Impressions

<– Uncle Walt-a-thon: Pinocchio

When I was a child, Dumbo was possibly my least favourite Disney film, so I wasn’t much looking forward to this one except for one particular scene. I’m not sure why I didn’t care for it. I possibly just didn’t like the elephants, Dumbo included; the gossipers are intended to be annoying, and the animators succeeded there. As a child I also didn’t connect much to the mother/son relationship, which, being the whole point of the film, is rather critical.

Much like my experience with moe my interest in the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise has suddenly waned to the point that I just don’t much care about it anymore, despite enjoying the series, both the anime versions and Tanigawa Nagaru’s original novel series, for the first time since I first encountered it in my college anime club six years ago.

[]Part of this may stem from my general fatigue with high school settings in anime and its related media, but since I still enjoy several other ongoing series with such settings, that doesn’t seem to be the reason. Neither does the possibility that even after seven novels, two television seasons, and one film, I’ve just burned out. After all, I’m still following Oh, My Goddess!, which is far longer and less interesting, especially in recent volumes. I just finished The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya, the seventh novel, and it wasn’t any better or worse than previous volumes. So, these two are, at most, minor factors.

Yesterday, Fate/Zero came to its conclusion. I’m sad to see it end, too, because I can’t remember the last time an anime had me this excited. I can even put a price tag on this one, $700 - $370 for the first season (reviewed here) and $330 for the second.

Fate/Zero is a series that does almost everything right. Taking the animation, for instance, very few TV productions look this good. The first season did have a few scenes that had to be touched up on the blu-ray, and the second will be the same, but overall it’s a great-looking show. The action scenes especially looked fluid and well-choreographed. Even the dialogue-heavy episodes, and this show has several, have enough detail to really feel alive, and retain the generally dark, heavy atmosphere of the rest of the show. We do get the occasional lighter-hearted scene, usually involving Waver and Rider, but that’s never enough to fully escape the feeling of dread appropriate to the show’s high-stakes plot. The only problem with the animation is the use of CG, which isn’t too bad, but doesn’t quite blend into the rest of the show.

<– Uncle Walt-a-thon: Snow White

So, after a brief delay the Uncle Walt-a-thon continues, this time with Pinocchio. Like Snow White, it’s a technically impressive film with the art, animation, and music. The character art, in particular, improved noticeably. In the older film, characters sometimes stood out against the background due to a simpler colour palette and less texture, like they were obviously animated separately from the environment they were in. Here, that wasn’t a problem at all.

While I was still at university, I bought the second season of Rozen Maiden, based on the comic series by Peach-Pit, called Rozen Maiden Träumend. I liked the comic, and figured I would find the first season at some point. I did find that first season four years later, when Netflix finally got it back in stock, so I recently got to make use of my ancient purchase.

I’ll start with just a few words about the first season, because S1 was a simply mediocre affair. The premise is that a middle-school boy, Jun, who stopped going to school some time previous due to an unspecified traumatic incident, comes across a magic doll, Shinku. She’s one of seven “Rozen Maidens,” destined by their creator to battle each other in something called the “Alice Game” to become Alice. Over the course of the series we meet Shinku’s sisters, though most aren’t actually keen on fighting and are content to more or less goof off at Jun’s house. So, we have two parallel story lines, the Alice Game on one hand, and Jun’s internal conflict on the other. It’s an interesting setup, but unfortunately the first season falls short of the mark.

Dark Horse just released Ueda Hajime’s comic adaptation of FLCL in omnibus form, and though I already own Tokyopop’s old two-volume release I went ahead and double-dipped on this. The comic holds some nostalgic value for me, since I actually read it long before I saw Gainax’s original anime version. Dark Horse did include some extras to make it worthwhile, and it’s a unique enough comic that it’s well worth the purchase.

This past weekend, I started an Uncle Walt-a-thon. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be watching every major animated Walt Disney film. First up was Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

Overall, it was quite good, primarily as an animation showpiece. The background art was done with a soft colour palette, similar to water colours, which gives it a childlike, storybook feel. It reminds me somewhat of last year’s Wandering Son. There’s also a nice variety in the settings; the evil queen’s castle, the dark part of the forest, the dwarves’ cottage, and the mine all have their own colour schemes and very different atmospheres. The character animation was very fluid - this show has almost constant movement, which modern animation often lacks (granted, this applies mostly to TV shows).

In his mostly autobiographical comic Disappearance Diary, Azuma Hideo notes that in order to maintain an optimistic outlook on life, he’d removed as much realism as possible from his book. Azuma’s dry humour and cartoony art style make what should be a depressing story about a man running away from his responsibilities and living homeless seem rather light-hearted and funny.

Author Takimoto Tatsuhiko, in the afterword to his novel Welcome to the NHK, notes that his book also has a fair amount of autobiography. NHK also has a depressing subject, a twenty-two year old college drop out living as a shut-in (Japanese: hikikimori). Like Disappearance Diary, there’s a dry sense of humour, but here it serves to sharpen, rather than dull, the story’s edge, and though well-written, that edge makes it a sometimes difficult book to read. Our protagonist, Satou, meets a young woman named Misaki who decides to cure him, and he also spends a lot of time with his extremely nerdy neighbour and former high-school underclassman, Yamazaki. Takimoto pulls no punches in describing Satou’s life, from his social awkwardness, to his compulsive lying, to his drug trips, to his thankfully brief obsession with, um, pictures of little girls (if you’re thinking of Chris Hansen’s old show, yes, they’re those kinds of photos).

Okay, “sucks” may be a bit strong, but Fujishima Kosuke’s Oh, My Goddess! volume 41… it’s still not very good. Neither were the last couple volumes.

I hate saying that, too, because I’ve really loved this franchise since I started reading in 2009. Nowhere near its 1994 American debut, but still longer than any other comic I follow (a couple webcomics excepted). The series’ basic premise, a young man living with a beautiful goddess, is pretty blatant wish-fulfillment fiction, but the characters are likable enough that I can forgive it that. There have been some slow points in the over twenty years and forty volumes of publication, of course, but coming in late to the party has allowed me to just rush through those rough patches quickly, and dwell more on the highlights.

While browsing around Amazon the other day, I saw a recommendation for Akira Club, which I hadn’t heard of before. Since I like the Akira film and loved the comic, though, I figured I’d check it out.

The book collects Otomo Katsuhiro’s preliminary sketches, promotional art, title pages, and other odds and ends from the Akira comic, along with a couple things for the film adaptation, with many short comments from Otomo. Kodansha originally plublished this in Japan in 1995, and Dark Horse released it in the United States in 2007.