January 2009

Way back in 1992, an art student named Craig McCracken created a short film called The Whoopass Stew in which he introduced The Whoopass Girls. Two years later, the film got picked up for Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Animation Show. This got McCracken's foot in the door at Cartoon Network, which in the mid-90's sought out original work from independent animators to help establish the cable station's unique brand. By the end of the decade, McCracken had a kid-friendly version of his creation in The Powerpuff Girls. To this day, no animated program has had a higher rated premiere.

The Powerpuff Girls is a campy mix of anime and classic Hannah-Barbera cartoons. This is why it's so strange that the show got a full-blown anime makeover in 2001 with the help of a slew of big names in Japanese cartoon production. The result was Demashita!

Read more >

For the last two installments of Anime Friday, I covered a neat little series called Paranoia Agent. Watching it made me realize that the real narrative power in anime is that, quite simply, cartoons aren't bound by physical limitations, so suspension of disbelief is easy. As I found out with this week's subject, Serial Experiments Lain, this is also anime's primary weakness.

Serial Experiments Lain follows a young girl, the titular Lain, as she comes to uncover the mystery of dead people speaking through an Internet surrogate called The Wired, and indeed the mystery of her own true identity. The show does this through a back-and-forth of minimalism and frenetic intensity. At first, I adored SEL's slow, deliberate pacing. It had a David Lynch quality to it, oppression and dread barely held back by a thin fence of clean sets and spare dialog.

The problem comes when director Ryutaro Nakamura has to contend with Chiaki Konaka's clunky script.

Read more >

Last week I began my analysis of Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, a short anime series that caught me off-balance with how good it is. So, how did the second half hold up?

All in all, I think Kon pulled it off. That's not to say the series doesn't stumble as it hits the halfway mark. The cynic in me wants to believe that Kon was contracted to make thirteen episodes for a series that really only had material for eight or nine. Still, the stuff that's there is so good and the conclusion is so satisfying that I'm willing to give Kon the benefit of the doubt and say that his pacing was deliberate. Hell, for what we get at the end, his decision is downright literary.

As episode 7 closed, we witnessed Shounen Bat's first actual murder when he/it assaults a teenaged boy copying the evil spirit's MO. Before that, Shounen Bat merely conked people on the head with enough force to hospitalize them. It's a not-so-subtle sign that his power is growing.

In fact, that's basically what the second half of the series is about.

Read more >

It has been said that Dario Argento puts the 'gore' in gorgeous, that in watching his movies, you will see horrible things happen, yet you cannot look away because it is done in the most beautiful way possible. Those who have witnessed the imagery in films like Suspiria and Deep Red know that this is true beyond any doubt. Not content to point a camera and shoot moving objects, his films greatly utilized anamorphic lenses that would pan and zoom with jagged suddenness as if in the grip of fits as bodies and blood falls all around.

Read more >

It must have been around 2000 or 2001 when I first saw Takashi Miike's disturbing drama, Audition. As the film reached it's now infamous climax and the credits began to roll soon afterward, I was sitting in cinematic shock. I was not new to gore and oddity in film, not by a long shot, but I had never seen anything quite like this. It has been said that Audition is essentially a build up for the last fifteen minutes and while with your average movie this may be nothing more than hyperbole, it is not so much of a stretch here. Information comes slowly and tidbits of the absolute horror that we will be subjected to are few and quick; the film actually functions much like nothing more than a slightly off-kilter romantic drama until . . . Well, I will not spoil it for you if you have not been lucky enough to see it.

Such is the paradox of Takashi Miike: Born in Osaka, Miike turned to film after abandoning his dream to become a motor mechanic.

Read more >

Up until this week, all the anime I've watched for this project has been in the form of feature-length films. Today's entry, Satoshi Kon's Paranoia Agent, is a short series. At thirteen episodes, it seems tailor made for this kind of analysis.

It occurs to me that anime works best when it's serialized, at least usually. Arguably, a series like Dragonball Z would work a lot better as a dense, two hour action piece than the stretched-thin punchline that it is. But when it comes to the serious stuff, the format benefits from a slow burn. Paranoia Agent wouldn't really be able to convey the slow buildup of tension and all-around strangeness that it does if the whole thing were packed into a two hour exercise. Odd as it is for me to say it, this anime rides on subtlety and nuance.

The first seven episodes of Paranoia Agent introduce us to a cast of loosely related characters. Each one becomes involved, either as a victim of or an adversary to a mysterious assailant called Shounen Bat (baseball bat boy for you anglophones).

Read more >

Some people argue that watching a foreign film is not unlike catching the public transport to the park. After all, those few hours seem to drag on forever, you wonder if this trip worth all that effort just get a glimpse of nature's finest and you know someone is bound to retell a depressing life story at some point during the ride/movie. Well, suffice it to say that not all foreign films are like that. Take for instance Storm Riders. An immensely popular fantasy flick made in Hong Kong, it boasted three vital elements that had all self-respecting gamers queuing up for tickets - well choreographed battle scenes, characters with magical abilities and epic story telling. Made in 1998 and inspired by a famous Chinese comic book (Fung Wan), the story was typical of the wuxia genre - powerful, larger-then-life warriors standing up to an evil regime. This particular movie, while bemoaned by comic book fans as an annoying deviation of the original plot line, was critically acclaimed by many.

Read more >