Monthly Archives: August 2011

The Underappreciated Art of Capricious Ornament

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Last night I saw Double Team, the 1997 action film starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dennis Rodman and Mickey Rourke, directed by Tsui Hark. I had a great time with it, and if anything in that first sentence piqued your interest I recommend giving the movie a shot. Despite the inarguable deficiency in many of the film’s performances, there remains a particular greatness to it.

I don’t want to review Double Team. I’d much rather talk about something fabulous in its execution, something all too often unappreciated by storyteller and storylistener alike: the art of being unpredictable.

There are few sensations I enjoy more than getting involved in a story and having absolutely no idea what’s going to happen next. And yet most Hollywood movies are ferociously resistant to this. Even specialized nerd fare like Hellboy II: The Golden Army is ruined by that hackneyed impulse to spoil a climax in the first few minutes by way of allegory.

Being predictable works sometimes. Like in Fist of the North Star. There’s no such thing as a Fist of the North Star spoiler. Let’s be honest, just about every character introduced is going to die, and Kenshiro’s mythic quest will continue, like a Greek tragedy of sorts. It has a quality I’ve rarely encountered with modern stuff. I liken the experience to reading Bible stories as a child: there’s a sense of wonder and reverence at the intense morbidity, while the story mechanics themselves are fairy-tale simplistic and predictable. Yes, I just compared Fist of the North Star to the Bible. Shut up. I like it more.

But that’s the exception to the rule. Predictability ruins most everything. For example, every film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. They’re average at best, satisfying the box office and critics alike with the bare minimum amount of charisma required, when their every flaw would be better augmented by throwing us a curve ball or two. Like having a boss fight with a shredded Mickey Rourke in a Coliseum lined with tripmines. And a tiger.

I liked this movie, if you can't tell.

Why?

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I upgraded to a much better template which will make this site easier to read. It also means I have more width for images!

That’s not enough of an excuse to waste your time with this post, so I also added a page to the site which explains why this blog exists.

Thanks for reading, and I hope to have new content for you soon, if only to bury that silly MangaUK post I made last week.

The day I called MangaUK a whiny little bitch.

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REDLINE is an anime movie that came out in Japan, and will be coming out in the UK and US eventually. It’s coming out in the UK in November of this year, and in the US sometime in 2012. REDLINE is a very good movie, so there has been a lot of twitter chatter about it. A lot of people, myself included, impatiently imported the Japanese blu-ray, because North America shares the same Blu-ray region coding as Japan does.

For the longest time, the UK has had to wait much longer for anime to come over than us Americans do. So an Englishman tweeted that FINALLY we had to wait and not them. I responded in kind. Continue reading →

The Key To Great Anime: Takeshi Koike (Prelude to a REDLINE review)

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In the summer of 2003 I had an experience which would be endlessly repeated in my time as an anime enthusiast.

The Animatrix DVD came out and I watched it and it was awesome. It’s the first and best of the recent “hey Japan, promote our Western property by doing an anthology anime” ventures, which would come to include Batman: Gotham Knight, Halo Legends, and Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic. With each of these titles, various Japanese animation studios contributed their own individual pieces of a larger story.

The Animatrix was great, not only because of the talent involved, but because of the extensive special features, which give you a lot of information about the Japanese directors contributing to the project. It also included an educational featurette about the history of anime and its rise to popularity in North America.

Seriously, if you somehow missed that DVD, you probably want to pick it up. A lot of great stuff in there, even if your knowledge or interest in The Matrix doesn’t extend beyond the first movie.

When I saw The Animatrix, the short that blew me away was the sixth one, World Record. It’s about a man who breaks free from the Matrix entirely on his own, through raw strength and will power. It was a fresh premise stylishly presented, and buoyed by melancholy or gentle hopefulness (depending on your interpretation). And it was written by Yoshiaki Kawajiri. I totally loved it, and I knew I couldn’t be the only one.

I was the only one. I had no friends that gave more than half a crap about World Record. The Matrix message boards I surfed back then (oh yes, don’t get it twisted, I’m a huge dork) had little to nothing to say about it, with people ranking it among the worst offerings on the DVD. I felt like either I was insane or I was surrounded by insane people.

I’m still either insane or surrounded by insane people, though I’m more inclined to accept the former.

Among the many special features on The Animatrix resides a World Record commentary track by director Takeshi Koike. All these years later, the only part of that track I can remember is about this fucking key.

Right in the middle of World Record there’s a zoomed in slow motion shot of a key being thrown to a valet. The amount of detail put into this very mundane moment is ridiculous, imbuing it with a heightened sense of importance. The key not only moves across the screen but tumbles in all three dimensions with perspective that is painstakingly accurate, despite the many planes of its shape, and the glimmer of light that dances across it.

The key looked too perfect, like a computer-generated object.

In the commentary track, Koike is asked by the Animatrix producer if it’s actually CG, and he says it’s not. The producer seems genuinely surprised at this, and Koike coolly responds by saying that meant he did his job correctly. CG effects and objects are frequently used in The Animatrix, so it wouldn’t have been surprising if they did that here. Drawing the key this accurately would be a far more laborious process than simply using CG, hence the producer’s surprise.

Eight years later, and that’s the only thing I can remember from the entire Animatrix commentary. There’s a reason for that.

Is it because the easily overlooked craftsmanship of this one shot mirrored my own perception of the overlooked craftsmanship of Koike’s entire short? Partially.

But it also stands out to me as a moment where an enormous amount of effort is being invested into something, without any expectation of the audience being aware of that fact. Anime is usually the complete opposite. It’s efficient, it’s resourceful, it’s getting by secretly doing less, to give the consumer the illusion of more. In fact, CG elements are frequently used to that end, to incorporate effects or staging in a more cost-effective way.

Long story short, I was endeared to Takeshi Koike long before REDLINE ever came out. When I heard he was making his own movie at Madhouse, my response was “all right! This is my dude!”

And remember: if you really enjoyed World Record, you’re not alone!