Akuyaku Reijou wa Ringoku no Outaishi ni Dekiai Sareru, or The Villainess Is Being Doted on by the Crown Prince of the Neighbouring Country, is but a conglomeration of common cliched devices popularized by a subgenre of otome that has been skyrocketing in popularity and appeal, otome isekai. Both badly written and one of the most profoundly exhilarating works I’ve ever read in the crown jewel of the fantasy genre, ‘Isekai’. The manga itself is an exercise on the possible apotheosis of the combination of the most meagre, generic and non-proprietary cliches and tropes repeatedly cycled in the realm of Otome Isekai, it’s of course,
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shamelessly repetitive yet wonderfully exciting at the same time. Unintentionally clumsy in its transition of feelings from one scene to another, where emotions are portrayed in an almost robotic, mechanical manoeuvring from one sequence to another, the manga itself is destitute of any sophistication in providing any exalting originalities. Our main character, Tiararose, spends most of her time contemplating her experience in her past life, struggles with remembering and adhering to the rules of the game she held firm to, weeping quiet tears that trickled down her pale face when confronted with numerous forced contrivances, she quiver under the possibility of her love being stolen away from her, or dramatically pictures alternatives in a future where her favourite Prince Aquasteed doesn’t love her anymore. This manga is a land filled with barren caldera, where you could stand at a high vantage point from the beginning, overlooking the canyon whose precursor was that of a dried sea from a promontory and you could guess easily the centre conflicts of the show and discern yourself how much it deviates from your speculations and conjectures. It doesn’t.
However, let’s backtrack a little. This manga is a badly written piece and yet one of the most profoundly exhilarating works I’ve ever read in the subgenre of fantasy, Isekai. In spite of the scathing criticisms I mercilessly plunge into immediately at the head start, this manga managed to provide a great deal of exaltation, it’s not an easy feat to inculcate such an impression in the audience without some perceivable quality that may, or may not have been hidden under the layers of rust. Some might argue it’s plain guilty pleasure and it’s perfectly fine to have that, but I am not here to exploit easy attempts to build an easy argument by casually dismissing the fun I’ve had as ‘guilty pleasure’. I want to be able to rationalize this sense of feeling that roused from the back of my mind naturally as I read page after page of romantic scenes between Prince Aquasteed and Tiararose. First, it’s imperative for us to carefully dissect the plot. It’s rather simple, no need for the difference between a perspective at first blush or a detailed introspection, one could immediately identify the plot easily without heeding excessively: girl gets reincarnated in a game she played – met and discovered that she has been betrayed by his fiance – with a pure stroke of luck and coincidence a prince asked for her hand - condemnation is prevented – having understood the game mechanics gave her certain advantages – winning over the rival – finally travel with the prince and gets married – more challenges. Albeit a bit overused, these are the spur of incidents that could tug at the hearts of most people, reaching climaxes that arouse a sense of great satisfaction within the readers, while the normal, daily lives of Tiararose and her pining for beloved Prince Aqua (similarly, vice versa) does a serviceable job for the audience to latch onto both of these characters well.
Such literary devices aren’t uncommon at all, rather, the pulpy serials of fantasy and science fiction in pulpy magazines of the early 50s to 70s are one of the successful practitioners of this curve of narrative. Repetition, but not to a very discernible degree where it becomes painfully distracting (but still definitely noticeable). Repeatingly exercising and putting into motion the preconceived ideas scraped from similar works of fiction, emphasizing on creating a link between the story and a familiar audience, playing around likewise emotional approaches: character betrayal, heightening of events through a sudden turn by a stroke of luck (a primal precursor would be The Count of Monte Cristo), after a bestowal of omnipotence through instant recognition of past events and what could happen, etc. That is precisely why the works of otome isekai, while not innovative in the literary sense, and neither did it manage to form any pioneering sequences of events that could revolutionize the genre, is able to thrill the audience. By a well-play of existing tropes and by carefully evaluating the cliches and how it brings about the change of events, even the most astute and intellectually critical mind would have to agree that he/she/they are drawn deeply into this vortex of exultation and frenziness. And thus drawn into this extending canvas is the quirky mix of the dull and painful kitsch as well as the delightful and alluring and unparalleled excitement. With a touch of the excess, one is opened to a whole new world of excitement that could prove powerful to even a harsh critic since it fulfills the contradictory yearnings of the mind for pure, unbridled entertainment.
That’s still probably not enough to justify the sort of gaiety and joy I received from reading this manga, in spite of being aware of its glaring shortcomings. I’ve pointed out a few possible and probable points that interlink the sources of this exultation and the effects it was able to achieve through the faulty yet perceivably mighty choice of repetition while not sacrificing the fun the readers experience from the pages of this manga. But I believe it’s insufficient to appropriately justify how the framework of the aforementioned could bring about such impressive results despite being suffused with occasional bad writing choices as ‘padding’ (or ‘filler’, for a more familiar term). Thus I believe it’s significant for us to study the interlinks that connects the reasonings and the effects. The reasonings are there (but not elaborately described yet), the effects of how such a structural repetition could bring is there, but the established connection between these two points is perhaps one of the most important – if not the greatest influence that holds over this series. It’s the power of how these Otome Isekai authors are able to master the bridge – between this cause and effect that their works could become this contagious and affecting, insomuch that it supersedes the necessities of having a strong plotting ability to narrate the central story, rendering it second fiddle to the act of bridging between two elements of the story in this context.
So let’s backtrack a few paragraphs once again. This manga is badly written from a critical perspective, but is also one of the most exciting fantasy manga ever written (for me). The overall structural integrity of the manga is questionable due to the large amounts of padding which inevitably distils certain powerful scenes down to really cheap melodrama. While writing the review, I tried my best to rearrange and edit a number of scenes in the manga in my headspace, restructuring it to give it a tighter pace, thinning it down so all the bad padding and redundant self-reflections of our protagonist could be removed, essentially slimming down the unnecessary contents so we could gladly enjoy the distilled essence of the manga – and I eventually gave up – even with the attempt to remove the amount of repetition I abhor in the manga (not removing all repetitive scenes, mind you, to achieve some level of theatrical effects), I found it that my own distorted product seems to be apprising me of the impossibility of such a task – even if we are bored by the monotonous repetition of unnecessary kitschiness woven into the narrative, the unravelling of an extending web of highly similar narrative lines – the princes, the princesses, the preceding betrayal and the subsequent darling appearing out of nowhere, the flashy, garish scenes of our protagonists sharing teas and cakes, the love rivals, the dances, libraries, kitchens, sweets and finally the wedding. Surely no one would dispute for the sake of artistic sublimity, one could easily remove a number of redundancies that suffuses the manga. Nevertheless, our mind who seeked entertainment argued that the exact contrary is true.
Would we be able to enjoy as much – as we did previously, the story, whenever Prince Aquasteed shares an intimate moment with Tiararose if not for the organic spasmodic delay through Tiararose’s repetitive scenes of self-doubt and gradual uncovering of the next love rival? (we giggle, or a chill goes down our spine when the latter is played out). It turns out that the relentless padding with endless sequences of Tiararose’s self-doubt, albeit detrimental to the artistic merits of the story by including limitless redundancies and empty narrative calories, nonetheless it has its own structural value, a common virtue that similarly runs in the veins of these otome isekai manga, the structural value of incessant padding. If it’s condensed or wiped out, the exasperation and increasing frustration would not be built up naturally through the mighty use of this shoddy (yet a bit effective) trick of a kitschy artifice, therefore when the prolonged suffering and agony of the audience is expelled out of the mind through an intimate moment ensues the painful repetition, the happiness that followed is heightened by the preceding agonies, and thus this neurotic delay (from the story) pushes our minds from troughs to crests. Ultimately we felt that the duration we’ve endured is earned, as the immediate expulsion of weariness unintentionally dispelled the manga of its suspicion of weaponizing dull, tedious filler to fill up the empty narrative lines. While such a practice is aesthetically repugnant, but speaking from a structural standpoint, it does contribute to the heaping of emotions which sooner or later, results in an avalanche of emotional relief when expelled. It thickens the structure of the plot with lignified walls, whilst not pretty to look at and definitely not polished well, it manages its principal function to entertain rather well.
While there exists merits in the story, one should not merely discuss the process to rationalize the guilty pleasures and excavate the greatness within the mediocrity, it’s of equal importance that we should be able to proffer the glaring issues speckled throughout the narrative. Whilst a lot of the plot points and elements contribute an especial temptation to us readers, the number of problems that followed cannot be dismissed easily. If a critic, or a more intellectually demanding reader is completely underwhelmed by stories that go under the label of ‘Isekai’, they are expected to leave this specific genre to its ghettos and its ghettoised readers. The modern pieces of fiction that run under the labels of isekai, blessed by its large amounts of readership and viewership are treated with contempt and met with whiteeyed dismissals by shrewd critics and exigent readers as something of a lesser genre. To better circumscribe with the literary tradition of undergoing serious transformations (to the form, style and movements) by gradual metamorphosis as time passes, literary works and art are fully expected to follow the flow of biological evolution. Biological evolution, as in the stages of adaptation, degeneration, decay, elimination, retrogression, succession and inevitable developmental stagnation.
Retrogression and developmental stagnation. It’s typical in the process of natural selection, whether its nature, or in our art, however it’s even more common and evident in decidedly enclosed literary genres, by enclosing itself in compact, unventilated and dense comparts, it’s of course, undeniable and also inevitable, that inbreeding occurs recurrently in order to better suit the need for reproduction. Hence, in the case of Isekai, these manga and light novels and anime, riddled with the selfsame literary devices and limited tools of writing, would unavoidably resort to having incestuous relations with works of similar veins of blood, consummating with each other to further produce works that are violated, vitiated and ventriloquized by recurring techniques, plot, characters and themes. The more such actions are practised, the more virile our producers are to endlessly recycle maddeningly repetitive plots and banal themes (then treat it as ‘important aesthetics’ for very lazy reasons) and slap on it a different title, the more enclaved the genre is. The ghettos increase in size, their territories enlarge day by day, they might forget they’re enclaves hopelessly shut off from entire worlds and thrive in it, but even in their most lucid dreams would they have to realise that they’re still pathetically trapped under the same land and enclosed by the same walls.
So, it is rather easy for us to criticize the framework of the story. It’s an entertaining but unsuccessful work. There exists the presence of an incongruent fusion between past titles and undeniable influences from other works in the similar genre throughout the story. The writer, albeit the incompetent and overly thickened framework had provided a great deal of exaltation, is also simultaneously highly unsatisfying for more deeper realms of interpretation. It’s a patchwork of rosely tinged melodrama, some degree of character introspection and endless rinsing of sweet moments. These elements, while giving us a load of fun and exultation, have a very imperfect composition, its unbalanced and utterly incongruous arrangement of sequences considerably weakens the entire structure of the novel once we inspect it with a more critical lens. An example comes directly into my head. The unimaginably cheap melodramatic inclusion of Tiararose’s meeting with the Fairy King of the Forest after she indirectly caused the triggering of a particular event that might in turn, trigger another event in accordance to the plot of the otome game (referred to as a definite route in the game), where the supposed ‘heroine’ love rival would fall in love with Prince Aquasteed and vice versa. Desperate and heartbroken, she fled into the castle and is swooped away by the Fairy King and the sequence is left once again, unhinged and Prince Aquasteed abandons the heroine Lady Aishira there to search for his beloved.
The sudden inclusion of the Fairy King to resolve the problem she indirectly caused – is a very inadequate and milquetoast scene , not only does it weaken the powerful hints (which are repeatedly emphasized before, to remind people) that are stressed numerously for chapters, it’s also a complete waste of opportunity to develop fruitful solutions that could inspire more nuanced developments between our protagonists. The previous chapters, while suffering under the influences of egregiously bad panelling (let’s admit it), do a serviceable work to imply the existence of a shadow [mentally] that stands firmly footed to its silhouette that looms large over the mind of Tiararose. In spite of that, it was resolved easily as there is no definite resolvement at all, the threat was glossed over and triumphed over by the silly drama incurred by the Fairy King who snatched Tiararose away for the purposes of giving her a ‘good sleep’, the conflict, or the interesting setup is penultimately vaporized by such a juvenile approach to handling a rather satisfying buildup and ultimately treated with a forced battle between Prince Aquasteed and Fairy King ‘Keith’ for Tiararose. The intense, heightened theatrical effects that are inserted in the previous chapters, ergo, are ignored deliberately and a substitute for the supposed resolvement is in no way compelling enough – or at least, convincing enough to serve as a solution to the proposed troubles that awaits Tiararose. The writer is unable to find a way to impose this interesting motif with an equally rewarding resolution, it’s a thinly disguised semblance of a motion to serve as a suitable resolvement. In conclusion, the number of exciting scenes in the manga, while undeniably exhilarating, is also an acne on the face. The ambition for the setup is bogged down by the incapability to resolve, both the preparation given and the actual workmanship involved is highly incongruent, both of them are doomed to be artistically insufficient, and it’s therefore an artistic failure.
The example above thus can be adduced easily to the lengthy paragraph I elaborated above. The suspicion of inbreeding between works of otome isekai is clearer than ever. A similar story with a similar setup can be discovered practically everywhere: [Ouji no honmei wa akuyaku reijou is awfully similar in everything]. We with our two eyes could clearly perceive the prosperity of isekai titles and the incontrovertible proof to its extensive influence needs not to be explained. But what is also equally [easily] discernible is the fact that despite the sole fact that these titles are still prevalent as ever, these internal intense dynamics of ghettos named ‘Isekai’ are all exercises in repetition that ultimately lead nowhere. These writers could copy each other, setting up a similar framework that is highly efficient, but most of them ultimately crumbles under their own weight since they could only figure out how to imitate precisely, but they couldn’t find their own voice to provide a sensible resolution, as in the case above. The nutrients they assimilate are themselves, they assimilate each other, (mark the similarities between Ouji no honmei wa akuyaku reijou and Akuyaku, at the least), it does not generate new patterns of appreciable quality but resorts to join the old ones that are increasingly frustrating to rapidly growing readers. In such cases, with the demand to pander certain audiences who demand more of these easily digestible but annoyingly repetitive works, all of us are unavoidably trapped in a circular motion: We are trapped in this perpetual moving machine, while enjoying the stories in the flow we are also critical of it, and in the long run we’ll probably exhaust ourselves and our minds with the limitless regurgitation of similar frameworks and not full fledged stories, it’s almost as if we as readers are products of thralldom, but voluntarily.
We now exist in the largest domain of herd creativity, while I could rationalize my overall liking for the series, I could not deny that I found it occasionally frustrating for how similar it is to other series, and how desperately I wanted it to become independent of those titles and plumb into greater depths so that it could reach the plateau of creative sublimity.
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Apr 12, 2022 Mixed Feelings Preliminary
(29/? chp)
Akuyaku Reijou wa Ringoku no Outaishi ni Dekiai Sareru, or The Villainess Is Being Doted on by the Crown Prince of the Neighbouring Country, is but a conglomeration of common cliched devices popularized by a subgenre of otome that has been skyrocketing in popularity and appeal, otome isekai. Both badly written and one of the most profoundly exhilarating works I’ve ever read in the crown jewel of the fantasy genre, ‘Isekai’. The manga itself is an exercise on the possible apotheosis of the combination of the most meagre, generic and non-proprietary cliches and tropes repeatedly cycled in the realm of Otome Isekai, it’s of course,
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Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Dec 22, 2021
Kimetsu no Yaiba: Yuukaku-hen
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings Preliminary
(3/11 eps)
Kimetsu no Yaiba is bound to be one of the most discussed shows of the season, perhaps the year, crossing to the year 2022 as well. Of glowing prominence within the anime community, this one’s possibly one of the strongest, aside from Mushoku Tensei Season 1 Cour 2, which had finished airing by the time this review of mine was released onto the platform. I find Kimetsu No Yaiba to be a strange phenomenon, bizarre yet one that is worth scrutinising, my position with Kimetsu no Yaiba is also a difficult one it seemed, in accordance to my preference of viewing and observing anime and
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television series– biassing more towards shows with an austere strength, unflinching, yet at the same time pertains a certain virtue of its own - whether is it its comedic, tragic or a quirky mix of the former two, a show that could either walk out seeking purchase on its own in the current era filled with a great amount of shows due to its stark contrast with others for its superb originality; or a show that takes inspiration from its precursors, but with a clever twist or even intentioned misreadings of their predecessors they managed to produce something that prods at us, demanding attention that warrants great payoffs for those who do sit down and scrutinise it; or simply a great work of enduring art and profound ingenuity that casually harrumphs and critics and audiences alike would flock over it and shower it with endless praises, forming a timeless classic. From this point of view speaking, Kimetsu no Yaiba might not be a truly great series - rather a mediocre drab, with a plenitude of memorable sequences tangled within the mess of a confluence of different linear storylines and the usual, predictable anime tropes that are pervasive within this show. Those who are unwilling to listen to my review on the show may be influenced by the fact that my profile picture wears a jacket of Tanjiro’s picture, stamped on it for quite a long time for now, but rest assured I am in no way a fanatic that would swoop in to defend the series from its needed criticism, neither did I curvette whenever there’s sequences of Tanjiro swirling and running across streets do kill demons. Artists with no sense of self-hatred should not be involved in art, my position with reviewing and working a critique are the same - a reviewer who can’t bear the need to heap superlatives onto the show without possessing a method of dealing with the principal strengths and weaknesses of the show - even deliberately diminishing the other or berating those who do so - is nothing more than a schmaltzy fanatic, a bigot who is drunk with their own self-indulgent lucid dreams that babbles endlessly without any merit of its own.
The perfect allegory for Kimetsu No Yaiba’s current predicament would be a group of elephants with an abnormally large head - its head rammed full of scenes that could pique our excitement, images with cinematic verve and full of vibrancy as well as carefully constructed flashbacks rammed with innuendo, designed to heap up emotional responses to evoke sentimentality in the audience’s minds; while the spindly legs below are straining, trembling, wobbling and gyrating out of immense pain, doing their best to support whatever weight was carried on the back of the animal, and the spindly legs are the characters of Kimetsu No Yaiba. Just as Inosuke and Zenitsu had no ear for Tengen, I had no eye and ear for Kimetsu no Yaiba’s characters. Ephemeral, acrid and dreadful are the descriptions I would resort to use if I were expected to describe the characters within. Kimetsu No Yaiba is primarily driven by plot occasions, heavily in fact, with the Entertainment District Arc starting with Tengen disrupting a day several months after Rengoku’s death to pick up members in order to fight a demon hidden in the entertainment districts. If Tengen makes no attempt to assail the starting points of the show, it would’ve been stagnant as a puddle of water in a drain, other than Tanjiro, none of the characters seem to have an agenda of its own, a central drive, a core for their actions and how it creates a reaction. Other than Tanjiro’s valiant attempt to create any sort of conflict by going to Senjuro and Rengoku’s house to send Rengoku’s last words to Senjurou and deliver condolences, nobody else ever bothers. It reflects the grave undertones of the story that there is so subtle undertone. That, in my opinion, was one of the most rampant, unrestrained problems within Kimetsu no Yaiba. I disparage the characters for a good reason. Tanjiro, to me seems to be more than just a wasted opportunity, a capable character mingled up in ashes that astonishingly dull his chances of ever attaining more than what he had, as his character can’t blow sand against the wind due to the larger narrative requirements abstaining from ever receiving a chance for more development, and is instead forced to participate in big, vivid blots of comedic sequences mottled everywhere with painfully unfunny humour and dreadful jokes with the lesser Inosuke and Zenitsu. Comedy is forsooth subjective, by all means, but any good writer, or a vastly adequate storyteller would tell you rapid and immediate tonal shifts for comedic skits is an irrational prompt, and an excessive amount of comedy inculcated into every minute is also equally annoying, if not a persistent pranging on the pacing on the show. If those comedic sequences wouldn’t resonate with the audience, then some of these story beats where Zenitsu getting infuriated by the fact Tengen has three wives, or Tengen frustrated by Zenitsu and Inosuke running around without listening to him would be offensively banal. I’m on that side, personally speaking, and it’s been nothing short of a dreadful bore, waiting for the thawing moment where they could discuss something of matter to character, the overarching plot, or even just an exchange of opinions on carrying the mission. The characters themselves are also pantomimed, absurdly exaggerated in every course of action possible. Even within a same scene where Zenitsu is absolutely angered by Tengen’s status of being in a polygamy relationship, his face is exaggeratedly twisted, gesticulating relentlessly and his voice is portrayed as some sort of belching. While Inosuke is still reusing the same jokes and punchlines stemmed from his buttress personality of being an uncultured swine due to being actually raised by a pig, nothing about him has any great effect on the story, as of now. But I can still tolerate Inosuke, given there’s a scene portraying him trying his best to search for the demon lurking in the building, but ultimately fail to do so, albeit a bit weak to justify this as a progressive stance for his character, we could still see his perseverance in his job, and his irritation and exasperation when he was unable to accomplish it. Tanjiro, in the 3-4 episodes we’re given seemed to be robbed of all spotlight, granted he’s given far more chances at screen time in the first season, but he’s still weirdly desiccated from character work, such an exclusion is indeed a sacrilege in my eyes, but I’ll have an update on it, if they could enrich his character more within the next few episodes. Tengen is possibly the least developed here, he’s not as thematically rich as Rengoku, and ripped off any attempts at character ever since his introduction, being introduced as perfect, handsome, strong and loved: It’s pallid, if such superficial and surface traits should be taken as characterization. Such an undercooked team is quite a self-immolation, as it burns the possibility for a character-driven plot line, but is one that Kimetsu No Yaiba is actively avoiding, so I’ll not give too much panning on it. I have a generally negative viewpoint towards Kimetsu No Yaiba’s characters at the larger picture. They are placards of simplicity, the characters are usually capable of experiencing a single feeling at a time, they are mere self-advertisements: ‘I’m angry!’, ‘I’m furious!’, ‘I’m so happy!’, ‘I’m so excited!’, ‘I’m sad……’, ‘Why?’ (insert a melancholic tone). According to the sources of numerous critics, no matter Internet or professional anime critics or essayist, seemed to me to be elated by Kimetsu No Yaiba’s attempt at characterization, but most characters here that shines, or those given more luminescence, are instead given a rough, raw caricature that gives them the basic traits, ‘The Empathetic Big Head Hammer’, ‘The Yellow Thing That Screams and Belches’, ‘The Half-Naked Pig that Yells and Vaunts’ or ‘The Cute Little Sister that Muffles in A Closet’. They race through plots that are seriously tight and rushed without slowing down for characterization, their adventures are thus hammered into flat metal that illuminates in a cold light that radiates no warmth of characterization that can reach our emotions better instead of selling sentimentality. Goutoge seems to me, is chosen by Japan’s manga industry to become a capable writer that explores relationships, whether it’s a romance between teenagers, or is it a brotherly relationship between a set of friends or a drama driven by family conflict, but she ironically took the wrong turn and chose to write about an adventure story, a shonen-esque narrative about killing demons which should’ve been littered with mind-boggling yet hot-blooded scenes that excites the target audience for shonen magazines. Kimetsu no Yaiba, for me strictly speaking, resembles more of a straggling story that tries multiple times to emphasise on character, juxtaposed with its contemporaries, Boku No Hero Academia, Dr. Stone, etc. Going so far as even giving passing antagonists that matter nothing some semblance of backstory, though each one is unique on its own but often reaches about the same conclusion. The backstory that begets the transformation of humans into demons are either a broken dream or promise, or being abandoned by someone, or being isolated, prejudiced and distanced. These sorts of backstories work at the first few scenes, because a villain with a reason to become what he is right now is definitely far more interesting than one with a yammering idiot with no distinct or distinguishable traits. The problem with it is that it happens often, too often, that it rids the supposed ‘backstory’ of each demon of clarity and discernible motives veiled behind his irrational, violent tendencies. What separates those demons as former individuals? Other than Rui in the first season, the rest had been painfully underwhelming. Good thing Daki’s backstory carries a stronger tang of emotional value contrasted with the rest, that I’d not discuss first, as it’s going to come in the next few episodes, and I’ll have a clearer verdict by then. So, I’ll currently reserve a score of 5 for the second season. If it improves, I’ll consider adding 1, if it weakens, I’ll deduct by 1 or 2. I’ll slowly update more of my thoughts on the aesthetic quality of the show, the soundtracks, the opening and ending sequences and possibly a future update on the narrative and characterization.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 2, 2021
Ryuu to Sobakasu no Hime
(Anime)
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Not Recommended Spoiler
Mamoru Hosoda. This director should be considered one of the major powerhouses in the realm of animated films in Japan, it’s the same director that has been able to elicit worlds of thoughts from the viewers using its narrative and characters. The same can be applied to me as well. I consider myself a fan of his works, (used to consider myself anyway), but I wasn’t aware of the film Belle directed and written by Mamoru Hosoda before the news came out stating that Hosoda himself won a 14-minute standing ovation in the Cannes Film Festival for his new film, which caught my eye and
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prompted me to check out what his new film is, which turned out to be the aforementioned film, Belle, which I haven’t been able to watch until a few days ago. It’s a 2 hour film, not particularly noteworthy of its length but it’s definitely lengthy enough for some memorable sequences to be sprinkled throughout the film which I’ll be discussing here.
[Spoiler alert for a number of scenes, or else it's impossible to write about a few major problems I find within the film.] Make no mistake, I really thought more deeply about this film (than I usually would for an anime film) for a while before writing this review, it’s really about something, but something also rings hollow throughout the film for me personally, but the script itself was convoluted to the point where it’s aiming to incorporate themes that are promising but way too ambitious -- considering the length of the film, is not enough, it’s far from enough. The film starts with a long shot which gradually gets larger as the camera swoops down to give us a clear shot of the internal environment of the platform of ‘U’, the opening shots are probably my favourite sequence of this film, it brings about the greatest strength of the film, which is of course, the aesthetical quality and how it slowly constructs an elegant virtual world imbued with exuberance after being inhabited by tens of millions of users from all over the world. This is a clear cut example of showing, instead of using more of the time for the narrator to further explain how the virtual world had created differences for the world, it used the few shots to convey such a simple idea -- that the virtual world was used and enjoyed by people from across the globe, regardless of race and gender, either as a platform for either escapism or even entertainment, it’s honestly remarkable to utilise its authentic aesthetic value to construct that sense of worldview. And that’s where the plot begins to unravel, a girl named Suzu, after the death of her mother, was affected greatly by this accident, in which her mother chose to save another girl and drowned herself, she was still considerably traumatised by it and haven’t really walked out of it even after several years and it had basically rendered herself unable to sing anymore. The first few minutes were able to impart these pieces and bits of information to me, but the scenes after the sweeping shots of the virtual world had me confused for a little while. If I were to describe this feeling after finishing this movie and after a rewatch of the first few scenes, I’d say this sense of confusion is probably arisen from my thoughts about a particular scene, where we have a few sped over pictures and frames where Suzu went to school, talks with her friends and family, went to a karaoke and ran out, and unable to sing on a winter’s day. It felt like I was being hit by a moving ticking clock that was sped up excessively, it’s more of a montage than it is a scene, as it mostly made up of stitched together images and compiled story beats that are very short (only a few seconds). These types of montages are constant -- in Hosoda’s films (which admittedly I’ve seen only five), case in point in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time where the relationship between Chiaki and Makoto are often sped through to focus more on the mechanics of plot, and in Wolf Children where Hosoda often glossed through the struggles Hana faces when fixing the house they had in the countryside. Whilst the concept of time and how it’s treated makes sense and fits in the themes of The Girl Who Leaped Through Time, not so particularly commendable in Wolf Children, but it’s quite clumsily done in Belle, what should’ve been more impactful in the relationships between Suzu and her deceased mother or her father is severely lacking in any sense of development. Barely any screen time was spent on building the preexisting setups of the film but more were spent on minutiae details on how Suzu had a complicated relationship with her childhood friend Shinobu and a weirdly shoved in subplot where Shinobu and Suzu was caught by some other students to have a more-than-conventional relationship, which I’d question. It’s not too much about how Hosoda can’t focus on scenes as Suzu having a budding crush on her childhood friend, that much I could tolerate, but if such unnecessary scenes weigh over the important details that are needed to set up to be paid off in the latter parts of the movie, I’d deem it really sloppily written, a thing I’ll reserve for the later part of the review. Mamoru Hosoda, though I certainly would not doubt his capabilities of directing itself, is an inherently flawed writer, he isn’t a writer that could create nuanced stories which feature great deal of character moments, his characters behave more caricaturistic than it is realistic. This is eccentric itself, as his shows usually don’t aim for fantasticality as Miyazaki do, or magical realism like Takahata do, but rather resorting to develop a dash of the eccentric within a seemingly realistic narrative. Now, caricature itself is neither a significant flaw nor even worth condemning about, Dickens used caricaturistic characters all the time throughout his oeuvre of work, but keep in mind Dickens knows how to use it perfectly, use it artistically to the point that even Nabokov is genuinely impressed by Dickens’ artistic cloud. But Hosoda isn’t Dickens, for he’ll never be able to use caricature well (for now, anyway), his principal inadequacy that lies within the story is how often he interweaves caricature with storyline, Dickens’ choice of caricature, though gross often but within the superficial surface of gross caricature lies moment of dramatic intent layered with wit and insight, created to infuse caricature with truth, usually utilising caricature for perversions of feelings and thought rather than impressing us with realistic depictions of a character. That itself is a phenomenal use of caricature, with Mr Bounderby representing a dramatic monster rather than a worldly boss, or Stephen Blackpool that is bound to perfection rather than being an honest workman that would’ve worked in real life parallels. But I found neither of those in Hosoda’s Belle. Saying Shinobu is caricature is untrue and a misuse of words, as there is nothing worth being caricatured in Shinobu, he’s synonymous to a part of the background, the words he mutter didn’t change much other than uttering Suzu for the umpteenth time, which itself is a waste of character. There’s a certain effect I can see Hosoda is trying to aim for, which I opine as the growth of Suzu and her maturation after her mother’s death, but it falls dramatically apart as Shinobu provides no juxtaposition to Suzu’s character other than being ‘otherworldly cool’ which sets him to be apart from the other boys, but mere praises and a few muttering of words are not character traits, neither are both of those presenting any semblance to the chance of giving him caricature, he’s just there for wasting potential screen time that could’ve been used for other purposes, for instance Belle’s relationship with the Beast, maybe even forming some sort of bond between Shinobu and Suzu? Those never came into existence, sadly, as Hosoda did not trust story beats, he trusts story arcs and acts, if you can’t even produce a few story beats well, it’s hard to say there would be any great scene, not to mention sequences or acts. It’s not even just Shinobu, the same can be said for a couple of characters, and yes, barring Suzu, we have a character Dragon that is basically developed almost in the third act of the film after Kei is introduced, any expert screenwriter with mickle experience would know that’s a ludicrous move, but Hosoda is a capable director, yet a subpar writer, in this film he did all the characters wrong, their motivations other than Suzu are simple mouthpieces for Hosoda to channel his opinions onto, the most vivid example being Kei, a character that is stuffed in none other than the reason to have some semblance of criticizing family abuse, but he is not given any kind of value for us to emphasize for, or even care about, as he appeared only in the last part of the movie. That’s not to say if he had appeared earlier it would be better, because Dragon is only an important thing after an hour of the film has passed by, which is a pretty meandering pacing with story beats accelerating and slowing down so randomly that it’s not even remotely funny. They’re milquetoast characters, not meaning feeble or timid, but a lack of defined, rigorous traits that sets them apart other than a few catchy phrases that are by no means synonymous to characterization. The process where Suzu stumble across the virtual world of ‘U’ to how she reinvents herself in the virtual world as Belle and how she sung her songs till the day she got widely acclaimed by the online users of ‘U’ and how she went up the ladder to become the diva of the highest popularity on the platform remains the most memorable sequence for me. The scene, in my honest opinion, had captured the essence of the Internet perfectly. How internet celebrities came into the public eye, how they performed and caught the public eye and how the public eye came to be aware of her and all the praises and blind hate showered upon her as her popularity skyrocketed in the first part of the film. There’s a kind of trend that you could see in Hosoda’ films, you can clearly see that he directs and produces a film about every a decade or so that centres around the topic of the Internet, it’s a really welcoming topic as the theme of online platforms is getting more relevant than ever, and Hosoda usually do bring a lot of new things onto the table and he typically observes the current climate of the internet well, it’s evident that he did do a great calibre of research while producing these films. To bring about some examples, we have the first few Digimon films in his body of work, its central theme talks about the Internet can bring about societal members that is scattered sporadically over the globe together, no matter how far we are from each other, and no matter how different we are in terms of gender, race, and background. Summer Wars focused on the gradual maturation of online platforms and how the unification of people of online platforms could be a potentially great power that would soon loom over the entire Internet, these themes are complementary with the period they’re in and are still fun rewatches over the years. Belle touches on such a common narrative thread, where our young, promising protagonist comes face to face with the current climate of the Internet, especially in an era where Japanese anime culture is increasingly prevalent with the popularisation of virtual youtubers and how they impact the traditional conception of an online celebrity, and it’s an era where Internet users are more than ever, and has been growing rapidly, accelerated by the events that mirrored the pandemic. It’s also a pretty impressive reflection on the contemporary issues of online users, where everybody was subconsciously eager to tear down the faces of their favorite celebrities, finding out their identities and subsequently bellowing yells of triumphs when they had discovered the backgrounds of the celebrities. So, the movie really starts to trade in big ideas when the diva Belle’s rise in popularity is also juxtaposed with how eager the internet users are to discover her true identity. Hosoda definitely had plenty of fascinating concepts and ideas while keeping abreast with modern Internet cultures. However, there’s a common issue that raises a critique on Hosoda’s films which I’ve been seeing for quite a while ever since I started reading criticism from Japanese articles, that he’s quite a good conceptualizer or an ideator, he excels in thinking innovatively while coming up with barebone synopsis and movie concepts, as shown in Belle, where he had a discernible favour for quite a few prevailing themes in the film, but to translate this interesting ideas into some sort of screenplay where the story would inevitably geared around is not his cup of tea. It’s definitely perceptible ever since Satoko Okudera no longer works as a screenwriter for the last three movies of his, and Hosoda himself takes over as the screenwriter to pen the scripts he directs. How is it evident, you’d say? Well, the movie has a strong 25-minute start where tons of flashy expository scenes are shot where expository dialogues are portrayed in a way that is not boring and has a sense of cinematic verve in them. But it starts to get troublesome when Hosoda seemingly doesn't know where to go on with the story. Ever since the introduction of the character ‘Dragon’, things start to go downhill, the tone changes from an exhilarating exploration of the online ‘U’ virtual world and its ensuing processions and cultures to a kind of mystery story where everybody starts to investigate the identity of Dragon. It’s done so suddenly and out of random to introduce Hosoda’s pie-in-the-sky ideas about everybody trying to rip apart the Dragon’s identity, until it starts to rob Suzu of her character development. She went from trying to adapt herself in this new identity to trying to know who this ‘Dragon’ character is, which irks me terribly. I felt like Suzu’s struggles as an online Diva was glossed through yet again, as Hosoda did in Wolf Children’s character of Hana, to introduce another subplot where everybody attempts to find out who Dragon is. This type of tonal shift is relentless in this movie, in my first count, there’s basically 5 different tones spread throughout the movie with a total of 4 tonal shifts, it went casually from a girl who went through serious transformation on an online platform to be a Diva, then another subplot introduces an element of mystery by having the users figuring out who Dragon really is, then it shifts again to introduce a sequence with a Beauty and the Beast styled character drama between Belle and Dragon, followed by a convoluted and confusing sequence of chasing and some random person who called themselves the guards tracking down Dragon and tried to kill Belle and is then subdued by an upcoming sequence where Belle and a gang out of nowhere trying to save the real-life Dragon -- a boy called Kei (have an awkward ‘I love you’ scene) to the final scene where Suzu goes forward to save Kei and his brother from being abused by their father. This is tonally a mess, it’s trying to cram six different sequences that are tangential to each other at surface value and tries valiantly to merge them up together, but to awkward results. The screenplay itself crumbles due to an incoherent structure, certain subplots are either way too dragged out, some are unnecessary and some were grossly oversimplicated. To illustrate my point further, there’s a small subplot before the climax of the film where Suzu helps Ruka to confess to Kamishin, and that small subplot alone lasted for almost 7 minutes. It’s offensively banal to include such a scene because overall it serves no purpose to the film itself, Ruka and Kamishin can’t even considered a side character, they’re minor, and they’ve none of the development that Suzu previously undergoes, so I’m kind of flabbergasted to see Hosoda adding such a redundant scene into the narrative while completely demolishing the relationship between Suzu and the Dragon. That’s a scene that we needed, because in the end of the film we’d need to have these scenes so that their relationship pays off in the final end of the film. But, it accomplishes none of those. All the value of the relationship between Belle and Dragon is undercut by the lesser amount of screen time the screenplay has given them. It’s insufficient, we get sort of a montage where there’s a few scenes that clearly takes direct inspiration from Beauty and the Beast, but an inferior version of it. Why is it inferior? It’s of the utmost importance to remark that Belle and the Beast’s relationship in Beauty and the Beast is tested throughout the film and the Beast is given ample time to develop, where he faces his inner demons and begins to discover his true self. Though it’s really hard for the Dragon to discover his real best self in this movie….. Because there is none. Why? Because the subplot once again shifts from a mystery to learn the identity of the Dragon to a tale of redemption, salvation to find your best self within the darkness of your heart, which is exactly what Beauty and the Beast is about. But Belle isn’t Beauty and the Beast, it’s a wolf that coats itself as the grandmother, it’s a movie that latches itself onto a pretension of a great, vivid schema that is Beauty and the Beast without learning what the animated movie was about. The part of the film about Belle and the Dragon is hilariously snipped from Beauty and the Beast and stuffed into the movie without any focus on their relationships and dynamics thus producing something that can only be described as ‘dismayingly unsatisfying’. It’s by my accounts unsatisfying, because Hosoda insists on distilling a plot that should’ve been the main focus of the film (even in the movie poster itself…..) down to its climaxes, which includes the process of Belle meeting the Dragon and questioning who he is (Belle and the Beast), how Belle gets to interact with the Dragon, though laughably minimal (Belle in the castle with the Beast) and songs that are sung by Belle in the Dragon’s castle. (original Belle in the castle). Those are pretty discernible parallels that can be seen by even casual audiences leaping into the theatre for fun, while Beauty and the Beast does this in 84 minutes by detailing the plot with beautiful moments of Belle gradually learning to care for the Beast whilst Beast went on to discover his best self after his interactions with Belle and thorough inner reflections. But the film Belle presumably thought that it would work by scrapping the highest moments in the original Beauty and the Beast movie and inserting it into this film would produce an equally great effect and have a long lasting impact on the audience, but it doesn’t. We don’t even get to know who the Dragon is until the final act, we don’t know his backstory (though there are moments where Dragon is revealed to have serious bruises, deemed as ‘foreshadowing’, but other than that, there’s still nothing), it’s just him regurgitating some edgy phrases and constantly spewing out his irascible and irritable dialogue of ‘You don’t know me’, ‘Get off of me!’, ‘Get out of here’, ‘Goooooo!’ and……? What does that have to do with Belle or even Dragon as a character? And why did he suddenly warm up to Belle after a mere time frame of 10 minutes where he saves her from the worse and far annoying ‘cops’ which I view as nothing but nuisance to the plot, because it’s just a not-so-covert attempt at reinventing the character Gaston that I cared about in the original Beauty and the Beast for being a threat and an actual influencer for the overarching plot throughout the narrative, but this random guy with neon backgrounds of ads and sponsorships are simply getting in the way of forming a bond between Belle and Dragon. How is that earned? Since when they’ve reached such a profound relationship that the Dragon is willing to pull such desperate measures to save Belle who he deems as constantly interrupting himself when they have had the barest interaction between each other? Or is it simply a convenience to galvanize the plot further? Or is it some part of the screenplay that didn’t transfer well into a film with visuals? I saw some criticisms from Asian countries’ reviews where they were frustrated by the film’s decision to omit romantic scenes, to be fair to this film, it never actually sets itself up as a romantic film, I respect the film’s decision to use the story frame of Beauty and the Beast to construct a meaningful conflict and detailing the budding relationship (not romance) between Belle and Dragon (which seems promising at first glance, as I’m sure that Hosoda can do much more than a romance film whilst emphasizing on forging bonds between a random pair). However, I do not view it as being well-constructed, it’s infuriating for me to see Hosoda being so condescending and derogatory towards his own characters, his own creation and insulting them by having them playing out some silly romantic comedy between two unimportant characters instead of developing the one that matters, the one that should’ve bring about the greatest payoff in the movie…. Which I’m going to get into right now, and I’m more than just disappointed in the final act of the film. I think the final act suffers immensely from the lack of exploration in Kei’s backstory and how it complements the issue of family abuse that I could clearly see Hosoda trying his best to explore in the final act, but truth be told, I found his proneness to compile a number of scenes that should’ve been evenly spread out more to be a serious problem right here. Kei’s background is supposedly juxtaposed with the internet users’ propensity to ignore or even having ‘pretending to care’ attitude in the implied scenes, but the huge issue here is how the theme is handled. Hosoda doesn’t seem to know the principles of screenwriting here, you’d never, ever see a character introducing his backstory in the final act of the film, and he’s barely a character even after the review of his supposed background story. Because there’s no character other than his family abuse. That’s the major complication right here, you can’t really have one of our main characters to have some surface level of background and expect it to work out as emotionally powerful as you’ve thought. Kei only exists because Hosoda want to criticize the central issue of family abuse that is pervasive in society, and to be said, it’s actually nice to see an animated movie willing to discuss real life issues instead of providing endless escapism and imagined relationships like Shinkai’s films do (though not necessarily a bad thing), We need the spiritual successors to Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises that are willing to reflect on society’s complications and its dark histories. In spite of that, I think these kinds of social critiques sound good on paper, or sound good purely in terms of the screenplay, but digesting a screenplay and then reformatting it in a visual based movie isn’t exactly the same thing, which is why I think the social critique of family abuse doesn’t work as well as Hosoda would like to imagine here. The entrails of this ‘family abuse’ act is bungled by Hosoda, as it explores this theme only close to the end of the show, which is clumsily done if we look at it from the aspects of a screenplay, let’s examine a better example. Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies and why it works. The reason why Grave of the Fireflies works as a critique because it allows to forge a bond and emotional bridge with the two main characters Seita and Setsuko in the first parts of the film, where we could peek into their lives before the war arrives, and how the war gradually impacts them by taking away their mother through a tragic death, how Seita struggles to save himself and Setsuko, how Setsuko slowly crumbles physically and mentally in the events of war and how it lead to the downfall of Seita as well. I think Roger Ebert puts it the best. The film’s greatest gift is not told as melodrama, but in simple neorealist drama, And there is time for silence in it. One of the film’s greatest gifts is its patience; shots are held so we can think about them, characters are glimpsed in private moments, atmosphere and nature are given time to establish themselves, it also meditates on the cause-and-effect of the arrival of war and how it slowly perforates the lives of the people in it. I think the biggest reason Belle fails as a social critique is because it spent a surfeit of time on themes like student romance while only trying to ‘tell’ us about how Kei and his brother suffers under family abuse, but even the scene of family abuse and how it impacted Kei is directly told, towards us and towards Suzu, we aren’t allowed to feel for Kei, as we have no ties previously to him, there’s no glimpse into his life and why family abuse is exactly this terrifying and how it destroys his personal life. Belle has only sojourned in my mind for a while, as it exploits Kei as a character to deliver the theme, instead of filling the character Kei to deliver on this theme, these two things are wholly different, and it delivers wildly varying strengths when it comes to the emotional feels of the film. What is even more ironic, say, is that Takahata seems to aim more for a fantastical side of animation, which combines a lack of visual realism with plasticity of character (big eyes with tonsils to be seen clearly), to produce a reality that is heightened and simplified to hit at the deepest of our hearts, instead of reproducing reality like Hosoda but castrating it with a million quirks of his own to include melodrama with no character truths and simple characters that make no part in the film to spew out unerring comments like Shinobu that I would compare it to micturate pretentions excessively to impress me. Before ending this review, I’d say the single biggest problem in this film lies in the last sequence, where Belle discovers the identity of Kei is the most emotionally awkward sequence I’ve ever seen and the sole embarrassment from this sequence…… I’m not ashamed to say I laughed through the entire final sequence instead of being emotionally attached to it. And how they resolve the family abuse sequence angers me. Why? I’ll explain it in detail here. Suzu immediately travels to Tokyo to help Kei -- by herself, yes, there’s about 10 or more people at the scene when they discover the fact that Kei is abused -- yet all 10 people leave Suzu, a roughly 16-17 year old girl, to go and resolve the family abuse problem. The process of resolving isn’t just ludicrously stupid, it rips the supposedly ‘realistic’ show of any logic. Personally speaking, I’ve always viewed logic as unnecessary and overrated in films, but the film here is clearly geared towards portrayal of realism, yet it resolves its central conflict in the most unrealistic way possible whilst trying to criticize society, it’s juvenile and honestly absurd. Shinobu, despite having some guise of relationship with Suzu, is just a good-looking vase there, and he encourages her to go and meet Kei whilst never actually does anything and simply uses his mouth, which is the most prominent problem in the entire Japanese anime industry, vocal cords are more powerful than action itself. The issue isn’t the point that she acts blindly and impulsively without thinking rationally, but the problem is……. There’s so many other problems. A character in a melodramatic narrative can resort to impulsive acts, similar to how people in real life can succumb to immediate response during emergency without thinking through twice, but the impact is lessened when we’re given ample time to think rationally as an audience. Melodramatic essence is essentially distilled while you’re giving the audience too much time to think, because the audience are not subdued by the tight tension that is absolutely permeated and pervasive in the scene, if the tension is ridiculously overpowering and the stakes are at an abnormally high, we might be swept away by the conglomeration of painful stakes and tension and be inclined to do the same as the character. Akin to how Wolf Children had Hana chasing after her son Ame after he turns into a wolf, she chases after him desperately and forgets about her daughter trapped in the school by typhoon. Though I thought that scene is also severely lacking in other aspects, it did pull out how the stakes might alter the show forever and Hana might not be able to see her son anymore, but in Belle the impact is far more gelded. There’s a few scenes: the striding under the rain in the streets of Tokyo, the moment in the bus where she messages her dad on the phone, the group discussing how to help Kei. There’s too many scenes like this that created sparse moments amongst scenes that should’ve been tense, until the irrational response was rendered with impertinence and considered an umbrage by the audience. The tragedy of Belle is that it’s a movie with a ragtag collection of phenomenal elements, mingled with one of the most beautiful animations and visual art styles in recent years, along with some of the most mesmerizing soundtracks of all time. But it’s deleterious for us to consider this a great film simply because of the great soundtracks and animations. I’d prefer not to lie to myself about the quality of the film, though I loved certain scenes of the film. But Hosoda, you’re not a capable screenwriter, and through this film I can see the potential, but the actual result is utterly outlandish, and is probably one of the biggest disappointments for me personally.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Oct 1, 2021
Digimon Adventure
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
As Nabokov once remarked in the first line of his superb autobiographical novel Speak, Memory, the cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. I was one of those things that come into existence in a brief crack of light, and a few months ago did my mother slyly mentioned that an unfamiliar sight of a moving screen had rendered me crying for the rest of the day while I went back home for the first day in my life, and the programme that was shown on the
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TV screen was none other than Digimon Adventure, a show that was probably my earliest encounters with anime, or any type of show in general, which was being watched by my sister who valued it as the single greatest thing ever, and hitherto. The show had been a predominant part of my childhood, the franchise that I had grown up with and never grown tired of, along with a few children’s shows I’d still reserve my unanimous admiration and love for (Avatar and Gundam, as a few examples). A few weeks ago, along with my little cousin I sat down on the couch to watch Digimon Adventure for the umpteenth time, and I am there to re-evaluate from the perspective of a critic and not through the fine lens of a nostalgic manchild nerd (which I am still kind of), whether the show holds up in terms of its relevance and the degree of its sophistication when it comes to storytelling, character writing and act structure. After two days of non-stop binging with him, he loved it to the core, but I sat there for a while in order to rationalise my thoughts for the advancement of plot within the show and how I feel about it. It’s not a particular subject that could be explained in a few sentences and thus I’d be devoting an entire review for the series I had adored so much ever since I was a kid.
With great effort, I slogged through the first few episodes. Digimon Adventure was a show that has the habit, or perhaps a distinct traceable form of likening character development to episodic growth, narrowing the characters to one episode full of growth, and then proceeding to plunge deep into the narrative without complementing its characters with the background. It’s not to say it’s necessarily a bad thing, as it had a more fast-paced storytelling that prevents the audience from dozing off, but that alone limits the development of several characters, Koushiro/Izzy was shaped to be an expository machine that could utilise a computer to its fullest capacity other than his own episode of having his partner evolved into Kabuterimon. Other than Taichi/Tai who was bestowed with a few layers of characterisation by having him possessing traits that are more fleshed out compared to his cronies and his peers within the team, and maybe Matt/Yamato who had some sort of family background about his parents divorcing, resulting in the separation between him and his brother, Takeru. Takeru was possibly the most believable character in the narrative, where he started as a crybaby and immature kid (as expected of his age) and how he tries desperately to catch up with the team, along with his companion Patamon, who was also equally immature compared to the rest of the Digimon. The inclusion of crests in the series is something I’m thoroughly skeptical of, its use in the series is perniciously evident throughout the series, to give each of the characters a discernible trait without confusing the audience, but the effect is the exact opposite, I was left underwhelmed by the classification of crests, which divides into courage, friendship, love, sincerity, knowledge……. It’s a dire move in my eyes, an attempt to distinguish the characters that displayed caricaturistic tendencies, but the effect is once again the complete opposite, it results in the show having threadbare characters that demonstrates the central personalities that the show attempts valiantly to focus for each character and that alone renders most of the characters to be walking caricatures that are used to emphasise the power of the crests, rather than the crests used to emphasise a particular trait among the others they possessed. The crests effectively limits their characterization, and perhaps even binding them from having a vivid caricature, as the show seemed content with just having a distinguishable trait for each character, instead of developing the ideas of the crests, how could the crests be juxtaposed amongst each other, how could they improve a character, or how could they strengthened their bonds by having their characters gaining personal lessons from each other’s greatest strengths (their most special trait showcased by the crests), but that seems too much of a request from my part, since the crest principally works as a sort of mirroring event for a personal experience. I do not have a predisposed dislike for these characters, but their distinguishable traits had first propelled me through the mundane episodes for me to check out whether their specific traits would have influences among each other, but it ultimately fails to do so, knowledge is seemingly mutually exclusive with courage, friendship is absolute and is not intersected by values of sincerity. It’s dreadful, and Hikari is probably the worst offender of all. The writers added this thinly characterised character among those that are at least imparted with a certain level of maturity while not advancing her, giving her a trait of ‘Light’? There are three parts of this story where Hikari shared three incarnations, each with really differing personalities, a time she was sick and she acted sweet and overly relying on Tai when Tai got transported back to the real world, another she became sly and unusually optimistic in the Vamdemon arc, the other she became completely silent other than having a silhouette and a puppet for Homeostasis in the Machinedramon portion of the story. We knew nothing too much about her rather than being given the information other than she is supposedly ‘kind’, which is something yet again, cliche and done trite and excessively. Sage Hyden’s video on the movie Suicide Squad had also propelled me to look deeper into Digimon’s story structure problems, in which the characters had limited interactions other than labelling the 8 characters as ‘friends’. The first 7 episodes or so introduced us to the characters, but there’s that. It told us almost 90% about the characters, but the characters know nothing about each other. It's mentioned in other sources such as reference books of Digimon, but I don’t give a damn. Why should I read the reference books when it should've been shown to me in the series? It reeks of the stench of the greed of the company to lure me to buy supplementary materials to fill in those blanks, and it actively ruins something that could’ve been significantly better. It’s all about flashbacks that don’t complement the scene, the series had burned a lot of potential that could’ve served as story revelations that could’ve been peppered throughout the entire series. There’s 54 episodes, there’s no need to rush all of them at once. From the first few episodes, we know that Matt’s family is divorced, he’s separated from his brother. Izzy is a computer nerd who can solve everything through his intelligence. Sora is a loving person who cares about each other. Had they withheld some of the information or simply used visual storytelling to imply some of the possible personalities they have, they could’ve used the kernels of these backgrounds to draw parallels between characters and create compelling scenes where the characters discuss what matters to them. Or how they view their current predicament. I know Sora and Matt are supposed to be a thing together, so why there’s no scene where Sora and Matt bond with each other, they have one thing in common, they care about others subtly, just as Matt loves and cares about Takeru, Sora showers care toward Piyomon and the rest of the cast? Instead they shoehorn them in at the end of the second season and their scenes together are less than the fights Matt has with Tai. Tai is an overly careless but brave person who leads the whole team, while Joe had issues about being the eldest in the group and had a sort of responsibility to lead the team instead of rely on others, why isn’t there a scene where they talk about it and bond with each other instead of talking about how hungry or tired they are for the rest of the series? The rapid exchange of dialogue is evident throughout the series, and it’s clear that the writers want to have an exuberant atmosphere between the characters instead of them having dry conversations of expositions. But they’re doing it unnervingly wrong in a lot of places, truth be told. There are pairs of characters who never interacted with each other for an unbelievable amount of time. Did Matt talk with others actively other than Tai and Takeru? Did Hikari speak of a word with Joe and Mimi and Izzy? Where are the interactions between Takeru and Izzy, Mimi, etc? Some may find my fastidiousness to be overtly geeky and view me as an uncouth guy who frets over the tiniest of the details, but I’d still like to point out a few major character writing issues these shows from the past tend to have, especially with Digimon. Digimon has a primitive sense of reliance on focusing the products of character advancement on evolution, a concept popularised by Adventure and has since been a normative routine for character growth in the Digimon franchise. It makes sense for me as a child, but it no longer does such wonders for me as an adult, it’s offensively banal by characterising our beloved Digimon partners as nothing but product pieces of a formula, the growth of a character. The Digimon had demonstrated a discernible sense of personality, but alas as the series slogged on with its narrative, the lovely Agumon and Gabumon were stilted, they had no potential rather than being a token of moral support and a mere tool of fighting. They are actively quelled to emphasize their partner’s growth, and they’re there for the sake of being there. They are staunchly faithful to their partner, never questioning and more of a fantastical company than an actual friend that follows you side by side. The Digimon may serve as a sort of innuendo as our childhood, stoutly faithful to us but never actually abandoned us, but innuendo is not enough, the writers seem to be wanting to trade in big ideas by having a relationship between partners and how they actively complement each other, but their faithfulness to each other is neither earned nor rewarded. Their Digimon are automatically a product of the writers’ determinism to have them mingled up with their partners from the start and was doomed to remain so for the rest of the series. It’s clearly shown in the first episode, Koromon immediately recognized Tai as his sole partner without any reason whatsoever, other than being ‘destined’, which has fundamentally destroy any possible chance of a full fledged character than a mouthpiece of moral support and a milkily bland character that is not separable other than a few mottos or type of dialogue they use. Though I would definitely sharply criticise the choice of writers being satisfied by only adding a layer of personality for each character for simple distinction for the audience rather than actually featuring them as real humans, while it’s easier said than done, it could’ve done more merits for the characters that I’d still adore even if I questioned their status as a fully fledged character. For the lighter side of things, I’d praise the causality in the show, the characters made decisions, and those decisions beget irrevocable consequences which alter the outcome of an event. There are not many scenes that are wasted in the series, but wrapped neatly in a chain of cause and effect. Tai’s initially conceited and bratty attitude caused Agumon to be digivolved wrongly into the insidious SkullGreymon which greatly harmed the then-Koromon and this incident renders Tai to be afraid and cautious - fearing that he might hurt his partner due to his tendency to rise up and went straight for it rather than thinking twice. It thrusts him into this conflict when he has to choose to either confront his insecurities to save Sora who was captured, or step back and be unable to save his friend. These character-reviewing decisions are in line with the chain of cause and effect which creates compelling scenes that are meaningful to the central themes of the story. I am genuinely elated to discover that Digimon Adventure had managed to utilise it to its fullest extent. But underneath the wonderful seam between causality and character motivations, something deleterious hides behind a facade of a nice intention to develop characters, but eventually turned our beloved characters into a mouthpiece to voice opinions toward social issues, those comprise mostly of adolescent problems or social complications which include parent’s divorce (Matt and Takeru), being adopted (Izzy), being pressured into pursuing an undesired career (Joe), kid having a spoiled attitude as a result of parents that overly coddle them (Mimi), being forbidden to do something they loved (Sora).The attempt essayed in including or incorporating such themes are amiable to be said, but sadly, it’s grotesquely oversimplified in the large sense, those issues are brought up out of nowhere within an episode, and is then resolved in the same episode, often in sudden realisation. That’s to me, an ambitious brain that wants to tell the audience some meaningful lessons, but the body ended up collapsing due to the incredible weight of inquiries and solutions in the brain that coalesced together to form an ugly lump of blob. It suffers constantly from trying to add depth with discussing issues that are faced by the characters, but they’d have the characters resolving it internally and instantaneously, often utilising inner monologues and flashbacks, but when they’ve finally met their parents, the issues are no longer a matter, they did not gain the perspectives enough to discuss the problems in a serious tone with their parents, but resort to solving them in an episodic manner, as if growth are acquired in a time frame of two minutes. That’s not growth, but the illusion of growth, the illusion that similarly trapped them in predicament before this sudden realisation. It’s not earned, as it’s quickly resolved, the problems have not yet taken deep root within the characters and how they’d be making problematic decisions, why would it be considered ‘depth’? Is it not needlessly stiff and trivial (treated solely as an interesting background) in the larger narrative sense? I read a poem named The Sea by Borges arranged in John Updike’s Picked Up Pieces before I made this review, and it sparked me in an instant, what is the world for Digimon Adventure? Me, having a predilection for character writing over minutiae details of worldbuilding might have galvanised me to write more of the characters than I cared for the world, but there is something hazy and obscure about the Digital World. Digimon Adventure sets up a world that should’ve had the wealths of rich lore mixed with a wide variety of background stories that are complementary with our digimon -- yet they glossed through the riches of the Digital World and had a dismayingly implicit way of showing the world, often relying on superficial aesthetics, a desert, a lake, a village, telephone booths out of nowhere, and a restaurant that uses US dollars for no apparent reason. A lot of the parts of this world are absurdly constructed, seemingly stitched together whatever the writers could think of, resulting in an unintentionally exulting comedy that had me chuckle a couple of times. Occasionally it’s mildly infuriating for me to see a world so reductive, where its inhabitants had only ‘popped’ into existence and the social structure of a community of Digimon is ludicrously unbalanced. But maybe I asked too much from a children’s series, but children’s series like Avatar: The Last Airbender had reached sublimity by delivering us a world of rich lore and a detailed world that complements our characters in the story. The Digimon’s physiology is also left unexplained, with Koromon having metabolic activities while the others don’t, some sleep while some could live without rest. I’m a fan of Tolkien with his inventive spin on preexisting races in mythology and how he incorporates them into his fictional settings, but I’m also a fan of M. John Harrison, Michael Moorcock and Mervyn Peake, who prioritised atmosphere, beauty of aesthetics and scenery. I need not a world that is so detailed like Orion’s Arms or Middle Earth, but having such scant regards for the world is definitely not something I’d laud for, considering Adventure’s tendency for reused footage and a wobbly artstyle (Joe’s face can literally change 5 times in an episode), pretty cheap directing skills that relies heavily on reused cinematography that are largely insufficient as well. The music of the Digimon, however, is close to perfection, I’d say. The integration of different types of pieces of music spanning several genres, including classical music: Bolero and Concierto de Aranjuez. Koji Wada was constantly outstanding, and I still loved him for that (May he rest in peace). Digimon Adventure emerges from the strain in the viewer's imaginative sensibility for fantasy stories, a valiant attempt in crafting a fantasy story that is woven with well-written characters (a doubt from me), whether it touches the sublime or approaches the boundary that separates the crude and those that share a common excellence within storytelling is still a doubt for my part. It had achieved a notable quality, that is levelled by its horrible precursors and uplifted by its inferior contemporaries, but Digimon Adventure by itself is not a work that shares the same vein of quality as the great works of children’s fantasy series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Neighbour Totoro, the animated Batman series and The Wind in the Willows. Digimon Adventure itself, though I criticised much of its choice of storytelling, still possessed an imagistic strength that constitutes greatly to the heaping up of events that would eventually create gigantic images that leave us with a connection to the characters, even though some of them are thinly developed. And when the hat was blown away by the gust of wind that surged across the valley as the train took off which left the world temporarily, so did myself, feeling drifted away as the series ended, with sadness that the story I had grown up with did not age well but had still filled me with a sense of contentment after the eclipse ended and the characters parted ways, saying goodbyes.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 29, 2021
Josee to Tora to Sakana-tachi
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
2004 is the year when the first adaptation to Josee, the Tiger and the Fish occurred, and through shameful admission would I come to confess that I slept halfway through the movie, probably because of its loosely structured pacing and the overall tone was darker and grimmer in comparison to the type of movies I used to see those years earlier. I’ve read the short story originally penned by Seiko Tanabe, through vague memory I remember it being succinct but not satisfying for me as an overall story and it’s comparatively lackluster when you compare it with the author’s other works when it comes to
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style and prose, it’s flimsy and clunky in the large sense with its choice of words that I can only deem as coarse. I have just watched the animated film of Josee, the Tiger and The Fish a few days ago, a film that I had only known about until this May, and forsooth I have a great deal of thoughts about the film. It lulled me with its engaging atmosphere but I can’t seem to agree with a lot of the reviews I found on this platform re the quality of the film. Thus, I’ll try my best to marshal all of my thoughts about the animated film adaptation of a faulty short story that I had also reread a few months ago and see whether or not it’s of a film that has an enduring and inherent quality that holds on its own, or it’s merely a periodic piece of a specific year that had a modicum of value within its plot, aesthetics and characters.
I’ll reserve my own thoughts on the plot later, which I deemed as secondary compared to the characters in this film. In this particular film, two characters were emphasised, Tsuneo and Josee, who I’ll be exemplifying with a few texts from the movie itself and with their dynamic through several dialogues. I’ve seen some people calling the characters ‘bland skates’, which I’m inclined to disagree with. Josee, the Tiger and the Fish had some questionable moments where a complementary backstory with motivations are cut short by a tendency of the film to demonstrate its capabilities in ramming their screen time with aesthetically pleasing environments, but the characters do have a kind of disposition of their own, when it comes to Tsuneo, he’s developed enough for a 90-minute movie. In a well-written plot, you would understand the cause and effect of a scene, a scene where probably there’s a conversation between characters which are raised temporarily to concoct some sort of conflict which ends with a resolution that leads to the next scene. Tsuneo’s development was chopped into very tiny bits that are scattered throughout the movie instead of being culminated into a huge heap of an emotional moment that puts focus on its character. There are quite a few scenes that showcased conversations between Tsuneo and Josee, which works to a certain extent, both are united by their profound love for the ocean, but that’s more of a superficial reason, a longing that is shared by both characters but their motivations are characterised differently. Tsuneo had his enduring love for the ocean as diving is one of his favourite hobbies and would soon be one of the main careers that he is interested in pursuing for, whilst Josee’s love for the ocean is portrayed as her yearning for freedom as she viewed the vast ocean to be wholly symbolical with the notion of freedom, which is contrasted by her current state, where she is trapped on a wheelchair, unable to do more than lying down, drawing, not being able to walk around, climbing or even pursuing her dreams. It reached a climax after her grandmother died, as shown halfway in the film, where there’s a character-based conflict. Tsuneo was torn between his choice of following his dreams and studying overseas whilst another side of him was bound by his sense of responsibility, albeit a little closer to his feelings for Josee as subtly implied by their exchange in dialogue and body movements, which are both significantly more intimate than before. There’s a part of a scene where Josee laments her inability to do anything at all, and what she had been trying to falls apart hitherto, which stuck with me more than the other parts of the movie, as it’s not tediously lengthy inner monologues or loquacious educative nonsense that were thrown in by an amateurish writer, but something the character would actually say: “It was out of reach. Everything’s always out of reach. The red balloon caught on the roof. The cicada husk on the tree. Walking under an umbrella in the rain. Climbing the steps of a shrine. All of it. I no longer wish to reach for any of it.’ Writing Josee’s sad lamentation about her inability for any possible future in a succinct yet foreshadowed way is what I immensely enjoyed about the film. There are brief shots in the film that had actually shown these imagery, and that thrusts us into thinking that maybe Josee was not as apathetic as shown in the first few scenes, and strengthened by her capabilities in drawing, maybe it’s not based off a faulty imagination of how she thought of freedom, but of a yearning she’d had long kept inside her that was ultimately imploded after the death of her only pillar in her life, her grandmother. Josee’s internal yearnings was then juxtaposed by Tusneo’s both caring (but not in an understanding way, but rather sympathetic) and observant nature. Tsuneo is an observant in the first two acts of the film, he was given his own motivations and a background which shows him to be independent of his family through a phone call that shows us he’s a disciplined individual who has control over his life in general. But his life is inverted by the appearance of Josee, which shows another side of a life that he’d never imagined, one that is gloomier with shades of hope slowly fading away, which contrasts both of their values they hold onto personally. The writing on this film is simplistic yet has a surprisingly solid three-act structure where irrevocable decisions are made and lead to irreversible consequences as well. First act sets up the first meeting between Tsuneo and Josee, and ends with them travelling to the beach and starting to have frequent outings together, the second act begins on the development between the pair which is basked in by the death of Josee’s grandma and finally leads to Tsuneo’s accident which renders him completely immobile. A third act begins where Tsuneo and Josee’s role is reversed, where Tsuneo is now reduced to a character that is gloomy, pessimistic and bitter whilst Josee’s story picks him up and inspires him for the better. Though I’m a lover of tragedies and were a little disappointed with how the film ended on a note that is way too optimistic and having a much too happy tone in general, I’d still applaud the film for its attempt at story structure. Josee, as an animated Japanese film of 2020, would arguably go down the lane to become one of the cognates of the major periodic pieces (though it’s popularity is considerably much smaller) with 5 centimetres per second, Weathering with You, Fireworks and maybe From Up the Poppy Hill. Shinkai’s Weathering With You, despite its success at rendering the audience hooked with its alluring scenes and visual overload retains its insidious nature of trying desperately to take itself seriously despite having story themes that spiralled out of control, From Up the Poppy Hill seemed way more genial and narrowed down to an extent but is ultimately thin to the point where it’s apparently transparent that lacks the distinction, while Fireworks is seemingly just a correct depiction of a badly-written fiction that signifies the death of the screenplay. Today, these films lulled us, but never captured us as deeply as its predecessors, either it’s of an overreliance of beautiful visuals alone but never utilised it correctly (but rather to flex about its superior art style), or the tendency to underperform in character dynamic. Josee, the Tiger and the Fish is something between the two, I’m still feeling a little underwhelmed by the screenwriter to diminish their moments of building up their relationship in the first act and replaced them with brief shots of them having outings where they either eat, go to a random place or having a silent conversation. That I’d question. The characters are largely silent in those scenes, and it resembles a hastily stitched together montage than it is a scene. However, the screenwriter did have his points marked in my book by having the few scenes we have in the movie to be filled with Tsuneo and Josee’s intimate interactions and talk about what matters to them, sharing their different philosophies about something. To illustrate, Josee with her love for drawing, akin to her love for freedom one day, and her insecurities and fear for her inability to carry out anything without somebody else’s help. Whilst Tsuneo represents the lighter side of life, he strived for his dreams and teased a few moments where he could happily live a life with his friends in the aquarium (?) [I’ve forgotten the part]. It all cultivates the end of the second act and the beginning of the third act where Tsuneo was met with an accident. It changed our nice and bubbly protagonist into a bitter and gloomy person that slowly abandons his love for diving once he knows that it might be impossible for him to rehabilitate. That shift in tone and scenes had him understanding and acknowledging his past ways of treating Josee, with sympathetic care and a sense of superior responsibility rather than actual love for her. And that separates the two in a final situation. Though I had a distaste for the part of the screenplay for telling one of side female characters to confront Josee to go for Tsuneo instead of having Josee slowly coming for this realisation, but it did inspire Josee to try her best to do whatever she could to get Tsuneo back to his feet. This course of action had actually placed them as equals, something the original short story and the other films don’t have and I’d eulogize the film for that. However, the film goes for a method that is a little too forced by having Josee telling a story that resembles Tsuneo’s life in front of the public and causing Tsuneo to be inspired and get back on his feet. It's a mixed reaction for me to watch this scene. A part of me wonders if Tsuneo would still feel secure enough to have himself exposed to the public after a few violent retaliations he had with his friends and Josee. But with that said, such a forced parallel managed to get him back on his feet and work for the better. The final part where Tsuneo had to launch a search for the missing of Josee was arguably the weakest part of the film, as it effectively undermined the film’s serious tone in the final part in an exchange for desperate forced parallel, which in my eyes were nothing more than a nuisance, the only thing that is worth the wait was the kiss scene, but then it’s romantic but placing it after a silly scene is quite the absurd choice, I’d say. Josee, the Tiger and the Fish is something that muddles between the boundary of mediocrity and good. It effectively recreates cliche moments to bring about a fresher perspective for an older story that is rotting even in the 20th century compared to its grander counterparts, but the film tricked itself by assuring itself was doing enough by adding a few more characters that serves as talking mouthpieces with a weak caricature that was severely disappointing. Eve’s song in the end is worthy of all the praise as that song fits perfectly with the film’s romantic notion. But whether it's enough to place it as a great piece, or even just an inescapable piece of animated film in the canon of Japanese anime seems to open me some level of doubt. Your Name is hopelessly average and reeks of the awful pungent smell that an overreliance on visual overloading with no actual care to the ink and paper it used for the screenplay can be something that is so commercially successful to the point it becomes an inescapable piece that is lauded by so many poor, ludicrous and inadequate youtube critics proved that possible, but I strife with a large part of the anime community in search of something that is actually great, not merely referential and inescapable, but Josee, the Tiger and the Fish seemed to me decent enough to being an inescapable film, but whether its quality is great enough, or solely penumbral for the whole anime industry, is something that would be left for re-evaluation of future audiences to decide.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Sep 28, 2021
Fruits Basket 1st Season
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
Having to sit down to watch all 24 episodes of Fruits Basket in a day was quite the experience for me, but I can’t really say whether it’s a pleasant or a dreadful one. The series has been hailed as one of the greatest shojo series of all time, and while I could glimpse the possibility to ascertain such a claim after finishing the all the seasons of the remake series, but I would be lying to myself that one can call Fruits Basket as a great series from the first season. And I’d be diving into the reasons as to why I have extremely
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conflicting emotions and feelings to discuss this particular season. I’ll say this in advance, a lot of people expressed their thoughts that Fruits Basket is a large series encompassing numerous characters with different personalities and multiple layers of conflict between varying characters that possess their own agendas and philosophies in their way of life. I’m currently here to review only the first season, which comprises 24 episodes which roughly translates to at least 480 minutes, which is an ample amount of time to develop at the very least, a few characters. I would definitely like to discuss how Fruits Basket develops its characters within that time frame and whether it does it adequately, or with scant regard for its characters.
I don’t think there’s really a need to regurgitate what the plot is about given that it’s right there on the centre of your screen in the headpage. So, I’ll save some screen time to talk more about the storylines and characters and how they complement each other. The first one I’ve got to talk about is Tohru. Tohru as a character in the entire narrative changed a lot, drastically even, but when it comes to the first season, the slow pacing on occasional points of the storyline had presented her as a character that had a flat arc. What is a flat arc? To put into the simplest terms, our main character goes through a multitude of events which challenges their agency with different characters that might or not contradicts our main character’s and the main plot was to incorporate the change of the characters that surround our main character in situations rather than changing our main character’s personality. That’s actually more common that you’d imagine, case in point, Paddington, Diana Prince. She is kind, heartfelt and caring towards others. Well, there’s no problem in attempting to bestow a character's personal traits as this. But maybe because this is a 90s series, it had multiple gags which did not age well, notably the caricaturistic approach to Tohru’s kindness and Kagura’s slapstick comedy to slap Kyo because she likes her and sometimes she’s too flustered. One of my major drawbacks of this show was predominantly Tohru’s characterisation. Flat arc characters can be generally done pretty well if there were character-based scenes where they were exchange of thoughts and a more nuanced way of communicating by sharing their philosophies upon a certain subject. Arisa’s gangster/hooligan background and her interaction with Tohru’s mom was handled well, but in comparison Tohru’s conversation with Ritsu (his insecurities about his abilities and gender) and Yuki (his social communication) is way less empowering. It’s because there’s an educative nature and a shared background between Arisa and Tohru’s mother which could carefully construct a bridge of connection between the two characters which led to Arisa’s transformation after being accompanied by Tohru and her mother. But the conversations Tohru had with Momiji, Ritsu and Yuki are not on particularly equal grounds, and there’s no high ground for Tohru to be educative about. Because they had very different outcomes and generally contradictory points of views which makes it hard to believe a few lines from Tohru could impact their personality. To make it clear, it isn’t worth condemning everytime this kind of scenes appear in the anime but it happens so constantly that it eventually robs a lot of the characters of their own agency, instead of making their own big character-reviewing decisions, we are drawn into Tohru’s stream of consciousness style of persuasion for the characters in accordance to Tohru’s own viewpoints and disregarding any sense of discrepancy that they might have with Tohru’s own morals and her connection with her mother. Doing so excessively would penultimately result in a sequence of character development that are unextractable and largely overshadowed by Tohru’s constant appearance and ultimately begets a shallow character development for the side characters. It’s one that makes me almost turn off some of the episodes in the series because it is literally encoding an almost theological optimism to push the boundaries as to how Tohru can help the other characters based on her opinions on subjects. After a prolonged expression of mine toward the negative impacts of Tohru’s compressed characterisation (down to a mouthpiece), I’d reserve a great deal of praise for her cronies. Arisa and Saki. There are far more interesting characters than characters that are starred in episodic natures, (Kagura and Ritsu) and a great amount of time was dedicated to enrich their backstory, their motivations and how they gradually progressed from a person of lesser morals to a person with more positive traits, especially Arisa with her hooligan background. I’d commend that and some of the scenes where the sunset background blends pleasingly with the interactions between Arisa and Tohru’s mother are also worthy of praise. There’s also a few dynamics between characters that are fun and engaging to look at - Yuki and Kyo, though they would always fight with each other nearly every single time they met, but the facial expressions and dialogue they shared during the copious amount of conversations they had was more than fun to look at - the pair had conflict which would lead to some kind of resolutions - either they tone it down eventually or Tohru’s intervention (that’s actually done rather solidly) which rams the scenes they had with an engaging power within it. There’s also new characters that are introduced halfway in the series, like Hatsuharu or Hatori which shared an interesting dynamic with such characters as Kyo and Shigure, and both of the pairs had also their personal ties and connections that are formed based on several foundations of their backstories, which significantly develops the characters more and there’s definitely no more complaints with that from my part. The sound is decent enough, in my opinion. It had a fairly well done opening songs and two beautifully choreographed ending songs that are in sync with the beats of the music. The lighting in this show was nothing special, considering most of the scenes they had shown are a consolidation of character’s moments and background music and then the lighting. It’s the same as probably the rest of the anime around the period, nothing worth to be frustrated about, nothing worth to vie with the best in the industry. However, there’s a major issue that I find to be perforating the character’s dynamics that suffused the series. The monologues. They are often too whiny, inflated, tendentious and overwritten. Monologues in a human being are generally long and confusing, yes, as shown in multiple works of literature, prominent examples would include James Joyce’s stream of consciousness, but the monologues of multiple characters, especially Yuki and Kyo are garnished and embellished with a sort of poetic structure and mumbling about trivial metaphors to promote a sense of beauty and are often mixed and mingled with a decent background music or a long shot where Yuki’s torso was contrasted with the background. This kind of over-the-top would incrementally forge a bond almost immediately with the audience as it has complementary music and scenery to lure the audience in, aplenty with emotions. But it’s done too much, I’d say, a few scenes are acceptable, but a great amount of scenes are devoted into constructing great deals of monologues, and sometimes there’s even a group monologue which is used to contrast said characters based on their inner thoughts, or sometimes unite them together in a big picture. Nevertheless, it suffers greatly because the sort of decorated poetic style within the narrative monologues or even a heartfelt conversation between two best cronies or bosom friends are inflated with complacent interruptions of the writers to endlessly truss all the scenes with plenitudes of ribbons and balloons. Yuki’s inner thoughts, Kyo’s inner emotions, Tohru’s inner reflections and even Momiji’s inner explorations are done way too excessively and it even shared a same sort of tone and structure in them which itself promotes a contradiction that they are different in their inner self with each other. That carries away the wealth of character development formed by dynamic between characters that sets them apart by uniting the characters forcefully in an chaotic manner that sadly undermined some of the powerful scenes they could’ve had. Maybe this sort of monologue has the intention of showing us that deep down, the characters are all the same, they are not perfect and share a great deal of problems too. But the writer seemed too jonesed to promote this sense of storytelling structure so much that it becomes tiring to look at in the broader sense. If every scene or every monologue is filled with the writer’s precarious love for poetical dialogue, it’s would be the same condition as Aldous Huxley criticising a lot of Poe’s poems, it falls into vulgarity and of a coarsest virtue that ultimately becomes the same as wearing a diamond ring on every single finger. Nice to look at in the first few scenes, but the rest are bereaved of the character’s life, hence we are trapped between the extended fore and aft of over-trimmed inner monologues. My review here, sadly asks at variance with the rest of other people here, if Fruits Basket is of a Periodic Piece or an enduring masterpiece of character writing? The series in its first attempt at a reboot with 24 episodes seems to be a quirky and sleazy mix of the two, its style can be occasionally alluring, absorbing, magnanimous and welcoming, yet there exists a few episodes that meddle with a style that is archaic, stiff, overwritten, and overly embellished. I am fond of the characters put forward, their introduction are rarely pretentious, but their inner lives are sometimes overwritten and tressed with a gazillion embellishments which confuses me to the extreme. I’d be reviewing the rest of the seasons in the future (which I deemed better), but for the performance of the first season of Fruits Basket, if it’s a work that remains charismatic and relevant for the 21st century seems to me open to some doubt.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Sep 27, 2021
Ookami Kodomo no Ame to Yuki
(Anime)
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Mixed Feelings
I was more of a watcher of movies than I was an anime fan. Strangely enough for a lot of people, Wolf Children was actually one of my first encounters with the anime industry a few years ago. As a casual viewer, I was more than elated to say I thoroughly enjoyed the film, though there were certainly a few scenes that were problematic. However, a few years later and after a rewatch, I had garnered some thoughts of mine about this film. As a viewer, I’d still continue to like the film, but as a critic (personal anyways), I had a few things I’d
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like to opine about the film. It’s by no means a bad film, but it had its fair share of problematic scenes that is veiled behind its aesthetically pleasing scenes.
I’ll guess I’d go with a couple of pros first to show my appreciation for this film so this review of mine wouldn’t be downright asinine for some people. Mamoru Hosoda’s movies had a special kind of design when it comes to his characters, on first sight it feels like an overly simplistic design with minimal amount of approach when it comes to drawing the characters’ faces. But after finished watching the movies and a few years of watching anime, I’ve definitely come to cherish the designs, its minimal shading and lighter tones allows greater freedom to express the character’s facial emotions, enables a more fluid approach for the characters to convey their facial expressions rather than a downright generic anime character with large dead fish eyes and facial responses that resembled cupboards then actual humans. That’s definitely worthy of praise in my humble opinion. Another would be the establishing shots of the film. The film, under the directing of Hosoda had no major problems when it comes to directing (expected of Hosoda), it had really amazing establishing shots, some of them includes Hana’s husband transformation into a wolf, or the shot when Hana moved to a countryside and the slow reveal of the house and the surrounding environment is an engrossing experience mingled with its beautifully constructed cinematography. Hosoda had his own quirks in directing films, notably his tendencies to include cumulonimbus clouds, weathers that largely take place in summer for his settings and aesthetics. At first sight it seems banal, but Hosoda had his style when it comes to handling the vibrant atmosphere of summer, rather than resorting to simple propensities of including sounds of cicada for the umpteenth time, he would usually focus on the portrayal of floating white clouds which is contrasted with the skies and usually, his portrayal of joyful characters. In an interview, Hosoda had voiced his opinion about his proneness to include summer days to emphasise on character growth, and I’m inclined to agree with that. His films, Summer Wars and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time had usually utilised this background subtly to complement the character’s growth and it’s wholly commendable. Before going through the cons, let’s have a brief introduction to the rough plotline of our story here. Hana's life as a single mother is difficult, after the death of her beloved husband who died tragically while having wolf instincts of hunting for his children. Yuki and Ame constantly switch between their human and wolf forms, bearing extreme similarities with wolves and lack of a child’s normal behaviours and quirks other than superficial traits of having human faces, etc., and Hana has to hide them from the world. After she receives complaints from neighbours of the rambunctious noises and a visit from social workers concerned that her children had not received any sort of vaccinations, Hana moves the family to the countryside away from prying neighbors, to keep her family’s private life secured at all cost. She struggles to repair a dilapidated house and essayed multiple failed attempts in planting crops. With help from an old man named Nirasaki, she finally learns how to farm adequately and efficiently and becomes friends with some of the locals. I’ll start with the first and most troublesome part of the film. The personage in particular, Hana. I view Hana’s struggles as a mother to be particularly interesting and worth exploring, but what the script rewarded me was something that confused me, and subconsciously repelled me in my rewatch a few days ago. It was exacerbated by the tendentious themes the film was trying to depict, but ultimately failed by a long milestone. Gundam’s creator, Yoshiyuki Tomino had complimented the film as being ‘realistic’ and ‘surrealistic’ in the depiction of ‘character’ and ‘atmosphere’ respectively and had launched a new worldview in the anime industry and hailed it as a new milestone. Needless to say, I’d vehemently disagree with Tomino on this. I’d refer to Hana as a caricature, or a framework, or at best a lesser character in the form of the film’s personage, rather than calling her a ‘realistic’ characterization of a single parent. Tomino obviously had no idea when it comes to the depiction of realistic single parents. Hosoda’s films had its problems when it comes to character development, most of his characters are presented as joyful, vibrant, positive and overly exuberant in nature. But when it comes to Hana, his approach to her character is caricaturistic in depiction. The movie was marketed as a portrayal of a single mother raising two wolf children who have different personalities and even more varying instincts of wolves that are contradictory to humans. Coming from an Asian backdrop, I could quickly identify the grotesque nature of the film; it's one of the most conservative viewpoints of asian communities towards a ‘mother’. Caring, utterly kind and loves her family unconditionally. Hosoda, in the film, seemingly created Hana simply to convey the message of a mother unconditionally loving her family, rather than developing the idea that a single mother struggles under the soul-crushing pressure of raising a kid, much less two children with wolf blood in their veins. It seemed to be upon this rewatch that Hana had only begun living in the first minute she appears, she was thoroughly empty. Hana is perfected to the core where she is no longer human, she can instantaneously tolerate her conditions, she never complains and would always be ready to adapt to her environment. That’s a caricature, where a trait of mother’s ‘loving nature’ is taken for granted, Hana never faced any mental issues or problems even under extreme pressure: (How to vaccinate her children? Would her children be discovered in school? Would their natural instincts surge and appear?) Did she have no family? Friends? Acquaintances? Any sort of relation other than his werewolf husband? Why did she automatically accept raising her two wolf children as her sole life mission? Did she have no other hobbies with no other personality trait other than being kind and caring towards her children? Did she exist solely to take care of the two children? It’s trite. Threadbare by stripling Hana down to a few basic traits. As aforementioned, I’ve stated Hana was predominantly empty. I would rather call Hana as a stereotype of a thought experiment than referring to her as a person. How would a mother who loves her family unconditionally raise two wolf children? And not ‘How would a single mother raise two wolf children?” Precisely that she is empty, and hence she could resort to loving her children unconditionally without questioning their compatibility, until she was developed into a perfect mother that is no longer realistic. In her book about poverty that exists within single parents, Michiyo Nishimori mentioned the film briefly and argued that the depiction of single parents is inherently flawed. Hosoda wanted her character to be perfect, hardworking and accepting no matter how hard the situation is. And that’s precisely the same thing that most single mothers can never hope to accomplish. I’m inclined to agree with that. As someone who had a friend of mine who was raised by a single parent, the condition is not as good as the film portrayed, and there are numerous shots emphasised on Hana struggling to take care of her children and after a few struggles she was able to accomplish anything. Raising her children, tending her family, no longer lingering over her feelings for her deceased partner, moving, farming. All are accomplished with a minimal amount of struggling and suffering without complaints. It seemed to me a grotesque characterization of Hana, not depicting the suffering of a single mother, but the romanticization of suffering as to how Hana could ‘manage’ every obstacle possible. It may seem that I’m making myself a fastidious lout who mumbles over the minutiae details of the film, but some of the details of the film would cause an jarringly obvious misfire in the film, in my opinion. This theme is taken way too moralistic to the extreme, and I would have the conjecture that this lesson the movie was trying to convey resembles a dying satyr, it has a mind of deep thought and serious inquiries, yet the flimsy and spindly legs are failing to support the weight of the ambitious brain. It needs more proofreading and reflections. Though I had pet peeves with Hana’s choice of characterization and her husband’s lack of distinct and distinguishable character persona, I’d reserve a great deal of praise for the script revolving around the two children. Even though it’s predictable for the storylines, it presents causality in a film script pretty neatly. Two of the wolf children faces choices, makes decisions, the decisions had an ultimate impact on their outcome and it shaped them as different persons in the end. It was wrapped up nicely and I found the change of Ame from a timid boy exploring his insecurities as a wolf boy (the part where he discussed with his mother about the depiction of wolves in fairytales was particularly visceral and melancholic) to a grown wolf who became the guardian of the forest to be really great. The same goes for Yuki, though I would question the choice of giving some sort of ‘romantic notion’ by giving her another plotline that concerns another boy of similar age, which I found to be underwhelming since her personal connection with the boy was half-baked and scant in the large sense. But alas, it didn’t take away the character development of Yuki if we were to take into account the overall plot of the film and I’d praise her characterisation. However, the final act of the film was a bit sleazy and overly melodramatic for the sake of inserting a dramatic sequence in the film. It was eccentric to add the part where the mother questioned herself whether she had done enough for her son in the forest where it is raining, and cried for her son who she thought might have abandoned her. That part had further thrown Hana’s character into the dustbin yet again, as that line was not coming from the character but rather as the writer’s mouthpiece in an attempt for Hana to develop a trait of her everlasting ‘self-doubt’ that the film thought that it ‘subtly’ integrated. There are a few reasons that I don’t particularly enjoy this. First of all, it’s his son who seemingly ditched his mother there, yet Hana who took care of them carefully without complaints seemingly took the blame yet again, which is honestly banal and contradicts what the film had previously shown. A selfless and loving mother that Hana was. Or else not even the insecure Ame would have love his mother so much while he was still a little kid. Two, it further undermines Hana’s possibility of ever becoming a character that is ‘human’ in nature. She carried whatever her weight herself, and laments over how she had done inadequately, when she had raised her two kids, one to become a capable human, another to be a naturally grown wolf? How? Again the writers had butchered her by deifying her into some sort of mother who was far too loving and never questioned her son’s actions or behaviour. It’s relentless in the film, and it contradicts itself again by having her forget that her daughter was in the school trapped by a typhoon which could be potentially dangerous for her to spend almost a night there. Did they proofread this? Or did they have her intentionally forget her daughter so her daughter could have a side plot line as well? That’s wholly unnecessary and a surprising discrepancy that undermines Hana’s character while trying to develop Yuki. Overall, it’s a 6 for me. It had its great moments (editing, directing, sound), but a large part of writing had its issues for it to be completely overshadowed by the pros, but it’s largely enjoyable. So I hope to see how Hosoda improves his movies with Belle, which I’m looking forward to watching in the future.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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