More randomosity! And if it seems like these posts are coming ever thicker and faster, it's because a) I have a bit of time on my hands, having cleared the boards of contracted work in the exhausting blur that was the first five months of the year and b) because I have a silly number of them ready at the draft stage and I'm trying to get caught up. So, with that in mind, let's crack on and have a gander at Gundam-W: Endless Waltz, Silent Möbius The Motion Picture 2, Lupin the 3rd: The Hemingway Papers, and Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie...
Is it fair to review the feature film adaptation of a three-part OVA that was in itself the conclusion to a forty-nine episode TV series? Perhaps not. Yet Endless Waltz seems to have been made with at least the possibility in mind that someone would watch it without prior experience of Gundam Wing, and that's good enough for me.
Though it has to be said that, in the first third, the flashbacks that are there to introduce a modicum of background for characters the more experienced viewer has been hanging around with for some twenty hours were the most confusing element, and I'm not certain it wouldn't have been easier to keep up if writer Katsuyuki Sumisawa had thrown me in completely at the deep end. But no, Endless Waltz chooses to function much like a proper, self-contained movie, with a narrator to drop in vital snippets of backstory and those occasional flashbacks and characters who have a habit of discussing their mutual history or making declamatory statements about recent events. And with all that, it's still an uphill climb, though more because the cast is large for a ninety-minute film and less because the plot is especially complicated, since it isn't. It is, in fact, very much in line with that of Char's Counterattack, the film that concluded the original Gundam saga, only with five pilots instead of one. In the aftermath of a major conflict, a year's fragile peace is disrupted by yet another bid to take over the Earth from yet another orbiting colony, with the added wrinkle that everyone was so eager for peace to stick this time that they're unprepared for another round of hostilities, having gone as far as firing their best weapons into the sun.
It soon turns out that a degree of familiarity is actually in Endless Waltz's favour, as is the relatively straightforward narrative. And after a wobbly first third of catching up with its many characters and shuffling them into place, things pick up considerably and keep picking up, resulting in a climax amply good enough to atone for the rocky beginning. It's to the film's credit that it finds meaningful and varied threads for everyone and then does a solid job of navigating between them, so that a slender plot feels meatier that it is. And for what was originally an OVA, the film's a polished bit of a work, with all-round slick animation and some splendid action, let down only by the brief intrusion of dated CG.
For all that, and perhaps because I lacked a history with the series, and despite suitably Gundam-esque themes of how exactly you go about hanging onto peace in a way that doesn't lead to more conflict down the road, I found Endless Waltz a touch lightweight in comparison with my favourite entries. Maybe it comes down to the sheer number of characters who are teenage boys; for the first time, I felt I very much wasn't the target audience. And as cool as the climatic twenty minutes are, there's something a bit silly about the themed Gundam suits with their outlandish weapons and accessories that seems out of place in a series often regarded as the quintessence of 'real robot' shows. As such, while I enjoyed my time with it and would happily recommend that anyone with enough familiarity to get past that uneven first third give it a shot, I'd place this somewhat below my favourite entries.
I've since decided I was slightly harsh on the first Silent Möbius movie, which has nothing really wrong with it besides the fact that there's only so much you can accomplish in an hour, and does a whole lot right in the time it has. And the same could be said of this second film, which followed a year later and picks up about as directly as is possible from its events. Or one thread of them, anyway: that first film focused on Katsumi Liqueur of the futuristic anti-demon police force AMP, shifting between a present-day crisis to a flashback that in turn informed those current events, and it's that younger, less kick-ass Katsumi we're back with this time around.
If there's a problem, that's it right there: the character Katsumi will become is a damn sight more interesting than the one she was, and this second film saddles us entirely with the former, meaning that at no point does she kick butt with a talking sword. By the same measure, there's not a great deal of dramatic tension to be found in the question of whether Katsumi will turn her back on AMP, who are now actively trying to recruit her, and obviously we know she's not about to die. On the other hand, it's not an inherently bad idea to use her personal history - which a bit of digging on Wikipedia reveals to be chock full of vital Silent Möbius plot stuff - as a way into a wider narrative, and Katsumi's wishywashiness as a protagonist is mitigated by the other AMP members, who are uniformly more appealing. Thanks to them, we get a couple of exciting bursts of action and a climax that mostly makes up for the steady pace of what's gone before.
Nevertheless, an hour of Katsumi largely being sad and indecisive would be tough going were it not for how downright pretty everything is. I'm not wholly sold on the character designs, but they're distinctive and slickly animated. The backgrounds, however, are on a whole different level. The colour palette is frequently gorgeous, but more than that, there's a technique at play that's so striking it's tricky even to describe, with certain settings reduced to an almost impressionistic level of detail without going so far that we doubt they're real places. Dreamlike is the word, I suppose, though even that doesn't get to the bottom of it. At any rate, they're a terrific visualisation of Katsumi's emotional space and particularly her sense of distance from the world around her.
Those backgrounds are the best thing the second Silent Möbius picture has going for it, but it's fair to say that its flaws are, for the most part, circumstantial. There was obviously meant to be at least one more of these movies, this even ends on a "To be continued..." card, and as the middle act of a story, the second entry would work considerably better than it does as a standalone. As such, I can't bring myself to be too harsh about it. There's no reason to seek it out on its own, but if the whole "cyberpunk with demons" setting appeals to you then the two films together are an appealing stab at that concept, and a window into a world so intriguingly presented that you'll likely wish, as I do, that another film or two had been forthcoming.*
Who would have thought it would be director Osamu Dezaki that got me over my lack of enthusiasm for the Lupin the Third franchise, and Lupin who got me over my issues with Dezaki? Yet here we are, and here's the second of the director's Lupin TV movies that I've seen, and I like it nearly as much as The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure, which I liked rather a lot. Dezaki would polish his approach to these things in the intervening six years, but nevertheless, this, his second stab at the series, is a fine bit of work. There's no getting around it, the director is an excellent fit, and his stylistic tics - which can be so irritating when he's making, for example, horror - are well suited to the off-the-cuff lunacy that's the world of Monkey Punch's ungentlemanly super-thief.
A big part of what's impressive here is how the film finds ways to keep an entry in so long-running a series feeling fresh. For most of the first two thirds, we have Lupin operating alone and the rest of the supporting cast off on their own subplots. Inevitably these bring them all together eventually, but nevertheless, it's a satisfying change of pace, and Lupin - a character I generally only find bearable in short bursts - actually benefits from being the centre of attention. The plot is in some ways so much boilerplate: there's a treasure that points the way to another much bigger treasure and various interested parties are on its trail. But again, there are enough twists on the formula to keep things fresh. Most noticeably, the film confines itself almost entirely to a single setting, an island nation caught in a war between two batches of treasure hunters, paving the way for plenty of Yojimbo / A Fist Full of Dollars style shenanigans as Lupin's regular allies Goemon and Jigen find themselves in the employ of the opposing factions.
Where The Pursuit of Harimao's Treasure was exemplified by a couple of huge action set pieces, The Hemingway Papers occupies itself more with incidents, but generally they're fun and there are still standout scenes. The best is what would normally be the big, show-stopping heist, but here is a jokey slice of cool in the Ocean's 11 mould, as Lupin and Fujiko team up to make the complicated and deadly look preposterously easy. Nothing else is quite that delightful, but on the other hand, there are more than enough enjoyable moments spread over the ninety-minute run time to keep the pace from dipping, and enough that are really ingenious to make it feel somewhat special. Like the animation, little in the plot rises above the level of good TV movie territory, yet it's a good TV movie based in a well-established franchise that can be terrific entertainment in the right hands, and - again, who'd have thought it? - Dezaki's hands are definitely that. It's probably not extraordinary enough to convert the uninitiated, but if you're a Lupin fan, it's certainly one to keep an eye out for.
It's probably reasonable to say that, assuming you have any preconceptions at all and assuming you know in advance that what distributor ADV called a movie was actually a two-part OVA cobbled together into a single, hour-long entity, the Sonic the Hedgehog animated film is about what you'd expect it to be. That's to say, there's a flimsy plot involving doctor Robotnik creating an evil robot duplicate of Sonic while also scheming to destroy the world and marry the president's daughter Sara (where he expects to go on their honeymoon is anyone's guess), there are a couple of boss fights, there are sequences that directly ape the video games, and the whole endeavour is stitched together with a spot of comic relief. Whereas at no point is there the faintest sense of anyone trying to reinvent the wheel, or even of attempting to exceed the limits of their brief in more than the smallest of ways.
So the soundtrack is a bit better than it needs to be, and while the animation is resolutely cheap and TV-esque, some thought has gone into the backgrounds and world-building, making for the odd scene that legitimately feels as though somebody made an effort to imagine how the world of the games might function if it was expanded into three dimensions. And there's a welcome quirkiness that makes the comedy more charming that irritating; in particular, the relationship between Robotnik and his unknowing wife-to-be is good for a few laughs. Then again, a lot of what ought to work doesn't fare so well. Sonic isn't very fun to be around and doesn't actually accomplish much; the film does a dreadful job of explaining why we should care about him or consider him to be so important that he'd be at the president's beck and call and villains would make robot duplicates of him. And the action is quite duff, limited by the budget animation and, again, by the fact that Sonic can't do a lot except run around.
Which is probably a good point at which to admit that I've never really got Sonic, either the character or the games franchise, and so obviously I'm in no way the target audience here. I guess that, if I was, I'd have liked this well enough. As I said above, it does precisely what you'd expect, and does it all reasonably well, though without any real flare. And I suppose that, given how badly wrong video game adaptations can go, that's not quite such faint praise as it sounds. At the least, you get the sense that those involved had a degree of affection and respect for the franchise. But to honest, if you're anything except a hardened fan, it's tough to say that this one's worth the trouble of seeking out.
-oOo-
Coming back to this, I was surprised to realise what a very average selection it is, and also that I was one entry away from a themed post on middling movies in series that were capable of better. Endless Waltz and The Hemingway Papers are a good-but-not-great Gundam movie and a good-but-not-great Lupin movie, and the second Silent Möbius film suffers from not being quite as strong as the first Silent Möbius movie. Which only leaves Sonic the Hedgehog, and while I pulled my punches in the actual review because I know a lot of people really like Sonic, it did basically suck!
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* There would be a TV show six years later, and I keep meaning to track it down, but animation-wise, TV anime from 1998 was a long way from feature film animation from 1992, and it looks awfully ugly and cheap by comparison.
[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]
* There would be a TV show six years later, and I keep meaning to track it down, but animation-wise, TV anime from 1998 was a long way from feature film animation from 1992, and it looks awfully ugly and cheap by comparison.
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