Results tagged “anime”
Movie Reviews: Gate of Hell
Few things in the movies excite and enthrall me more than a lost masterpiece, found once again. Last year a nearly-complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, believed lost to history forever, was located (it was hidden inside the wall of a movie theater, no less!) and restored. For film buffs, it was akin to unearthing the Ark of the Covenant. Gate of Hell might not come trailing the same level of name recognition or film-history pedigree, but having it restored to its original beauty and then some is no less exciting to me. This was not the first Japanese movie I saw, but it lodged so profoundly in my memory — not just for its blazing visuals, but its emotionally turbulent story — that it might as well have been.
As with Ugetsu, another film I saw early on in my self-education in Japanese cinema, I watched Gate of Hell courtesy of a VHS copy rented from the mom-‘n’-pop video store around the corner from my apartment. And as with Ugetsu, both the telecine and the print were in such lamentable shape that I wondered if that was because nothing better existed. I wasn’t far from wrong: Gate of Hell had been photographed via a single-strip Kodak process, Eastmancolor, that faded badly over time. Fortunately the studio, Daiei, had prepared a three-strip separation master — separate black-and-white negatives for each color channel — that preserved well. This process was later used by many others, e.g., MGM for their Metrocolor system (2001: a space odyssey), and when combined with digital technology, one could easily produce a remaster that outstripped the original. It also helped when the film being restored was something that had more than imagery in its favor.
Read moreTags: Criterion Japan Kazuo Hasegawa Machiko Kyo movies review samurai Technicolor Teinosuke Kinugasa
Book Reviews: Paradise Kiss Vols. 2-3 (Ai Yazawa)
I’m going to start my discussion of the second and third volumes of Paradise Kiss with the sex scene in volume 2. Actually, there’s a couple of such scenes, but the one that comes most crucially to mind involves heroine Yukari and her lover / antagonist / homme fatale George. I mention it not as a way to denigrate the story, but entirely the opposite: if Paradise Kiss is able to take one of the hoariest, most stock components of any romance — the good-girl heroine losing her virginity to her bad-boy lover — and make it into a complex and nuanced story about whether or not the guy and the girl even deserve each other in the first place, or deserve something better than what they currently amount to.
Read moreTags: Ai Yazawa books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Movie Reviews: Hara-Kiri (2012)
Takashi Miike's remake of Masaki Kobayashi's Hara-kiri is one of those movies where nothing's really wrong, but that by itself isn't enough for the territory. It's a perfectly competent update for a movie that didn't need it, and maybe that's the problem. The original film was not flawed in any significant way, save maybe in the eyes of a modern audience for having the effrontery of not being in color. In fact, Hara-kiri was and remains a masterwork, a product of the samurai cinema of the Sixties that used the form to challenge authority, to question the mystique and pomp of the warrior class that had been used as emotional propaganda for generations.
Much of that confrontatory attitude has drained out of Japan's moviemaking. Almost all of the samurai productions of the last couple of decades have been redolent with sentimentalism. Even Miike himself — normally one of Japan's bad boys of moviemaking (a label he'd have gained for Ichi the Killer alone) — had veered into weepier territory with productions like Sabu. I liked Sabu a great deal, if only because it showed that Miike was not a one-note Nelson. The man could, and has, made movies in just about every genre imaginable, and learned to reign in his excesses when it mattered. If there was someone to make a confrontatory movie in today's climate, it was him. But this somehow isn't that film.
Read moreTags: Japan Kōji Yakusho movies review samurai Takashi Miike
Death Of An Iconoclast Dept.
Nagisa Oshima (most notorious for In the Realm of the Senses) has died at the age of 80. I wonder whether or not someone of his cage-rattling importance will be able to step up to the plate in his absence.
I've reviewed a number of his films here (see the link with his name above) and will continue to do so as they become available. Which, I hope, will only continue as time goes on.
Tags: Japan movies Nagisa Oshima
Spice Of Life Dept.
Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika, the basis for Satoshi Kon's film of the same name, is now available in a domestic printing. I had great things to say about the novel back when it was only available as a U.K. import.
Tags: fantasy fiction Japan literature Satoshi Kon Yasutaka Tsutsui
Creator Knows Best Dept.
Back when Dark Horse still published manga in the 32-page newsstand-comics format, two of the titles I encountered regularly from their lineup was Urusei Yatsura and a still-ongoing favorite of mine, Blade of the Immortal. Both had been reformatted and retouched to read left-to-right, as opposed to the original right-to-left orientation in the Japanese printings.
When at the time I mentioned this casually to a fellow fan of a few more years' experience than I, I got a seething earful from him about what horrible butchery this was and how it totally ruined the original artwork and I should boycott the publishers and mail them dead cats because blah blah creative integrity blah blah artistic intentions glib blurb. I quickly learned not to bring up the subject with him again.
Note that I'm not pooh-poohing his position per se, just the fulminating vehemence with which he delivered it. In fact, at the time, I mostly agreed with him. I thought dubbing anime into English was an abomination, too, and for many of the same reasons he cited: wasn't it a violation of the creator's intentions to essentially rework a significant component of his product?
I've run into variations on this argument over the years, and they all revolve around the same question: Do creators always deserve the final say in how their product is delivered to an audience? Or are there circumstances where others know better, and might even be able to improve on what they've been given?
Read moreTags: anime Blade of the Immortal creativity creators manga Ridley Scott Terry Gilliam
The 10th Level Dept.
Zeami Motokiyo, widely considered to be the man who developed the foundational aesthetics of nō drama as we have come to know it, once wrote a treatise about nine levels or grades of acting quality. The topmost grade, myōka-fū, is said to be a performance of total sublimity and spontaneous perfection. As Masaru Sekine put it:
An actor, to create this supreme art ... must reach to the depth of subconsciousness, so that his body moves almost on its own and his voice comes completely spontaneously. His acting surpasses his own intention. ... The actor himself cannot explain his own performance at [this] leve, as he hardly realizes what he is doing .... [I]t is beyond an audience's powers of analysis or praise.
(Emphasis mine.)
Read moreTags: creativity inspiration Japan Nō
For The Girls (And The Boys, Too) Dept.
The other night a bunch of us from the Fan to Pro circuit were chatting about what it would take to get a game maker to create something aimed at the female-gamer market — the U.S. / English equivalent of an otome game, for lack of a better label. That in turn inspired me to go back to my previous post about live-action anime adaptations and ask myself: Where in this list are the live-action shojo anime projects for Western audiences?
Read moreTags: adaptation anime Japan live-action anime live-action manga manga movies shojo
For The Girls (And The Boys, Too) Dept.
The other night a bunch of us from the Fan to Pro circuit were chatting about what it would take to get a game maker to create something aimed at the female-gamer market — the U.S. / English equivalent of an otome game, for lack of a better label. That in turn inspired me to go back to my previous post about live-action anime adaptations and ask myself: Where in this list are the live-action shojo anime projects for Western audiences?
Read moreTags: adaptation anime Japan live-action anime live-action manga manga movies shojo
Big Eyes Small Market Dept.
My colleague Steven Savage weighed in on the anime-to-live-action adaptation problem, which he sees as being dominated by five issues.
- It [the property in question] has enough name recognition for good marketing, or something marketing can use as an edge.
- It can be relatable/similar to existing properties. Game of Thrones wouldn’t have gotten made without LOTR. Adapted anime properties need to be “marketable” as they’re reminiscent of previous successful works.
- It can fit into an existing release structure, like the usual movie trilogy, standard TV show season (probably a cable season).
- It has long-term potential for development (look at the way Twilight is getting milked).
- It can be done without massive localization issues.
Tags: adaptation anime Hollywood movies
Book Reviews: Flowers of Evil, Vol. 3 (Shuzo Oshimi)
Third installment in this symphony of adolescent emotional brutality pits hapless would-be seeker of transgression Kasuga against his (female) mentor in perversity Nakamura, with his would-be sweetheart Nanako caught between them. After Kasuga and Nakamura enjoy — not sure that's really the word, actually — an orgy of destruction in their school homeroom, Nanako's forced to see what Nakamura wants her to think the "pervert" Kasuga is really made of ... except that Nanako is even more pure-hearted than anyone banked on her being. Where the story goes from here ought to be a real challenge; let's see if they branch out even further and more daringly, or simply repeat the same beats as per a goofy sitcom where nobody ever learns. My money's on the former.
Tags: books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Best Original Screenplay Dept.
I've been curious about the ratio of original-to-adapted projects in filmed science fiction for some time now, in big part because a cursory survey of significant SF movies from past decades shows that most of them were in fact reworked from short stories or novels. The originals mostly seemed to be the tons of awful cheapies that flooded the market and vanished without a trace, only to end up on midnight TV or Something Weird Video.
Among the early exceptions I can think of, apart from Metropolis, was Forbidden Planet. It was adapted — shilling for lifted wholesale — from Shakespeare's Tempest, but it wasn't reworked directly from any pre-existing SF novel. In fact, an adaptation of it was written from the script (something Frederik Pohl never stopped kicking himself for turning down, since he ended up loving the movie). 2001 was a hybrid: it was written both as a literary and as a cinematic project, more or less at the same time.
Read moreTags: adaptation anime movies science fiction
Book Reviews: Paradise Kiss, Part One (Ai Yazawa)
It’s been said that genres are reading instructions. A book bearing the label science fiction earns certain exemptions of tone and content right out of the gate that a book labeled fantasy or romance or literary fiction does not. Romance is a label we associate freely with broad brushstrokes of emotion (e.g., hate-that-is-actually-love), coincidence, and a great many other things we’d only tolerate in small doses, if at all, in something not sporting that label.
In other words, a genre is a label for a specific kind of suspension of disbelief, and that may explain why many people turn their nose up at certain genres. Some people find the suspension of disbelief re: human behavior or motivation required for a romance to be far more absurd than the suspension of disbelief re: physical reality required for a fantasy, SF, or four-color comic story. I don’t believe this mechanism underlies all instances of why people snub a romance for something else, but it sure explains why many people never try out certain genres at all. They have evolved a certain discipline for their suspension of disbelief. They do not let themselves play outside of those strongly-painted lines.
It’s a shame, because within any genre there is always the possibility for happy accidents and lively discovery. Shojo manga, the whole subdivision of manga nominally intended for girls, has many titles with plenty of crossover appeal. Having a mainstream breakthrough experience with one of them doesn’t much increase the odds of the others following suit — the Dark Knight Trilogy hasn’t caused mainstream moviegoers to pick up too many Batman comics — but it can at the very least expose the reader to new territory. The very best of shojo manga has included some territory I might never have discovered on my own: Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra, for instance, or Moto Hagio’s remarkable work that freely crossed between labels: romance here, fantasy there, science fiction at times, all of it remarkable. Read more
Tags: Ai Yazawa books Japan manga review romance shojo Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Limit Vol. 1 (Keiko Suenobu)
In my first years of reading about Japan I learned quickly to separate the sociological wheat from the pop-psychology chaff. Most anything I encountered originally in English about “conformity in Japanese society” was potted pop-psychology churned out in the 1980s, when fear of Japan buying out America rode high and books that purported to explain those inscrutable Japanese were being hustled out into airport bookstalls. (The big airport-reading trend now is neuroscience for businesspeople, which manages to be even more insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved than Yellow Panic For Dummies.)
I find the whole discussion of Japanese social conformity to be at least partly a red herring, because society is by definition a conformist enterprise. Most of us are conformist if only in that we do not kill the other guy because we know that if we do most everything we ourselves could draw on runs the risk of spontaneously collapsing. The idea that Japan puts greater pressure on people to fit in and work together seems borne less of perspective on the very tangible historical conditions that shaped such things, and more out of a need to contrast their straightlaced ways with more allegedly freewheeling ones elsewhere. It’s not that conformity doesn’t exist in Japan; it’s that most of how non-Japanese talk about the subject is unenlightening, sanctimonious b.s. designed to make anyone not Japanese feel like they dodged a sociological bullet.
This may seem like a loaded lead-in for a review of a manga — Keiko Suenobu’s Limit — but I cite it here as a lead-in for a story that, in its own pop-culture way, attempts to look at conformity in Japan from the perspective of a type most vulnerable to it: the schoolgirl. Limit’s main schoolgirl character is Konno, and in the opening pages she makes it clear that the ability to conform, to merge with the current and just drift along, is not something you do because you like it. It is simply a fact of life, a survival trait you either acquire and use to your advantage, or ignore at your own peril.
Read moreTags: books Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Pro Bono (Seicho Matsumoto)
It all starts when near-penniless Kiriko makes the trip to Tokyo to enlist the help of lawyer Kinzo Otsuka. Kiriko is a hapless woman trying to scrape together a legal defense for her brother; he stands accused of a murder for which there seems a preponderance of solid evidence to send him to the gallows. Otsuka, on the other hand, is everything she’s not: well-heeled, surrounded by peers who appreciate his hard work, enjoying the affection of a woman who runs a classy French restaurant.
Kiriko presents herself in Otsuka’s office, minutes before he’s about to run off and enjoy a tryst with his ladyfriend, and he finds himself having to give her one piece of bad news after another. It’s not just that she can’t afford him, but that he’s also convinced she wouldn’t be getting significantly more robust legal representation by paying for a “name” lawyer. And no, he won’t take her case on pro bono. She tries to change his mind, and her single-mindedness instead leaves a impression with a journalist who’s been sniffing around for a story that might look good in the issues-and-controversy magazine he writes for. But even he has to admit the deck is stacked heavily against Kiriko’s brother — and the whole thing seems to end with a thud when the brother is convicted and dies in prison before his execution.
Read moreTags: fiction Japan mystery review Seicho Matsumoto thrillers Vertical Inc. writing
Book Reviews: Sakura: Blossoms Wild (Moyoco Anno)
A while back I reviewed Sakuran, the motion picture, and I called it “the antidote to Memoirs of a Geisha”: funny, sassy, bold, and bitter, where Geisha was just wistful, sodden, and romanticized in all the wrong ways. The same good things could be said for the manga that was the source for Sakuran, now out in English thanks to — who else? — Vertical Inc., who are increasingly becoming to manga what Criterion or perhaps Kino International have been to film.
Read moreTags: books Japan manga Moyoco Anno review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: A Guru Is Born (Takeshi Kitano)
Takeshi Kitano (or Beat Takeshi to his legion of fans) nominally gets notice as a filmmaker, but he's written a bevy of books — some fiction, some non- — slowly finding their way into English. Boy was a good taste of his talent; A Guru Is Born is even more ambitious and rewarding.
Read moreTags: fiction Japan review Takeshi Kitano Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: The Flowers of Evil, Vol. 2 (Shuzo Oshimi)
The second volume of this mix of antisocial-kid thriller and outsider-kid romance ratchets tension further as bookworm Kasuga is pulled all the more violently between the innocent girl he's had a crush on (Saeki) and the sociopath girl who's yanking his puppet strings (Nakamura). Against all odds, Kasuga manages to take Saeki out on something resembling a normal date ... even while the whole time the poor kid's wearing Saeki's gym clothes under his own, as part of his contract with Nakamura. In the end he collapses all the more definitively on the side of the devils, although how he does this or to what end I won't ruin here — seeing how it unfolds is a major part of the book's substance. Further proof that psychological torment is far more effective (and affecting) than the physical kind, although one wonders if in the end Oshimi's going to be best known for introducing a new subgenre of manga for American readers: mental-torture-porn. But his yarn-spinning is tight and deft enough to make concerns like that secondary.
Tags: Japan manga review Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: Enma the Immortal (Fumi Nakamura)
When I first heard about Enma the Immortal, I am ashamed to admit I was immediately reminded of another Japanese pop-culture phenomenon, one which has lionized the attention of comic lovers: Blade of the Immortal. Aside from the similarity in titles, there are other connections: both start in the late feudal era, and both involve an antihero who’s been given the curse (not the gift) of immortality. But Enma is no BotI clone, and in fact once you start reading Enma it quickly diverges from anything BotI-ish and takes on its own flavor.
Read moreTags: fiction Fumi Nakamura Japan samurai Vertical Inc.
Book Reviews: The Flowers of Evil, Vol. #1 (Shuzo Oshimi)
High schooler Takao Kasuga has two ways of coping with life in the backwater known as Hikari City. Both should be innocent, but they turn out to be anything but. The first is books — the more esoteric and offbeat, the better, and that includes Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (which the title of this series references unambiguously). The second is his classmate Nanako Saeki — “my muse, my femme fatale,” as he rhapsodizes over her. So smitten is he for her, and so intoxicated has he become with Baudelaire’s hymns to lordly indecency, that when Nanako forgets her gym clothes at school one day he hastily swipes them and takes them home with him.
No, even he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s a lethal admixture of two normally incompatible impulses: a guilty conscience and an impulsive heart. Stealing Nanako’s shorts and tank top will take him the rest of his life to pay back; this he is positive of. And yet he went and did it all the same … and, worse, he finds out has a witness to his crime: Nakamura. This is not one of the other boys in his class, who rib him about his love of weird books and his moon-eyed feelings for Nanako. Nakamura is another girl, and if the text for Takao’s spirit is a hesitantly-read Baudelaire, hers is an enthusiastically-devoured Marquis de Sade. Read more
Tags: Charles Baudelaire Japan manga review Shuzo Oshimi Vertical Inc.
