Ranma Remains

There are a lot of pointless remakes out there but I think I've seen the most pointless remake of all time. I got Netflix for the month for a few reasons, one of them being I really wanted to see the new Ranma 1/2 series. It's an adaptation of the same first volumes of the manga that the first anime series adapted back in 1989. In many cases, it's a shot for shot replica of the old series only now it's drawn and coloured on computers instead of with pencil, ink, and paint. Nudity has been censored with "doll anatomy" and it has a new score by a different composer.

Even many of the voice actors are the same. Hayashibara Megumi returns as girl-type Ranma and she's still great. But many of the actors playing teenagers certainly don't sound like teenagers, particularly the character of Nabiki who now sounds like an old woman.

I don't know why this thing was made. I work in Japanese schools and I hear kids talking about Ranma 1/2 exactly as often as I heard them talk about it before this new series came out.

Was there anything I liked? The scene where Ranma meets Kuno has the same dialogue--Kuno demands to know Ranma's name but before Ranma can reply Kuno says it's better form to give his own name first. In the new version there's a slight pause and Ranma says awkwardly "douzo", "go ahead." That was kind of funny but it didn't justify a whole remake.

Ranma 1/2 (the new one) is available on Netflix. Oddly, when I searched for "Ranma", it wasn't even the first title that came up. I'm not sure what that means but if it means the show's not popular I wouldn't be surprised. Some people on YouTube have made compilations of clips comparing the new and old versions. Sometimes the dialogue overlaps precisely:

I guess this is like when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. At least he had a new cast and shot it in colour so he made some effort to be different.

X Sonnet #1904

Exhausted words for "red" deplete the shade.
Infernal rings diffuse the air and sky.
With phony coins, the counterfeiter's paid.
The only dream became a daily lie.
Surprising spots of time return to mind.
Betrayal lurks in slowly boiled brains.
The ghost of vengeance seeks a kill to find.
The story's told in blood and whisky stains.
Reforming cities never costs a god.
Deserving roads obey the wheels above.
Some greater damage rusts a metal rod.
The lack of lightning killed a demon dove.
A couple eggs were lost beneath the grill.
For making yoghurt, raise a local mill.

The Unbreachable Gulf of Close Proximity

Why is Japan's population in decline? One need look no further for answers than to popular art in the country, 2004's The Place Promised in Our Early Days (雲のむこう、約束の場所, "Beyond the Clouds, the Promised Place"), for instance, though one might have to look carefully. It's the first feature film from Shinkai Mokoto, a filmmaker who's recently been hailed as a successor to the increasingly outre Miyazaki Hayao, though with this feature the predominant influence of Anno Hideaki is unmistakable. It's not a film that quite struggles out from under the shadow of this influence but it does feature hints of the longing and disconnect between a boy and a girl, Shinkai's most interesting artistic preoccupation, which peaked in 2016's Your Name.

Set in an alternate universe, The Place Promised in Our Early Days finds three Japanese junior high school students dreaming about flying the little plane they built into Ezo airspace. Ezo is the new name for Hokkaido which, in this history, has been annexed by the Soviet Union. The Soviets have built a thin white tower that extends into infinity and is visible from as far away as Tokyo.

The three students are two boys and a girl. One of the boys, Hiroki (Yoshioka Hidetaka) is usually the point of view character and he falls in love with the girl, Sayuri (Yuka Nanri). As in Your Name, sci-fi elements present obstacles between the two, taking the form of dimensional separation and dream sharing.

Japan has the highest average IQ in the world and has a culture that stresses the importance of indirect communication. So when a young person's imagination runs rampant, provoked by natural instincts, it's easy to see how Shinkai's sci-fi plots function as metaphors, even allegories, for shyness and endless second guessing. Every second guess could be an alternate timeline. The film's also peppered with distinctly Evangelion-ish scenes of secretive meetings between military and intelligence officers at ramen restaurants as well as scenes of command rooms where staff scream technical jargon at each other while screens flash alarmingly.

As in Evangelion, the complicated professional and bureaucratic crises are reflections of and metaphors for personal psychological agonies. Shinkai is not as adept at lending the same complexity to female characters as Anno is and Sayuri is presented as innocent of carnal appetite, though she does have an interesting scene in which she contemplates her empty desk at her school, years after her graduation (and possibly in another timeline).

So it's not hard to see why it's so hard for young people in Japan to find romantic partners and why the divorce rate's so high. I'm sure by now you're thinking of that classic opening scene from Idiocracy. I often think of it now that I live in Japan.

The Place Promised in Our Early days is available now on The Criterion Channel as part of a playlist of Shinkai Makoto movies this month.

A Light Rain

A teenage boy runs away to Tokyo and meets a girl who can control the weather in 2019's Weathering with You (天気の子, lit. "Weather Child"). There are some really interesting things about this movie, particularly in the first thirty minutes, but the premise starts to get too loose for the emotional weight to hold together. The filmmakers try to compensate by pushing the music up but it just becomes loud.

Hodaka (Daigo Kotaro) is the teenage boy. We meet him reading Catcher in the Rye on a boat to Tokyo. Again, director Shinkai Makoto presents a surprisingly familiar Japan. As Hodaka wanders around Shinjuku, there were several places I remember walking past myself.

He's unable to find a decent job and can barely afford lousy accommodations. Then he finds a gun in a trash can. He uses it to scare a yakuza who's trying to force a pretty girl into sex work. There are a lot of transgressions going on here I found heartening--Hodaka is never portrayed as a bad person for running away or for reading Catcher in the Rye. I'm more ambivalent, but no less surprised, about the fact that his use of a gun is portrayed positively throughout the film (mind you, this movie came out a couple years before Abe's assassination).

The pretty girl Hodaka rescued, Hina (Mori Nana), turns out to have magical powers; she can stop the rain with her will alone. Hodaka says they ought to monetise this, and it being early August, the rainy season, they do pretty well for themselves.

The first part of the film has a slightly Oliver Twist-ish quality, improved by the lushly detailed art and realistic obstacles Hodaka faces. It's precisely these qualities that makes the film disappointing as it shifts gears to lazier writing and new concepts are thrown at the viewer instead of development. We never learn why Hodaka ran away from home, we never learn much about Hina beyond the fact that she's really sweet and has a kid brother. So when we get to the climax and they're supposed to be falling in love (of course, since this is a popular modern Japanese film, they never actually proclaim anything or consummate) there's no emotional weight. This is paired with a natural disaster aspect as the weather starts to go haywire due to Hina's tampering and, just as in Suzume, the movie unwisely avoids showing or even mentioning deaths or injuries or even expensive property destruction that occurs due to these disasters.

The animation is really good, though. If Shinkai becomes just a little more courageous, I suspect he'll make something really good in the coming years.

Weathering with You is available on Max.

X Sonnet #1810

With giant lizards crushed, the hamster wins.
We never know what beasts emerged from mice.
But questions hang as heavy marks of sins.
So many thoughts return to change a price.
Eleven drummer babies prep the meat.
You never change a purse between a friend.
Containment fails when cheaper puppets meet.
So it's a worthless straw can never bend.
Resentful spirit rain restrains the grass.
A rising green insults the falling blue.
But fearful elves traverse the flooded pass.
Among the bones. are *they* remaining true?
The mutant cakes were waiting near the boat.
The hungry watched the frisky fattened stoat.

Earthquake Worms

A teenage girl finds she alone can protect Japan from a series of devastating earthquakes in 2022's Suzume (すずめの戸締まり). It's a bold idea to create a fantasy around Japan's infamously devastating, chronic natural disasters, one of which just recently struck Ishikawa. On that score, unfortunately I think director Shinkai Makoto strikes a too trivial tone, but setting that aside, the film is a cute romantic adventure.

On the way to school one day, Suzume (Nanoka Hara) meets a handsome young man (Hokuto Matsumura) who asks her the way to the nearest ruin.

Overcome with curiosity, she skips school to follow him. She soon discovers the young man, Souta, is a kind of wizard whose sacred duty is to fight sinister cloud worms who cause Japan's earthquakes when he's unable to shut the interdimensional doors they come through. Her curiosity leads to misfortune when the young man is transformed into a three legged chair after she sets loose a cat-like "keystone". Intended or not, there are definite shades of Eve eating the apple.

It's a very well animated movie with beautiful, detailed backgrounds. I don't remember another anime that so painstakingly captured a Japan I recognise as the one I live in. When Suzume was in Kobe or Tokyo I was able to recognise places I've actually been to. Director Shinkai Makoto pays tribute to some surprising anime by using music from their soundtracks--I noticed Kiki's Delivery Service and, of all things, Kare Kano.

Ultimately, I don't think the film's mythology is any comfort to the victims of earthquakes, which is a good example of why using kid gloves to talk about disasters in art is often a mistake. The film also doesn't have the emotional impact of Shinkai's Your Name or Garden of Words, but it's not a bad movie.

Suzume is available on CrunchyRoll outside Japan.

X Sonnet #1808

As globs of batter change to muffin shapes,
A timid foot has fallen late on ice.
Discordant thoughts arise from sour grapes
To chill affections guessed forever twice.
The blanket clutched a dusty chair for ghosts
To rest their dogs or drink to early light.
The sparrow lamps will make for nervous hosts
And shifty guests will start a secret fight.
Conditions shift as yolks traverse the shells
Of aging helmets, naught to show for mines.
But certain dreams were ringing copper bells
Upon the brink of matins, witness signs.
As triple eyes delivered late arrive,
A quiet force announced herself alive.

Piece for Peace

I've watched the first two episodes of Netflix's live action One Piece. I can't help wondering who this show is for despite the fact that it's apparently massively popular, being one of the most successful shows to ever debut on Netflix, ranking with Stranger Things and Wednesday. It certainly must have a built in audience since the anime TV series has over 1000 episodes, the manga is even longer, and there are several feature films. I saw one of the movies and I wrote about how boring it was last year. The first five or six episodes of the anime TV series I found to be a little better. That's the way with most long running anime series. They get maybe one season where the creators can be inventive, where interesting characters can meet, important characters can die or get significant new powers, etc. But once something becomes really popular, all the characters have to be frozen in a particular stage of development.

I guess hoping to avoid a disaster like the live action Cowboy Bebop, the live action One Piece seems at times to be blindly faithful to the original except where budgetary restraints come in. The bit where Luffy is carried by a giant bird before finally getting a proper introduction to Nami is only passingly referring to in dialogue. But the show keeps the basic aesthetic as well as the underlying rules of the fantasy world.

And that's a problem. When I watch the anime, I feel like I'm watching something for kids aged 13 and under. But the Netflix show has bloody severed limbs and cursing. By the time of the movie I saw, any hint of graphic violence seemed to be absent from One Piece. Early episodes of the anime TV series have a couple actual deaths of unnamed characters. Meanwhile, it's a world where sex doesn't seem to exist, despite creator Oda Eiichiro evidently getting hornier and hornier over the years.

A sure sign Oda had limited input in the live action series is the absence of bikinis. Press says he had a lot of input in his executive producer role but press said the same thing about Watanabe Shinichiro and Cowboy Bebop, only for Watanabe to say he had basically no control after the show ended up being a dud.

The absence of sex is only one of the things I find disturbing about the show. Yeah, I say disturbing because the show is fundamentally about loyalty and morality, about what it means to be a good person. But every dramatic proclamation of morals feels very hollow when the story is so hazy on what the stakes are. Luffy wants to be a pirate who doesn't steal or murder but he and his crew apparently don't have to worry about finding alternative means of survival. If pirates don't steal or kill, it's not clear what they actually do aside from searching for the fabled treasure called "One Piece".

Inaki Godoy is very charming as Luffy and I appreciated how much he reminded me of Errol Flynn. But even Errol Flynn's Robin Hood was fighting Prince John because the ordinary people of English were starving. There was a sense of necessities for survival. The live action One Piece reminds me a little of the Russian Brother series of films, a kind of fascist story about a kindly strong man who goes around beating up bad guys.

One Piece is available on Netflix.

Building a World of People and Birds

Last night I was fortunate to see a great movie, Miyazaki Hayao's new film, 2023's The Boy and the Heron (君たちはどう生きるか, "How do You Live?"). It's an awesome work of melancholy, surreal fantasy and a courageous social commentary. Not to mention audacious in Japan's current political climate.

The film was already a curiosity before its release due to Miyazaki's decision not to advertise it beyond the publication of a single poster. Before seeing the movie, I'd concluded there were two possible motives behind Miyazaki's refusal to advertise the film as normal. Either it was a flex, to show just how far his name alone could carry a film, or it was a face-saving gesture, an excuse he could point to when the film didn't surpass the box office success of Kimetsu no Yaiba. Now that I've seen the film, I know it's neither. Miyazaki knew that many people in Japan, if they knew anything about the film's subject matter, would refuse to see it.

I saw an eight o'clock showing on opening night with an audience that filled about two thirds of the theatre. I live in Kashihara, a city in Nara prefecture, just east of Osaka and about an hour south of Kyoto by train. It's a very conservative part of a very conservative country. When the film ended, one woman applauded and I joined her. No-one else did. When I came home, I opened Twitter and found the movie was trending mostly with negative Japanese tweets about it.

There are several hot button issues in the film. The protagonist is mixed race and this plays directly into the story. The story is set during World War II and it promotes the value of individualistic thought over collectivist thinking.

We meet Mahito (Santoki Soma) when he awakens during an air raid in Tokyo. Fire is falling from the sky and he learns his mother isn't home, that she's in a part of town now engulfed in flames. We learn a lot about Mahito's personality right away when he first rushes out the door in his bedclothes but then stops in the street, hurriedly turns around, and goes back inside to get dressed in his uniform, then rushes back out, forgetting to put on his shoes. And we can surmise that Mahito is a boy so deeply conditioned to conform to rules and customs, he can't even make the decision to bypass them in an emergency. And in his haste, he forgets to put on the one piece of practical clothing prescribed by custom, his shoes.

After his mother's death, he and his father, who builds fighter planes (much like the protagonist of The Wind Rises and Miyazaki's real life father), move to the country. Mahito's father marries Natsuko, the younger sister of Mahito's mother. Mahito's difficulty at accepting a replacement mother is worsened by her carefree manners. She takes him to their new home where they're to live with several elderly aunts. It turns out Mahito's great uncle was a famous American architect. This, by the way, would be enough for Mahito himself not to be considered Japanese in Japan, where racial purity is still very important. There's plenty of evidence to show Mahito is dissatisfied with himself. He picks a fight at school and afterwards smashes himself in the head with a rock. Is it to make his opponent look worse, or is it just that Mahito had hoped for more pain and punishment from the fight than what he got?

Nearby, there's a fantastic, abandoned, western style mansion that was designed and built by Mahito's great-uncle. Since his arrival, Mahito has been pestered by a large heron that occasionally speaks and starts to take on human characteristics. It lures him into the old house with the promise that his mother still lives. Instead, both Mahito and the heron are accidentally transported to another world. This other world is filled with western structures and symbols, including massive forests of cypresses. Many shots resemble Arnold Bocklin's famous painting, "Isle of the Dead".

In addition to cypresses, Miyazaki gives us chiaroscuro clouds, much darker and more threatening than usual in his films. But the tone of the film, as Mahito finds himself searching the strange world not only for escape but also for Natsuko, remains placidly anxious. He encounters dead people, or people who've been presumed dead for years, and with the general tone it does feel like a land of the dead. It has a similar vibe to the train journey in Spirited Away.

The wound on Mahito's head continues to be significant as a symbol of his own nature and how he feels about himself. The visual of gushing blood is continually repeated. In one scene, the blood is recalled when his face is covered in jam. And blood becomes important in the sense of inheritance when Mahito encounters his great uncle, who now lives in this world like Prospero, having apparently created it and bound its denizens to his service. His relationship with his daughter, Himi, a fire witch and possible incarnation of Mahito's mother, recalls Prospero's relationship with Miranda as well as the relationship between Odin and Brunhilde, the latter more directly referenced by Miyazaki in Ponyo.

There's a wonderfully creepy military of giant parakeets who seem intended to satirise the Imperial Japanese military. I loved a scene where Mahito is captured by them and he finds himself surrounded in a quiet house. The only sound we hear is of the birds loudly breathing through their nostrils. It's very creepy and weird.

As usual, the Japanese title is much more evocative than the English title. It doesn't quite translate, though--君たち, "kimitachi", is a plural "you" like we don't have in English, except informally, as in "you guys" or "you all". This is a significant point in a story that's about collectivism versus individualism. It's also a reference to a 1937 novel of the same name, a novel which also makes a similar point about individual thought, and which was hated by the contemporaneous regime.

This isn't a film that awkwardly pushes a message. It renders a world brilliantly and establishes a sense of experience. It's not a movie about answers but about the epiphany that life is full of unpredictable ambiguities, unreliable comforts, and inevitable death. The elusive and ephemeral qualities of life's comforts make attempts to impose order seem especially destructive. The film takes its time but every time a character leaves, whenever something ends, you miss it, and you're left feeling struck by how easily things can slip away.

The Boy and the Heron is now in theatres in Japan.

Reset no Yaiba

The third season of Kimetsu no Yaiba began last week, beginning the "Sword Village" arc from the manga. This season looks to be hewing closer to the manga after season two disappointed audiences with excessive padding. Though it's a little strange, after the bloodbath of the last season finale, to have Tanjiro and his friends totally recovered and up to their usual antics. Tanjiro had two of his fingers broken and Inosuke was skewered through the chest in what looked like a mortal wound. Nezuko went further into demonaic transformations than she ever had before and now she's back to the cute little lady who rides in a box without anyone commenting on it. Even her little bamboo bit has been replaced without comment. It was clearly destroyed last season.

It sadly contributes more to the feeling established last season that, however dire and bloody things get, there's always a reset button somewhere, ready to restore everyone to season one status.

This season has taken at least one step in the right direction, though, by splitting up the group, as sad as I am to bid a temporary farewell to Inosuke. Now Tanjiro and Nezuko are teamed with two of the "Hashira", the high ranking demon slayers who harness a particular element. Joining the Kameda siblings are the Mist Hashira, Muichiro Tokito, and the Love Hashira, Mitsuri Kanroji.

If nothing else this season, we can all enjoy Mitsuri's cleavage. Except Tanjiro, who amusingly begs her to cover up when he sees her running down some stairs.

Kimetsu no Yaiba is available on Netflix in Japan.

The Garish Seas of Saturation

The more things change, the more anime stays the same. While most of the world knows anime from outstanding examples like Princess Mononoke and Akira, the vast majority of anime films that get pumped out are like 2016's One Piece: Gold. The thirteenth theatrical release in the One Piece series, following on from the long running TV series and manga, it has all the usual earmarks of franchises that are long past their expiry date--it's overladen with old characters who get spotlight moments and can't be killed and the climax is a by-the-numbers fight that mostly involves characters screaming at each other about how powerful they are or how important friendship is or something similarly trite. Since this is One Piece, there was a fair amount of references to straw hats.

I saw this movie on the bus on the class field trip to and from Mie last week. By the third act of the film, I was the only one, apart from the driver, still awake on the bus. Sure, the kids were tired from the trip but I suspect they could've stayed awake had the movie contained the tiniest spark of life.

I've seen the first couple episodes of One Piece and they were entertaining. I always meant to go back to it. It's about pirates, obviously a subject of interest for me. The creator supposedly researched real pirates but that's so far never been at all apparent. The series is set in a fantasy world with the usual hodgepodge of historical signifiers. The main character is a kid named Luffy who has a stretchy limbs superpower like Reed Richards except he also seems to be nigh-indestructible. Along the way, he picked up a vast crew of quirky characters whom I'm sure all have their own delightful introductory episodes but in Gold are mostly just a roll call of character types.

The few female characters stand out, particularly the popular Nami, but every woman in the movie, without exception, is rail thin with massive breasts. I'm not against titillation and if that's your thing, more power to you, but surely some of the women in the background could have had variant body types at least. They all look like strippers, which I suppose kind of fits with the modern casino setting of the film. The movie's about the pirate crew attempting a heist. That is, until things devolve into the usual battle royale.

The Other, Other Conan

In my never ending task of catching up with all the things my students are into, a couple days ago I started watching Detective Conan, aka Case Closed (名探偵コナン). It's the new movie all the kids are talking about but I watched the first couple episodes of the TV anime from 1996. It's not bad.

I'd seen a couple episodes dubbed in English when the show aired on Adult Swim in the early 2000s under the title Case Closed. Like most Adult Swim viewers, I didn't have any interest in a show about a little kid, and there's certainly nothing particularly adult about the show, except to the lingering Puritanism of American broadcast restrictions. But I like kids a lot more than I used to and so I can enjoy a kids' show.

The show's about a brilliant high school student detective named Shinichi Kudo who's transformed into a brilliant elementary school student detective called Conan Edogawa. Among other things, this derails his plans to make it with his high school sweetheart, Ran.

In prepubescent form, he goes by the name Conan Edogawa, which comes from combining the names of two famous mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Edogawa Ranpo. He has a pretty charming obsession with Sherlock Holmes.

The show's funny but also capable of real tension at the right moments.

Detective Conan is available on Netflix in Japan.

Twitter Sonnet #1583

A ghostly people filled the hasty dream.
The happy barge obtained suspicious eggs.
A sunny breakfast bought a reckless team.
The tide can wash a skinny pair of legs.
A fire marked the path of burning snakes.
The rivers bound the ragged edge of day.
They met for bound'ries drawn for lofty stakes.
A dotted line designed the phantom way.
A shame the crownless case should think at times.
The brain provides some facts beyond the pale.
So look ye cats at kings for less than dimes.
But heave and never rue the dainty whale.
The ships were real but oceans turned to coke.
Mistook, a real delight was deemed a joke.

Z versus S

There's plenty of sex and violence in the new season of Kimetsu no Yaiba, aka Demon Slayer. This show that's beloved across Japan by people from ages three to seventy. Good for them. And Japan's crime rate is astronomically lower than countries now trying to clamp down on this kind of thing.

The latest arc, "The Entertainment District", features the trio of demon fighting boys, Tanjiro (Natsuki Hanae), Inosuke (Yoshitsugu Matsuoka), and Zenitsu (Hiro Shimono), teaming up with a master slayer named Uzui (Katsuyuki Konishi) to investigate a red light district in Tokyo. The three boys dress as geisha to infiltrate three different geisha houses where Uzui's three female ninja assistants disappeared. Soon they discover a demon woman who uses her obi sash to dismember people. In the latest episode, Tanjiro's sister, Nezuko (Akari Kito), furthers her transformation into a demon in order to savage the villain.

In the process, Nezuko herself loses several limbs only to regrow them, multiple times. Not for the first time, only now more vividly, I'm reminded of my own Nesuko from Boschen and Nesuko.

Like Nesuko, Nezuko tries to resist a natural bloodlust, she can regrow her limbs, and she doesn't wear panties. She does part her hair on the opposite side, though.

I guess the similarities are likely all a coincidence. Nesuko certainly talks a lot more than Nezuko who remains mute most of the time. Still, I'm reminded of the minor character from Panty and Stocking with Garter Belt that was clearly modelled on Gir from Invader Zim and wonder if this is another example of a Japanese artist drawing inspiration from a casual perusal of American media. I guess it's flattering, if so. But it makes it all the stranger now that I work with kids who love this show and, as I share in their enthusiasm, I can never say to them, "Hey, I made a Nesuko, too, decades before this one . . ."

Kimetsu no Yaiba is available on Netflix in Japan and Boschen and Nesuko is available on my website, Anelnoath, worldwide.

Twitter Sonnet #1514

With tighter trousers, legs approach the bench.
The time arrived when crystal formed a flame.
A metal neck consumes the fleshy wrench.
We all remembered late the lodging's name.
A muffler wet was like a scarf for tongues.
We hid the treasure deep below the pad.
The cheapest house contained the wooden lungs.
No shedding wig could hide from us the mad.
The ruler broke for words with nothing in.
The music held a solid rule above.
The package broke the bread's recycling bin.
The spotless alley's filled with hearts of love.
Another demon dances strange with blood.
Another rabbit runs from Elmer Fudd.

His Suit Protects His Face

How about a James Bond movie for shy men? 2021's Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway (機動戦士ガンダム 閃光のハサウェイ) might fit the bill. It features a handsome, mild mannered terrorist for whom flirtation and action seem to occur nearby while he remains passive or defends himself. This guy's so milquetoast, it's kind of hilarious. But the film has some fantastic animation and a really sexy female lead.

I've never been especially interested in Gundam, despite my appetite for anime otherwise. I love Evangelion, which is kind of a subversion of Gundam. And oddly enough, even now, the original 1990s Evangelion series feels like a subversion of this 2021 film. I guess it's no surprise since it's based on a novel series from the late '80s. I wouldn't have watched the film except my coworker was so insistent that I should.

The first scene is pretty impressive but not especially ingenious. It features a terrorist hijacking of a commercial spacecraft and my coworker told me the director took influence from 2001: A Space Odyssey to portray the passengers in zero gravity. But the scene is much more reminiscent of a very similar scene in Cowboy Bebop, which was also produced by Sunrise. The leader of the terrorists even wears a jack'o'lantern mask, recalling Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door.

Among the passengers are three of the film's lead characters: Hathaway Noa (Kensho Ono), Kenneth Sleg (Jun'ichi Suwabe), and Gigi Andalucia (Reina Ueda). It's the loving attention animators give to Gigi's floating blonde hair that shows just how much was invested in the film.

Hathaway is the main protagonist. He's the real leader of the terrorist group, Mafty, and the hijackers are only pretenders, part of a conspiracy to give Mafty a bad name. Somehow, Gigi seems to know everything, which Hathaway comes to know when she's aggressively flirting with him. After Hathaway's thwarted the attack and the ship lands, he finds that she's booked them both in the same lavish hotel suite, He spends a lot of time sitting around, looking chaste and pensive while she flashes skin at him.

Kenneth is the other side of the coin, even bragging to a stewardess about how he's comfortable talking to beautiful women. Naturally, he turns out to be the villain.

Maybe you're asking at this point, what is it, exactly, that makes Mafty a terrorist group, apart from the fact that everyone says they are? It's never clear, which may be intentional. Mafty may be a victim of propaganda. They do, though, have giant fighting robots which finally show up more than halfway through the film.

Hathaway is given the opportunity to shield Gigi in his arms while she panics beneath the giant metal figures. So the manliness of Gundam combat finally undoes the confidence of the beautiful seductress. Not that such impure thoughts would ever occur to Hathaway. So the viewer can have his cake and refrain from publicly acknowledging he'd eat it, too.

The animation is pretty good and detailed but the story remains lightweight.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Hathaway is available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1512

Fantastic candy cracked the pasty house.
A gentle zombie searched the surgeon's room.
We cram a human brain to quite the mouse.
Repeating lights could sugar coat a doom.
The pirate plate supports a platter prize.
Assorted seas survey the sandy hopes.
Restricted tickers beat the heart to size.
Concentric cows remember braided ropes.
The hopping starts before the feet align.
The quicker tally counts the extra toe.
The speaker read the words and chucked the sign.
The army boat abridged a book to know.
Reversing coats acrue the lint of ten.
To take a test, return and wear the pin.

Owboy Nobop

I finally finished watching the live action Cowboy Bebop last night. I guess you don't need to me to tell you it's not very good. Everyone's saying it now, in a heart-warming union of normally polarised political camps. The consensus seems even greater than the one for the nigh-universally disliked Thirteenth Doctor era of Doctor Who. Even Screen Rant is talking shit about it, which means they think it's very safe to do so. We can all come together in our disappointment.

A lot of people start by talking about how "cringey" Ed is, though Ed doesn't appear until the last scene of the last episode. Played by non-binary actor Eden Perkins, who, surprisingly, still doesn't have a Wikipedia entry, they come off sort of like a zany '90s Jim Carrey knock-off. Maybe Yahoo Serious. Yeah, they're pretty annoying but it's hard to imagine how else a faithful, live action version of Ed could behave.

A lot of the problems with the show stem from an attempt to apply cartoon logic to live action. The final episode recreates the cathedral action sequence from the anime where Spike falls through the stained glass window, about three storeys up. The anime cuts to him recovering in very cartoonish, full body bandages, with Faye sitting nearby, a shot that plays with Faye's association with bondage as well as the show's cartoon nature. In the live action version, Spike is simply walking normally along the wharf with a barely perceptible limp. It was kind of acceptable in the anime because the cartoon logic is acknowledged and played with--in the live action version, it just seems dumb.

The show goes out of the way to insist it's not kink-shaming, featuring a few scenes of characters literally engaged in bondage. But I guess the writers feel you have to make a very clear distinction between bondage implemented for sexual pleasure and bondage the occurs as part of a fantasy series' plot. This is what happens when you have writers who categorically don't understand fantasy.

Another recurrent problem is the show's diminishing of heterosexual male characters, particularly Spike (John Cho). His skill as a martial artist was a defining part of his character in the anime--in the live action version, he seems to be just average, except in one scene in the penultimate episode where he takes out a whole building of gangsters. Clearly meant to be as impressive as the hallway scene in Oldboy or the one on Daredevil, it suffers again from slowly executed choreography. Spike's face is kept in shadow for much of it so it seems even John Cho's stunt double is a slow-poke. It was particularly evident after watching Shang-Chi.

The sexual chemistry between Spike and Faye (Daniella Pineda) is nervously avoided by making the two of them pals who gab about loofahs. Faye has a one night stand with a woman, a sexy mechanic with pretty much no personality otherwise, who gives Faye her first orgasm. It's all done purely for titillation, which I'd normally be all in favour of except, again, it makes Spike look like chopped liver. Spike can't seem to fight any of his own battles, either, and fights he won on the anime are almost invariably now fights where he's saved by someone, usually Faye or Jet. This leads up to an intensely stupid climax in which the final nail is put in the coffin of Julia's character, or any chance that she'll be as intriguing as her anime counterpart.

For some reason, several stories have been repurposed to be about young women breaking free of their domineering or manipulative mothers. The eco-terrorist episode about the Ma Barker type with three sons is now about a Ma Barker type with two sons and a daughter who finally musters her courage and stands up to the old woman. Faye's con-man love interest, Whitney Haggis Matsumoto, from the anime becomes an older woman in live action who had posed as Faye's mother. They must put aside their differences and work together for one episode in which, at least in spirit, Faye finds she's an apple that hasn't fallen too far from the old con woman tree. It's mildly nice but tonally way out of place.

Well, the turnaround on reboots these days is like two or three years. Maybe next time the property will be exploited by people with talent.

Twitter Sonnet #1496

A challenge tilts the wind beyond the mill.
And here a stalwart crow engaged to stand.
The armour rusts despite an iron will.
He cocked his hat to stir the heartless band.
The scattered snow was like an army lost.
The snakes of smoke adorned the frosty ridge.
Behind the fighter's back he weighed the cost.
A gleaming knight defends a fateful bridge.
The steps were shifting fast beneath her feet.
The reeds were singing songs of names and heads.
Another figure took the vaunted seat.
So feeble dreams defend a score of beds.
We read of ancient fish on glowing books.
And slowly put our mouths to wire hooks.

Mugen Again

I caught the second episode of the new season of Kimetsu no Yaiba last night and, as I suspected, it consisted, I think, entirely of footage from the movie. Having it juxtaposed with the animation in the first episode, though, reminded me of how the movie was criticised for looking no better than the television series. Now I can clearly see the direction is at least better in the film footage. There are more creative angles and there are fewer scenes of characters just standing there talking about what they're going to do.

The opening theme was new, though.

The influence of Rengoku's popularity is obvious. Within the context of the overall story, there's no other reason he's more deserving of prominence in the opening than, say, that spider family from the middle of season one or the demon in the haunted house whose drums altered physics. But I do like Rengoku and his weird, constant, unblinking stare, an unrelenting beam of genki.

But my favourite characters are Nezuko and Inosuke. This first episode had one of my favourite moments from the movie--Inosuke riding a train for the first time is like an excited dog in a car. His exultant laughter as he presses his boar head to the window cracks me up.

I noticed he takes off the head in the opening. There's more and more merchandise showing him without it, too, which is disappointing. That boar's head is 60% of his appeal.

Wolves and Rabbits

I'm currently working at a very small junior high school, I'll be here for a month. I was here for a month last year at around the same time so I'm reconnecting with a bunch of students, some of whom barely remember me. One of the tiniest first year students who had seemed especially attached to me last year, though, is now a tiny second year student who definitely remembers me. She was a little sulky this year because she thought I'd forgotten her name but when I called her by name she immediately perked up and wanted to open a salvo of all her small store of English. I asked her to recommend an anime series to me. First she said, "Kimetsu no Yaiba."

"Everyone knows Kimetsu no Yaiba," I said. "What is something only you like?"

Her friends were gathered round as she thought and thought and they giggled when she finally said, "Jujutsu Kaisen."

"Everyone knows Jujutsu Kaisen!" I said.

Finally, she recommended Beastars, which I'd never heard of. I was happy to find the whole thing on Netflix when I went home.

I've seen the first two episodes now and it's not bad, pretty interesting, even. I'm not a fan of the furry aesthetic but this show doesn't have the super-ironic, anti-sexual, cloying furry humour. It imagines an alternate reality populated by strange animal/human hybrids. There's a social divide between herbivores and carnivores and eating meat is a big taboo. The show is set on a college campus where, at lunch time, the carnivores are forced to enjoy soy burgers.

The interesting thing is how assumptions of predatory instincts underlie all social interaction. The concept is a little similar to Zootopia but with a darker, distinctly Japanese edge.

The main characters are a wolf named Legoshi and a rabbit named Hal. Legoshi is in the drama club where a self-possessed, widely admired stag is at the top of the social food chain, regardless of where evolution may have placed him on the actual food chain. Legoshi is mostly pretty laid back, though he conceals anxieties about his own predatory instincts. When he starts to earn the stag's respect, he finds this respect makes him naturally want to work harder for the stag. This adds to anxiety over his suspicion that he may be a murderer, having found a desire to consume flesh occasionally overrides his conscious mind.

Hal, meanwhile, is ostracised because she's a slut. This is revealed in episode two and I laughed because, I thought, of course. She's a rabbit. But it makes for an interesting juxtaposition when Legoshi is shocked out of his anxiety over wanting to eat her to find she wants to eat him. So to speak.

It's very surprising in a Japanese series. Virginity is considered a virtue here for boys and girls. Girls proudly carry cherry charms on their school bags and boys brag about how they haven't had sex. Any time a character is portrayed as promiscuous in an anime, it's usually an older, often villainous, character, or the anime is out of the ordinary. So this one seems to be.

The animation is an interesting mix of cgi and 2d animation that hasn't gotten old yet but I suppose it might. The opening theme is some nice stop motion animation. The only thing that bugs me so far is that Legoshi wears suspenders and a belt--and his suspenders don't cross or connect in the back.

That video has over 39 million views!

Twitter Sonnet #1484

The yellow grass was hair from golden vaults.
The healthy drink produced a kind of bread.
We gathered late to drink a set of malts.
We cluster early honours fit for lead.
The slower light was waiting back behind.
For reasons lost the circuits took the chick.
You crank the pad to make the tape rewind.
Reversing streams creates a haunted brick.
At table five, the napkin carries weight.
A something schmutz defaced the bent lapel.
A mouth exceeds the mask it quickly ate.
Behold the bill and eyes of M. De Spell.
The lawless meat reflects a hungry moon.
A rabid dream permits a tasty boon.

Cowbop Beboy

Netflix has released the opening for their upcoming live action adaptation of Cowboy Bebop.

The attempt to wed live action with a two dimensional style is strongly reminiscent of Sin City. Sometimes it's really awkward, like the first shot of John Cho smoking, in which it seems like his arm was digitally moved about to fit the timing. Though I'm surprised they're actually portraying him smoking.

The original opening for comparison:

The obvious difference is the lack of the fourth lead in the Netflix trailer, Edward. Edward had previously been announced as appearing in the Netflix series but for some reason Netlix has been coy about her. Her actress hasn't been named and no pictures published.

A lot of negative reaction on the internet has been generated around Faye, played by Daniella Pineda. Despite the costumes on Spike and Jet hewing very close to the anime, Faye's costume is notably more conservative and generic. It covers more of her body and also aesthetically looks more like Guardians of the Galaxy than the tweaked 1950s style of most of the characters in the original series. Pineda added a lot of fuel to the backlash by posting a video in which she mocks the fans for their dislike of her costume as well as mocking the idea that she physically doesn't match the animated Faye in the bust department, something I don't remember seeing anyone complain about.

The fact that the makers of this show and many others feel women need to be more covered now makes me feel more sad than outraged. The change in her aesthetic, though, seems like a sign they really didn't understand what the original series was trying to do.

Recently, more images of the supporting cast were released:

Julia and Vicious, on the top left and right, look pretty much the same as they do in the anime. Ana and Gren, on the bottom left and right, make me think that if I ever need to go into witness protection and look inconspicuous I should hope Netlix wouldn't be in charge of giving me my new look. Ana was an apparently ordinary woman working at a corner drugstore and now she's another badass in a leather coat. Gren was a man whose body started to take on female attributes against his will. He was a saxophone player in a small dive bar and dressed in plain slacks and a button down shirt, unsurprisingly inconspicuous given he lived on a world populated almost entirely by men, and dangerous men. Now it looks like he's a flamboyant cabaret performer, which makes me wonder if they're drastically changing his whole story. This seems like a sign of either the clumsiness of wokeness or a clumsy pretense at wokeness (depending on whether you consider "woke" a good thing). Someone trying to show a more positive portrayal of a transgender character clumsily put one in a more stereotypical role in the process.

I'll certainly be watching this show. But so far the boldest things about it are things it directly copies from the original series, which is not a good sign.

Jidai Jedi

The combination of Star Wars with Japanese animation is an idea with so much potential so I was excited when Star Wars: Visions was announced. It premiered yesterday, an anthology of short anime films from some prominent Japanese studios produced for Disney+. The final result is interesting, sometimes quite good, but more often disappointing. For the English voice casts, some relatively big names were recruited, including David Harbour, Lucy Liu, and George Takei. But I only watched a few minutes of the English version before switching to Japanese. As is often the case, the English dub is awkward and unnatural sounding and drastically changes the meaning of the original dialogue.

The best three stories are "The Duel", "The Elder", and "Lop and Ocho". "The Duel" is obviously inspired by Yojimbo but doesn't follow the concept of a ronin playing both sides of warring factions. Instead, a lone warrior fights against an Imperial takeover of a village. It's almost entirely in black and white except the glow of electronics--like lightsabres and droid eyes--are in colour. The hero (Masaki Terasoma) comes off as really cool, using few words and precise attacks. He's intriguingly mysterious and the other characters marvel over the fact that he uses a red lightsabre.

Another story, "The Ninth Jedi" from Production IG, also makes sabre colour a plot point. In this case, a sabre smith creates lightsabres that change colour automatically based on the spiritual alignment of the wielder. This was an idea I really didn't like. The idea of the human soul being reduced to colour codes is even worse than the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system. "The Ninth Jedi" is set some time after Rise of Skywalker and involves the ruler of a planet trying to resurrect the Jedi. The protagonist is the teenage daughter of the sabresmith who, like Rey, is inexplicably expert in lightsabre use the moment she picks one up and is able to deflect blaster fire. Production IG has made some impressive things in the past but I'm used to weak output from them by now. So I wasn't surprised this was a letdown.

I was more surprised by the weakness of "The Twins", which was directed by Kill la Kill and Panty and Stocking director Hiroyuki Imaishi. The story involves two powerful Dark Side Force users, twins, a man and a woman, in command of two Star Destroyers. They're using kyber crystals to combine the two ships into an ultimate weapon but then the brother (Junya Enoki) turns to the Light Side and tries to run away with the crystal. There's an over-the-top and ultimately meaningless fight sequence and I was reminded of the weak last twelve episodes of Kill la Kill instead of the magnificent first twelve episodes.

More than half of the stories involve kyber crystals for some reason, the essential component of all lightsabres. Considering how often crystals factor into anime and Japanese video games, I suppose it makes sense.

"T0-B1" from the studio Science Saru is about a robot boy seeking a kyber crystal so he can become a Jedi. This story is cute but too obviously Astroboy.

I was disappointed by the first Studio Trigger short, "The Twins", but "The Elder", directed by Masahiko Otsuka, is mostly pretty good. A Jedi master, Tajin (Takaya Hashi/David Harbour), and his Padawan, Dan (Yuichi Nakamura/Jordan Fisher), go to investigate reports of a Sith on a remote planet. The relationship between the two men and their personalities are nicely established over the course of the investigation. The story's main idea about the inevitable deterioration that comes with time and age was surprising and very effective in the context. It felt like a genuine moment of mono no aware. The only disappointing part of this one is when one character gets slashed in the gut with a lightsabre and makes a complete recovery shortly thereafter. Nearly every story had one stupid moment where something really amazing and horrifying that happened was immediately softballed in an implausible manner. Disney claims to have been hands-off but this felt like studio interference. At least the women don't look like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Despite the fact that I don't like the furry aesthetic, I really liked "Lop and Ocho" from Geno Studio. Set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it involves a very Japanese-looking community on a planet occupied by the Empire. A bunny girl named Lop (Seiran Kobayashi) is a slave of the Empire until she's rescued by the local leader, Yasaburo (Tadahisa Fujimura), and his daughter, Ocho (Risa Shimizu). Seven years pass and Ocho has decided her people must cooperate with the Empire while Yasaburo is still against it. A nice sense of genuine, personally motivated political tension is created, with each side having clear, understandable motives. Stylistically, too, this is one of the nicest looking episodes.

All the stories have good visuals, except maybe "Tatooine Rhapsody".

Twitter Sonnet #1476

The shadow shirt attracts a sudden breeze.
The even heat absorbs a dream of mist.
Reminders float on ships on purple seas.
On lines of green we kept a changing list.
Another hand assists the falling wish.
A probing question bounced an offered truce.
Another hand of cards produced the fish.
We gather late to praise the giant moose.
A speaker jack awaits the mouldy floor.
For heaven's sake, the smaller shoe was laced.
We scratched a music sheet across the door.
The staff are sunk beneath a treble case.
The kyber crystals weigh the painted mind.
A glowing sword destroyed a melon rind.