CK's Cartoon Corner

[Cmdr_King]

that's a 2015 cartoon, featuring James Franco?  Hope so, just ordered it off amazon~

e: I know we talked about it before in fact, I just don't remember the conversation well, just that I saw ads at one point then never knew what happened with the movie itself.

[Grefter]

Sailor Moon.

TIA.

[DjinnAndTonic]

Do Haruhi. I feel that show is in such a weird position as basically the first show that started the whole 'Moe boom' that turned anime into a mistake. But there's like... actually some cool stuff worth talking about here, especially about the nature of escapism, and how it's both uplifting and can potentially destroy your whole world.

[Cmdr_King]

The Little Prince

I usually take more to the ends of films than the beginning.  So it's taking a bit to process how to talk about this one: an utterly striking start that really carries through the rest of the piece. 

The opening scene for the school interview isn't too intense, certainly I’ve seen some fairly stark interview waiting scenes before.  But then we move to the swankiest part of town, wherein all the houses are stacked rectangles.  And then the mom has planned out the little girl's entire life until she's out of college down to the hour.  Including all her birthday presents.  Like the one for her 9th birthday in two seeks.

The Little Girl is 8 years old and they're telling her to decide her entire life path.  Jesus fuck, no wonder she needs a damn fantasy adventure!

From what I know of course this entire plot is not taken from the story it's adapted from.  Instead, it's a framing device around the story of the actual Little Prince, which is actually pretty well handled.  The mix of CG and what seems to be stop motion (and a really good approximation if not) sets everything off nicely, positing the Narrator as the Aviator is pretty nice.  They really did quite a great job of paralleling the new material to the original, and I think grounding this part of the movie in mundane things really sells the core emotional hook of two very lonely people finding one another.

Now, once the Little Prince finishes, the movie has another act to go through, and it loses a lot.  Switching back to the main art style entirely is definitely a bit off as a decision.  A lot of the main animation can be a bit empty, too clean, and that works wonderfully during while it’s alternating with Little Prince’s story because it highlights how sterile and lacking in humanity the Little Girl’s world is.  Without that contrast though it just starts to feel like a budget limitation.  And it probably was!  This is a French production, they don’t have the talent pool and money big American houses do, so I don’t doubt they struggled to keep the main animation budget under control, and the Little Prince animation was undoubtedly a lot more costly and had to be utilized as sparingly as possible to get the movie out the door.  But when you’ve done so wonderfully for 2/3rds of your running time hiding all those facts with good creative decisions and using those limitations to create narrative resonance, suddenly losing it can be quite distracting.

But y’know what?  There’s something about the compare/contrast between the original material and the book and the time periods they were made in that kinda works.  The original was written during World War II, and very much has the feel of a fairy tale for the industrial, scientific world.  It’s morally forthright and ends at a place meant to allow parents to explain to their children about death and the afterlife and so forth.  It’s written in the perspective of an adult, so they can teach their children.  The new material is from the perspective of the Little Girl, in our time.  Like most children now, she’s been orphaned by modern life: one parent gone, the other overworked and absent to make up the gap.  Her life is far lonelier than the lives of a mid-20th century children.  Until the start of the movie, she really had only herself to understand the world through, and so when confronted with the reality of mortality?  The only one that could help her cope with it was herself.  Through the lens of the story, she imagined a new ending, one she could digest, because it added the context the original story could assume a parent would.  And in that light, the Little Prince returning home and finding his loved one died, rather than simply leaving the earth through death himself, is much more suitable.  It doesn’t assume you have some independent understanding of Heaven, and instead creates a literal image of loved ones lighting the way for you after they’re gone.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the bits with Mr. Prince are still goofy as hell, but as a vessel to get to that ending to the journey… I’ll live.

There’s one earlier scene I do want to mention apart from all that though, because it mislead me a bit about the overall moral here.  Like obviously a play on mortality and the journey to adulthood are what The Little Prince is about (unless it’s… waaaay different in its totality than what’s in this film).  But the start of the book content, with the Narrator’s story about his failures to draw and then his drawing of a box being just what the Little Prince needed?  That’s an interesting facet of that that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before.  The Narrator had a fierce desire to express himself through art, but didn’t have much talent for it.  So when he draws something he can handle, then explains that what was needed was hidden inside it?  I kinda figured it’d be a lesson along the lines of “find a way to make what you can do fit in with what you love to do”.  But then, I suppose that is the sort of lesson a modern person would want to take from a work, isn’t it?

Rating: 8/10.  Never quite got the emotional punch to rate higher, but there’s a lot here that’s working and I think everyone should give it a shot.

[dunie]

Yeah, to me the opening was more than an introduction of a strong motif or comedic relief, really. There's something about her relationship to her mother and the system in which she's overworked as a single parent that's lost in your review. Give or take, I understood the intense micromanaging her life as a clearly false overcompensation for the lack of a two-parent household. In the case of this story, it's a heterosexual household. Her mother overworked herself in a way that is both psychically draining but also necessary in her eyes for producing the resources she believed necessary so that her daughter would never become herself. It's more than tragic, as it is both representing how capitalism strains familial relationships but also the outcomes of females across generations that see new wealth. It's not just the old man and the girl that are lonely. I can see how she's orphaned in a poetic way, but I also see that her mother was unwilling to slow her own work schedule for far more than her daughter's future success. I would have never described moments of the Prince as goofy. I recall every scene as outright depressing or sad, dealing a little less directly with mortality and moreso with trust and the tricky threshold between ignorance and innocence. I wonder why that is that I felt this way. Hm. Maybe because I saw the incorporation of his story as envisioning more frameworks for existence without a particular logic other than emotion?  Anyway, glad you watched it! It's beautiful to me.

[Cmdr_King]

Yeah, the movie is fairly up front about the Mother's motivations.  Which come to think of it makes her a strange break from the adults in the Little Prince's journey; they capture the sense of confusion a kid might have about how adults behave, but on the whole they're strange people doing silly things without much internal motivation.  They do what they do because that's who they are.  The Mother does what she does because she doesn't see any way to help her own terrible life except to make sure her daughter can avoid it.
That is, the other adults, seemingly, are just bad people.  The Mother's not a bad person, just stuck in a bad world.

By goofy I was more thinking that it tends to have humor that broke the tension for me.  Mr. Prince himself most especially- the bumbling in his introduction sequence was just odd as a choice, and made it hard to take his grappling with the situation as seriously as it needed to be to fully work.
That said, like the Mother's motivation/arc, it's all secondary to the Little Girl; film's focus is firmly on her, and you have to take everyone else from the margins.

[dunie]

The moral compass off good and evil is stressed less in the girl's story than the Prince's. I mean, for the girl's story what is evil are systematic processes like gentrification or repetitive work and rewards. It's so interesting to me that the cliffhanger of the elderly man and his home were pretty much sidelined so that he could literally conduit the girl into a parallel universe of gluttony!

Ah, see, yeah. I was far more forgiving for the humor since I expected it in so-called animation films for children, and also because until the Prince had other humans to modify his emotional conversations, he existed without human recalibration.

[Cmdr_King]

Hellsing

A bit of production history for this one.  Hellsing is adapted from a manga of the same name… but specifically the first two volumes (with a smattering of material and notes from later I suspect).  Said manga ended up being 10 volumes.  So essentially in 2001 they produced about 6 episodes based on the existing material followed by an addition 7 including whatever nuggets Hirano deigned to give them with a more or less original story. 

As such, not only does the story go off on a hell of a tangent and ignore some pretty clear “this will be important later” markers, the property it was adapted from was still quite early into its run for several episodes, and some bits that are tonally at odds even within the manga to that point ended up being adapted pretty faithfully because… well, that’s what they had to work with.

On which note, let’s start here.

Weakest Episode- Order 02: Club M.  The series starts off with a monster of the week vibe, which this one exemplifies with the young couple.  Monster of the week comes off as real weak when the monsters aren’t serving some larger villain openly, which they haven’t at this point, especially when said monsters are in fact the kind that theoretically have motivations.  Why did they become vampires, is there some meaning behind their killings for them, are we supposed to feel bad when they die because hey they were young and in love?  I dunno, apparently it wasn’t important, but a lot of attention was drawn to it so dismissing all that to focus on the main characters is weird.  Especially since part of the thrust was that Seras was clearly struggling with killing them!  So she was probably asking those same questions. 

Now the remaining episodes of adapted material I actually like a fair bit, but what’s more interesting is how they decided to flesh out the rest of the run.  Since it would be a bit out of character for anyone in the cast to have a fight last more than two episodes, and making an original villain too important might make adapting later material (which I think they clearly expected they’d end up doing until literally the last minute, more on that later) awkward, so they instead took some heartfelt stabs at guessing the backstories of the characters from available information and fleshing those out with some more psychological episodes.  And I’m always a sucker for that.

Best Episode- Order 10: Master of Monster.  This one snuck up on me, because at the very start it seemed kinda cheap.  Oh, Integra’s in an “I lost all of the blood and need surgery” coma, let’s have tragic backstory.  But honestly… to this point in the series I didn’t care all that much about her.  She’s just kinda generic grumpy commissioner, except a lady, which is fine but she doesn’t really interact all that much with our POV character Seras so it lacks impact.  But baby Integra is adorable, and they manage in the one episode to lay out very quickly and effectively her path from precocious tween prodigy to hardass knight commanding the deadliest fighter on the planet over the course of about a day.  Her utter goddamned refusal to accept her uncle’s usurpation, or take the slightest bit of Alucard’s shit, is actually amazing when you give it context and put her in personal danger.

So while they tried to keep it a light touch, as noted they did add an original villain for the last few episodes.  He kinda works, albeit he’s not especially interesting or well developed.  But the last episode spends most of its running time with an epic battle between him and Alucard, and then literally splashes some title cards wrapping up the plotline (oh he was hired by a traitor from the Round Table, they were quietly executed, but oops also Integra was still arrested) then a ten second epilogue for an ambiguous ending.  And I have to think that, up until they had partially animated this episode, they thought they’d take a year or so, let Hirano get ahead, and then adapt more of the manga for a season two.  Then suddenly realized that was going to take several years for that to meaningfully happen, and instead gave up and wrapped up their original plotline and the series with it.  Instead, hey revisited it several years later once the full manga was finished with a fully faithful and cleaned up edition.  An Ultimate edition if you will.

Support the official release.

Rating- 7/10.  In the end there’s not a lot of real hook here for me I find.  It was riding a pretty steady 6 until episode 10 in fact, but a few upticks are really all I need to go from “well it’s decent” to “yeah that was good”.

[Cmdr_King]

My Little Pony: The Movie

For this one, I feel the need to issue a reminder: these are not really reviews and are much more interested in discussing why a work is the way it is (and, on occasion, delving into picking out themes and very very rarely what is probably actual critical analysis, although that’s rare and amateur at best), both in terms of analyzing emotional response and in looking for evidence of production history within the work because we are in fact nerds here and trivia is fun.

See, I don’t know how to feel about this one, and I’m gonna have to discuss in detail a critical plot point of the movie to figure it out.  Sorry folks, I don’t have an easy up/down is this worth watching note this time.

Hasbro has gone back to deep wells for this one.  The core plot is essentially “special movie big bad shows up, heroes have to travel to distant lands to meet new allies to combat it”, which is basically how every movie of kids TV show has gone since such things existed.  Which Hasbro was deeply involved in in the 80s, so yeah, back to the well.

Now, within that framework, the movie’s… average?  It’s not terribly subtle about the toyetic nature of these things.  And I have to admit that some of the designs on the new characters (pretty much all of them except Tempest Shadow and the Storm King I’d say) do clash with the established material for me.  Mostly the color pallet and gait of everyone feels off.  But the characters themselves are fine.  I mean, they got Zoe Saldana to voice a character, and decided fuck it, she’s a pirate bird captain.  Because I’m pretty sure if you put a microphone in Zoe Saldana’s room as she slept her nighttime mutterings would be usable material for that character. 

And of course we’re a good 7 seasons into the show now so they’re real good at the main cast now.  Pinkie is mugging the HELL outta that camera, Apple Jack’s snarks are perfectly placed, I think the song they give Rainbow is probably the best Dashie song I’ve seen in the series.  They seem to have made a conscious effort for the incidental cast not to interact with the plot too much, for all they were most generous with visual cameos.  And Derpy shenanigans.  Can’t forget those.

And now that we’ve nibbled up to it, let’s dig into the issue.  The main goal of the quest is to get the help of the Hippogriffs.  Once everyone gets there, they discover they hold a magical artifact that let them shapeshift and escape the Storm King, and are understandably not keen on going back to openly fight him.  And so, noticing how cripplingly lonely the princess is, Twi sends everyone else to win her over while she… steals the goddamned artifact?

WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WRITERS.
TWILIGHT SPARKLE IS NOT THAT FUCKING STUPID.

I mean, like.  I actually went home from the theater and had to look up if this was supposed to be somewhere earlier in continuity.  Like I mean maybe… I can see Twi being that panicked and dumb right after becoming a Princess?  Bit of a stretch, but I can kinda buy it.  But you’re telling me that Twilight used befriending someone as a feint at this point in the show’s continuity?  I just don’t fucking buy it.  You already have to buy a lot of nonsense up to this point in the film, because frankly I just don’t see how the Storm King is somehow a larger threat than some previous villains, but hey, I guess they got a good sneak attack in.  That can matter a lot.  And let’s be real, a certain amount of contrivance just to get the plot started, and to justify some new toys characters and locations is just part and parcel of a marketing-driven series, and you do accept a bit of that if you stick with the series. 

But that sort of break in characterization really kicks you out of the movie.  They follow that up with a big blow up between her and Pinkie, and honestly that’s why it’s there.  They needed Twi to be isolated so she could be captured and set up the endgame.  But no, you done fucked up whoever wrote that, and I’m really not sure if all the other stuff I liked before and after makes up for it.

In light of which, let’s rewind.

LET’S SING!

We Got This Together- Does every big episode in the series start with one of these?  The town song as they prepare for a big day?  If not all of them, at least most of them I reckon.  This one is a bit longer and more involved than average, which makes sense all things considered?  I feel like some of the intent behind the film here was to draw in lapsed fans, so reintroducing the main cast to get everyone on the right page is a good move.  It also reinforces for that audience that we’re focusing on them, not the expanded cast like Starlight or Sunset or any of a number of characters.

Totally snuck in a Discord cameo there.  Granted I had a short conversation with a random stranger in the theater, since we both happened to be checking to see if there was a stinger (there’s not for the record).  We even designed it: totally should have had Discord pop back up and be mad he missed all the fun.

I’m the Friend You Need- Y’know, I kinda like Capper actually but… the naiveté on display here… I’m gonna need an assist.



Thank you Sir Patrick.  Not much to say about the song, since it’s more for the montage than a show stopper if that makes any sense?  But yeah, lives or dies on how much you want to like Capper.

Time to Be Awesome- I gotta admit, there’s a big disconnect here.  I mean, didn’t they stop piracy because they were afraid of the Storm King?  I don’t know how “be awesome!” got them past that hump.  Maybe focus more on how they could totally defeat him as long as they got to the Hippogriffs?  But y’know what, I don’t care that much because fuck it, it’s time to be awesome!  Very nicely captures a soaring spirit feel.

One Small Thing- I swear this is Pinkie’s theme song with lyrics.  Actually, I think Time to Be Awesome was also Dashie’s theme with lyrics.  So anyways, most of the music in the movie’s been pretty good, this one’s no exception, but it’s not really standout one way or the other.

Open Up Your Eyes- So there’s… about three songs through the series I’ve kinda fallen for:  True True Friend from Magical Mystery Cure, Welcome to the Show from Rainbow Rocks, and Light of Your Cutie Mark from Crusaders of the Lost Mark.  I’m not sure if this surpasses any of those for me, but it’s definitely among them. 

I do think they oversell the tragedy for Tempest Shadow a bit, since when they dramatize her backstory here it really feels way more like she just kinda gave up rather than cracking under the trauma she went through.  But it does set up nicely why she’d both be so driven to be strong (to show them, SHOW THEM ALL) but also have a giant gaping blind spot towards someone who valued her abilities.

Rainbow- Holy shit Sia really is an aussie.  The way singing erases accents in English is sometimes amazing to me.
Oh right, song.  It’s a nice ending concert thing?  Certainly not Sia’s best song, but I do have to say… there’s a gravitas to it?  It’s both melancholy and determined, and I feel like that’d be a great fit for the overall plot…

… y’know, if they hadn’t completely fucked that up?  I really can’t tell if they wrote parts of this four years ago and just touched it up for the “now” point it occupies in continuity without actually changing the parts that matter, or didn’t bother paying any attention to the basic Hasbro Movie Formula script aside from character-specific gags, or if they just are kinda at the limits and don’t know how to write the more mature characters they have now and keep falling back on the basics from earlier in the series to inform character flaws. 

But for all that, the fluff is really quite great; what I’m having to chew on is, which do I weight more for this series?  Do I toss the complaints with the plot since it’s there to string together characters moments and gags I’m enjoying, or is the plot issue so badly out of character it’s poisoning the whole movie?

Rating- 6/10.  You’ll be unsurprised to learn I instead toss it the “it’s… okay, with a few standout moments” score.  I mean, I did the whole song bit because I picked all the songs up off iTunes, it’s doing quite a bit right, but damn man.  Damn.

[Cmdr_King]

Anastasia

Let’s return to Don Bluth, in this, his final surrender.

I’m not entirely sure that’s even unfair really.  I’ve never went and dug through interviews, especially more recent ones, but the degree to which this is shamelessly a Disney Princess movie is astonishing.  It’s unmistakably Bluth’s art influence and has some of his particular flourishes, especially in the dark moments, but no mistake, he’s making someone else’s movie here.

And of course, being a Disney Princess affair means… let the anvils ring!

A Rumor in St. Petersburg- There’s such an air of artificiality to this.  I don’t know why, but something about the backgrounds and setting that make all the choreographed dancing stick out in the worst way.  Could be the mood whiplash too.  But I think it’s something about the setting, like the street there flags as “now” and a real place, so the fake behavior stands out.  Could also just be since I’m using kinda a cheapo copy so the actual video quality isn’t meshing right, but I think it’s just the presentation falling apart.

Journey to the Past- The exposition right before this is also pretty dire.  I’m suddenly thinking Bluth was taking the piss with this whole operation.  Like god damn, this is practically this except Anastasia is actually a movie that exists, and it has about the same sense of really TRYING to miss the point this hard thanks to following the formula.  I mean it doesn’t help that the song is weak as hell too, but yeah, I’m already kinda in the wrong mindset for song by the time it starts.

Once Upon a December- Gosh I remember liking this one quite a bit.  It’s pretty good, although I had utterly forgotten why.  It’s haunting really.  There’s an echo on everything that gives it a sort of horror movie vibe, it’s unreal and something disastrous is coming.  Like this sells the base concept of the backstory in a way showing the events didn’t. 

In the Dark of the Night- Why is there a bug civilization in evil wizard limbo?  In fact the whole part where the bugs are a chorus is distracting.  You have like the green glowy goblin dudes, you couldn’t anthropomorphize them?  Or have Bartok do accompaniment? 

Sidebar; oh man Bartok is like Hunchback Gargoyles tier.  Which is sad because hey, a character for Rasputin to talk against and question his plans is fine, but he’s always on and it just comes back to being artificial.

Learn to Do It (/Reprise)- Montage!  We’re friends, we’re all friends here, thank you.  Actually aside from the reprise, I’m not sure what this is doing here.  Sure, sure, set up princess training and how easily Anya takes to it.  But… why ride bikes?  Horseback?  The only one that actually does make sense is the reprise part really.  Although Dimitri does fall flat on his face, maybe that’s the important part.

Paris Hold the Key- Okay, Paris being a perpetual ongoing street circus makes waaaay more sense than St. Petersburg doing it.  … holy shit they’re in a Monet.  Daaaamn.  Okay like… nooone of the rest of the movie does this.  There’s a bit of a disconnect between backgrounds, characters, and inanimate objects, but a lot of that is CG blending and the movie being from 1997 and, as I recall, Fox Animation only having like three films total and Fox being notorious cheapskates.  Or maybe some of the other songs use famous artists as backgrounds but I’m too uncultured to catch anyone but Monet.  I dunno.

Y’know, they really got into making new outfits for Anya.  Makes sense since they’re doing Disney Princess, but actually they have some really tasteful designs here, it’s great.

The ending meanwhile sure is a thing that happens.  Especially the part where the animal sidekick does the real hard work of setting it up while the final win is a layup, just stepping on something that’s already literally underfoot.

I dunno.  As fakey as it can be, as often as that kicked me right out of things, and much as they sanitize the historical background so much I remain convinced the understatements are master theses on the art of sarcasm (embers of unhappiness, really?  Really?)  There’s a certain charm to this.  I like Bluth’s human designs, you can see a lot of effort into some interesting bits of the film, the main emotional climaxes moooore or less work.  You do, in the end, want these people to be okay and find some measure of peace.

Rating- 5/10.  Split the difference?  Sure, split the difference.

[Captain K]

Sidebar; oh man Bartok is like Hunchback Gargoyles tier.  Which is sad because hey, a character for Rasputin to talk against and question his plans is fine, but he’s always on and it just comes back to being artificial.

[Cmdr_King]

Hellsing Ultimate

Hellsing Ultimate, despite being adapted by the same people from the same material, is a lot of things that the earlier Hellsing really wasn’t.

It’s horror porn, gore porn, gun porn, and occasionally just porn.  It’s an indulgent, fantastical mess, that always demands your attention except when it’s clearly just playing with itself.  You do have to give it a minute once in a while.

So I’m going to bypass some of the usual staples for talking about a series here.  Hellsing Ultimate is 10 OVAs released over a period of 6 years.  The animation quality is generally movie-tier.  The narrative flow is kinda gibberish: I considered reviewing each set of the blu-ray release as its own thing, because while there’s still a really crummy cliffhanger between VIII and IX, that’s still as close as it has to cohesive structure.  Four installments detailing Millennium’s coming out of the shadows, four more detailing the Battle of London in earnest, and the final two resolving all the conflicts between the main cast and wrapping up the plot.  But within those arcs, the start and stop points don’t make much sense.  Like the best part of the series is probably the final battle between Alucard and Anderson, which is split between VIII and IX, while the lowest point is probably Millennium’s initial assault on London, which is mostly V but with some bits of IV and VI.

So yeah, that’s about as coherent as the technical talk is gonna be.

The word for all this is gonzo really, in both common uses of the term.  Visceral, emotional, personal, with no sense of objective outside reality, and also using the barest of establishing shots before getting straight to the show.  It’s not strictly accurate in the second sense, since there are certainly plenty of times it does slow down and brood for a bit before going back to the action, but those moments get shorter and less frequent as it goes, and after a certain point the talky bits are just as spectacle driven as the blood or the action.  I mean, you aren’t going to convince me that Alucard reverting to his WWII appearance and ranting about what a failure Walter is for damn near 10 minutes isn’t meant to be a sort of carnage.

I have to say I’m totally in love with the credits sequences in Ultimate.  They almost always present a bit of a tonal contrast with the episode their paired with, while also expanding on background elements in a clear but unobtrusive way.  That the music is always quite good helps a lot of course.  It makes an odd contrast because, given the nature of the series, there’s times where some sequences you can kinda just check out a minute since it’ll be over the top, long, but not really be anything but gory spectacle, while the credits always pulled me forward in my seat a bit so I could catch the details behind the credits themselves. 

Really that sort of thing is all over the place in Ultimate, it does a lot of clever things and can go long stretches with just perfect pacing and flourish, but occasionally it gets completely indulgent and if you’re not into the specific thing of that scene (especially a lot of the gun/military porn) and it’s kinda easy to check out.  Of course, that’s sorta the point isn’t it?  Horror comedy from a guy who got his start in illustrated porn indulging his personal sense of style, of course it’s gonna be gonzo and over the top.

Which actually provides a nice bridge into the subtextual meat of the show.  There’s a line used very late in the series that boils down the main conflict between Alucard and Anderson, which is very expressly echoed by the Nazi villains as well: that deep down immortal monsters are whimpering children looking to die.  But this doesn’t really hold true, because the dividing line isn’t between monsters and men.  Seras is defined by indomitable drive to stay alive.  Walter and Anderson go out of their way to BECOME monsters because they… basically wanted to die on their own terms having one final battle.  Sir Penwood, generally portrayed as a coward, ultimately decides to go out triggering a bomb to take as many Nazis with him as he can, even when he reasonably could have escaped.  And as might be expected, Integra’s life has been defined by spitting in the face of insurmountable odds and refusing to bow to those who would threaten her, always defeating deadly threats with extreme prejudice.

This undercurrent is really consistent.  Men fight until they find a worthy opponent to die to, while women fight to live.  And it’s strange because I’m really not sure where they’re going with it.  Especially when it comes to the main cast, because for Alucard and Seras it also definitely ties into the vampiric bloodlust, rape vs consent thing they have going on.  It’s almost like… there’s this belief that men, by nature, steal and take what they will, but because of this are damned and worthy only in death.  Women, meanwhile, use what is offered, but no more, and have earned life.  Although this might be tied into the minor preoccupation with purity that’s there as well; Seras can only become a vampire because she’s a virgin, and several mentions are made of Integra’s “maiden virtue”.  We don’t really know what’s up with any of the vampires of Millennium, but they certainly go out of their way to sexualize Rip van Winkle’s death.  I dunno.  It’s messy and has some clear parallels to Japanese gender roles overall, except with a distinctly negative spin; men will dominate by nature, but they are little more than dogs because of it, animals waiting to die.  So seemingly the idea is that, if a woman can preserve herself against such assaults, she becomes a proper liege, who will strive towards the greatest good and never taking more than what is offered.

It’s strange trying to decipher the messaging of something that’s simultaneously overtly skeevy but also has a clear respect for its own characters.  Of course wild oscillation between effective material and being distractingly over the top is the Hellsing experience isn’t it.

It’s gorgeous, it’s gripping, and it’s certainly trying to say… something.  Honestly the real weakness here is I don’t know that it speaks to me, specifically?  Well, it’s not, and I know it’s not because I think it’s only actually interested in speaking to one person, Kouta Hirano.  But then again…

Rating- 8/10.  To borrow a completely unrelated quote?  Stay a while, and listen.

[Cmdr_King]

Woo, 3 hours under my wire.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Season 6)

I don’t have much to say on the lowpoints this season, so lets knock this one out right away and move on to what’s working.

Weakest Episode: Newbie Dash.  Y’know, I like Dashie, she’s often my favorite of the six, but damn if he pouty episodes aren’t tiresome.  How many times has your overcompensation gotten you owned Dashie?  Right, all of them.  Why you gotta do a thing.  Admittedly the Wonderbolts running on friendly assholism is kinda bleh to me to start with, even if it does make sense for the sort of people they are.

I’ll admit I needed to skim episode titles to single that one out, but there’s a couple episodes like that (Flutter Brutter’s another one) where, yeah it’s new stuff I guess?  But it’s really just a new coat of point on a typical (x)-episode plot and it’s season 6 guys, you did this one and it wasn’t good the last time.

But really the bulk here are just… fine.  As slice of life content goes, season 6 holds the batting average.  There’s some fun concepts in there, and I dunno if they got all the milage they could have outta, oh, “Dischord vs DnD” it still exists and that’s peachy.

Our continuity this season though with in Starlight episodes, which actually did something they show had been aching for: showing just how hard it is for a villain to earn redemption in their own eyes.  Well, okay, Equestria Girls had been doing something with that with Sunset, yeah, but y’know what? Her problem was her confidence was shot after her inner darkness manifesting as a literal demon.  Starlight’s deal is her coming to grips with just how bad she was in the first place.

I mean some folk, not without reason, were kinda pissed that Starlight seemed so easily forgiven after her “I almost destroyed time!” escapades.  Y’know who else thought that?  Is crushed daily by just how dysfunctional her understanding of basic life is?  Spends noticeable amount of time in each appearance paranoid about the possibility of relapse?  Was so overwhelmed at the ease with which the people of her village forgave her she had a panic attack?

Yeah.  Even if everyone else either accepts that she wants to change and wants to make that easier for her, or doesn’t really know what she did and thinks of her as just Twilight’s weird friend?  Starlight Glimmer hasn’t forgiven Starlight Glimmer, and time will tell if she ever can.

Honestly the more they show Starlight the more I am so, so tempted to delve into thinkpiece “diagnose the MLP characters!” stuff and that’s totally not something I should be doing.  But I’m sure that piece exists and damn if I don’t feel like Starlight, specifically, hits you in the face with it harder than everyone except Twilight.

ER, anyways, so the Starlight arc through the season has a secret weapon in its quest to make me like the episodes and root for her. 

That’s right, they brought back my irrational favorite pony, the Pathetic and Friendless Trixie!

Best Episode: To Where and Back Again part 2.  This is probably my single favorite episode in ages, and it mostly just cheats to get there then lets everything unfold naturally.  Shove Discord and Trixie into the party together, biggest braggarts of the show?  Yeah, nah, that’s ending gloriously.  For good measure they bring back the biggest hanging villain on the show, because of course they do, they know continuity is my catnip.  Thorax is a bit nothing as a character which isn’t ideal, but I have to admit, I do like that the episode that introduced him didn’t really have much Starlight in it, cool way to downplay that the changelings were going to be a thing in the finale.

On the whole there’s some signs of fatigue in the basic structure of the show here.  Having Starlight to be the lead on some episodes, and the format tweak for CMC episodes, help quite a bit, but I think the writers for the non-anchor episodes are starting to strain under continuity rather than using it.  Which sorta makes it surprising that the show has an eighth season lined up in some ways, but we don’t know much about that yet and it’s entirely possible it’ll start winding down at that point.

I mean, I saw they launched a proper Equestria Girls webseries sometime this year, the exact thing I mentioned that the last EQ movie was setting up for.  Seems like a thing that could happen.

Rating- 7/10.  The good episodes were an improvement from the last couple seasons, but the middle episodes were a bit weaker, so around the same feel overall I think.

[Cmdr_King]

One Punch Man (Season 1)

One Punch Man is a strange show; not quite parody, not quite a regular comedy, definitely not straight shonen.  And as usually happens in those cases, I’ll be forming thoughts on this one in the writing, because organization is for chumps.

In that light, let’s knock out the formality early.

Weakest Episode- The Modern Ninja.  I actually kinda like Speed-of-Sound Sonic, but there’s really nothing else much going on in this one.  The power suit thing feels like a step down from the last couple episodes, even allowing that this is setting up for arcs that haven’t happened in the anime yet, and while Sonic is kinda fun it’s not a terribly interesting fight which is a bit of a buzzkill in a filler episode.

Rating- 8/10.  It’s often uneven and there’re some quibbles to be had with stuff like the casual attitude towards collateral damage, but it’s absolutely worth recommending and watching.

Let’s get started then.

Best Episode- Unyielding Justice.  The show’s thesis statement is absolutely in this episode.  I’m just not entirely sure how to take it.
The speech from Mumen Rider would be amazingly sincere and heartfelt in a serious super hero show, so in this show which is about 30% parody?  Spending the entire episode to this point playing it so straight and topping it off with this makes it stand out all the more.  Even when you know it’s going to be followed seconds later by a crushing curbstomp.
Except that’s then immediately followed by Saitama saving him and congratulating him on a job well done.   And when some asshole in the crowd (seriously, what the fuck is wrong with those fans!  Er that guy!  YOU WERE IN THE BUILDING AND SAW HIM TEAR A HOLE IN THE DISASTER SHELTER AND MELT A FUCKING CYBORG DOWN TO HIS FUCKING HEAD IT WAS CLEARLY FUCKING REAL) tries to disparage the other heroes and ends up getting the whole crowd behind him because of Saitama’s bad reputation, he instead leans into that reputation to deflect credit back onto them.

At one level this is another layer added to Saitama.  Sure, it’d be nice to be appreciated and rewarded for his hero work, but really… he’ll deal.  It’s fine.  He gets funded by the Hero Association now, so all the material concerns are put to rest and he can just keep on keeping on, so does it really matter that much if he gets the respect other heroes do?  Nah, more important to do the job and keep people safe.
Honestly I have to think, between this attitude, how he came by his powers, and the baldness that Saitama is meant to be a Zen figure in the most literal sense, a teacher by example for the ways of the Buddha.  Unfortunately I don’t know my Buddhism nearly well enough to really follow that train of thought to its logical conclusion, but it just makes too much sense.
It’s important to remember though that Saitama doesn’t really change much from the start of the show, at least not in this season.  Sure, he gets fired up once in a while, his circumstances change, but he’s more or less the same guy.  We just get to learn more about him as we see him in those new circumstances.  So how it affects him isn’t really as important as how he tries to influence others, since they’re the ones that react to the fact of his existence.

And really that’s the best way I can approach it from the other side.  The world doesn’t know how to react to Saitama.  Being part satire while also being a shonen, the universe is fundamentally cynical.  The effective heroes are assholes and the heroic ones are ineffectual.  Swathes of cities are so regularly attacked by monsters people just gave up living there.  And of course, like our world, society is petty and cruel- a world where evil tends to triumph, and is getting more powerful all the time.
And then here comes Saitama.  Sure, comedy might demand he sometimes take out buildings, but funny how few casualties there are when the giant naked Attack on Titan reference falls on a city eh?  The king of the sea is beyond human science, he could easily conquer the surface world… except the heroes buy enough time for Saitama to show up and do his thing.  A wild DBZ knockoff appeared!  Saitama used “Actually Trying”.  It’s super-effective! 
Saitama existing means a world where Good will always triumph over Evil.
And the world can’t process that.  How can that exist?  There must be a trick.  It’s a scam.  He’s a nobody leeching off the real heroes who had to die trying or saved everyone for their own ends.  Any possible explanation except that he’s the real deal and if they follow his example, the world will be a better place.
… dammit, I just got to the same conclusion again.  Zen, man.  Zen.

Closing ramble… I made a point of name-checking a few shows, and honestly I’m pretty sure everything in this show is a direct shoutout if you’re more knowledgeable about shonen than I.  Those were just the ones I knew without looking.  That said once we get to the end of the season with the S-Rank Heroes the whole thing feels more American comics than shonen.  Very Justice League and all.  The short episode and a half arcs are pretty fun and help draw more attention to the overall flow of the tone and narrative.
I kinda ignored Saitama’s ennui, but despite being where they pull the whole tag line (“Can a hero be too strong?”) initially, it feels incidental at this point.  It could eventually turn into something that challenges Saitama’s understanding of himself and corrupts things, but in Season 1… yeah, it’s window dressing.  Worth noting for the future, but right now not really relevant.
There’s not officially a season 2 at time of writing (although it’s coming).  I eagerly anticipate it. 

[DjinnAndTonic]

I liked the first couple of episodes of One Punch Man quite a lot. Found it to be utterly hilarious. And the over-the-top parody just -worked-, especially having watched it immediately after being exposed to its contemporary Japanese Superhero show, My Hero Academia.

And then... I just got really bored with it, really fast. I don't think its message is strong enough to carry the episodes in any sort of serious way. If it's not being comedy, it just feels like a hollow shell of a show to me. When it went all-in on being the Justice League in the last two episodes, I literally fell asleep to some of the most visceral animation in modern anime. That should not happen. It was the middle of the day, I wasn't even sleepy.

I'm not quite sure when OPM went wrong, but it just flatlined for me somewhere midway through. Maybe its message just doesn't resonate with me? I think I'm the only person who doesn't love this show, and I can't figure out -why-.

[Cmdr_King]

Nah, i’ve Seen some folks that don’t care for it. More thoughts when i’m Not on phone, but I had a somewhat opposite arc where I was lukewarm at first but really dug the parody once it tipped there was more going on.

[Hunter Sopko]

I found the manga (the cleaned up one, not the source manga) much easier to follow and more entertaining. Though I did go and watch the relevant fight scenes. I tend to nope out of manga adaptations pretty quickly these days for some reason. The transition tends to show.

[Captain K]

The manga is not that great early on either.  I initially disliked it and became a fan as it went on.  The really good stuff is past this "season".

[Cmdr_King]

Batman Beyond (Season 1)

Okay, so… what if Spider-Man… but BATMAN?

The anecdotes from Timm and Dini amount to them being asked to make Batman in high school, but no mistake, the concept is much closer to “what if Spidey but Bats”.  Being the key creators of one of the most influential cartoons of all time and going on to make one of the only good shows of the early 00s (Batman: TAS and Justice League, ‘natch) you expect quality in the end of course, but I’m surprised at how thoroughly they embraced the idea.

There’s a push and pull the show has for me; it can pull off transcendental brilliance moments away from struggling through an obvious writer’s problem.  While it’s strongest in the opening episode (because they had nooooooooo idea how to write Bruce genuinely bonding with Terry starting out) it’s certainly something I remember cropping up here and there throughout the entire show, not just the first season.  I think it comes down to just how amazing the show is at creating its aesthetic even out of the gate.  Screens everywhere, clothes that make a point of accenting, rather than blending, the functional parts, doing away with photorealism on TV in favor of shadow play news, background music that moves fluidly between piano strings and guitar riffs… those things can at any moment suddenly jive and immediately suck you in, but that means the natural pains of making a new show with largely original characters and trying to find their voices stand out all the more.

Simultaneously it has to be said that there’s a real reverence for what feels like old-school comic writing.  One thing folks often lament about modern books is how thoroughly the decompressed style took over; that is, every story is a 5-6 issue thing written with the trade in mind, with no real natural jumping-on point books that tell one story well while giving the reader incentive to seek out other books.  And that’s where this first season sticks out.  Blight is the main villain throughout, but most episodes don’t feature him in a prominent role- just Rebirth, Meltdown, and Ascension.  But he appears in a majority of the others, setting up other villains and reminding us that he’s a personal nemesis to both Terry and Bruce.  We learn first thing that Barbara Gordon is the new commissioner, but y’know how long we go until she has the full picture?  10 episodes in, and then it’s a couple more before she gets a spotlight episode and we get her side of the intervening ~50 years.
It’s a neat transitional period for the DCAU as a whole, and in its own way I can see liking its style more than the rest.  It’s definitely the most distinct show in the canon… well, unless Static Shock is really out there, I guess I’ve never seen that.

Unusually I kept thinking of oddball episode-specific comments as I went through, so we’ll start with the weakest, then end on the best before we wrap up.

Weakest Episode- The Winning Edge.  Someone just told them to do a drug episode.  Steroids powered by Bane-juice makes sense for the setting and all, but it doesn’t really add anything either and… well, it’s a stock episode concept to start with, y’know?  It’s okay and all, but never really elevates itself either.

Golem should be required viewing in schools.  22 minutes for a concise, thorough exploration of what toxic masculinity is, how it perpetuates, and how just being bullied doesn’t suddenly mean you’re magically the one in the right at all times.

Shriek… fuckin’ showoffs.  I think that’s the entire reason Shriek exists, the sound guys had an idea and wanted to show off.  That said there’s some meat to this episode I wanted to highlight even though it’s middle of the road for the season.  I mean the whole conceit of how much people  underestimate sound and hearing is a fun concept to start with, and there’s the undercurrent of what people do in the quiet moments revealing who they are I’m digging. 
And I mean… I can’t NOT take a second to highlight the final exchange. 
“The voice kept calling me Bruce.  In my mind, that’s not what I call myself”
“What do you call yourself?”
*glare*
“Oh, yeah, I suppose you would.  But that’s my name now.”

Best Episode- Meltdown.  Of course it’s the Mr. Freeze episode.  But I mean, only one episode hit me in the feels.  And I think I really only need one line:
“Believe me, you’re the only one that cares.”

Rating- 7/10.  I gotta admit, the high points are real good, and the low points aren’t terribly low, but aside from Meltdown it never quite popped for me and I can’t quite say why.  Buuuuut y’know me, I’m gonna go with that gut reaction.

[Cmdr_King]

Castle in the Sky

My first temptation is to just pick out all the Miyazaki-isms and talk about how this fits in the Ghibli canon.  Except this is the first time I’ve covered one, and also I found something more specific to talk about with it anyways.

I mean, seeing as I haven’t covered one of these, let’s hit the basics.  Castle in the Sky is technically the first Ghibli film… in that the main production crew of Nausicaa founded Ghibli almost immediately after its release, so while technically nothing before then is Ghibli it’s more accurate to think of this as the second after Nausicaa.  And even at this point a lot of the studio’s more enduring tropes were already present:

- Unabashed feminism in the form of young leading women unafraid to take charge or fight for themselves in the face of adversity.
- Astounding sequences of flight and an unmistakable admiration for flying vehicles.
- Gorgeous backgrounds, in particular pastoral landscapes notable for their vivid colors.
- Those same backgrounds carrying a sad undertone, celebrating the resilience of nature yet taking some pains to show the deeper scars of the story at hand underneath.
- A devotion to contrasting the humanity of monsters with the monstrousness of humanity.

And there’s plenty to like about just the overall pace, the mix of comedy and seriousness, how elegantly they weave action and quiet scenes, all sorts of stuff like that.

But what that jumped out at me was the main villain.  It’s easy for me of late to see fascism everywhere for ~Mysterious Reasons~, and especially the toxic masculinity that underwrites it.  But there’s enough specific imagery and lines that I’m comfortable saying this is intentional.  He’s driven by entitlement: he’s a Prince of Laputa!  He should rule this world!  How dare these vines defile the holy temples!  And the way he goes about everything is very specifically hypermasculine.  He uses the military, since of course violence is power, but he also holds them in clear disdain.  They are beneath him, for he is heir to the power of the ancients!  The technologies and weapons that are his birthright put their paltry power to shame!

I also ran across people reading some of his comments to Sheeta about resurrecting Laputa as his intention to use her to repopulate.  Which… certainly fits everything else about him…

But all this makes a lot of sense.  Like a lot of Miyazaki’s work Castle in the Sky works in a lot of environmental themes, most clearly when Sheeta speculates that the people of Laputa didn’t die out or anything, they simply realized they’d cut themselves off from nature and returned to a better life on the surface.  So making your villain a personification of male entitlement, complete with fetishization of technology and power over nature, is a natural contrast.  Of course, it also means that the main villain is a straightforwardly evil nazi-type, which is quite the contrast from most Ghibli works.  Granted, recent events have taught us that the ability to easily recognize and identify such ilk is highly relevant, and muddying those particular waters wouldn’t really be very responsible.

But there is some complexity elsewhere to make up for it.

The robots are terrifying things.  The first one we see melts its way through a stone castle and all the soldiers within it.  It’s a product of technology in a setting that ultimately concludes on the sanctity of the natural world.  But it also only does exactly what it’s told to do.    It destroys the building where Sheeta is held captive because her instruction was too simple: help me.  We later see dozens of them that are inert, because with no one to utilize them the technology merely returns to nature just as nature reclaims the land devastated in the past.  Until seized by Muska in the finale, most of the robots merely sat, unused, a threat to no one.  The one active one we see has merely maintained the garden and brought flowers to the dead.  We could probably surmise it was given a more complex instruction: tend the garden, and preserve all the lives within it.  And so it does, for untold centuries, perfectly benign. 

Technology is only in opposition to life and the natural world when those who covet it, rather than understanding it, use it for evil ends.

Despite individual moments of beauty I dunno that I ever fully clicked with Castle in the Sky.  While the story does need characters like them I don’t really have much to say about the Dola gang, and the scenes with them serve the emotional need of “we need a quiet period between the rescue and the finale”, but aside from the flexing scene (which is indeed glorious) they’re just kinda there I felt like.  Admittedly the whole scene of them ‘helping’ in the kitchen just dragged for me which plays a big part.  I also never really felt much of anything for the male lead?  I dunno, I feel like finding those threads made me sound a little too positive since really it’s a film I like well enough but didn’t get much emotional impact from.  But here we are.

Rating- 7/10.

[Cmdr_King]

DuckTales: Treasure of the Lost Lamp

So when I sat down to watch this, it’d been many a year since I’d actually seen the film.  I was immediately struck by the fact that the villain was unmistakably Christopher Lloyd, and I somehow didn’t know this fact.  Clearly my memory and insights will be impeccable for this outing.

Indeed, on that note… a lot of this is building on a series of tweets I did a couple weeks ago.  All told there’s not a lot here that I found, but I also hate to let the blog go more than a month without some sort of content, so best follow through and assemble all that into something resembling thoughts.

Okay so most of the first half of the movie is a solid archeology run, followed by… some of the 90sest content I can think of.  The Genie is trying his damnedest to talk like the cool kids and make him some catch phrases to land.  Actually maybe that’s more 80s cartoon sensibilities.  Anyways, the issue is that nothing about it is really attention grabbing, save some neat creature designs and one or two animation errors (we’ll come back to some of that stuff).  They want to establish that Scrooge feels he earned the treasure, that Genie is a deeply unhappy person (and also, well, a person), and that the kids are quickly invested in his well-being, and just kinda put it out there. 

Actually, the other thing of substance is that the wishes that go on are almost always twisted, despite Genie seemingly being benevolent and obedient to a fault.  Webby’s wishes for a pet and living toys are so destructive they have to be unwished, and a simple wish for ice cream still ends in Dewey having some land on his head.

Second part is mostly entertaining for the creature designs, or more specifically Merlock’s animal forms.  Beetle aside they’ve got a good mix of clearly being Merlock while also clearly being the animal they are, and the carry over of color and hair elements really sells the thing.  He also gets beaten up pretty thoroughly, which is nice since his demise isn’t especially potent.  The finale is mostly cool for the transformation of the money bin into Merlock’s castle, which is a fairly obvious “hellooooooo animation budget” moment.

But… yeah, not a lot to it.  In fact, only two real takes here.

The wishes all coming out a bit corrupted for the most part is strange given Genie’s character, but make perfect sense for DuckTales.  As much as Genie doesn’t really land as a character, so him getting to escape the genie life in the end doesn’t have much emotional weight for me, that Scrooge does it is interesting.  Boiled down to his core, Scrooge is an idealized personification of capitalism, right there in his motto: he made it by being tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties, and he made it square.  His wealth has value because it reflects his own hard work, and if he had done so by taking short cuts or swindling others it would diminish it regardless of the numbers.  Literally no rich person in history can claim this, but in DuckTales capitalism works!  Which also means that wish-granting in a literal sense like the Genie’s is antithetical to the setting.  Sure, you’ll get it, but it’s not going to come cleanly because you didn’t earn it.  And similarly, Scrooge makes two wishes that amount to “return what is rightfully mine”, then uses the last to end the cycle by freeing the Genie.  Because in DuckTales, doing anything else would just be against everything Scrooge stands for.

(We’ll set aside whether a foreign adventurer can ‘rightfully’ claim the treasures of folkloric figures.  DuckTales has far more questionable examples than the treasure hoard of a legendary thief and I’m probably not qualified to dig into that topic anyway.  And I mean, it’s a 1990 adaptation of a comic series from the ‘50s aimed at children, that sort of examination is way outside the scope here.)

The studio here is fascinating though.  Far as I can tell, this is the first published work from Walt Disney Animation France, which is what it says: an animation studio under the Disney umbrella in France.  And you can tell they’re new, they have a few animation errors here and there, the backgrounds don’t quite mesh with the character models (all the ducks have a sorta gloss to them that stands out), little things.  But they also put in some quality work here in terms of designs and concepts where they had the space, so Disney basically kept them on the roster helping with the TV work, then tapped them to do the Goofy Movie.  And then suddenly after that… they’re listed as working on every Disney film between Hunchback and Brother Bear basically.  So I dunno what the whole story here is, the studio was ultimately absorbed into the broader company then dissolved when Disney exited traditional animation after 2005… but I wanna know more.

Rating- 5/10.  But no real deep insight here.  It’s… fine.  I appreciate bits and pieces on an intellectual level, but no real deeper emotional resonance.  Just kinda basic, averagish stuff.

[Cotigo]

“The voice kept calling me Bruce.  In my mind, that’s not what I call myself”
“What do you call yourself?”
*glare*
“Oh, yeah, I suppose you would.  But that’s my name now.”

This is the only thing that stuck with me from Batman Beyond.  I believe you forgot Bruce pointing to his head and saying, "Tell that to him." Such a good ending for an episode I remember nothing else about.

[Cmdr_King]

I believe that’s right.

It’s a pretty good summary of the show really, especially at that point.

[Cmdr_King]

Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection F

I think I’m kinda bored.

Which is unfair.  Everything about getting to the showdown between Freeza and Goku is actually quite good.  Bringing back Pilaf and the gang is a bit gratuitous I suppose, but considering how dour the film as a whole is I won’t begrudge them having a second comedy element besides Whis.  Using F during Freeza’s resurrection?  *chef kiss* (and let’s be real, I guarantee you that when they had the “holy shit Battle of Gods made all the money, how do we follow that up” meeting, someone just said Maximum the Hormone and the entire movie wrote itself afterward.)  The fight with the Freeza Force is a bit long, but also does a great job of giving each fighter a moment and making their fighting styles visually distinct and instantly recognizable. 

The opening has to get its own section of course.  So Freeza has to be just history’s greatest monster right?  His personal Hell is huge, and dozens of angels and other spirits are dedicated to eternally serenade him.  He hangs from the great tree, encased in his pupa, there to await forever more until he can truly transform for the better.  And this is all beautiful and poetic, but it really stands out because generally speaking Dragon Ball Hell has always been fairly bureaucratic; King Yemma sits at a great desk, in full business attire, rubber stamping the fates of souls.  Wait in lines, work menial jobs for all eternity.  But Freeza?  Oh no, he gets the special hell, the ironic kind.

But about half the movie is the big fight, right?  And it’s… a perfectly solid DBZ style brawl.  Freeza not picking up right away that Vegeta was just waiting for a chance to kill him was weird, but it also set up the only real twist in the proceedings so that’s an alright trade-off.  New forms are always fun I suppose, and both of them feel appropriately powerful in a way that DBZ could be hit or miss at.  Basically though it’s sorta hard to care?  I think there’re two main contributing factors.

1) The entire foundation of this fight is on shaky ground.  Conceptually, by making the thing a big title fight for all the marbles between Goku and Freeza… you’re trying to be better than the original end of the Namek saga.  And you can’t.  Moving it to Earth so the stakes are technically higher, giving them new forms, making the occasional nod to Freeza learning from the previous bout, that’s all great and adds a little to the fight as spectacle.  But you can’t replicate the original transformation to Super Saiyan, or the real meaning of that original victory: Goku is officially the strongest man in the universe.  You can still present him new challenges, smarter and stronger foes, shonen  power creep, and it’s fun and exciting and all that, but the cultural impact will always be less, and making that comparison so directly weakens this story by default.

(Suddenly I can’t help but wonder if this implies Vegeta’s entire character arc, his quixotic quest to recapture and overcome the original battle between him and Goku, is a metaphor for the show itself.  Eh, beyond the scope of a Resurrection F post.)

2) Between the first time I watched this, near release, and now, all of Dragon Ball Super has come out.  While I skipped all the episodes directly adapting this movie (I am assured this is the right decision), Freeza’s comeback in the Universe Survival arc exists now.  And for all its problems, Freeza was consistently the best part of it.  His transformation to Golden form there was given far more weight and spectacle than in this film, his cruelty was more terrifying, his humor more clear and funny, his power far more overwhelming until the very end.  So now that I have so much more Freeza to compare him to, the little nuggets we get in Resurrection F feel so much less satisfying.

In the end Resurrection F is spectacle over substance, but nothing here is better than what’s been done either before or since in the series.  That’s a bit unfair to the film in its original context of course, and what’s here is… fine, but it doesn’t stand out or hold up, at least not the way Battle of Gods does.

Rating- 6/10

[Cmdr_King]

Incredibles 2

So, after chewing on this a few hours this morning, I started coming up with crazy theories.  Buuuut it’s also out in theaters now, so let’s talk some basics first before we get down to that.

I’ll say out the gate I definitely like the first one more, but they are different movies and have different strengths.  Nothing in this one really gets the same emotional weight as Bob’s two big emotional scenes in the first, I think most of the slower paced hero sequences worked better in the first, and it all wraps up much more concretely and satisfyingly.  2 has more flaws, mostly in that the way they weave Helen’s A plot and Bob’s B plot together doesn’t quite mesh, or at least seems like a few scenes were in a strange place?  I’m having trouble pinning down exactly what the issue is.

However 2 is a lot better at big bombastic action scenes (in part just because of the advances made in 14 years of digital animation of course), and more importantly it’s the funnier movie.  It leans on slapstick more directly, but y’know what, don’t underestimate good slapstick.  There’s also a subtler sense of banter between the family, in that “not really angry but kinda mad” way, that never really cropped up in the original which makes sense since this one is more forward-looking and less strained for everyone.

There seems to have been a very conscious decision to highlight the ladies in this one, because Helen manages to kick even more ass than in the original (impossible as that may seem), Evelyn oozes style in a way that I have to love for a Q-type character, and Voyd is adorable and I’ll not hear otherwise.
Really this is sorta a long-form “if you want more Incredibles, this is a slightly different take on that, but definitely fills that box”.  Lacks a certain something, but as theater picks go you can do far worse. 

Rating- 6/10

Okay!  Soooooo.

The big hot take in the era of internet hot takes has long since been that The Incredibles was basically a batch of Objectivism wrapped up in friendly kid-digestible form.  I certainly touched on that when I talked about it, mostly from the perspective of “well I mean, it’s worth looking at”.  And I think I got it right: a certain amount of that is inevitable, because of the nature of super heroes, but the fine details of the story all work pretty hard to fight against this: the horrifically pro-corporate Insuricare boss is portrayed even less sympathetically than Syndrome, the heroes are all under the (wholly willing!) supervision of the government, and Dash and Syndrome both using the “when everyone’s super no one is” sentiment seems like a deliberate setup to debunk it, an immature child at the start of his journey.

But if you’re so determined, you can build that argument.  And I think overall Incredibles 2 thus set out to be more explicitly against such things.  Bob’s obsessive need to help people was  cheekily cited as one of his weaknesses in bonus materials in the original, and while he absolutely goes above and beyond in that department comparatively, 2 introduces a ton of new supers and they uniformly display that same drive to altruism.  The desire to use their powers publically because it’s part of their identity fits the usual outsider mentality you see in superhero fiction, but the specific bent towards using it for good being universal even outside Helen and Bob’s personal circle is telling.

The more conclusive bit is how the villain uses the “superheroes are inherently kinda Randian” argument as the foundation of her entire plot.  She weaponizes it against them, while cultivating the Objectivist Ubermench image for herself in the process.
- Makes multiple references to the fact that she personally designed and built all the tech that sustains the family business.
- Considers working in “sales” or otherwise engaging with people who are not at her level as beneath her, peasant work to foist upon her less capable brother.
- Specifically mentions her father depending on others, rather than the safe room he built, as the reason he died.
- Builds the entire character of the Screenslaver around rants of personal responsibility, decrying people for relying on heroes, or the government, or anyone but themselves to solve their problems while they leech off society.
- Specifically invokes the idea of supers seizing power for themselves when feeding them lines while mind controlled to panic the public.

That is just a laundry list of ticked boxes there, more even than Syndrome, and it feels like more of a stretch to say that isn’t the point.

Also the part where she spends the whole movie telling Helen how much alike they are and how they should be great friends, all to build up to a wholesale rejection of every one of her arguments.  (…. granted that could also just be that Evelyn is into her, but I mean I’m pretty sure that “sexually attracted to Elasticgirl” is synonymous with “has a pulse” in the Incredibles universe.)  But really it’s just a clearer, more direction version of the same general thrust the original had.  The Incredibles concludes that being ‘special’ only matters if you’re true to yourself and those around you, and Incredibles 2 returns to one of the oldest of all heroic mantras: with great power, there must also come great responsibility.

And while there’s a lot of differences in execution, these thematic similarities are a big part of why 2 hasn’t left as much of an impression on me.  Yeah, it’s doing a clearer, louder version of that one theme, but it lacks the texture of the original.  Like, I don’t think there’s another good thematic reading of it.  Meanwhile, you could absolutely read The Incredibles as… oh, I dunno, a veteran narrative.  Or a statement on toxic fandom, or on masculinity, or about the lasting damage cold war paranoia had on that generation.  Not all of them WELL, but it’s there, and when it comes to lasting the test of time, that sorta thing matters a lot.  And maybe my opinion of 2 will rise over time (certainly I think my opinion of The Incredibles dipped a little over time, perhaps one day they’ll meet in the middle), but unless I missed something… it’s just kinda good, solid theater fun.