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I'm in for a real cinematic treat for the next three weeks. The Bell Lightbox (which has awesome, state of the art theatres) here in Toronto is holding a Studio Ghibli retrospective. I watched both Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky yesterday, neither of which I had ever seen before. Oh. Mah. God. I liked Nausicaa very much and absolutely loved Castle in the Sky. I like modern CGI animation films like the ones Pixar puts out, but seeing these older, cel-animated beauties with great adventure stories and without wise-cracking, pop culture referencing characters is an immense treat. Seeing Only Yesterday tonight, which I have also never seen in any format before.

Burned through Saki over the last couple days in preparation for the spring season. Very Happy

I'm finishing up Rose of Versailles. 2 episodes left! I love classic shojo and this really is one of the best of the best. Even if some things between Oscar and Andre really bother me.

@ Blood-
Lucky! I don't want to spoil Only Yesterday for you with too much anticipation, so let me just say that if you're not blown away I'll be very disappointed.
I want a book report.

Last edited by Blood- on Sun Mar 11, 2012 10:05 pm; edited 1 time in total

No book report, but I can report I enjoyed it. Impeccably observed and I'm not sure any countryside scenery has ever been more gorgeously rendered. Unfortunately - and this is no fault of the movie - after the adrenaline rush of Castle in the Sky and Nausicaa, I don't think my mind was prepared for the drastic switch in mental gears to a quiet drama (albeit one with some fine humorous moments). I cannot claim my attention was rapt at each and every second. However, profoundly glad I got to see this on the big screen.

I would also be remiss if I didn't provide a link to Justin Sevakis's superb rumination on the film, one of the few reviews that actually kind of choked me up when I first read it.

right now im watching death note

IchigoKurosaki13 wrote:

right now im watching death note

You enjoying it? Where are you up to?

I started Usagi Drop, and loved it so much I marathoned it. It's such a heartwarming show =). And I loved the faces Rin and Daikichi made, they were hilarious =D. At first it seemed to me that Rin was unrealistically mature for a 6 year old, but when I thought about it, it made sense. Her father died, her mother spoiler[left her], and the rest of the family initially treated her as an unwanted burden. That's enough to make anyone quiet and reserved, child or no. It really showed how much you have to go through and all the things you have to think about when raising a child.

Now I'm starting The World God Only Knows II. On ep 3 and so far so good. The end of the first season got very slow, but this season has returned to the energy of the first's first half.

@Blood-
Yes. My two favourite bits are:

::crush::

spoiler[whether she might be brain-damaged]

Actually, scrap that. There are too many fave bits to name. It's one of my bestest films.

C - Control episodes 1-2

Eh...it's fine I guess. Looks nice. I'm not actually seeing a lot of substance so far. It's basically just a typical creature battling show (with maybe a pinch of magical tsundere girlfriend show) despite the business themed coat of paint.

Shiki episodes 6-9

Okay. I'm enjoying this quite a bit. Especially now that we've moved past the point where everyone is oblivious to the situation. It's an interesting show with a strong, gripping atmosphere. After much deliberation though, I've decided I don't like the character designs. Having odd, extravagant, or inhuman looking characters can help build a mood but it doesn't really work when it's only a random assortment of characters among an otherwise very minimal and realistic aesthetic. Then it just feels disruptive.

Madoka Magica episode 4

Still looking good. Not sure there's much to add based on this episode alone.

@ ailblentyn - I enjoyed the spoiler["is she, like, retahded?"] bit, too. Although the comedic highlight for me was the entire spoiler["period"] flashback. Dare I say that this was spoiler[a period piece?]

I had forgotten from Justin's review that the ending provided us with spoiler[a translated version of "The Rose"] and a few people in the audience started laughing when it came on (more out of surprise, I believe, than anything else). I loved it, though. I guess it would be too much to hope that a reasonably priced BD becomes available at some point?

I got Haruhi-chan in the mail the other day and decided to give that a rewatch, but this would be my first time dubbed.

Bang Zooms strengths do not include comedies. They've done dubs for only a few comedies and they've turned out alright like Lucky Star, but they're not great at them from a pure ADR standpoint. Their problems with comedies is my problem with them as whole in that they're more concerned with matching the Japanese script than they are at actually being funny in English, but since the shows they work on tend to be really good shows in general, their dubs don't really suffer in quality. It's like the shows make up for the directors and writers lack of creativeness and fear of diverging even a tiny bit from the original. This is why always hope comedies go to either New Gen Pictures, Funimation, or Sentai (well I used to wish that when they were ADV), because they're not afraid to break away from the Japanese script for the sake of English.

However, this being a Bang Zoom production doesn't take away from Haruhi-chan being funny dubbed, and I think the actors were really able to show off. That's the funny thing about Bang Zoom comedy dubs: Their actors are funny and you can hear that they have natural talent for comedies, but their writers and directors aren't cut out for it as much.

Crispin Freeman in particular is really good and I think he learned how to do comedies from his days in New York when did three seasons of Slayers. Michelle Ruff did a terrific job at balancing Yuki's monotone nature while still being able to be funny and show just enough emotion when Yuki would get excited. The star and the surprise for me, though, was Bridget Hoffman. Pretty much everything Bridget does are those soft spoken, kind characters that don't raise their voice ever, and so I was shocked to her do Ryoko's slapstick scenes so well. I just didn't know she had it in her to be that funny, and she was hilarious. I have newfound respect for her, even though I loved her anyways.

So yea, a very good and funny show gets a very good and funny dub, just as it should be.

I recently finished Ghost Hunt (rated excellent) and Fortune Arterial(rated good). I must say I absolutely loved Ghost hunt. The first couple of arcs were all right, but the last 3 arcs were great, especially the Labyrinth one. The spoiler[ last episode with Mai in the dark room with the zombie was awesome].

Now I am trying to finish my backlog, so I am currently finishing True Tears and Seto no Hanayome. I just watched the episode with the 2 fathers dressing up as girls from gal games. Can you say funniest anime episode of all time? Well to me it was, as I have never laughed so hard before for an entire episode.

I watched all of the Megazone 23 OVAs last Friday. It was strange, because it felt strangely nostalgic, which should be impossible, because I’ve never seen any of them before. It makes some sense, however, because they, are at least the first two, are virtual archetypes for the OVA form, so they might induce feelings of nostalgia in anybody who was introduced to anime when the OVA was the leading form of anime in the West.

The first Megazone 23 is a middling work. It’s not very substantial or clever, although it probably seemed cleverer before later works pilfered its best bits, but it’s still exciting enough to enjoy and pretty enough to admire.

Megazone 23 is really a gussied-up compilation film for a television series that was scrapped part of the way through production when a sponsor withdrew its support. The cobbling that was needed to put it together comes through in its story. It’s not really choppy to the point of incoherence, but the story has an odd flow. The intensity of action rises and falls more than it builds to a finale and many sub-plots seem to need more meat on their bones. The greater story seems incomplete; there are gaps in it that aren’t really bridged. Conveniently expository telephone calls and the characters being just where they need to be just when they need to be there are used to let to story leap over its narrative chasms. Then again, this isn’t too much about its story. Megazone 23 is very much a VROOM VROOM BOOM BOOM affair; fast and vivid, but insubstantial. Yet it doesn’t really have a loudest VROOM or biggest BANG, there isn’t really a grand, ultimate climax, although the ending that it does have is ambiguous, oddly fulfilling and contemplative.

It all looks quite nice. They couldn’t rely upon computers to help them with the VROOM and BANG stuff, so they animated all of it, quite impressively too. Cars, motorcycles and mecha move exuberantly, brining anarchy to busy streets full imperiled crows and lousy with little details. When metal crashes through walls and glass, a cascade of lovingly rendered debris crash along with them and grand, blooming explosions often soon follow. The mere humans aren’t animated with as much enthusiasm as the exciting stuff, except for the artful writhing of the female lead in the sex scene wherein the protagonist is courteously rendered invisible, but they still move well. The designs are very much creatures of their time. The film revels in the eighties; hair is puffed grandiosely atop bodies wrapped in the whole range from aerobics leotards to a big collared leather jacket with accompany scarf wrapped around the neck. The female characters are ardently neotenic with archetypically big eyes and small mouths. The mecha designs are serviceable, but not really particular distinctive or remarkable.

The characters are likewise mostly serviceable, but unremarkable. Shōgo Yahagi is a fiery youth, hardheaded with a rebellious streak and a righteous streak who loves motorcycles, but not in the dangerous Hell’s Angels way. You’ve met this boy before; you might like him, but I find him kind of dumb and a little tiresome, but ultimately tolerable. Most of his supporting cast are his love interest, Yui, and her two roommates. They’re the ones who suffer worst from the skeletal sub-plots. One is the daughter of a wealthy man who has a line or two late in the film and the other aspires to be a filmmaker, that’s most of what happens to them. Yui isn’t too interesting either, but earns a little credit for avoiding being an early moe creature by enjoying a little impurity. There are a pair of affable bikers who are Shōgo’s friends, but they have perhaps two or three scenes, so most of what we get of them are some entertaining displays of quirkiness. The antagonists aren’t seen too much, but despite mostly just being mean fellows with deep voices, their motivations are reasonable and with a more ambition, they could almost be made pragmatic heroes to compete with the idealistic Shōgo.

There is also another character in Eve, the pop idol, but she’s ultimately more a concept than a character. Her part, which any modern viewer will find instantly familiar, and the larger science fiction conceit of the series are fine concepts, but suffer from this being, as I wrote, a VROOM VROOM BANG BANG affair. They make some basic sense, but don’t really withstand scrutiny. The peculiarities of the premise mean that nearly everything can raise a question as to just how it works, but Megazone 23 doesn’t address the answers. It would probably be impossible for it all to work anyway, so maybe that the effort isn’t wasted is for the best, but nevertheless, active application of the MST3k mantra might be required, if you can be bothered.

Megazone 23 Part II is a different creature and I liked it better than the first. As should be disgustingly predictable by now, there happens to be a Buried Treasures article about it.

Megazone 23 Part II was created to be an eighty minute feature rather than being constructed from the corpse of a doomed television project. This means that it’s tighter, more coherent and seems to be deliberately building toward something. It’s substance is also more than the diaphanous gown for the cool go real fast and blow stuff up real good bits. It’s more a lightweight cotton dress. It tries harder than its predecessor, but it’s still far from spelunking in the deepest caverns of pathos.

The art of Megazone 23 Part II is very different from the first. All of the characters who return, which is mostly the hero, heroine and antagonist along with some barely recognizable supporting characters, look very different. The designs are more realistic and detailed. Yui now looks relievingly further north of twelve. The eighties flare has not gone away, however, although it is slightly more focused given that most of the principal cast are now Shōgo’s biker gang. The designs are still extravagant embodiments of the era, but the styles have had some time to mature a little and the range is narrower.

The animation improves upon that of the first, which was already good. Megazone 23 Part II followed the visually extravagant precedent for OVAs that the first did so much to set. There are lots of bikes rallying about, some, but fewer, robots fighting and various feats of animation spectacle hither and yon. There is also gleefully animated ludicrously blood violence, far moreso than the first. The goriest scenes are also perhaps inadvertently the funniest; the violence is so preposterous and the blood so superabundant that it can’t be taken seriously enough to shock. It doesn’t help that the victims of it are led by a man who looks like the mascot for a failing chain of family-style seafood restaurants where people who think that Red Lobster is too ritzy eat on special occasions. The sex scene is also animated with more aplomb and care than in the first. This time the animators even conceded that heterosexual sexual intercourse also involves a man, but still applied some creativity to keep Yui mostly in the foreground as she and Shōgo vigorously grope and writhe.

The cast of Megazone 23 Part II is also improved over the first. Nobody’s complex, but Shōgo’s gang are less erratic and ephemeral than Yui’s roommates and Shōgo’s friends in the first were. They’re too firmly entrenched to bikes and leather to be allowed something as lame as likeability, but some of them have enough of their own relationships, personality and ambition to be appealing. The most striking is Dump, a big, heavy, amiably butch woman based upon a then-popular female wrestler Kaoru Matsumoto. In the forest of waifs and the odd thicket of bombshells in anime, a prominent supporting character whose waist isn’t perilously narrow and isn’t treated as a joke is an uncommon treat. Curiously, Megazone 23 Part II declines to display her naked body in a group shower scene as it does the other female characters. She and the other bikers aren’t really deep or complicated, but they have some definition and work well enough for the story’s purposes.

After the improvements to the characters and more even structure, of Megazone 23 Part II reaches for some real meaning in trying to take advantage of its science fiction conceit and have a message. It isn’t revolutionary or sophisticated, but it’s pretty well delivered and isn’t quite as routine as a lot of the ‘now here’s the moral of the story’ ploys in science fiction stories. It doesn’t worship or revel in adolescence and youth rather, in a scene that recalls part of the final act in the original Megazone 23, smacks it down in humiliation and puts a hope with obligation upon those going through it. It’s an unusually mature closing thought for something that showcases eyeballs being propelled out of sockets on gushers of blood and lots of hand grenades.

Both Megazone 23 and Megazone 23 Part II have English dubs directed by Matt Greenfield with the same cast. It’s a very satisfactory effort all around. Vic Mignogna plays Shōgo Yahagi at an appropriately high emotional pitch and the script is very deliberately filled with the words and phrases of the eighties, which feels authentic, but of necessity can’t avoid sometimes being cheesy.

Megazone 23 Part III sees fit to uproot the story and chuck the whole thing a few centuries down the line. Only two characters from the first recur, one is the idol Eve, who reappears in a way that doesn’t really make sense, and the other is a surprise twist, except that it isn’t at all, but let’s all pretend that it is anyway. It was written by Emu Arī, who also wrote Bubblegum Crash. Well, it’s a little better than Bubblegum Crash. So is having your silver anniversary dinner at MacDonald’s.

No longer in Megazone, the story takes place in the City of Eden, a cyberpunk ‘paradise’ that obviously isn’t operating under the control of ‘The System’ and its mastery, the mysterious Bishop Wan Dai. “Bishop Wan Dai,” incidentally, is the name I will adopt if I ever become a boxing promoter; a miter will stand in for a towering afro.

Here we begin with the adventures of a dull, annoying gang of adolescents who mostly won’t matter after the first act. These rambunctious youth are avid players of an excellent argument for not letting the Japanese use English called Cybergame Hardon. This isn’t something that the English dub script could have elided or altered either as the words Cybergame Hardon show up many times in the artwork. A sample line said by a female character: “I’ll be really busy tomorrow when the new Cybergame Hardon goes up.”

The central figure of the gang is Eiji, who’s a lot like Shōgo, but he plays with hardons rather than ride motorcycles. There, I told you everything that you needed to know about him. Then there’s Yacob, the disagreeable, power-mad director of E=X, a company in league with ‘The System’, who wants to do a bad sci-fi thing for lame sci-fi reasons. Really, the rest of the characters don’t matter. To muddy it more, we have a third principal in Sion, who works for the Orange Company, which opposes E=X. He’s like… this guy… I can’t really remember much about him or anybody else, really. The rest of the characters barely matter. They have parts in the story, but they’re not very interesting or vivid and the story doesn’t provide a context that makes one want to try to care.

I can’t really remember much of the story, which was more complicated than that of the first few parts, but somehow less engaging. Any complicated story risks becoming a boring mass of parts if its characters and ideas aren’t compelling enough to make the audience try to pay attention to it all., which is how Megazone 23 Part III fails. The writer tried hard to make the story big, but it’s too much for a cast isn’t interesting and ideas that were never very good and that we’ve encountered and grown tired of already. Even by the time Megazone 23 Part III was made the audience had to be sickeningly well acquainted with them.

Megazone 23 Part III isn’t even very good-looking. The designs try to ape those of the first two, but seem to be from an awkward moment when the ridiculous fashions of the eighties were giving way to the ridiculous fashions of the nineties, leaving plenty of ridiculousness, but not much sense of identity. The animation can’t save it either. Some of it is at the level of an OVA, but perhaps the ugly popping of the Japanese economic bubble hurt the production. There are several scenes where the animation declines to a literal slideshow. I don’t know why, but it seems that all they did was color the animatics. There are more animation errors here than before. The animation production of Megazone 23 Part III is pretty messy.

So ends the Megazone 23 Part III trilogy, not with a bang, but an elbow fart. The series was always haphazard; the first part was a Hail Mary play to recoup the investment on a scrapped television production, the second wasn’t planned, but managed to outdo the first and the third was born with some horrible deformity and might’ve been better off aborted than living a life of pain.

In spite of the weaknesses of part III, I do recommend buying the ADV collection. The first two are worth watching. They represent some things lost in animation. Despite the abundance and diversity of series now shown, there’s a romance to the evident effort put into these old OVAs that comes through when realizes the impressiveness of drawing every frame of a smoke-belching explosion or notices all of the little details and visual experiments woven into the background. The set also includes an enjoyable commentary by Matt Greenfield, David Williams, and Janice Williams on Megazone 23. They’re old school fans with a clear love for Megazone 23 and the commentary includes some interesting explanations of early anime fandom as well as some amusing observations about the details of the OVA borne of having doubtless carefully watched it many times over.

Finished watching Kotetsushin Jeeg.

A fun, straightforward Super Robot show with good fights, good music and some winks and nods to older fans. I especially liked Jeeg itself, it's completely modular nature made for a pretty cool gimmick. And the Double Jeegs scene was just awesome.

Final rating: Good

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