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Oct 6, 2020
I have a replica of one of Matisse's Blue Women perched up on my wardrobe, watching me sleep. She was made by my ex, whom I still see often and like very much, and it reclines with a natural grace against an almost empty clay pot and a very old Winnie the Pooh teddy bear. In that context Matisse is a warm hug, the smell of cumin, the feeling of a sleeping cat on one's legs. Even in the gallery, where Matisse often loses something, he rarely feels less than pleasant.
Play Jazz renders Matisse in such a way, with the stuttering motion and the scanlines,
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that his aesthetic is transposed into a hideous 80s corporate gothic. The move is a vital and bold one simply as an act of resetting the familiar, but the film does barely any work in selling me on this and rather I feel as though it's my own brain that has come up with all of the beauty. I could have done the same thing by walking over to the abandoned textile factory and standing by the big pile of burnt out TVs coated in the colourful spray paint of graffiti. I don't normally like dismissing art as not worth my time on the basis that it doesn't provide me with something unique; I'd struggle to justify listening to so much jungle if that were the case. Something about the choice of jazz as subject matter justifies my low score here: Bechet's fantastic solo cannot be corporatised so easily, and it makes the aesthetic I describe above feel incomplete. The film is better than most would give it credit for, but it's not enough for me.
Reviewer’s Rating: 2
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Jun 18, 2020
In a technical sense, Miyazaki's speciality is lending animation the sense of a real space that live action has. He maps out imaginary spaces via the movement of characters or the virtual camera through that space, and Princess Mononoke for a long time I felt was a lesser work of his since it largely ignores this aspect of his film-making. This is in fact not true—the film’s cinematography aligns with its narrative and emphasises margins and thresholds. One of the first images of the film, the first to involve magic anyway, is when Ashitaka and Yakul converge on the outskirts of their village and trace
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a path along the dry stone wall that separates ground of different elevations. The second magical image is the boar demon struggling to cross the threshold of shade into the dazzling sunlight, stopping dead for a spell as he is bathed in light and the wriggling blight tortures him in its pain.
Most of the most striking images in the film are like this for me. Shots of convoys on precarious cliff faces, a valley fortress on the water's edge, characters connecting across a river. The astonishing image of flowers sprouting at the fall of Godly hooves is more in line with the intentional conceptual content of the film’s narrative, but as amazing as these spiritual images are they are what best demonstrates the tension that stops this film being among the very best that Miyazaki made. Princess Mononoke is so concerned with the margins that the divisions it creates can never be healed, and so when it comes time to venerate nature it does so in a cursed sense. For all its moral struggle it eventually fails to reconcile humanity and nature, and what ought to be (and in practise is) a tragic story without proper resolution is treated as though it isn’t. I think I love the film, since I happen to love Miyazaki, and the tragedy of its frustrated effort to love too many things at once is extremely moving. It can’t affirm any transcendent spiritual philosophy in the way Ponyo and Howl’s Moving Castle can though. The contradictions make it too human to be spiritual.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 30, 2020
I think Advent Children reveals that the artist is more honest when they refuse to attempt to fabricate the experience of being in combat. There is the historical idea of being in a suit of armour with a sword in your hand ready to get slain by Frenchmen, and there are films that involve sword fighting, and the two are necessarily totally divorced from one another. Gritty realist fantasy will always fail to properly immerse because no matter how close to reality the art gets there is a necessary structural barrier to true experience that comes with viewing an object, like a film, as art.
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Abstraction comes with its own structural barriers but the abstract work normally much more honest about its true purpose. Cloud's sword is SOOOO BIIIIG, right? How does he swing it around so fast?
The Star Wars prequels were criticised for their handling of the lightsaber fights by some because the film makers chose to have the swords weigh as much the light, which eschewed the realism of a actual melee that the original trilogy seemed to gestured toward. The complaint was that the new fights looked flashy but with nothing visceral to ground them. There are three good reasons why in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith the duel between Anakin and Obi-Wan feels weightless, the first is that their swords are literally made of light. The second is so that the movement of the bodies of the characters, which are ostensibly real things made of flesh that have weight even in universe, can dissolve and become one with their surroundings. The uncanny plastic of the lava and the light beam swords for a while bleeds into the only real things on the screen and renders them one with the world they live in. Ignoring the silliness of midichlorians, it finally involves the Jedi as people in the divine mysticism of The Force by turning them into spirits.
The third is that it's cool.
Advent Children of course doesn't have anything real in it at all. Even the narrative itself, which was criticised for being full of non-sequiturs and constant hopping through time, makes no concessions to the logic of cause and effect in either the conventional dramatic sense or its real life operation. The only concessions Advent Children makes to anything tangible are its cryptic references to the probably more coherent narrative of the game (which perhaps crucially to my enjoyment of this film I have never played and know little about) and the way it blends so many different settings and tropes from reality and other media together. The stark unreality of every single constituent part of the film is liberating because it lets the things within the frame move at the speed of thought. The sword fights DO feel without stakes, but that isn't a bad thing! There is no palpable scent of sweat and blood and steel in the air, because Tetsuya Nomura is a modern man and he doesn't know what those things smell like. He isn't interested in doing that sort of art. In the same way that Star Wars involved the Jedi into its in-universe mystical backdrop briefly, Advent Children does a decent enough job of executing the tight balancing act of making every aspect of its world feel involved in the mystical Life Stream for its entire run time. The settings happily feel disconnected and lonely in the way that separate video games maps feel from the hub world, the objects that populate the settings are an empty sort of rarefied matter, and even the way Tifa climbs the stairs in her bar looks like a kind of combat dance. The film opens with a smokey cloud-scape and sustains that image perpetually.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Apr 21, 2020
"Simon! Your drill is meant to dig towards the heavens!"
Kamina's savant skill in motivating those around him produces sentences like these rather often in Gurren Lagann. Within the scope of the narrative the characters learn not to take their meaning literally, and just instead absorb the sentiment. What would it mean to take this literally though? Drilling upwards through the ground is a familiar aspect of tunnelling but it takes only the first episode for this familiarity to evaporate. Once Simon and Kamina leave their pit they have to start drilling upwards through the air, or more accurately, through nothing.
The scene where they first emerge
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from underground and take in the majesty of the surface is beautiful not because we can finally take in the majesty of the surface, but because the characters feel that it is beautiful. The scene symbolically embodies the wonder felt by the characters, and the moment manages to endear itself to us in this way, but it surely means something other to us than to the underground villagers. Gurren Lagann largely lacks an audience surrogate, and the buffer between our own expectations of how the characters will go on in the future to realise their cosmic endowment and their own blind struggle against the immediate forces constricting them in the present produces an irresistible, mythic simplicity. In fact, the panorama shot of their new frontier reveals the extent to which the setting of Gurren Lagann is physically empty. The surface is barren, and we get no sense that this is fertile ground to be explored or conquered. It isn't, and the blankness is important. The continent of dull sandstone upon which the campaign against the beastmen is played out is less a setting than it is a field or a medium.
The conceptual power of the spiral motif in Gurren Lagann is that it suggests that from an infinitesimally small point, motion and drive can produce infinity. Little by little, we advance with each turn. When this motif is coupled symbolically with the drill as a weapon we get a physical and visceral image of a tool boring through a surface, but dwelling on the abstract spiral shape without this symbolic coupling instead provokes the mind into extrapolation. Extrapolation from what we have is what drives the wonder in Gurren Lagann. The immediate impulse of resistance without the spirit diluting influence of pragmatism forms the objective ground from which we extrapolate the ultimate destiny of the characters. We yearn for the destruction of the Malthusian menace of Father Magin / Lordgenome / Rossiu / The Anti-Spiral, the impossible liberation from evil without concession and compromise. The path ahead is totally open and dreamy, and only the path behind has any concrete grounding in the logic of material law. Once Simon traverses the ground it becomes trivial and earthly—it reveals itself as simply more dirt that had to be scooped away. The path ahead always seems like heaven.
Gurren Lagann never tries to be more than human. When the scope is as large as we apes can possibly understand, the dizzying expansion has to break. You can't get to the infinite by thinking about the spiral spinning, like a Zeno's paradox you have to skip ahead conceptually, over arbitrarily large regions of contiguous space or actually achievable action, straight to the end. When we eventually have to make that jump, signalled by the flashing of infinity, the blankness of the setting feels like a stage as, from out of the impossibly massive golem, steps a man who has done the impossible and need do nothing else.
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Jan 4, 2019
(3 is a good score more, see my profile)
I am very comfortable rating this higher than both Fullmetal Alchemist and Samurai Champloo.
The clue is in the name people: Rhythm. Yesterday, the 3rd of January, was my Birthday, after unfortunately getting up at 5am to go to work I decided to spend the rest of it with my family exercising my identity as an avant-weeaboo. While in a really very good Japanese restaurant I told to my Mum why I think Haiku is a symbol of the insidious influence of Western capitalist jingoism on Japanese (nationalist) culture and why I don't often care for overly literary
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films. I think I remember vaguely alluding to the first point pretty well in my recent Ponyo review so here I will vaguely allude to the second one.
"At Darmstadt I was talking about the reason back of pulverization and fragmentation: for instance, using syllables instead of words in a vocal text, letters instead of syllables. I said, “We take things apart in order that they may become the Buddha. And if that seems too Oriental an idea for you,” I said, “Remember the early Christian Gnostic statement, 'Split the stick and there is Jesus!’ ”"
- John Cage, Indeterminacy 1959
John Cage by this means that we take an art down to its syllables: sounds that have no meaning - and then from there we may choose to build them back into words, which do have meaning, or we may choose to do something quite different with them. We may indeed choose to build a kind of mechanism, something which does not mean anything but whirrs and wiggles in its way and ends up resembling nothing but what it is, which may be very beautiful. I'm not entirely sure what the syllables of a film are: it may be frames, but they are essentially just paintings or photographs. It may be Time, according to my other aesthetic hero Andrei Tarkovsky. If it is that wholly abstract thing, time, then our brains might need to get a grip on it via its handholds, the rhythm of a shot. In any moving picture there will be some degree of churning, the bits and pieces probably have some kind of direction, a cardinal direction that is. They move from some region of the screen to another, or from an imaginary point off screen to an different imaginary point off screen, and happen to pass through the part we can see.
This film consists of nothing but bits and pieces moving in a direction, and though it is only two minutes long and truth be told not exactly good enough to totally warrant this spiel I have written, I think it is a good example of "something quite different" built from the syllables of film.
Review Epilogue:
This film has a really neat soundtrack. It's an electronic offering by a man/entity known only to me as POL. If you have any information about this man/entity then please message me about them.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Jan 1, 2019
The story to Angel's Egg doesn't matter. I like to think of it as a sort of visual poetry, because the actual narrative substance of this film comes from its casual arrangement of ostensibly profound symbols in a way that doesn't suggest any kind of traditional story. If that sounds pretentious let me dispel that notion: This film is actually pretty simple and isn't "deep" in the way that a one would expect a layered/meta-textual narrative to be.
(Montage in film is the idea that you arrange various images together to create a collage of shots, so that the images all come together to create a
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composite work of art. A controversial take on this practise (and one I agree with in most cases but not quite all) is that it is a failure to create a spiritually rich art, because it reduces """"poetry"""" to a formalistic exercise in concise storytelling. Poetry is similar to montage because words, like images, have some kind of inherent meaning to them from the outset, and then when you combine them a composite art appears. With this in mind...)
This film uses traditional montage but it's a much less coherent affair than anything that Sergei Eisenstein would consider effective. The thing that really interests me is that way that it emulates poetry, non formalistic use of montage. In any given twenty minute segment of this film is looked at we might see:
Man ............ Fear ................ Fish .........
Food ........... Water ..............War ..........
Sleep .......... Shelter..............Religion......
Which are all essentially perennial ideas that permeate through all of human culture, but the art of suggestion in this film is that you can combine them how you like. It's like a fuzzy-felt fable. Anyone can watch it and get whatever they like out of it - religious stuff, gender stuff, motherhood stuff, pulpy post apocalypse story stuff, inconsequential visual spectacle because it's by Yoshitaka Amano and Mamoru Oshii so of course it looks gorgeous.
It might seem like it takes itself too seriously for this interpretation, but in light of all I have just said I choose to ignore that and just think of it how I want to. The film of affirmation!
Reviewer’s Rating: 9
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Nov 25, 2018
Recent reading has convinced me that film does not usually suit being treated like a 'mechanical' or 'immediate medium', in the way music and painting are or can immediate because of their independence from representation. Film, by nature of the camera capturing actual imagery, does not have this freedom, so the best films treat the content of the frame as a kind of poetry which requires the audience to place it within the context of their experience to make it beautiful. Animation doesn't really work the same way though; it can be truly a mechanical art because rather than showing us life in motion it
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can just show only motion instead, the way a dance also can. The life is often incidental, and takes a back seat to pure visceral catharsis of motion. The reason this film is interesting to me is that it jumps in between this meaningless immediate style of artistry and the more traditional film style, which is subservient to our understanding of the images.
Two animation cuts are sublime: The car, which is entirely too small to properly contain the men within, rides up an almost vertical hill and is filled with leaves and birds which creates a furious maelstrom of green and red, within which the drivers thrash around. Lupin, dressed in scuba gear and swimming stealthily through a pipe, is spat out into a chamber and to avoid falling he frantically tries to swim breast stroke up the stream, and does so in total silence, before eventually succumbing to the pull of gravity and dropping like a rock.
Both of these cuts rest on the imagery within, otherwise they wouldn't function as visual comedy, and both also only work based on their utilisation of the free movement of animation. They are both small miracles within the wider context of the film, which is certainly very good even for me who doesn't usually care much about silly adventure movies.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Aug 28, 2018
(4/10 is a good score for me, see my profile)
Wonder isn't particularly visually mind bending, in fact I imagine anyone watching this has seen similar blobby animated doodles in the past, either as little animated gifs or as more properly realised flash animations on Newgrounds or someplace like that. It isn't boring, but since I am such a visually minded person when it comes to film criticism I was naturally drawn to the mechanical process of the movement, and in that respect the film doesn't blow me away. It's merely quite pretty.
What distinguishes this one is that it's hand drawn and that it was made
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over the course of a year, with 24 frames being drawn in one day as a strict timetable. That it was hand drawn does not interest me in the slightest, but the strict structuring of development is actually quite interesting to me as it brings out the devices of improvisation and the process of shifting interests.
Essentially the film is a fascinating visual diagram of animator Mizue's trains of thought, in that his imagination is captured for a few days or a week maybe on one specific idea before moving on to another. One idea is a series of colourful amorphous blobs drifting without purpose until they are dissected by a rigid spike running around in a circle, but then a second later it all dissolves and a new idea emerges. Perhaps not all the ideas are visually captivating, but some of them are and anyway the cycle of their inception and then retirement is more than enough to make this short worth watching regardless.
The ending segment makes me want to see Mizue tackle paint-on-film animation, as it reminded me of The Dante Quartet by Stan Brakhage.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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May 9, 2018
It opens with a hand, covering a lens. Shots in films are constrained by the moment the editor begins and ends the cut, the long shot might seek to produce a dreamlike effect by holding the gaze for longer than one can bear, or the shots can go by quickly and in turn bring these margins into the forefront and make them the subject of the shot. Ito's hand does this in a comical or playful way. Here's a margin, he says. In stop motion every single frame is separated by cuts, the filmmaker chooses to use his trickery to lend the scene a sense
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of continuity. But here's some black space to chop the shot, Ito says, and he puts his hand in front of the camera.
Anyway enough of that heady preaching. This one is interesting because it's in a way humorously sinister, in that it all seems so on the nose. I could see myself hating it for this reason but I suppose I have a soft spot for Ito's impeccable sense of style. It just works, and it's lots of fun.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Feb 16, 2018
This film is littered with references. Setsuko Hara of course is the obvious inspiration but the film has way too many for a baka gaijin like me to catch all of them. One that I liked a lot is the use of the ghostly old weaver, which in and of itself is a part of Japanese folklore but the setup in this film explicitly references Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. This kind of homage is nice, and of course thematically appropriate given the subject, but it does contribute slightly to the disconnect I feel between the subject and the medium.
See, my motive for opening
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the review by talking specifically about the references to film is to draw attention to why this disconnect appears. Early Kon films I think are too caught up in traditional live action film techniques, and there's not enough attention paid to the specific features of the medium of animation. I don't care for Perfect Blue at all, and while it would be too much of a simplification to blame my dislike of it on Kon's awkward application of learned techniques from traditional film to the medium of animation I have no choice but to diagnose that as my most major gripe, if only to make this review more elegantly written.
I don't want to be too harsh a critic, but because the emotional beats of Millennium Actress are so brilliant I feel I ought to point out what I think is wrong with the film in order to justify giving it a 5/10 (a good score for me, see my profile). The montage scene leading up to the climax on the moon is stunning, maybe better than the any scene from his best film, Paprika. The voice acting is great but the character animations are even better, they're so emotionally expressive that they really manage to sell what would otherwise be quite a hokey melodrama.
Millennium Actress does begin to move towards a kind of animation-centric filmmaking though, the kind that Kon had really mastered by the time of Paprika. Much of the film is built around match cuts which utilise the freedom that animation can provide, and also the use of using the space outside the frame playfully to move in and out of "film view" and "memory view" is neat.
Now, Kon is a clever dude. I don't have to tell you this I expect. The film isn't just a melodrama, it's also a psychological drama, firstly in the obvious way that much of it is played out through memory, but also in that the central MacGuffin of the key and the artist is used to interweave the trope of the distant love with the idea of the unattainable object, a structure in psychology also known as the objet petit a. Part of the reason I couldn't justify giving this a higher score is that this interweaving is very messy. I feel like if Kon had been a bit more of a Bergman nerd as well as an Ozu nerd this could have been executed better. Perhaps he is a Bergman nerd, that was just me also making a classic movie reference, I hope you enjoyed it.
In any case, it's a very good film. It confuses me that this is so much less critically acclaimed and loved than Perfect Blue. I can't think of a single metric in which it isn't far superior.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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