Category: Reviews

Kiki’s Delivery Service anime review

Well I watched it all right, but I didn’t like it much. After the halfway mark I was just yawning non-stop. Some Ghibli movies are just about admiring scenery, not telling a story, and there’s certainly plenty of nice scenery to admire in Kiki’s Delivery Service. The plot itself though… This rather unpleasant girl named Kiki flies around on her broom delivering a few items over 1h 45mins, meets a couple of nice people, makes a couple of friends, has a crisis of confidence and gets over it in time to save one of the new friends she has made from falling to his doom. I can’t exactly say “Nothing happened” though. It’s more accurate to say that everything switched over so quickly and all problems were resolved so easily that I couldn’t really appreciate what was going on.

How’s she’s going to find a place to live?
“Hey there!”
Oh. That’s settled then. Now she’s running a delivery service.
*cough cough*
Oh. So much for that. Well at least she made a friend.
*sulk pout*
…Or not. Oh no, she lost her powers!
“Help me!”
…Guess not… And there go the credits… Good riddance.

I always did like the ending theme though, which I heard long before watching the series and which made me a Yumi Matsutoya fan. But the movie itself is pretty, but dull, and I’ll have forgotten most of the characters by the time I wake up tomorrow. You win some, you lose some. The next Ghibli movie chronologically should be Only Yesterday (Omoide Poroporo) but I’ll watch some regular anime before that.

Ore no Imouto ga konna ni kawaii wake ga nai anime review

Ore no Imouto ga konna ni kawaii wake ga nai supposedly means “My little sister can’t possibly be this cute” or something like that. It is a rather bad show about a boy who lets his otaku sister physically and verbally abuse him for 10 and a half episodes. Halfway through the eleventh episode she apologizes and gives him a present and so everything is supposedly hunky-dory. “My little sister isn’t cute at all, what on earth have you been smoking?” would be a better title, imo.

Bit of a waste of my time, to be honest. It had some moments of humor, but the creators spent too much time forcefully extolling the virtues of the otaku lifestyle (there are none) and desperately defending the non-existent rights of 14- and 17-year old children to play pornographic R-18 games. The harder they argued, the worse it all looked. I liked Lucky Star‘s lighter take on the matter: yeah it’s wrong, but it’s fun. When you try to justify the unjustifiable, you just look ridiculous. “I have to play porn games or I won’t be me any more.” Oh? That would be a good thing. The world could use a few less viciously violent PMSing 14-year olds.


So in short, Ore no Imouto is about a boy whose sister plays pornographic games and watches pornographic anime and takes occasional breaks to kick and slap him about. If you’ve watched one episode, you’ve watched them all, really. Or more like, if you watch Lucky Star and whatever you can stomach of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu, you’ve watched it all. There’s no otaku stigma where I’m from, so it was impossible for me to relate to the rest of what they were waffling about.

There was one spot of interest though: the main character’s sweet relationship with his childhood friend Manami. There was a whole episode devoted to it, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside after watching it. It’s just happy and sweet and comfortable, no fighting, no crossed signals, no violence, just a lovely friendship that may blossom into love with time.

Well, that’s what I was hoping anyway, but then I looked up spoilers for the remaining light novels and it seems the MC ends up dating his little sister’s dark, sarcastic friend who also verbally and physically abuses him on occasion. They break up shortly afterwards, but the fact that he’d even date her when he has Manami means there’s no hope at all for my preferred pairing. Bummer. I’m rooting for you, Manami! Study hard, go to a good college and find a loving, sensible guy who isn’t attracted to drama and who can appreciate you and your wonderfully welcoming family. Good luck!

Next I really am going to watch Kiki’s Delivery Service this time.

My Neighbor Totoro anime review

Continuing the run of Ghibli movies, I watched My Neighbor Totoro. I’d heard a lot about this movie, and of course the totoros are all over Ghibli’s advertising, but the movie itself was rather underwhelming. Two little girls move to the countryside with their dad, run around for an hour, have a fight, run around for another 30 minutes, the end.

The mythical “totoro” creatures themselves only show up a few times in the film, and only the big one plays any sort of important role. It was a decent watch, but probably one of those things I’d have to be 6 years old to truly appreciate. Actually I know a trio of sisters aged between 9 and 4, and the dynamic between the oldest and the youngest is pretty much like that between Satsuki and Mei in the film. I was impressed they managed to capture that interaction so accurately, but beyond that, yah, nothing special.

Next is Kiki’s Delivery Service. According to a Studio Ghibli special I watched, Hayao Miyazaki spent a whole day staring at women in skirts as research (ahem, ahem) for this movie, so let’s see how it turned out.

Chrome-Shelled Regios anime review

A bunch of kids live in a mobile academy in a world where the outside air is toxic and giant bugs roam the landscape. Our main character Layfon Alseif is extra strong but has issues using that power. He also has lots of girls only too willing to jump his bones. Chrome-Shelled Regios is basically a cross between Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Gundam Seed, without the mecha.

It’s one season, 24 episodes long and divided into a number of arcs, but there’s no real story. It’s just episode after episode of Layfon and his captain Nina taking turns angsting over inconsequential crap.
Layfon: I don’t wanna fight.
Nina: Get over yourself.

Nina: I’m too weak.
Layfon: Snap out of it.

Layfon: I don’t wanna fight.
etc, etc, etc.

Intersperse this with battles against bugs and men and add a number of side characters who don’t do much or mean much and you’ve got yourself a series. It does seem like *eventually* they’ll figure out a way to purify the skies outside and take out all the bugs and reclaim their world, but at the glacial pace the series moves, this probably won’t happen till Kenshiro comes around in 20XX.

It’s still fun enough that I watched the whole thing, but if they made a second season it would still be more angst angst-action-angst-action-angst-lame attempt at comedy-angst stuff, so I’ll just wait for the whole light novel series to end and read the ending with my grandchildren.

Update: Huh. The light novel series did end, in 2013. Much sooner than I’d expected. I’ll have to find the time to read the whole thing from start to finish, because apparently the anime left out a lot of things. I was rooting for Layfon to get together with… never mind, I’ll save the spoilers for when I do read the whole thing. Look forward to the update, in 20XX.

Another trip, another movie – Mr & Mrs Incredible

This is like the fifth time I’ve flown on KLM this year. This time I watched some non-Cantonese movies as well, so I only got one Canto movie in. It would have been more, but the other movies on offer all seemed to be either romantic movies or heavily Mandarin-influenced, so I wasn’t interested.

What I watched this time was Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, starring Louis Koo and Sandra Ng as a pair of retired superheroes who have to go back to their roots to foil a dastardly plot to steal martial artists’ powers. It’s not as good as it sounds. Pretty much the only good thing about it was that Ng and Koo have some great chemistry as a married couple as they go things like jealousy and infertility and buying a house together, that sort of thing. I can’t say I got too much Cantonese practice out of it, but I did finally figure out that the “gu-leung” thing that annoying ATV series kept saying stands for “Miss” or something close to it. That’s new.

So basically Mr. and Mrs. Incredible was a movie with plenty of failed attempts at humor and some rather mediocre superpower action, but the romance between the two leads made up for it. It was quite sweet and touching. A bit corny sometimes, and that love scene after she gets pissed off, well, that was like borderline marital rape, wasn’t it? But they overcame everything and had a baby in the end, so all’s well that ends well… I guess? It’s best not to think too deeply about it.

Well, enough about that. Next up, I’ve found two fairly modern Canto movies that have colloquial Cantonese subtitles: Stephen Chow’s Knight of Gamblers and Ekin Cheng’s Young and Dangerous 2. Young and Dangerous 1 probably has them as well, but I deleted it long ago and can’t be bothered to get it again, so we’ll make do with that we’ve got. Both movies aren’t much to write home about (YD2 is actually b-a-d), but if I can get my hands on some audio ripping software, I can rip the voice track, chop it up through Audacity and get myself several hundred new entries for my SRS. My computer is almost out of space, so I’d better get on with it sharpish so I can delete them.

That’s it for today!