Original Ghost in the Shell film is great in my books though its storytelling is unconventionally loloshii to a point it isn't everyone's cup of tea. Oshii isn't interested in traditional narrative filmmaking and it shows. Stand Alone Complex is far more straightforward (and also better, but not due to lack of loloshii per se) and as such often liked even by people who didn't like GitS film.
Innocence I liked despite everything when I last saw it years ago. It's one helluva flawed bloated mess but I think overall it pulls through to the plus side of things. Still, it's Oshii's worst and most self-indulgent feature so if GitS anime was not your cup of tea Innocence will make you vomit.
GitS 2.0 is pointless.
And yeah, listening to BrikHaus when it comes to Oshii is dreadful mistake.
Dr. Nick wrote:Going back to the glorious Nippon wank in
Silent Service, I'm not at all sure what the deal with it is and who's fundamentally responsible for it. Based on a very non-representative sample of Kawaguchi's works available in English, the guy doesn't really seem like a right-wing jingoist. In
Araragi Express, the main character's most trusted friends are illegal Vietnamese immigrants, and they're all depicted as upstanding people who just happen to be gun smuggling, human trafficking criminals. Considering the original manga version of Silent Service is an absolutely beastly thing 32 volumes in length, it might be that the initial set-up we see in the anime gets totally shaken up in the later volumes. Or maybe not. It might also be that Takahashi went all
Deep Blue Fleet with his adaptation and ramped up the Yamato Damashii more to his liking. There's really no way of knowing until the Balrogs stop eating all the brave scanlators daring to approach Zipang's Machuria arc and the rest of Kawaguchi's manga.
Yeah I can't say how it compares to the original manga. I'm kinda curious about this Takashi boogeyman series of a Deep Blue Fleet. There's very little information going around and certainly no subs for any episode. AND there seems to be absolute shitload of those episodes, I have no idea how any OVA series can run for so long yet maintain such level of obscurity.
Anyway, Silent Service was difficult to evaluate because of all this. If one leaves aside all the nippon banzai and stupid geopolitics nonsense it would be fairly good action film (though characters etc. would still count against it somewhat, there isn't a single even remotely humane feeling person in the whole cast). So in a sense it was a film that was good and bad at the same time and I ended up tossing a coin which side to focus on.
Fireball wrote:Watched the TTGL movies last weekend and I don't know if it's because they simply suck or because the series has little rewatch value to me but I found myself mostly bored. Some nicely added sakuga towards the end though.
The films are extremely meh, especially the first one.
robersora wrote: I would have never endured to watch, nor could recommend this train wreck if it wasn’t for the great directing by Anno. He manages to save the absolutely horrible source material, which is crowded in clichés, boring and/or unbearable children as „characters" and uninteresting plot. The story centers around people you don’t want to know in a setting you don’t want to know about because you cannot see it any more. In a sense you can compare it to The Great Gatsby, which uses the same approach. Both conceal the pile of shit the the core of the story inhabits in abundance of style.
I'm not one to usually make these sort of comments but you're simply
dead wrong if you think Kare Kano was clichefest and stereotypical by-the-book shoujo romance. In fact this makes me suspect you haven't seen much shoujo romance.
To begin with the lead characters are absolutely nothing like stereotypical shoujo leads have traditionally been. Especially Yukino Miyazawa who is pretty much anti-thesis of every other shoujo lead around. She's fiercely intelligent, strong-minded, egoistic and raucous borderline superhuman when the series starts. As far as genre typicalness of leads go she's
way more original main character than Shinji was in the mecha anime context. Arima comes not too far behind, resembling model student Shinji if anyone and his jackass "rogue" quotient typical of shoujo leads (girls like assholes after all) is minimal.
Beyond this the storyline in the period anime covers veers quite clear of shoujo landmines. There are no love dodecahedrons involving main character to speak of. No second guy is ever inserted into Arima-Yukino equation (Asabi is a joke character for most part and hilariously enough is obsessed with Arima, not Yukino) while Tsubasa's crush on Arima quite quickly becomes non-entity and she's never treated as serious love rival.
What's more Arima and Yukino get together by episode 4! In the very beginning of the story! Typical shoujo manga wastes countless tankobons before getting to this point and might end not long thereafter. Kare Kano just breaks the rules here once again.
So I think in this respect you're not being fair to the manga at all.
(That characters get a lot character development as a rule (esp. the leads) isn't really deviation from shoujo pattern though, that has always been the greatest strenght of female-oriented manga in comparison to male-oriented. As such it isn't "playing against the rules" as obviously as above considerations)
Eleven wrote:I decided to finally watch Nadia - The Secret of Bluewater. I just finished episode 11. It's all fine, it's fun, it has its mysteries, but... How will this story fill 39 episodes? I feel like most of the answers to all the mystery stuff are pretty obvious (no, I didn't spoiler myself, I knew absolutely nothing about the show before I started it - except, that it's a classic).
I'm afraid of filler episodes, Nemo staring at his own version of Bluewater and looking gloomy every now and then, but answers at the very end. Is this how it's going to be?
Anno directed, GAINAX-TAC animated Nadia is basically episodes 1-22, 35-39. In between there's the infamous "Island Arc" that was largerly outsourced to other studios in Japan and Korea (esp. Korea) and was not directed by Anno. It's awful, characterization breaking filler for most part though episode 31 is exception and plot-relevant (hence why it's also on Anno's Nautilus Story edit).
Anyway, you can split down the story to 4 distinct arcs:
1. Tower of Babylon arc covering 1-8
2. Nautilus arc 9-22
3. "Island" arc 23-34
4. Finale arc 35-39
The story carries it's weight without any genuine filler apart from 3. I'd recommend skipping it entirely sans ep 31 but if you don't want to do that watch eps 23-31 and then absolutely skip 32-34 nevertheless. Existence of those episodes is nothing short of mystery because episode 35 follows logically from end of ep 31 and unlike Island arc earlier *there are no plans to be found for those episodes anywhere*. I have no idea why those episodes exist but they're also the very worst episodes of Nadia so, uhh...
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So, it looks like my journey of discovering how Eva influenced mecha anime continues. By now I'd like to call it "Journey of Discovery: How Neon Genesis Evangelion ruined /m/echa forever". I feel like I'm marching onwards in swamp of shit.
Last time the object of study was the trite cash-in Dinagiga. Unfortuntely farther this goes on worse the results seem to get...
Brain Powerd
Isn't it sad, Gendo-kunOh wow. This series was spellbinding waste of potential and talent. This is the worst tv series from Tomino and I don't think he has ever topped this in awfulness outside the infamous Garzey's Wing-Wings of Rean OVA pair. What's tragic is that unlike those two this could've been
great series. I have no idea how many times I've said this by now but a defining trait of Tomino seems to be this: Guy has great ideas for characters and stories as well as intriguing concepts per se but his ability in execution of said ideas ranges from schitzophrenic to non-existent.
Unfortunately Brain Powerd belongs to latter category non-stop. There's great anime here somewhere, buried under heaps of nonsense. The story premise is honestly pretty good, most characters have decent to great backstories and room for development and this all ties to series's main themes very well and naturally. Brain Powerd is clearly something of a sequel to Victory Gundam except it's done by Happy Tomino. Motherhood, family in general et cetera are the main themes here and the exploration of them with vague sorta-mystical organic mecha warfare and cast of characters suffering from emotional isolation and broken families is all very reminiscent of Eva.
Honestly, on purely conceptual level and in terms of story premises I think this had incredible potential to be Tomino's best work since original Gundam.
What's more the core team for the series is truly astonishingly high quality. First of all there's Mamoru Nagano doing mechanical designs and his work is very evocative and stylish per se. Orphan in particular is inside-out masterpiece of SF setting design and the basic "Anti-body" mecha design baseline is fittingly strange. Mutsumi Inomata's character designs are also of characteristically high quality, especially female characters have superb designs (in fact guys seem to be a bit "whatevered" in comparison). Last there's Yoko Kanno doing the soundtrack in her full late-90s glory.
But all of this is wasted by horrid, muddled storytelling and general nonsense directing on Tomino's part.
if I had to sum the series up in one image this would be it This series has some of the most awful, unintentionally confusing storytelling I have EVER seen in any series. I don't really want to go in much more detail than that because otherwise I'll be ranting here all night but since something needs to be said...
There's astonishing lack of explanations for most basic setup work any story needs to do for longest while, the series has bad habit of making at least one third of its dialogue utterly incomprehensible technobabble while remaining two thirds are infamous and stereotypical LOLTOMINO dialogue of the worst kind.
The story is not even all that complex but it's so incredibly poorly and confusingly told a lot of shit happening seems completely ad hoc or poorly motivated. Number of asspulls and nonsense plot twists don't help at all. What's more the series is absolutely terrible at creating any tension or sense of motion. Basically, there's this bigass space ship on bottom of ocean called Orphan and if it surfaces it's gonna kill all life on Earth. Except not. Except it will. Except not. Actually it jus surfaced but some vague shit about "B plates" meant no apocalypse occured. Except they weren't used. Except they were. Except they weren't and no one knows wtf B plates even are. Oh wait now it's rising higher and story is ending how is this going to end. Oh. Wait, you call
that ending?
Characters fare little better. There are some powerful moments and good bits of characterization but in general there seems to be little rhyme or logic to character interaction and behaviour. While Brain Powerd lacks obnoxious kill em all streak of Victory in general characterization is surprise buttsex levels of confusing and alarming just like in it. Add on this the general major Tomino sin of expository abuse and we get some of the absolutely worst scenes and characterization from the guy I've ever seen.
Directing is per se pretty awful too. Tomino ruins a many would-be serious scenes with utterly incomprehensible formal choices: most blatant are those beyond stupid zoom-ins/zoom-outs of some particular shot repeated again and again and again. It's supposed to create intensity and sense of energy but it just looks fucking awful per se and is generally used in wrong places to boot. Tomino also does some really shitty editing and establishment of place and time here and there. For example late in series one scene inside Orphan ends with people looking shocked up. Then we get shot of mecha descending from angle that looks like obvious followup to previous shot. EXCEPT NOT AND THESE SCENES HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH EACH OTHER.
If shit like this doesn't count as bad directing I don't know what does.
The most hilarious example of random infodumb/expository dialogue abuse I remember ever seeing in anime. Also this shit makes absolutely no sense and came out of nowhere in context. But Xard! Even if Tomino bumfucked the storyline and basic dramaturgy the mecha action will still be worth it right? Nagano's designs look pretty cool and Tomino has always known how to direct mecha action, right?
HA!
yes even mecha action was generally shitty and looked like ass I never expected I'd say this but Brain Powerd has absolutely awful mecha action. This is some early Ideon episodes tier bullshit except arguably worse. Brain Powerd's mecha are just plain boring in terms of abilities and looks after the initial buzz dies off. They're not very interesting to watch in fights per se but worst of all Brain Powerds and Gran Cher's look SO GODDAMN SIMILAR it's almost impossible to tell apart enemies and friendlies in most action scenes.
Basically, I see these extremely similar robots going at each other in the skies with little to no change in action style episode after episode
and I can't even tell who is who. Early on I constantly made mistakes in assuming who was piloting what. Later on it gets a bit easier to tell thanks to stronger colour coding and new abilities of late-game Baronz but that's small consolidation.
Is there anything I'd unreservedly praise in Brain Powerd? Aside from Orphan design only one thing: the soundtrack. It's absolutely amazing and you have no idea how much it makes me wish Kanno had scored NGE instead of Sagisu. I think Eva has good soundtrack and all but something like Brain Powerd's score would've been absolute killer, especially late in series. Powerd's OST has fewer songs than I'd prefer (some were never even used in anime) but they're all fantastic, especially the stunning ending song Ai no Rinkaku sung by Kokia and Flow sung by Seika Iwashita. Those are just fantastic songs per se. I also like the OP song. Still, the real big deal here is the orchestral score that largerly alternates between dramatic chorals, subdued fittingly submarine feeling synth and sax driven numbers and string driven pieces of beauty and bombast.
I'd say the score overall is stronger than that of Turn A Gundam even so talk about waste. Too bad the use of music is most of the time awful. Apparently Tomino had huge trouble communicating to Kanno what he wanted to express and Tomino in turn had hard time using the music Kanno had provided him with. It shows. Sometimes as unintentional greatness in contrast, sometimes as plain bad mismatch. In any case soundtrack this good deserved much better series.
Brain Powerd's Level of Evangelization: so-soFinally thereis the question of the depth of how Evangelized this piece is. While I think there's definitive influence in certain aesthetic choices (pyramid-ship, character design for Yuu's father etc.) mostly Eva's influence is quite abstract. It provided foil for Tomino and as such something he consciously tried to top and I'm sure certain scenes and some thematic blabber was influenced at least indirectly by Eva. Hell, series's tagline when it first aired in WOWOWOW reads like intentional negation to what Tomino took to be Eva's main message.
However, ironically enough I think the influence the series had on Brain Powerd is rather superficial and I believe Tomino when he said the overall storyline and themes were in place even before Eva aired. There's huge number of similarities in theme and focus but instead of influence I think this is just coincidence - Tomino was already doing something of a proto-Brain Powerd with Victory Gundam towards the end after all. Heck, Tomino has always been the original "mecha pilots with shit parents" guy and a lot of this sort of material in BP is already there in Zeta Gundam.
So the influence is there to some extent but it's not all that big. Tomino mostly just played up the similarities in interviews because he's a showman and he knew he would be accused of ripping off Evangelion regardless. So better to market the thing as his response and way to "crush" Eva!
Verdict: Awfully told story about parents and children.... through borderline incomprehensible organic mecha warfare. Lovely soundtrack.3/10De:vadasy
nuff saidOnce in six months or so I see something so bad even shitting on stinker like Brain Powerd feels unjustified in comparison. De:vadasy is one of those rarer than rare anime.
De:vadasy is absolutely worthless Eva derivative 3 episode long excuse of OVA. It is awful on every barometer (except mecha design as De:vadasy itself looks pretty cool and is logical continuation in terms of further beastification of mecha anime).
The production budget seems to be passable but it's so awfully directed not even Avatar tier budget could save this. What De:vadasy took to be Evangelion's essence was this: grimdark mecha, vague metaphysical threat to mankind (launching from Ramiel-shaped black hole in space no less), whiny and incredibly unlikeable main character, teh Rei and heaps of weird subtext and psychotechnosexual fetishism.
De:vadasy's main character is probably the most hateable cunt I've ever seen in mecha anime, combination of worst traits of Shinji and Urusei Yatsura's Ataru (if you can imagine that). He is least of its problems though. The series is directed in incredibly "artsy" way in obvious attempt to mimic Hideaki Anno's stylistic chops but the results are drivel that would fail to pass class in film school. The narrative is jumbled, non-linear mess with constant beyond shitty crosscutting, pathetic attempts at building tension and mood, abuse of darkness etc. "grim" art direction and general competence failure at Film Directing 101. In terms of directing this is Mars of Destruction tier bad except horribly pretentious and edgy try-hard to boot.
Then there's the storyline that makes no fucking sense, has no closure or decipherable story structure AND seems to exist only in order to throw grotesgue bullshit, shitty fight scenes that are over before they begin and tons of borderline-hentai sex and fetishism on the screen.
I bet De:vadasy is exactly how Eva would look like for someone who found it grimdark, disgusting and perverted pseudo-profound pretentious mess. What I don't get is why would such a person want to make his own Eva in this image!
In terms of content De:vadasy was Apocalypse Zero bad and in form mostly incompetent nonsense. However what's really damning is how it left me feeling disgusted
and bored. It disgusted me with its barely hidden contempt for audience and leeching off Eva in the worst way possible, it bored me by being so awfully directed that no amount of sex, gore and mecha could raise my interest in the least.
De:vadasy's Level of Evangelization: Over 9000
I don't have to say anything here do I...
Verdict: Absolutely appalling.1/10
).
