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Mar 18, 2018
This is one weird movie. It started out kind of boring, but by the time I saw Sophie being a sassy old grandma I was hooked. The kid, the fire, Howl and even the Witch of the Wastes were awesome characters, and the scenes of Sophie cleaning the house and doing everyday stuff were simply great. Then the plot had to kick in.
I liked this movie, but making sense out of this narrative is impossible, and it kind of misses the point to focus on that when it's always happening in the background. A washed-out war story running constantly behind the characters living their lives
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to make for a dramatic last arc is not something I can get on board with (especially when Miyazaki's forte is staying out of generic plot structure, see Spirited Away, Totoro or Kiki's Delivery Service).
Making it worse is the fact that this ends with one of the most random plot twists I've ever seen. Why even bother making a story.
And yeah, it's pretty. But it's a Ghibli movie, what did you expect?
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 11, 2018
Quick summary, read below for more details:
-Short episodes are amazing
-Most characters are really good
-A small set of characters appear very frequently, and most get forgotten
-Joke explanations get tiring real quickly
Gintama is a series that is, at it's best, a really emotional or absolutely hilarious anime. Because of that it really is a shame, that something with the potential to be this good could end up making me feel tired even before starting an episode.
Gintama is an episodic series, kind of. It's divided by very short arcs, with the longest ones going for around 5 or 6 episodes, and most of them being half or a
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full episode long. There are arcs that introduce characters, arcs that further the plot and "filler" arcs, which are actually the bread and butter of the show. They're often comedic one-offs that set up a funny situation, and end with a great punchline which is often kind of endearing at the same time.
You can see that this kind of approach does not work very well if the runtime is longer, because there is nothing really interesting in the middle. There is a clear setup, but once you understand where it's going, there is usually not really a point in keeping it going for another episode, let alone two or three. (This is the main reason why, in my opinion, the best "arcs" are the ones that last half an episode)
But Gintama does this anyway. Now how, one may ask, do they keep rolling a joke about the main characters going to an underwater palace to stop a pervert turtle for 4 episodes? The answer, lies in one of the shows main strengths: it's fantastic roster of characters.
Everyone in this series has a story of their own, and a very well-defined personality (even if that personality is an annoying mess) which makes you think how they would react to different situations and how they get along with different characters. You could say the main focus of Gintama is exploring these relationships, while also taking the audience for a fun ride.
The problem is, as the series stretches and the amount of characters increases, there are some that get forgotten, and some that we want to forget but can't because they are on screen every two episodes. Some have been played to death like MADAO, while others like Sakamoto are barely touched upon.
That's without even mentioning the main way in which Gintama shoots itself in the foot with the ever present joke-explainer character (Usually but not always, Shinpachi).
In comedy, subtlety is king. It's what separates old Simpsons from new Simpsons, it's what makes laugh tracks so damn annoying. If you have to explain a joke, it's usually not that funny. And my grudge with the show is that it's one of the exceptions to that rule of thumb: it's funny despite the explanation... and yet it explains it.
Gintama is obsessed with letting everyone know: "Hey! I just made a joke! This is the joke right here!". It's even worse than a laugh track because you don't even have the opportunity to think about what the joke is, they say it right there in front of you.
I'm pretty sure this problem radicates in the fact that, after all is said and done, this is still a show for kids (which is still a condescending attitude, but I can kind-of understand it). The manga probably does a better job in not making Shinpachi so damn annoying by shouting things mid-sentence because you can stop reading his dialogue, but that doesn't fly in anime.
I'm pretty sure that if you cut out most of Shinpachi's lines, the show would have a much better flow and would be much funnier. Though that would leave too much time that the episode would need to fill- wait, that sounds familiar...
That's right, my old point: the best episodes are the half-episodes. They are the most densely packed, fast-paced, joke-explanation-free episodes out there. These are the ones that remind me why I love Gintama in the first place. I just wish more of them were like this. But as the series stretches more and more, these episodes become less frequent.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Dec 13, 2016
Basically, if you don't know anything about Gantz, I'd say don't bother. The movie clearly tries to introduce newcomers to the Gantz game concept but does so in such an awkward and incomplete way that I'd say it's very hard to understand unless you're at least kind of familiar with the rules.
The story makes some drastic changes from the manga, which by themselves wouldn't make it bad, but together make the Osaka Arc a much simpler and more boring experience (You can feel this in particular during the first half of the movie). The new ending is the only change I think affected the movie
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positively. Without spoilers, I'd say that while it wouldn't have had sense in the manga, it makes a perfect fit for the narrative flow of the movie.
I think the most disappointing part of the film was the music. The trailer had this really strong theme going on, but it was absent from the movie except from the credits, and all the music was pretty much the same "dramatic eleventh hour track".
Anyway, I personally enjoyed the movie, but upon thinking about it for a while, I realized it had some very weak points. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone who's never heard of Gantz, but if you want to see the Nurarihyon fight animated, or at the very least have seen some of Gantz and liked it, I say go for it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 27, 2016
One Piece is excellent in every single way. The characters are deep and interesting, the world feels really alive and fleshed out, and Oda really knows how to pace arcs correctly.
Sadly, the anime adaptations goes from good to great to amazing to ok to absolute clusterfuck. It's a really depressing case of unending anime series syndrome. I remember watching this about 7 years ago when there were about 400 epipsodes, and you could mostly skip all the filler arcs and end up with a kind of sluggish but overall enjoyable series, but later arcs, I believe starting at about episode 430-ish, have a lot
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more filler INSIDE the actual adaptation arcs, which makes it that much more difficult to get around. I've also seen some of the newer fights, and they were really disappointing. The animation was really bad compared to the better arcs (Enies Lobby, Thriller Bark and Shabaody Archipielago).
My recommendation for watching One Piece is: look for a guide that says which episodes are filler, and try to skip as much of it as possible. If it ever becomes unbearable, switch to the manga.
Personally, as soon as I caught up with the anime, I started reading the manga. I still read it to this day and it's on my top 3 manga list, alongside FMA and Magi.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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