Banned From Broadcast (2003-2008)

Banned from Broadcast is an occasional series of initially six short – about forty-five minutes – documentary-style POV horror movies made for Fuji TV that by now has also spawned three theatrical features and a surprise return episode in 2017. The episodes as well as the films were all directed and written by Toshikazu Nagae, who has worked quite a bit in the realm of direct to video and TV horror with tiny budgets.

When doing Banned from Broadcast, he actually reveals himself as a master of the form on the level of beloved house favourite Koji Shiraishi. But where Shiraishi uses his ability to mimic all kinds of media – as long as they are cheap – to create a crazy, idiosyncratic world of cosmic horror and existential absurdity, with only occasional trips into the horrors of humanity itself, Banned from Broadcast is nearly exclusively – apart from the very first episode – about human horrors rather than supernatural ones.

On the surface, all episodes, be they about a poor, large family with rather more problems than their documentary format likes to admit to, or a village of people with suicidal ideation are meant to be sensational or cloyingly sentimental TV segments that didn’t make it to broadcast for one reason or another, the filmmakers apparently able to emulate the tone and style of such things as they are done in Japan to a T. But there are secrets hidden in the background – sometimes literally – and so the stories the films are apparently telling aren’t what they are actually about. Particularly early in the series, the films expect the audience to figure things out for themselves – there are usually no big exposition dumps or explanations about what really happened. You either figure things out, or you don’t, or you look up enthusiastic interpretations on the Net.

Later in the series, things do end on explanatory montages, and while these certainly make comprehension of the series’ undercurrents easier, these montages still lack full explanations; ambiguity and the series’ trust in an audience’s willingness to play detective stay strong throughout.

Banned from Broadcast, however, does always play fair with its clueing. If you’re looking in the right direction at the right time, you can figure things out early, rather like a video-based shin honkaku detective.

What is going on is usually based on a somewhat cynical view of humanity and especially contemporary Japan, apparently a place filled with cruelty, vengefulness, cults and conspiracies, a nastiness lingering right below the consciously quotidian shooting style. Typically, the fictional filmmakers and one other character are duped in some way – often for revenge – and everybody else is playing up to their expectations to achieve something unpleasant. There’s a pervading sense of paranoia and distrust running through most of the episodes, made even stronger through the authentic feel of the presentation. In these films, everybody lies, and more people than you’d imagine are prepared to do horrible things to someone else, for reasons good or bad.

To my eyes, all of this isn’t just very fine horror but also feels like a conscious update on the golden age mystery formula that’s so big in Japan. Just that where Kosuke Kindaichi can usually at least help establish some form of justice or order, we can only watch, aghast, and think.

Three Films Make A Post: Expose the corruption. Protect the hive.

The Beekeeper (2024): Somehow, for reasons only known to the Hollywood gods who keep good directors out of work, David Ayer still ends up with decent budgets for his movies. This Jason Statham vehicle is John Wick minus the style and the weirdness, with added bee metaphors (so many bee metaphors) and shows our hero boringly killing his way through the usual hordes of incompetent caricatures. There’s never a second where he appears actually threatened, which doesn’t exactly up the excitement ante, and the staging and filming of the action sequences is blandly competent without any sparks of visual or kinetic imagination.

The plot is silly, but never so silly it ever threatens to make the movie fun, and Ayer’s direction lacks style, visual imagination and character to a nearly disturbing degree. Bees and Jason Statham deserve better, as do people who want to actually be entertained by their dumb action movies.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2023): On the positive side, The Beekeeper does at least have a vague idea of what its audience might expect of it, it’s just not terribly good at delivering it. This (first and only?) Kaijuverse streaming show as produced for Apple doesn’t, or rather, it appears to believe that what an audience wants from a show named after a secret giant monster hunting organisation are endless scenes of badly written soap operatics, mostly done by C&W style pretty young actors lacking the gravitas and actorly depth that might draw interest out of this nonsense.

Things tend to pick up whenever a monster appears or when the show spends time on flashbacks into the early years of Monarch, but most of its running time is wasted on moves that were old when Dallas made them. Apart from being clueless about what an audience may want from it, the show is also unlucky: take for example, the stunt casting of Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt as the younger version of Kurt’s character. This sounds clever on paper but suffers from the younger Russell’s inability to act his way out of a wet paper bag.

Lord of Misrule (2023): It probably shows my skewed tastes that William Brent Bell’s critically drubbed folk horror movie is the one of these three pieces of media I’d actually recommend to anyone. It’s not that I disagree with the general gist of its critical reception: this is indeed a best of folk horror tropes compilation tape that has little of its own to add to the canon, and isn’t always great at connecting the tropes sensibly.

However, I happen to like these folk horror tropes, and am perfectly okay with the way Bell arranges them here, especially since the production design is derivative as hell, but also looks and feel pretty good. Thus, Bell manages to create at least a handful of decently creepy scenes for Tuppence Middleton to be dramatic in. Which to me makes for a decently good time.

Past Misdeeds: Agon (1964)

aka Giant Phantom Monster Agon

aka Agon: Atomic Dragon

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Agon is a series consisting of four twenty-five minute episodes that make up two storylines which are distinctive enough in tone and substance to not treat the short series as a traditional four part mini series, but rather as an aborted attempt at a continuing kaiju show.

In the series' first half, atom bomb explosions awaken and mutate a prehistoric monster and hobby Godzilla impersonator soon to be dubbed Agon (that's a Japanese English short form for "Atomic Dragon"). Agon has the munchies, so it soon attacks an important nuclear research facility that comes complete with its own nuclear reactor to get at all that tasty, tasty uranium. While its at it, Agon also causes a nuclear explosion, but thanks to this being the 60s, there are no repercussions to that at all.

Anyhoo, Professor of SCIENCE(!) Ukyo (Nobuhiko Shima), shaving-impaired cop Yamato (Asao Matsumoto), roving reporter Goro (Shinji Hirota) and professional professorial assistant Satsuki (Akemi Sawa) are taking on the case of the hungry kaiju. Well, actually, after an unsuccessful fight between Agon and library footage of the JDF, they just lure Agon back into the sea with more tasty morsels of uranium. The End.

Of course, Agon returns in the second storyline to walk into a plotline about two yakuza and a suitcase full of drugs that soon finds the still hungry monster walking around with a small fishing boat and a little boy in its mouth, while vaguely stomping on a small industrial town. Fortunately, our heroes contrive to poison Agon with the suitcase full of drugs, a fantastic plan that at least drives the monster back into the sea. The End again.

Agon surely is not one of the high points of kaiju film making, but at least the show has an interesting story behind it. I have to admit to certain doubts about how the official story explains why the Fuji TV series was only broadcast in 1968, four years after it was made. Officially, Toho complained that the film's monster was resembling their very own Godzilla too closely, seemingly not knowing that the monster was designed by an apprentice of their very own Godzilla-creator Eiji Tsuburaya and the much superior first two episodes were written by the frequent Toho kaiju writer Shinichi Sekizawa. Supposedly, when Toho learned of that fact four years later, they suddenly had a change of heart and allowed Fuji TV to go ahead with the broadcasting.

I can't say that story makes much sense to me, especially when we have the much easier explanation of the utter crapness of its last two episodes for Agon's absence from the screen. The Sekizawa episodes, both directed by Norio Mine (says Wikipedia), are actually pretty decent stuff as far as ultra-generic kaiju romps go. There's nothing about it anyone hadn't seen in the genre by 1968, but it's decently enough paced, and rather cleverly written around the problems of a TV budget.

It also helps the series' starting case that Mine does some quite decent work, too, using clever editing and well-chosen camera angles to let the few extras he has look as much as panicking crowds as possible, and using shots of modernist buildings and models of modernist buildings to get the proper pop art city-smashing mood going even though he doesn't actually have a city for his monster to smash. The slightly pop art-y mood is further enhanced by the strange sepia-toned black and white stock the series is shot on, which, I assume, is the best way to colour-code things when you can't afford to actually colour-code your sets. Then there's Wataru Saito's strange little score that consists of some jazzy beats and a lot of weird synthesizer warbling that suggest a Japanese version of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop and really help to pull the first two episodes into the realm of the cheap yet formally interesting.

The special effects themselves are all over the place; there are some very fine model shots, but there are also horrible moments like the one where a very bad Agon doll just stands in a pool of water standing in for the monster appearing out of the sea: The Agon suit itself does look good enough from a certain angle, but there's a lack of detail in its face and an immobility about its whole head - especially the eyes - that's never convincing, but is survivable as long as Mine shoots around it.

Unfortunately, Fuminori Ohashi, the director of the final two episodes does not keep up with these minor aesthetic achievements at all. The director instead opts for a bland point and shoot style that seems ready-made to show off all the worst sides of the series' effects work, with Agon walking around with a boat model crammed into its mouth for about twenty minutes being one of the most embarrassing - though of course pretty funny - things I've ever seen in a kaiju picture; and I've watched all of the original Gamera movies by now. For some reason, Saito's music isn't put to any decent use at all anymore, either, warbling around ineffectively and utterly divorced from what's going on on screen. It's difficult to watch these final two episodes and not think nobody involved in the production actually gave a damn about what they were doing.

Apart from Agon's boating trip, the so crap it's funny part of the later episodes also includes long shots of the monster standing around not moving a muscle (one suspects the suit actor was on holiday), and one of the more undignified methods of getting rid of a kaiju I've ever had the dubious luck to witness. Don't do drugs, giant monsters, okay?

The rapid decrease in quality is a bit sad, really, for while the script of the show's first storyline doesn't have an original bone in its body, its execution speaks of enthusiasm and creativity behind the camera, and it's not difficult to imagine the show the first two episodes promise to be a lot of fun to watch.

Past Misdeeds: Garo (2005-2006)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


A secret war is raging (at least in Japan). Creatures from the Underworld known as Horrors regularly creep through the cracks between dimensions to possess humans whose darkest impulses accommodate the character of the respective horror and use them to commit various atrocities. Fortunately, humankind is protected by the Makai Knights, warriors of mystical bloodlines who are able to use a magical metal known as soul metal. When need be, a Makai Knight can conjure up full body armour made from the material, but (because that's how it goes in tokusatsu shows) they can't stand being clad in the magical armour for long.

Garo follows the attempts of the perma-scowling Golden Knight Kouga Saezima aka Golden Fang aka Garo (Hiroki Konishi, now called Ryosei Konishi to confuse everyone as much as possible) to keep his territory (which might be the Eastern half of Japan or of Tokyo) save from the Horrors.

In the first episode, Kouga protects the artist Kaoru Mitsuki (Mika Hijii) from the attack of a horror, but can't prevent the dying beast's blood spattering all over her. Horror blood is quite insidious. It makes the person tainted by it a magnet for Horror attacks, and - as if that weren't bad enough - also kills the victim after exactly one hundred days in a gruesome and painful manner. By the laws of his order, Kouga is bound to kill everyone tainted thusly by the blood, but he decides to let Kaoru live and use her as bait for the various monsters of the week. Not that he's telling her anything of this, mind you.

Of course, Kouga's scowl and his absurdly abrupt manners hide a very soft core, and in truth he has a plan of trying to save Kaoru through an obscure ritual whose existence makes the whole "kill people who came in contact with Horror blood" rather problematic. Later on, Kaoru will turn out to be closer connected to the fight between the Makai Knights and the Horrors than anyone would suspect.

Apart from the secrets of Kouga's and Kaoru's pasts and family histories, and the monsters of the week, the show does (of course) also feature an equally scowl-prone rival with a chip even bigger than Kouga's on his shoulder, and a terrible conspiracy that might or might not have something to do with the three little weird girls working as Kouga's bosses.

Would you believe that everybody will learn something about showing one's feelings and stopping the damned scowling before the 25 episodes are over?

The Japanese TV show Garo is another project by master monster designer Keita Amemiya, who here is also credited as creator of the show and as its "chief director". I suspect that makes him something comparable to a very hands-on show runner for a US show.

Garo is the rare case of a tokusatsu superhero show that isn't made with a kid audience in my. Themes and tone of the show are comparatively mature (even if the emotional lives of the main characters aren't), there's even some thematically appropriate - dare I say "classy"? - nudity.

Amemiya's monster designs for the show are frequently quite brilliant, often mind-bogglingly bizarre and always completely in tune with the thing the respective monster is a metaphor for. The show's tone is often quite close to horror, with the hosts of the Horrors usually representing (and living out) the least pleasant impulses and feelings of humanity. In most episodes, Garo aims for a mood of the creepy and the bizarre, and hits its aim more often than not. Of course, there are a few other episodes. Two of them ("Doll" and "Game") have the sort of weird acid-dream quality only Japanese filmmakers still seem to want to achieve with their works from time to time, a few others are doing some rather interesting world building (that even comes together to build something like a coherent philosophy, though not exactly a deep one), and some others are doing their best to melodramatically explore the lead characters' inner demons.

The latter episodes are unfortunately the least successful ones. While the older and more experienced actors are as solid as can be, the young lead actors are ill-prepared for what the scripts ask of them here. Mika Hijii is probably the best of them; at least she's really getting into the melodramatics her character has to go through. Male lead Hiroki Konishi (and his "brooding rival" Ray Fujita, too) is often rather dreadful and at times doesn't even manage to scowl convincingly. I did have the impression that his acting improved a little over time, though. However, it is also quite possible that I just got used to him.

What Konishi and Fujita are quite good at, on the other hand, is physical acting and stunt work. Unlike many other contemporary tokusatsu shows, Garo has a lot of fighting going on when its heroes aren't wearing their stuntmen and digital effects enabling armour. At least half of the fights is actual screen fighting between the actual actors, and it is this aspect of the show where Konishi and Fujita shine. Both really seem to throw themselves into their fight scenes with enthusiasm, a certain verve, and even competence, and manage - with the help of Makoto Yokoyama's more than solid choreography and direction that knows the difference between intense and fast, and impenetrable - to make the non-suit fights memorable and exciting.

Once the suits are donned, the fighting becomes nearly all CGI all the time. Those CGI fights are an acquired taste. Where the choreography of the real life fights is oriented on martial arts cinema (with a dose of wuxia), once the armours are donned the fights begin to look very much as if they came out of a (good) hack and slash videogame (say Devil May Cry). After a few episodes of getting used to the show's very distinct two types of fights I started to enjoy the contrast between them.

Amemiya makes it quite easy to enjoy the CGI elements of the show. While everything in these scenes looks as artificial and unreal as it gets, the things it represents are frequently so imaginative and bizarre and would not be realistically achievable through practical means anybody could afford, that it would need someone much more curmudgeonly than me not to be charmed by them. How else could you witness a giant monster clown bleeding fireworks?

While a lot of Garo's basic elements are pretty generic, much of the show is pervaded by a palpable feeling of enthusiasm - for silly monsters, for metaphors, for melodrama, for the genre its working in, for the healing power of art, for fights and for batshit insanity - that makes it utterly impossible for me not to be excited about it. It's the type of genre work I like the most, working inside the clichés of a given style, but exploring how far a show can go while doing that.

The Japanese public was at least excited enough about the show to lead to a two part special/TV movie named Beast of the White Night or Beast of the Midnight Sun (that turned out to be a very silly, yet entertaining cheese-fest front-loading the show's fantasy elements and mostly eschewing the horror) and an honest to Cthulhu big screen movie, Garo: Red Requiem that came into Japanese cinemas just at the end of this October. You'll sooner or later hear from me about the latter, I'm sure.

In short: Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita (2012)

aka Humanity Has Declined

As the title of this twelve-part anime show states, in its nearly post-technological future, mankind has entered a state of stagnation and decline, with the remainders of humanity living a rather bucolic and peaceful looking life. It's a very soft apocalypse, where no punky raiders ride around in dune buggies to rape and pillage. Instead, what's left of humanity takes its own end with a slightly melancholic shrug of their shoulders.

The new dominant species (or as the show calls them "the new humanity") on Earth are the Fairies, weird yet probably well-meaning little creatures with a thing for hats and sweets and horrifying and/or cute ever-smiling holes where their mouths are supposed to be. Oh, they also can do magic. And science. Or something.

The show's nameless, pink-haired protagonist returns to her home village (humanity can't do the whole "city" thing anymore) to work as an UN mediator between humans and fairies. She's really rather good with the fairies, but she still gets into a bunch of strange, hair-raising and often wickedly funny (on more than one level) adventures, like having to thwart the world-domination plan of naked chickens, or becoming trapped in a manga where she has to survive the horrors of actual Japanese manga magazine culture, or surviving the the mandatory "Groundhog day" time vortex episode (which does not take up ten episodes, and includes a most curious tea party). It all ends up in a surprisingly poignant and complex boarding school adventure that would be the stuff of a whole season in most other shows.

As the show merrily jumps around in its internal time line, there's no major plot developing. Storylines usually take up two episodes and merrily take from the part of otaku culture the show's producers want to explore, send up, or work in this week. These genre detours get plenty crazy, but they never lead to a show that only consists of pieces of other shows or cultural artefacts. Instead, Jinrui manages to take these bits and pieces and make them intrinsic parts of itself; I'd even say it could stand on its own for a viewer who doesn't even get half of its winks and nudges.

Still, that structure should by all rights lead to a rather random show, and if you only look at its very surface, Jinrui is rather random (like its fairies). On a thematic and emotional level, though, there is more than one through-line to the show, with melancholic yet hopeful acceptance the emotional tenor between all the craziness the show can come up with.

Surprisingly, all that randomness also manages to add up to the sort of somewhat coherent worldbuilding where even the more bizarre elements begin to make sense once you put them in context with each other. Of course, the show expects its viewers to do large parts of that effort themselves, so if you don't, it's just adorably random, which is also well and good.

The show's main director Seiju Kishi and composer (aka lead writer) Makoto Uezu belong to the type of contemporary commercial anime workers who seem to be doing just about any kind of show, with no philosophical through-line I could find, so it's impossible to position Jinrui in the context of a body of work, seeing as most of what they have done lacks any personality of its own as far as I can tell . Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita on the other hand, is all personality.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,in short,sf,comedy,seiji kishi,makoto uezu

On WTF: Agon (1964)

As any fool knows, Japanese giant monsters are the best, so it's of utmost historical importance when fansubbers dive into the depths of the archives to dig out things like Fuji TV's Agon, one of the more brazen and direct attempts to rip off Godzilla for a TV format.

This week's column on WTF-Film will tell you how that attempt turned out for everyone involved.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,reviews,giant monsters,kaiju,norio mine,fuminori ohashi,other places

Three Films Make A Post: TEEN-AGERS ZOOM TO SUPERSIZE AND TERRORIZE A TOWN!

Detention (2011): Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am! Look how clever I am!

Nyarko-san: Another Crawling Chaos (2012) aka Haiyore! Naruko-san aka Haiyore! Nyarlko-chan: Sometimes, it would be easier to be among the number of people who can declare movies - or in this case anime shows - to be a guilty pleasure, something to look down on from on high and enjoy ironically. Sadly or fortunately, I don't have that sort of barrier protecting me from actually enjoying stuff, and so it can happen that I'll go out and shout at all the world that'll hear it: "Oh boy, this generic, clichéd and low-brow anime romantic comedy - with mandatory fourth wall breaking - is often really funny, at least if you enjoy laughing about its millions of Lovecraft/Cthulhu Mythos and pop culture related jokes per episode!". Then, people look at me funny and at best mumble some crap about the show probably being "so bad that it's good", when it is in fact good enough to make me laugh. Repeatedly.

The Clairvoyant (1935): Music hall clairvoyant Maximus (Claude Rains) suddenly develops actual prophetic powers when in the presence of a woman (Jane Baxter) not his wife. After various melodramatic happenings, our hero's marriage to a pre-blonde Fay Wray is on the ropes, and he's standing in court for causing the catastrophes he foresees.

Let's start with the positive: Wray and Rains really play well with each other, and Wray's more naturalistic acting style often helps reign in the cinematically less experienced Rains's tendency to just stare at the camera and declare his (pretty terrible) dialogue melodramatically like a bad stage actor. Unfortunately, that's about it: as a supernatural melodrama, the film's just not very interesting. The melodrama seems far-fetched, things happen because they are in the script instead of having the fated feeling they are supposed to have, and the film's treatment of the actually pretty fine ideas at its core is buried beneath tonal insecurity and complete lack of characterization (just try and describe Rains's character with a different word than "melodramatic").

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,japanese tv,british movies,horror,comedy,fantasy,melodrama,claude rains,fay wray

Another (2012)

When high school kid Koichi Sakakibara (confusingly an anime protagonist who is neither one of those tsundere monstrosities nor treated as a total loser even though he's friendly, reserved and a bit shy) transfers from Tokyo to a school in a small country town, he does not expect the strangeness he is going to encounter there, despite being the kind of avid reader of horror novels who should be suspicious of country life.

His new class may greet Koichi friendly enough, but there's something off about his new classmates too. Why does the class have a "head of countermeasures"? And what is the big secret everyone does so pointedly avoid telling him for bizarre reasons like his coming to the class in the middle of a school year?

Possibly even stranger than the behaviour of Koichi's classmates is a girl named Mei Misaki, whose pale-skinned lonely character make her a) a natural-born goth and b) the mysterious girl the new boy in school just must get interested in. Stranger still is that nobody else in class seems to see Mei, quite as if she were a ghost to everyone but Koichi. The combination of mysterious girl and mystery is too much for Koichi too resist, so he begins, in his own reserved manner, an attempt to unravel it. When he reaches the conclusion that Mei just might actually be a ghost, classmates begin to die in strange and random accidents. The secret Koichi is trying to understand will turn out to be far more dangerous, and far more complicated, than he could have expected.

Another, a 12-part anime series chief directed by Tsutomu Mizushima and written by Ryou Higaki, based on the novel by Yukito Ayatsuji (or possibly its manga adaptation, for all I know) surprised me quite a bit for the positive. Although - as you know, Jim - the horror genre has quite a rich tradition in Japanese media of all types, there really aren't all that many anime shows doing the genre justice. Furthermore, the careers of Mizushima (whose body of work looks completely random to me) and Higaki (who just hasn't done all that much until now) don't look too promising on paper. However, after I had seen the first handful of episodes, any scepticism I had towards the show turned out to be unwarranted.

In fact, while Another is not a perfect show - there's a bikini beach episode and a certain flabbiness in the plotting of the episodes before the finale standing between it and that description - it's a very good one. The show has a rather wonderful time building up its strange mystery (including some effective red herrings), ending each episode with a clever - and utterly melodramatic - cliffhanger, until everything ends in the sort of hysteria that is one of the major charms of a certain school of horror manga. Think Kazuo Umezu's Drifting Classroom, and you get the mood - if not the plot trappings - of the last two episodes. In fact, Another as a whole does have the feeling of being an update of the sort of horror manga Kazuo Umezu did best, but with clear improvements when it comes to the treatment of gender (the novel was written by a modern woman, after all), and a taste for more personal apocalypses.

The show is also very good at using the classic trappings of teenage angst for its purposes; there are some moments that should speak to the isolated and angsty teenager in every one of us. Of course, this is also the kind of show that follows a demonstration of very real and close to the bone teenage anxieties (of the sort we don't all lose growing up) with scenes of teenagers dying mildly gory, and slightly grotesque, deaths, and some well done melodramatic shouting. Wonderfully, Another does manage to balance out these very different dramatic impulses and techniques more often than not, resulting in a story that works well on rather more subtle and very unsubtle levels.

On the visual side, the show is very much a state of the art anime of today, the sort of thing whose look and basic character design is not all that original, but that does too well bringing these characters to live or - as it may be - death to be called generic. The show is also pretty great at providing a sense of place beyond "generic Japanese high school in the country", always making the locations the story takes place in memorable and individual.

On a personal level, I'm also quite happy with the show's nearly total - except for that damn beach and bikini episode - lack of fanservice; one could nearly suspect the people in charge trusted their viewers to be more interested in the story they tell than in spotting another pair of panties. While I'm far from being a prude, and do think that sleaze has its place, it does not need to be everywhere all the time.

So, if you want to watch a piece of teen horror done right, Another might be just the thing for you.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,tsutomu mizushima,ryou higaki,horror,reviews

Dantalian No Shoka (2011)

aka The Mystic Archives of Dantalian

At the end of the Great War, the former pilot Hugh Anthony Disward follows a letter telling of the death of his incredibly bibliophile uncle and his inheritance of everything his uncle owned to the man's rather dilapidated mansion in the country. There, Huey not only finds and inherits the expected - that is to say a large library and mysterious circumstances surrounding his uncle's death - but also what seems to be a rather cranky girl of dubious age (it's the good old "looks like child or doll, acts like a grown-up" that can make the inevitable romance aspect of a show like this pretty problematic outside of Japan; my moral stance is it's not paedophilia when nobody is a child) with a bizarre fashion sense named Dalian. Dalian isn't just any old little girl, though. The girl is in fact something called a "biblioprincess", the warden and physical embodiment of and gateway to an extra-dimensional library that keeps magically empowered books - so called phantom books - from harm and the wrong owner. Huey's uncle was Dalian's so-called key-keeper, responsible for protecting her, and, if need be, unlocking the keyhole in Dalian's chest to fetch a plot-relevant magical book. Dalian chooses Huey as her new key-keeper, and from then on, both spend most of their time either looking for, or just stumbling over, various phantom books and the chaos, destruction and swelling orchestral music that follows them, meeting creepy automatons, flesh-eating plants who are books, various disturbances in the force of love, and even zombies, until the show comes to a sudden end.

The twelve episode anime show Dantalian no Shoka is based on a series of light novels by Gakuto Mikumo. Like the novels (at least that's what the Internet tells me), the show is mostly separated into stand-alone stories - some episodes even feature two or three very short vignettes instead of a full story - and not very dependant on a larger story arc. There's an internal chronology to be sure, and some things that happen early on will be somewhat important later on, but for the most part, this is episodic TV of the old-fashioned kind, where nothing ever changes for longer than a single episode.

Fortunately, Dantalian's basic set-up is actually a pretty good fit for the type of show it is. Being only twelve episodes long, there's also no risk that much repetition can set in.

Seeing how the single episodes are written, I doubt there'd have been all that much repetition in the show's future anyhow, for if Dantalian does feature one thing, it's variety. Apart from all threats being based on a phantom book somehow, the writers are free to do what they want, so there are standard monster romps, an intensely creepy episode about the horrors of love and resurrection, another one that finds our heroes entering a fantasy novel (and a completely different drawing style to boot!) attacked by book worms - the show (and/or the books it's based on) is nothing if not imaginative.

That imagination is put into an interesting context. The show treats the time between the wars it takes place in as the point where traditionally Romantic European ideas meet - and sometimes battle - modernity as we know it, a thematic through-line that is not only visible in the nature and consequences of the phantom books (there's really a lot of E.T.A. Hoffmann as seen through a Japanese lens in some of the episodes, as well as an interest in art and occultism that seems earnest and well-researched), but also in the design of the show. The - rather bucolic - England the show takes place in is visually standing right between (a Japanese interpretation of) the Victorian age and a (Japanese interpretation of ) the Roaring Twenties.

This combination of elements that do not quite fit together, yet work in a very pretty way, alone would make the show worth watching; that the show actually uses these elements to explore the way change comes upon the aesthetics of a world makes it a must see for my tastes.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,fantasy,horror,reviews,yutaka uemura

In short: Prayer Beads (2004)

A woman and her imaginary children take bitter vengeance on the friend who slept with her husband. A vending machine in the country is the source of a very special soft drink. A doctor takes a drug that lets him see the worms and tentacles that are really inside of people. A creepy anime character fulfils wishes in a variation of the story of the monkey's paw. Two elderly espers hunt down and explode the killer of their granddaughter.

These and other stories belong to the Japanese nine-part horror anthology series Prayer Beads. Most of the episodes are written and directed by a certain Masahiro Okano, who also has a "supervised by" credit. Okano seems to exclusively work for Japanese TV, so info about him or what else he did is hard to find on the Western internet. It is pretty clear, though, that he has extensive knowledge of all the horror clichés you'd find in this type of anthology show, and is not ashamed of using them.

The episodes are shot in the somewhat raw and cheap looking style typical of contemporary Japanese TV. Okano and the other directors do their best to use this rawness to give most of the episodes an immediacy that is making it much easier to swallow the sillier of the stories. In a few episodes, there are pretty effective attempts at producing a more dream-like feel and pacing through the magic of weird and fast editing and colour filters, or by going the extra mile and actually creating cheap animation for the anime-themed episode. This sort of thing doesn't let the show's budget look more impressive on screen, but it demonstrates an interest in the details and a willingness to experiment that makes it difficult to argue against a show this visibly putting an extra effort in.

Tonally, Prayer Beads is all over the place. Some episodes are examples of earnest yet weird character psychology-based horror, while others, like the vending machine episode or the mushroom hunt story, seem to exist mostly to set up a rubbery gore gag, which in case of the vending machine story is absolutely worth it. The show isn't at all timid when it comes to the rubbery gore anyhow - generally, Okano seems to belong to the school of Japanese horror that just loves to put improbable explosions of red and gooey stuff on screen, at least as far as the TV budget and TV morals allow.

All in all, Prayer Beads is worth watching. There's nothing sensational or original about the show, but it's clear that its producers have their hearts in the right places and know how to have fun with the traditions of the horror genre.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,masahiro okano,in short,horror

Three Films Make A Post: Many Motion Pictures Promise You Terror But This One Is Truly Frightening!

Proie aka Prey (2010): The male members of a family owning a rural chemical plant are trying to hunt down an overly aggressive boar, but eventually have to defend themselves against a whole pack of mutant killer boars. Of course, they are responsible for the boars' existence and of course tensions in the small group make their survival exceedingly more difficult than the boars alone could. Man is after all - and please repeat after me - the greatest monster of them all.

While I couldn't shake the feeling to have seen Antoine Blossier's film more than once before, I also felt decently entertained by it. This is, after all, a well-paced, well-acted, and well-shot film that manages to make good use of the old "you're mostly just hearing the monsters" trick. The only thing it truly lacks is an identity of its own.

 

Kishin Houkou Demonbane (2006): On paper, a mecha/fight anime sprinkled with terms taken from Lovecraft and Western magic(k)al traditions where the Al Azif is a Magical Girl sounds like a surefire win of the bizarre and silly to me. Alas, the copious use of Lovecraftian names is basically all this twelve-episode show has to offer. The rest is dire fanservice, horrible animation, characters more generic than the word "generic", and fight scenes as lazily animated as the producers could get away with. It's as if all the show's creative energy had flown into the use of Lovecraftian words, so that nothing was left for minor things like decent plotting, pacing, or even just a basic interest in entertaining one's audience beyond showing the panties of the Necronomicon to it. Which is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write. Oh well.

 

Insidious (2010): As much as I sympathize with Saw director James Wan's and Saw writer Leigh Whannell's attempt at making a more subtle piece of ghost-oriented horror, I can hardly call the result of that attempt a successful film, for if there's one thing the pair seems to be unable to do, it's being subtle. Neither the attempts at building psychological tension nor the theoretically creepy scenes work, mostly because there's never any proper build-up to them, and even if there were, in the end, Insidious prefers to PLAY VERY LOUD MUSIC AND SHOUT at its audience instead of actually going through with that subtlety thing. If you think a guy suddenly jumping at you shouting "BOO!" is the height of horror, you'll have a heck of a time, though.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,japanese tv,horror,mecha,james wan,antoine blossier,in short

Occult Academy (2010)

Original title: Seikimatsu Occult Gakuin

1999. The Waldstein Academy is a peculiar school teaching its students not only from the usual academic curriculum, but also everything there is to know about the occult (where "the occult" in the parlance of this show is everything from magic to aliens to cryptozoology). Obviously, strange happenings are a daily occurrence at the place, but things get even more strange when the Academy's principal and owner dies. His alienated daughter Maya returns to the Academy for his funeral, and after cleaning up a bit of possession trouble with her Dad's corpse, takes over as the place's new principal - which later on won't dissuade her from also becoming a student of the place she owns - planning to close it down as soon as possible. Maya faults the Academy and the occult for her parents' divorce and the distance between herself and her Dad.

Closing the Academy down and hating on the occult becomes a much lower priority to Maya soon enough, though, for episode two finds her witnessing a naked guy descending from the heavens. Fumiaki Uchida, as he will later turn out to be called, is supposedly a new teacher at the school, but, as he explains, is in truth a time agent from the far-flung future of 2012. In 2012, just as Nostradamus foresaw, humanity will have been nearly destroyed by an invasion of aliens from another dimension. Fortunately, Nostradamus's prophecies make also clear that the alien trouble began with a dimensional gate opening at the Waldstein Academy in 1999, so the future resistance has sent Uchida to destroy the one element - known as Nostradamus' key - that will cause the rift to open. Alas, Uchida isn't the first time agent they send. His five predecessors all found horrible ends, and Uchida - a former kid spoon-bender turned spoon-bending fake - really is the dregs when it comes to saviours of the world. He's cowardly, an idiot, and will soon enough turn into Maya's favourite punching bag. Still, Uchida and Maya will pool their talents (his: being ineffectual and running away; hers: being dominant and hitting things with spiky or sharp things). And if you think this all sounds rather ridiculous and completely random, then it's just because you haven't heard about the side plots and single episode stories I've left out here to preserve my sanity - those are even more ridiculous and random.

Occult Academy is as complete of a mess in structure as any 13-part anime show could ever hope to be. For most of the time, the show even seems to be unsure to what genre it belongs. Is it soft teen horror? A high school comedy? A harem comedy? Tear-jerking melodrama? Time-travel SF? A romantic comedy? Well, it's everything, usually all at once or in very uncomfortable or just very silly combinations that make no dramatic sense whatsoever, as if "structure" were a word the show's lead writer Seishi Minakami (whom you might know from the more coherent Paranoia Agent) had never heard before. Occult Academy is the sort of show that doesn't see any reason not to have the usual pubescent sex jokes in a tear-jerking episode about a dead little girl finding peace through a Christmas party in July (complete with guilt-ridden Dad dressing up as Santa Claus), or to have high melodrama about childhood trauma next to magic duels right out of Final Fantasy. Heaping lots of stuff that shouldn't belong together on is of course not an atypical anime technique, but most of the better shows doing this actually have a plan and a reason for it. Occult Academy is just random.

Of course, I would not have watched the whole show if its randomness weren't often pretty enjoyable. A lot of the show's jokes are actually quite funny in their innocent low-brow way (yeah, sorry to puritans, but the childish sex jokes are innocent too), which is a plus in something that's at least in part a comedy. Though the show's randomness usually means that scenes that should have emotional punch just reduce me to giggles, it also makes the show exciting in so far as you'll never guess what bizarre nonsense it will pull off next. From time to time, Minakami even has fun with slightly subverting the same clichés he's just been wallowing in for half a dozen episodes - for example, the horrible moe character is in truth an evil witch. Which is neither all that original nor very clever, but I'll take what I can get.

If you're planning on only watching one anime show this year, Occult Academy shouldn't be it at all, but if you're looking for an entertaining distraction with an identity crisis and copious amounts of very weird and very Japanese crap, this should fit your needs.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: anime,reviews,comedy,horror,sf,wtf,melodrama,tomohiko ito,seishi minakami,japanese tv

Three Shows Make A Post: Reincarnation or Madness?

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (2006): I'm probably the last person on Earth who expected to be charmed by the highly polished surface of this combination of high school comedy, SF, ironic wish fulfilment, ironic formalist experimentation and every Japanese pop cultural obsession ever, great love for it from every direction be damned, but I am as charmed by it as I'm impressed by the sheer amount of enthusiasm and cleverness on display here.

It's the sort of show obviously completely conscious of every problem with the pop culture it so loves, but instead of deconstructing it completely, it has decided to playfully embrace everything, the low-brow, the high-brow and the inexcusable, and let its audience's brains sort out the difference. Who am I to argue with love?

Witch Hunter Robin (2002): Young Italian witch hunter with pyrokinetic powers works as part of an organization that solves crimes committed by other people with supernatural abilities in contemporary Japan, until she begins to doubt the morality of her mission and the motives and goals of the people she's working for. That might sound somewhat awesome, but the show sabotages itself - at least for my tastes - with the slowest narrative tempo I've ever witnessed. It's not just the extremely slow development of the show's plot that's the problem here, it's the slowness of everything: most scenes run twice as long as they need to just because everybody is animated and voiced in near slow-motion, as if the whole cast were on valium. Supposedly, this is a technique to emphasize the basic melancholy and sadness of the whole affair, but snails aren't necessarily melancholic.

Iria - Zeiram the Animation (1994): This is an animated prequel to Keita Amemiya's loveable tokusatsu Zeiram, and - as prequels do - provides us with a retcon that doesn't fit what's happening in the movie (you'd think Iria would have mentioned that Zeiram is something of an archenemy of hers), and gives us an origin story nobody ever asked for (nope, I didn't want to know what Bob the Computer did before he became a computer, sorry). Nonetheless, the six-part OVA is a perfectly entertaining early 90s anime with all that entails - including (on the negative side) spiky-haired orphans and (on the very positive side) a heroine who neither suffers from amnesia, nor moe, nor a case of the whininess. I'd call that a win.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,sf,comedy,horror

In short: Outlaw Star (1998)

The future! Smart-ass ray-gunslinger Gene Starwind and his kid side-kick Jim are operating a combined bounty-hunting/mechanic company on a planet on the backend of the universe. One day, a simple bodyguard-job for the outlaw "Hot Ice" Hilda turns into a of life-changing event that leaves our two buddies with a dead Hilda, a stolen experimental spacecraft navigated by amnesiac bio-android girl Melfina, rumours of a treasure hidden at something called the Galactic Leyline, and quite a lot of enemies. Among the latter are the man who murdered Gene's father (and his bishounen brother) and a large group of Taoist magic using space pirates.

In theory, Gene and Jim are planning to use their new ship to find the Galactic Leyline and the treasure, as well as helping Melfina get her memory back, but in practice, they spent most of the show with various insane and dangerous projects to earn enough money to pay for the ship's upkeep. At least, our heroes are the sort of guys who can turn enemies into friends, so their crew eventually also features an intensely annoying cat-girl and the female wooden-sword-swinging assassin Suzuka, both initially out to kill our heroes. They will probably come in handy once the show remembers it has a main plot.

Yes, Outlaw Star is most certainly one of those anime shows that randomly sticks every idea one of the scriptwriters once had while visiting the toilet as well as every fashionable anime cliché of 1998 into one of its episodes, without a care of any of it fitting together in any way or form.

Fortunately, this scatter-shot approach works out quite nicely for the show for most of the time. There's a sense of glee and delight running through most of the episodes, as if the team producing it just had a lot of fun throwing Taoist magic, spaceships that fight each other with grapple hands, Old West mythology and chambara action - to only take a few of the show's more awesome bits and pieces - into one large, episodic semi-comedic space opera. The same sense of fun runs through the character and object design, a love for the colourful, the larger-than-life and the just plain weird that excuses a certain lack of originality.

This lack of originality and ambition is the show's biggest weakness on the writing side - if you know the character types and the show's basic plotline, you can guess what will happen throughout the series with frightening precision; the writing is keeping on the safe side so much that the show might be infuriating to anyone obsessed with the idea of "The New" in SF. The show's other weakness is the slavish way in which it fulfils certain otaku expectations, and basically writes its own fan-fiction - see the sleazy and pubescent hot springs episode, annoying cat girl, the highly uncomfortable way the show's gay character is treated, or little things like the fact that Melfina needs to step naked into a tank of blue liquid to navigate the space ship. It's by far not as bad as it could be - this is no Neon Genesis Evangelion undermining its own virtues every five minutes - but if you're allergic against this specific part of anime culture, you might find your fun suddenly interrupted by writers with the emotional development of twelve-year-olds.

For my tastes, the show's speed and enthusiasm, its tendency to nearly shout "awesome!" at every new bit of space opera weirdness it can come up with and the small fact that these bits often are as awesome as the show thinks they are, more than make up for these flaws.

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,sf,adventure,in short,mitsuru hongo

Blue Gender (1999-2000)

Diagnosed with an incurable genetic illness, teenager Yuji, together with a lot of other people suffering from the same illness, is put into hibernation, with the hope to get him out of his freezer again once a cure for his problem has been found.

Yuji probably didn't expect the state of things when he wakes up in 2031. Some anonymous soldiers and a mecha are trying to get Yuji's body out of the facility he has been sleeping in for more than twenty years, but are attacked by a horde of large, insectile creatures. During the course of the fight, the teenager's hibernation sarcophagus is damaged, leading to the boys awakening. It takes him some time to realize that the mecha is not another horrible monster, but is in fact trying to protect him from the creatures. It sure doesn't help that the robot's pilot Marlene is not much of a people person, and doesn't say a word to the shocked boy for quite some time.

Somehow, with the help of a whole squad of mecha and soldiers, Marlene manages to expedite Yuji out of the building. After a bit of back and forth and the second of Yuji's many hissy fits of the show, his rescuers finally bother to explain a bit of what's going on to him. Turns out that Earth has been overrun by these strange, frequently mutating bug things that were for some reason dubbed "Blue", most of humanity has been killed and a few chosen ones have been evacuated onto a space station named "Earth Two". The ruling cabal of the station has for some reason the soldier's don't know about (and, at least if you ask Marlene, don't care about) decided to bring as many of the hibernating "sleepers" into space. Yuji is the only sleeper the squad responsible for the sleepers of Japan has been able to free.

Things do not improve for the soldiers during the next few episodes of the show. Slowly but surely their numbers are whittled down by bug attacks until they even allow Yuji to learn how to pilot a mecha (here called "Attack Shrikes"). He turns out to get surprisingly good at it improbably fast. Various attempts to leave Earth - first via a facility on the open sea, then together with another rescue squad in Korea - fail, until the only choice left is to try to get Yuji somehow to the space port of Baikonur in what once was Russia. By that point, Yuji has learned that the inhabitants of the space station aren't exactly heroes: while they fled to space, they let the surviving humans on Earth to rot, and treat the survivors they meet when on a mission on the planet as completely expendable.

After Korea, what once was a military squad now consists only of Marlene and Yuji. Of course there's romance in the air. Yuji's whiny yet compassionate attitude whittles down the defences Marlene has built in long years of loneliness and trauma, and the boy is sixteen or seventeen. Obviously, the young, and unspoken, love will have to stand more than one test in the future, but its effects are rebuilding Marlene into a much more whole person.

After half of the show's episodes are over, the couple finally reaches Marlene's home, but there, things only become more difficult. The leaders of the place turn out to be space fascists planning to use Yuji and others with the same genetic problem for their own, not exactly humanitarian, purposes, and they don't look too kindly on Marlene's change into an ethical person, either.

On the surface, the anime show Blue Gender is nothing special. Looking at its single elements, one might suspect that the show is a rather artlessly fashioned grab-bag of ideas that were popular in SF/mecha anime at the time of its creation: there's the teenage male hero with hidden powers and an easily aroused libido; the gore-loving giant monsters; the mecha of the real robo variant (sub-genre demi-god Ryosuke Takahashi had a hand in the creation of the show). In the middle of the series, elements of academy shows begin appearing, but also a revolution and the mandatory ecological message. On paper, it's really too much, and too little of it is original, but the show's main script writer Katsumi Hasegawa (who must be one of the nerdiest men on the planet, seeing that he also writes light novels, draws manga and has experience as a suit actor for tokusatsu show as well as "special effects critic", whatever the latter may be) and its director Hiroshi Abe (not the actor) fuse the show's disparate elements so well that they fit quite organically.

There are only a few episodes that don't really work, usually when the middle aged men decide to write about sex as if they themselves were still sixteen, and not just their hero and their presumed audience. For most of the time, though, everything comes together into a coherent and fitting whole and doesn't betray its ideas and characters to the demands of fan service too much. Even when Blue Gender uses stock character types, it knows quite well when to stop using them.

Hasegawa does quite a few clever things in his scripts. While the way the show uses Marlene won't stand up to a strict feminist interpretation (but what does?), it's nice to see a show respect its female lead's competence even after its male lead has found the awesome mecha pilot in himself. It's also nice - and quite surprising - to find a show that doesn't pretend that a woman must give up on her competence to achieve emotional wholeness. In fact, once Marlene has begun to face her own feelings, the show changes from being told through Yuji's perspective to being told from Marlene's - not exactly the kind of narrative strategy you'll find very often in anime or elsewhere.

I also approve of the show's tendency to go into the nasty places (children dying, innocents dying, terrible changes in Yuji etc.) its world suggests without doing it just to be gritty and edgy. Everything unpleasant is a natural consequence of the show's backstory. The same goes for the show's at times melodramatic tone - it's simply appropriate for business like the end of humanity or desperate teenage love.

The only other negative I can find is the very variable quality of the animation. I wouldn't at all be surprised to hear that the show went over budget or over time in its final third, when episodes (especially the second to last one) begin to use the good old technique of using static drawings where they really don't belong.

Still, a bit of shoddiness in the later stages of animation are a price I'm willing to pay for a show that uses its clichés without becoming one.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,sf,mecha,katsumi hasegawa,hiroshi abe,reviews

The Great Horror Family (2004)

Original title: Kaiki Daikazoku

The rather eccentric Imawano family movies into a new suburban home. While the family's dad, being an enthusiast of the paranormal, is rather excited about the fact that something's supposed to be not quite right with the new house, the rest of his family is a bit blasé about it all. And no wonder: though Dad has no talent at actually seeing the things he's so excited about under any circumstances, the rest of the family has inherited the psychic abilities of a long line of female priests and mediums.

While the family is still moving in, Grandpa (Shunji Fujimura) has some frightening experience with the central hub for all of the house's mystery, The Room That Will Not Open, and dies. Obviously, being dead and all, he's now not the best candidate for the family's spiritual protection anymore, so Gramps's ghost moves into the Room and charges his hapless grandson Kiyoshi (Issei Takahashi) with the job. The dead old man is convinced that something important and terrible will happen soon.

In fact, Kiyoshi has his hands full with a series of ghostly appearances, aliens, yokai and other weird occurrences that happen in and around the house in a matter of minutes. Cursed gothic lolitas, men in black, whacky priests and a female ghost (Kyoko Toyama) with a crush on the young man will also make an appearance. Kiyoshi's rather inconcrete mission isn't made any easier by the utter weirdness that is the natural state of the rest of the family (Tomiko Ishii, Shigeru Muroi, Asuka Shibuya). And those are just the little daily troubles the young man will have to survive before he has to cope with the true nature of what is hidden inside The Room That Will Not Open.

The 13-episode TV show The Great Horror Family is what happens when a bunch of directors and writers - among them Takashi Shimizu and Yudai Yamaguchi - with love for and experience in all things horrific decide (well, or are hired) to make a horror comedy.

The early episodes concern mostly relatively traditional Japanese ghosties and ghoulies who all go about their usual business until their problems are solved through practical absurdity. The first episode, for example, sees the beleaguered Kiyoshi turn into a nightly ghost psychiatrist babbling away with the sort of kitchen psychology that could only convince a ghost of anything and inadvertently winning a fan for life (death?) in a female ghost named Asami. Through this, the audience learns early on that ghost are just people, too, only very dead and rather single-minded ones.

The further the show goes along, the more its emphasis wanders from funny interpretations of the more traditional ghosts to the sort of total absurdity and weirdness one expects of Japanese comedy. The show turns to situations that would be outright frightening or disturbing if they weren't played with a wink followed by a deadpan look.

I already liked the beginning of the show quite a bit (it's funny, you know), but the more absurd episodes tend to be even more entertaining. Honestly, what's not to like about a Yakuza movie parody in which Kiyoshi runs away from home and starts to work for a dead Yakuza bartender called Memento Mori, who offers living guests the opportunity to spend time with some charming living corpses, until the man's business is destroyed by zombie hit men? Or the episode in which a ghostly builder decides to renovate the family's home, and the Imawanos find themselves trapped in the bizarre, non-Euclidean labyrinth it turns into? The comedy format acts as a way for the makers of the show to be as playful as possible, and watching these guys being playful is a lot like listening to a group of very good improvising musician on a good evening.

While the show's visuals are solid, yet very TV-looking and therefore are bit bland at times, the excellent cast is what carries the show besides the humour. Everyone's not just cast exceedingly well, but game for everything, willing and able to switch from an ironic emulation of utter dramatic earnestness to bizarre grimacing at a moment's notice.

Even though not every episode's plot is something to write home about, the wild, random asides so typical of what I've learned to identify as Japanese humour make every single one of them worth watching. In this context, I'm even willing to approve of the slight sappiness that comes with the J-Drama territory.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,comedy,horror,reviews,takashi shimizu,yudai yamaguchi,asuka shibuya,issei takahashi,kyoko toyama

Gunslinger Girl (2003-2004)

A secret arm of the Italian government has invented an especially nefarious tool in their fight against a loose grouping of left-wing terror organizations working in the country: cybernetically augmented and brainwashed assassins. For practical reasons (and because of the utter lack in ethics that comes with a political position), the government agency - going by the name of the "Social Welfare Agency" - only uses small, orphaned girls who wouldn't survive without its very special medical intervention.

These girls are then paired up with adult males working as their handlers, called "Fratellos", whom they are conditioned to love and obey. Surprisingly enough, most of the handlers grow quite attached to the girls, and are consequently guilt-ridden and depressed.

Gunslinger Girl is a thirteen-part Japanese anime TV show. There does exist a second season/show (the differences between these two things tend to be less clear in Japan than here), Gunslinger Girl: Il Teatrino, that is followed by several OVAs, but that has been created by completely different companies and people, and so doesn't really belong in this post.

If you want to, there's more than enough material in Gunslinger Girl to read it as a show speaking metaphorically about paedophilia, but I don't think that's the direction the show or the manga by Aida Yu it is based on are consciously out to explore. Sexuality isn't really on the agenda here except in a few bitter asides. in fact, the show thankfully goes out of its way to avoid even the tiniest bit of sleaze (it does the same with other science fictional elements beside the cyborgs, by the way; as a lot of the best SF outside of space opera does, the show keeps to one basic new thing/idea and just follows its implications).

Rather, Gunslinger Girl is interested in less specific questions about what it means to be human, guilt, and the nature of affection and love. Mostly, the show realizes these exploration through slow, somewhat ponderous character-driven episodes that concentrate on of the girls and her handler at a time. Most of the episodes aren't much interested in turning directly towards the political conspiracy at the show's centre, or the acts of violence themselves, which tend to be short and fast, and not necessarily built to excite. The show is this still is a spy series in which the assassins not only kill terrorists, but also politicians and cops who act perfectly in their democratic rights, it's just not concentrating on analysing anyone's ideologies or the moral horrors of covert work. These spy thriller elements do appear, but for most of the time they are side-lined as much as possible. Moral questions are explored through the effects actions have on characters instead of directly. These elements are there to enable the character work happening all around them.

This character work truly is character work too - the show usually avoids casting its characters into the typical anime types, and instead gives its sad, hurt and terribly twisted (in a subtle way) girls and its sad, guilt-ridden and sometimes cruel men room to breathe.

Although part of the basic tone of the show is that of melodrama, Gunslinger Girl likes its ambiguity more than its scenes of crying, and sets much more trust into its audience's ability to fill in blanks and interpret the emotional (and often moral) implications of what is going on for themselves than is to be expected. This makes it the type of show that needs viewers willing to work a little, paying us off with an emotional mix of melancholy and disquietude, and moments of beauty that would be kitschy if they weren't standing in contrast to the show's more disturbing moments.

What Gunslinger Girl doesn't deliver is much of a plot. Sure, in about half of the episodes (sometimes terrible) things are happening to the characters, yet the emphasis is never on the outside action, instead always on the things the outside action causes inside the characters.

Of course, the world is full of TV shows and movies always concentrating on the action and the mega plot instead of the characterization, so a show building on other aspects with as much subtlety and intensity as Gunslinger Girl does provides a needed balance, especially when it packs as much of an emotional punch as this one does. And I don't even like children.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,anime,spies,melodrama,morio asaka,sf,reviews

On WTF: Garo (2005-2006)

It looks like I just can't escape Keita Amemiya's work at the moment, so why not entertain the rest of the Internet with a piece about his "mature" tokusatsu show Garo, especially when the show turns out to be pretty great?

If you want to read more about it, my write-up on WTF-Film will enlighten you.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: japanese tv,ryosei konishi,keita amemiya,mika hijii,tokusatsu,reviews,horror,other places

In short: Hideo Nakata's Curse, Death & Spirit (1992)

Three short films made when the later Ring director Hideo Nakata was still slaving away for Japanese TV, cobbled together to form a short anthology movie.

The first story, A Cursed Doll, concerns the misadventures the aspiring actress Satomi has when she discovers a traditional Japanese doll hidden away in a cupboard of her parents' home. Sudden doll appearances and a near nervous breakdown follow, until the doll's secret is revealed.

In the second story, Waterfall of the Dead Spirit, a recently widowed mother and her son go on a camping trip with her friend and her friend's children. They are confronted with a female ghost who has lost her child and has no qualms in trying to grab random children that pass by to fill the empty space by her side.

In the third (and best) story, An Inn Where A Ghost Lives, two girls and one of the girls' younger sister go on a short vacation in an inn, only to meet a rather sad ghost there whose life somwhat mirrors the way the younger sister feels.

How much the interested viewer will like the three shorts will probably depend on her or his tolerance for simple, not really subtle ghost stories, overwrought acting and the dubiously cheap look of early 90s Japanese TV shows.

If you're a Nakata fan like me, you will still find moments of interest. Even this early in his career and in such a weird place the main themes of Nakata's work as well as his interest in the people the horror happens to start to emerge; from time to time - mostly when the execrable special effects or the actors don't interfere - there are even moments of true creepiness. Stylistically, there is a palpable influence by the films of Nobuo Nakagawa, which is probably a good influence to accept when you are making a ghost story on next to know money like Nakagawa did for most of his career (his studio killing masterpiece Jigoku excepted).

The first and third episode are by the way written by Hiroshi Takahashi, who would go on to write the Ring films for Nakata (and utterly weird stuff like Crazy Lips for other people). It's also nice to know that Takahasi isn't responsible for the terribly saccarine ending of the middle story.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,in short,hideo nakata,horror

Hellsing (2001-2002)

Great Britain, through the God-given wisdom of its unsurpassable queen, has its own way of dealing with the typical troubles that plague every modern state in the form of vampires and other monsters. A secret, para-military religious order, the Hellsing Organization, has been protecting the Glorious British Empire (can I get an "Amen!" here?) for centuries.

The current leader of the organization, Sir Integra Wingates Hellsing (and yes, "Sir" Hellsing is a woman - thanks, delightfully stupid subtitle writer) has quite a bit of trouble with her job. When she's not banging heads with the (mostly evil) vampire hunting arm of the Vatican, the Iscariot Organization, she has to cope with the new-born trouble of a very modern type of vampire created by human hands through the implantation of some sort of living microchips. This type of vampire is rather less subtle and a lot more uncontrollable and worldly ambitious than the classical kind, so there's a lot of rather unpleasant work to do for her and her men.

Fortunately, the Hellsing Organization not only has a copious amount of red shirt footsoldiers, but also employs its own pet vampire. Known only as Alucard (hey, it's better than Dr. Ackula), the insanely powerful creature has his own reasons to serve Hellsing through the 13 episode run of the show, whatever they may be.

Right in the first episode he makes a young, dying police woman with the arch British name of Seras Victoria his vampire servant, probably to have someone carry even larger guns than he himself uses, wear short skirts and be our viewpoint character through most of the mindless carnage that follows.

Ah, Hellsing. A nearly classic example of the beauties of the trashy side of anime. The show might not be "good" in the way most people like to use the word, but it has at least two things going for it. Firstly a very neat visual style, wildly mixing Gothic imagery with an insane tourist's point of view of England and secondly its wonderfully skewed perspective on British culture. Whatever it can get wrong about the UK (I don't think anyone making this show knows that England and the UK are different entities) it does get as wrong as humanly possible. The viewer should be prepared for some entertainingly outrageous interpretations of British patriotism, the Church of England, the position of the Queen and honestly everything the show could possibly get wrong. Special bonus points go out to the Evil Vatican (for some reason not shown molesting children - a missed opportunity) and the fusion of the Big Evil Black Man stereotype with the Evil Albino stereotype into one offensive package. The show is full of things like this that would annoy and offend endlessly, if one could bother to take anything here seriously.

Hellsing's plot is mostly an excuse to throw as much silly-cool and stupid into the viewers' faces as possible, sometimes to great effect, just faltering from time to time when the show tries to "say something" or (please no) tries its hand at "characterization". Luckily, the latter does not happen too often.

I should warn everyone who likes his questions answered, though. The final episode of the show takes great pleasure in not answering a single question that might have come up during the show, even the identity of a traitor in the show's interpretation of the British Government isn't explained, instead we're treated to a sudden pop-up text that informs us, that yes, indeed, there was one and now he's dead.

This fits the tone of the rest of the show perfectly - I dare anyone without knowledge of the manga or the OVA to explain the logic of the show's plot to me (or the motivations of its characters).

I can't say I care much, though. I came for bizarro England, blood, bodily transformations and big guns, and by God, these things the show delivers. Amen!

Technorati-Tags: japanese tv,anime,horror,action