Finally watched Spriggan. Superior animation which is probably what I like most about this anime, and then it's your usual action-packed, violent, super-human powered characters again. The storyline was interesting enough, although I felt it lacked a lot of character development. Sure we know enough about Ominae Yu, towards the end, but what about his so-called mentor, Jean-Jacques Mondo, or the origins of Clonel McDougal - what, exactly, about that kid? I always like character development, some background - it always makes for an interesting sub-story or canvas upon which the story unravels. This is more evident in something like Beserk, which like most anime, I had a hard time pulling together in the beginning, but eventually makes sense in the third or fourth episode, or three quarters into the film. There's a lot of everything in Beserk - magic, action, adventure; violence, refrences to homosexuality, the love triangle, and pretty decent dailogue. I'm eagerly awaiting the next DVD release set for March.
Princess Mononoke was beautifully animated, with rich, lush colors, landscapes and mythical creatures, but the story made me feel that it fell quite flat. I hoped for it to soar and just float above the forest, sweeping across the sky with the mythical creatures but somehow it all got lost in the stellar cast of voices; among them Gillian Anderson and Billy Bob Thornton. I don't see the point in employing celebrity voices (does this REALLY help to sell the thing itself? I can see that it just might do that in America for such American audiences...) as I don't believe in selling a story through the likes of, ESPECIALLY through the likes of someone, like say, Claire Danes. She was great in My So Called Life, but she ruined it all for me when she did that stupid film, filmed in Manila and let loose some innane comments that did a diservice to her intelligence and forever changed how I feel about her as a human being. But I digress - Mononoke is, I suppose, a sound story. But I really feel that so much has fallen away in the translation and Miramax's desire to "Americanize" the script for the benefit of us non-Japanese speaking peoples. Why couldn't they retain Gaiman's original work (although I'm not completely convinced that that would have been 100% better, but I'm sure much better nonetheless), in trying to retain the more cultural, even mythological aspects of the script. I'm sure Americans or non-Japanese speaking people are intelligent enough to understand what might be taken for Japanese culture and history and just simply leave it as that. No need to simplify it. We are not idiots. I'm sure we would take it upon ourselves to do the research if need be. I seriously think that bringing in such a "stellar" celebrity cast detracted from the feature and the final translation script was somewhat hollow and did not really make me love the film in the way that I might have, had it not been shot with the Western film distributor's iron balls...
6:58 AM | |
