The heatwave finally broke, just in time for my birthday. Thanks weather! It’s been a month of pretty mid anime movies here at home, so not a lot to recommend. There’s some new stuff up on the server though and, as a gift to me, I feel like you should all blow of work (where applicable) and watch a movie or something.

Server Updates

• None

New Additions

Outlander (seasons 3-4) (2014) 1080p HEVC, 5.1 AC3 audio (English), SRT subtitles (English)

Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) 720p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

Son of Godzilla (1967) 720p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

His and Her Circumstances (1998) 480p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), ASS subtitles (English)

Sailor Moon (1992) 1080p HEVC, stereo FLAC audio (Japanese, English), ASS subtitles (English)

Destroy All Monsters (1968) 720p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

All Monsters Attack (1969) 720p HEVC, stereo AC3 audio (Japanese), SRT subtitles (English)

Suzume (2022) 4K HEVC, 5.1 DTS and stereo FLAC audio (Japanese), various PGS and SRT subtitles

Changes

• Moved Gundam AGE Memory of Eden from the movies library to the TV shows library, which is technically more accurate, or at least plays nicer with how Plex treats things.

Deletion Proposals

• None

What’ve I Watched?

Eureka Seven: Good Night, Sleep Tight, Young Lovers (2009)

Eureka Seven has been unfairly criticized as being an Evangelion knockoff, and its film followup (known in the English localization as A Pocketful of Rainbows) can rather more accurately be accused of trying to pull off an End of Evangelion. Rather than follow on from the story of the TV show (thankfully, to be honest), the film recuts and reinterprets the source material into effectively a new story. It is, I believe, meant to provide an alternate lens to consider the themes of the original but, unfortunately, at some point it looks like they forgot to include any of the themes! Ultimately it comes off as spiteful and irreverent to no end but irreverence itself, characters we recognize from the show appearing on screen as entirely new characters who share almost nothing (sometimes not even a name) with their TV form, and in almost every case their film interpretation is more toxic, hateful, and fatalistic. This results in a movie that, despite being largely made out of recut footage from Eureka Seven, doesn’t really have anything to do with it, and doesn’t bring anything worthwhile of its own to the table either.

Mobile Suit Gundam AGE: Memory of Eden (2013)

A two-part OVA retelling of Gundam AGE, Memory of Eden starts off by making a couple really strong decisions: It entirely cuts the first (and worst) arc of the TV show, and uses the extra space provided by that to spend a lot more time setting the groundwork for the main characters of the second arc. This makes the story much more centrally about the relationship between Asemu Asuno and Zeheart Galette, correctly identifying that this was really the emotional core of the show. As a result, the first episode of the OVA is a wild improvement over the TV show, turning the first three quarters of the second arc into a much more coherent story.

Unfortunately, if you read last month’s newsletter you may recall that this is a show with four story arcs and that means that more than half of it still has to fit into the second episode of the OVA, and that just… doesn’t work. Though the second episode also does some admirable work trying to focus the story on Zeheart’s emotional journey, there is just two much material to fit into 77 minutes and the result is functionally incoherent, with characters from the show being referenced without any introduction and scenes ending without resolution to suddenly show the same characters in a different situation, sometimes on an entirely different planet. Perhaps with a third episode of a similar length they could have spaced out the second half material to make a functional story out of it, and in that hypothetical case we might be looking at one of the vanishingly rare examples of an anime’s film compilation being better than the original series, but what we actually have is a very mixed bag: an excellent first episode that is better in almost every way than the material it adapts, weighed down by an irredeemably messy and mostly uninteresting second episode.

Suzume (2022)

This was my first experience of a Makoto Shinkai film and… I’m sorry to say it more or less lived up to my expectations. From its first act, it comes off as fluffy, fun adventure movie: 17-year-old orphan Suzume meets a mysterious boy named Souta and is unexpectedly thrust into helping him with his mission: closing a series of magical doors around Japan that hold back a monstrous worm whose appearance in the human world brings with it catastrophic earthquakes. And when that’s all the film is trying to do, it works quite well. It’s beautifully animated, which is to say it looks very expensive and laden with effects, fancy shaders, dramatic digital camera moves, parallel worlds rendered in hypersaturated hyperrealism. It’s in the second act that all this starts to really show its seams, because the problem is Suzume is not really an adventure movie in any real sense, it’s actually a romance. And the problem with that is that Suzume and Souta are not actually characters. Suzume is an everygirl protagonist, orphaned and living with her kind aunt, plucky but unassuming, and most of all uncannily willing to run off to spend days wandering around with a boy she just met, not because she has any desire to run away from home (the film is clear about that fact) but seemingly just because she’s so exceedingly helpful. Souta is the mysterious college boy, stoic and long-haired, sometimes quick to criticize but also quick to apologize, and desperate to prevent anyone else from having to put themselves out on his account. These are facts we learn about them from their very second interaction in the film and that’s all we get for the rest of it. At a certain point we learn that Souta is studying medicine, but it has no real relevance to the story. Their romance, meanwhile, is just that Suzume thought he was cute when she first caught sight of him and as a result decides without warning that she’s willing to traverse the land of the dead and risk the destruction of the world in order to get the boyfriend.

And this is the core of the problem: the closer you look at Suzume the worse it comes off. All that shininess I mentioned appears, under inspection, without substance. It doesn’t serve any narrative or emotional function, and it doesn’t even really have a coherent visual identity, but instead seems like an exercise in cramming as many lens flares, particle effects, and rippling textures into as many shots as possible. It’s maximalist in a scattershot way that comes off looking more like a high budget gacha game than a film. During the film’s second act Suzume and Souta travel by rail across southern Japan and encounter a series of interesting characters, but they each fail to develop beyond the initial brief, and it increasingly strains credulity that Suzume would continue encountering these perfectly nonthreatening, perfectly helpful, very convincingly-drawn cardboard cutouts in each town she visits. Tellingly, on going to Wikipedia to remind myself of some of these specific beats, I discovered that not a single one of these interactions is mentioned in the plot summary.

Perhaps most perplexing though is the film’s seeming moral, and this is where the real hairy Makoto Shinkai–ness becomes apparent. Ultimately there seems to be an offensively anodyne, deeply conservative moralism at the heart of the film. It’s an uncritically heteronormative romance where the romantic leads have no particular character traits and no emotional chemistry to speak of; it is sufficient to assume that the leading girl is in love with the leading boy because they are the leading girl and boy and it is not necessary to expend any screen time to show why she feels that way. The main engine of the plot is a series of compounding personal sacrifices that are made without context and ultimately rendered trivial to undo, serving to provide momentary emotional frisson but then to be tossed aside without consequence. And the thematic function of the worm itself, bafflingly, is to moralize natural disasters themselves, suggesting that some of the great tragedies in Japan’s history (the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that killed almost 20,000 people, or the 1923 Great Kantō quake that killed over 100,000) seemingly happened because people had not held fervently enough to traditional Japanese values of politeness, modesty, and propriety. (While the Great Kantō quake comes up specifically in the film, apparently the outcome of the last time the seals on the worm failed completely, the film notably does not mention the Kantō Massacre that immediately followed, in which police facilitated a weeks long pogrom against Koreans and other “foreign subversives” in the region, killing another 6,000 people. This event probably would not have sat terribly well with the film’s perspective on traditional Japanese values). In the end, Suzume puts everything right, wraps up her quest and her own backstory with a nice bow, and literally turns to the camera to tell us that it will all be okay, the future is going to be good and there’s nothing to worry about; a somewhat odd note to land on considering Shinkai’s previous film was about the world being destroyed by climate disasters.

Unfortunately, I felt rather more positively about this movie when I started writing this review than I do now. Its premise——which initially drew me in——is definitely fun and would be even moreso if the film allowed itself to be stupider about it and didn’t moralize so much. It is, again, very pretty in a vapid and empty way. There’s a mischievous little cat creature voiced by Ann Yamane who’s a lot of fun and would have made for a way better secondary character than Souta. Unfortunately, in order to write this review I had to spend more time thinking about the movie and, as established, this kills it. There are sketches of characters that could be great, elements of Suzume’s life that seem ripe for exploration, moments of drama that almost touch something meaningful, but in each case the film turns away in a way that makes it clear that these aren’t actually the things it considers valuable. From this film, Shinkai clearly wants to tell high concept, tearjerker romantic stories, but the tools he deploys to that end are all signifier and no substance: shimmering skyboxes; swelling musical cues; tearful, drawn-out sacrifices; and clocks ticking down threateningly to the end of the world. But without actual characters to experience those things, without actual conflict and loss and not just the stylistic evocation of those things, it comes off as cheap and emotionally manipulative rather than dramatic. It’s a film that wants you to think that you’re facing danger, experiencing growth, but then drop you right back where it started. No growth, no change, the future will be fine, don’t worry about it.

Miscellany

• I’ve been making a bit more progress in my reading backlog this month, particularly working through some of the big works of video games criticism from last year that I had missed. A few that I think are particularly worthy of drawing attention to are Sabrina Imbler’s piece for Defector about how Neopets simulated the basics of, and in doing so ended up holding a mirror up to, the ideology of capitalist accumulation; Gabrielle de la Puente’s piece about the anesthetic quality of idle games in a world where “action” and “success” seem ever more untethered from each other; and Kayin O’Reilly’s piece about design, overdesign, and the socioeconomics of producing media in a world where everyone has more media than they have time to engage with. (And definitely not about yellow paint.)

• There’s a new Seeming single. Actually that was last month but I forgot to mention it.