Celluloid Wunderkammer: Call Me Tonight (1986)

From http://i1091.photobucket.com/albums/i386/jgespi/caratulas/CallMeTonightRedux-1.jpg

Dir. Tatsuya Okamoto

Contrary to the provocative image that I've included at the beginning, this short piece of obscure anime flips the expectations for hentai into how perverse the concept of tentacle erotica is. I've been lucky to discover these fascinating obscurities released straight to video, mainly thanks to the Anime News Network article series Buried Treasure - found here - and thankfully these works that have never been released on DVD even in their home country have been discovered by Western fans, subtitled by said fans, and made available online. I admit to haven't even see key anime works like Cowboy Bebop (1998) yet seen the likes of Call Me Tonight, my habit for digging deep into the depths of my favourite things sending me to material like this, made back when money was plenty enough for a subversion of anime sexuality, when anime hentai was only birthed within the same decade, to be made. If this material was made available on DVD, when pigs fly, they would be fascinating curiosities for anyone to see.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/19348/celluloid-wunderkammer-call-me-tonight-1986-director-tatsuya-okamoto/

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/call-me-tonight/w448/call-me-tonight.jpg

Seeds of Memory: Kaiba (2008)

From http://media.animevice.com/uploads/0/1293/119292-kaiba_large.jpg

Dir. Masaaki Yuasa

Within basic, rudimentary knowledge of any form of creativity, even doodling on paper, it is made very clear how small details can alter the results of a creation. A single note of an instrument can be bent with modification, or a change in the blowing/plucking of it, to make a new sound or change how the original note is played. Shading, dimension etc. can alter a drawing, which anyone having done a secondary (high) school art class could attest to. Altering certain details can depict certain human emotions in a clearer way - the difference between the passions of jazz against the aggression of heavy metal, and both styles can be modified to convey different emotions than the ones I've given them in this example. But by changing notes, words, lines sketched on a page, whatever is in front of you, it's also possible to present more abstract concepts such as internal states, dreams and memories. Animation, which is inherently about using basic lines to creating moving images, is perfectly able to do this, as is the case in the twelve episode series Kaiba. In the distant future, a young man wakes up with no memories. He has two distinct physical traits - a birthmark that is a symbol and a giant hole directly through his chest. The only potential clue about his past is a locket around his neck with a blurred picture of a girl his age in it. In the universe of Kaiba, memories can be preserved and commodity. People can be preserved on chips and change bodies. Memories can be altered. Of course it's the rich who have the privilege while the poor go as far as selling their bodies if need be to support their families. In this universe the protagonist goes in  search of the girl pictured in the locket and discover who he is, even if it means spending a large quarter of the series in other bodies than his own.

To clear aside the one major flaw of Kaiba, from the same director of The Tatami Galaxy (2010), it's that at twelve episodes it does shorten the potential journey and possibilities it could have gone with its premise. The first six travel around the universe set-up, exploring what memory means to human beings, while the last six deal strictly with the key narrative with the ideas thought about wrapped around it. It does feel abrupt when the switch happens; if any series could justify twenty four episodes, when many procrastinate at that length, it's this one if it was written and planned well. But one has to be grateful for the series even existing. The series as a whole is inventive and imaginative, using creativity to depict a concept that is both to reconfigure the story in a new way but also bring in a melancholic attitude to the nature of memory's mutability. Immediately the visual look and character designs are instantly noticeable. In another review, they might be called "childlike" or "cartoonish". Instead I would say it's a distinct, bold and colourful one. Character designs to be sympathetic for. It benefits the series because the result allows for a greater fluidity to the animation. For a series that isn't really about action set pieces, the few times they happen, in the first episode no less, are impressive. The series' look also leads to two distinct virtues. That this is an animation willing to push itself to the most vivid things you could create from just your imagination possible, a completely alien new world onscreen even if aspects are recognisable. It actually evokes the great René Laloux's Fantastic Planet (1973) just in the level of interest in the flora and social life depicted in the background of locations. This is combined with a very thoughtful view on the concept of memory.

Kaiba takes immense joy in the notion of memories. Depicting the mind as a library of  books full of past thoughts and images. As seeds and liquid. Its fascinated with how they could be preserved and how people could continue to live beyond their original deaths. Unfortunately in such a world it means this ability to preserve and remove memories leads to greater remorse for their loss. The girl the protagonist is trying to find is likely part of a terrorist group who oppose the technology able to manipulate memories and bodies. As he travels through the universe in the first half, we also see various implementations of this technology and the repercussions of it when matched with the complicated emotions human beings have. The animation in style, composition and tone depicts this without weightless exposition. It's not difficult to compare  Yuasa's style and thoughts to Mamoru Oshii and the late Satoshi Kon, the former in his cerebral takes of his ideas, the later in manipulating reality depending on his characters' mental states. But Yuasa is different from them. Oshii is concerned with philosophy greatly. Kon's key obsession was dreams. Yuasa even above these two directors' take on it is directly obsessed with human emotion. Relationships and interaction, friendship and communication, is important in his work. He has no issues with tackling love and even sex head on, and it says something that the series can make a subtle reference to menstruation, without making it seem abrasive, in one episode when most anime now has developed an embarrassing track record in portraying women. The series even goes as far as play with a queer/pan-gender take on what being able to switch bodies could mean, not a great deal barring one episode, fitting titled Masculine Woman,  but enough to be an idea as fully formed as other within the series.

From http://animewriter.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/kaiba290.png

The series has no issues with melodrama being used to convey its ideas, pulling at the heartstrings and making the director vastly different from Mamoru Oshii. The best episode is the third in the whole twelve series, but is a great beginning for a story that continues as highly in quality long afterwards. A character is introduced, leaves halfway through in a way that is heartbreaking, and in a nicely wrapped up little story, when I'm usually not fond of episodic anime because the stories are weakly put together, makes a dramatic and philosophical point that strikes home fully. That this character, while long gone, still exists physically for a large portion in the series for a while adds a very inspired move by the anime, in forcing home the the subjectivity of what the body and mind mean, disturbing in its implications, but also in how she still "exists", and the queer/pan relationship that happens with a secondary character, suggests a glory in someone being allowed to still live even if they're technically dead. If the series could have been twenty four episodes long, with this level of quality still there, moments like this episode could have been allowed to be even more powerful, even if the final work in reality is still something special in its own right.

Particularly for a series clearly made in the era where anime is created with computers rather than hand drawn cels, very noticeable even to a novice like myself when you see enough anime, Kaiba nonetheless shows far more of the amount of talent human hands and minds are capable of in building its world. Everything in this was clearly designed, such heady ideas through the simplest visual flourishes allowed to be taken as far as they could. Its baffling the series never got a wide release in the English speaking world; maybe in anime fandom its "weird", but the story and ideas are conveyed in ways that are fully graspable without having to work with them as other anime required. Oshii was difficult with the celebrated Ghost In The Shell (1995) even before the divisive sequel, but his work was released over here. Kaiba is unconventional because, if one takes the simplest and obvious of changes in something, a colour palette, character style, how everything is conveyed by what is drawn, its furthest, there's somewhat of a paradox that, when even the simplest of modifications of image or sound are avoided in more mainstream work, something that does them looks more experimental. With this series this is strange to have taken place. A legitimately beautiful, gentle opening and closing song are wrapped around each episode, rather than something really trite like is an unfortunate case with other works, setting up the notion of love that can even overcome the loss of memory and multiple bodies that is the eventual key theme for the whole series. Despite the jarring jerk in the plotting in the middle, the series does indeed fully run with the notion of how human existence and interaction could be drastically altered, in reality and philosophically, but that notions of love and kinship could still exist despite the burdens created. Far from naive with this message, Yuasa also has the advantage of realising how badly human beings can negate this and harm themselves, as seen in realistic terms in The Tatami Galaxy, even if his heart is for the happy endings. The notion of fate or the strength of eternal love in these two works isn't the sappy, asinine debacle is its usually turned into but a true optimism for good of people to be able to exist together regardless of the fact reality can be completely undermined. The last episode of Kaiba suddenly turns into Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997), completely within the bowels of the human mind like that film becomes, but rather than the violent catharsis and destruction of what was before to even consider healing, this ends with reconciliation of what existed before instead.

Anyone can do this. On a written page. Painting. Film. Sculpture. Anything. Knowledge helps improve your ability to do this. In trying to depict these ideas to a wider audience however a problem arises. Anyone can do this, but to widen the palette and tools, you're stuck with issues of commercialism. It's actually not encouraged in the mainstream to even modify a slight aspect of what you're doing to be different unless you have the money and ego to go forth with it. Music has the most freedom because, even before MP3 distribution furthered the ability to reach new audiences, musicians can play the most unconventional music possible and find a way to get it distributed, the most uncommercial acts and musicians able to develop cult followings and reputations. Art in general has the advantage that, despite the questions of what "art" is, that many different manifestos and techniques have opened up what it is as expression of thought. Literature and writing in general is helped by the fact anyone can write an idea or mood down on paper, since paper and a pen is easily available, although as someone who wants to become a fiction writer myself, I dread when it comes to actually trying to publish the novel I presume I will make; even if the internet (again) has made it possible to distribute one further, the issue of whether the most interesting works, like in music and art, eventually rise to the surface will happen with novels now is something I'm worried about, the desire just to cause one person to think enough for me to have succeeded. Moving images unfortunately have suffered in this area because the cost of making them. The great creators have managed to make films regardless of this but were still handicapped by distribution. Animation has greater flexibility, but unfortunately the perception that it's for children, and like Disney or Pixar has been a severe handicap on it. Thankfully Kaiba managed to get made. This proves that you can always have hope even if the final work is never financially successful. Although it's on a roll of a dice in a lot of cases. In fact Yuasa had to use Kickstarter to fund his last animated work, a mere short. The further sadness is that I could only see Kaiba through the kindness of a person online in a way considered very un-Kosher in some eyes. It's annoying because Kaiba is bold in style but not alienating, very clear in its ideas. Very simple, understandable ideas merely stretched as far as they can go, through characters who are only real in their voices but living through the few pen strokes people made on computers. The thing that avoids making this epilogue completely sad is that the work being reviewed is a testament to how the simplest bendings and modifications of the moving image, animation, led to something that was great.

From http://animediet.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/vlcsnap-00193.jpg

You're Under Arrest Specials (1999)

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51AK9PM9B2L._SY300_.jpg

Dir. Junji Nishimusa

Probably one of the least thought about difficulties with being an anime fan is that franchises, even small ones, can be split up into multiple works - sequels, prequels, spin-offs, comedy specials etc. - from the successful (or well loved) original. We don't get most the merchandising or tie-in material to the original anime. In some cases we don't get the original source material said anime is based on. Franchises which have multiple continuations, if they're released separately, or only a piece is released, can lead to some problems with context missing. Or you can find a piece second hand in the store and are left to work with it only, like is the issue here for me writing this review. One result of this is that, if you continue with the franchise or not, you'll end up with an inherently different perspective on it from others because the fragments are connected together uniquely to you and/or the context was different in registering it. Or you could just evaluate the one piece by itself and see if it is followed to in the other parts if you look for them. One of the most peculiar examples of this is Sailor Victory (1995), which is the last two episodes of four, the first two a high school comedy drama, the last two a Sailor Moon/robot series parody with the same characters in new positions and contexts. Only those final two episodes were actually released in the West. To assess part of this franchise here, You're Under Arrest, I can only gamble and judge this material by itself as it's the first time I've been in this world.

Five episodes. Normal twenty four or so length each. Four segments per episode. From the same manga author of the famous Oh My Goddess! franchise, you follow two female traffic cops, Natsumi Tsujimoto and Miyuki Kobayakawa. Natsumi is as hot blooded as her red hair, with superhuman strength and compulsive in her behaviour. Miyuki, blue hair, a car obsessive and tech head with a disturbing ability to create security systems that use very violent methods to ward off potential thieves and trespassers. Two other female officers join them to create the main four person group of protagonists. Yoriko Nikaido, nerdy with glasses and black hair. Aoi Futaba, blonde, who is actually a man dressed as a woman all the time, not only accepted as a woman by her fellow officers, but is portrayed, with a female voice actor, as a very sexually attractive individual drawn to be beautiful. Thankfully a joke punch line that undercuts her femininity is dashed, and for the most part she's as sexualised as the other women when the episodes occasional do this. (In fact, in a work with very little sexualisation, she's the one that gets the most glamour shots, which is the one sole virtue of interest with the work for how this implies something very radical). Aside from these four, there are two males in the key cast, higher up in rank in the department including their section chief. All the sections of each episode are played for comedy. The scenarios are hijinks associated with the perils of the job as traffic officers, although its exaggerated and only occasionally has them deal with actual traffic related crimes like speeding.

It's pretty light hearted. At least in tone. Despite some mild titillation, the female characters, especially the main two, are allowed to play off each other as comic foils and being legitimate bad asses in their job. They are too good at their jobs, but it's always to the horror of their boss. Sadly the mini-specials are very lazy and bland. The first half really undermines this strong female prescience by having NEARLY EVERY IF NOT ALL the segments being about perverts, dirty photographers and numerous thieves of female underwear. One episode, if not more, every segment of it, is all about perverts and panty thieves. Its incredibly jarring in its laziness and willingness to do this for every part, not necessarily because of how questionable the attitude could be seen to be, but what it says about Japanese men if this is what is made for a (clearly) male audience. God, one hopes that there's not a level of truth to the amount of panty thieves seen in this, including one who steals them, rather than gets them from willing women, to make a blanket out of that, once he lays in, he claims will make him possess them! When it gets past this oversaturation, it's a breath of fresh air. Even then though, it's not a boost in the quality of the jokes or tiny stories anyway. There is nothing particularly in the writing that stands out barring the unique aspects of the four police women when they are allowed to breath, but no where do their personalities get written fuller to add up to a fully interesting comedy work.

The whole package feels average. It's very, very cheap looking, very obviously in the transition to using animation drawn on computers from 1999 onwards. I have a crush on dated computer effects, for their breaking of reality to the fantastical in their fake appearance, but not here or most of this transitional anime, when stilted animated buildings and cars in long shot jerk onscreen against the hand drawn animation. The pop songs for the opening and ending are annoyingly bad. Its milquetoast to an extreme. And despite some moments of good humour, this piece of the You're Under Arrest franchise, by itself for me, is a pointless quickie, which contributes nothing of interest aside from two things, a positive and a negative. A positive that, even if the franchise failed to do so if I get to it, the idea of two bad ass female cops, one super strong, the other a tech head, even as traffic officers, would make a cool pulp story. The negative is God's annoyance in me using His name in vain about how many times the segment stories were about men stealing women's underwear. A bored writer or two lead to me using religious names in irritated and baffled exclamations I may have to apologise for if the Christian afterlife actually exists. Thanks anime. 

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/protectedimage.php?image=DaveFoster/yuaminis06.jpg

Knickers Up In A Twist: Colorful (1999)

From http://anime4ok.narod.ru/P/colorful-01.jpg

Dir. Ryutaro Nakamura

Over sixteen episodes lasting six minutes each, Colorful explores a situation that can be pretty awkward for heterosexual men, or awkward for the women depending on what happens. It can happen in any situation, but this anime concentrates on men obsessed with women. Sat across the other side, walking past, on the bus or cramp train. Sexual objectification is a potential issue, but it's as much an issue of code of conduct, and also how one reacts in such a situation too. The male notices the woman. The human eye has to see a person in their entire figure to make a picture of them, but it does so in fragments too to get a full image. Sexual attraction to the other person, male or female, could be involved. It also depends on one's reaction to areas of the human body that are considered sexual. And what one can image in your head when an image suggests it to that individual onlooker. The woman's legs are bare under a skirt or shorts. They may be voluptuous and/or wearing very revealing clothing. Is it okay to notice? Ignore it? Is it ok to look? Is what my sister once said, that a brief glance at a person's figure is okay, gawking at them too far, or is it more complicated than this? Colorful is about the even more potentially awkward situations. The main trope, although amongst others, is the accidental glimpse of a woman's underwear - sat or getting out of a car, at the top of jeans crouched, a gust of wind. There are other situations too - the sight of a person's bra, of their cleavage leaning over, accidentally brushing against them, a strained skirt button. Also in this series the men are flat out gonzo for these sorts of situations, or perverts, looking out for these moments like hawks. How, when the situation happens, they discombobulate with all the facial distortions of a Looney Tunes character, the absurdity of it revealed.

Anime is pretty notorious for its sexual pandering, especially now as it's taken to an extreme level, discomfortingly so at times as an anime fan as this sort of thing is now getting the front pages of Netflix and is becoming what anime is perceived to be. The near-nudie shot - ironically actual nudity not that prevalent despite the era of ultra-adult anime of Ninja Scroll (1993) - has been around for decades. The gag where a male character falls on a girl and has his hand on her breasts by accident, only to get his head kicked in has been bread-and-butter in sex comedy humour for as long. The schoolgirl with breasts bigger than the pumpkins you can get in supermarkets in October is getting nearly as old. The accidental exposure of a girl's knickers by various means too. The border between harmless sexuality and just crass sexism is up to debate in most cases, some shifting to the latter pretty quickly, and that's not including those that cause you to frown at how lifeless and just un-sexy they. How they make sexuality and erotic desire, in their lameness with these jokes, a commercial regurgitation when animation should allow for some of the wildest and imaginative sexual fantasies, and the most beautiful romances, to be depicted. Yet the clichés are still being used because, to use that old phrase, if it ain't broke, why fix it? I'm faced in the medium, as a fan, with how much this is a sellable commodity, for good and the truly abominable, the beautiful, sexy and fun with that which makes me find my male gender unsalvageable in their misogyny. Colorful at first is wonderfully hysterical in kicking this aspect in the teeth. A male sees a woman, or goes out of their way to see one in a compromised position without them noticing, and react in a way, whether they see anything or are thwarted, that is utterly comical in how rubber faced they are drawn in reacting. That and how they can be thwarted or compromised themselves in the various sketches, when the woman realises what's going on, if they're flying low, or claimed by a haunted lamppost.

http://mkmiku.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/clrfl4.jpg

Originally made for segments for a television program, the work is also presented as a series of abstract vignettes with reoccurring characters. Two male friends obsessed with women, particularly their English language teacher who does amazing things with her tongue when showing how to pronounce the letters "L" and "R". A female athletics student and her male coach, who views her with pride in her abilities and holding back his lust. An American tourist who desires to be a film artist and to see "the upside down Mount Fuji", which doesn't leave much to the imagination when I finally realised the metaphor after the viewing of the series. The tone of Colorful is abrasive structurally. Segments over each episode's six minutes involve repetitious and distorted imagery between them. Multiple animation styles and aesthetic presentations co-exist together, and the music is drum-and-bass and electronic. The series doesn't match at all to the director's more famous work Serial Experiments Lain (1998), but the willingness at improvising and mixing different artistic styles, while staying in a consistent tone, is there between them. The results in the first few episodes are rambunctious, bawdy and manic.

The major issue with the series is that even over sixteen episodes, that are only six minutes long each, less than two hours, it wears out its key joke and premise quickly, never going anywhere else with it. It stops being about the absurdity of heterosexual male sexuality but just an excuse to see hand drawn women's underwear with them not being a willing participant in the erotic side. Most are just one dimensional background for jokes, and the reoccurring female characters don't get to be in on the joke. There's also a lost potential in flipping this idea on its head and imaging a heterosexual woman taking the position as the voyeur that's never considered. The jokes, like those in the West about this sort of thing, also eventually get to punch lines that may be offensive to some or at least eye rolling depending on how you view what a situation like this would be like in reality. A male inadvertently eyes up a fat or old woman, and is viewed as a joke, whether its sexist not even needing to be touched upon because the joke is lame already. One joke even goes as far as a different type of person wearing women's panties, a lame joke before you even consider if its offensive or not. By some time, the abstract tone of the series sadly becomes repetitious as well - it plays with the same notes, never expanding them into more bizarre and imagining flourishes. Moments in the last episodes do shine. The reoccurring characters help, especially when the American's final segment, with a friend from his country, becomes an image within an image and a bickering argument, of accented Japanese that even namedrops Woody Allen you can only hear. Ideas fall into the best of psychotronic imagination, that was part of reason why I feel in love with anime in the first place, where the truly unexpected takes place and is used to its potential even if more to the idea could have been done. Such as a high school girl the size of a kaiju appearing from Tokyo harbour; the obvious underwear joke is there, but its more funny for the matter of fact tone and details like what happens when a phone the size of a monument starts vibrating. It's a shame that the series doesn't play in this sort of area more often and just continues the same joke over and over again until it become tasteless or unfunny.

The episodes were probably not meant to be seen one-after-another, but each time the programme slot was on in Japan, but the joke is still one note the more its repeated and the original laughs are lost. It's a fascinating curio, with some great laughs, but it really doesn't live up to its premise. An entire level of satire or goofball humour with the idea of the male libido that it doesn't take advantage of. You don't even see any actual nudity or sex either, which adds a strange note to this criticism. It teases, in the sex and humour, but eventual you call its bluff as somewhat repetitious and get a little bored with it.

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To Clear Through The [Re]Watch List #2: Nurse Witch Komugi (2002)

Form http://nsm01.casimages.com/img/2008/01/24//080124073811194601639808.jpg

Dirs. Masato Tamagawa, Masatsugu Arakawa, Yasuhiro Takemoto and Yoshitomo Yonetani

The problem with Nurse Witch Komugi is one that goes beyond the complaints taken at Japanese anime within the last decade or so. Those complaints are still there. The discomforting sexualisation of young girls even if they're animated. The pandering to a small subset of otaku where the fetishes and in-jokes to anime are alien to any outsider. Honestly even if you did have fetishes to glasses on a woman, big breasts, maid outfits etc., or have watched obscure giant robot shows from the seventies, you may feel a disconnect to this still. The problem is that, for its few bright spots of imagination and clever humour, able to mock itself too, the sum of it is the issue that faces not just anime, but any group. Geek culture. Cult works. Hobbies. Dare I say even religion and politics. When the quality and fun is replaced with a cheap aesthetic look and everything feels tacky. Not fun. Extravagant. Sincere. Uplifting. Clever. Sexy. Any potent feeling, not even kitsch. Just tacky. And such works are knowingly tacky, which is worse because it'll encourage the followers of that areas to just want tackiness. Within five straight-to-video episodes, including a bonus "2.5" one, it automatically caused my heart to sink when the opening theme is a sickly cute song, sung in too high a voice by the female singer, using medical terminology to describe romance. The lyrics are ridiculous, the voice too high, but the problem is how contrived it feels even when I don't speak Japanese. Too cute. Too quirky. To the point it doesn't feel sincere. This is not something cheesy that you can enjoy for its sincerity and because it's ridiculous, like how I've fallen in love with the song by Loudness from the animated box office bomb Odin (1986) which I covered on this blog. This is just being cute because it wants to be surface level cute and nothing more.

The anime is a spin-off from a TV series called Soul Taker (2001), which not only takes characters from a serious work and place them in a comedy, but it became far more popular and talked about then the original source. I have never seen an episode of Soul Take but this isn't a hindrance for Nurse Witch Komugi. Now the references to anime from the past I may have to see to get some of the jokes. Komugi is a downtrodden cosplay idol, looked down upon by her management for continually screwing up the jobs assigned for her to become more famous. A lot of the reason she screws up is that she has to juggle a secret alter ego, transforming into a nurse witch to defeat the minions of a King of Germs, a task assigned to her from a magical land of medicine with a perverted rabbit mascot by her side. Representing the villains is a maid witch; a great idea from the series is that she has a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde personality where neither side knows of each other, one the villain, the other Komugi's school friend. From there it's a comedy with action but its empty. You're stuck with a work that panders but offers nothing of real interest for a great deal of it. Loosely connected around Komugi having to fight evil virus monsters and being a cosplayer trying to get higher in her career choice, it boils down to a series of absurd sketches per the six episodes but not really succeeding.

A great deal of it is arbitrary. The titillation, of course taking cue of the magical girl genre its riffing on to show Komugi's costume change sequence like a stripshow, is creepy because, like in most anime unfortunately, the characters are seventeen or younger. But its creepier and perversely lazy in how it's incredibly chaste while yet having countless bathing scenes and the like, especially as a straight to video release. Treating sexuality in such a compromised way yet presenting dubious sexuality in a sugar coated tone is incredibly off for me even after all the anime I've seen. In the perfect world, if titillation was still required, the creepy sexualisation of young girls would be boated out in favour for grown up female characters, as much in control of the sexual nature of the work as the viewer. Unfortunately even then, if the lazy, chaste tone to it was kept in still, the anime would be compromised as before. This kind of anime takes sexual fetishes and smoothens them of all their interest and depth in favour of a checklist mentality. Big breasts. Older women. Maid costumes. Nurse uniform. Flat chests. To decry any sexual objectification of this sort of thing is too obvious. Decrying this sort of anime for killing off any sense of mystery and tantalisation to sexual fantasies, especially when animation could give one the chance to show something completely fantastical if actually used properly for once, should be done more often.

The same laziness is there with the references as jokes. They're funny when you don't even need to know the references, when the jokes already funny in context of these new characters or completely bizarre to you because of the lack of knowledge. But like Family Guy at its worst, it's a private conversation that isn't actually that worth knowing the secrets of, because there's nothing beyond the surface name checking. Moments do shine in the anime. The bosses Komugi deal with are imaginative and funny. One representing all those otaku fetish forums, which naturally pisses Komugi off when the "flat chest" forum, represented by cat people, group around her. A giant robot that gets its own mecha show theme tune sung with burning passion like the originals. Legions of road raging vehicles that leads to a peculiar joke mocking completely CGI animation being released around the time this was made. Even a wrestling match in Hell. And those moments, mentioned earlier in the review, when it mocks its own industry, while completely hypocritical considering the anime itself, do sting. Crazed fans. The chaos of fan conventions, and an entire episode about making anime that shows that the creators of this are masochistic about their profession.

There was the potential for something great here, but most of Nurse Witch Komugi is not like the good ideas presented above. Most of it responds to the most mediocre aspects of anime in recent years, which are just dull to sit through. The final episode tries to be fairly serious, in air quotes since its still humorous, about a teacher witch (presumably) with breasts so large they have the consistency of beanbags than living flesh. The lack of time in twenty or so minutes to make something compelling, especially when the actual story is of the episode is dull anyway, prevents it from doing anything of worth. It's pretty much like this for most of the anime over its episodes. Brief glimpses of goodness swallowed by the tenuous. It's kind of surprising that one of the directors of this was Yasuhiro Takemoto, considering looking into him he made two good comedy vignettes series, Lucky Star (2007) and Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu (2003), bearing in mind their imperfections and that they were based around vignettes rather than a consistent plot. The thing is thought, while Lucky Star is the superior of the two, Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu is a good comedy series which yet still suffers from problems effecting this one - bad opening theme, creepy titillation suddenly appearing in a later episode, and some moments that fall over badly even if they're rare. And this was a work with clear delays between each episode, and multiple directors working on various episodes, which unless the quality is kept to a high level, is going to cause drops in said quality to take place. Ultimately Nurse Witch Komugi is pretty much the sort of thing not really worth seeing. I actually rewatched this a second time when it came to this review, and frankly the sense that this was made for the smallest, tiniest audience of people who have no real connection to anyone else even in Japanese pop culture is big. And it's not good. It looks cheap, it's not funny enough, and it does define how tacky anime can unfortunately get.

From http://pic.rutube.ru/video/33/3e/333e02e08f06fb49d6e34f95303bc03e.jpg

Clearing Through The To-Watch List #3 - Jinki: Extend (2005)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/64/Jinki_Extend.jpg

Dir. Masahiko Murata

"Do I have to write about this? " "Yes, because you're a crazy completist!" "I'm wasting my time." "But you're a cine-masochist..." "But-" "-and will write about any anime you-" "But I didn't write about Cospley Complex (2004) and that was atrocious..." "Ignore that one." "Fine," I think to myself having this internal debate, "But I'm going to strop about it while the series is still warm in my mind." I found a science fiction anime series for cheap. Giant robots. Front cover of the first volume is two girls, one with black hair, the other blonde hair. First scene of the first episode is them, older, fighting each other in "Jinki" war robots in the centre of Tokyo. The blonde girl, drawn like a very cutesy, moe character, is the villain. Even in bad anime, how characters, especially female ones, have their eyes depicted when they've lost their sanity or moral compass is always artistically effecting. The stereotype of female character with eyes bigger than their heads has use when you can exaggerate emotions for potent effect. The other girl is the heroine completely outmatched. Clearly the series is going to skip back to when they were younger, together in the same training camp as friends, maybe as close as sisters, maybe a tragic back-story. It's obvious but you can get good powerful drama from the idea. This is not what you get.

The series is actually a mashing together of two separate manga into one narrative. It tries to be clever by juggling two different time periods but with a lacksidasical tone. The first is in 1988. The black haired girl, Aoba, is shipped off to a Jinki defence base against her will in Venezuela by her evil mother. Nonetheless she shows a superhuman ability, and enthusiasm, to pilot one of the Jinki that needs to be honed out of the unatheletic girl who was more interested in plastic model kits before. The time period is never told to us, and with any reason for why this alternative dimension is as it is for this advanced robot technology to exist in the eighties. The blonde haired girl, Akao, appears in this segment, but she exists more so for the part set three years later in Japan. A more advanced version of the Jinki defence force exists, with a whole group of girls and women piloting multiple Jinki. With no memories from before those three years previous, Akao also has superhuman powers of her own which are of interest to a dark group. Completely off topic for a moment, the main villain is a rather bland, height stunted masked man who is so much of a void I wished one of his barely seen minions stabbed him, Julius Caesar style, and taken over the world domination plan for themselves. But he exists and he's interested in Akao, with plans to pervert a girl who refused to fight into evil. A girl so much of an innocent that, unfortunately, to depict it there's one of her flashback memories, of how happy she's been with the Jinki pilots, of her being completely unable to open a packet of crisps without someone's help. Yes, some packets of food are a bugger to open but as characterisation of a female character I wouldn't be surprised if anime was dismissed as misogynistic for this sort of thing and an insult to crisp packet manufacturers. This moment happens long after it becomes clear that Akao, along with all the other characters, even the more sparky Aoba, are pretty one dimensional. In the first few episodes the white elephant already went to sitting on top of me refusing to be ignored. The young, innocent Akao, turned into a killing machine, piloting a leviathan sized red robot, with dead eyes is a starring character of a badly put together, cheap looking series.

At thirteen episodes, there's far too many characters and plot points to cram into them, especially as this is two manga set in the same world being combined together. The story actually had to be finished on the twelfth episode, the final one an epilogue as a DVD extra. It is a complete mess. It might have worked regardless of the squashed length. Hades Project Zeorymer (1988-1990), giant robot sci-fi too, was four episodes with far too much plot to cram into them, but not only was it good hand drawn animation, with great robot designs, but the plot was an amazing dramatic sucker punch regardless. Jinki:Extend is bland. Generic plot. Paper-thin characters. Beyond Aoba, the female characters, who dominate the show, are less like real female characters then strange perceptions of femininity written by isolated males. The girls are submissive, despite being pilots of city destroying war machines, easily breakable or/and mentally nonexistent. It comes apparent too this series is trying to rift on Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) in being dark, but never succeeding. I'm flabbergasted, despite having legitimate problems with it, that I could have hated that acclaimed series  at the same level as something like this. "Why?" I ask myself, "Because I'm an idiot."

Fan service creeps in slowly. Aoba is caught with her pants down a couple of times. Eyes roll. There's a clear attempt at potential underage Sapphic passion that's not edgy, in this TV friendly work, not character building or romantic, but a lame attempt to keep the male otaku happy. Indeed, when they meet again, discrete under the sheets, two characters fondle each other admiring how much they've "changed" everywhere on themselves, not with an (admittedly) perverse take on horseplay between two girls, but because, hey, let's drool over underage animated girls groping each other. With an innocent casualness that's more disturbing than being explicit about it. A female character is from Nottingham, England, raising a brief smile cause it's not that far from where I actually live, but she's abruptly introduced late in the series, uselessly characterless, and is there only to have a character who wear shades, to be an adult with big breasts, and wear clothes to show said assets off without any sense of a person oozing sexuality and charisma. Then there's the creepy aspects which scuttle in through the later episodes in the Japan arc. Anime can be dubious, which I admit as a fan of it, completely offensive, but even something like The Legend of the Overfiend (1989) forced you to see the things it showed and the full horror being shown. Jinki: Extend is the first thing in a while that's made me sit up in some of the stuff it was showing, legitimately creeped out by its slapdash and casual use of some of the perverse material is references. It's even beyond having a female villain, randomly introduced later on, be represented as being evil by having her snog any girl in her vicinity, as if being attracted to the same gender is a villainous character trait on her bio. A female Jinki pilot, whose already depicted as a asinine, weak and frail archetype, is kidnapped by a man disguised as her older brother, who plans to pilot his Jinki in a later fight with one hand while the other "plays" with her. It's not played as a sickening gut punch or a trangressively potent comment, just an offhand remark that is flippantly suggested and never mentioned again along with his whole character. One girl is dunked into strange liquid which partially dissolves her pilot's suit, skin-tight as designed for male viewers, yet doesn't dissolve the ropes she's tied in, by another male pervert on the villains' side who, along with the scene, is never mentioned again too. The lack of actual explicit content and the rushed nature of the plotting makes this stuff pointless disturbing than important for the plot, which is worse than something that was being offensive on purpose. A key part of a relationship, barely sketched out anyway, is that one of the people within it was raped and she still gave birth to the child conceived. The discrete, flippant tone of the off-screen rape, and the plot reveal, barely mentioned again too like the other examples, is in all serious far and away more objectionable, when such material can be written in half heartedly because it seemed "normal" to have it done in the narrative.

Its despairing to defecate verbally on something other people worked hard on, but this is terrible. Characters look the same, confusingly, but on purpose for the plot. Some look the same but it wasn't on purpose. Major plot points and events are skimmed over, for being able to get the entire narrative gone in such a small space of time, but also for squandering it on the wrong things. The thirteenth, final episode is the one that actually has some virtue. It's nice that a character has some back-story from photos and unprocessed photo film found in her old home, memories once lost rediscovered. Its legitimately funny when one girl, too young to drink, still pretends to be drunk for fun, as every girl is firing off twenty year old fireworks that still work in a back garden, to the bafflement of others. But it's too late. It cannot save a bland, forgettable anime. And it can't save it when the characters had no personalities before and when some were pointless molested in an occasional, out-of-place sequence in a previous episode. A paradox is created. Why review something no one would want to watch?  Catharsis. To get something of worth from my wasted English pounds. To warn people off it. To cause people to remember this series, blocked in amnesia by its blandness, reading this and remember how bad it was to share the pian. If a fan of Jinki:Extend, if one actually finds this, gets annoyed, and tries to convince me to try it again, or read the mangas, although it would have to be a bulletproof argument to even consider doing so. Because I'm a masochist who will cover any anime I watch. Admittedly I did skip over reviewing one as stated in the beginning, but that might be the exception. I may stupidly rewatch it just to review it. But in this case, Jinki:Extend is just horrible even for someone fond of collecting bad anime along with the good anime.

Going Through The To-Watch List #2: Odin - Photon Space Sailer Starlight (1985)

From http://merryfrolics.files.wordpress.com/2006/04/odin12.jpg

Dirs. Eiichi Yamamoto, Takeshi Shirato, Toshio Masuda and Yoshinobu Nishioka

Odin... is a folly. Its negative legacy is understandable. It has so many problems. Tonal ones. Length related ones. Consistency ones. But I cannot hate it. I'm drawn to films this sincere in their failure. Plus there is much worse in existence. Really much worse in existence in animation and live action. This was a cakewalk for me for a film infamous for its length. When you get into world cinema through Satantango (1994), that's nearly eight hours long, you've jumped into the deep end of the cinematic swimming pool rather than start with the arm floats in the kiddy one. I can think of ninety minute films that have felt like dental operations compared to this one's lengthy stroll. The film, past this, is a mega budget folly in the truest sense. In anime there is a series called Space Battleship Yamato (1974-1975). One of the most well regarded anime ever made. One of the most loved. Ordinary people on the street in Japan, even if they are older now, know of the show not just a small club of otaku. One of the creators, Leiji Matsumoto, became incredibly famous. The other creator, the late Noboru Ishiguro, has contributed a great deal to the industry but he was also notorious with stories under his belt. One of which involved live howitzer shells. Odin... was supposed to be a landmark. One of the highest budgets for Japanese animation. It shows. The first part of a planned franchise. It failed miserably and the result is usually scorned.

A test flight of a new experimental spacecraft, designed to look like a sailboat but laser and gravity-based energy to propel its sails. The test is interrupted when the new crew get a distress signal on the other side of our galaxy. Finding only a female survivor, they are led on to a journey to a planet called Odin. The possibilities to travel light years ahead to a new civilisation are too tempting to the crew as they mutiny against their officers. Once on their way, they discover a threat to them and their own world. Pretty simple plot. The mentality of Star Trek for global exploration. Grandiose and for all mankind. The prologue is an elaborate story of the history of sailing on Earth. Vikings. Christopher Columbus. An ode to sea travel and discovering new land expanded to outer space for new cosmic sailors, with the mechanics for space travel in their world explained. All shown with a sombre narration and classical orchestration. Then suddenly the film proper starts. A space station where the test ship, the Starlight, will set off from. Someone suddenly appears on camera, pointing to the side and shouts "Go!". The young crew start running around like idiots on the ship for what feels like a whole music video. It is a music video. A cheesy and ridiculous glam metal job by Japanese band Loudness blares out over the images. Immediately there's a discrepancy. The orchestra has wandered off. Christopher Columbus's future generation are being propelled by eighties cock rock.

The schizoid tonal shifts stay. Serious melodrama at one moment, silly the next. It wants to be profound, fed by its high budget and wide eyed in its view of cosmic travel. But the music by Loudness  is there. And the rest of the score, while catnip for me, is still eighties dated synth. You immediately get the logic jumps in the script as it goes along. One key protagonist failed to get on the ship, punching his trainer in the final exam. Yet illegally commandeers  a personal spacecraft, gets on board the Starlight, and is not put in an improvised prison hold but allowed to help through the lark of the boatswain. The film cannot keep its point together. Its charmingly naive for me. So earnest and goofy at the same time. But you will laugh if the film doesn't drain you. Countless mentions of the "mizzenmast" will come as an improvised drinking game you will lose. The countless galactic navel laws broken in the name of exploring the universes have to be ignored completely. What's with the Norwegian references, alongside the ones of Viking mythology, and considering the sole female character is supposed to be Norwegian herself, Sarah Cyanbaker doesn't exactly sound Scandinavian either. When she screams she cannot take it, because it's too much, the film's fed a line into the hands of people whose brains were scrambled by the film and want to get revenge on it.

The film would have been good nonetheless for many, even unintentionally, if it kept itself focused. It has to be enforced how good it looks. When someone would be suicidal enough to do so much detail on each animation cel. The galaxies depicted are like that of acid rock music and someone staring at a lava lamp for too long. Pink nebulas. Strange machine men. Eighties hair. A random inclusion of blue, space snake-dragons made from blue fire passing through the stars that just looks awesome regardless. The ship's graveyard that exists out of time and dimension completely and looks likes the contents of a spinning colour wheel or of a Skittles bag. Action wise, the animation allows for dense, exhilarating combat sequences by themselves especially by the end. Yet the film is incredibly dumb alongside being this cool. It will have characters suddenly turned a function in the ship into, say, an improvised wave cannon just because. "Just because" is Odin's modus operandi. Usually it's a loved aspect of anime but here it's a complete jump required for some of the moments when whole plot trajectories are based around them. Then there is the bigger problem. The film is two hours, nineteen minutes long. I've said already that I have seen far longer work and that I resisted Odin...'s length and pace issues. I even like it's this long, when most anime is under ninety minutes feature length. But even I admit it feels too long, or actually, not put together well enough to justify the length. The film's not a piece of garbage as its reputation says it is, but for all its virtues, it's a structural mess. Four directors. Three screenwriters. I was grinning when the warp speed sequence for the Starlight was shown, golden orange glow blurring the entire screen, and still was each time, but having said that having this sequence five times at least in the film is overkill. It's not spectacular when the mutiny feels like when the crew ran around the ship like idiots in the beginning, with the same Loudness song, but funny. It's not a good idea to intercut the serious dramatics with unintentional humour. By its end its stating the obvious, naive views of human kindness and the coldness of machinery, while yet being about how great the robots look animated. And as archetypes the characters are barely detailed. Someone has a grandmother back on Earth, but he even calls her "Granny" and that's all we get of her or any person close to the characters. And at over two hours, it's going to feel long even for someone like me resistant to it, still able to feel the time pass despite being resistant to the brunt of the sensation. Even I confess to looking at the running time left at points and being amazed about how much more left there was of it.

The film is a folly of excess. It shines with beauty in its production. Its good intentions are nice. It's not a piece of excessive capitalist rubbish, wasting money for the sake of it, but a folly of someone wanting to make a work that moves metaphorical mountains. True mega budget films are like this. The virtues and the terrible mistakes both have to be admired to appreciate the whole film. When money was like tap water in the eighties, you got weird, obscure straight-to-video anime, it was possible for a film like Mamoru Oshii's Angel's Egg (1985) to be made and put in a cinema, and an attempt like Odin... at a spectacle wouldn't be seen as a really bad idea. But while I wish, too young and born in the wrong country to appreciate it from an eye witness's place, for this era to return, a large chunk of the remembered anime from that era, barring the few mainstream successes, weren't big hits. Even the big hits were hits for a cult fanbase of anime otaku. Its not dissimilar to live action cinema in the West at the same time. When Blade Runner (1982) was a film unsuccessful at the box office than a cult masterpiece.  Odin... tries to be something which makes it more rewarding. It's not merely being as average as possible. I can think of anime which is far more pointless in its existence than this one. I would rather have the majestic folly of this film, which tried its damned hardest but only failed. I can only enjoy its failure because it feels more genuine as well as being thick headed. The ending credits is live action footage of the band Loudness playing another song. Tight leather pants. Poodle hair. Fog machines turned up to eleven. A rudimental placement of the animated Starlight going over them. This is not how you're supposed to end a film trying to be serious, but what the hell? I have the song now on my iPod, knowing how ridiculous it is. The opening guitar riff is irresistible. It fits the amusing bombast of a film completely. The bombast of the film, no matter how misguided it was, was worth the spectacle. 

From http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Odin-Screen-2.png

Videotape Swapshop: Space Adventure Cobra (1982)

Dir. Osamu Dezaki

This film has grown on me. The imagery. The sensuality. How damn cool it is while still being humourous in the same way the Lupin The Third anime I have seen is. Its sad that something this playful, that's not the ultraviolent anime of the nineties for men only, but more larkish while techincally beautiful and experimental, is missing now. It proves you can have a romp while pushing the boundaries of how animation can look. Without being silly because its able to be silly itself and completely sincere in its too. I can hope one day that this changes, when everyone gets bored with anime high school, or the industry collapses and the crazed offspring of the most die hard animators, who wanted to cut their teeth on their own work, get the chance to try something. I'm hoping for something ludicrous, but something this awesome and fun is something I'm begging more for.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/18173/space-adventure-cobra-1982-director-osamu-dezaki/

From http://i835.photobucket.com/albums/zz278/Jexhius/CobraTheMovie.jpg

An Introduction For Angel's Egg (1985)

From http://guriguriblog.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/untitled-1.jpg

Dir. Mamoru Oshii

[Note = This was originally an introduction for a project I'm part of on the forums for MUBI, which is why its tone may be a bit different. I hope you all can get something of interest from it though.]

Angel's Egg is now an even rare type of creation in the Japanese animation industry. Experimental anime still exists, even in pulpier areas, but with the economic issues taking place globally many industries are playing it safe and drawing back away from areas of bolder creation. Hollywood even went away from the mid-budget hard boiled action and crime films that were part of its bread-and-butter at one point, so how could another Angel's Egg be made in anime now unless it was a suicidal risk? In the eighties, with an economic boom, so many anime works were commissioned even though they were just made to let someone experiment or to try any idea out. Mostly these works were made for the new, and at times higher budgeted, straight-to-video market, with creations like California Crisis: Gun Salvo (1986) and Cosmos Pink Shock (1986) examples of the most obscure of the obscure I've at least seen myself, usually up to a mere forty minutes or so long, one off pieces with no original source material or follow-on, and only available now thanks to Western anime fans who have acquired Japanese VHS tapes and put up digital copies online. Angel's Egg is more significant in this area because it's a completely abstract film that was made to be shown in Japanese cinemas. It didn't do well, understandably despite wishing for a perfect world of the opposite, but it has built up a reputation. A lot of it is to do with two key men who created it. Director Mamoru Oshii, who would go on to make entries for the Patlabor franchise, the two Ghost in The Shell films, Avalon (2001) and The Sky Crawlers (2008), a chequered career in cerebral, acclaimed animation and live action experiments. The other is artist Yashitaka Amano, known most for his illustrations for the Vampire Hunter D  novels and his work for the Final Fantasy videogame series. But the film has gained a lot of status by itself for a lot of good reasons.

From http://johnnywestmusic.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/angels-egg.png

It's an incredibly surreal film. Even on this viewing, things in it do not make rational sense for me, more dreamlike and felt than connected together into a full conventional tale. But there is a clear through line within it. The world depicted is a dying one, desolate, destroyed, with remnants of a war still going on. A young girl wanders through an empty town keeping herself alive and carrying a giant egg, the egg incredibly precious to her that she guards it all the time. (The odd, accidental or purposeful, pregnancy motif when she carries it under her dress is either saying a lot about my own though process, or something to dig into another time with another person). A soldier encounters her, adamant to find out what's in the egg, following her with the possible intent of breaking it just to answer his questions. It's here that a very important piece of information about Oshii has to be taken into account. Oshii has been documented as being a Christian at some point, whether he is still or not unknown, to the point of considering entering a seminary. The drastic change, in the path of his life, that would lead him to instead become a celebrated auteur of anime cannot be ignored when viewing a film like this with its choice of Christian symbolism. Anime is notorious for its vague uses of this type of Christian-Judean religious symbolism, especially since the TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) became a leviathan of a work that brought more people to anime but made a hodgepodge said symbolism haphazardly with its real intellectual meat.  But Oshii's use of any symbolism, quotation or reference, even if you have difficulty with it, has always been done with some clear purpose, even in a film like this that is also clearly abstract.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v178/brngrofdeth/tnt1.png

The soldier, with bandages on his hands and carrying a staff/weapon shaped like a cross, doubts his existence and the meaning of it. His interpretation of the story of Noah and the Ark, in a key monologue in a film mostly without dialogue, is a very disillusioned one. He even questions whether he actually exists. The girl believes devoutly in her egg being something of importance, maybe even an egg of an actual angel, but he wants to break it open to see if this is true or prove his disillusionment forcibly on another person. There is also a group of fishermen in the town, but their prey are giant shadows of fish, which their spears merely pass through and damage their surroundings. It is missing the point to say the film is about blind faith in a "fictitious" God. Atheism is a religious belief in itself, just one where there is no God and the Holy Book is of natural science with no suggestion of it coexisting with a spiritual entity, and disillusionment with one's beliefs can be encountered in any person like it did for Mamoru Oshii. The soldier is trying to find himself, while at the same time he is just as questionable in letting his nihilism cloud his judgement and bully a young girl. In a destroyed world, one would ask if God actually exists. Even in our own world, November 2013 as I write this, the situation of the world with its centuries of war, religious conflict and disillusionment, and the wider realisation of the atrocities committed globally has made the issue of the existence of a God (or Gods), and the question of the existence of evil, more pertinent. Even whether one truly exists could be up to debate, as the soldier suggests to the girl they are being dreamt by another, such an ironic idea when said by a character hand drawn and made to breath and be alive through another person's hands. Even those who stayed faithful to the belief in a Christian God can suffer as well; a term, "the dark night of the soul", was coined in the sixteenth century to describe a rare sensation where certain Christians felt they were completely alone, that God was completely absent in existence and their beliefs may have been wrong. In the New Testament itself, Jesus Christ, said to be part of God Himself as well as His Son, screamed while on the Cross why he has been forsaken for a brief moment. The crisis Angel's Egg depicts is that of the loss of a surface to even place one's foundations, one's feet, on. Oshii in his career would explore these themes in different areas, asking what makes us human, with the "soul" against technology in the Ghost In The Shell films, and in the plot events of The Sky Crawlers.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_hLY9DmXXlH4/S76jjGnwoHI/AAAAAAAABu8/
DQYIuf9ZNao/s1600/vlcsnap-2010-04-09-04h13m34s50.png

The film looks beautiful. Painstakingly animated in ways rarely done now if ever. It looks legitimately ethereal in tone and look through Amano's character designs. It sounds beautiful and mysterious in its score by Yoshihiro Kanno. Its paced slowly, so slowly time seems to abruptly holt at one point with a character just sitting there in the dark. Unfortunately this kind of anime is not being made available. This film is not available commercially in the West, and other inventive works like Belladonna of Sadness (1973) aren't either. As much as anime at its best, in its pulpiest genre based material, can be so brave and creative in its aesthetics and ideas, films like Angel's Egg have been left stranded. The key target audiences of anime are young teenagers who haven't been given an opportunity to grasp slow paced, cerebral work that is not punctuated by Facebook links. Or adult geeks of both genders that, stereotypically but honestly at times, are more interested in alarming sexual fetishes involving fictional school girls or boys, or want to stay in their adolescences permanently, considering what is mostly being made now in anime, not something like this film about the existence of God. An audience needs to be built for Angel's Egg so it can be finally released. It's the strongest piece so far for me in Mamoru Oshii's filmography, and one of the most potent works made in this medium.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSPbsRBytjbbKL2BNIdzsXQX5t3PhgU1FtrNQ6Fj_xWLibRPUW_aNsa2NvAu7qiBPEI6oUjfx2jlfA7tUoHfmNn3L2rlU9CykR1RnuKUwWYvQjNFOLTi0Y3Lo__kHmz5wgqcJQvo8ggPn3/s1600/angel1.jpg

Anime 18 Review Link - Baccano! (2007)

From http://theakiba.com/images/2013/01/3827_Baccano.jpg

Dir. Takahiro Omori

Japan

Despite being a huge fan of anime, whose finally starting to get at the stage of viewing anything in large quantities, I'm likely to stay very picky with what anime series I will buy without viewing first or put a lot of anticipation in. I will watch anything, but only the most offbeat and unconventional anime series immediately grab my interest. Considering how much the box sets for television anime is, even when it's on sale, for me, and I realise I may be a complete skinflint Scrooge when spending my money, I can't slam money on the counter unless its something that, upfront, is going to be unique. Baccano! is very glib and very violent, but its defiantly not conventional for many reasons. It didn't even need to be based on American gangster films and be a series set in Japan and its presentation is still unconventional. It's the sort of anime that (sadly) doesn't sell as much as the Narutos of the world but would ultimately be the more memorable work.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/15306/baccano-%E2%80%93-2007-director-takahiro-omori/

From http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_FXzbebG1RO0/TUONE48R06I/AAAAAAAAAAY/
s9cAaqmTMtY/s1600/top_baccano.jpg