Serdar | Genji Press

I once theorized that the difference between Japanese and American comics is that the former are about characters and stories while the latter are about franchises. I’m in the process of being proven wrong about this — or maybe it’s just the scope of the theory’s in need of revision. Case in point: the Blood: the Last Vampire continuity. It started with a short animated film, and then was rebooted into the Blood+ continuity: a long animated TV series (two seasons), a set of novels based on the TV series, a manga based rather loosely on the TV series, and now a new prequel manga series.

And yet, through all of these variations and offshoots, certain things remain consistent — much as they do, I suppose, in American franchise comics. The Hulk is always green and angry, Tony Stark is a genius playboy alcoholic, and Saya of Blood+ is always a mixture of girlish naïveté and deadly precision. Case in point once again: Blood+ Adagio, the newest installment in the franchise. It’s a prequel series, set in the early years of the Russian revolution, and purports to fill in backstory as to what happened to Saya and her compatriots during that time.

I love Japan.

Twitch - Noboru Iguchi Says ‘Geisha Is Beautiful!  Geisha is Robot!’ It’s the ROBOGEISHA Trailer!

... I don't think I've ever said "What the f___" so many times in a row while watching a trailer.

I love Japan.

Iguchi is the madman who gave us Machine Girl.

I think my brains melted out of my nostrils right around the time the geisha transformed into a robot tank, drove up the side of a skyscraper and started shooting missiles at a giant feudal-era samurai castle that had also metamorphed into a city-destroying monster.

Did I mention I love Japan?

Some of you might remember how Oldboy (one of my favorite flicks, period) has been the target of at least two attempts to bring it to the big screen in the U.S. The first was in the hands of director Justin Lin, he of Better Luck Tomorrow (and, more recently, Fast and Furious). That went nowhere, but then two other folks with slightly higher profiles picked it up: Steven Spielberg and Will Smith. They're not licensing the movie for a remake, but the manga it was derived from.

This has apparently opened a massive can of legal worms. Not only is it possible that Spielberg and Smith went to the wrong people to license the manga, the Korean movie company that produced Oldboy (Show East) has vanished. (See previous link.)

That has frightening implications for the availability of the movie in any form in the future. Tartan, the distributors for the film in the U.S. and U.K., also went bankrupt, which means any copies you have lying around right now may well be the only ones available for some time.

Maybe Smithberg should have talked to Dark Horse first?

Tokyo Rampage is an example of a movie that’s not very good but remains interesting despite itself. It’s set in modern-day Tokyo and deals with one of the perennial subjects of filmmakers there: disaffected youth and sociopathic Tokyo criminals. The director in question, Toshiaki Toyoda, has made at least one other truly outstanding movie about that first subject — Blue Spring — but this time around he’s dealing with a story that’s a good deal more arid and far harder to make interesting to an outside audience. He does give it his college best, though, and what he ends up with is enough to hold our attention for its running time but not much more than that.

Rampage opens with Arano (Kôji Chihara), a sullen young man wandering around Tokyo, sunken down in his overcoat and lugging around an airline bag full of weapons. He has some strange, undefined hatred of yakuza, so severe and deeply ingrained that he stabs one to death for the grand crime of scalping theater tickets. The dead gangster’s associate is Kamiju (Onimaru), a long-haired punk only slightly older than Arano himself but with a small crew of hangers-on. Kamiju’s not exactly living large, though: most of his work consists of enforcing collections for his pimp boss, and he spends a good deal of time and effort ducking calls from his mother. Arano is wilder than him or any of his buddies, and they find that downright intimidating where they haven’t found much of anything intimidating before.

I got into music backwards. I started with the excesses of Merzbow and the murderous overkill of the Swans, and then reversed gears into more conventional territory. And even then I was still going backwards: I didn’t start my Coltrane collection with A Love Supreme, but rather Ascension. By the time I’d fallen back into something like normal territory, my ears had already been prepared for most anything they might encounter.

And yet I keep being surprised — especially by Merzbow himself, whose encyclopedic catalog of releases grows by at least thirty or forty discs a year. There are many releases that repeat each other — I’m not sure the lay listener will sense much difference between Noisembryo and Green Wheels (I do, but that’s another story) — but at this stage in his career he’s found ways to challenge himself and explore new territory all the time, even if only incrementally. To that end, 13 Birds is fast shaping up to be the open-ended successor to all the ideas Merzbow only touched on or hinted at with Door Open At 8AM.

Funny, touching, enthralling, horrifying, and finally heartbreaking, Face is precisely the kind of movie I love most to encounter and then tell others about. No category will encompass it succinctly; it’s an original. One critic called it the greatest Japanese film of the last decade or more, and it’s not hard to see why. It tells a story of great ambition in such a modest, careful, understated — and often hilarious — way that its greatest shocks and most powerful moments sneak up on you from behind and stay with you for a long time.

I wonder if some of Face’s sheer bite and sassy vigor comes from the fact that it’s based, however loosely, on a true story: a bar hostess murdered a co-worker, fled, and hid out for years on end before finally being caught. But that seems unfair to director Junji Sakamoto and his lead performer, a stage actress named Naomi Fujiyama. Sakamoto brings a strange combination of quirky black humor and blunt pathos to this story, and Fujiyama’s performance is so unaffected and natural that we forget a camera is watching.

Darker Than Black caught my attention from the beginning, held it through each successive installment, and continues to keep me guessing and absorbed. Volume five, the next to last disc in the whole series, does what most penultimate volumes of any series do: it sets things up in preparation for what we anticipate will be their final resolutions. Some of this is by filling in backstory, and some of this is via breaking equilibriums that have held the story together until now.

The first half of the disc revolves around Huang — Li / Hei’s “controller”, a regular human who makes up in nerve and bluntness what he lacks in super-powers. He was once a cop, we learn, who lost a partner of his to a Contractor. That alone would be enough to instill the distrust of (and disgust with) Contractors that we see him evince throughout the series, but there’s more to it than that. It’s also precisely the sort of “more” not served by talking about her in detail, since the details go a long way towards providing the kind of character depth that has made this show a winner.

Since many of the FUNimation DVD titles I've looked at are now available as streaming video from the FUNimation site, I've added links to them within each review. I may add more links of the kind as we go on.

A show this good should not have to end.

And yet here we are at the sixth and final disc of Mushi-shi, as beautiful and original an anime as any I could ever dare to ask for, and I feel downright glum knowing there’s no more after this. There is the manga, courtesy of Del Rey, which I’ll be getting around to reviewing before too much longer, but this series works so well as anime, is so lush and evocative, I fear reading the manga is going to feel like a step down.

Don’t expect anything like a real climax, though. The final disc of Mushi-shi does not bring anything to a definitive end, because this series has never been about definitive beginnings and endings in the first place. It’s about the flow of life itself, which doesn’t start or conclude anywhere but is simply something you dip into and out of as your time on earth allows. I was worried the show would devolve into a manufactured conflict with some great enemy — maybe a sinister mushi-master who’s creating an army to do his bidding, etc. — but thankfully, nothing of the kind happens.

Most shows are about stuff like whether or not a given villain will be defeated, or whether or not the guy will get the girl. Mushi-shi takes place on a wholly different plane — it’s not about a hero or a violent competition, but about an entirely new world with its own nature and biology, its own laws of being, its own cycle of living and dying and being reborn. It has the same meditative beauty as Haibane Renmei or Kino’s Journey — shows that are not about fighting or blowing things up, but simply observing things as they are and knowing their true nature. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The “mushi” (derived from the Japanese word for insect) are like primordial homunculi — large single-celled organisms that only a few people can see, but which interact with the real world in bizarre ways. Sometimes they latch onto people and cause afflictions that have to be dealt with, but they’re not inherently evil: they just have a life cycle of their own, and sometimes we are part of that life cycle whether or not we realize it. The mushi-shi or “mushi master” of the title is Ginko, a young man with a mop of pale hair and a cigarette perpetually dangling from a corner of his mouth, and the ability to detect and work with (or rout out) mushi when they manifest.