Tokyo Godfathers (2003)
directed by Satoshi Kon
Another movie with a baby in a central role. Three homeless bums find a baby in a dumpster and try to find out why it has been abandoned and by whom, while fostering it for the time being. While the movie makes the life of homeless look far too easy at times, even if it tries to display some of its elements correctly, its an engaging piece that tries to make its main character seem genuine and human. Those three have found in each other a second chance, a second family, after they left their original one for reasons of their own. During their odyssey through the city to find the mother of the baby, all these things come out and each of those three has to face their past. Mind you, this is not a movie about redemption, but about three people who are lost and get a chance to reconnect to some of those people from whom they are running away. While there’s too much coincidence involved to make the plot feel realistic, the reactions of every character and their stories ring all too true and make you feel with them. And it can be quite funny at times.
Rating: 4/5
Amon Saga (1986)
directed by Shunji Oga
Amon Saga is standard fantasy fare. A lone, silent hero bent on revenge on some generic fantasy villain. There’s also a princess involved, who needs saving and doesn’t do much apart from standing around and looking gorgeous. That said, it’s not a bad movie, just a tad too generic to make much of an impression. The most interesting thing are some of the visuals, for example the fortress of the villain is located on the back of a gigantic turtle, which indeed looks impressive.
Rating: 3/5
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
directed by Mamoru Hosoda
A very neat movie that utilizes time travel to tell a very lovely romance that goes right to your emotional jugular. It goes like this: a girl somehow gains the ability to travel in time and uses it mostly to correct simple, everyday mistakes or just have fun. Mostly she hangs out with two guys (no love triangle there, thank god) and we follow her exploiting her time travel ability. When she realizes that her actions actually have consequences, and escaping her own mistakes makes someone else pay, the movie turns a shade darker and serious in tone, which makes it easier to address the romance angle. While the romance aspect is important for the movie, it’s not overwhelming and most of the time the movie retains a slice of life feeling, which helps getting to like the main heroine on her own terms and not just as some gooey-eyed girl from some schmaltzy romance.
I thought the ending was nice, but I do wonder how many people realized how pyrrhic it actually was, since when they meet again there might be some kind of age difference.
Rating: 5/5
Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space (2002)
directed by t.o.L (”trees of Life”)
I can’t spew too much vitriol over this, as this is clearly not made for someone like me who appreciates plot and characters. T2:APCiS is one of those art thingies, style over substance and a big canvas for hidden meanings. There’s something of a semi-coherent story about a cat going into space (Tamala, the apathetic main character) to go to her birthplace, Orion. Instead she gets sidetracked and crashes on planet X and other strange stuff happens. It might be more interesting and entertaining if you’re stoned or otherwise mentally impaired, but to the rest of humanity it’s just plain boring. Also the animation looks cheap (some might call it stylish, I don’t) and the sound is annoying.
Rating: 1/5
Ninja Cadets (1996)
directed by Eiji Suganuma
by AIC
The first scenes of Ninja Cadets (a two episode OVA from 1996, that feels conceptually a bit like a prototype for Naruto) can make the impression that what follows will be a violent and bloody action movie like Ninja Scroll, but soon it becomes a light-hearted action-comedy. You’ll have the standard youngster characters, the serious one, the goofball and so on, who train to become ninjas and have to complete an important task. One of them is a princess (the one surviving the attack on her family from the beginning of the first episode) and some assassins follow the group to kill her, but prove to be rather ineffective at doing their job. Since there are only two episodes, the story feels unfinished, even if the two episodes comes to some sort of finish. It’s like watching the first two episodes of an unrealized TV series, which is quite unsatisfying, since you expect more to come. Still, it’s entertaining.
Rating: 3/5
Ninja Scroll: The Series (2003)
directed by Tatsuo Sato
by Madhouse
While this series does not completely match the atmosphere of the movie, it feels less sophisticated in execution and writing and some of the secondary characters have a tendency to become a bit annoying, it is quite entertaining and Jubei feels and acts like the Jubei you know from the movie. The plot is rather thin, mostly you’ll get the feeling this series is just one action scene after another, not that this is much different from the movie, but in a series it can become bothersome. Some episodes try to tell a more serious story only to completely miss the mark and feel ludicrous. But I couldn’t help but feel entertained. I just love movies with well done action sequences and some of the enemies were as imaginative as the enemies from the movie.
Rating: 4/5
Ninja Scroll (1993)
directed by Yoshiaki Kawajiri
What makes Ninja Scroll work so well is not just the perfect pacing and the imaginative action sequences, it’s the main character. Jubei Kibagami is neither a lone wolf or an idealistic hero so commonly deployed in action movies, but an everyday guy who just happens to be damn good at using a sword. But instead of getting all moody when facing setbacks or spouting some inane proclamations about justice to his enemies, he just does what needs to be done (if he can’t help it). Often he just tries to find a place to rest and sleep.
Plotwise it’s about a group of uber-ninjas trying to get their hands on something, with Jubei and others standing in their way. The movie has some nice plot twists and quite many eye-catching and gorgeous to look at choreographed action-sequences. The whole thing takes place in old Japan, but don’t expect much realism. As I said, Jubei as the main character is well done, but so are most of the others, friends and foes as well. Especially the conundrum of Kagero, the female main character, makes her into an interesting character and a good counterpart to easygoing Jubei.
Rating: 5/5
Mars of Destruction (2005)
directed by Yoshiaki Sato
Every medium has it low and high points. This is a low one for anime, but its attempt to cram as much plot as possible into merely twenty minutes gets a point for trying. There are some monsters, called Ancients, who suddenly appear and seem to have a relation to the fragments of a destroyed human space explorer. The Explorer got destroyed when entering Earth’s atmosphere after coming back from Mars. To counter these Ancient there’s this group of young armored girls (whose armor still doesn’t like very armor-like, you can’t get around fan-service in some animes) and one guy (whose whining reminds me not positively of the main guy from Evangelion) in some super-duper fighting suit.
There are two battles, with the enemy boss, after losing the second one and dying, coming shortly back to life to reveal that humans are the real invaders to Earth and the Ancients are the real Earthlings. Stretched out over two hours or even a series this all might have made much more sense, but this compacted it comes over like nothing more than rubbish, worst of all, completely derivative rubbish. Also the animation looks really cheap.
Rating: 1/5
Mind Game (2004)
Directed by Masaaki Yuasa
A more appropriate name would be Mind Fuck, because of the bizarre plot and the style attack on the viewers senses. The basic plot is about a young guy who meets his childhood love after years with no contact, goes to her fathers restaurant, gets killed by a soccer yakuza, meets God, regains his life and kills the soccer yakuza instead, and on the run from the yakuza ends in the belly of a big whale, together with his childhood love and her sister.
The belly of the whale is used as a means of self-discovery, there the three refugees are free to discover who they are and what they really want from life. All this sounds like a rather contrived way of getting some character growth, but it works. Partly due to the animation, that mixes many different style, throwing something new at every turn at the viewer, to display a wide array of dream- and mindscapes, partly because the movie takes itself and its characters never too seriously, yet never makes them into laughing stocks and gives them real depth.
In the end, the message of the movie is: live your life every moment, do something, go out and engage with reality, enjoy your time on this world, because it’s all too short. Something I can subscribe to. Neatly packed into a wild and frenetic animation package.
Rating: 4/5
Shakugan no Shana (2007)
Directed by Takashi Watanabe
Man, did this movie felt like a generic product. The character design screamed anime formula. The story felt generic too (it even had this extremely annoying tendency of many anime series of recent years where some magic techno babble is used to explain some concept integral to the story, which is the worst kind of info dump you can do). It’s about this kid who finds out he’s just a placeholder for a dead guy and that one day his remaining life will go out like a candle. There are demons, good guys (or gals) fighting them and so on. Now our kid finds that all out, is rather shocked and then helps one of the good gals to take care of one of the bad guys.
It’s not really boring, most of time I thought it was nice to watch (apart form the one bit that is absolutely necessary for every generic anime, where the good and naive hero has to make some righteous speech that is just nauseous to watch). But overall it’s pretty forgettable fluff. Might be that the original novels from which this has been derived are much better, but I wouldn’t know. Watch one time for the nice action sequences (but even those feel generic, as if I’ve seen them already a thousand times elsewhere).
Rating: 3/5
