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Feb 3, 2018
Recently translated into English for the first time, Sequence is a highly evocative buried treasure that excels in communicating its simple themes through its audio-visual presentation. Plot wise, it presents an interesting fusion of time-travel, reincarnation and shoujo romance. This makes it somewhat unique, and perhaps more interesting to those who may find straight romance stories to be lacking in imaginative appeal. Knowing nothing about it going in, I was pleasantly surprised; it seems like a lot of care was put into this ova.
Sequence is very melancholic, dealing with longing for lost memories and connections, and using the synergy between its shot composition, art style
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and soundtrack to highlight those feelings. The music in particular is breath taking, especially the solo flute scores that were inserted in as being played by one of the main characters. The animation is always competent, but there is little in the way of animation spectacle. All the backgrounds are very understated, but lush and pleasant to look at at the same time. I particularly liked the character designs and their color palettes, which were simple but highly effective – they all consistently looked great and well differentiated from one another so to represent their place in the story.
The story was generally well paced, and only focusing on four characters allowed us to get a pretty good idea of who they all were. Many of their interactions were genuinely touching. The utilization of reincarnation and time travel in the plot was effective, and the way that they integrated these elements was appropriate for the tone of the story and its themes. One criticism I have is that it seems that the plot resolved too quickly. It would have been more emotionally effective if they built up to the conclusion for a bit longer – it felt like a small piece of the story was missing. This would have also allowed us to develop the personalities of the characters more, which would have been a bonus. I also find that the reveal that punctuates the conclusion is fairly predictable, though still quite effective. Sequence is not an amazing story, but it is a coherent and well crafted one.
Fans of shoujo anime and beautiful, slow paced, ovas ought to check this out. It is definitely too short to tell its story as well as it could have. But I imagine that that is just an issue of adapting a 5 volume manga into a 40 minute ova. Perhaps this was something more like a love letter to fans of manga, or an advertisement for it, as some old ovas tended to be. If you have 40 minutes to kill and want to delve into some obscure high quality shoujo you could do much worse than Sequence.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Dec 31, 2017
Golgo 13 is an underappreciated classic by the great Osamu Dezaki, one of the most important figures in anime history. Golgo 13 excels in not just one way, but in three. First of all, this movie is a masterwork of nihilistic neo-noir pulp. Secondly it is an auteur art-house film by a truly visionary director. Finally, it is a poignant meditation on the nature of evil. The three elements are all delivered masterfully and tie into one another with incredible coherency.
Golgo is a stoic assassin with little to no personality. He exists to kill and get paid for it, and is always inexpressive and cold.
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He has allies and business partners, who he is reliable to, but there is no warmth in any of his interactions, even with the women he beds. He is entirely amoral – killing is merely his business, he is empty. People often criticize the movie and this character for just that – Golgo is not really a human being; he is an amoral power fantasy, unspoiled by any sort of accessible charm or sentimentalism. Dezaki was willing to play this character straight, despite him being entirely unsuitable as a protagonist for standard movie goers, who look to empathize with their ‘heroes’, or at least enjoy the appealing side of an anti-hero.
There are no heroes in the world of Golgo, at most there are victims and victimizers. Every sequence exemplifies a grimy, desperate and corrupt late 70s dystopic atmosphere. Even bright scenes seem uncomfortably abrasive, as the light is always blinding and hard, and every landscape and person we see seems worn out. The music simultaneously has a kind of suave groove to it while sounding tragic, rough, and pained. At the moment I write this review I am listening to the song featured in the ending credits “Golgo 13 & I”, featuring a sexy bemoaned chorus of “kill me, kill me once again” set to dirty jazzy J-Rock. It is incredibly evocative and fitting, as is the whole score.
The story is paced and written bluntly, without any subtlety, and the plot itself is a simplistic sequence of violent and cruel events. The film achieves its powerful atmosphere with its absolute minimalism and willingness to abandon regular story telling conventions to maintain the purity of its vision of nihilistic cruelty. This is the ultimate exemplification of unmediated, brutal pulp, filled to brim with sex, violence (sexual violence as well) and hyper stoic masculinity. The world this film presents feels real enough that you can practically smell the cigarette smoke and gaudy cologne, and hear the tired desperate moans of its people as you watch it. I would liken it to an earlier take on Umetsu’s highly controversial and powerful “A Kite” in terms of its tone.
At times character animation is used wonderfully to tell us what we need to know about characters without excessive dialogue, and the depictions of the characters are always highly detailed, often utilizing four or five tone shading for maximum dynamic effect that always matches with the inventive color palettes used to highlight the scenes' mood. Golgo also utilizes a heavy use of hatching on the characters, which adds on an extra layer of grime to their presentation. The character designs themselves are hyper realistic, and Dezaki makes his women voluptuous and far more sexy and cunning than cute, something that makes me think of the female characters in Kawajiri works like Wicked City and Midnight Eye: Gokuu ,who have a similar aesthetic to them.
What is most important about this film is that here Dezaki had come to perfect the style of limited animation that made him such a revolutionary figure in the industry back in the 70s (perhaps I will take this back upon seeing more of Dezaki’s later works, but this is clearly his style in its maturity). His sense of conveying atmosphere through color design and shot composition is unmatched here – as nearly every shot (not just scene, but shot) in this film is perfectly crafted to convey what it needs to. Dezaki uses visual motifs of reflective surfaces, blinding light work, and surrealistic, psychedelic, and nightmarish moments of emotional and physical impact to leave you breathless at every turn. This is of course also full of Dezaki’s signature postcard memories (sometimes in rapid fire), split screen sequences, and his use of complex background layering and motion to create immersive locations through the illusion of the parallax effect. Visually this is an auteur’s playground, and for this alone it could be considered a masterpiece, since Dezaki’s visionary approach has in many ways never been matched.
However, there is 30 seconds of atrocious 1980s CGI that this movie has become famous for. At the very least the CGI sequence has an appropriate color design for the film, but the models used in the sequence are laughable. Still, 30 seconds out of a 90 minute movie is easy enough to excuse. The intro also utilized CGI, but surprisingly it worked well. It also really goes to show the degree to which Dezaki was willing to use this film as a playground for experimentation in animation. It is also worth mentioning that while structurally it is mostly successful there is an argument to be made for it overloading the story while new elements in the final third, which does make it seem like certain elements from the manga were thrown in just for the sake of appeasing fans, although it made the film less effective than it could have been.
Finally, there is the thematic core of the film. In aphorism 146 of ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ Friedrich Nietzsche stated that “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” And nothing could more accurately convey the philosophical underpinnings of this meditation on human evil and resentiment.
The main antagonist Dawson lost his son to Golgo, and the plot is based around Dawson’s attempt at revenge against Golgo. Golgo may be a monster, but he is an empty one, he is less than human. In contrast Dawson is the one who shows immensely human emotional outbursts and is constantly in a frenzy of pain and hatred throughout the film. Dawson becomes a far more horrifying monster than Golgo because of how human and relateable he is in his emotional agony, resentiment, and his need for revenge, and through his actions he winds up as even more empty and despicable than the man who he initially felt righteous indignation towards. Anyone who has comprehended the monstrous actions and attitudes of "righteous victims" throughout history and in our current historical moment will understand how much truth this message conveys.
Golgo 13 is to my understanding the highest selling manga of all time, with its main demographic being an older male audience. It is something of a cult classic that has never really broken into the North American market. I cannot speak for the rest of the franchise, but Dezaki has caught my interest in the franchise through this flim.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Oct 15, 2017
There isn't much to say about Iczelion. This will probably be hit or miss with most people. Personally, Hirano's character designs are some of my favorites and I am a sucker for hot blooded, fun mecha shows with women as the protagonists. "Fight!! Iczer 1" is one of my favorite anime, and I had fun with this alternate take on that story.
The powered armors in this series are all really cool - and give off a kind of Super Sentai vibe to me. The fight choreography is very good and the visual direction in general is stylish and effective. The antagonists looked pretty goofy, but
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I thought that they suited the tone of the series well. The art was not amazing for an OVA, but it was still quite good. The music was good as well. There is nothing interesting going on with characters and plot, but there is nothing bad about what is being done there either. Developing those features simply were not the point with this title. The girls have a bit of personality, but there are no real character arcs save the 'mc', and she also had a funny quirk that made the battles even more entertaining in a goofy fun way. The show ends without resolving the plot, I assume that it was canceled.
I suspect that this mainly appeals to a small niche, but if you loved any of the other Iczer anime, Hirano's character designs, enjoy watching 90s anime girls fighting in powered armor, and just want to have fun for an hour, you could do much worse than Iczelion. If the premise, anime that is just meant to be fun instead of deep, and art style, does'nt appeal to you then there is very little here for you, and it would be best to skip it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Oct 13, 2017
"Windaria" is a gorgeous original fantasy film from 1986, featuring breathtaking art and kinematic animation sequences as its primary strengths. This movie seems to have been riding the wave of industry optimism about high budget and highly artistic anime films, following the success of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind" and "Macross: Do You Remember Love?" in 1984. Likewise, many of scenes involving hover vehicles reminds one of the masterful scene flow that one can find in the action sequences in the 1984 OVA "Birth": as we are shown rapidly morphing background shots around detailed vehicle motion from different perspectives – making even a
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simple ride through a forest seem exciting. That’s right, I said hover vehicles. This is not so much a sword and sorcery styled fantasy as it is something that resembles steampunk in some ways, but is probably best left not being labeled.
"Windaria" has a simple and effective story with a very clear and unambiguous sense of morality and narrative direction, which (for me at least) gives off a kind of healthy naivety, being viewed now in an age where moral ambiguity has become almost more standard and safe in film than utilizing more traditional notions of moral dualism, and excessive plot twists are used to cover up a lack of interesting ideas.
The shot composition and audio-visual directing is masterful. There is allot of animation – and every scene uses its masterful sense of motion to convey just the right emotion for it. Every movement is powerfully expressive and well conceived. The music choices are always appropriate and add on a lot to the scenes. Heavy exposition is not needed to explain what the emotions of the characters in a scene are – almost everything is laid bare through the audio-visual presentation, and just about every scene in this movie becomes supremely memorable and even sublime due to this.
The beginning of the movie gives us a long gorgeous scenic overview of the world, and it feels very much alive right off the bat. The color palette is lively, playful, and soft in these opening scenes, and the beginning of the movie presents us with a naive and joyful world, one that sadly is about to be torn apart due to unchecked ambition and jealousy. As we are introduced to the antagonists it is made entirely clear, via their homeland’s color palette, their uniforms, their mannerisms, and the bleak city they inhabit – exactly who these people are. Where our protagonists live in a lush and lively world full of water and plant life, our antagonists live in a wretched lifeless mountain range, surrounded by industrial excess, squalor, and degeneracy. Where our protagonists act with a naive joy and a love of the simple pleasures of life, our antagonists live in a world of drunken antagonism, grey poverty, and brutal folly, as they operate their industrial weapons poorly and constantly cause disaster for themselves with their incompetence, merely to brush it off as if it was a matter of course. These people feel tired and jaded – their grey world has sucked them up and left them numb. Industrialism goes hand in hand with degradation. This film makes these points with very little dialogue. The antagonist’s side doesn't receive much moral condemnation from characters – we get to see exactly what is wrong with them without much commentary. It is a great example of world building that follows the maxim "show don’t tell".
The character designs are very pleasing to me, though every now and again a shot of a character will come off as slightly lacking in dynamism in comparison to how dynamic the world is, a bit more shading on the characters in some shots could be helpful. Still this hits a very nice spot between total realism and cartoonish abstraction, focusing on excellent bodily anatomic detail mixed with larger eyes and a more abstract facial style, that works well for fantastical settings. The character designs remind me of "Genmu Senki Leda" from a year earlier. If you like character designs that exemplify the archetype of 80s proto-Moe then these will probably hit the spot for you.
This movie could have benefited from a slightly longer run time. Our characters develop in a sensible way, but it does feel like the development happens too abruptly at times, as if we missed a few scenes that showed the route they took to get from point A to point B. Likewise, certain thematic elements that were explored at the end could have been tackled with a bit more clarity.
Likewise, the film has two major character arcs/plot lines. Either cutting one of them out, or having more run time to explore both of them in more depth would have been a bit more effective. We could have gotten a stronger sense of who these characters are this way as well. But these are very minor problems considering that the goals of the film are far more oriented around immersive world building and aesthetic emotional power than the story or the character’s personalities.
If you like fantasy, high budget anime films with an impressive degree of audio-visual mastery, a highly effective “show don’t tell” delivery, hyper-kinematic action sequences ( and hyper-kinematic romance and drama sequences at that) and genuinely immersive and sublime world building – then "Windaria" is absolutely for you. If you are coming off of a "Nausicaa" high and want something slightly derivative, but not too much so, then this may be up your alley. The girls are pretty great too, if floofy haired 80s anime babes are your thing, that is.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Apr 16, 2017
Vifam can be best described as a show that settles upon simple concepts and focuses on executing them as well as possible. The show has a simple premise: humanity has expanded out into the galaxy and has come into contact with an alien race, over time war broke out between humanity and them, a group of children( from ages 4 to 15) got separated from their parents in the fighting, and we follow them as they go on an adventure through space to find them again. They learn to defend themselves, make hard decisions, and grow up a lot along the way.
These children and
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their development is the focal point of the show, with the ongoing war and enemy attacks providing the background needed to facilitate their growth. The children really do feel like children, and there is a prevalent slice of life element present that connects you with them all as characters. Their trials are almost as much about learning proper social interaction and dealing with their own personal challenges as it is fighting off enemy mecha and managing their spaceship. The two intertwine constantly. All the characters are well developed, and in a stroke of brilliance the show delivers a story about how children – through their need to be protected and loved by their parents, a definitive trait of children – end up maturing into heroic, independent and reliable individuals who tend to do just fine without them.
Visually this show delivers, the art is rarely if ever off model and the mecha are well designed and tend to just look plain good. At times it looks as good as you would expect an OVA to. Even the grunt units tend to be well shaded and rarely are brought about via stock footage. What is especially interesting is that the mecha are incredibly plain – just about every unit has the same set of weapons and have similar capabilities, and yet every battle is dynamic and engaging. The choreography is extremely well done, especially considering how plain the mecha and their capabilities are. The creators pulled this off by making battles multifaceted, adding in more elements than just the mecha combat, and by having a good sense of how to keep a battle visually engaging in general. Just like with the general themes and character development in this show the mecha element is simple and effective, focusing on high quality execution and not worrying about novelty or flashiness. The music is well done and achieves what it needs to. The main antagonist’s theme is really satisfying to me personally and is one of my new favorites in anime.
Vifam is an underrated gem from the golden age of mecha anime. It isn’t a flashy show at all. If anything it is the epitome of “substance over style”. If you like 80s mecha anime then this is a must see.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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