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.

http://cdn.static.ovimg.com/episode/619621.jpg

Don’t Feed It After Midnight... [Pet Shop of Horrors (1999)]

From http://i.animecrazy.net/pet.jpg

Dir. Toshio Hirata

Japan

From http://ani.me/site_media/media/articles/2012/10/27/pet-shop-of-horrors-1_png_650x10000_q85.jpg

In Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984), the younger buyer of a Mogwai is given a set of rules of how to take care of it, including the rule the title of the review is taken from. If not followed then the seller is not accountable of the misery the results lead to. Pet Shop of Horrors, a four part anime mini-series adapted from a manga by Matsuri Akino, follows this same idea. Morality tales are a vast part of human storytelling. In the West it has been with us since the fairytales we heard as children, and while slasher films got too puritanical for their small britches at one point, moral warnings still exist in the horror films we watch as adults. In Japanese pop culture, morality tales are quite common in horror fiction. You could argue that the morality tale could be viewed as a way to distract people from the truth of certain things, used to scare anyone into conformity with public fears and old wives’ tales, but they also exist as warnings from wiser people to others of having common sense and to avoid making mistakes that will cost you dearly. The old phrase “be careful for what you wish for” applies to a lot of horror tales, especially with ones like Pet Shop of Horrors and its characters who may be far from innocent in the first place.

From http://www.watchcartoononline.com/thumbs/Petshop-of-Horrors-Episode-1.jpg

Housed in Chinatown in Los Angeles is a pet store owned by the mysterious Count D, a soft spoken man with a sweet tooth and a feminine demeanor, who sells “dreams” to his customers as well as regular pets. The ‘dreams’ however are bizarre creatures that require a strict contract of three rules to be signed to acquire hem, that cannot be broken by the client at any point. If the rules are broken, the pet store is blameless for what happens and something exceptionally gristly is bound to happen. Officer Orcot, a homicide detective, believes D is clearly behind the deaths after buying these pets, but the true nature of the customers is far more morally grey than one would immediately presume. Bear in mind that this mini-series is only four episodes long only, single stories that do not get deeper in terms of  connecting plot as the manga may do*. Also like some of the horror tales I’ve seen in anime and in manga, it is full of elaborate explanations after the events to explain them and the morals of the tales, which could be seen as off-putting for being over explanatory. It became quite obvious with this work that this over-elaborate explaining, all from Count D himself and his philosophising, is the main meat of many of these tales as well as the gruesome conclusions, and the mystical creatures in this mini-series that may be real and hallucinations, so to view the work with this in mind markedly improves it greatly. Count D effectively becomes a one-man Greek Chorus and Crypt Keeper as well as the one who gives them the object (ie. the pet) that causes the events to happen. The four episodes play off the conflicts of human emotions and their follies, the old chestnuts that are still great themes to tackle, but adds the additional fact that, like in many Japanese stories, the person involved may have willingly let themselves be damned. Why Hideo Nakata’s Ringu (1998) became such a legendary horror film as it has was probably both its premise of the cursed videotape, but also its theme of the complicity of people, in how the tape came to existent and that a victim, anyone of us viewers in reality too, could let this happen to us even if we knew going in that viewing the tape could kill us after seven days, gambling our life on such high stakes and scepticism. Pet Shop of Horrors plays with this concept nicely in such short a space of time.

From http://www.randomdestination.com/members/mj/amvscreencaps/Embrace_Your_Fate.jpg

If there is an issue with the mini-series it’s that, despite being hand drawn animation before the use of computers after the Millennium that became standard in anime production, it’s not the best it could have been even for television. The first episode, which I read in some form in a sample catalogue of manga from a distribution company, is naturally going to be superior in most exceptions on page, even if this version includes a bit I may have been deprived of from the sample that will disturb female viewers more than the male ones, but despite the virtues of the story itself, it lacks the complete punch an animated adaptation could have had. Pet Shop of Horrors is a solid ninety minute DVD, but it wasn’t allowed to fully form into something special because of the lack of episodes and the clear faults of the visual look and design. It may be a one-off viewing for many only because of this, unless you become enamoured by the material, but within the context of morality tale fiction, and what this does right in just four episodes, it was a great one-off viewing to have regardless.

From http://www.vendadeanimes.net/imagens/vendadeanimes.net/produtos/pet_shop_of_horrors_2.jpg

* I have yet to read the manga, but something that is ten volumes long as it was after it ended either went to a major narrative by its end or at least added to the backgrounds and the natures of the main characters within it. The four episodes of this anime adaptation are one shot tales only. 

From http://i.animecrazy.net/q-chan.jpg

Reader’s Choice: Salem’s Lot (1979)

From http://fwooshflix.com/files/2012/10/salems-lot-wallpaper-1024x768.jpg

Dir. Tobe Hooper

USA

[Selected by the Gentlemen’s Guide To Midnight Cinema forum. Check out the main website here - http://ggtmc.com/]

I was somewhat hesitant to view Salem’s Lot because it was a TV film. While television can be a great sequential art, the stereotype of typical television, especially the ‘TV movie’, can be such an uninteresting creation with its limited palette copied over countless creations and grinded out. Salem’s Lot in comparison to Tobe Hooper’s theatrical films is clearly a television work, but far from grinded out material it proved to be something a lot more hopeful immediately as it started. Adapted from a Stephen King novel, it follows a writer (David Soul) who goes to his hometown of Salem’s Lot for his vocation. Something is amiss with the Lot as disappearances and deaths by unknown circumstances become more apparent, while a man named Richard K. Straker (James Mason) now occupies the main house of the town, the Marsten House, which has a bloody history and for the writer is a construct of pure evil. Paradoxically a single three hour film and two feature length parts that create one single work, Salem’s Lot has to operate within the structure of television, such as the many fades-to-black that would be where the ad breaks would be, but unlike something like The Stand (1994) adaptation, which after its brilliant opening credits is all the worst aspects of a ‘TV movie’ for five hours, Salem’s Lot feels more carefully made and with a richly simplistic story. Length is not necessarily a good thing, but three hours allows the characters to be fleshed out and the sense of overwhelming tension grows as the threat to the town starts to take over. In terms of actors the general level of the cast is excellent and helps the material perfectly, not taking into account the prescience of James Mason and his distinctly gentle yet sinister vocal intonations. There’s even a small role from Elisha Cook Jr., who is synonymous with pulpy black-and-white cinema for me.

Despite its structure, and being part of Stephen King’s created world, the work still exhibits a great deal that is distinct to Tobe Hooper as well. Not only is he a criminally underrated film director, usually dismissed for only contributing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to genre cinema, but the most intrinsic aspect of his films is a heightened intensity that is entirely his. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legendary for this virtue but it continues on in other films in Hooper’s filmography, from the artificial sets and bleeding colours of Eaten Alive (1977) to the terrorisation of a peaceful family within Poltergeist (1982). When it builds up, Salem’s Lot shows the same intensity, not straying too far from the conventions of its main concept, but playing it up for maximum creepy effect and throwing some effective jump scenes at me without reducing itself to just repeating them. The length, put together so every scene provides something to the story and mood, allows it to grow in its horror content far more greatly than most ninety minute films, while also having a fantastical edge that is refreshing when this sort of television work, especially now, can be creatively rudimentary. It doesn’t feel like a typical ‘TV movie’ either, made with elegance in terms of look and slowed pace, richness to the look of the film even before the supernatural aspects intervene into the narrative. I was absolutely happy when Salem’s Lot was not only good but exceeded my expectations further. The hesitance with television work for me feels justified as, with the exception of televised animation from Japan, the medium is usually an excuse for copying the same lifeless creation and look ad nauseum. A work like Salem’s Lot, even if it had to still concern itself with its origins despite the advertisements that cut between it no longer existing, proves otherwise to this. Stephen King only really succeeds if the director or a key creative voice in the adaptation brings their distinct mindset to the material too. Someone like Mick Garris, who directed that adaptation of The Stand and a few others is the wrong sort of person even if he is more faithful to the source books; Brian De Palma and Stanley Kubrick are the people needed and Tobe Hooper succeeds with his adaptation too. 

From http://s4.hubimg.com/u/6342519_f520.jpg