Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash
Alternate Titles: Hai to Gensou no Grimgar, Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion, Grimgal of Ashes and Fantasies, Hai to Gensou no Grimgal
[starrater]
Alternate Titles: Hai to Gensou no Grimgar, Grimgal of Ashes and Illusion, Grimgal of Ashes and Fantasies, Hai to Gensou no Grimgal
[starrater]
Alternate Titles: School Live!
[starrater]
[starrater]
Alternate Titles: Gate: Thus the JSDF Fought There!
[starrater]
[starrater]
[starrater]
Alternate Titles: Silver Fox
[starrater]
Alternate Titles:
Silver Spoon
Review:
When Gin no Saji was first announced it made a large buzz in the anime world because it was the first anime to be created by the famed manga artist, Hiromu Arakawa, who brought us the Full Metal Alchemist series. Silver Spoon also benefited from having a recently well known director, Tomohiko Ito, at the helm. Ito is recognized as being the director of the hugely popular Sword Art Online series. A lot of expectations were set up from the start with this anime because of its “all-star” staff, but does it live up to the hype?
Gin no Saji from the outset couldn’t be more different than the aforementioned Sword Art Online and Full Metal Alchemist. The famed creator and director find themselves operating in a very different genre, “slice of life”, more specifically agricultural “slice of life”. There aren’t too many, if any, anime that exist on farms or deal with farm animals so its certainly true that Gin no Saji brings something fresh to the table.
The series takes us through a large number of agricultural and farming lessons that cover such topics as milking cows, dealing with raising chickens, making cheese, making pizza, raising pigs, and of course, coming to grips with the slaughtering of animals to which one may have become attached. Gin no Saji does all these things and it does it with a good blend of humor, character interaction, and generally crisp and refreshing visuals.
All this seems great but throughout the course of the series, viewers might have found themselves wondering, “where is this going”, “what is the conflict”, and “will there be a climax”? Unfortunately, this is a slice of life anime, and this genre often depends on internal character struggle to be the overall conflict of the show, the engine that keeps things moving forward. It should be noted that Gin no Saji doesn’t have a very strong engine. If this anime were a car, it would be a Prius; all about the environment and not so much about moving things along. The series truly lacks the kind of internal struggle that one hopes to see in a slice of life story. Of course the typical theme of “I don’t know what to do with my life”, is present but Hachiken never really convincingly decides where he is going in life. The one main struggle Hachiken has is with befriending the animals he will inevitably be slaughtering. However, after several episodes of dealing with this subject, he repeats his initial mistake at the end of the series by naming yet another piglet. Despite the ironic and humorous names he assigns such as “pork bowl”, one can’t help be feel like, while Hachiken might have learned something, we went in a circle. This anime falls well short of some of its predecessor anime such as Honey and Clover or Hanasaku Iroha in the department of fleshing out internal character struggle.
In addition to the lack of struggle, in a genre that often depends on it, the show is very much a “flat liner” all the way through. The series passes the viewer through episodes that focus on individual tasks such as making pizza and how to properly attach the pumping hoses to the teats of a cow but ultimately there is a huge lack of excitement either external or internal of a character The viewer will find themself waiting for the moment where the series peaks its story, but this moment will come.
So all in all, Gin no Saji is a nice little “slice of life” show that is well made and enjoyable to watch. The characters are generally likeable but it is held back by lack of a punctuated character struggle and an overall engine that drives the story. This anime is set to have a sequel in Winter 2013 so perhaps these developments will occur then.
[starrater]
– Review by Dustin Kramer
Isn’t the Internet great? Think of all the things we can do with it — sharing, communicating, manifesting our digital selves in the physical world to deal with crime and natural disaster recovery. Wait, we can’t do that last one? Well, if we can’t by 2015, we’ve been scammed (also hover boards and Mr. Fusion, please and thank you). But imagine if we could actually eliminate the need for central authority and organizations by using cyberspace to self-govern. Could it really work? Gatchaman Crowds attempts to answer this question and a few others. Let’s dive in.
In the aforementioned near-future landscape of 2015, the Gatchaman are a group of not-so-super superheroes in the fictional Japanese city of Tachikawa. With only one of their five members, the paragon Sugane Tachibana, actively fighting alien invaders known as MESS, there seems to be some trouble in paradise. Paisan, the supergroup’s cowardly leader, is an alien that looks like a panda — but don’t you dare call him one. His bark is much worse than his bite, and he avoids violent conflict at all costs. Utustsu is a recluse, crippled by social anxiety and the fear that she might hurt someone with her power. Jou, the misanthrope, has been jaded by too many years on the G-Crew (just think of him as the grizzled cop that’s “too old for this shit”). OD rounds out the group as the swishy, self-described “Gatchaman who can’t transform.” Right, so, who needs broken superheroes anyway?
Rui Ninomiya, or LOAD-GALAX as he’s known online, has developed a social network that allows users to connect and help one another with various issues. Need legal advice? The GALAX platform will connect you with an attorney and reward the counselor with a kind of proprietary currency. Rui’s goal is ambitious; he wants to break down old systems of power and leadership and “update the world” in accordance with his ideology. He dreams of a world where individuals use the internet to advise and protect one another, upholding the universal understanding of discovered law. But his logic is flawed. He has recruited an elite group of 100 GALAX users to participate in a special program called Crowds — a platform that allows its participants to drop physical avatars into the real world to deal with more immediate threats to humanity like earthquakes and riots. So, in relying on his own wisdom to determine which 100 among us deserve this privilege, he has effectively recreated the hierarchy that he wishes to dismantle. Crowds is only made possible through technology (or magic or whatever) called NOTE, a small device the Gatchaman also use to transform into their super suits. He is given this by Berg Katze, an androgynous alien who will become important later.
At this point it should be apparent that Gatchaman Crowds begins as a sort of anti-superhero tale. It succinctly establishes a world in which the heroes are ineffective in comparison to a benevolent populace. It’s very Japanese, really. Rui’s pro-collectivism is conveyed loud and clear and exists in contrast to the far more individualist, god-like hero tales from Western comic book fiction. The theme even gets its own scene where Rui speaks to one of his Crowds users, but the dialogue here only serves to expose the living hell out of something that, unfortunately, was already quite obvious had you been, you know, watching the show — but its point is an interesting one to be sure. A part of me hoped that the story would focus on illustrating how veritable gods find their place in a world that no longer needs them. The direction it ends up going in is a bit more conventional but thematically satisfying all the same — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
In the first episode, the G-Crew’s status quo of virtual inactivity is promptly disrupted by a hand grenade of eccentricity known as Hajime Ichinose. Unconventionality made flesh, the secondary school scrapbooking sweetheart is tapped out by the Gatchaman’s overseer, the mysterious JJ. Questioning the G-Crew’s every method of operation and quickly disregarding any and all instruction she is given, Hajime all but neutralizes humanity’s primary threat, MESS, by the end of the second episode. Maaya Uchida’s shrill performance here is fittingly irritating given the nature of the character. Love her or hate her, Hajime is a force to be reckoned with — but so is Berg Katze (I told you he’d be back).
Once MESS has been taken care of, Berg Katze uses his strange power of transforming into someone by kissing them to steal Rui’s identity, hijack GALAX, recruit his own “Neo Hundred,” and begin wreaking havoc with Crowds, awarding points to users for blowing up government buildings and the like. However, it only takes a couple of conversations with Hajime for her to figure out that Berg Katze is her equal opposite. Where Hajime promotes transparency by removing her Gatchaman costume in public and introducing herself by name, Berg Katze hides behind the faces of those he kisses. And it’s in observing this dichotomy that the conflict resolution becomes clear. Rui decides to take Crowds public, allowing anyone and everyone to become a user, but he no longer trusts in the inherent good of the general public. He makes the cynical yet effective decision to turn the whole thing into a game — much like Berg Katze did — but instead of winning points for acts of terrorism, users can make food for refugees, participate in rescue parties, et cetera. The plan works; before long, Berg Katze is hopping around, powerlessly begging for someone to pay attention to him. Quite a fitting end for the world’s worst internet troll.
Gatchaman Crowds turns out to be a fairly dense show thematically. Its politics land a bit on the cynical side, but that doesn’t mean they don’t ring true. The show uses GALAX and Crowds to effectively illustrate the usefulness of the internet as a communication and organization tool but decries the value of anonymity in cyberspace. I can’t imagine this show is popular with those darker corners of the internet that seem to thrive on facelessness. The world of Gatchaman reconciles itself somewhere between the communist ideology sought by Rui at the beginning of the series and the currently standing hierarchy of power but doesn’t take any time to explore the longterm implications of this compromise. What happens when Crowds users discover more profitable ways to exploit the platform outside of the built-in reward system? What can be done when these activities cross into the realm of illegality? Instead of addressing these issues, the series uses valuable runtime (half an episode to be exact) to flashback and re-explain how Hajime has helped her comrades throughout the course of the show. Oh, well.
And that brings me to the problem with Hajime. She is the necessary antithesis to Berg Katze, a force of absolute good to combat a force of absolute evil. She is the manic pixie dream girl that shows up to cast an unrelenting ray of sunshine on all of the dark spots within the G-Crew. She is the angel on your shoulder whose words you strive to embrace, even when Berg Katze shows up on the other shoulder to offer you a more enjoyable but malevolent alternative. Because of this, she’s not what you’d call a dynamic character. The writers go to great pains to show you how perfect she is and how her perfection comes at a price — she’s weird. Rui’s whole concept that the normal people will do “the right thing” is totally debunked the moment Hajime shows up. Sure, she’ll always do the right thing, but she is in no way normal. This is absolutely the point. Hajime and Berg Katze are both ideas, and when the villain is absorbed into our heroine’s body in the last moments of the final episode, you get the feeling that this combination of light and dark finally bestows Hajime with all the good and bad that it takes to be “normal,” whatever that means.
The series has a very distinct sense of style — one that I’m admittedly not very fond of. The bright, piercing eyes and broad streaks across characters’ hair is a bit too Candy Land for me, but I really can’t blame someone else for finding the look appealing. Lots of the animation is pretty janky, save for a couple of sequences near the beginning and end of the series. Some elements (like the Tiger & Bunny-esque Gatchaman suits and the cubic MESS aliens) are rendered in CG and don’t look nearly as shoddy as a lot of the other animation. While the hero costumes are a bit busier design-wise, the way they blend in with other elements frankly puts T&B to shame.
Taku Iwasaki’s soundtrack is also notable, utilizing a variety of styles to fill out the atmosphere of the series. The main action theme brings to mind funky exploitation film scores from the 1970s and is a personal favorite of mine. Other musical styles explored are as eclectic as orchestral, electronica, and choral.
I’d like to applaud how progressive Gatchaman Crowds is for featuring three, count ’em, three LGBT character who aren’t defined by their sexual proclivities within the story. However, the realization that the cute panda character is likely meant to sell toys and the prepubescent “introvert” inexplicably wears a bikini everywhere is a forceful reminder that you are indeed watching anime. I guess some harmful tropes are just easier to overcome than others.
Gatchaman Crowds deserves praise for it’s ambitious take on individual and group morality in the internet age. It still feels pretty incomplete in places, but I doubt it could have been much more fleshed out — even if its allotted 12 episodes had been used a tad more economically. Having no experience with the Gatchaman franchise until now, I can’t make an educated recommendation of this series to fans of the older stuff. I can, however, recommend it to anyone who likes a pretty good superhero story with some somewhat heavy cerebral stuff mixed in.
3.5 androgynous aliens out of 5.
[starrater]
by Dustin Kramer
When it comes to analyzing anthology films, there is always the question of how to approach them. Should each entry be examined based on its own merits, or should the collection be discussed as a singular entity? In short film anthologies where multiple filmmakers are gathered to create pieces under a unifying theme or idea, one should expect that each work will vary greatly in narrative, tone, style, and even the artists’ personal interpretations of that coalescing concept. This encourages the analyst to consider the entries independently. But then what is the point of gathering them under a common banner? Is it simply for convenient consumption? In this piece I will take a look at Studio 4°C’s presumptuously titled Genius Party, a collection of seven animated shorts by Japanese filmmakers, and ponder whether its entries need to be seen as an undivided unit or if they are better cherry-picked from the lot and enjoyed as standalone projects.
Genius Party
The film opens with Atsuko Fukushima’s Genius Party, which lends its title to the anthology as a whole. The short begins with what appears to be a man dressed in a makeshift bird costume wandering through the desert. When the bird-man finds a stony sphere with a face admiring a flower, he snatches the little stone’s heart and eats it, causing him to grow fiery wings. Another stone witnesses the strange transformation and decides to eat its own heart. A tall, iridescent flower sprouts from the rock creature, develops wings, and flies into the sky to the amazement of all the other smiling boulders who are now exposing their own hearts. A bolt of lightning descends from the sky and bounces from heart to heart taking us to our title screen, which serves to bookend this collection of films. We briefly return to the bird from the beginning who is staring blankly at a massive, fleshy, pulsating film projector surrounded by a floating ring of stone creatures. Thus ends the first segment of the movie.
Although undeniably strange and kinetic, this introduction doesn’t serve to establish much of an overarching concept or idea for the films to follow. Sure, I could wax intellectual and pronounce the unifying nature of cinema appreciation as the central theme of this opening segment, but the short barely gives me enough to make such an assessment. Moreover, the films that follow don’t seem to share this message. Apart from the animation, the best thing about this segment is its percussive, electronic soundtrack.
Shanghai Dragon
Next up is Shoji Kawamori’s Shanghai Dragon. This film follows a bullied Chinese boy who finds a glowing device that will bring into reality whatever he draws with it. Soon after this discovery, the planet is invaded by space ships and robotic war machines. The boy must exploit his newly acquired equipment to save the Earth from destruction. After becoming a superhero in the vein of popular super sentai series and saving the world, the boy learns that the invaders came from a star far away and in the distant future. He sketches and summons a dragon to travel there and, presumably, fight on.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this portion of the anthology is how inconsistent the animation quality is. From top to bottom, it constantly wavers between top-tier production values and the stuff of TV budgets. One of the more interesting aspects of the animation is how the elements drawn with the device never look like they are totally part of the surrounding world but actually like what they are: haphazard doodles come to life. Despite the issues and an ending that feels tacked-on, Shanghai Dragon proves too charming to dislike and is among the better segments in Genius Party.
Deathtic 4
The cute-but-grotesque Deathtic 4 breaks up the mostly traditional animation that fills out the rest of the anthology. We are introduced to a world full of zombies and monsters living out run-of-the-mill, day-to-day existences. When a strange storm brings a living frog to this morbid place, a zombie boy recruits his friends to help him return the frog to the living world before it is discovered and killed.
An interestingly produced piece to be sure, director Shinji Kimura appears to have digitized hand-drawn textures and layered them over computer animated characters and backgrounds to create a world that exists visually somewhere between CG animation, claymation, and traditional animation. Outside of action sequences, the frame rate suffers. The stop-and-go vibe doesn’t work quite the way it does in claymation and ultimately only distracts the viewer. This derivative story about the subjectivity of “life” and whether it is worth protecting is no where near as successful as its stylistic cousins by filmmakers like Tim Burton and Henry Selick.
Doorbell
Comic book artist Yoji Fukuyama’s Doorbell tells the story of a high school student who must outrun ghostly clones of himself to his daily pedestrian destinations. If the apparitions beat him, they commandeer his life, making him — the “real” version — invisible to friends and family.
Perhaps more than any other animated film I’ve seen, Doorbell is noticeably the work of a manga artist. Fukuyama, who had only worked in comics prior to this project, has made a distinctly static animated film. Impeccably framed and kinetically stunted, this segment is an excellent example of how a medium can perform outside your limited expectations. Not above or below them, mind you, but in a different space than you might envisage given the chosen art form. This is not to say that the short is a series of unmoving images; the shots that the director chooses to linger on define what the audience will take away from the experience when it cuts to black. What ends up being a cogent allegory for self-improvement is a standout in this collection.
Limit Cycle
I wish I could give you a summary of Hideki Futamura’s Limit Cycle, but the absence of any semblance of a narrative structure makes that impossible. I wish I could tell you about the characters of this piece and how they grow and change or at least how the world changes around them, but that’s pretty hard to do when there aren’t any. I wish I could initiate a conversation on how this segment utilizes its animation in a way that is unique or interesting or beautiful, but it doesn’t.
Limit Cycle can only be described as a longwinded, self-important musing on God versus the self and individualism versus hive mind. Its points are hardly coherent and read more like throw-it-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks poetry than the essay that it means to be. It begins with vivid, aggressive sequences over loosely related narration. Eventually, we are given biblical illustrations flying toward the camera in lieu of the interesting, if pointless, animation we were treated to at the outset. Unsuccessful in almost every way, Limit Cycle is unmerciful at almost 20 minutes long and is among the lengthiest pieces in the anthology.
Happy Machine
Masaaki Yuasa’s Happy Machine follows a baby as he discovers that his nursery and everything in it, including his caretakers, are artificial. What follows is a grand, psychedelic adventure of obstacles far too dangerous for any real infant to traverse. Imagine Patrick Read Johnson’s Baby’s Day Outif it had it been written based on an LSD-fueled fever dream and you’re on the right track.
The color pallet and designs are simple, and the animation is fluid. The segment is easily one of the most visually interesting and beautiful shorts inGenius Party. A dynamic elemental motif guides the aberrant narrative as the baby encounters various creatures with the visual and functional flourishes of fire, water, air, earth, and metal. The short’s weakness is its pacing, which disrupts its message about the cyclical nature of life. It loses its way near the end when the baby is nearly consumed by a giant plant while trying to save one of his new friends. In an awkward time skip, we cut to the baby as an old man walking through the desert. He travels alone pulling a wagon behind him carrying rough wooden sculptures of the creatures he met as an infant. He finds a colossal humanoid structure — likely the titular “happy machine” — on the dry plains. Entering it, he finds a crying baby in a dark, empty version of the fake nursery he came from himself. Back outside the contraption, the old man sacrifices himself to power it up, returning color and life to its interior and happiness to the infant. The final title card reads tsugi — not the Japanese word for “end,” but rather the word for “next.”
Baby Blue
Baby Blue, written and directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, posits a hypothetical. “What if we forget about today and our futures?” He puts these words in his characters’ mouths — a high school aged boy and girl — but he wants the audience to answer the question. Maybe not “what if” but “what would be left?” Without today or the future, we are left with the past. The things we do today, whether in service of our fleeting desires or the trajectory of a life hopefully well-lived, may stay with us forever. What we disregard today we will certainly remember tomorrow.
The high school students, portrayed with realistically understated performances, take this paradoxical manifesto of sorts and play hooky from school. Using only the money in their pockets at the time of departure, they make for the beach. Reminiscing along the way about similar flights of mischief from their childhoods, it’s clear that these two have a rich, well-recollected history of “forgetting about today and the future.” After stealing a bike, getting lost, outrunning a police officer, and evading a biker gang with the help of a hand grenade (yes, you read that correctly), the runaways reach their destination. A solemn conversation at the sea laments missed opportunities despite having lived a life together. The mutual disappointment of never exploring a romantic relationship with one another is poignant and real. With the events of the day too recent to see through rose-colored glasses, the could’ve-been-couple retreats to their homes feeling a bit lost.
Had I not known that Baby Blue was the product of Shinichiro Watanabe, there’s only one other person I would have guessed directed this piece: Makoto Shinkai. Like the brunt of Shinkai’s body of work, this film relies on the audience’s understanding of nostalgia to provide emotional resonance. It even looks like a Shinkai film when it utilizes beautifully rendered wide shots of cloudy skies — almost a hallmark of the man’s films at this point. But unlike Shinkai, Watanabe demonstrates that the character’s feelings of nostalgia can’t be dwelled upon too much without making the characters seem inactive, as though in a state of arrested development. Instead, Watanabe conveys that time spent together recalling “the good ole days” will be indiscriminately reminisced about in years to come. It’s a bittersweet reality that we can’t see how happy we are today until we reflect on it as a bygone age. The nostalgic overtones don’t define the film like they tend to in Shinkai’s work but alternately enhance Watanabe’s message about the nature of the emotion. The films draws to a close in a scene with an extremely low frame rate, as though sequenced with a series of photographs — perhaps the ultimate symbol of happy recollection.
* * * * * * * * * *
The need for these movies to be assembled under a single title confounds me. There is no narrative, thematic, or creative through-line connecting the seven films that comprise Genius Party, and the fact that five more films were originally intended to be included in this collection (later released asGenius Party Beyond) speaks volumes about the importance — or lack thereof — of sequence with these stories. The only shared element between these productions is where the animation was produced, Studio 4°C. In this light, it feels less like a creative boundary for a group of artists to work within — as seen in Tokyo! or Paris, je t’aime – and more like a sizzle real for the production studio. I assume the title refers to the filmmakers, but the pervasiveness of modesty in Japanese culture makes this a little hard to swallow. In any case, however you decide to watch these shorts — whether to completion and in their collected order or independently of the Genius Party placard — shouldn’t affect your experience.