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!

Laputa: The Castle in the Sky anime review

I’m watching the Ghibli movies in chronological order, so after Nausicaa comes Laputa: Castle in the Sky (or just Castle in the Sky if you’re American). Another excellent movie, with an amazing soundtrack. It picks up faster than Nausicaa and has a happier ending, too. I just wasn’t happy with the bad guys getting away with murdering Nausicaa’s sick old dad in the previous movie, but this time everyone gets what’s coming to them so it feels really good.

“Be careful what you wish for” is normally the theme of this kind of movie, but in this case it’s more like “Wish for whatever you want, just don’t be mean to other people while doing it.” Wanting to find the legendary Laputa wasn’t a bad thing in and of itself, and as Pazu said, someone would probably have found it eventually. In fact, if the bad guys had treated Sheeta and Pazu a little better, they might have cooperated willingly (Pazu especially, seeing how eager he was to find it). So they really got what they deserved in the end for their child-kidnapping robot-killing town-blowing up ways.

Laputa is more child-friendly than Nausicaa as well. It’s not half as preachy and Pazu and Sheeta feel more like regular kids just having a fun adventure. What a lovely movie. But the castle itself is such a sad place. I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch it again for a while, but it was a great experience nevertheless.