Cybersix (1999)

Creator(s):  Chu Takara, Carlos Meglia, Carlos Trillo

Director(s): Hiroyuki Aoyama, Toshihiko Masuda, Atsuko Tanaka, Nobuo Tomizawa, Kazuhide Tomonaga, Keiko Oyamada, Kenji Kodama, Keiichiro Furuya

Studio: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Network of Animation

Finished first watch: 28/10/2020

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for Cybersix

Ratings:

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
3		4	3	5	3

This show is so bad lol. I can hardly believe I managed to put myself through the entire thing, let alone the amount of positive things I've seen/read about it online.

Don't be fooled by the cool, mysterious aesthetic.

Cybersix was a very successful comic in the late 90s and this series is based on that. But when it was adapted for TV, they changed the target audience from adults to children. This meant getting rid of all the serious and supposedly 'dark' themes of the comic. That alone should be enough reason for people not to watch it - it basically becomes inappropriate for both sets of viewers. That can definitely be felt when watching; there's no consistency in terms of the tone. Certain parts genuinely feel like somone put the wrong sound effects or music on the mixer and you're just left totally baffed. The music is honestly awful too - it's not just inappropriate but often sounds atonal or out-of-key (in a bad way). This is a pretty mean thing to say but the show could potentially be better if watched on mute. Sound design is bad enough for me to even think about sound design for the first time on this blog and the script and voice acting are so stale it's unbearable.

On the script, there's so much telling (i.e. not showing) that it actually feels stupid. Everyone explains everything they're thinking even when it's ridiculously obvious but there's almost no effort made to convey that information through what's on screen. Even the few times the directors did find good ways of showing things visually (including having things literally written out on screen), the characters explained everything they were thinking anyway - just in case. It's exhausting.

Storytelling overall is also pretty poor. First off, there's next to no story to tell; you have no idea why anyone is doing anything nor what their motivation is. The events across the 13 episodes also all seem to happen to the same 3 people in the city, who all happen to be very close to our protagonist (fair enough for a kids' show). Also lots of things seemed to just happen completely randomly with no significance later on. For example, they showed the emotional backstory of how Data 7 was created and his past friendship with Cyber 6 - but then through the rest of the series, Data 7 is literally just a normal panther. They don't even call him 29. He could have literally appeared from thin air and the series would be completely unaffected. Maybe that all comes into play in the comics but man, so much pointless stuff happens in the cartoon.

As said above, characters do things for no apparent reason and that makes it difficult to be even slightly invested in them. They also all seem to talk in one tone of voice each throughout, as well as learning nothing and changing nothing about themselves. And to top it all off, there is a completely unnecessary and totally baseless romance involving the main character (of course there is, she's female).

Animation isn't actually too bad. There are lots of genuine, good quality sequences of things like smoke, explosions, monsters and machines. But all the characters are quite poorly done in my opinin (which is mental when you see that this was animated by TMS(!)). They use a low frame rate, which isn't bad in itself, but they don't utilise it well, in my opinion. It feels like a lot of breakdowns and even in-betweens are missing from most passages. It's at its worst whenever Jose does his little soldier march. I appreciate that the show tried to create its own art style too but it didn't really work for me. The way they drew body hair was just ridiculous and designs genuinely did not fit their purpose - there was nothing endearing about Lucas and nothing sinister about Von Richter. Some of the action was decent but nowhere near good enough for this show to be worth rewatching.

In short, ignore people talking about how good Cybersix is. It was definitely progressive for its time (portraying a cross-dressing main character in the 1990s cannot be understated - that's a big win) but that says nothing of the quality of the cartoon. Equally, I imagine the comic was as successful as it was for a reason but none of that shines through to the TV series. So maybe go read the comic but do not watch this series.

The Legend of Hei (2019)

Director: MTJJ
Writers: MTJJ, Kexin Peng
Studio: Beijing Hanmu Chunhua Animation, Beijing Jiyin Yinghua, Dream Castle and Heyi Capital

Watched 27/10/2020

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for The Legend of Hei (Luo Xiaohei Zhan Ji/罗小黑战记)

Ratings:

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
8		7	7	8	7

The world has been crying out for the next classic (traditionally) animated film over the last few years. After my first watch, I'm ready to say that The Legend of Hei is that film. It's just shy of perfect for me: the cuteness and charm of Ghibli and Disney, coupled with amazing action and a solid, well-told story. It's missing a few things here and there but on the whole is just a wonderful experience. Chinese animation is actually having a bit of a moment right now and if this film is anything to go by, it's very well deserved.

First up, the film is visually stunning. It has these gorgeous fine-art-style backgrounds that blend perfectly with the legitimately beautiful, simple, 'clean' lineart-style characters and foregrounds, where the two could really have clashed. Even just the bright colour palette makes the film super pleasing to the eye. Then we get to the animation: fuck me, it is so brilliant. I can say without a shadow of a doubt, this is the best flash animation I have ever seen. In my (uneducated) opinion, they used flash and the 'simple' artwork absolutely correctly and got the two working in perfect harmony. There were no frozen body parts or eerie, stiff actions; it was full body acting, with complicated poses and motions. From what I could tell, characters were animated much more traditionally for action sequences but whatever they did worked amazingly well. All the fights in the film are intense, clearly articulated, exciting and fun. They also did really well to blend this traditional character animation with 3D modelling and camera techniques to make every fight super dynamic (but never disorientating). In general, the animation was just really well considered and well executed throughout, with lots of nice little details. This is pretty much as good as flash animation can get (again, just my opinion). One tiny criticism: there were a few shots of CGI cars and buildings etc. which looked kinda bad, but they can't have amounted to more than 10 seconds of screen time in total, so animation gets a strong 8 from me.

Look at this shit. Bloody beautiful.

The story is very solid; not life-changing but still really good. There's a nice blurring of good and evil and if the film is watched by kids, there are great lessons to be learned from it. It's also a good example of how to construct a story around a fantasy world; the world-building and story-telling are seemlessly integrated and that's one of the film's real strong suits. You're organically fed information that's essential to understanding the world you're watching, whilst also unravelling the plot. There are some instances where things could have been a bit more clear (like what 'Engulf' was early on) but there's potential stuff was lost in translation, especially since I dowloaded the subtitles from a random person on twitter.

Characters are good. The main characters just about edge their way into being complex and imperfect but there are plenty from the ensemble cast that are very stereotypical. Designs for characters are pretty cool but a bit stale when you consider the genre and region. It's difficult to talk about diversity in a fantastical universe but at the very least, there weren't enough female characters. There were in fact 0 major female characters and this film sadly fails the ol' Bechdel test*. This is the most obvious area for improvement imo. Characters' development and journeys through the film were pretty great and made a lot of sense. The only exception is the first montage bit between Xiao Hei and Wu Xian, which had some corny music (although music was great and very fitting literally everywhere else).

Like I said, the Legend of Hei has practially everything. I would recommend this film to families, tweens, animation students, action fans, people who love cute shit - basically everyone. It's a great film and I'll say it again: this should be considered a classic in the future. It's a shame that it's so relatively unknown. Hopefully it gets distributed worldwide in some form or another.

Small random thoughts: those spirit-y things were a bit too Princess Mononoke for my liking but we'll let them have that one; for directing, using different colours for Feng Xi's and Xiao Hei's 'Realm' attacks in the final battle would have made the fight more readable; on top of being mad cute the film was unexpectedly funny - it also used those anime-comedy-frames very tastefully (more importantly, very sparingly); what the hell was up with that goofy ass dragon??

*Update: Officially made my first submission to BechdelTest.com for this film! (Link)

The Breadwinner (2017)

Writer/Director: Nora Twomeu
Studio(s): Aircraft Pictures, Melusine Productions, Cartoon Saloon

Watched viewing on 16/04/20

***SPOILERS***

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
5		5	6	6	6

Straight up, I didn't like The Breadwinner.

Just felt like a typical western feminist trying to show the world how bad and backwards other parts of the world are. The important thing is that (apparently) Afghan people really liked the film, so it's not really for me to say. But at the end of the day, I didn't enjoy the film all that much and this blog is just my personal thoughts.

I didn't like that the film was in English with VAs who, to me, sounded like English was their first language. It sounded like they even tried to sound more Afghan, which was just a bit odd. Also the film doesn't make it clear enough what year the story is set in and what the situation in Afghanistan is at the time (the very vague 'Hindu Kush mountains' description just isn't sufficient). I feel like this means it does more harm than good; it tells selective truths (whole truths, don't get it twisted) but could be interpreted as suggesting that Kabul in 2017 is what you're seeing in the film. It isn't. You're seeing Kabul from 20 years ago, under Taliban rule.

The story was quite bland. I totally appreciate that it's probably largely true but this doesn't make it entertaining to viewers like me (again, it's not for us anyway). There's little impact/consequence for actions by characters. There was no moment of true gratification for Parwana when she becomes the breadwinner. Ultimately, our quite likeable main character is even a bit of a passenger to the end goal of the film. Also they made a pretty big deal about the witch's 3 items, of which the boy in the story only ever gets 2. I also just have a problem with people telling other people's stories for them.
The film got lots of praise for its 'attention to detail', but I caught a few things I thought it got wrong: not saying Bismillah before eating, reading from left to right and speaking while praying. My knowledge of Islam and Arabic (on which Pashto and Dari are based) is obviously only surface-level but these didn't seem right to me.

The art style was actually really nice, but the animation was a bit disappointing in places. A lot of CG vehicles. The storytelling was nice but not anything revolutionary. And the characters were far too simple (maybe except for the mother).

I Lost My Body (2019)

Director: Jérémy Clapin
Studio: Xilam Animation

Watched on 02/03/20

***SPOILERS***

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
6		4	7	6	5

A nice little journey but overhyped by the animation community.

Overall, the film achieves its objective of amazing visual storytelling. The creators set themselves the challenge of having a non-human(-body), non-speaking major character in the Hand. This allowed them to do a lot of brilliant things to show feelings and communicate emotions through things other than dialogue and facial expressions. They show just how good they are at this in the first scene, when the Hand escapes through the window, then presses itself flat against the wall and in the shadows; tension and relief all without dialogue. Some other excellent examples are when the Hand is on its knuckles by the stream (as a person would be on their knees) and just how content the Hand looks when it perches on the blind man's piano. It's clear from early on in the film however that the Hand is not the main character nor the focus of the story.

The film ends up being quite a typical weird, French romance. The real story is that of the lead character, Naoufel. The story is interesting and gets you invested and really is gripping at times but ultimately goes nowhere. There's a little bit of character development but there's nothing to the plot - the focus is much more on the journey than the destination (which I find super wack, generally). Not only does the story go nowhere but there are also very clear and distinct plot points that just go unanswered. The lack of explanation of why the Hand is alive (and can both see and hear) genuinely does not need explaining - it works well enough to suspend your disbelief, particularly in this medium - but who the hell collected the Hand and put it in a jar in a fridge? Why was there a jar of eyeballs? Who was the person in the pigeon mask graffitiing on the rooftop? Why was there so much focus on them?? The film would literally have worked just fine without these things but they were included anyway for some odd reason. I'm hoping they're part of some niche Parisian cultural reference that went over my head, because otherwise they served no purpose whatsoever. The ending is also incredibly unsatisfying. The run and jump onto the crane is really not a goal nor focus other than one conversation and throwaway comment. In fact, it was far more effective in that throwaway comment because the point was the viewer isn't expecting it (as the conversation alludes to). But it isn't the main character's major obstacle by any means, so makes a really anticlimactic ending. I will say thought that the 5 minutes or so before that are very well done, creating plenty of good quality tension.

I'd have liked the film a whole lot more of they'd kept on pushing the envelope in regards to animating a hand to convey human emotions. If they'd continued to challenge themselves to do that and further the story that way (as well as fucking complete it), it would have been much more deserving of all the praise. The choice to focus on what is quite an uninteresting human element to the story is what limited for me, essentially doing the opposite of what made 'Godzilla: King of the Monsters' good to its fans. (G:KOM just focused on the giant monsters fucking each other up, rather than boring, introspective human stories. Critics hated that but the fans loved it.)

Generally speaking, characters were quite flat throughout. They all fit an archetype or trope without showing a whole lot of range/depth outside the very important main characters (Naoufel, Gabriella and Gigi). But even those 3 had very limited levels of complication to their characters and barely grew or changed throughout the film. Naoufel's ultimate growth into being slightly less of a coward is a little abrupt and he's honestly not likeable enough as a character for that to even feel powerful. His backstory and coping mechanisms are very cool and the use of the recordings as plot device was great too. The directors do a good job of sprinkling these recordings throughout the film to keep the viewer waiting for answers.

I think directing and general approach was great. Again, visual storytelling was very strong from start to finish with lots of great shots directing the eye to exactly what the director wants and telling the story by showing (not telling).

The animation is good. Maybe very good but not amazing; there weren't many instances that left me genuinely amazed from an animation perspective. One that did however was the umbrella scene which sends the Hand into a spiral over busy traffic. The transition from blurry car lights to a star-covered space view was very clever but the scene was made by how well they animated the turning of the hand itself. The is was the best example of the concept of solid drawing being well displayed throughout the film, with animals, objects and buildings all feeling very 3-dimensional. Outside of that, the animation was believable enough to get the viewer invested in the story but definitely not the most impressive animation you'll ever see. I can also appreciate the appeal and tone of the highly stylised art and animation styles however, again, neither was amazing.

Overall 6/10. Holds the attention well and has moments of brilliance but the lack of great characters and a real story meant I personally didn't really enjoy it.

Update 31/03/2020: After reading about the making of the film, I'm quite impressed by how the animators were able to create this 2D film in a '3D' environment in blender. This doesn't change the effect of the animation and how it tells the story, but it's an interesting point worth noting.