Samurai Flamenco
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3.0
Sensualist, The
The Sensualist is a 1991 animated film from Studio Grouper based on The Life of an Amorous Man, the 17th century novel by Ihara Saikaku. The movie should presumably tell the story of Yonosuke, a clothing store proprietor and titular amorous man. However, the film’s actual narrative has little to do with Yonosuke but rather a foolish tailor by the name of Juzo. You see, Juzo is in a bit of a pinch. He made a silly bet with some jerk-off that he could sleep with famed courtesan Komurasaki at their premier meeting, so now he’s off toward the capital city of Edo to make good on his wager. Problem is, Komurasaki is a very classy lady and doesn’t just invite any old joker into her futon. In fact, she doesn’t serve working class patrons at all, and even if she did, she doesn’t kiss on the first date. Like I said, a very classy lady. It looks like Juzo’s going to lose his bet, so what’s on the line anyway?
Not much–just his penis.
Lucky for our hapless tailor with the doomed dong, merchant class hunk Yonosuke has a bit of a history with the high-class hooker. Feeling bad for poor Juzo, the shop owner sets up a meeting with Komurasaki so the guileless gambler will at least have a shot at saving his manhood, but it is still a long-shot.
The Sensualist is an obvious labor of love by director Yukio Abe, who has found quite a bit of success in the anime industry as an art director (Colorful), background artist (The Dagger of Kamui), and audio engineer (Battle Angel). Those up on their Japanese film history should recognized the name of screenwriter Eiichi Yamamoto, frequent collaborator with the late “god of manga” Osamu Tezuka. The movie is short, clocking in at a brisk 55 minutes that is spent jumping back and forth between the central story with Juzo and the aforementioned backstory of Yonosuke, including his past encounters with Komurasaki. The easiest complaint of the film is its uneven script. The flashbacks should ideally serve to illuminate Yonosuke’s motivations in helping Juzo, but they only ever denote the ostensible protagonist as a lifelong libertine. The end result is a main character whose development feels told rather than shown. Furthermore, Yonosuke’s eventual success with Juzo’s conflict ultimately has little to do with his past and is quickly explained away in the penultimate scene with Komurasaki.
But where the movie falters in story it makes up for in aesthetics.
The movie is visually striking, summoning motifs from the ukiyo-e paintings of Edo period Japan to fill its frames. Many shots entirely abandon depth for super flat images that more closely resemble the antiquated art form. The depiction of water as undulating white lines against a dark field is especially reminiscent of the renowned woodblock prints. The male characters are drawn with a slightly more modern sensibility, but the female characters–especially Komurasaki–appear to have stepped right out of “Three Known Beauties” or “Beauty and Attendant.” The animation is limited by its resources, but there is no doubt that each frame was painstakingly fine-tuned to Abe’s meticulous vision, resulting in a piece that feels handmade, human, and brimming with graphic information.
Pervasive sexual symbolism adds a layer of artistry to the erotic depictions in the film–everything from the lotus flower as a time-honored vaginal metaphor to the somewhat hokey, phallic turtle’s head breaking into frame before revealing itself to be but the shelled amphibian. More esoteric imagery conveys the act of sexual penetration in evocative, beautiful ways–lightning strikes, orange flames against a backdrop of ocean waves, and even a series of red lines suggestively folding into one another.
Despite its technical limitations, The Sensualist is certainly a gem that has been forgotten by time. As one of only four projects that Grouper Productions had a hand in and a crew with this as their sole credit to this day (I couldn’t even find a cast list), this bit of direct-to-video art seems to have left no mark whatsoever on the world of animation, and that’s a shame. Those trying to track this down on home video will likely only dig up the Japanese DVD release of director Yasuzou Masumura’s live-action adaptation from 1961. As far as I know, The Sensualist has only seen life on home video as a VHS release. If you have the opportunity to see this little movie in any form, I highly recommend you take advantage of it.
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Hunter X Hunter Phantom Rouge
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Gingitsune
Alternate Titles: Silver Fox
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Gin no Saji
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.
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Rozen Maiden – Zurückspulen
Alternate Titles:
Rozen Maiden 2
Rozen Maiden Rewind
Rozen Maiden 2013
Plot:
Jun is a middle school boy who endured severe trauma from the treatment of other children when his hobby of sewing was discovered. He retreated from the world, avoiding interactions with real people and stopped going to school. One day he receives a letter asking if he will or will not wind. Jun chooses to wind and soon a Rozen Maiden named Shinku appears. Shinku informs Jun that he is now her servant and she is involved in a game with other dolls, known as the Alice Game, to become the perfect girl named “Alice.”
However, in an alternate world, Jun does not make the same choice. He chooses not to wind the doll. He grows up without resolving most of his problems, has a low-paying basic job in which he is unappreciated and walked all over doing and has difficulty with his college classes. That changes though when he finds a package about doll making. Combined with a mysterious text from his younger self in the alternate dimension where he chose to wind and he is drawn into the world of Rozen Maiden once more.
Source:
Rozen Maiden is based off of a manga by Peach Pit. The original manga has eight volumes and went from 2002-2007 with an anime adaptation done in 2004. There is currently an ongoing manga with nine volumes that started in 2008. There is also one other television series, Rozen Maiden: Taumend, and an OVA Rozen Maiden: Ouverture. Rozen Maiden: Rewind is based off of the current revamp of the manga.
Staff:
The director Shinichi Omata only has one other directorial credit to his name – under a pen nname actually – and that is Sankarea. This was not the director for any of the previous Rozen Maiden series.
The music was done by Shinkichi Mitsumune who has worked on a few notable series such as the music for the original Rozen Maiden and its other incarnations, Utena, FLCL and a Love Hina OAV. Despite this I did not feel that the music in the series was anything astoundingly special. I would give it an above average rating.
The animation production was done by Studio DEEN.
Review:
I have seen the original Rozen Maiden, though not Taumend or Overature, and I have not read the manga. So I come into Rozen Maiden: Rewind with some experience in the franchise and knowledge of the characters. I reviewed the original back in episode 83 and gave it a 3.5 out of 5.
That being said, I actually enjoyed the original Rozen Maiden. I recognized its problems, but I thought it was fun to watch and the characters were enjoyable. So I went into Rozen Maiden: Rewind with optimism. I did not expect the series to be a stunning exemplar for the season, but I expected myself to enjoy it. I was, more or less, correct.
Right away I found the premise interesting. The first three or four episodes they spend a good amount of time really cementing you into this alternate universe. The main villain, Kirakisho presents herself during this time. Called the white rose she has meddled in both universes, which originally led the wound Jun to be able to reach out to the unwound Jun.
I enjoyed the first four episodes of this twelve episode series. The first episode was a nice refresher into the world of Rozen Maiden. The next two I felt we really got to know the unwound Jun. By the fourth I was ready to go, we had Shinku, knew the villain, and had a mention of the Alice Game. OK, Great.
Then, the series kind of spins its wheels for a bit. Episodes 5-8 felt like they devoted too much time to world and character building for a 12 episode series in which MOST of the viewer base likely already knows enough about the characters to skip. When it wasn’t doing what could be argued as “development” the main plot was really on hold.
The anime tries to manage two stories at once, the unwound and the wound world. At the end you learn that the unwound world has really kind of been a plot-device for progressing things in the wound world, where the focus – I feel – of the series really lies. The only thing that mattered in the unwound world was unwound Jun, really everything else could be tossed away and I’m not quite sure how I feel about that.
Despite the slow down part-way through the series the final episodes finally get to what we’ve been looking for the whole time: Alice Game action. The final three episodes do deliver. There is a bit of a cliffhanger, but in that “there could be more” kind of way and not a “uuum, this isn’t finished” kind of way. There is a complete story here, yet I can’t help but feel I would have been happier if it was a 24 episode series to merit the feeling of slow world-building through the majority of the first 8-9 episodes.
In all, I don’t think I enjoyed Rozen Maiden: Rewind as much as I enjoyed the original Rozen Maiden. Perhaps I would have a lot more if I could enjoy how true the anime was being to its manga counterpart (or, so I hear). Or, perhaps the content of the series just has a shelf-life of one anime for me. Whatever the case may be, I did not find myself hating it, but I found myself simply watching it out of obligation more than enjoyment.
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Eternal Family
Alternate Title: Eikyuu Kazoku
Eternal Family
by Dustin Kramer
The opening text crawl of Koji Morimoto’s Eternal Family tells us about six strangers who have been gathered together, had their memories erased, and convinced they are a family. The reason? Science, natch. But in order to pay for the experiment’s operating costs, the scientists sell the surreptitiously recorded footage of the fake fam to a television broadcasting company. The ensuing reality series is a huge hit, and these six deeply disturbed people become stars ignorant of their own celebrity.
Ben is the father; he is an actor by trade and the only family member who has not been brainwashed. Working for the broadcasting company, he carries around a blow-up doll with a hidden camera installed in its gaping mouth. A-ko, the mother, suffers from constipation, an affliction that will contribute heavily to the incident that sets the story in motion. Akiko is the elder daughter; she is a pyromaniac divorcee looking for love. Sasuke is the oldest son; he’s a graffiti artist that huffs paint fumes and occasionally fires his machine gun. Sae, the younger daughter, speaks through a hand puppet. Michael is a baby; he’s always carrying a pair of scissors. A dog named Tamasaburo and a chicken are the titular family’s pets.
One day, after a bad bout of constipation, A-ko causes a plumbing disaster that releases her and the rest of her family into the “real world.” The broadcasting company pulls out all the stops and offers a whopping 200 million yen per family member to whomever can find them. On their brief journey, the unknowing prisoners learn of their renown just before being captured and returned to a state of tabula rasa. In the final moments of the series, Tamasaburo helps his family escape the brainwashing machine. Ben gets fired over this and begins searching for these five strangers he now calls family.
In retrospect, Eternal Family appears to have been much more prescient than a 1997 audience might have expected. Debuting a year ahead of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show and right on the precipice of the reality TV boom of the late 90s, the series seems to understand the morbid curiosity with which TV watchers consume this most cynical of genres. The extreme propensities that each of the family members possess is an apt satire of similar casting choices in shows where the point seems to be “put these people in a confined space and watch them implode.” Mercifully, Morimoto’s story isn’t quite as contemptuous as this. Ben’s final actions cement a much more uplifting sentiment: that family doesn’t necessarily mean blood.
The animation is pretty wacky — a visual cousin of works like Hiroyuki Imaishi’s 2004 film Dead Leaves. A noticeably lacking budget leaves everything a little on the sloppy side, but the art direction by Hiroshi Kato manages to hide the brunt of these issues. The music is all over the place — from barely-there to bombastic, rhythmic action supplements — but nothing about it is very memorable.
In 1997, Studio 4˚C began releasing Eternal Family in 53 30-second installments, and the episodes were collected for a DVD release in 2004. I know I’ve been calling it a series, which it is, but watching it compiled feels much more like a filmic experience. The 30-second segment serial is an experimental format, and just like in the scientific world, experiments can fail. In this case, the format’s victim is undoubtedly the story’s pacing. The need to have something “happen” in each segment makes the whole thing feel choppy and needlessly breakneck when watched uninterrupted. The limited runtime leaves little room for dialogue, therefore necessary exposition doesn’t come across naturally — or at all. I imagine the expository text crawl was a late-game addition when someone on the production crew realized that the thing didn’t make any damn sense. These problems really did a number on my viewing experience, and although it wants to be, Eternal Family isn’t a lot of fun to watch. The total runtime clocks in at just under 30 minutes, so you won’t have to put up with it long.
Koji Morimoto’s Eternal Family is violent, misanthropic, and darkly prophetic. Despite this, it manages to strike a sympathetic chord in its final frames. However, its limitations — both involuntary and self-imposed — encumber its potential for success.
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Free!
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Genius Party
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.
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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.
