Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Sunday, February 3, 2013

CHILDREN WHO CHASE LOST VOICES FROM DEEP BELOW (2011)

Makoto Shinkai's next film after the wonderful 5 CENTIMETERS PER SECOND concerns a young girl, Asuna, who spends her spare time climbing a hill near her house so she can listen to a strange musical sound on her crystal radio.  One day while walking towards the hill she encounters a mysterious creature that kinda looks like a bear.  She's saved my an equally mysterious boy.  They spend the afternoon together and he mentions a place called Agartha.  Stuff happens and before you know it Asuna has traveled to the strange world of Agartha.  All of things that happen there might not be exciting, but they're all beautiful thanks to the animation. 

Not as good as 5CPS, but it's still a nice story and the animation is so breathtaking that honestly I could've watched it with the subtitles turned off and liked it just as well.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

TALES FROM EARTHSEA (2006)

Beautiful animation, but man that story was a mess! From what I can tell, the film is based on a popular fantasy series by author Ursula K. Le Guin. I am not a fantasy reader, but according to Wikipedia this film is "a combination of plots and characters from the first four books"!!!!!! Four books compressed into a 115 minute movie?! Are you fucking kidding me? No wonder it felt all weird.

As best as I can tell: long ago in the land of Earthsea, magic and dragons were more prevalent, but now those things are extremely rare. Bad omens have been seen all over the land and it's obvious that the Balance is out of wack. The king is murdered by his young son and the boy runs away. Out in the middle of the desert the boy is saved from a pack of wolves by a the only good wizard still around. The two team up and travel around. Eventually after a few minor events (including saving a young girl from slave traders) they end up at the farm of a female friend who just happens to be the caretaker of the girl the boy saved from the slave traders. Anyway, so there's this evil sorceress who hates the wizard and is looking for the secret to eternal life and in doing so she causes the Balance to be out of wack. She kidnaps everybody and some how the boy's shadow is running around on his own or something and there's a magic sword and out of nowhere a dragon appears. I was so goddamn confused that I turned to my cat for help but all he said was I should try scratching behind his ear for answers.

It's sad that the story ended up being such a jumbled up disaster because the animation was really nice. TFE could have easily been a classic, but I think the filmmakers bit off more than they could swallow. I hate to say it, but skip it.

Once again according to Wikipedia: for years Studio Ghibli had been asking Ursula K. Le Guin for the permission to make a film about her series, but she always said no. But then after seeing SPIRITED AWAY by Hayao Miyazaki she agreed. Problem was that Miyazaki was already busy making HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE so his son, Goro, was put in charge of TFE despite the fact he had never directed a movie before. In the end Le Guin told Goro "It is not my book. It is your movie."

Oh yea, that awesome looking dragon on the poster. It's only in the movie for like two minutes.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

SUMMER WARS (2009)

From the director of THE GIRL WHO LEAPT THROUGH TIME comes the impressively animated but ridiculously plotted story of an high school math genius, Kenji, who is invited by a very cute classmate, Natsuki, to visit her family's estate for her grandmother's 90th birthday celebration and ends up nearly destroying the world. D'oh!

Things go well enough at the beginning, until he receives an mysterious email with a math problem. He replies with the answer. Turns out the email was from an "hacker artificial intelligence" named Love Machine and the answer was the code protecting a massive virtual reality world called OZ. OZ isn't just some bullshit social networking site like Facebook, but an worldwide infrastructure that controls everything from red-light signals to satellites!

That would spell Bad News Bears for most people, but luckily Natsuki's family are descendents from a samurai warriors so they have a real fighting spirit...also Natsuki's uncle is the one who original created Love Machine for the U.S. Army!!!!!!! Talk about a small world. But that's only the beginning of it. Assembled within this small family gathering is the greatest gamer on OZ; the owner of a specialty computer business who sets up a supercomputer in the living room (!!!); a military guy who gets a large radar for them; a rich guy who parks a huge yacht in the koi pond to power the supercomputer plus numerous emergency workers like paramedics and pigs. It's insane...especially when Love Machine points a falling satellite towards a nearby nuclear power plant and Kenji hacks into the satellite's GPS to redirect it while virtually fighting Love Machine in a fist fight!

Normally a story that fantastically ridiculous (and lazy) would turn me completely off, but the animation was impressive enough that I watched the entire thing and rather enjoyed it. I'll never ever watch it again, but it was a nice way to burn a few hours. Too bad the story wasn't better.