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Autumn Anime 2016 |OT| The seasons change, but we're still Falling for Euri
- Thread starter TUSR
- Start date
- Status
Theonik
Member
Are you buying the newly announed BD?
Probably not. Gotta buy Escaflowne first.
XiaNaphryz
LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Sounds like typical dumb high school drama to me!
And all is right with the world.
Theonik
Member
You mean you didn't get it already??
Fun fact: in the latin american spanish dub they incorrectly pass her off as Bulma's sister upon her introduction. I believe it wasn't until years later during Z that they made the retcon into her being her mom.
Dedication Through Light
Member
I just need more Klance.
Dedication Through Light
Member
Id never forget it. Favorite composer and fhana did songs in it.
names2hard4you
Member
High five, me too fam. I think I've said this before, but if they totally removed the crappy fan service it would have been even higher on my list. I really, really enjoyed that show's slow burn and how intricate it was dealing with the chatacter's personal growth over the course of the 10+ weeks it was airing. Both in mind and on the battlefield against the goblins.
Dedication Through Light
Member
I loved ranta development as well as the awesome eng dub. Cant wait to buy.
Also the know name music group did very phenomenal op ed insert songs.
Cornbread78
Member
Jojo Phantom Blood 02
Those seven years went by instantly with some good ol' fashioned rugby!
This letter, it proves the fiendish villainy and sabotage and the conspiracy of the mask! I've spoken to a lot of people and they agree, Dio is crooked and loses composure easily. SAD!
I must say, I think the dub makes this show way better. I'm loving all these over the top British mannerisms so much.
Those seven years went by instantly with some good ol' fashioned rugby!
This letter, it proves the fiendish villainy and sabotage and the conspiracy of the mask! I've spoken to a lot of people and they agree, Dio is crooked and loses composure easily. SAD!
I must say, I think the dub makes this show way better. I'm loving all these over the top British mannerisms so much.
Jex
Member
[Flip Flappers] - 5
I didn't really care for this episode and judging from the reactions both here and elsewhere this puts me in the minority. So, I thought it might be worth elaborating on my issues with this episode in depth.
I am also going to get into “Spoiler Territory”, which I don’t think is a big issue in a show such as this but I just make be clear that I will not be spoiler tagging any of the developments in the plot of Flip Flappers episode 5 (such that it is).
My complaints are the following:
The main conceit of this episode is that our heroines find them locked into a time-loop in a spooky, twisted version of their school. Now there’s lots of potential for this concept in terms of playing with the geography of space and time and I think for the most part this episode didn’t really explore that potential. This was probably a bigger issue for me than for most people because I was constantly thinking back to other works that have handled similar ideas before and how much better they were than this. My main touchstone is the 1984 Mamoru Oshii film, Beautiful Dreamer.
In Beautiful Dreamer, we have a very similar conceit, where our protagonists explore their school, but the further they explore the stranger and more distorted the school becomes. What I want to draw your attention to in this scene is how the visuals create a distorted reality for both the protagonists and the audience. This distortion, of breaking of the rules of reality, starts out fairly subtle but builds over the course of the scene until you feel that reality is falling apart. I don’t really have the space or the skill to go over the entire sequence but I can discuss a few key parts of the scene.
The first hint the movie gives that something is wrong with the geography of this school is this simple sequence:
We start on the landing of a flight of stairs. We clearly see Mendou (the character dressed all in white) climb the stairs and ascent to the next floor of the school. Ataru (with a white shirt and blue trousers) is very clearly shown descending the stairs, the director even goes as far as to have crawl down so that you understand he is descending. However when Ataru reaches the bottom of the stairs we see Mendou come up the stairs, as if he was below Ataru. Yet, Mendou should be two floors above Ataru, not one floor below him. What is going on? The answer, of course, is that the normal geography of reality does not apply inside this school. In this school, you can climb the stairs and yet appear on a flight of stairs below here you started.
The next key above sequence starts with Ataru entering a classroom, and then through first person exploring every corner of the room until he finds himself faced with an endless corridor of himself. I'll start by linking to the animation of him entering the room:
Ataru finds himself trapped in what appears to be an infinite series of reflections, but no mirrors are present. This isn’t a simple trick – reality is what has become warped, not just Ataru’s perception of it. He is trapped.
Lum’s power to fly is used by great effect by the director to further confuse the audience. It’s pretty important to witness the camera movement in these flying sequences to understand what I mean:
There’s quite a lot to unpack here, but I feel like the most important components of this sequence are:
- The confusion between walls, ceilings and floors. This confusion is created by a number of factors. Firstly, the light oscillates between being on and off, and this oscillation is very fast. Even when the light is on, it doesn’t illuminate the setting completely. Not only is there a lot of shadow, obscuring the true nature of the space, but as Lum spins so the camera spins with her, and at high speed too. This rotation and camera movement, combined with the darkness, is very disorientating.
- There’s lot of repetition and symmetry in the visuals which makes it feel like the characters cannot escape the environment because it is endless.
- The character travel along fairly clean visual lines, but there’s no end in sight to these lines, like train tracks stretching into the horizon. They are trapped in an infinite space, a loop.
The reason Lum is flying throughout the school is to find her beloved Ataru. She eventually locates him but in doing so she confuses the audiences perceptions of space.
In this above scene, the audiences idea of up and down is effectively destroyed. Is Lum flying ‘down’ towards the ‘ground’? If so, is Ataru running on the right hand wall, but if so how he floating in the air? Or, has the camera angle tricked us, and Ataru is in reality running on the ‘ground’, and Lum is actually floating sideways? In other words is it:
Possibility 1:
Or Possibility 2:
We can’t possibly tell which Possibility is correct because the director has chosen a completely ambiguous angle, so we’re completely confused. Both versions of reality are possible because Lum, as character, can ignore the laws of physics and fly at whatever angle she wants. She has the power to distort and confuse our reality.
So to conclude, the Mamoru Oshii, the director of Beautiful Dreamer, uses a number of powerful visual techniques to distort reality and create the feeling that our character are entrapped within an endless and confused space. This scene is what was really going through my head when watching Flip Flappers episode 5. What visual language does Flip Flappers use to convey the same ideas?
Flip Flap-ing
Both Beautiful Dreamer and this episode of Flip Flappers have a very similar structure. Beautiful Dreamer starts off slowly, with characters starting to suspect is ‘wrong’ with reality and this wrongness accrues over the 1st half of the movie before culmination in the aforementioned school sequence where everyone learns that reality has become warped. The characters then seek to find a way out of this predicament.
In Flip Flappers, much of the episode is devoted to the ‘build up’, where the protagonist go through the same loop multiple times before they start to push back against the fabricated world that they have become trapped by and seek a way out of their predicament.
My main problem with the ‘build up’ in Flip Flappers is that I feel like the locations we keep revisiting aren’t particularly interesting. So we have the Music Room, Library, Tea Room and Sewing Room:
All of these spaces feel too ‘normal’ to me except that they are lit by candles and populated by these weird shadow girls. Unlike Beautiful Dreamer, these images don’t play with repetition, lighting, location of characters, symmetry, or perceived depth to unsettle you and create the feeling of entrapment and wrongness. Instead, they just look a bit drab and flat.
Now, in all fairness, you could argue that the scenes aren’t supposed to look weird because our protagonists aren’t supposed to realise they are trapped in a loop. I can buy this to a certain extent, but I feel you can subtly employ some of the visual techniques I mentioned above to create the feeling of wrongness without going totally overboard. Moreover, these scenes should already feel ‘off’ because they are populated by weird monster girls, so these locations clearly shouldn’t feel ‘safe’ anyway.
Eventually our characters do discover they are trapped within a loop and they seek to escape. It’s during this sequence that we start to get the same kind of imagery as Beautiful Dreamer:
But it’s only a fairly brief scene. I do appreciate how the windows bend and warp and appear to stretch towards infinity, but I guess I wanted to see some more weird stuff like this throughout the episode. Most of the episode does not contain the same visual weirdness.
Traversing the Abstract
The final sequence inside Pure Illusion takes place in a far more visually abstract space, a giant clocktower. Unfortunately I found it to be as dull as all the previous spaces contained within this episode:
The problem with this sequence is that I’ve seen a lot of characters climb a lot of clocktowers (or spaces with lots of spinning cogs) both in anime and live action cinema. Nothing is particularly interesting or unique about this scene. Even the abstract elements of the space, such as the floating stairs and cogs just seem kind of haphazardly thrown in there.
This is particularly weird because Flip Flappers, as a show, has its characters regularly traverse weird, cool, colourful and unique abstract spaces. We even see one of them in this very episode:
Yet there’s nothing unique about this cookie cutter space. It just feels like a bit of a letdown, considering that I thought the characters breaking free of this illusion would be handled with some interesting and mind-bending flair.
Spooky Ghost Girls
This has taken WAY to long and now I realise that I can’t possibly also fit an entire discussion into this post about how to direct effective horror. It also seems kind of unnecessary for me to detail why I did or did not find something scary. Talking about horror is a little like talking about comedy, either the material produced the desired effect in the audience or it did not. For me, this episode did not make me feel scared or even ‘creeped out’ but I can see that it certainly worked on certain people.
Anyway, yeah, that’s how I feel. I hope this week’s episode will be better!
I didn't really care for this episode and judging from the reactions both here and elsewhere this puts me in the minority. So, I thought it might be worth elaborating on my issues with this episode in depth.
I am also going to get into “Spoiler Territory”, which I don’t think is a big issue in a show such as this but I just make be clear that I will not be spoiler tagging any of the developments in the plot of Flip Flappers episode 5 (such that it is).
My complaints are the following:
- I did not think that the visuals of this episode were particularly creative
- I did not think that the horror elements were executed well.
The main conceit of this episode is that our heroines find them locked into a time-loop in a spooky, twisted version of their school. Now there’s lots of potential for this concept in terms of playing with the geography of space and time and I think for the most part this episode didn’t really explore that potential. This was probably a bigger issue for me than for most people because I was constantly thinking back to other works that have handled similar ideas before and how much better they were than this. My main touchstone is the 1984 Mamoru Oshii film, Beautiful Dreamer.
In Beautiful Dreamer, we have a very similar conceit, where our protagonists explore their school, but the further they explore the stranger and more distorted the school becomes. What I want to draw your attention to in this scene is how the visuals create a distorted reality for both the protagonists and the audience. This distortion, of breaking of the rules of reality, starts out fairly subtle but builds over the course of the scene until you feel that reality is falling apart. I don’t really have the space or the skill to go over the entire sequence but I can discuss a few key parts of the scene.
The first hint the movie gives that something is wrong with the geography of this school is this simple sequence:
We start on the landing of a flight of stairs. We clearly see Mendou (the character dressed all in white) climb the stairs and ascent to the next floor of the school. Ataru (with a white shirt and blue trousers) is very clearly shown descending the stairs, the director even goes as far as to have crawl down so that you understand he is descending. However when Ataru reaches the bottom of the stairs we see Mendou come up the stairs, as if he was below Ataru. Yet, Mendou should be two floors above Ataru, not one floor below him. What is going on? The answer, of course, is that the normal geography of reality does not apply inside this school. In this school, you can climb the stairs and yet appear on a flight of stairs below here you started.
The next key above sequence starts with Ataru entering a classroom, and then through first person exploring every corner of the room until he finds himself faced with an endless corridor of himself. I'll start by linking to the animation of him entering the room:
Ataru finds himself trapped in what appears to be an infinite series of reflections, but no mirrors are present. This isn’t a simple trick – reality is what has become warped, not just Ataru’s perception of it. He is trapped.
Lum’s power to fly is used by great effect by the director to further confuse the audience. It’s pretty important to witness the camera movement in these flying sequences to understand what I mean:
There’s quite a lot to unpack here, but I feel like the most important components of this sequence are:
- The confusion between walls, ceilings and floors. This confusion is created by a number of factors. Firstly, the light oscillates between being on and off, and this oscillation is very fast. Even when the light is on, it doesn’t illuminate the setting completely. Not only is there a lot of shadow, obscuring the true nature of the space, but as Lum spins so the camera spins with her, and at high speed too. This rotation and camera movement, combined with the darkness, is very disorientating.
- There’s lot of repetition and symmetry in the visuals which makes it feel like the characters cannot escape the environment because it is endless.
- The character travel along fairly clean visual lines, but there’s no end in sight to these lines, like train tracks stretching into the horizon. They are trapped in an infinite space, a loop.
The reason Lum is flying throughout the school is to find her beloved Ataru. She eventually locates him but in doing so she confuses the audiences perceptions of space.
In this above scene, the audiences idea of up and down is effectively destroyed. Is Lum flying ‘down’ towards the ‘ground’? If so, is Ataru running on the right hand wall, but if so how he floating in the air? Or, has the camera angle tricked us, and Ataru is in reality running on the ‘ground’, and Lum is actually floating sideways? In other words is it:
Possibility 1:
Or Possibility 2:
We can’t possibly tell which Possibility is correct because the director has chosen a completely ambiguous angle, so we’re completely confused. Both versions of reality are possible because Lum, as character, can ignore the laws of physics and fly at whatever angle she wants. She has the power to distort and confuse our reality.
So to conclude, the Mamoru Oshii, the director of Beautiful Dreamer, uses a number of powerful visual techniques to distort reality and create the feeling that our character are entrapped within an endless and confused space. This scene is what was really going through my head when watching Flip Flappers episode 5. What visual language does Flip Flappers use to convey the same ideas?
Flip Flap-ing
Both Beautiful Dreamer and this episode of Flip Flappers have a very similar structure. Beautiful Dreamer starts off slowly, with characters starting to suspect is ‘wrong’ with reality and this wrongness accrues over the 1st half of the movie before culmination in the aforementioned school sequence where everyone learns that reality has become warped. The characters then seek to find a way out of this predicament.
In Flip Flappers, much of the episode is devoted to the ‘build up’, where the protagonist go through the same loop multiple times before they start to push back against the fabricated world that they have become trapped by and seek a way out of their predicament.
My main problem with the ‘build up’ in Flip Flappers is that I feel like the locations we keep revisiting aren’t particularly interesting. So we have the Music Room, Library, Tea Room and Sewing Room:
All of these spaces feel too ‘normal’ to me except that they are lit by candles and populated by these weird shadow girls. Unlike Beautiful Dreamer, these images don’t play with repetition, lighting, location of characters, symmetry, or perceived depth to unsettle you and create the feeling of entrapment and wrongness. Instead, they just look a bit drab and flat.
Now, in all fairness, you could argue that the scenes aren’t supposed to look weird because our protagonists aren’t supposed to realise they are trapped in a loop. I can buy this to a certain extent, but I feel you can subtly employ some of the visual techniques I mentioned above to create the feeling of wrongness without going totally overboard. Moreover, these scenes should already feel ‘off’ because they are populated by weird monster girls, so these locations clearly shouldn’t feel ‘safe’ anyway.
Eventually our characters do discover they are trapped within a loop and they seek to escape. It’s during this sequence that we start to get the same kind of imagery as Beautiful Dreamer:
But it’s only a fairly brief scene. I do appreciate how the windows bend and warp and appear to stretch towards infinity, but I guess I wanted to see some more weird stuff like this throughout the episode. Most of the episode does not contain the same visual weirdness.
Traversing the Abstract
The final sequence inside Pure Illusion takes place in a far more visually abstract space, a giant clocktower. Unfortunately I found it to be as dull as all the previous spaces contained within this episode:
The problem with this sequence is that I’ve seen a lot of characters climb a lot of clocktowers (or spaces with lots of spinning cogs) both in anime and live action cinema. Nothing is particularly interesting or unique about this scene. Even the abstract elements of the space, such as the floating stairs and cogs just seem kind of haphazardly thrown in there.
This is particularly weird because Flip Flappers, as a show, has its characters regularly traverse weird, cool, colourful and unique abstract spaces. We even see one of them in this very episode:
Yet there’s nothing unique about this cookie cutter space. It just feels like a bit of a letdown, considering that I thought the characters breaking free of this illusion would be handled with some interesting and mind-bending flair.
Spooky Ghost Girls
This has taken WAY to long and now I realise that I can’t possibly also fit an entire discussion into this post about how to direct effective horror. It also seems kind of unnecessary for me to detail why I did or did not find something scary. Talking about horror is a little like talking about comedy, either the material produced the desired effect in the audience or it did not. For me, this episode did not make me feel scared or even ‘creeped out’ but I can see that it certainly worked on certain people.
Anyway, yeah, that’s how I feel. I hope this week’s episode will be better!
striferser
Huge Nickleback Fan
Yuri on victor 5
Oh my, oh my, oh my.
Production issues aside, i like this episode. The story is still engaging, and seeing Yuri become more and more confident is wonderful. And that ost!
Keijo 5
I ain't gonna complaining about special move that involve dog aura appearing on butt. No sir, that was magnificent.
Hibike euphonium 2nd season 5
Thoraxes already did super amazing write up about the concert, and yeah, it was amazing performance. Kyoani just released a 8 minute of movie quality anime during tv series run. Heck, i won't be complaining if the next episode is recap or just slide show.
Bernard Jou Iwaku 5
Never heard any book mentioned here....
Oh my, oh my, oh my.
Production issues aside, i like this episode. The story is still engaging, and seeing Yuri become more and more confident is wonderful. And that ost!
Keijo 5
I ain't gonna complaining about special move that involve dog aura appearing on butt. No sir, that was magnificent.
Hibike euphonium 2nd season 5
Thoraxes already did super amazing write up about the concert, and yeah, it was amazing performance. Kyoani just released a 8 minute of movie quality anime during tv series run. Heck, i won't be complaining if the next episode is recap or just slide show.
Bernard Jou Iwaku 5
Never heard any book mentioned here....
Ivan A Nguyen
Member
Keijo!!!!!
This is the one punch man of sports anime and I love it!!!!!! This probably proves that I'll always have poor taste in anime, but there isn't a single episode that airs that I haven't burst out loud laughing. I'm on team butt cannon.
This is the one punch man of sports anime and I love it!!!!!! This probably proves that I'll always have poor taste in anime, but there isn't a single episode that airs that I haven't burst out loud laughing. I'm on team butt cannon.
nintendoman58
Member
This is a fair criticism, I'd say.
My knowledge of horror works is very, very minimal. I honestly avoid horror-centred stuff like the plague. I'm okay with certain horror elements in some shows though, as a way to spice things up a bit, taking a fairly cutesy and innocent looking thing and unexpectedly throwing some spooky stuff in there like in Earthbound.
It's fairly reasonable to assume that people who have seen other horror things might not be all that impressed by last week's Flip Flappers. With me knowing next to none of it though, it all came across as new and interesting to me.
It's sort of like how somebody with absolutely no prior Gundam knowledge can find enjoyment out of IBO.
hosannainexcelsis
Member
Oh boy, Jexhius returns to long-form criticism. Exciting day!
The first 20 seconds looked good.
Jex
Member
I acknowledge that I had a very personal reaction to the episode based on the specific media that I have consumed, which won't hold true for most people. Still, my reaction was so different that I felt the needed to explain my reasons clearly.
I thought Flip Flappers 5 was generally more interested in the concept of the monster student body performing the senseless 'proper schoolgirl' routine every single day and enchanting traversers into becoming part of it, with some nods to stuff like Marimite (the writer is a big yuri-head after all), rather than showing a warped reality like episode 2. I can understand your complaints though, since this show is fairly episodic and ambiguous about its endgame lots of people are watching it looking for different things. And I can agree with the clocktower part; it would only work for people who are at least somewhat interested in the characters, I think (which seems to be a significant minority).
The horror elements, likewise, came across fairly tongue in cheek, culminating with that Shining reference. The affable and well-mannered traditional school girls turned The Wall-inspired fiends that have lost all hints of individuality, shown through their distorted homogeneous voices working like a chorus. At the end of the episode, when they retrieve the fragment and break the curse, you can hear the individual voices coming back separately to represent that the girls were brought back to their original state.
The horror elements, likewise, came across fairly tongue in cheek, culminating with that Shining reference. The affable and well-mannered traditional school girls turned The Wall-inspired fiends that have lost all hints of individuality, shown through their distorted homogeneous voices working like a chorus. At the end of the episode, when they retrieve the fragment and break the curse, you can hear the individual voices coming back separately to represent that the girls were brought back to their original state.
nintendoman58
Member
Hey, by all means, keep doing that!
I love it when people that have a different reaction to something than the majority go into genuine detail about why they feel the way they do, going so far as to talk about other works and how similar approaches were handled there as opposed to here.
You didn't come off as arrogant, or somebody trying to be a contrarian, you just made a well-written, analytical post!
I thought Akio Watanabe under his pseudo name Poyoyon Rock did the character designs for Akiba's Trip.
Am I missing something here?
hosannainexcelsis
Member
There are other parts of the trailer that feature good animation. This is directed by Hiroshi Ikehata, director of Robot Girls Z and Sore ga Seiyuu, so I would expect to see him bring in animators that will put his preferred loose and freeform approach to animation on display. Of course, as we can see, it's still a show about stripping people naked.
Jex
Member
All really good points, especially the bolded. For whatever reason my slow brain failed to realise that the faceless school girls were of course representing a kind of brain-dead conformity to the norm. It is, in fact, super obvious. When the girls are robbed of their traditional outfits and find themselves clad in the more traditional, washed-out, conservative attire of the Illusion School you see them start to conform with everyone else. When they recover their original, colourful uniforms they are able to break free of the system, as it were.
Cuz it is! ^_^
Maximilian Kolbe
Member
fault - milestone one
This VN is a lot better than i expected.
This VN is a lot better than i expected.
The Vision of Escaflowne 1
I have watched this episode so many times I have lost count, and every time I worry that the spell is going to be broken and I will see the flaws in this show that other people do.
It never happens. I still love Escaflowne.
I am absolutely no expert videophile but the UK Bluray transfer looks like how I remember the show looking, rather than the grim fuzzy messes of the other recent BD transfers of DVD releases I've bought (Gankutsuou and Noein). That's really what I'd hope for.
The only thing of real note from the first episode in terms of "new things" is that the new dub, much like the Ocean dub, does not preserve Van's "Fanelian language" when he's speaking to Amano, which was always a nice touch in the original Japanese. It seems like a pretty good dub, though it's hard to cast out memories of the old version for me (Esca has always been a show I'll watch in either language).
If I can find the time, motivation and enough to say I'd love to commit to rewatching and commenting on the show properly now it's on BD but I suspect that will be impossible.
I have watched this episode so many times I have lost count, and every time I worry that the spell is going to be broken and I will see the flaws in this show that other people do.
It never happens. I still love Escaflowne.
I am absolutely no expert videophile but the UK Bluray transfer looks like how I remember the show looking, rather than the grim fuzzy messes of the other recent BD transfers of DVD releases I've bought (Gankutsuou and Noein). That's really what I'd hope for.
The only thing of real note from the first episode in terms of "new things" is that the new dub, much like the Ocean dub, does not preserve Van's "Fanelian language" when he's speaking to Amano, which was always a nice touch in the original Japanese. It seems like a pretty good dub, though it's hard to cast out memories of the old version for me (Esca has always been a show I'll watch in either language).
If I can find the time, motivation and enough to say I'd love to commit to rewatching and commenting on the show properly now it's on BD but I suspect that will be impossible.
Aoi Bungaku 01
So hey, that was pretty fucking goddamn amazing.
Osamu Dazai is an existence I only learned of from a few anime titles and as such, it's pretty interesting to finally see his work in what seems to be a direct adaptation. I'm not sure how faithful this is or how faithful it can be considering it's only 4 episodes and if had to badmouth anything in this episode, it would certainly be the abruptness with which it escalated to a certain point but still, consider me intrigued, impressed and entranced.
Morio ASAKA
Chihayafuru (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP; eps 1, 3, 25), Episode Director (eps 1, 25), Unit Director (OP)
Chihayafuru 2 (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP, ED; eps 1, 16, 25), Episode Director (ep 25), Unit Director (OP, ED)
NANA (TV) : Director, Storyboard, Episode Director, Key Animation, Opening Key Animation
Gunslinger Girl (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP; eps 1-2, 13)
Mōryō no Hako (TV) : Storyboard (eps 6, 11)
Pretty impressive resume this guy has... Dunno how he never came up on my radar.
So hey, that was pretty fucking goddamn amazing.
Osamu Dazai is an existence I only learned of from a few anime titles and as such, it's pretty interesting to finally see his work in what seems to be a direct adaptation. I'm not sure how faithful this is or how faithful it can be considering it's only 4 episodes and if had to badmouth anything in this episode, it would certainly be the abruptness with which it escalated to a certain point but still, consider me intrigued, impressed and entranced.
Morio ASAKA
Chihayafuru (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP; eps 1, 3, 25), Episode Director (eps 1, 25), Unit Director (OP)
Chihayafuru 2 (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP, ED; eps 1, 16, 25), Episode Director (ep 25), Unit Director (OP, ED)
NANA (TV) : Director, Storyboard, Episode Director, Key Animation, Opening Key Animation
Gunslinger Girl (TV) : Director, Storyboard (OP; eps 1-2, 13)
Mōryō no Hako (TV) : Storyboard (eps 6, 11)
Pretty impressive resume this guy has... Dunno how he never came up on my radar.
I presume you meant Osamu Dazai, not Dezaki (who was a great anime director but not an author). In any case, I enjoyed Aoi Bungaku. Pretty good stuff.
Ghost Hound 7-8
Talk, talk, talk. I have a slight morbid curiosity over pseudo-science like OBE's, lucid dreams etc so i found it somewhat interesting but jesus i could imagine some of this would bore people to tears.
Still, still not sure what to make of it all. There's a half of me that wants to believe it's all building to a payoff but the cynical side says these fuckers are stalling for time because some scenes go absolutely nowhere.
Supose im near the end of G Gundam too so: where the hells my Ireland Gundam?
Talk, talk, talk. I have a slight morbid curiosity over pseudo-science like OBE's, lucid dreams etc so i found it somewhat interesting but jesus i could imagine some of this would bore people to tears.
Still, still not sure what to make of it all. There's a half of me that wants to believe it's all building to a payoff but the cynical side says these fuckers are stalling for time because some scenes go absolutely nowhere.
Supose im near the end of G Gundam too so: where the hells my Ireland Gundam?
hosannainexcelsis
Member
If you haven't already seen this, I want to bring to your attention this excellent article on Sakuga Blog giving a even-handed summary of the fiasco caused by the publicized tweets of a P.A. Works in-betweener, and the larger realities of the industry it points to.
names2hard4you
Member
Titanfall 2 arrived today. Stoked to play this tonight. Folks on Twitter are saying that if you play it with Japanese dubs, it is one of the greatest things ever lol. I may give those a try.
Cornbread78
Member
I finished Trails of Cold Steel II today and that is my AoTY selection so far.
We should add a catagory for "anime related" media so the puppet show and Trails can get some anime love.
We should add a catagory for "anime related" media so the puppet show and Trails can get some anime love.
Jex
Member
Leeds Film Festival: Animation Day The Mini-Review: Part 1
I am utterly stuffed. I have watched about 24 hours of anime in the last couple of weeks which is not something I would recommend doing. I just dont have the time right now to sit down and thoroughly review every single thing I have watched with level of critical appraisal that these works actually deserve. Yet, if I dont write something up soon I am going to begin to get key details. So for the time being Im going to have to ask you bear with me as I deliver my initial impressions of the movies that I watched.
Ive have never previously attended any anime film festival in the UK, but I was very impressed by the quality and diversity of the films they had to offer. It was, however, a little exhausting watching all these movies back to back from 11am to 10pm. Its definitely something I would recommend doing if you have the opportunity because, sadly, you dont often get the chance to watch these animated features in a cinema settings.
Before getting down to business Id just like to give a shout out to DiGiKerot for recommending that people should sit in the balcony of the town hall because that was definitely the best seating in the house. It was also very cool to meet up with javac and discuss what he thought of the festivals selection movies.
As I mentioned above, the schedule was very diverse and well-constructed, by which I mean, they chose the right kind of film to follow up from the film before. The running order was: Kizumonogatri Parts I + II, Belladona of Sadness, Father and Daughter, The Red Turtle, Pyshonauts and A Silent Voice (which, by the way, is an emotionally gruelling way to finish up a very long day of movies.)
This line up turned out to be a festival of riches. There wasnt a single bad, or even average, movie among those screened. Each film brought something different to the day and I would really recommend everyone goes out and check out all these films, where possible. Now, onto the main events:
Kizumonogatari Part 1
This is the only movie from the festival that I had already watched before. The first time that I watched this film I honestly didnt know what to make of it. I knew that I had found the film to be problematic and that I found it off-putting, but I wasnt sure what was causing my reaction. Watching this movie a second time, especially in conjunction with its sequel, helped clarify my issues with it.
My main take away from this viewing was that the director considered the story and characters of Kizumonogatari to be completely larger than life. In response he seems to have taken every single scene and character interaction in the story and found a way to almost comically exaggerate the events taking place. This exaggeration can be fairly off-putting and distracting: Araragais over-the-top encounter with the sun, Hanekawas ridiculously large and bouncy breasts (with accompanying sound effects), the musical score (which sounds like something out of a 1940s cartoon at times), the gallons of blood spilled by Shinobu, the preposterous introduction of Meme, the opening titles being in French, on and on and on it goes in a manner which can be overwhelming. Once I was dialled into the directors stylistic choices I became slightly more comfortable with the film but it didnt stop me from feeling that some of them went over the line into ridiculousness.
My second biggest conclusion from watching this film is that it truly does not stand alone. After watching the first film in isolation and then watching it again back to back it really feels like these two films are actually just two pieces of one larger whole. I was not satisfied with the ending of Kizumonogatari Part 1 when I originally saw it because it felt like someone had just arbitrarily hit stop in the middle of a story which is basically the case. I can maybe understand why they chose to divide and release the movie the way that they did but it certainly doesnt do the individual parts any favours.
Oh yeah the animation is also totally nuts in this movie, but I think youve probably noticed that form the trailers.
Kizumonogatari Part 2
I found myself enjoying this far more than Part 1. It feels like Part 1 was just putting the pieces into positon, whereas this movie gets to pay that work off. Structurally, as well, Part 2 feels tighter, being built around encounters with 3 bosses, giving the movie a sense of progression and purpose which the original lacked. I wasnt bothered that the movie ended without resolving the whole story because at least it felt like it was ending at an exciting and logical point of the story, whereas Kizu Part 1 ends just as the basic premise of the story is revealed.
Here are some random thoughts about the film:
- I felt that the emotional and comedic beats of this film all managed to hit home correctly in a way that I doubted would be possible after the brashness of Kizu Part 1.
- Araragis gloriously toned abs make their triumphant return to the screen and Hanekawa is desperately thirsty to feel their greatness.
- The action in this movie was very good. Not something that I expected to ever be writing about a Monogatari property, although I guess I should be surprised considering that the movies director was also the director of the brutally visceral and battle with the Snake apparition in Bakemonogatari.
- Every scene spent with Meme is time well spent.
- The depiction of Shinobu in this movie is as gratuitous and uncomfortable as youd expect from the franchise, would not recommend viewing with the family or other human beings
- The poster for this movie is pretty deceptive
More quick thoughts on the rest of the movies tomorrow.
I am utterly stuffed. I have watched about 24 hours of anime in the last couple of weeks which is not something I would recommend doing. I just dont have the time right now to sit down and thoroughly review every single thing I have watched with level of critical appraisal that these works actually deserve. Yet, if I dont write something up soon I am going to begin to get key details. So for the time being Im going to have to ask you bear with me as I deliver my initial impressions of the movies that I watched.
Ive have never previously attended any anime film festival in the UK, but I was very impressed by the quality and diversity of the films they had to offer. It was, however, a little exhausting watching all these movies back to back from 11am to 10pm. Its definitely something I would recommend doing if you have the opportunity because, sadly, you dont often get the chance to watch these animated features in a cinema settings.
Before getting down to business Id just like to give a shout out to DiGiKerot for recommending that people should sit in the balcony of the town hall because that was definitely the best seating in the house. It was also very cool to meet up with javac and discuss what he thought of the festivals selection movies.
As I mentioned above, the schedule was very diverse and well-constructed, by which I mean, they chose the right kind of film to follow up from the film before. The running order was: Kizumonogatri Parts I + II, Belladona of Sadness, Father and Daughter, The Red Turtle, Pyshonauts and A Silent Voice (which, by the way, is an emotionally gruelling way to finish up a very long day of movies.)
This line up turned out to be a festival of riches. There wasnt a single bad, or even average, movie among those screened. Each film brought something different to the day and I would really recommend everyone goes out and check out all these films, where possible. Now, onto the main events:
Kizumonogatari Part 1
This is the only movie from the festival that I had already watched before. The first time that I watched this film I honestly didnt know what to make of it. I knew that I had found the film to be problematic and that I found it off-putting, but I wasnt sure what was causing my reaction. Watching this movie a second time, especially in conjunction with its sequel, helped clarify my issues with it.
My main take away from this viewing was that the director considered the story and characters of Kizumonogatari to be completely larger than life. In response he seems to have taken every single scene and character interaction in the story and found a way to almost comically exaggerate the events taking place. This exaggeration can be fairly off-putting and distracting: Araragais over-the-top encounter with the sun, Hanekawas ridiculously large and bouncy breasts (with accompanying sound effects), the musical score (which sounds like something out of a 1940s cartoon at times), the gallons of blood spilled by Shinobu, the preposterous introduction of Meme, the opening titles being in French, on and on and on it goes in a manner which can be overwhelming. Once I was dialled into the directors stylistic choices I became slightly more comfortable with the film but it didnt stop me from feeling that some of them went over the line into ridiculousness.
My second biggest conclusion from watching this film is that it truly does not stand alone. After watching the first film in isolation and then watching it again back to back it really feels like these two films are actually just two pieces of one larger whole. I was not satisfied with the ending of Kizumonogatari Part 1 when I originally saw it because it felt like someone had just arbitrarily hit stop in the middle of a story which is basically the case. I can maybe understand why they chose to divide and release the movie the way that they did but it certainly doesnt do the individual parts any favours.
Oh yeah the animation is also totally nuts in this movie, but I think youve probably noticed that form the trailers.
Kizumonogatari Part 2
I found myself enjoying this far more than Part 1. It feels like Part 1 was just putting the pieces into positon, whereas this movie gets to pay that work off. Structurally, as well, Part 2 feels tighter, being built around encounters with 3 bosses, giving the movie a sense of progression and purpose which the original lacked. I wasnt bothered that the movie ended without resolving the whole story because at least it felt like it was ending at an exciting and logical point of the story, whereas Kizu Part 1 ends just as the basic premise of the story is revealed.
Here are some random thoughts about the film:
- I felt that the emotional and comedic beats of this film all managed to hit home correctly in a way that I doubted would be possible after the brashness of Kizu Part 1.
- Araragis gloriously toned abs make their triumphant return to the screen and Hanekawa is desperately thirsty to feel their greatness.
- The action in this movie was very good. Not something that I expected to ever be writing about a Monogatari property, although I guess I should be surprised considering that the movies director was also the director of the brutally visceral and battle with the Snake apparition in Bakemonogatari.
- Every scene spent with Meme is time well spent.
- The depiction of Shinobu in this movie is as gratuitous and uncomfortable as youd expect from the franchise, would not recommend viewing with the family or other human beings
- The poster for this movie is pretty deceptive
More quick thoughts on the rest of the movies tomorrow.
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