Gunbuster (1988)

Director: Hideaki Anno

Studio: Gainax

Finished Watching: 18/11/2020

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for Gunbuster

Ratings:

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

I wanted to not mention that Gunbuster was Hideako Anno's directorial debut (even though that's basically the only reason I watched it), because things should be judged on their own merit and Anno's name is a pretty heavy one. But I have to admit, it's almost impossible not to mention that fact, since Gunbuster is pretty much exactly what you would expect from the mind behind Evangelion. It's even got a lot of very similar elements to NGE, the main similarity being you'll have a lot of questions as a viewer and receive next to no answers.

The plot is okay, maybe on the low end of 5 outta 10. There's no real explanation of why Noriko is the chosen one (other than her dad being a space hero), which is made worse by the fact Coach literally chooses her but never explains his decision. No explanation of why Gunbuster is so good either. The main storyline is that some monsters want to destroy the earth so they can survive and breed; although the show does flirt with the suggestion that that's understandable and the humans are the real threat, they barely scratch the surface and it just turns into an 'us vs. them' with no real substance. The enemies literally do not communicate in any way, so it's pretty brainless. I did like that the cost of missions was the passage of time on Earth - that felt very real. Everything else was very predictable though. There's also quite a lot of pointless side stuff - e.g., Smith was basically a convoluted plot device to make Noriko suddenly get serious and Jung could have just not existed and we'd have the same story.

This stuff kinda ties in with the storytelling - there aren't many plot hooks, so there isn't much 'storytelling' in that sense. Screen direction is good though - you see what you need to and they weren't afraid of a scientific/military map to orientate you. The ridiculous fanservice is enough to actually decrease your enjoyment of it, though.

The animation is a little bit plain. Frozen jaws, sliding cels and all that. The fight scenes are a bit of a mix, because the Gunbuster suit itself moves really well but the majority of the battles are just long-range gunfire, which is a bit naff (despite the effects animation being pretty good). Machinery on board the spaceships was animated well and I'm almost completely convinced they didn't use any kind of modelling for it (not sure what was available in 1988 tbf). They also did this outline blur thing at high-impact moments, which just looked a bit dead to me. I'll give it a 6 overall, just because the artwork was really nice (on the aliens especially).

Characters were pretty meh. They weren't complex as much as they were just inconsistent with themselves. Coach is the clearest example of an anime staple taken straight off the shelf. In contrast, Kimiko was someone who felt very real. Wouldn't get a poster with any of the characters on it though.

A kinda interesting watch but would only recommend if you're an Evangelion obsessive.

The Black Cauldron (1985)

Director(s): Ted Berman, Richard Rich

Studio: Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Feature Animation, Silver Screen Partners II

Watched: 31/10/2020

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for The Black Cauldron

Ratings:

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
3		3	4	7	2

Disappointing. Would never have imagined such brilliant animation would make such a boring film. Pretty much a story and storytelling disasterclass.

The animation is really nice and in that classic Disney style but it falls just short in some areas. For example, the character animation is really expressive but movements are in little jumps, rather than being completely fluid. The mouthing of speech seems to miss out a few syllables here and there, which makes it look a bit sloppy. A fair few of the animations feel a bit weightless too. That said though, it is still very well done throughout and definitely makes the film look appealing at least. One sequence that really stands out for being good is Hen Wen being captured by the dragons, especially where they used the dragons' shadows to build up the anticipation. The art design is a bit bland. Like the character designs are so bog standard that I don't even think an allowance can be made for the time the film was made. Shit was already tired back then. But the art itself is quite nice.

Anyway, here's a very poorly structured stream of thoughts on why the story and characters are so bad:

Taran's only want in life is to be a warrior. Fair enough in itself but we have absolutely no idea why. He just says it. Yeah there's the cute little fake swordfight thing at the start but that only half ties us into the already weak character motivation. Basically, they tell us but don't show us. Then in the castle, he finds a magic sword (through no action of his own) that kills all the bad guys for him. So he has no actual development - he's no closer to being a warrior than in minute 1 - but even worse, he starts being a cocky little prick about it. There's just no reason you, as the viewer, would be behind him.

Also, when he's in a situation, he stands around saying "no", "don't", "come back" and stupid shit like that instead of just getting stuck in and trying to help. That gets really annoying really quickly and is made worse by the voice actor, I think. It's honestly so bad that it makes the previously mentioned scene with Hen Wen almost unwatchable, despite how good it looks. His little winge at Gurgi is also unbearable.

The only character with anything likeable about them is Princess Eilonwy, who's actually proactively trying to escape from the castle. No idea why nor how she got there in the first place but at least she's influencing her own destiny (despite her magic little light ball thing doing a fair amount for her). But then of course she has a completely baseless romance with Taran. So that's 0/2 on characters.

There isn't really much wrong with Fflewddur Fflam but you could basically remove him from the entire film and the story would be exactly the same. So clearly a poor character and just highlights how weak the story is. I will give credit for his snapping strings being quite a cool quirk and the decent banter between him and one of the witches.

Speaking of the witches, what was the point of them? They were a terrible 'challenge' for the main characters to overcome to get the cauldron. Every rule they set out ends up not sticking, so they could literally have been replaced with something like a small hill that needed to be climbed. They con Taran and co. out of the magic sword but then Taran gets it back at the end. Then the very fundamental story device they add is that someone will have to give their life to destroy the cauldron... but then at the end, Gurgi just comes back to life anyway. It also does not make any sense why the witches would want the sword or the cauldron. They're another one that seems to just be there for decoration.

The fairies are rubbish and literally magic the main characters to where they need to be. For free. They didn't even ask them a riddle - just did it. So again, what was the point of them?

Gurgi was possibly the worst comic relief/cutesy character I've ever watched. His voice was creepy more than anything, so I never found him cute. His design was cool but the very prominent moustache made him look too adult-like, which just did not sit right with the rest of his design. Made him confusing and a bit uncanny. Also, he has no affiliation to anyone, so doesn't put himself in danger, which I quite liked. But then he sacrifices himself to destroy the cauldron for no apparent reason. At that point, he'd escaped capture and could easily have just carried on with his life. We didn't see any moment of resolution or rising to the challenge; he literally just popped up and was like "yeah, sorry about that" then hopped in the pot. Made no sense.

So that's like the main story point solved by a side character who doesn't even develop into the role but even worse, the big bad Horned King literally just dies. It's not said in the script anywhere that committing in the cauldron would cause someone who rose people from the dead using it to die. So Taran and them didn't even have to fight the Horned King in any way. Everything really does just seem to happen at random, with no link between anything.

Also, earlier on, they have the Cauldron and knew exactly how to destroy it but just sit around and don't for some reason. They aren't even deliberating about the fact someone would have to die; any one of them could have just popped themselves in it and wrapped ths whole thing up. Really dumb.

So yeah, basically a rubbish story with really unlikeable characters. Wasn't even spooky. Would not recommend this film to anyone, honestly.

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)

Dangaizer 3 (1999)

Director: Masami Ōbari

Writer: Reimu Aoki
Studio: Chaos Project

Completed viewing on 08/10/2020

Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for Dangaizer 3

Ratings:

OVERALL	NB: These are not weighted equally (if at all)	Plot	Storytelling	Animation	Characters
5		2	4	8	4

Not one single thing about Dangaizer 3 makes any sense. Not the story, not the premise, not any of the actions of any of the characters. It raises (honestly) about a hundred questions, which it doesn't even attempt to answer and feels like its 4 episodes capture a snippet of the middle chapters of a much longer story. But as an OVA, it was designed specifically to have only these 4 episodes, so we know that's not the case. In fact, it's a completely original work and has no other related media. So maybe the creators completely abandoned the idea of telling any kind of actual story and just decided to have as much fun as they could in ~100 minutes of screen time. If that was their goal, they absolutely smashed it. If not, the 90s were just a wild time.

The above clip is the sole reason I watched this show (shout out @randomsakuga). And that clip is all you really need to understand it. Absolutely bonkers character designs, great fights, phenomenal animation and intense 80s/90s anime vibes. Beyond that, there isn't really much to it. The story is basically non-existent; the script implies there are all these prophecies and histories behind it but it's like that's just a bluff the creators know they can't be called on. You kinda accept that and move on. Same with the cool but flat and sometimes confusing characters.

Character designs however (along with armour designs and mecha designs) are amazing. You could call some of them corny but the creators really don't seem to care, which is great. The style is like what you'd sketch in the side of your notebook when you were 11 (angel wings, capes, eyepatches, lots of buckles etc.) but these guys dial it up to 100. It's too unbothered to be cringey. Similar stuff can be said for the old school hard rock music and the nostalgic R&B opening and ending. The whole thing is literally 'no story, just vibes' and it really works.

The animation is undeniably great, as seen above. As much as I found myself in appreciation of the hand-drawn effects, the weighty, dimensional mechanical objects and the gorgeous art underpinning it all, I also just wondered what life must be like in an economic boom. Minimum-wage in-betweeners must honestly cry imagining a time when a rogue studio could afford to put this much beauty and detail into a random throwaway OVA. Ah well.

Last thing I'll say is I did find myself cringing at the very gratuitous 'fan service'. There was no need for it and it definitely detracted from the enjoyment of the show, especially when they quite plainly stated that the main character is in high school. I get it, they needed to sell copies, so fair enough but it's more than enough to make me never seriously recommend the show to anyone.

If I could rate Dangaizer 3 on animation and vibes alone, it would be an 8/10, dead serious. The kind of thing you could make loops out of for you 'alternative' music video.