Miyazaki Marathon Day 2: Laputa: Castle in the Sky

Name: Laputa: Castle in the Sky
Type: Movie
Rating: Any Age
Runtime: 124 min
Directed By Miyazaki Hayao
Produced By Studion Ghibli
Year Produced: 1986

The To Aru Kagaku no Home Theater Miyazaki Marathon... and then some... continues, despite public protest!

This is a "festival" where I sit down at spend about a week and a half watching all of the Miyazaki movies that I want to.  I didn't mention this last time, but I don't have any particular interest in Ponyo.

What's still to come are:

Wednesday - My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
Thursday - Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)
Friday - Porco Rosso (1992)
Saturday - Whisper of the Heart (1995)
Sunday - Princess Mononoke (1997)
Monday of Next Week - Spirited Away (2001)
Tuesday of Next Week - Howl's Moving Castle (2004)


I've already reviewed Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa yesterday, so if you're interested in that, then check it out... back there.


Set in (again, no name) what appears to be a coal or other fuel mining town, Laputa is a magical story about a young girl... actually, I don't have any idea how old the two main characters are.  About 12?

This is Sheeta, the main character.  You try and guess her age!

She is being held captive by a group of strange, suit-wearing men... gentlemen (not), for reasons unknown (I love that word... that phrase).  Suddenly, from out of the clouds comes...

Mutant... dragonfly things.

Well, you explain it!  I don't think that this could work, even in fantasy... especially not with two people riding...

PIRATES!!

And guess what, they've come for Sheeta (of course.  If you can't predict these kinds of things yet, you need to leave.  I actually think that a story about the hero's friend would be awesome.  Yeah, probably slightly boring, but it'd sure as hell be different).  Actually, they didn't come after her, but rather the jewel that she is carrying.

Doom.

So Sheeta brains her guard and escapes through the window.  She's just forgotten one vital thing...

Oh dear...

The fact that she's really high up.  She's above the clouds, for God's sake.  Looking back on it, she probably regrets her choice to brave the outside of the ship, but then again, hindsight is 20x20.

Sheeta manages to crawl along the hull of the ship until she gets to the window in the above picture... then she slips and falls.

If she died, then that would make it impossible to make the joke that I always do, but since she didn't, and I'm getting tired or being predictable, I'll just say this.

She flies away...

...

... no, seriously!  I'm not the boy who cried wolf, dammit!  She actually flew... not away, but she sure as hell floated!

Woah...

She floated down to the surface of Earth... or wherever, where she is spotted and then "caught" by this guy, Pazu.  The guy from Ghost in the Shell SAC before he grew up.  Not.

Pazu...

"Catch".

Actually, in all fairness, that's not what happened.  This is what it looked like (since it is a freaking screen-shot).

Yes, girls are heavier than they look (not intended to be a derogatory remark of any kind).  I can attest that you are not one of those heroes out of any number of B action films.  Neither are those heroes, actually, if you look, they're straining.

Anyway, now that everybody's after them, they've got to get away... naturally.

Okay, I watched this twice, and I have to say that I liked it a lot better the second time.  It had one of the best scenes in it, involving idiotic American-Style fighting!  No spins or twirls or anything, just punch as hard as you can.  It's pretty awesome... actually the whole scene was awesome...

POP YOUR BUTTONS, BOSS!!

WOOT!!

The characters were fun and awesome, and nobody that you cared about died, which was cool.  By the way, the above two characters (especially the second one) are among my top-ten favorites right now.

The music must have been good for the show because I don't remember it at all!  If I had particularly liked it though, it would have stuck in my memory.  I do get the feeling that it was a lot of light, probably woodwind instruments.

Both the English and the Japanese were good, and Mark Hamill makes a comeback as the bad guy.  What's going on there, man?  Am I going to see him in My Neighbor Totoro too?

 Mr. Skywalker?

Check it out, it's good fun.  "Clean" if that's the right word, though I'm not too thrilled about the term "Good, clean fun".

Laputa: Castle in the Sky Minitheatre

Ghibli 13 Movie Collection (Dual Audio) Nihonomaru

Coming up next!

Day 3: My Neighbor Totoro!

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo

Name: Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo
Type: Television Show
Episodes: 24
Rating: TV-14
Runtime Per Episode: 24 min
Director: Maeda Mahiro
Produced By Gonzo
Year Produced: 2004

Ignoring the totally yaoi covers and pictures that I found online, I have my own opinion of this show.

Since I have a hard time being mean, I'll have to say this...

It was... interesting.  In a good way, though.

The whole story is vaguely reminiscent of the actual classic... The Count of Monte Cristo, written by... I don't know and I don't particularly car, I'm nowhere near a literal guy.  If the book isn't loaded with pictures and speech bubbles, I don't usually bother with it.

I kind of remember watching that one movie: Man in the Iron Mask, or something like that, but I don't remember well enough to cross-reference.

The story behind this one version is that in the distant, distant future, you've got a bunch of noble brats... and then a heroic soldier from I dunno what campaign.  As you can tell, I already have a slight bias, but not debilitating (and I didn't like the soldier much better than the others, it was just that I agreed with him a lot more than say... I dunno... Albert (pronounced "Ahl-bhere", since he's French... wait, that explains it!)).

Albert is the son of a famous General (famous from some other campaign), and some rich princess-kind of person.

Bored with his mundane life of... whatever the hell it is that young nobles do, Albert and his friend Franz go on some kind of vacation to another world.  They arrive just in time for some big festival, and during the course of it, Albert meets a mysterious, pointy-eared, freaking green tall noble, who drops his pocket watch.

Like any good conniving upstart, Albert uses the return of said pocket watch to have a meeting with the mysterious man, who is introduced/actually introduces himself as the "Count of Monte Cristo".

Now the big question running through my head right now is: "If this is space, and most of the humans alive in that age probably haven't even heard of Earth, then where in the hell is "Monte Cristo", or is that not even a place?".

Anyway, the two get together and CoMC (... you know, I'm not even going to explain it to you.  If you get it, good, if you don't, then you've got a problem) invites Albert and Franz to brunch at a... public execution.  What the fuck?  Have people in the future reverted back to some kind of medieval entertainment system?  Then again, this is based on a classic set in those times, so maybe this is supposed to be happening.

And so their wild and utterly annoying time together starts.  If you know the story of the Count of Monte Cristo, then you know where this story leads, and if you don't... then I guess you'll just have to watch it, won't you?

I actually watched a bit of this before I even decided to do this blog, so I had a good idea what I was getting myself into, and I choose to anyway because this anime had a couple of things that I wanted to talk about.

First of all, the director Maeda Mahiro was staff on a couple of other animes that I liked, such as a couple of Miyazaki movies like Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky, and even Porco Rosso (all of which are coming up in quick succession), and he also worked on Samurai Champloo (which I just recently watched... it wasn't bad), and Last Exile (which I didn't love at first, but after watching it a second time a while back, am starting to like).

Maybe because of all of his work on stuff that I already liked (though he didn't direct any of those), or maybe because he's just good, I found the style and such of this anime to be really cool... it was just the characters that pissed me off.

The other thing that I'll bring up is the clothes.  I don't know if this is unique, or something Maeda Mahiro's take from one of his other animes, or what, but the way the clothes were animated was really interesting.  Since I'm an aspiring mangaka myself, I'll let you in on a secret.

Mangakas, being people who don't want to work themselves to death on every little detail have come up with something called a Screen Tone.  What that is is like a sheet of a "tone" with a given pattern on it.  What they do is cut it down, then basically glue it over the parts of their work that they want... toned.

... Like all that black in night scenes... do you really think that the mangaka spent about three days coloring all that shit in?  Well, maybe, yes.  But probably not.

For those of you who are reading this without any frame of reference in this anime or manga, then I'll tell you... that you're out of luck.  You might as well just close this down and go watch the anime I'm talking about.

For those of you who are following me, then I'll just finish up with; "What made this anime worth reviewing is the fact that they use a stable tone on the clothes.  So there's no crinkles or anything, it's just a shifting tone on a body.  It's really kind of cool and new."

Since this is from a book, I couldn't tell you if it was "true to the original work", but it seemed to flow nicely and keep a good pace.  Actually, I don't really recall a down moment, there was always something weird or aggravating going on.

Character development was good, actually.  The Count's history came to light in bits and pieces, though if you had half of a brain, you could usually see the plot "twists" coming from an episode away, but that's okay.
Albert's history and personality... I don't really give two shits about.  He was a little prick, the end.  In this show, I found myself liking the supporting cast way  more than... Albert.  The Count was okay though.

The animation style, I've already said everything that I want to about that, but still, even if it's just for the first episode, I highly recommend checking it out just for that.  It was a really mind bender the first time I saw it.  No matter how much I plug it though, I actually didn't find it all that appealing.  It was new and all, but it kind of distracted me for a while, not that the story line was keeping me enthralled.

Japanese or English, it doesn't matter, Albert was still weird.  Actually, both versions were good enough.  And in the English one, Albert's wimpy side was made all the more clear by the actor, so good job, man!

The music was... harsh on the ears in the beginning.  I dunno what that guy was on when he wrote that, but the dumbass tried to cram too many syllables into a line, then he scratched on another, and all kinds of weird stuff happened.
All in all, I wouldn't have kept that take... or the song, for that matter (I thought the song in general was crap too).  Eugenie's version wasn't bad though... mainly because nobody was singing it.

The ending themes were pretty good, more to my style of music, and when you're following up "We Were Lovers", it's hard not to be better.

Okay, I've bashed this enough for the visible section... oh, and I watched this from a borrowed DVD, so that's why this post isn't overflowing with pictures and stuff.

Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo Minitheatre

Coming up next!

Miyazaki Week... and then some!

Day 1: Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa! 

Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1st Gig

Name: Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1st Gig
Type: Television Show
Episodes: 26
Rating: TV-14
Runtime Per Episode: 25 min
Director: Kenji Kamiyama
Produced By Animax, Bandai, and others
Year Produced: 2003

One of the few animes that I can stand to watch in English, Ghost in the Shell S.A.C. (both of them), were produced about 7 years after the movie directed by Mamoru Oshii and was the first thing reviewed on this blog.

The classic troupe (with the same voice actors from the original Japanese version) and a couple of new faces make a return/entrance, to hunt down crime on the mean streets of New Tokyo, now!  Screw Hong Kong!
Actually, in all fairness, I thought that the movie was set in New Tokyo (I'll explain the "New" part later), but as I was looking around the net for verification of my plot summary, I figured out that the director said that it was set in Hong Kong, and that, if you looked carefully, you wouldn't find any hirigana or katakana (two character sets exclusively from Japan (since Japan got most of it's third alphabet, kanji, from China)) in any of the sign names... you might find English though... odd.

Chief Aramaki (Old Ape) and the Kusanagi (Queen Kong/The Major) now have a new foe!  A Super-Class-A Hacker (a term you'll hear quite a lot through the series)!  What is that?  No idea.  As far as I can figure, it's an honorific saved for those who have the ability to quickly and effectively hack/infect (via standard computer virus) other people's cyber brains.
It all started on February 3, 2024 when a man kidnapped the CEO of a micro-machine manufacturing cooperation called Serano-Genomix, demanding him at gunpoint to reveal a secret that "the world needed to know"... but what was this secret?  And who was this masked man?  And what does it have to do with the events occurring today... in mean, in the future...

The first part of a two-season run (though the two seasons have close to nothing linking them story-wise), Ghost in the Shell S.A.C 1st Gig is... strange in it's episode layout... actually, both "Gigs" were.

There were two types of episodes; Stand Alone episodes, and Complex episodes (and you can tell the difference by the color (green and blue respectively) and the fact that it tells you over the episode name).
Stand Alone episodes are just what they say.  The anime equivalent or a oneshot, or just a normal anime episode (pardon me, I have a mind more adapted to manga).  A plot that is summed up during the episode with practically no impact on the others except random flashbacks and references down the line.
Complex episodes, however, are part of the main story; that of "The Laughing Man".  I don't know what to relate it to, since I don't have television, and rely on downloading to get all of my anime and stuff, but that's the way it works.

The same thing goes for the 2nd Gig, only those are called Individual and Dividual episodes (new names for Stand Alone and Complex episodes, but pertaining to the main plot in that one.)

As far as the character development goes, even though some new characters were introduced, the plot still revolves around Motoko, Batou, and The Laughing Man, so you don't get to see much about them.  Togusa looks like hell though.  That's what married life does to some guys, though.

It's hard to describe character development, actually, since I watched the movie long before the show, and as such, couldn't really tell if there was much deep, probing ventures into the psyches of the characters...
Actually, that's a lie.  You get to know Batou a lot better through the series.  Like the fact that he grew a pony-tail.  A new aspect of his personality is revealed, and you learn about his jaded past (and how he lost his eyes!).

The art style was very different from the movie.  Don't be frightened by the opening sequence.  Actually, that's what I was afraid it was going to look like, and I was very happy when it was... well... not that.  There was a lot more color and shine in this one.  The eyes are probably the most apparent change in the art style (they get a lot more... anime...)

See?  She's also a lot more... I dunno... purple.

Animation style and flow is still good, and since it was for TV, that had to kick up the action factor, and drop most of the philosophic and (God, I'm getting sick of this word) existential stuff.

I don't know if I should be happy about this or not, but I found it well balanced for television.  Just enough action to keep them watching, but just enough thinking to make them question their existence a little (if they haven't been numbed by the movie already)... good work!

Again, good voice acting.  While they kept the original cast from the movie in Japan (as earlier stated, geez, don't you read anything I type?!), they changed almost everybody else except for Aramaki.  Among the new cast are (as far as I am concerned) a couple of stars!  Richard Epcar as Batou and Crispin Freeman as Togusa.

I don't particularly like or dislike Freeman, but I noticed that I've been seeing him quite a lot.  Saw him in Noein, and heard him for about a second in Hellsing (which I will be reviewing rather soon).

Now I do like Epcar.  I haven't seen him as much as Freeman, but I like the characters that I've seen him play, and also he's just got a inflection in his voice, and knows how to use it!  The guy's awesome!

As for the dubbed vrs. subbed argument, I can't lend much to it.  It was nice seeing the original voice actors in the Japanese one, made it easier to transition, but, like I said, I can stand this show in English (probably because I watched it in English first, though that doesn't always make a difference).  Now this show is one that I can stand to listen to while I'm "working".

I found the soundtrack and such better than the movie.  The movie had it's own charm, as I stated (the wailing children charm), but the anime was more into the punk/rock scene, with a couple of... "pop" (is that the correct term for "Inner Universe"?) numbers in there.
My personal favorites included Lithium Flower by Scott Matthew, Run Rabbit Junk by... someone, probably Yoko Kanno (who composed the music for pretty much all of the music), and Inner Universe by Origa.  You can also get an OST CD with all of their songs on it.

In the end... it really depends on what you're looking for.  If you want the action and more multi-ped tanks, watch the anime...

 

If you want the philosophy, the self-awareness, the more depressing (or should I say "realistic") story-line, or the nudity, then you should watch the movie (I think I know what you'll pick if you're a guy).

I can't attest to which one I like better, so the best that I can say is watch them both... just for the experience.  If you don't, then...

... I'm afraid you'll just have to accept the consequences... and the bullets and the pain.

I've also been told that the games produced for the Playstation are quite good, though since I'm too poor to afford a controller, I can't attest to it personally.

Once again, check out MiniTheatre for this one, and again, if you want to listen to the English version, go to the dual-audio folder.  Actually, I got mine from a Mediafire file folder, but it's only the English version.  I'll give you the link anyway.

Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1st Gig Mediafire Folder

Coming up next!

DNA²!