Category Archives: On screen

Film, television and visual novels

Halfway through Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica: holy crap, this is good

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An issue I see quite often in anime fandom is the cry of “it’s not a cartoon! It’s animation!” I’m as guilty of that as anyone, and even set out my own thoughts on the topic a while ago but quite frankly it’s a whole can of worms I can’t be bothered to deal with again. I will say though that Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica IS a cartoon. But what a cartoon it is.


“I am the bone of my sword…” and so on. Make of that parallel what you will

I have it on good authority that the magical girl genre isn’t always aimed solely at a young female audience and, if you look at how long ago the Cutie Honey franchise ran before Hideaki Anno did his live-action remake, it never was. In terms of premise and outward appearances Madoka is the sort of thing you’d expect to see kids tuning into on Saturday mornings but what makes it one of the first big pleasant surprises of 2011 is how much else is hidden up its frilly sleeve.

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Reading stats: 989 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 3:57 mins

Thoughts on Loups-Garous, second half: the anime

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It was a funny coincidence when I spotted the Loups-Garous anime on fansub so soon after I’d bought a copy of the original novel. I was interested to see how the transition would go since the book’s an atmospheric and moody piece; the adaptation of Kyogoku’s Mouryou no Hako went through a couple of episodes where the wheels fell off for a while but it was still really disappointing to see Loups-Garous stumble so badly. I wish the staff who had worked on MnH had been given the chance to work on this one too, because that worked far better on screen than this did.

The novel laid the philosophy on quite thick but fortunately there’s enough going on in there to make for a decent movie from the SF and conspiracy-thriller aspects without exploring anything else too deeply. I actually think the film would’ve been bogged down with Kyogoku’s long-winded intellectual musings but even with a more digestible narrative it still falls flat and, oddly, seems to be aimed at a somewhat different audience from the source material.

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Reading stats: 1100 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 4:24 mins

There’s been a bit of a misunderstanding

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I’m momentarily breaking from the usual (sporadic!) routine of blogging about animated supernatural serial killers, robots and weird books to chip in my views on a different sort of media. I’m not sure how many of my readers are fellow UK residents, so bear with me if this unfamiliar to you, or that my intro is a bit long-winded if it isn’t.

One of my favourite TV shows at the moment is a quiz show called Q.I.. A recent episode has apparently sparked a bit of controversy but in case it gets out of hand I want to give my own view on the incident. I encourage others to comment below if you want, whether you’re from the UK or Japanese side. Heck, I’d be overjoyed if Stephen Fry himself had time to read this.

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Reading stats: 852 words, 0 images; estimated reading time 3:24 mins

Shiki and the disease that makes monsters of us all

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Shiki was hard-going at first what with its slow build-up and all, but it got better towards the end. The new OP and END theme tunes were an improvement on those of the first half and many of the backstories to the characters were satisfactorily filled in. The premise and rural setting are allegedly a homage to Salem’s Lot by Stephen King; I don’t care much for King’s style but I enjoyed this all the same.


I really liked these two in the end

I suspect the novel is even better (aren’t they all?) because the artwork and screenplay were a bit clumsy yet the characters were fascinating and, personal reservations about King-esque horror aside, it’s a good story. These were the series’ saving graces, in addition to a wonderfully fascinating moral ambivalence that just managed to make it memorable.

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Reading stats: 1150 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 4:36 mins

It’s time we showed REC some love

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I think REC must be a forgotten gem because I’ve never read or heard much about it at all. In fact I stumbled on it purely by accident when the premise of “boy meets girl, girl becomes roommate after her house burns down and romantic awkwardness ensues” read exactly like the early strips of my favourite webcomic, Questionable Content. Even so, my hopes still weren’t high because it didn’t sound like anything out of the ordinary.

Satisfied that I’d at least discovered something about the lives of characters who were out of high school I then learned that it was directed by Ryutaro Nakamura, which was another happy coincidence. As a matter of fact the storyline of REC is itself founded on happy coincidences and how things sometimes just…happen. Nakamura’s involvement may also be the crucial factor that tips this from being a likeable yet ordinary story into something a bit more special.

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Reading stats: 1078 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 4:19 mins

Macross Frontier: The False Songstress

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It’s fair to say that the anime industry’s track record for feature film adaptations of TV shows isn’t a good one. For the first Macross Frontier movie I was torn between the idea that another Macross cinematic outing helmed by Kawamori himself could only be a good thing and the opposing notion that similar efforts from other franchises have left me disappointed. This one could well polarise opinion among the Macross fandom but for me at least it’s not the waste of time the nay-sayers claim it to be.

The inescapable factor is the Serial Narrative Compression Effect or, to put it simply, the fact that an episodic TV series has to be squeezed into two hours or less of screen time. Certain details have to to be left on the cutting room floor, others are shuffled around and the thematic emphasis shifts too. Itsuwari no Utahime (a.k.a. The False Songstress) does suffer from these limitations but the streamlined plotline and the production values stemming from the feature film budget are where it really shines.

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Reading stats: 979 words, 1 image; estimated reading time 3:55 mins

Anime at the Leeds International Film Festival 2010

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I honestly don’t know what’s come over me in the past few weeks. I haven’t had time or inspiration to post anything (I still upload a pic or short missive on Tumblr fairly regularly…‘regularly’ being a relative term) but what I’m most annoyed at myself for is not having the motivation to reply to comments. Rest assured that I’ve read each and every one of them and I appreciate the fact that at least my readers have the time and effort to write something, even when I haven’t.

Last weekend was a lot of fun though, and kicked me out of my little funk for a while. Ironically I watched more anime during the course of Sunday afternoon that I had during the past month…with the exception of finishing my childhood fave The Mysterious Cities of Gold. LIFF always has a lot of interesting things on offer but the anime line-up this year was impressive: I didn’t get time to see Gintama and One Piece isn’t my thing but I was able to make it to Mardock Scramble: The First Compression, Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0 and Redline.

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Reading stats: 882 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 3:32 mins

Yukikaze, Unlimited Blade Works and playing to the strengths of the medium

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Maybe I’m stating the glaringly obvious here, but since it wasn’t obvious to me until recently I might as well set out my thoughts on it. I’m not saying that the Unlimited Blade Works is a great movie but it’s worth stopping to think about the broader context or what the movie itself is trying to accomplish. Similarly, there are a few things I could say about the Yukikaze OAV but now I’ve read the original novel I feel a bit different about it. Feelings concerning the motives behind, and effects of, adapting stories from one medium to another mostly.


Click for full size

An extreme example of the importance of context that I stumbled on is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s an enjoyable enough cyberpunk novel but not as enjoyable for me as I expected: I’m finding it tedious in places but when I remind myself that it was written before any of that stuff related to the internet, VR and even the cyberpunk genre itself were commonplace, I admire it more. Not that it makes the book itself more fun, but it makes its limitations at least understandable.

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Reading stats: 1403 words, 3 images; estimated reading time 5:37 mins

Memory Lane is paved with gold

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It’s strange how you remember certain things from a long time ago so clearly. Rewatching my childhood fave The Mysterious Cities of Gold for the first time in nigh-on two decades is proving how accurate my memory was before it was addled with things like schoolwork, girls, beer and all the other crap we’re preoccupied with as we grow up. Even more surprisingly, it’s still entertaining to me now.

I remember watching this for the first time when I was around four or five; the reruns were a few years later, when I was around seven or eight and able to appreciate it more. At that point my family had a single-floor house in Norfolk with a cherry tree in the front garden; rewatching this has dredged up memories of living in that place and sitting in front of the old 4:3 CRT Sony TV set. Good times…and now I can see how good they were.

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Reading stats: 1087 words, 1 image; estimated reading time 4:21 mins

Shiki halfway impressions

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My interest in this show was twofold. Firstly, I enjoy vampire fiction (apart from that Twilight bollocks, obviously). Secondly, the NoitaminA slot has hosted some innovative and flat-out excellent animated TV that’s in a different league from everything else, so for that reason alone I decided it would be worth watching. For the first half-dozen episodes though, I thought the schedulers had picked up a dud.

The sluggish pacing doesn’t do it any favours. Because the premise is based around an epidemic of vampirism-induced deaths spreading through an entire town, the cast is also fairly large so requires a lot of screen time to keep track of them all. The narrative’s refusal to move from one area to another within each episode means you frequently go for a full week or two before returning to a certain character or household, which makes an already broad-focused story even harder to follow.

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Reading stats: 1054 words, 5 images; estimated reading time 4:13 mins