setsuled | Entries tagged with animation

The combination of Star Wars with Japanese animation is an idea with so much potential so I was excited when Star Wars: Visions was announced. It premiered yesterday, an anthology of short anime films from some prominent Japanese studios produced for Disney+. The final result is interesting, sometimes quite good, but more often disappointing. For the English voice casts, some relatively big names were recruited, including David Harbour, Lucy Liu, and George Takei. But I only watched a few minutes of the English version before switching to Japanese. As is often the case, the English dub is awkward and unnatural sounding and drastically changes the meaning of the original dialogue.

The best three stories are "The Duel", "The Elder", and "Lop and Ocho". "The Duel" is obviously inspired by Yojimbo but doesn't follow the concept of a ronin playing both sides of warring factions. Instead, a lone warrior fights against an Imperial takeover of a village. It's almost entirely in black and white except the glow of electronics--like lightsabres and droid eyes--are in colour. The hero (Masaki Terasoma) comes off as really cool, using few words and precise attacks. He's intriguingly mysterious and the other characters marvel over the fact that he uses a red lightsabre.

Another story, "The Ninth Jedi" from Production IG, also makes sabre colour a plot point. In this case, a sabre smith creates lightsabres that change colour automatically based on the spiritual alignment of the wielder. This was an idea I really didn't like. The idea of the human soul being reduced to colour codes is even worse than the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system. "The Ninth Jedi" is set some time after Rise of Skywalker and involves the ruler of a planet trying to resurrect the Jedi. The protagonist is the teenage daughter of the sabresmith who, like Rey, is inexplicably expert in lightsabre use the moment she picks one up and is able to deflect blaster fire. Production IG has made some impressive things in the past but I'm used to weak output from them by now. So I wasn't surprised this was a letdown.

I was more surprised by the weakness of "The Twins", which was directed by Kill la Kill and Panty and Stocking director Hiroyuki Imaishi. The story involves two powerful Dark Side Force users, twins, a man and a woman, in command of two Star Destroyers. They're using kyber crystals to combine the two ships into an ultimate weapon but then the brother (Junya Enoki) turns to the Light Side and tries to run away with the crystal. There's an over-the-top and ultimately meaningless fight sequence and I was reminded of the weak last twelve episodes of Kill la Kill instead of the magnificent first twelve episodes.

More than half of the stories involve kyber crystals for some reason, the essential component of all lightsabres. Considering how often crystals factor into anime and Japanese video games, I suppose it makes sense.

"T0-B1" from the studio Science Saru is about a robot boy seeking a kyber crystal so he can become a Jedi. This story is cute but too obviously Astroboy.

I was disappointed by the first Studio Trigger short, "The Twins", but "The Elder", directed by Masahiko Otsuka, is mostly pretty good. A Jedi master, Tajin (Takaya Hashi/David Harbour), and his Padawan, Dan (Yuichi Nakamura/Jordan Fisher), go to investigate reports of a Sith on a remote planet. The relationship between the two men and their personalities are nicely established over the course of the investigation. The story's main idea about the inevitable deterioration that comes with time and age was surprising and very effective in the context. It felt like a genuine moment of mono no aware. The only disappointing part of this one is when one character gets slashed in the gut with a lightsabre and makes a complete recovery shortly thereafter. Nearly every story had one stupid moment where something really amazing and horrifying that happened was immediately softballed in an implausible manner. Disney claims to have been hands-off but this felt like studio interference. At least the women don't look like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Despite the fact that I don't like the furry aesthetic, I really liked "Lop and Ocho" from Geno Studio. Set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it involves a very Japanese-looking community on a planet occupied by the Empire. A bunny girl named Lop (Seiran Kobayashi) is a slave of the Empire until she's rescued by the local leader, Yasaburo (Tadahisa Fujimura), and his daughter, Ocho (Risa Shimizu). Seven years pass and Ocho has decided her people must cooperate with the Empire while Yasaburo is still against it. A nice sense of genuine, personally motivated political tension is created, with each side having clear, understandable motives. Stylistically, too, this is one of the nicest looking episodes.

All the stories have good visuals, except maybe "Tatooine Rhapsody".

Twitter Sonnet #1476

The shadow shirt attracts a sudden breeze.
The even heat absorbs a dream of mist.
Reminders float on ships on purple seas.
On lines of green we kept a changing list.
Another hand assists the falling wish.
A probing question bounced an offered truce.
Another hand of cards produced the fish.
We gather late to praise the giant moose.
A speaker jack awaits the mouldy floor.
For heaven's sake, the smaller shoe was laced.
We scratched a music sheet across the door.
The staff are sunk beneath a treble case.
The kyber crystals weigh the painted mind.
A glowing sword destroyed a melon rind.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: A star destroyer
Current Music: "Eat to the Beat" - Blondie

This week I finally got around to watching the 2016 animated version of 1966's Power of the Daleks, the first serial of the Second Doctor's tenure on Doctor Who. The original live action episodes from the serial, with the exception of a few clips and stills, are lost due to the BBC's ill-advised junking policy. Audio of all six episodes survived, though, so this was used to create an animated version. I found the result a mixed bag, mostly I prefer the old releases consisting of stills, clips, and title cards combined with the surviving audio of lost episodes. Your mileage may vary, depending on how comfortable you are with this particular form of animation, but I found the combination had a persistently distracting disharmony.

Mind you, I realise this was probably the best that could be afforded. Traditional hand drawn animation or fully 3d computer animation might have been better but even then I don't think it would have quite added up properly. So much of Patrick Troughton's performance is in his face and body, any animated version will inevitably be the work of other creative impulses and limitations. The old Star Trek animated series from the 70s wasn't quite as jarring, partly because the actors were recording specifically for animation, but animated Kirk and Spock were always of a different species than their live action counterparts. The 2D computer animation for Power of the Daleks also might suffer from my familiarity with its association with parody.

Maybe it's just me, but on shows like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021, and Harvey Birdman, it seemed like part of the joke. It created a sense of deliberate unreality, post-modern and a bit punk, reliant on the consistent impression that these images are being pushed outside their originally intended parameters. Space Ghost bantering nonsense with Zorak, the petty insecurities that come through in their dialogue and delivery undermining the simplistic hero and villain figures paralleled by computers stretching the drawings past their intended range. It was ridiculous, oddly imposing the external reality on the animation, and therefore funny.

So it feels out of step with the experience we're supposed to be having with Power of the Daleks. I love the idea that the Second Doctor's first moments are both frightening and funny, and Troughton is a big part of that in the surviving clips. The animation sanitises it, removes the sense of anxiety at the strange and uncomfortable.

Sometimes the animation carries its own sense of eeriness, typically divorced from any eeriness intended in the story. I felt sometimes like I was watching demon puppets who'd become trapped in a recording, especially in long pauses where they stand there blinking, shifting their eyes around, as though slightly panicked they're temporarily unconstrained by any dialogue from the audio, frightened by the sudden imposition of freedom.

The Daleks come off a little better, being fully 3D animation. Their familiar peevish monotone dialogue fits well with the animation and the sequence where a horde of new Dalek shells are manufactured is the most effective part of the animated serial. All in all, though, I prefer the audio accompanied by stills and clips.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Vulcan
Current Music: "Mi Tenampa" - Jose Alfredo Jimenez

In the struggle between logic and magic, sometimes the winner is the background artist. 1982's The Flight of the Dragons uses the old idea of a world of logic and science usurping the old dominance of magic, a worthy enough story to-day when politicians and media figures are increasingly making headway with the smoke and mirrors of hyperbole. But it's a message delivered with little coherence in this Rankin/Bass production. It has some nice visuals, though.

So dragons are basically big bags of gas, just one of the many unflattering qualities ascribed to the mythical beasts in this film. The gas thing is important because it's part of the protagonist's, Peter's (John Ritter), "scientific" examination of how dragons can fly and breathe fire. Since dragons are magical creatures in the film I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean in respect to the film's central thematic dichotomy. It certainly digs a whole in the stupid climactic scene where Peter makes dragon heads disappear just by shouting equations and theorems at them.

There's certainly merit in the idea that the world looks less impressive without magic, as evidenced by the film's depiction of dragons as astonishingly useless creatures. Vulnerable to ogres and teams of rats, even their fiery breath seems to function as nothing more than colour tinted air.

Peter's personality gets trapped in the body of a dragon after a spell goes awry and he's accompanied on his quest to stop the evil wizard Ommadon (James Earl Jones) by a fairly typical adventuring party. A lazily written knight named Sir Orrin Neville-Smythe (Bob McFadden) is a collection of American stereotypes of the British--he demands tea and randomly throws in words the screenwriters probably thought sounded British but generally just sound odd, as when he accuses an innkeeper of "caterwalling". When the group is joined by Danielle (Nellie Belliflower), a female archer, it's Sir Neville's duty to use every gendered idiom he can think of--"Good man!" "A better man than I!"--to make it all the more shocking when she removes her cap to reveal long, oddly sparkling hair.

Still, nothing he says is as bad as his armour. Why couldn't the artists look at actual pictures of plate mail instead of giving us this weird, form fitting exoskeleton?

Yet the visuals were what I liked most about the film. They did vary in quality but I especially liked the backgrounds by Kazusuke Yoshihara and Minoru Nishida. I love the arrowhead shaped leaves.

Current Mood: sick
Current Location: The woods
Current Music: "Whomsoever Dwells" - Sinead O'Connor

If I had a nightmare after staying awake for two days spent drinking and reading Tolkien it might be something like Ralph Bakshi's 1978 Lord of the Rings. I have a lot of respect for Bakshi and there are a lot of good ideas in this movie. It is often effectively frightening but it comes nowhere near being all the things a Lord of the Rings adaptation needs to be.

I don't think all the horror is intended. Bakshi's extensive use of rotoscoping gave some of his films the infamy to make them the Final Fantasy: Spirits Within and Polar Expresses of their day. It's been pretty well covered so I won't harp too much on it except to say it's one of the aspects of the film that makes it feel like a curiously degraded transmission. Almost like a found footage horror film. Watching the silhouettes of Ringwraiths stop across the river from Frodo (Christopher Guard), himself a man obscured behind flat, unshaded moving illustration, the figures' separation from the abstract or washed out backgrounds not only prevents anyone from seeming like they're actually in any of these places but combines to give one the constant feeling of inaccurate perceptions. Maybe it's the effectiveness of Bakshi's compositions and the anxious energy he succeeds in bringing across that makes this inability to see so disturbing. It's like going downhill blindfolded in a cart with no brakes.

There was clearly a lot of work put into the backgrounds. There's a lovely Arthur Rackham quality to a lot of them, with muted colours and dark contours. This was likely part of a 1970s reaction against the myriad colours found in Disney movies of previous decades but unfortunately an expansive Disney palette would have been pretty useful in conveying the sense of a fully realised Middle Earth. Still, these chromatically restrained backgrounds might had worked fine if the characters actually seemed to inhabit them.

And yet there is a weird charm to it. It kind of reminds me of Lotte Reiniger's 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest surviving feature length animated film. Composed entirely of black silhouettes against solid colour backgrounds, it has some of the same mystery about it, though Bakshi's film seems to jar with his subject matter and intentions.

I hadn't seen the movie since I was a kid and I barely remembered it. Watching it last week, I was surprised how many times I spotted compositions Peter Jackson had borrowed for his film. I hope Bakshi's not bitter about that because it's nice to think something about his film endured in a good way.

Twitter Sonnet #1058

Divined in crumbs, a hasty message lost.
Departure took the books and princes up.
A crown confers a long and heady cost.
Reflections top the toxic metal cup.
Recumbent cloaks assign a party hat.
To ev'ry infantry the air's a lance.
In troughs of charging lamps there swung a bat.
The trees in silhouette begin to dance.
A jacket kept from dust and sight the book.
Amassing drapes, a rain of cherries fell.
The curtain call compelled another look.
Again unheeded rang the broken bell.
In decades claimed for starchy billing rooms
A baking shroud in foil softly looms.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: 小さくて赤くて黒い部屋
Current Music: "The Coffee Song" - Cream