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Colorful is a touching drama about a soul who is put into the body of a young boy named Makoto, whose own soul has left his body after committing suicide. As the new Makoto has to come to terms with the sins of his past life, he has to uncover why the young boy killed himself and try to heal those wounds. At least that's what I had hoped the movie would be about, the reality is that it ends up being much simpler than that.

The large majority of this movie's problems are due to character development, or I should say the lack thereof. ... Part of the reason for Makoto killing himself was that he was emotionally distant from his family. So what does new Makoto do to become closer to them? Nothing, absolutely nothing. In fact, it is his family that try to change themselves after his suicide (or his failed suicide by their point of view). Ironically, new Makoto's sense of self-pity and judgmental personality turns him into the new source of conflict and drama in his recently acquired family. Makoto is just a cold and mean character, and he doesn't get much better as the movie progresses. I found it really hard to sympathize with him even when he was clearly designed to be a tragic character.

Another of Makoto's problems was that he had no friends. Again, new Makoto does nothing proactive to try to fix this; eventually the class idiot befriends him because he liked Makoto's shoes and happened to bump into him outside of school a few times. Perhaps I'm being too harsh, but I'm frustrated. Frustrated that the main character didn't try to change himself, frustrated that he wasn't more sympathetic. Practically everything falls into his lap with his family trying to make amends and with kids at school starting to care about him. Despite the insistence of a classmate that he has changed, I don't see it. The Makoto we see throughout the movie and the Makoto who kills himself at the start of it aren't really that different.

I can't give this movie high marks because it fails to show the real struggle with fixing broken relationships. And the ending of the movie is just the tip of a really disappointing iceberg.

There are better things to watch if you want to delve into existentialism or melodrama, go see Mushishi or Haibane Renmei and save Colorful for a rainy day.

Super Dimension Century Orguss... I was excited to start watching another anime from the person who directed Legend of the Galactic Heroes and SDF Macross, it evens looks like SDF Macross. What could possibly go wrong with this anime? Just about everything, I'm afraid.

For reasons unknown to me, the budget for this anime is noticeably lacking. For those who have seen Macross and the infamously bad Max vs. Miriya knife duel, that's about how Orguss is ALL THE TIME. Reused frames and clunky character movements run rampant and no amount of directorial magic can draw attention away from it. Your eyes will be subject to ... bleeding if you watch this anime.

What is Orguss all about then... The setting is an Earth that consists of many different versions of Earth due to a new dimensional bomb set off by the main character, Kei. Kei is transported to the future and must make the Earth right again while protecting himself from the various versions of humanity that want to use him for their own goals. Sounds good, right? Oh no, horrible memories are flooding back! One of these new "human" species look exactly the same as regular humans, except they have weird hair tentacles. This bothers Kei for about 2 seconds before he starts fawning over the sexy hair-tentacle women. The presence of the tentacles is merely so that they don't look exactly like humans, I can make this bold statement because their purpose is never mentioned throughout the rest of the show, nor do they seem to be of any use except as a reminder for them to be very careful around scissors. To add insult to injury, this beacon of evolution, the people who have easily ripped off hair-tentacles, can't have children after the age of 18. No, you did not read that wrong, every girl belonging to this species gets knocked up when they're underage. Oh, Japan...

I also have to add, in one of the early episodes Kei notes how these people don't really mourn death the same way humans do. This is not adhered to or brought up again for the rest of show. It was too hard to write in an entire one cultural difference apparently.

"Surely then," you ask, "the characters make up for it?" HAHAHAHA, did you think this would be anything like SDF Macross where there is an underlying character drama underneath the all mechs and lasers? Unfortunately, wrong. There is a vague attempt to make some melodrama by having the main character be a man-slut homewrecker, but we're saved from that horrible plot point by the convenient killing off of his competition. It's no spoiler, the guy has maybe four lines and nobody even likes him. Life lesson: infidelity is no problemo if the dude you're screwing over is a total jerk.

I can't say much about the overall direction of Orguss, there isn't much of one to begin with. Just know, basically everything ends up having no consequence and everyone but maybe three characters could not have existed and it would have all ended the same anyway.

Thanks for nothing, Orguss.

The first thing I noticed about Last Order was the change in art style. What used to be heavily stylized character designs became very boring and unoriginal. I really want to stress this because the first Battle Angel, despite some mediocre art in the beginning of the series, still managed to look freakin' awesome! The art style is kind of retained for the first volume, but it changes fast and unexpectedly. Suddenly Alita looks like she has a horse face and frog lips, and so does pretty much everyone else who looks human. They offset this by having significantly more robots and cyborgs that don't ... look like people at all, except these designs are messed up too. Somewhere along the line they must have ran out of ideas for robots because some of the new designs are absolutely hideous. In the roller ball arc of the original Battle Angel Alita, there is ONE character who looks stupid, and he happens to be a joke character.
Let me lay out some the new designs:

1. A huge monkey bot that shots lasers out of its even bigger penis
2. A shrimp bot (like the shellfish)
3. The Thing rip-off
4. A bot inside a bot inside a bot inside a bot

And this is only a taste of the ridiculous designs. So the only thing that really keeps the art score up is that it at least looks good, but that's about it.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order starts by throwing the crappy ending of the original right out the window. This is a very good thing, as the original ending was rushed and didn't make any sense at all. The sequel picks up a couple chapters before the original ending. However, Last Order quickly falls prey to the "gotta explain everything" disease. Battle Angel Alita was great because it put all its focus into the characters and the action. Last Order is like reading a Wikipedia entry about the history of the Battle Angel universe. Okay, yes, there is action and poor attempts at philosophy stuff in Last Order, but it is all ruined by interruptions from boring flashbacks of people we don't care about. All the mystery to the setting was ruined as soon as they started trying to explain everything.

Then at least the characters ACT the same right? Wrong. You see, for some reason Alita forgot how much of a complete bad ass she used to be. Remember when she loved battle because it made her feel alive? That girl is dead now. So now she asks stupid cliche questions to herself like "Why am I fighting?" Umm, hello!!! Its because you LOVE to fight.

And then Alita grows a tail.

Arghhh, I feel so let down by Last Order. Battle Angel Alita was brilliant at conveying drama with little talking and little inner monologue, but Last Order is exactly the opposite: WORDS WORDS WORDS. Everyone also has a "special" attack now which they shout out like in every shonen ever (the penis monkey's is the libido cannon by the way). So what ever happened to just punching the brains out of people? I dunno, because that never happens anymore. A punch will happen, then the punched guy will take a page to talk about how this has changed him as a person. SERIOUSLY?

Fans of Battle Angel Alita, read it, because I guess its worth what little feel of the original it kept. Just don't be disappointed when Last Order turns out to be vastly inferior to the original.