I don’t really like horror manga. Not that crazy about sci-fi either. That’s why even though volume 1 of 7 Billion Needles wasn’t that bad and even though it’s only 4 volumes long, I’m still going to drop it. Oh right, the blurb:
7 Billion Needles follows the life of a teenage girl whose quiet boring days are dramatically changed when her body is possessed by an alien life form caught up in an intergalactic manhunt.
It’s apparently loosely based on a novel called Needle by Hal Clement, whoever he was. The story has been “mangafied” quite a bit so that although Hikaru starts out a typical “leave me alone!” kind of teenage girl, thanks to the alien within her she quickly makes friends with other girls. And in typical manga fashion she’s immediately willing to sacrifice her life to save one of her new-found friends.
Volume 1 ends with her allowing the alien to take over Hikaru body completely in order to stop the gross-looking alien bad guy. If this super-attack had worked and the story had ended there, that would be one thing, but I don’t want to see any more nasty pulsing veins and alien serial killers for three more volumes, so I’m quitting here.
On the plus side the story is very fast-paced and the story is easy to follow unlike many sci-fi stories that go overboard with new technology and technobabble. The art won’t win any awards, but it’s functional and the action is easy to follow as it flows from panel to panel. If you happen to like intergalactic manhunts, don’t mind a bit of blood and gore and won’t roll your eyes at the usual “Power of Friendship!” Japanese cliches, you might just enjoy 7 Billion Needles.
Well, well, what do we have here? A love story disguised as an action movie, eh? We’ll just see about tha– hmm… It’s not so bad… I guess. My Google-fu tells me there are at least 5 Appleseed movies or anime series out there, all loosely based on Masamune Shirow’s Appleseed manga wot I haven’t read and don’t plan to. This particular one I watched came out in 2004. I quite like the art style, which blends regular anime art with CG. It’s not a flawless mix, but it’s a very interesting effect that works well for a faux-gritty movie like Appleseed.
Story blurb: Plucked from the last battlefields of the final war, mercenary Deunan Knute finds herself pressed into duty with the ESWAT, defenders of the Utopian city of Olympus. But serpents beneath the peaceful surface of this apparent Garden of Eden, and new seeds of destruction have already been planted! Now it s up to Deunan and her former lover, the now-cyborg Briareos, to unravel a deadly web of plots that threaten to bring down Olympus from within!
Pros
– I was worried when they started off with all the technobabble and stuff, but the story is very easy to follow. It could honestly have been set in any kind of world, not necessarily this one.
– Everyone gets a happy ending and the bad guys get what they deserve.
– Apart from Hitomi, all the other voices in the English dub were very well done, so much so that I forgot I was watching a dub after a while, only to be smacked back into reality every time Hitomi opened her little mouth.
– As I said, I liked the art style. The music was good too.
Cons
– At almost 2 hours long, it’s a little on the lengthy side. It’s still very interesting, but some parts could have been shortened – like the ultimately pointless war scenes at the very beginning.
– Part of the story seems kinda stupid, like why would humans have a giant tank full of a killer virus just floating above the city? You’d think it would at least occur to someone that hey, maybe we should develop an antidote to this thing just in case, you know?
– Appleseed is a story of love lost and regained and the hope that humanity carries within them, etc etc that sort of thing, so honestly the action felt out of place much of the time. It almost felt like the writers/director had one story they wanted to tell, but then every 15 minutes it would be like “Quick! The audience is falling asleep!” and they would throw in some lengthy action sequence out of desperation.
– Speaking of action scenes, the last one was entirely too long. Once the bad guys had been rumbled and it was obvious that Appleseed is an idealistic kind of movie, the fortresses obviously had no chance of taking down humanity while Deunan was around, so why spend 15 minutes pretending they do? IMO they should have had Deunan face off against the giant robots first, THEN had the showdown with the bad guys, but that’s just me.
Final thoughts
Appleseed will probably disappoint anyone looking for a gritty, futuristic, hardcore kind of action movie. It only pretends to be one, but inside it’s a mushy-wushy I Love You, You Love Me, We’re a Happy Family kind of movie. I liked it, myself, even though the story is rather below-average and contains a number of unexplained points (like if Deunan was there when Dr. Gilliam was killed, why didn’t the killers take her into custody and confiscate everything she possessed, etc). Did I like it enough to watch the sequel (Ex Machina)? Not really, no. But still, it’s a decent enough movie and worth at least a watch if you like romantic action movies.
I went on a mega-binge in the past couple of days and caught up in time at all, even though I’d dropped the Hajime no Ippo manga yeeaaars ago. I dropped it when Miyata was about to fight Randy Boy, so I had a lot of catching up to do. Actually I went all the way back to Sendo-Ippo II (Lalapalooza) because that’s really the best fight in the series, and then I continued from there. I skipped some of the more boring fights along the way, like… pretty much anything didn’t feature Ippo. Definitely skipped anything featuring Miyata except the very final page of his fight with Randy Boy. It’s about time he moved up two or three classes already.
But enough about that and more about the latest chapter, 1099 (raw spoilers follow from here on). The first round of the unification match between Bison and Takamura is over and Bison has a point lead. Since he’s a Thomas Hearns copy, Bison has a flicker jab that is giving Takamura a hard time.
Kamogawa asks Taka if he has a strategy for dealing with the flickers
Flicker jabs are portrayed as being dangerous and tricky to deal with every time they show up, but… why doesn’t Takamura have a strategy to deal with it? Why is the Coach asking him when it’s the coach’s job to come up with strategies like this? Why hasn’t this whole matter been discussed in advance?
I mean, I could buy the “I didn’t know he could do that!” excuse for foreign opponents like Woli, though even then in this day of Youtube and the internet it’s hard to believe there’s no video footage or Google Translateable newspaper article about them at all. But Richard Bison is a World Champion. From the USA, no less. There are bound to be hundreds of videos of his matches available if Team Kamogawa cares to find out, but they don’t. That’s just DUMB.
Then the two of them bicker about Taka not having a sparring partners on Bison’s level. Taka, with all due respect this is your fault for refusing to go to America. In fact Kamogawa should have sent him there to Dankichi along with Volg, that way Taka could have moved to up the heavyweights faster. Lots of selfishness, stupidity and clinging to each other from both men. I know I’m alone among Ippo fans for thinking this, but I think Kamogawa is a really bad coach, Anyway, none of them have any ideas. Bison’s busy steaming about Takamura stealing a treasure he wanted, most likely the other belt, so he won’t be much help either.
Chapter ends with the start of the second round. This might be a long match, maybe 10-12 rounds, so even if Morikawa writes one round per chapter we still won’t get anywhere for the next 3-4 months. Looks like it’s time for another lengthy hiatus from Hajime no Ippo. I’ll check back in once Ippo’s next match ends, whenever that is.
I thought I’d watch something more recent for a change, though I have been enjoyed the older anime movies I’ve been watching. Summer Wars is from the same director as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, which I thought was a rather meh movie with a spectacularly dumb twist near the end. Needless to say I wasn’t expecting much from this one, which is just as well. But first the summary:
Kenji is your typical teenage misfit. He’s good at math, bad with girls, and spends most of his time hanging out in the all-powerful, online community known as OZ. His second life is the only life he has – until the girl of his dreams, Natsuki, hijacks him for a starring role as a fake fiance‚ at her family reunion. Things only get stranger from there. A late-night email containing a cryptic math riddle leads to the unleashing of a rogue AI intent on using the virtual word of OZ to destroy the real world, literally. As Armageddon looms on the horizon, Kenji and his new “family” set aside their differences and band together to save the worlds they inhabit.
The summary goes on to call this a “near-perfect blend of social satire and science fiction” but it’s nothing of the sort, so we can leave that part out. Certainly an attempt is made to blend the two, but it is very poorly done and instead ends up diluting the effects of either one. If I praised Leda – The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko for its small cast and focused story, I’m going to have to go the opposite direction and criticize Summer Wars for an overlarge cast and story that can’t decide what it wants to be. Sci-fi save-the-world thriller or a lengthy rambling treatise about the joy of having a big family and how anybody who doesn’t is a cringing loser? Pick one.
Don’t be fooled. Natsuki does diddly squat for most of the movie. But having girls on your cover makes it sell more, so…
Part of the problem is the setting. A malicious A.I. on the “internet” is causing all kinds of havoc in real life, but almost all the cast are based in some small town called Ueda, and not even in the town proper but some distance away, so they’re not feeling the direct effects of the traffic chaos and bursting water pipes and fake ambulance calls and that sort of thing. They’re just chilling in their big fancy house eating delicious food and bickering among themselves. It’s not until their grandma dies – maybe because of the A.I. but more likely because of just plain being 90 years old – that they sober up and decide to save the world, but even then not all of them.
Which is another thing I have against the movie – how useless the women are for most of the show. The grandma/great-grandma is portrayed as a smart and resourceful cookie, but every other female in the show is dumb, selfish and self-absorbed to a fault. That includes the lead female Natsuki, who spends most of the show lying to her family and then fawning over her uncle Wabisuke. The rest of her aunts and female cousins just bicker, eat food, watch TV and don’t know the first thing about the serious business that’s going on because they’re just focused on domestic tasks.
Sure in the end the task of taking on the A.I. in an incomprehensible game of Hanafuda falls to Natsuki, but it’s obvious that this was just because someone on the staff woke up and said “Hey, the women in this show are really dumb and useless, aren’t they?” And so even though it hadn’t been established at all that Natsuki was some Hanafuda prodigy or anything – in other words anyone could have done what she did, but the writers just wanted to make her less hateable – she gets a few minutes to shine before the men take over again. Back to the kitchen with you, girl.
Third thing I didn’t like about Summer Wars was that the enemy was an A.I. Not that it was a bad enemy or anything, but it’s hard to feel anything against a non-sentient program that is just doing what it’s programmed to do. Especially when the A.I. spends a lot of time in the show not doing anything in particular while the cast eats, sleeps and squabbles. It would be easy and highly profitable for a terrorist group or even a gang of script kiddies to take over this poorly-secured Oz ‘internet’ system which world army generals have been stupid enough to link their nuclear missile accounts to, but that would ruin the peaceful family-movie vibe Summer Wars is clearly going for, so we have to settle for a mutated Micky Mouse enemy instead. Lame.
That’s not to say I totally hated the movie or anything. If I did I wouldn’t have finished it and I probably wouldn’t review it. Summer Wars had its moments. It looked great, for one thing. Bright, vivid colors, fluid animations. Everyday noises and sound effects like the TV in the background and the sound of footsteps on wood give an extra sense of realism to the regular family life scenes they’re trying to portray. The scenes in Oz were colorful and sometimes exciting. I got excited despite myself during the scene where they tried to trap the AI in the central tower, then it was like URGGHHH when their stupid cousin messed it all up. There’s always a screw up in any large family, I know it well.
But overall the effect of the family portions was diluted by the large cast (who should we care about) and the sci-fi stuff going on in the background (shouldn’t we be worrying about more than old family skeletons?) while the save-the-world story is watered down by the fact that the characters don’t seem to care that much, that they aren’t very competent or focused and that the enemy isn’t much to be afraid of. There’s a romance teased between Natsuki and Kenji at the end, but it comes totally out of nowhere and doesn’t fool anybody. I predict she’ll graduate in a year or two and date an older man who reminds her of her uncle and never give Kenji another thought at all in the near future.
tl;dr Summer Wars looks nice, but lacks focus. Still it does have a clearly told story and a clear beginning, middle and ending, unlike some of the twaddle I’ve watched recently, so you won’t go wrong giving it a watch.
The Yohko in the title refers to main character Asagiri Yohko, an ordinary high school girl who composes a piano piece to give her the courage to confess to her crush. She puts this song on a cassette and puts it in her Walkman (that’s how you can tell the movie is from 1985), but right after she fails to confess, she discovers that the song has magical properties that can send her to a whole new world. Can Yohko make her way back to her own world? Or will she fall victim to bad guy Zell who will stop at nothing to make the power of the song his?
Maybe she will, maybe she won’t. But first she falls victim to the show’s fanservice directors, who quickly strip her of her sensible outfit and put her in a skimpy blue bikini for the rest of the show. That’s been the fate of most female fantasy warriors since antiquity, but somehow it’s more disconcerting when the heroine spends the first 30 minutes dressed in sensible fashion only to suddenly TRANS-FORM! into Fanservice Girl after a while.
But that’s just one minor nitpick with Leda – The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko. It was a pretty good movie for the most part, and short too at only 69 minutes thereabouts. The ‘Leda’ in the title is the name of a legendary goddess/warrior in Ashanty, the world Yohko ends up in, who imbues her with power (and the aforementioned bikini) and a rather ugly mecha as well as the power to fight the forces of evil. Unlike most shows/games of that sort, the legendary goddess never makes an appearance or has a Deus Ex Machina moment. It’s up to Yohko, with the help of talking dog Ringhum and new acquaintance Yoni to do the best she can against the merciless, ambitious (but voiced by Shuuichi Ikeda so I like him) Zell.
It’s a good movie not only because it’s short, but also because it’s focused. That means little to no time is spent on Yohko whining or crying or hesitating to do her duty. She just asks “Okay, what do I have to do to get home?” and then she sets about doing it. Sure she has a few moments of doubt, especially early on, but she’s not your typical crying princess character. She’s stronger than she looks without being headstrong and reckless like the opposite of that trope tends to be. She’s a cool girl.
The focused nature of the movie also extends to the cast, which is really, really small for an anime. There’s Yohko, her two companions, her unnamed faceless crush, Zell, his right-hand man and then lots of robots and assorted henchmen. That’s it. Not only is the cast small, but it’s also largely unexplored. Most people have a backstory, but there’s no real “Why” to it. E.g. Yoni is Leda’s miko, but why would she become one, and why is she still hanging in there when everyone’s gone? You can tell a little bit about the characters by extrapolating – e.g. Yohko is probably from a well-to-do home because she can afford a grand piano and piano lessons and stuff.
The downside of that focus means that not much time is spent exploring the world of Ashanty, which seems like a pretty interesting place. Zell’s motive for wanting the song is to conquer a new world because he claims Ashanty is dying, but at the end Yoni and Ringham say “Nah, we’ll be all right.” Will they really? Is the world really dying or not? If you like world-building and exploration, The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko isn’t really for you, because it’s exactly what is says on the tin – all about Yohko and virtually nothing else.
But what it does do, it does well. A simple story of a girl growing and learning to face up to her problems instead of running away. She’s also learned that she looks pretty fetching in a blue bikini with shoulder pads, and at least two other swimsuits as well, which is important knowledge for life if there ever was some. All in all The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko was an enjoyable watch – decent mix of action and slow moments, small but likable cast, simple story well told. I quite recommend it.
