Anime Reviews

[eatersthemanfool]

I finally got around to watching Tokyo Ghoul. It's pretty good. On like episode 9 or so, close to the end of season 1.

[KGRAMR]

I haven't watched it but what do you guys think about the boxing anime Megalo Box? I've heard some good things about it but i'm not too sure about it yet. It's worth watching? Just to know...

[edmonddantes]

So, umm... here's a surprise.

I was browsing manga on ebay and ran across "Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea"

I was like "Wait... I know that title..."

Yes, this IS a manga adaptation of a freeware RPG Maker game. I hope its better than the Yume Nikki manga (which I honestly didn't like).

Conundrum: Should I play the game first or read the manga?

EDIT:  Both my links are to English-language versions, BTW.

[kaoru]

Decided to watch Pokemon the Movie 20: I choose you! since that's the reboot one that's an alternative retelling of the beginning of the anime. It's a bit weird seeing a lot of the more pivotal moments of the first TV series remade, while at the same time not having Kasumi and Takeshi being the companions. It also has some really weird out of place scenes, like that one bad dream where Satoshi is in our real world without Pokemon, or hearing Pikachu speak at the end. The movie should probably also have ended earlier, when they teach the antagonist a thing about the strength in friendship or some of the usual nonsens and ending it as a downplayed adventure movie, instead of coming up with the obligatory big dumb climax that involves a very half-assed legend.

[Woody Alien]

May 15, 2018 1:02:07 GMT -5 edmonddantes said:

So, umm... here's a surprise.

I was browsing manga on ebay and ran across "Wadanohara and the Great Blue Sea"

I was like "Wait... I know that title..."

Yes, this IS a manga adaptation of a freeware RPG Maker game. I hope its better than the Yume Nikki manga (which I honestly didn't like).

Conundrum: Should I play the game first or read the manga?

EDIT:  Both my links are to English-language versions, BTW.

Technically you should play the game first, but I think it's not as good as many claim (I found it to start well enough and then becoming tedious and tiring, read my opinion on page 45 of the Game Finish thread if you care) so maybe you should just stick to read the manga.

[edmonddantes]

So here's a show I didn't expect to be watching again, but I recently found a website (which I'm not sure its okay to link to) featuring the old WolfPackProductions fansubs of Sonic X.

I don't think I've ever seen the english dubbed version, and I remember trying to watch the subs once and getting bored... this time? I'm still wavering between being bored and being oddly interested in this little beast. I don't mind it having its own take on the characters and mythology since, well, that's kind of a tradition in Sonic animation (remember the time he had a brother and sister and they were in a rock band?), but I do have the following thoughts:

1. Okay, for as much as the show (and franchise in general) tries to push Sonic and Amy being the One True Pair.... Amy has far more chemistry with Knuckles than she does with Sonic. I seriously expect this to be like that pink-haired girl from Fist of the North Star where she eventually realized that Bat/Bart was her true love while she only had eyes for Kenshiro all this time. I would honestly have respect for this series if they did that.

2. I can see why people hated Chris Thorndyke. I haven't even gotten to any eps where he does anything annoying yet (I'm five episodes in) but the kid just freaking acts like a robot. I mean I get that he might've been meant to be a "see, this is how good children act!" kinda character for the audience to learn from, but it honestly makes him kinda creepy, he might as well be a robot. Its actually a problem he shares with most of the human characters who aren't that cool old guy. Is Japan actually like this?

3. Sorry to be fanboyish, but I will never accept the name "Eggman." I always mentally translate it to "Robotnik."

4. Speaking of which... he uses a deck of cards to decide which robot to use. How very Power Rangers. Actually the first time I watched this show this "robot of the day" thing was why I got bored as I had already watched two other shows with a similar formula. Also, part of me wants to hear him say "make my monster GROW!"

5. In the Japanese version, Sonic will sometimes speak in random English. I actually really like this.

6. In the first episode, during a crowd shot (its when Sonic first arrives on Earth) I swear Lupin the Third is in the crowd. I have a pic of the scene but I dunno how to upload to this forum. Lupin makes everything else awesome by association.

7. Ya know, Robotnik lying to Knuckles might've been more believable if he hadn't thrown in the "I wanna just live in peace!" part. I mean before that he had said he wanted to go home, which hey, that's pretty believable and is enough to make Knuckles sympathetic. Of course, Knuckles buys the entire story anyway, but still, on anyone else that probably would've broke the story right there.

8. This series eventually becomes an adaptation of Sonic Adventure 1 and 2, right? So are there gonna be parts where Sonic randomly falls through the floor or can't make it up a ramp because the collision with a speed boost didn't activate like it was supposed to? Okay that was a cheap shot, but... eh.

Anyway, not sure how much further I will get since I kinda overdid my Sonic fixation and wound up burned out, but I'll try to watch a few more episodes at a more reasonable pace.

[Woody Alien]

So I was reading about the ongoing giant robot series Darling in the Franxx jointly produced by A1 and Trigger; being somewhat of a Trigger fan and knowing that they should know their stuff about giant robots (being made by former Gainax employees and all) I was curious about it.

However, something went wrong: from what I've heard is basically a shitty Evangelion ripoff with early 2000s character designs, insipid characters, terrible pacing, a stupid plot that pretends to be clever with tons of symbolism, absurd technobabble and a moral that apparently amounts to "if you don't get with a girl and don't make babies, you aren't human!!1!1!". I kind of miss when JDarkside wrote on the forum, if only because it could be amusing reading him have a hissy fit over the supposed "heteronormativity" of this show and all its other bad implications.

And the only reason the show could be remembered in the future, well-loved female character 02 (yes that's her "name")... well she was pretty much Frankensteined (Franxxensteined?) from every single Studio Gainax and Trigger waifu beloved feisty female character, plus Lum Invader that is THE quintessential anime magical girlfriend, so I think they don't even get a good grade for originality. One thing's a "homage" (even an internal one, such as Trigger's earlier Space Patrol Luluco that was a celebration of its first five years), another is lazily reusing stuff from earlier, better shows just to be sure that people would like what you're doing.

[Snake]

Been watching Isekai Izakaya Nobu.  Damn show makes me so hungry.  And thirsty for frosty beer and chilled sake.  It always showcases a new Japanese dish each episode. Plus, I enjoy the bonus, real-life segments where they show how to prepare food or where to get the dish of the episode.

[kaoru]

Watched Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV. The not very unimportant fall of Insomnia, which otherwise happens completely off screen in the main game for some reason. Actually surpisingly decent a movie. Mindless action flick with stereotypical characters and some of the most cliched dialogue lines ever (Lunafreya drew an especially short stick, talking throughout the whole thing in nothing but meaningless platitutes), but it is great looking and full of cool action and does have nice more calm scene here and there. Bombast and enterining, even if not overly remarkable.

The weird thing tho is how much these characters look like real humans. Like sure, they are modeled after such, but it clashes heavily with how the recurring ones look in the main game.

[loempiavreter]

Apr 20, 2018 19:28:37 GMT -5 toei said:

That's most likely it. And Toshinden is Z-grade, not B-grade, ResidentTsundere!

God i miss v-cinema. Miike did his most fun stuff in that era. Now he only makes shitty anime adaptions and big budget samurai epics (without half the fun the old chambara's had). There was also this cool v-cinema flick, which was very cosmic horror/lovecraftian about this gizza finding a naked girl in the subway chained to the wall. Anyone know the title?

[toei]

I'm a fan of V-Cinema, too. Truth is, most of it was generic low-budget garbage (Miike himself estimated it at 90%, but most of the boring stuff didn't make it to subs), but it also gave directors the freedom to just do whatever the hell they wanted, which resulted in a lot of great, completely unique movies. At least Miike's still around, and some of his mainstream movies still show some of his energy and humor. Rokuro Mochizuki and Takashi Ishii had to go back to making erotic movies.

The movie you're describing doesn't ring any bells at all. Any idea who made it, or who was in it? Did it have a lot of erotic content (ie a pinku), or was it more horror?

[loempiavreter]

Sept 4, 2018 0:48:48 GMT -5 toei said:

I'm a fan of V-Cinema, too. Truth is, most of it was generic low-budget garbage (Miike himself estimated it at 90%, but most of the boring stuff didn't make it to subs), but it also gave directors the freedom to just do whatever the hell they wanted, which resulted in a lot of great, completely unique movies. At least Miike's still around, and some of his mainstream movies still show some of his energy and humor. Rokuro Mochizuki and Takashi Ishii had to go back to making erotic movies.

The movie you're describing doesn't ring any bells at all. Any idea who made it, or who was in it? Did it have a lot of erotic content (ie a pinku), or was it more horror?

Not a pinku fam. Story later on resembled lovecraft's 'in the mountain of madness' a bit, when they venture into the subterranean lairs of the subway in all the dv cam glory.

And well i don't think that v-cinema differs that much from the borderless action, suntribe and ATG movies of the 50s/60s or the pinku's of the 70s imo.

Does Electric Dragon 20.000v count as V-cinema?

[toei]

Borderless action films were mostly very derivative of Western cinema (that was the whole point), and not especially creative, unless you count Seijun Suzuki's antics, but he got fired for them. Miike did much crazier stuff, and it never hurt his career, because the people financing v-cinema left you alone as long as they made a certain number of sales. Suntribe is a specific sub-genre of movies involving mostly upper-class, rebellious kids. They're not especially gritty or interesting. Not a fan of either sub-genre. And pinku is limited by the fact that there's pretty much got to be a sex scene every 10 minutes. That's quite the constraint, and while some are surprisingly good, most of it is just harsh S & M stuff, which isn't my thing at all.
ATG movies vary wildly, since it was just a structure that financed and distributed independent movies. Definitely skews more towards intellectual & "artsy" movies, with a lot of deconstructionist New Wave stuff.

Technically, V-Cinema was a brand that belonged to Toei, standing for "video cinema", that made movies directly for the video market. When it took off, a lot of other companies followed suit, and from '89 to about '02, there was the "O(riginal) V(ideo) boom". The term V-Cinema sort of became synonymous because it was the leading brand, sort of like "Kleenex" with "tissue", though I don't know if that's just in the West, or also in Japan. Originally, the idea was to produce a lineup of short, straight-to-the-point action movies, with higher production values then what we associate with the straight-to-video market in the West, but it diversified. Toei were yakuza movie specialists, so before long there were a ton of them. Anime OVAs took off. Cyberpunk. Horror became huge after Ringu's success (which wasn't an OV), and even after the DVD market disappeared and killed the OV / V-Cinema, cheap Found Footage ghost flicks kept coming out for years, along with pinkus. Miike was known to diverge from a script however much he felt like, and go wherever his imagination took him; this got him an international audience through festivals like Fantasia, and boosted his career in Japan. There's a small tradition of Japanese directors doing that before him, but it's still a minority, because most of the stuff that works commercially in Japan is a lot more clichéd and ordinary than we think. Seijun Suzuki did it sometimes in his last few years at Nikkatsu; Norifumi Suzuki often did it at Toei in the '70s. Obayashi did it at Toho with House in '77. But because OVs were produced faster and for less, and because they could be marketed directly to adults, there was basically no censorship, and often little oversight, which is how the better directors were able to make exactly what they wanted, and some of them wanted to do some wild stuff.

I'm not sure whether Electric Dragon 80000V was released in theaters or not.

[Snake]

Finished up Gundam: The Origin.

So sad it doesn't finish up the manga series. All of the action for the final episode happens in the first half, just ending into the events that officially start the One Year War.
For the most part, it's really just focuses on Char's transition from runaway prince into Zeon's cold, calculating, manipulative legend. It's great for what it manages to cover.

[loempiavreter]

Sept 4, 2018 19:50:42 GMT -5 toei said:

....

I appreciate the write up fam, but im quite well versed wiv me genre's bruv. I do stretch the boundries abit inconfess, as i do include v-cinema from the rival companies of toei, like i stretch my definition of ATG cinema outside the ATG company.

But seriously a good gross of v-cinema, despite it's freedom, are either straight up actioners and yakuza flicks not that far removed from what borderless action films did in the 50s/60s. Avant garde, in which case ATG and japanese new wave are not that far off, or those slice of life flicks in which case sun tribe films are not that far iff despite the latter having a more thematic focus.

But what i miss of V-cinema is producing at a fast rate, the hit and miss quality, the low end dv quality and it's freedom to do whatever filmmakers want.

To condemn the output of 60s japan cinema to, only seijun suzuki was a wild maverick filmmaker is a disservice to the wondery surreal and out there work of the japanese avant garde. And while i adore Seijun (the influence he had on the 70s on the likes of female prisoner scorpion and blind woman's curse, def learned from suzuki's kabuki stage theatrics influence), there where other maverick directors, directors that made even more mental flicks.

Btw i found the title of the cosmic horror title and it's called 'Marebito'. Maybe not so v-cinema, still class.

So any v-cinema title u recommend? Something in the vein of 'the man whole stole the sun'?