of the show, it's kind of a mixed bag. The visual design is fairly average, as is the animation quality itself, which tends to fluctuate from episode to episode depending on where the money was put. This series also mixed in CGI elements, and given that this came out in 2002, it's pretty much a given that these elements tend to stand out, which includes J himself in his skeletal form. The design of Judoh is both intriguing and derivative depending on the angle and what part of the city is being looked at. At times it looks like the city from the Ghost in the Shell movie, New York, Blade Runner Los Angeles, and Old New York.


They have to rebuild the place every night after the Professor flushes.

The soundtrack is one of the more positive areas, especially if you happen to like bagpipe music. At times it can be pretty cool, but for the most part it's a little forgettable. Only the bagpipe really tends to stand out, and at times this isn't always a good thing (like say during dialog).

Anyway, I guess what it comes down to is that while this isn't a bad series, exactly, it didn't really leave much of an impression, either. It's worth it to watch once, but it probably isn't something I would have bought on my own. 7/10.

[CX]

I Dream of Mimi
(3 episode OVA)

This '90s vintage OVA is a guilty pleasure, and not just because of the nostalgia factor of the visual design. You see, this is an ecchi, which means lots and lots of naked boobies to those of you unfamiliar with animu terminology. That automatically tends to put it in the "pandering, not good" category for me, much like Sekirei and High School of the Dead. This isn't because I dislike fan service or anything -far from it- but when it becomes the point of the show, I guess I don't see the point of it when I can just watch out and out porn if I want to look at boobs, and (probably) real ones at that. What sets I Dream of Mimi apart for me, though, is mainly its subject matter, which has the effect of doubling the nostalgia factor - computers.

Much like Chobits, this OVA follows*sigh* an average high school student named Akira Takaoka, who through happenstance comes to own a computer that looks like a young woman, and hijinks ensue. Unlike Chobits, though, is that said computer, Mimi, isn't retarded. I can't tell you how refreshing that is after having seen more than once series that follows the same basic structure of what's come to be called the "magical girlfriend" genre. Usually this entails a "normal" male character having an unusual female character foisted upon him, and then having to somehow explain her off to all of this friends and acquaintances because he doesn't want them to think he actually has a girlfriend for whatever reason. But while most shows of this genre dance around the two of them coupling, due to the male character wanting to be chivalrous and "pure" or whatever, in this OVA, Mimi rapes Akira with her mouth within minutes of being let out of her box, so she can get his "user input".

Well, I did say this was a guilty pleasure, didn't I?

Anyway, Akira is basically fooled into buying Mimi from some shady character in an alley whose motivation is never explained or explored. He was actually after a normal PC that was supposed to be on sale, but was sold out by the time he got to the store, so at first he's actually upset that he has a seemingly sentient bio-android instead of a computer. Of course this isn't made any better by the two of them almost immediately being attacked by another bio-android like Mimi that wrecks the hell out of his house. Being Japan, this entails a battle of two machines that throw energy beams/balls at each other, though in this case it also involves sticking disks that have the pre-programmed attacks into Mimi's "front drive slot". With Mimi being fully functional and anatomically correct, you can probably guess what that is. Akira (and the audience) is then further shocked to learn what upgrading Mimi's memory entails, because apparently bio-androids can make physical memory out of spooge. And since her "front drive slot" is already in use, we now have a new catch phrase for anal - giving her a memory upgrade.

While most animes of this genre involve the protagonist giving his newfound magical girlfriend some kind of fake identity, this is about the only one I've seen that involves hacking the government's mainframe to actually make a legitimate identity. And of course by hacking, I mean actually entering the computer/network, which inevitably leads to battles with other computers.


"I fight for the user."

This eventually leads to foiling some kind of secret evil plan that involves American Macintosh-I mean Nackintosh computers invading Japan's computer network and sucking all of their breasts to get all of their data, since breasts are hard drives on bio-androids, apparently. Naturally this leads to Mimi saving the day, and Akira gaining a harem.

As you can tell, there really isn't a lot to this OVA, and not just because it's only three episodes long. And while you might expect the dub to not be all that great given when this OVA was made, to be honest, there just isn't a whole lot of enthusiasm from any of the voice actors, even in the Japanese dub, and it's not hard to see why. Mostly this just added to the enjoyment my friends and I had watching this, in a so bad its good kind of way. Plus, there's the nostalgia factor; I mean, anyone else remember when Quadras and Performas were the shiznit back in the day? No? Well, this is kind of what I'm talking about when I mention that I'm the right age to be an old school anime fan, even if I'm only just now watching these older shows.

So while there are some darker aspects that just kind of lead me, as someone now pretty familiar with anime, to say something along the lines of, " Oh, Japan...," overall I still enjoyed this series, even if it isn't what I'd consider to be "good." It's thin on plot, and characterization, making heavy use of clichés and character types, and with the only enthusiasm coming from the animators, but it's still fun and thoroughly entertaining to watch. Still, its lack of quality does lead to a somewhat low score, overall. 7/10. Not bad for computer pr0n.

[CX]

Fist of the North Star - Season 1
(109 episode series)

I first learned of this series, which originally aired in '84-'87, from the Anime Abandon look at the 1986 movie. Looking into it further, I found that both the movie and the series were done by the same people at essentially the same time. This lead me to believe that there was a chance that the movie's Charlie Foxtrot nature was due to it actually being a compilation movie based on the series, much in the same way both Blue Gender and Gurren Lagann have compilation movies made out of them. I wasn't especially kind to those movies, and I really raked the Fist of the North Star movie over the coals, too, as the only real appeal to that movie is the '80s corn, anime clichés, and ultra-graphic ultra-violence. So, even though the large number of episodes was somewhat daunting, I decided to give the series a chance, for giggles and grins if nothing else.

While the series' main appeals are essentially the same as the movie's, it's infinitely more watchable due to the story being more paced out and spread out over its episodes rather than having all of its elements crammed into a movie with no sense of the structure movies are supposed to have. I also found many elements were different between the movie and the series, such as the character of Toki, who is one of four adopted brothers who were training in the Hokuto Shin-Ken (Fist of the North Star) martial art, along with Kenchiro, the protagonist of the series, Jagi, and Roah. Toki is actually a pretty major part of the story in the series, as are many of the other characters who are essentially reduced to cameo roles in the movie. Then there's the way the final fight of the movie between Roah and Ken is actually a mixture of a raid Ken and his allies conducted on a prison city to rescue Toki, and the first fight between Ken and Roah. The sudden end to the fight in a draw by Roah make slightly more sense in the series, in part due to attempted character depth, and in part due to Ken actually being more evenly matched with Roah. So I'd actually liken the 1986 movie to the Toward the Terra and Cyborg 009 movies, which also came out in the '80s. This is because I feel the movie and series were separate adaptations of the source manga, even if the same production staff worked on both projects, and just as with the two movies I just mentioned, the production team made the mistake of trying to put too much from the long-running manga into a movie.

Anywho, it was obvious to me not very long into the first episode that this series was meant for a fairly young crowd. Sure, there's the fact that the series cuts back on the graphicness of the many, many deaths by either coloring the gushing blood white or black, or by cutting to silhouette before their various body parts exploded or fell apart from the various made-up martial arts being used on them, but I'm referring more to the mentality of the series. What I mean by that is the type of morality being shown, with the various bad guys Ken ends up exploding being very one-dimensional bullies. Ken represents the counter to that, then, where those with strength should use their strength to defend those weaker to them rather than preying on them. So basically Ken is the kind of characters little kids can fantasize about having to defend them from bullies who beat up on them, or fantasize about being so they can beat up those bullies themselves. Then there's the way a narrator will excitedly describe all the various made-up martial arts being used on the show, which usually are then never seen or mentioned again. Kind of the same thing whenever one of the established characters pull some new move out of their ass, too. The series is also very childish in how it views male and female gender roles, even though there's the whole Japan misogyny thing in there, too. Incidentally, one of the characters, Rei, shows his affection for one of the female characters, Mamiya, by ripping her clothes off at least twice. Rei is supposed to be one of the good guys, by the way. He also gives Mamiya crap because she has chosen to be a warrior and a leader to her villiage, rather than being "just a woman." The series treats every female warrior that way, and felt the need to give all of them some kind of tragic background to explain how and why they became a warrior.

So after saying all of that, you might think I kind of hated this series, when in fact I have something of a strange fondness for it. It isn't what I'd consider to be "good," but it is very watchable. Basically it has a lot of the same appeal of the movie - the '80s corn, anime clichés and general ineptness I like to laugh at, and random shit like Ken punching a WWII tank to death, and at another point fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger.


Yes, really, though to the show's credit, they don't lampshade it.

There are also things like Ken's signature "Ya-ta-ta-ta!" as he rapidly punches or kicks someone or something that make the show amusing to watch from a so-bad-its-good perspective. On top of that, the story actually does manage to be somewhat interesting to follow, even if it can be a bit repetitive at times. And by repetitive, I mean that in some ways this series reminds me of Casshern Sins in that much of it consists of the main character wandering a barren wasteland on foot, coming across people he ends up killing. Still, I often found myself wanting to marathon through many episodes in a row so I could find out how something turned out. So the story is something of a mixed bag, because on the one hand there's a general ineptness that can be either annoying or amusing, and on the other there's a somewhat interesting story going on. I honestly almost quit early on in the series because of how formulaic the episodes seemed to be getting, but I decided to hang in there, and I'm happy I did because the series eventually does get better.

So, for those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, here are the basics. In 199X, the world erupts into nuclear war, and the survivors are forced to eke out an existence in a desert world. While uncontaminated food and water are (supposedly) hard to come by, the good news is that there's plenty of hair dye, clown makeup, and football armor left over once all the bombed out stores have been looted. So you could say that there are plenty of similarities to Mad Max, but then the creators of Fist of the North Star admitted as much. They never really explained how in this world of scarcity that so many men are able to grow into muscle-bound giants, or how characters are able to find wood for campfires in the middle of the nuclear wasteland, but whatever. The story seems to be set only a short time after the nuclear holocaust, although other aspects of the story make it seem like almost a century has past, but that isn't really all that important to the simplistic plot.

The plot basically has Ken facing various foes who are also experts at some type of made-up martial art. First is Shin, who almost killed Ken, and took Yuria, his fiancé, for himself. So Ken is initially out for revenge on Shin and to rescue Yuria from him. Of course by the time he get there, his princess is in another castle, so to speak. The series is also somewhat manipulative when it comes to Yuria and a few other characters, and at times it can feel like they're pulling stuff out of their fourth point of contact. Like how the "Last Nanto General" is always drawn masculinely, even if covered head to toe in armor, all so they can pull a Samus on us. Anyway, the story is split up into various arcs that separate the series into 4 distinct parts in the first season, each dealing with a primary antagonist Ken and his allies must face. Last is his adopted older brother, Roah, who names himself Ken-Oh and swears to conquer heaven, right after he's finished conquering Earth. He also looks like something right out of Heavy Metal.


Incidentally an image I wish the people I glowered at from my forklift could see.

The characters, like every other aspect of the series, are also something of a mixed bag. Ken, the main character, is actually pretty bland. And while at times this can actually be a bit fun, like when he tells a foe that they're already dead right before their head explodes, it's a little annoying in how Superman-like his character can be. Not only can he regenerate the clothes he shreds by flexing his muscles during a fight, but he can also regenerate himself at will, even after being severely injured. One almost wonders why he wasn't able to heal the wounds that produced his signature big dipper scar before they'd actually turned into scars. But really, the thing with him is that there's no real drama with him. He's incorruptible, and frankly unbeatable. If there's any drama to be had, it's if he can manage to save other characters before they can be killed by the various bad guys Ken ends up fighting.

Then there's Lynn and Bart, the moé and comedy relief, respectively, and who also have the most annoying voice actors out of the entire cast. Say what you will about early English dubs, the voice actors for the English dub of the 1986 movie were a lot less annoying. Of course the voices fitted the characters, because they were also really annoying. Lynn, even though she's like 6, apparently gets a crush on Ken after he saves her and cures her muteness. She becomes even more clingy than Overly Attached Girlfriend, following Ken around and usually putting herself and Ken in danger as a result. Bart is mostly only annoying because of his stupid little schemes.

Yuria, the McGuffin, is annoying mainly through her passiveness, in keeping with the Japanese view on women, apparently. There's also the way every man who sees her apparently falls in love with her, all because she represents the "mother star" or some bullshit like that. Like Ken, she's also pretty flat, though with her it was kind of amusing the way Shin would keep doing horrible things in a misguided effort to win her over, even though she'd tell him right up front that she thought those things were horrible.

Speaking of Shin, one of the more positive aspects of the series was that it actually attempted to give its antagonists more than one dimension, at least the main antagonists like Shin and Roah, anyway. Roah in particular, despite being an evil bastard who stated that he was totally going to kill both Ken and Toki, eventually broke down crying and found that he couldn't bring himself to follow through with it, stopping just short of killing them both, and eventually he even gave some of this life force (somehow) to Yuria in order to extend her life so she and Ken could be together for longer. [SPOILERS] This also had the effect of allowing Ken to defeat him. [/SPOILERS]

So what's the bottom line? Well, I'm not going to give this series a very high score - it just doesn't have what I would consider to be actual quality deserving of a high score. But I would still recommend this series if you just want to see something for the fun of it. It may seem pretty daunting given the episode count, but keep in mind the age of this series. Much like Armored Trooper VOTOMS, this series saves a lot on animation by having a lot of its overall 24 minute run time taken up by its long opening theme and end credits, and varying lengths of recap. This makes most episodes only 15-20 minutes long. Many of these episodes are also only recap episodes, and can be skipped through pretty rapidly for what little new content is in them, or even skipped entirely. This is actually a bit ridiculous in some ways, because the end of Part 3 is taken up by 5 recap episodes, and Season 1 itself is actually ended with a recap episode. So you could probably breeze right through this series in a couple of free weekends. 3/10.

[CX]

Robot Carnival
(1987 movie)

It's films like this that really make me like '80s anime. An anthology, it showcases the work of nine different animation directors, some of whom were just starting out as directors. A more modern example might be Halo Legends or Batman: Gotham Knight, with the main difference being that those examples had entire studios behind the short stories that made up those movies, and the shorts in this movie are the work of only one to two individuals. Really, though it was done by a different studio, this movie could be thought of as another example of Neo Tokyo, which I reviewed earlier.

I can't help but feel the need to gush about this movie, and about '80s anime in general, really. There's a level of detail to it that you just don't see in modern anime, in spite of the fact that technology has actually made it easier to create animation compared to when this movie was made. True, there are some real stinkers, some of which I've already reviewed, but what decade doesn't have its fair share of them? Then there's the subject matter, with older anime seeming to be a lot more willing to delve into sci-fi than modern anime, which seems way more interested in the antics of some nerdy high school kid(s). Compare that to robots running amok in Robot Carnival and Neo Tokyo, and frankly I find them a lot more interesting to watch, but that's me. This movie and others like it also serve as something of a time capsule, and there's an added level of entertainment due to the '80s corn.


So very, very '80s...

Getting back to the actual review, as I mentioned, this movie is an anthology, made up of 8 distinct short stories, with only two of them having any actual dialog. This actually made for a pretty interesting contrast, as stories being told entirely visually isn't something that's done very often. That being said, the types of stories being told vary greatly in tone, and also in the amount of symbolism being used. Most of them are comedies, though some are dramas, with one in particular being quite sad, at least in my opinion. This does leave me with something of a problem, as I'm not entirely sure how to go about reviewing this movie. It's obvious that I'm going to have to discuss each story individually, but I'm somewhat reluctant to go into too much detail, because frankly I think you should watch this movie for yourself and I don't want my review to make that seem like it would be redundant.

Opening/Ending/Epilogue: Much like Neo Tokyo, this movie also has a kind of framing story. The difference here is that in Robot Carnival, it's much more meta, directly referencing the title by making it a giant sand crawler, reaping destruction across a swath of the post-apocalyptic desert. It's rather cartoonish, and has a very dark sense of humor, making death and destruction kind of funny. The ending actually shows a brief history of the carnival, back when it was more of a traveling circus, but even the opening kind of hints at this. Essentially, this sequence continues the theme of the short "The Order to Stop Construction" from Neo Tokyo of robots becoming destructive if left on their own for too long. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, though, as both stories were done by the same director, whose dark humor would later go on to produce Kite and Mezzo Forte. Incidentally, the visual style of this piece also reminded me a bit of Nausicaä, which made it a little more amusing for me.

Franken's Gears: There isn't a whole lot to this short, which is mostly just fun to watch. It's about a crazy old scientist who builds a robot, Frankenstein style in an appropriate-looking laboratory, filled with old school sci-fi equipment, which includes plenty of levers, hand cranks, and giant gears. It's a bit slap-sticky, cartoon sound-effects and all, and yet very fitting of this film's theme, which includes some more dark humor thanks to the scientist's creation imitating him a little too well. The sci-fi nerd in me noted some similarity to old-school German sci-fi, but that's about all the more I could tell you about this short, other than that it was kind of fun to watch.

Deprive: This is a very stereotypical '80s anime sci-fi, featuring an alien invasion, a kidnapped girl, and a heroic robot who comes to her rescue. That's pretty much it, aside from the fact the heroic robot somehow is able to make himself look like a generically good looking '80s guy (according to anime standards), and that the bad guy in charge of the alien robot invaders looks like an '80s rock star (seen in the first picture). It was also kind of fun to watch, though more for the '80s corn than anything.

Presence: This is my favorite short of the entire anthology, and is frankly the only one that has any real layers to it. It takes place in a kind of neo-Victorian setting, which might take a little explaining. basically, most of the architecture and dress of the characters in this setting scream Victorian England, yet there are extremely human-looking androids, hover cars, and a huge cyber-punk factory made entirely of pipes and valves that dwarfs the town most of the action is set in. The main character of this short is a rather stiff man who seems to have a strained relationship with his family, apparently at least in part due to the fact his wife seems to be the primary bread winner while he works in a factory and tinkers with toys and his sex-bot in his spare time.

Okay, to be fair this isn't explicitly stated, it's just that he made an android who looks like a young '80s female pop star, and mentions some stuff about not really feeling fulfilled with his marriage and needing something more "fundamental," so what else am I supposed to think. Plus this short isn't exactly lacking in symbolism, even to someone fairly oblivious to it.


SYMBOLISM!!

This short might actually be kind of fun to analyze, though my own take on it is fairly straightforward. For me, the sadness comes from the loneliness of the robot this man creates, apparently out of a sense of emptiness within himself. However, much like this his family, he seems unwilling or unable to emotionally connect with his creation, and this is what makes it a little unclear as to what exactly he was hoping to accomplish by building this living doll. Unfortunately for the robot, when she shows him some affection, this causes him to freak the hell out and beat her to death. Years later, his regret manifests itself when he starts seeing visions of his robot reaching out to him, and the sort plays with the audience a bit as to whether the visions are actually real or not. My own interpretation of this man's creation is that the robot is actually an idealized version of his wife, because until the very end of the short, her face is purposely left obscured. Apparently, the robot's open affection for him was just too much for him to handle for whatever reason, but like I said, this is my interpretation of what I saw.

This is also one of only two dubbed shorts, and while some people like to bitch no matter what about dubs, I actually quite liked the dubbing here. Effort was put into it to make it fit the setting, and I thought it helped add to the mood as much as the effective, if simple soundtrack. I did try watching the Japanese version for comparison, but unfortunately the subs followed the same script as the dub, so all I can really say is that the Japanese version had a lot less dialog in it.

Star Light Angel: A little more standard fare, this short follows a teenager and her best friend as they spend an evening at a robot theme park. They do pretty typical teenager stuff, so much so that the lack of dialog is no impediment on the story structure. This includes finding out in the most awkward way possible that her boyfriend is a complete bastard who started cheating on her with her best friend, with the two of them apparently unaware of the other's connection to the main character. So basically this short is typical teenage soap opera drama, but with robots. This includes a fight with a giant robot that appears out of thin air, because anime. Again, not much depth here, but enjoyable to watch nonetheless, if nothing else because it looks so awesome.

Cloud: I can't say I really cared for this short, which really stands out from all the others. It's about a robot born out of a cloud, that walks in front of clouds, until finally becoming a real boy at the end. Supposedly, the clouds represent time or some such, and at times I did make out the shapes of dinosaurs, and the anime version of "The Creation of Adam," weeping angels, followed up very quickly by the apparent nuclear armageddon. All while our little jaded robot apparently doesn't notice, apart from the weather becoming crappier during the nuclear war. According to what I read, there was supposed to be Romans and stuff in there, but I sure never saw it. Visually, it's very plain and simple, storyboard-like, really. Personally it's something I'd skip through on rewatching this movie.

A Tale of Two Robots: This is apparently a parody of WWII-era Japanese propaganda, and I can definitely see it. It's set in the 1800s and features a giant robot fight, because what's anime without giant robots. Steampunk fans would also probably like the fact that the Japanese mecha is wooden and steam-powered to contrast the Westerner's electrically-powered brick mecha. Story-wise, it features a "Westerner" trying to take over Japan with his giant mecha, "the product of his genius" as he calls it. In his way stands a small group of Japanese, who just so happen to have made a giant mecha out of wood for a parade that had been planned for the festival that was being interrupted by this foreign invasion. Destruction abounds, and much fun is to be had, as the writer/animator obviously had tongue very firmly in cheek.


Also, this happens.

There was apparently some butthurt over the dub of this short, with those involved being accused of racism for making the Japanese very Engrishy voices. The people upset about this should be slapped and kneed in the groin, because the fact that this short was a parody of WWII propaganda was apparently lost on them, with the dub company adding to it by parodying American WWII-era propaganda. Incidentally, the Japanese dub actually does have an English-speaking voice actor as the Westerner, which is why there are hard-subs for Japanese audiences during all of his dialog. Unfortunately I can't judge the Japanese, as I don't speak it and the subs provided only repeated the English dub.

Nightmare: Older anime seems a lot more influenced by Western culture and animation, which isn't surprising as the big-eyed look of anime is actually derived from the creator of Astro Boy, Osamu Tezuka, being influenced by Disney. Which makes it that much more ironic because this short seems to be very heavily influenced by two Disney works. Essentially, this is another "robots run amok" short, which is very reminiscent of Neo Tokyo's "The Order to Stop Construction," in just the shear scope of the robot action. It's also very reminiscent of Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain" in that as darkness falls in downtown Tokyo, a robotic Chernabog suddenly appears and begins to create robots out of random objects and machines scattered throughout the city with the help of a robot "horseman." I call him that, because while all this is going on, a single drunken homeless man awakens to see the machines overrunning the city, and tries to run away while the "horseman" chases him. The drunken human has often been called the chicken man, and I can't help but be reminded of the Disney version of Ichabod Crane. Of course, the director admitted as much, so there's that added bit of fun to this short. There's also how almost all sound during this short is made using musical instruments. Overall, it's pretty fun to watch, and it's actually one of my favorite shorts of this movie.

If I could gush over another aspect of this movie besides its animation, I'd also like to highlight the music used throughout this movie. Each short was given a distinct sound, which was perfectly appropriate for them, and helped to set the mood for each of them. Much of it is very '80s, but then, as I said, that isn't really a bad thing in my opinion, as it helps to make this movie a kind of time capsule. There was a certain fascination with robots in the '80s, besides just in Japan, and this movie perfectly captures that while having fun, as well as taking a moment or two to explore the more sci-fi aspects of artificial life.

I can't encourage you enough to watch this movie. Honestly, I wish that there were more movies like this, as long as the quality was at least as high as this movie's. Here's the trailer made for the American release. Really, seeing the trailer and reading even less about this movie than I've written about it right now was enough to get me to give this movie a try, so I hope the information I've given you can help you.

It's kind of hard for me to stick a rating on this due to its nature, but I think it was a bit better than Neo Tokyo, which I gave a 7. I think I'll rate this movie an 8/10, then.