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Hello, Guy's. Anime is one the best thing or this such kind of a hobby. It is Japanese TV show series based on a Japanese novel. Anime is everywhere nowadays. In case you’re new to the anime being a fan, you may have seen something odd while gorging on shows like Naruto or Bleach. And one of my favorite anime is haikyuu. One of the best anime series based on sports and I think this series is one of the shortest anime series. These series contain only 90 episodes.
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King of Thorn
Sci-Fi Thriller / 2010
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
The King of Thorn manga really stuck out to me because of the artist's drawing style, it starts like a classic sci-fi thriller and it's not a couple mean plot twists in it. Sadly the manga felt overlong and dwelled a lot on a cult subplot that really cost it my interest. A movie-length retelling of the story sounds great.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
Somehow, I got it into my head that I hadn't seen this before, and that may still be true, but I have definitely seen the twist ending before.
The twist ending is really the main reason I wanted to see this because it left such a big impression on me.
The basic plot is as such: There is a "Medusa Virus" devastating the globe which invariably turns victims to stone. A corporation shows up to provide lottery access to a new cryogenic technology with the idea being that patients can sleep until a cure is found. Main Girl Shizuku, and her identical sister Kasumi arrive at the remote castle complex which houses the sleeper pods, but only Shizuku won the lottery. Shizuku goes under and upon waking up finds the entire facility covered in thorny vines and overrun by dinosaur-like monsters.
The first big twist is finding out that almost no time has passed at all, it's not the distant post-apocalyptic future it seems, so whatever happened happened very suddenly.
The second big twist and ending to the movie is the reveal that Shizuku, with a past of self-harm, refused to go alone into the sleeper pods and wished to die together with her sister, and after accidentally throwing Kasumi off a cliff she cracks and becomes an avatar of the Medusa Virus, eventually creating a false Kasumi and placing her in a sleeper pod under the pretense that she is Shizuku.
I love that moment in the manga:
The twist ending is really the main reason I wanted to see this because it left such a big impression on me.
The basic plot is as such: There is a "Medusa Virus" devastating the globe which invariably turns victims to stone. A corporation shows up to provide lottery access to a new cryogenic technology with the idea being that patients can sleep until a cure is found. Main Girl Shizuku, and her identical sister Kasumi arrive at the remote castle complex which houses the sleeper pods, but only Shizuku won the lottery. Shizuku goes under and upon waking up finds the entire facility covered in thorny vines and overrun by dinosaur-like monsters.
The first big twist is finding out that almost no time has passed at all, it's not the distant post-apocalyptic future it seems, so whatever happened happened very suddenly.
The second big twist and ending to the movie is the reveal that Shizuku, with a past of self-harm, refused to go alone into the sleeper pods and wished to die together with her sister, and after accidentally throwing Kasumi off a cliff she cracks and becomes an avatar of the Medusa Virus, eventually creating a false Kasumi and placing her in a sleeper pod under the pretense that she is Shizuku.
I love that moment in the manga:
Now, I'm pleased to say that this moment is done justice in this movie adaptation, however I already knew that apparently. I've seen the clip before, but I guess I just hadn't seen the movie?
Well, now that I've seen the movie I gotta say... it's pretty disappointing.
Firstly, Yuji Iwahara's distinctive art style is NOT intact, and that is what drew my attention to this series in the first place.
Secondly, the cool dinosaur-like monsters have been entirely redesigned to be uniform and ugly. I really dislike the new designs and the uniformity takes away from the original presentation where the monsters where a mish-mash of hybridized forms, so when the survivors are attacked, it's just a cluster**** of different unfathomable creatures.
Thirdly, and by far the worst, is that the otherwise acceptable "normal" anime artwork they substitute in place of Iwahara's style is frequently interrupted of AWFUL 3D animation and most of the monsters are presented this way.
It looks atrocious, the framerate visibly dips every time they switch over to 3D, and because it's an entirely different approach to animation, characters move in peculiar ways you wouldn't expect if it were conventionally animated by hand.
It's like when they turn on the mo-cap in Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, it's incredibly jarring. And it's so obvious when the budget dips that you can effortlessly spot the 3D in screenshots.
I hate that they did this. It's so distracting, it looks ugly, and it's several steps down from the artwork we started with.
I appreciate that this movie had to, and probably should have, skimmed the plot a bit since it's 6 books fit into movie length, but they changed a lot and I'm not entirely pleased. The whole facility run by an AI called Alice was supposed to lead up to a reveal that Alice is just a little girl on life support being forced to operate the facility and it all came with an Alice in Wonderland motif, but this was entirely ditched and instead the characters mumble some bullshit analog to Sleeping Beauty the whole movie instead.
It's not subtle, it's not cute, and most of the time the story doesn't match up with the narrative of King of Thorn at all, so it feels forced.
The only substance we get relating to Alice involves the corporation CEO finding some artwork of a monster in the ruins where they killed one and instantly conclude that she can manufacture them from her dreams. It's terrible logic since she could have easily drawn them after the fact, but it's the only thing substantiating the other supernatural phenomenon in the movie.
There's also some weird shit like how the characters carry around molotov cocktails as torches. That seems incredibly dangerous.
When the Corporation CEO gestures to a hidden passage in a fireplace, the Marco character immediately starts shooting the wall. Is that the most practical use of ammo? You think this dude came here unarmed with the intention of shooting through a brick wall to escape?
I don't remember the manga very well, but I'm pretty confident they shuffled around the order in which the characters die of Medusa, which is another point against this movie because it frequently seems to forget that the characters are infected and that the entire plot of the movie is also intended to be a race against time with each of the survivor's bracelets increasingly indicating how close to death they are.
They barely come into play at all. In fact Fake Kasumi and The Kid are shown to throw away their bracelets at the very end of the movie as though the plague has ended, yet I don't think we ever got any dialog suggesting that.
This was a really half-assed adaptation. Someone else needs to give it a try.
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"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel
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Top 100 Action Movie Countdown (2015): List | Thread
"Well, at least your intentions behind the UTTERLY DEVASTATING FAULTS IN YOUR LOGIC are good." - Captain Steel
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Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions
Sci-Fi Fantasy / English / 2016
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
I've somewhat recently made the calamitously terrible life decision to get back into Yu-Gi-Oh! after 20 years and today I stand by it being the most horrifically unbalanced powercrept piece of shit game that planet Earth has ever had the misfortune of being cursed with.
I grew up with this game, collecting the cards, playing with my friends, even going to tournaments. I tried going to a local Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament (which I paid to enter) just last year and before my first opponent was even halfway through their opening turn I wanted to reach across the table and strangle the ****ing life out of them.
It's like paying to stick your head between someone's buttcheeks so they can shit directly into your eyes. It's like what Velma did to Scooby-Doo, just the highest possible disrespect by pretending to be the thing people used to like while being an unrecognizable degenerate heinous atrocity.
APPARENTLY, some people came back to Yu-Gi-Oh! after seeing this movie, which suggests to me that it does something that stirs a bit of nostalgia for what the game used to be. How good is it?
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
"It's true, I went through a great deal of trouble to recreate the Pharaoh's deck, his strategies, even his perfectly coiffed hair. In fact, that part is what took the longest."
This movie is awful.
But not for any of the reasons why I hate what the game became.
This movie is a sequel to the original Duel Monsters era anime series which... I barely watched, and it's true to that source material to a substantial fault.
If you cared about the characters, and their voices, and appreciate what is probably the highest production value of any Yu-Gi-Oh! animation to date, then maybe you'll get something out of this, but the anime was never the reason I played the game and it represents the game horribly.
The whole problem with the original series is that there is no adhesion to actual game's rules, which, you'd think, after almost 15 years they'd be able to make a movie that actually portrays an entertaining duel faithfully, but you'd be completely ****ing wrong.
Once upon a time we said, "Wait a second, Kaiba just summoned multiple monsters in a single turn!"
But now in this movie we have a thing called "Dimension Summoning", which is literally the exact same thing, except each character "uses their spirit" to pay the cost to summon the monster, which means there's no difference at all beyond the characters going "RRRRAAAAAAGGGGGHHH" and some completely meaningless Spirit Meter appears and fills up.
Clearly they couldn't waste the precious kid's (I mean adult's) attention in the movie theater by having the characters take multiple turns or anything, which is also casually glossed over. It's not representative of the current game either because they don't talk each other's ear off for 20 contemptible minutes as they explain the Nth effect activation they're resolving while their opponent can only sit there and do **** ALL.
There were so many times throughout the movie where I'm just gesturing at the screen, questioning "What the ****" because there is so much Deus Ex Machina bullshit.
One of the only explainable moments actually requires you to have knowledge about the booster pack tie-in product they released on the same day as this movie. The final boss monster of the big bad, Crimson Nova, has an incomparable 4500 ATK and is practically immune to monster effects. Yugi topdecks Palladium Oracle Mahad which allows him to reveal it on-draw to Special Summon it, then attack for 2500 which doubles to 5000 during the Damage Step if he's fighting a Dark monster.
None of that is explained in the movie, Yugi just summons this random dude we've never seen before, with an undisplayed power level, and casually beats over the big bad, which apparently ends the duel even though he didn't run out of Life Points.
Many more things go entirely unexplained, like why Yugi stalls to complete the Millennium Puzzle, or why Kaiba's duel disk prevents him from being warped into another dimension, or why Shadi is babysitting kids, or why these kids must be gifted the power of the Plana, or why Deva even entertains a ****ing card game with his enemies when he can literally dissolve them with his mind.
This power is described as being able to bring about a world free of fear and evil, and yet it has the fatal flaw that if the user isn't a perfectly good person it'll create a world of fear and evil instead. That's seems like a fantastic power to just hand to a group of impressionable kids.
Overall this movie is super cringe, they do the whole Power of Friendship thing, there's regular flashbacks to Deva's backstory which I can't be asked to give a shit about, the "big tournament" they hype up is literally just 2 duels, and there's a very noticeable stock sound effect they use for the duel disks that sounds exactly like a Halo Banshee when it accelerates,.
The fresh animations and occasional goofy line are not worth the price of admission, whatever you're paying. Because after all, Obelisk is not a monster, Obelisk is a god.
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Spirited Away
Fantasy / Japanese / 2001
WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Reassessment time.
WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*
It's been several years since I've seen Spirited Away, I remember it being a solid movie, but I've always been of the opinion that Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind was my favorite Studio Ghibli movie, despite the fact that it is often excluded from Ghibli's catalog of movies since it was released prior to the naming of the studio.
Princess Mononoke, from my perspective, has always been the pretentious weeb's infallibly correct choice for "Best Studio Ghibli Movie", but I think there's no question about Spirited Away being the most "mainstream" favorite provided that it was the first to receive significant overseas marketing and an English theatrical release.
This, like any mainstream darling, such as The Dark Knight, always gives me a significant amount of hesitation before I shower it with potentially undue praise, not because I think I've been unduly influenced to like the movie by fans, I think I'm quite resistant to hypetrains, but I am also possibly inversely affected by them.
When everyone LOVES this movie, it's hard for some people find faults, whereas I can find myself to be very nitpicky. Some people call this "contrarianism", but I think that's frankly bullshit. I'm just not that easy.
When nobody else is willing to criticize a movie I will gladly plant my flag and demonstrate to all the doubters that there's an adequate amount of shit to fling if you take any amount of effort. No movies are perfect and I can happily rip into my favorite movies' flaws too, but some people just can't appreciate that.
For my part, I think I respect my own opinions more because I'm unwilling to cow to popular conception, but I'm also self-aware of the fact that I can over-correct myself, as I felt was the case with The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight Rises was a shit movie riding off the fumes of The Dark Knight, but The Dark Knight was actually worthy of it's reputation despite my skepticism.
It took putting it down for a long time and coming back to it experience it afresh and appreciating it all over again to it, and that's the same case for Spirited Away.
My first issue with Spirited Away has always been the fictional animal exploitation in it. I've always contrasted it in my mind with Nausicaa, which practically preached against our damaging relationship with animals and nature, but Spirited Away isn't concerned about that and in retrospect I don't think I should have been as concerned about it as I was.
Spirited Away truly is an Alice in Wonderland type of story, Chihiro gets whisked away into a fantastical and oftentimes absurd and frightening world, but we're not intended to take any sort of moral lesson away from it and the world is so abnormal, you can scarcely suggest it normalizes anything.
Granted, there are still pigs raised for slaughter, "roasted newts", as well as all manner of unknown fleshy "spirit food", and consuming it is normal for the denizens of the town and bathhouse the world is centered around. I can make some excuses for it because the world is presented "as is", Yubaba is just the evil owner of the bathhouse because reasons, and that doesn't change by the end, so whatever is continues to be past the movie's end.
It makes me uncomfortable and I don't like that aspect of the movie, but I'm still able to become immersed in spite of it.
The other qualm I have with this movie is the random capital "Love" that gets dropped into dialog in the third act when referring to Chihiro and Haku. Mind you, I was watching the excellent English dub, but I'm sure it's not much different in Japanese.
There really isn't any excuse for an Overnight Romance in this movie. Haku has a grand total of two scenes alone with Chihiro for a total of what feels like less than 10 minutes of screentime, don't bullshit me that these characters are "in love" based on that.
It honestly kinda spoils some of the more heartfelt moments in this movie. Near the beginning when Chihiro breaks down just eating some rice feels like a really powerful moment because she's being shown a small kindness and the whole weight of the situation is coming down on her. It's a ****ing great moment that makes me tear up, but then when they get deeper into the movie we're talking about Chihiro acting out of "LOVE"...
Like what the hell are you doing? He gave her a couple ricecakes, chill the **** out.
The big reveal of "You figured it out, Chihiro! I'm the spirit of the Kohaku River!" moment also felt out of place. We're asserting that these characters have a connection based on an event that was BARELY foreshadowed, and we never even saw. I don't find that endearing, and Haku discovering his name and acting like he has a means to escape the bathhouse just raises all sorts of questions.
Mainly because this world presumes all sorts of weird random rules:
Chihiro can't look back across the river when she leaves,
Chihiro will fade away if she doesn't eat spirit food,
but Chihiro's parents turn into pigs if they eat spirit food,
Chihiro is invisible to all but Haku before she crosses the bridge,
but she needs to hold her breath when crossing the bridge,
Yubaba is obligated to give her a job if she asks,
but will take part of Chihiro's name in order to lock her into the contract?,
she can't even leave anyway because there's a river,
and her parents are held in captivity until who knows when...
Princess Mononoke, from my perspective, has always been the pretentious weeb's infallibly correct choice for "Best Studio Ghibli Movie", but I think there's no question about Spirited Away being the most "mainstream" favorite provided that it was the first to receive significant overseas marketing and an English theatrical release.
This, like any mainstream darling, such as The Dark Knight, always gives me a significant amount of hesitation before I shower it with potentially undue praise, not because I think I've been unduly influenced to like the movie by fans, I think I'm quite resistant to hypetrains, but I am also possibly inversely affected by them.
When everyone LOVES this movie, it's hard for some people find faults, whereas I can find myself to be very nitpicky. Some people call this "contrarianism", but I think that's frankly bullshit. I'm just not that easy.
When nobody else is willing to criticize a movie I will gladly plant my flag and demonstrate to all the doubters that there's an adequate amount of shit to fling if you take any amount of effort. No movies are perfect and I can happily rip into my favorite movies' flaws too, but some people just can't appreciate that.
For my part, I think I respect my own opinions more because I'm unwilling to cow to popular conception, but I'm also self-aware of the fact that I can over-correct myself, as I felt was the case with The Dark Knight. The Dark Knight Rises was a shit movie riding off the fumes of The Dark Knight, but The Dark Knight was actually worthy of it's reputation despite my skepticism.
It took putting it down for a long time and coming back to it experience it afresh and appreciating it all over again to it, and that's the same case for Spirited Away.
My first issue with Spirited Away has always been the fictional animal exploitation in it. I've always contrasted it in my mind with Nausicaa, which practically preached against our damaging relationship with animals and nature, but Spirited Away isn't concerned about that and in retrospect I don't think I should have been as concerned about it as I was.
Spirited Away truly is an Alice in Wonderland type of story, Chihiro gets whisked away into a fantastical and oftentimes absurd and frightening world, but we're not intended to take any sort of moral lesson away from it and the world is so abnormal, you can scarcely suggest it normalizes anything.
Granted, there are still pigs raised for slaughter, "roasted newts", as well as all manner of unknown fleshy "spirit food", and consuming it is normal for the denizens of the town and bathhouse the world is centered around. I can make some excuses for it because the world is presented "as is", Yubaba is just the evil owner of the bathhouse because reasons, and that doesn't change by the end, so whatever is continues to be past the movie's end.
It makes me uncomfortable and I don't like that aspect of the movie, but I'm still able to become immersed in spite of it.
The other qualm I have with this movie is the random capital "Love" that gets dropped into dialog in the third act when referring to Chihiro and Haku. Mind you, I was watching the excellent English dub, but I'm sure it's not much different in Japanese.
There really isn't any excuse for an Overnight Romance in this movie. Haku has a grand total of two scenes alone with Chihiro for a total of what feels like less than 10 minutes of screentime, don't bullshit me that these characters are "in love" based on that.
It honestly kinda spoils some of the more heartfelt moments in this movie. Near the beginning when Chihiro breaks down just eating some rice feels like a really powerful moment because she's being shown a small kindness and the whole weight of the situation is coming down on her. It's a ****ing great moment that makes me tear up, but then when they get deeper into the movie we're talking about Chihiro acting out of "LOVE"...
Like what the hell are you doing? He gave her a couple ricecakes, chill the **** out.
The big reveal of "You figured it out, Chihiro! I'm the spirit of the Kohaku River!" moment also felt out of place. We're asserting that these characters have a connection based on an event that was BARELY foreshadowed, and we never even saw. I don't find that endearing, and Haku discovering his name and acting like he has a means to escape the bathhouse just raises all sorts of questions.
Mainly because this world presumes all sorts of weird random rules:
Chihiro can't look back across the river when she leaves,
Chihiro will fade away if she doesn't eat spirit food,
but Chihiro's parents turn into pigs if they eat spirit food,
Chihiro is invisible to all but Haku before she crosses the bridge,
but she needs to hold her breath when crossing the bridge,
Yubaba is obligated to give her a job if she asks,
but will take part of Chihiro's name in order to lock her into the contract?,
she can't even leave anyway because there's a river,
and her parents are held in captivity until who knows when...
This movie does a great job of doing that Star Wars thing of creating a lived-in universe, but I feel like all these rules mainly exist solely for that purpose: fantasy bureaucracy.
They don't really serve the plot like they do in Death Note, they seem to exist mainly for texture.
I will say though, this is a very textureful movie. CGI is very cleverly buried into the background that I'm surprised when I notice it. 3D effects have a bit of an annoying reputation in anime now where they seem like a lazy crutch instead of anything that would actually improve the existing animation style, but this movie clearly had an enormous amount of hand-drawn animation and painting put into it, even for throwaway shots that you'll only ever see once throughout the whole runtime.
Not to besmirch Nausicaa, but there's a noticeably higher level of production quality here in both the animation and backgrounds. This is probably because this may be the most fantastical of all of Ghibli's movies. The characters are mostly inhuman, the environment is variously alien and ornate, frankly the whole idea of a massive spirit bathhouse coming to life at night is probably one of the least mainstream-acceptable ideas I can think of for a Japanese movie.
I do think a big appeal for some people is just the novelty of feeling "cultured" watching a movie like this, which I think is pretty stupid. Personally I find it enjoyable in the same way I enjoy movies like The Dark Crystal, it really presents a whole world and mythos to the viewer and it's easy to get swept away in it, which is a plus no matter what story you're talking about.
I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of the NoFace character was, his actions govern a good chunk of the movie and his motivations oddly seem to shift depending on how much he eats or has been able give away? He appreciates kindness, but doesn't like having his own kindness rebuffed? I'm not sure how to take his presence in this movie, but he's a strange and memorable character nonetheless.
The music is delicate and emotive, the sound effects are on point, the English voice acting is a substantial step above the average anime dub, there's a lot of good stuff in this movie.
But it really is the sum of it's parts and even the strange and not entirely explained aspects do little to offset the overall experience. From Yubaba freaking out causing the entire room to seize, to Chihiro welcoming the "stink spirit" that sets her hair to stand on end. All of the liquid effects in this movie look and sound wild including water, slime, and blood..
It hits you with a lot of sensations, it almost makes you wonder what the movie smells like. That's a level of immersion you don't get too often.
Overall, Spirited Away kinda loses me a bit at the end, but for a stellar first and second act, if nothing else, this is movie is:
Final Verdict: [Great] But it really is the sum of it's parts and even the strange and not entirely explained aspects do little to offset the overall experience. From Yubaba freaking out causing the entire room to seize, to Chihiro welcoming the "stink spirit" that sets her hair to stand on end. All of the liquid effects in this movie look and sound wild including water, slime, and blood..
It hits you with a lot of sensations, it almost makes you wonder what the movie smells like. That's a level of immersion you don't get too often.
Overall, Spirited Away kinda loses me a bit at the end, but for a stellar first and second act, if nothing else, this is movie is:
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