Notes on the Inaugural Meeting of the Humber SFF Society

Me reading.

I do like the word "inaugural", and it's not often I get to use it, even less often I get to use it correctly.  So that made it all the more of a pleasure to be invited to read at the inaugural event of the new Hull based genre meet-up group Humber SFF, along with fellow author Daniel Godfrey, whose Titan debut New Pompeii came out a mere couple of months ago.

It occurs to me only now that I've inaugurated two of these things now; I'm pretty sure I read at the first York event too, which is nice but makes me feel kind of old.  (Although, at least I got to type inaugurated, so that's something.)  Anyway, this one was put together by the brilliant Shellie Horst, with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm and the common sense to realise that Beverley would provide a much nicer venue than Hull would.  (In fairness, this may have something to do with the fact that Shellie lives in Beverley.  Still, credit where it's due.)  The Monk's Walk pub was very cool and medieval, as you can sort of see in the pictures, though a bit on the noisy side.  I suspect Daniel got the worst of that, but his reading still got me excited for New Pompeii - because who doesn't love time travelling Romans? - and afterwards I regretted not buying a copy when I had the chance.

Daniel Reading.

For my part I read from my soon to be announced next novel - code-named Super Secret Project Andromeda for no other reason than that's the name I just made up - instead of The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories like how I was supposed to.  But no one seemed to mind and I had fun, because I've been itching to field test this one for a while now.  I'm comfortable enough with these reading things now that I've started trying to differentiate the characters a little, and of everything I've written Super Secret Project Andromeda is just right for that, because it's absolutely all about the characters.  At any rate, people seemed to enjoy it, and I got some good questions afterwards, which is always nice.

Of course, about half of those questions came from Alex Bardy, who you may know as the raconteur and dilettante behind the York incarnation of these things, or from one of the other hats he wears; oh, and while I remember, Alex, huge thanks for giving me a lift home!  Generally it was a good crowd, and I got talking to some interesting people, whose names I of course immediately forgot - but at least one of whom I think I persuaded to give this year's Fantasycon a go, so that's something.

Hopefully this will be the first of many meetings for Humber SFF, and I urge anyone who's at all interested to give the next one a try, this and the similar groups in York and Sheffield are always a great deal of fun.  I'd also suggest that you pick up a copy of New Pompeii, from what I heard it sounds very good indeed.  And while I can't exactly encourage you to buy Super Secret Project Andromeda, at least not until it gets announced under its actual, proper title, I may as well end by pointing out that you can pick up my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories in paperback, e-book and hardback.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 14

With one exception, we're firmly in popular nineties franchise territory this time around, which inevitably proves both a good and a not so good thing.  I've come out with one new favourite, at any rate, and there was generally at least some good reason that nineties anime franchises proved popular, even if those reasons aren't always one hundred percent apparent now.

Anyway, enough preempting!  This time around we have: Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, Vampire Wars, Gunsmith Cats and Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China.

Dirty Pair Flash: Angels at World's End, 1994, dir: Tomomi Mochizuki

Perhaps it was foolish to expect much from this second, self-contained volume of Dirty Pair Flash, but I enjoyed the first quite a lot: it was derivative, but it was a lot of fun.  Angels at World's End, however, is much more of the former than the latter.  It has the vibe, in fact, of a show that's limiting its ambitions due to a tightening budget; you know how nineties sci-fi TV would always skimp by finding a naff excuse to stick its characters back in the twentieth century?  Well, that's precisely what Angels at World's End does: it's a holodeck episode, in essence, with Kei and Yuri stranded at a theme park that recreates historic (that is, then present day) Tokyo in perfect detail.

Only it makes no sense for this to have been a budget saving measure, the animation is no worse than last time around and maybe even a fraction better, so the only possible explanation is that someone thought this was a good idea.  Because clearly what one comes to Dirty Pair for is not explosions or laser fights or spaceships, its an episode where an underdeveloped side character falls in love with a flower shop girl that ends in a bizarre gay panic punchline.

In fairness, that's the only really terrible episode, though it's terrible enough to cast a pall over the other four.  The beginning and end are perfectly fine and feel at least somewhat in keeping with the first volume; the other two are too flamboyantly strange to really dislike.  One finds the Pair lodging in a haunted girls' dormitory, and feels very much like a parody of the Asian horror boom before the Asian horror boom had actually begun.  The other finds them trying to escort a professional shyster to prison in order to blow the reward money on a posh meal, and despite the fragile premise is perhaps the most enjoyable of the five.

Angels at World's End, then, is very much a wasted opportunity; the best thing it does is to develop the characters a little, but even then it feels as though the point is to watch Kei and Yuri moving nearer to their classic incarnations, which is really only interesting if you're familiar with the earlier show.  A tough recommendation to anyone but obsessive fans of the franchise, who surely already own it, and I suspect I'll be approaching the third and final volume with a bit of trepidation.

Vampire Wars, 1990, dir: Kazuhisa Takenouchi

When I discovered recently that the reason these Manga Collection dvds insisted on playing in a box in the middle of the screen was down to a setting on my PlayStation*, I found myself wondering if perhaps I hadn't been unduly harsh on them: after all, four I'd even kept, and the last couple I'd reviewed had at least kept me amused.  Sure the mandatory dubs were atrocious and sure there were some profoundly dubious inclusions, but maybe Manga deserved at least a little credit for the notion of a series bringing anime to the West at knockdown prices.

So it's with some relief that I report that Vampire Wars is rubbish, and rubbish in precisely all the ways that I've been criticizing these things for over the last few months: mediocre animation, rotten translation, listless performances** and, to cap it all off, a plot that simply stops at the end of its running time, with all the really interesting parts left dangling.  And it's not like there aren't at least a couple of those, in a story that pits the CIA against space vampires and doesn't even feel the need to make that hook the focus of its narrative.

Then again, the actual focus is our "hero", retired ex-pat terrorist Kuki Kosaburo, who is never for one millisecond of screen time as interesting as that summary makes him sound.  What follows is a boilerplate, if excitably bloody, thriller that takes a good two thirds of its running time to get round to the fact that we could have been hearing about goddamn space vampires all this time.  Come to think of it now, Vampire Wars reminded me a bit of Psycho Diver, which went to similar lengths to be all dark and hard boiled and edgy and to avoid absolutely everything that might have been interesting about its own plot.  And now I've been reminded of what a miserable load of nonsense Psycho Diver was!  Curse you, Manga Video, and curse your stupid Collection!

Gunsmith Cats, 1995, dir: Takeshi Mori

Gunsmith Cats is terrifically good.  And I almost feel like I could leave the review there, really: this three part OVA is among the best I've encountered in just about every way and I urge you to try and find a copy.

But perhaps I'm only being reticent because, as with so many of these things, it's not easy to pin down precisely what makes Gunsmith Cats stand out so dramatically.  I could certainly point to the animation, and rightly so, it's top notch, not to mention well directed, with some of the loveliest backgrounds I've seen in pre-twentieth century Eastern animation.  The opening sequence is particularly terrific, an effortlessly cool slice of pop art eye candy that prefigures (and perhaps betters) the similar work in Cowboy Bebop.  But there's much to love elsewhere as well, and I'd be hard pressed to point at another anime that captures the feel of being a manga come alive quite so well as Gunsmith Cats does.

Of course, sad to say, not everyone gets so excited over exemplary animation.  For those philistines, I suppose that Gunsmith Cats would be merely a well put together thriller with a couple of likable leads, some absolutely cracking action sequences and a fun, bluesy soundtrack.  Though even then, there's a little more going on than all that.  Gunsmith Cats is rare for anime in being set in the US with a largely American cast, but of course the version of Chicago where our heroes Irene "Rally" Vincent and "Minnie" May Hopkins run their titular gun shop and practice their sideline in bounty hunting is one filtered through a distinctly Japanese sensibility.  More than that, it's clear that creator Kenichi Sonoda gained most of his appreciation of American culture from seventies crime movies - and really, who can blame him for that?  Judged solely on the extraordinary chase sequence in the second episode, with Rally tearing about in a muscle car drawn in absolutely fetishistic detail, surely no one.

The thing is, Gunsmith Cats meshes its two sensibilities in a hugely satisfying way, with something of a Western animation influence creeping in that I've rarely seen in anime: just look at Minnie down there in the bottom right of the poster, and particularly the design of her eyes.  The overall effect is a general mode of realism that makes the traditional anime excesses - grenades thrown by the dozen are a particular favourite - stand out as charmingly goofy.  And that same balance of Western influence and anime sensibility stretches even to the plot, which finds the cats mixed up with a shady politician and a conspiracy within the ATF, yet also throws in a murderous Russian hitwoman for good measure.  (Its a story, by the way, that feels unexpectedly current, even a shade satirical; like most aspects of Gunsmith Cats, it's aged well.)  Heck, there's even a making of documentary on the DVD, which all alone is better than (and nearly as long as) Vampire Wars.

I'm finding that these positive reviews are breaking down into three basic categories: things I enjoy for largely dubious reasons, works of transcendent excellence that are much more than just good nineties anime, and those that are typical but exemplary examples of the work coming out of that decade.  Gunsmith Cats is without doubt in that last category, but definitely at its upper edge; it certainly has nothing to apologize for when pitted against more recent work.

Ranma 1/2 The Movie: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China, 1991, Shûji Iuchi

Rumiko Takahashi's manga Ranma 1/2 was quite the sensation, running for nearly nine years and to 38 volumes, producing two anime series (one of which reached an extraordinary 143 episodes) and three films, among other spin-offs.  Yet, like many of these things, its concept was simple enough at heart: protagonist Ranma has been pledged by his father to marry tomboy Akane, who wants nothing to do with him.  Oh, and due to an accident at some magical hot springs on the way, Ranma turns into a girl whenever he gets wet.  And his dad turns into a panda.  So, okay, not that simple.

Anyway, by the time we get to Ranma 1/2's first feature film outing, the series had had time to get a great deal more complicated than all that, and as far as I can judge (partly from having read and enjoyed the first two volumes of the UK manga release) had done so by Takahashi piling on more characters, all with their own quirks and many of them also shapeshifters of one ridiculous sort or another.  Big Trouble in Nekonron, China expects you to be up to date with much of this, which probably seemed a good deal more reasonable when it came out; on the other hand, MVM video had the decency to include some brief profiles of the core cast and no one has more than a couple of character traits at most, so it really doesn't matter a great deal.  What's much more important is that you're willing to get on board with a story where the main intellectual demand is working out what characters have turned into which cartoon animals.

On the one hand, Big Trouble in Nekonron, China functions surprisingly well as a feature length tale: it has a beginning, a middle and a clear climax, it makes use of all its characters, and gags and themes set up in the early portions all have a payoff by the end.  On the other, there's nothing about this story that wouldn't have worked amply well as three episodes of an ongoing show; the closest it has to a dramatic hook is that it takes the characters away from Japan for a trip to China.  The only sequence that really feels like its doing something dramatically outside what an episode of the series might deliver, in fact, is the opening, which involves just about every significant character in a madcap chase sequence after master Happosai, a tiny, ancient martial arts teacher with a fetish for stealing underwear.  Nothing here screams "needs the resources of a motion picture" and nothing particularly suggests a proportionate increase in effort or funding.  Frequently excellent composer and Mamoru Oshii favourite Kenji Kawai delivers the score, but then he also worked on the series and in any case it's far from his best work; the animation is very much of the "gets the job done" variety, neither impressing nor drawing attention to itself with any significant flaws.

None of which sounds especially positive, but I think it gives a fair impression of what to expect: Big Trouble in Nekonron, China is not the kind of film adaptation that takes its source property to new heights or in ambitious directions but the kind that does broadly the same thing at more than the usual length and is content to call that a day.  Fortunately, the thing in question is a great deal of fun, and so an hour and a quarter of it in one go is a pleasantly concentrated burst of such fun - even if during the middle its constant mania threatens to become a little enervating.  I like Ranma 1/2 the franchise, it's funny and sweet and immensely daft, and I liked this film adaptation, but there's no getting around the fact that its one for the fans or for those aligned with its wacky, none too subtle blend of humour.

-oOo-

So Gunsmith Cats was pretty damn great.  And I've no regrets over the time I spent with Ranma 1/2; at any rate, it's ended up on the "to keep" shelf rather than the "get out of the house as quickly as possible" shelf, so that's something.  But Vampire Wars has already faded mercifully from memory, and I'm trying hard not to think about the fact that I have a whole nother volume of Dirty Pair Flash to get through, which I'll inevitably hope will be as good as the first while secretly knowing that it's more likely to be as joyless as the second.



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]



* A note with the benefit of hindsight: No it wasn't, it's because Manga insisted on releasing non-anamorphic DVDs long after everyone else had the decency to stop doing so, and their crappy releases will never look right on widescreen TVs no matter how many settings you tweak.

** Another note with the benefit of hindsight: for some weird reason I felt the need to track down the US release of Vampire Wars, which has the decency to include the original language audio track with subtitles, and it's ... well, still not good, but substantially less painful, and even mildly entertaining.  I still can't recommend it, but my original review definitely feels kind of harsh.

How Much is Too Much Planning?

I talked a while back, here and to a lesser extent here, about how my novel writing process has gone from being a fairly laid back and make-it-up-as-you-go-along affair to a current level of preparation that could justly be compared with that of minor military campaigns.

And honestly, I'd come to the conclusion a while back that I was preparing as much as anyone reasonably could: plotting out the entire novel as a detailed synopsis and then breaking it down into a chapter plan before a single word hits the page, that's pretty organised, right?  And it seemed to be working, too: with the skeleton of a plot in place, I was freer to focus on characters, dialogue, action, all the fun stuff that can sometimes end up being two dimensional in a first draft when simply keeping everything rolling becomes the overriding impulse.

Then I got to my current work in progress, and everything exploded.  The thing is, it's a book that requires an astonishing amount of world-building - the world-building, really is what it's all about - and not having that ready in advance has been disastrous.  I mean, not disastrous, I'll get it figured out, but right now I'm thinking that'll mean an entire draft more than I'd normally do, which is hardly a good thing.  Plus, the writing's been like pulling teeth, and then putting those teeth in a sock and hitting myself in the face with it, because it's not fun at all knowing you're doing a rubbish job of something and I've been doing a really rubbish job of inventing a complicated alien society and ecosystem on the fly.

At the same time as that was sinking in I was talking to people about my synopsis for the next book in line, and the feedback that came from a couple of readers was that they weren't clear on how the central relationship was supposed to play out.  As we discussed it, my writer friend Charlotte Bond suggested I should try putting together some character profiles.  My first reaction was one of wariness, since that sounds awfully like a writing exercise and writing exercises are one of the many things I classify as people who claim to be writing doing something else instead.  But I didn't have any better solution, and I really did need to get this stuff worked out.  So I've been giving it a go, and, what do you know, the results have been surprisingly great so far.  Looking at the characters in isolation is pushing me to delve into their motivations and backstories in a way that I know I'd struggle to do if I was worrying about having to keep the wheels of a plot spinning.  Minor characters are developing a level of complexity I'd normally reserve for my leads.  And now I'm thinking that I really need to do something similar for the world: the major locations, the major systems, perhaps even the major events of its history.

I've always been distrustful of this sort of my approach, too, and for the exact same reason.  If I'm honest, whenever I hear fantasy writers (it's always fantasy writers) talking about how they map out every last corner of their world before they begin, down to what rodents like to eat each other and who cleans out the privies in that tiny village the characters won't ever visit, I tend to assume that they are in fact prevaricating.  Because, you know, they are.  But I'm telling myself that this feels different: I already have the novel planned in its entirety, so I'm not trying to craft anything extraneous; the character traits and relationships I'm figuring out will almost certainly find their way into the final book, and I have faith that so will the world-building, once I get to that.

But where will this all end? I have no idea, though it's easy to start imagining nightmare scenarios where advance plotting means writing the entire novel before I ever start writing the novel, trapping myself into some kind of weird Möbius reality in which planning only ever leads to more planning.  And wait, there's a word for that, isn't?  I'm pretty sure it's called prevarication.  So let's not do that.

Upcoming Appearances

I haven't been out and about quite as much as I'd have liked this year, because money basically, and I'm sad to be missing my first Nine Worlds this weekend - everyone have fun without me, and please spare no thought for me slaving away at a hot word processor! - but I do have a couple of things coming up that are worth a mention.

First up, I'll apparently be on a panel at Fantasycon-by-the-Sea.  It's called Wanted: Dead or Alive and the topic is "Is the anti-hero the new hero in fiction?"  To which the answer is, of course, no, and so I suspect that myself, Adrian Faulkner, Carrie Buchanan, Neil Williamson and Georgia Duffy will just use the question as a springboard to discuss how neat anti-heroes are, because anti-heroes are definitely neat.  I should probably talk about Easie Damasco, but I suspect I'll get distracted by Dime, the protagonist of my current edit-in-progress, a glorious son of a bitch who makes poor old Easie look like a good Samaritan by comparison.

But Fantasycon isn't for a couple of months, and my other event is a whole lot sooner: two weeks away, in fact.  That would be the inaugural meet of Humber SFF, which I'm honoured to be one of the two guest speakers at, along with Daniel Godfrey, whose debut New Pompeii came out just a couple of months ago.  There aren't many things that would lure me so close to the city of my birth, but I'm looking forward to this: Shellie Horst has been organising with a deal of enthusiasm and I'm a fan of the template set for these things by the similar events in York and Sheffield (and isn't it time for another one of those?)  I'm supposed to be reading from my collection The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories, but I did that at Edgelit, and now I have a longing to go instead with something from my unannounced next novel and then swearing everyone to secrecy afterwards.  So that's one more reason to come along, together with the fact that the Hull area is long overdue a group like this and it's in a pub - a really good pub, from what I hear - and that Daniel's book sounds particularly interesting: you might get to hear a chapter from a work in progress that doesn't officially exist yet, unless I chicken out and just go with a story from Sign in the Moonlight like I'm meant to.

Anyway, the details are here - wait, is that a real deer's head? - but basically it's a case of being at The Monks Walk pub in Beverley at 4pm on Saturday the 27th of August and then drinking alcoholic beverages and listening to writer words, followed by more drinking alcoholic beverages and hanging out with like-minded folks.  Hopefully I'll see you there.

Drowning in Nineties Anime, Pt. 13

What's this?  Another good outing?  With nothing I outright hated, a couple of things I really enjoyed, and one sorta, kinda borderline classic?  Nineties anime ... truly you're the gift that just keeps on giving!  This time through, Super Dimensional Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again, Dirty Pair Flash: Angels in Trouble, Red Hawk: Weapon of Death, and Memories, which gets bonus points for not having a colon in its title.

Super Dimensional Fortress Macross II: Lovers Again, 1992, dir: Ken'ichi Yatagai

Macross II, first proper sequel to epic sci-fi series Super Dimension Fortress Macross - which came to the West as part of the weirdly bastardised Robotech saga - is not much loved among Macross fans: missing the show's original creator, this six part OVA follow-up is widely considered as merely a rehash with better animation, covering the same basic plot beats and themes with a broadly similar group of characters.  But let's for the moment assume you haven't seen Robotech (I haven't) and flip that on its head: what we have here is a neat encapsulation of one of the best-loved anime series of the eighties, with a fresh coat of well-above-par nineties OVA production values.

With all of that said, Macross II takes a fair while to get good.  The first two or three episodes take their time in setting up the conflict and characters, though even then they have their moments: who knew that Macross predicted Futurama's splendid Monument Beach gag by some seven years?  Still, it's only towards the end, when events get serious and epic and even rather apocalyptic that the show finds its feet.  And even at its best, it remains thoroughly silly: in particular, characters are constantly doing irrational things to keep the plot on course, and it's one of those stories that could end in five minutes if the villain only didn't hold back the vast bulk of their forces until our heroes finally have the resources to counter them.

Still, those are acceptable forms of silliness when one is in the habit of dealing with nineties anime, and didn't bother me unduly, especially once the pace began to gather momentum.  A more serious criticism might be that, when you strip it right down, there's not a great deal here besides a run-of-the-mill alien invasion plot dressed up with plentiful amounts of giant robots.  Unlike with, say, Gunbuster, there's nothing that makes Macross II really special, besides the quirks that are apparently common to the Macross franchise: an involved back story and a strange emphasis on music that justifies unusual amounts of J-pop.  And for that matter, this really isn't on a par with Macross Plus, which would see the return of series creator Shōji Kawamori.  So, no classic then, but if you're new to the Macross franchise, enjoy epic scale sci-fi, and want a way to while away a lazy Sunday afternoon, Macross II might be just what you need.

Dirty Pair Flash: Angels in Trouble, 1994, dir: Tsukasa Sunaga

That title's going out of its way to sound dodgy, isn't it?  There's good reason to suspect that this might have been a deliberate move on ADV's part - we're very much in the time period, after all, when anime was still selling in the West entirely on the notion that it was either ultraviolent or pornographic - but it doesn't do a great deal to reflect what DPF:AiT actually is.  What we have here is a reboot of the long-running Dirty Pair franchise, reimagining the adult protagonists of the original works as troublesome teenagers with mild delinquent tendencies, not too much in the way of common sense, and a habit for hair-trigger violence.  Kei and Yuri are freelance future Trouble Consultants with the World Welfare and Works Agency - but as we meet them, neither their careers nor their partnership look like lasting very long, for Yuri is more interested in skiving off and dating and Kei is a gun nut with attitude issues.  And if that sounds like a setup for half the buddy cop stories ever told then congratulations!  You have the number of Dirty Pair Flash.

I'm not complaining, mind you.  There's much to be said for a formula well done, and if Dirty Pair Flash has nary a beat anywhere that hasn't been seen before, it at least hits them all with style.  At worst that means a drab corporate villain of the kind that nineties anime seemed to delight in and a silent-but-beautiful female assassin straight out of who knows how many similar stories, but at best - which is more often - it means episodes that are all too eager to devolve into hectic action sequences at the slightest excuse.  The first episode's is probably the best, a fine bit of farce that starts small and snowballs merrily, but a later shootout in a spaceport where absolutely everyone turns out to be a potential assassin gets all of the best visual gags.

At any rate, I consider myself a convert, having already picked up the other two DPF volumes; the six episodes here are a ton of fun, and perhaps even more than the sum of their parts.  Though its characters might be thin in theory, Dirty Pair Flash treats them seriously, and I was shocked to realise that by the end I was as absorbed just as much by how Yuri and Kei would learn to work together and grow up enough to save the galaxy as I was by the dippy action scenes; again, there's much to be said for stock characters in stock situations when everything's constructed with enough clear affection to draw you in.  This is nigh-on classic nineties anime, and while classic in this case should be taken more as perfectly typical than great, the show actually straddles the line between the two pretty fairly.

Red Hawk: Weapon of Death, 1995, dir: Sang Il Sim

There are probably only two really salient facts that you need to decide whether Red Hawk: Weapon of Death is likely to interest you at all: it's a martial arts anime from 1995 and it's only available as part of Manga's budget Collection range, with all of the horrid, subtitle-free cheapness that implies.

On the first of those counts, Red Hawk is neither very good nor very bad.  Its protagonist, the titular, Zorro-like masked vigilante, its main baddie and his weird henchmen, the brother versus brother dynamic that becomes a big deal towards the end, even the supporting cast are all resolutely standard fare, but that's not quite to say they're not entertaining.  Granted, some of the basic plot points fail to work at all, and there's no real suggestion that the filmmakers were invested in them.  It's obvious, for example, that main character Jan Chang is the masked vigilante Red Hawk, and yet the movie obfuscates the fact to no real purpose, dragging the reveal out for a little lame comedy but not much else.  It's obvious, too, almost from the beginning, that Jan Chang will be fighting his brother, and even the whys and wherefores are readily predictable.  In fact, once the opening scenes are out of the way, the film couldn't travel in much more of a straight line - though even then while fudging its character's motivations for no clear reason.  As with so many of these plots, there's really no reason that Red Hawk couldn't have got to the third act climax years before, and the sole explanation for why these events are happening now seems to be - well, that they are.

This probably sounds awful, but at worst it's functional, and the general breeziness keeps it afloat, along with some well above average animation; in particular, the animators are careful to get the motion of human bodies right, which when you're making an animated martial arts movie is a wise decision indeed.  The look of Red Hawk advantages it immensely, and brings a degree of excitement to fights that are too ready to descend into special-move swapping - though a couple of exceptions, especially towards the end, stand out through a greater degree of ingenuity.

At this point, then, Red Hawk falls firmly into the camp of "recommended, if you like this sort of thing" - I'd say that I enjoyed it more that the previous year's Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, for example, which it resembles in a number of suspiciously specific ways.  However, there remains the fact that what we have is a Manga Collection release, and few things are so guaranteed to turn watchable nonsense into subpar tosh.  We have the usual playing in a small box in the middle of the screen incompetence, the usual barely functional dub, and of course the usual clumsily inserted swearing that clearly isn't what the characters are saying (though that last does produce a genuinely hilarious moment near the end.)  Were it not for that general Collection-ness, I'd recommend Red Hawk on the strength of the animation alone, which really does make the whole thing more watchable than it has any right to be.  But it's hard to concentrate on good animation when it's been reduced to a box in the middle of your screen, or when you're trying to shut out mediocre American voice actors shouting lines that obviously have little relation to anything the characters were ever intended to be saying.  A thumbs down, then, but with my ire directed much more at Manga than poor Red Hawk itself.

Memories, 1995, dir's: Kôji Morimoto, Tensai Okamura, Katsuhiro Ôtomo

It's safe to say that you're unlikely to have seen another film quite like Memories, and even those movies that inhabit a similar space - which is to say, collections of animation shorts presenting themselves as feature films - are rare and far between.  Yet here we and are and here's Memories: a hugely expensive, lavish collection of three all but entirely unrelated stories, with the only combining thread being that they're all based on works by writer / director Katsuhiro Otomo.

But therein lies the rationale: for Katsuhiro Otomo was the creator of Akira, and Akira was a goldmine, both within and outside Japan, in the latter case proving the driving force towards the acceptance and awareness of anime in the West.  And even some years later (Memories was released in 1995, seven years after Akira) it's safe to assume that Otomo remained a name to conjure with.

I have no idea how successful Memories would prove to be, though now that I come to research it I discover that Otomo has made a total of four of these anthology movies over the course of his career, the latest being Short Peace in 2013, so perhaps the answer is "not so badly."  But it's precisely as easy to say why it might have done well as why it might have flopped horridly: it contains one near masterpiece, and one short that isn't much good at all.

To start with the positive: Magnetic Rose is fine enough that it makes Memories worth seeing all on its own, and fortunately it's also the longest piece at a (just slightly bloated) 45 minutes.  It follows the crew of a spaceship who, on answering a distress call to investigate a dilapidated wreck, find themselves in spaces and situations that couldn't possibly be occurring.  The results are a bit like a less overtly horror telling of Event Horizon, (which it preceded by two years), except with more opera, deeply lovely animation, and a script by a certain Satoshi Kon, who soon after would go on to direct Perfect Blue and begin proving himself one of the greatest writer / directors of all time.  Without Kon's work, Magnetic Rose would still be pretty damn good; with him it becomes a tangled, hypnotic study of the ways in which the past infects and poisons the present.

Then Magnetic Rose ends and Stink Bomb starts and - well, I won't say Memories breaks down altogether, but it comes damned close.  Stink Bomb, the story of a sad-sack, dim-witted salaryman named Nobuo who inadvertently turns himself into a living biological weapon is, at its finest, a good example of a solid mid-nineties anime story.  But at it's worst, it's damned aggravating.  The thing is, Stink Bomb is striving for satire, but its plot only keeps stumbling along because everyone involved behaves in the most idiotic way possible, and particularly Nobuo, whose rampant stupidity costs a great many lives.  So lousy satire then, but there are times when Stink Bomb finds its groove - like Magnetic Rose, it relies heavily on its music - and in those moments, as I say, it's a perfectly solid example of what anime at this point was just fine at doing, only with the utterly splendid level of animation that drives the whole project.

Last up, and by far the most interesting section, comes Cannon Fodder, directed by Otomo himself.  Cannon Fodder is the near-plotless tale of a city that exists only to war against an unseen, probably nonexistent enemy - and as a mood piece designed to develop one idea to the fullest extent possible, it's pretty great.  Not to mention as a technical exercise: it's the only one of the three parts that moves substantially away from realism, with its characters looking very much like soldiers who've just blundered back from the Somme, but more to the point it's shot in one extraordinary take, using what must in 1995 have been cutting-edge CG work.  It's thrilling while you're watching it, but kind of airy and easy to forget afterwards, the lack of a narrative feeling like more of a problem in retrospect.

Still, it's not a bad ending to a film that somehow manages to be both totally flawed and totally indispensable.  If you have any interest at all in animation then you need to see Memories, because some of the finest work ever produced in the field is to be seen here.  And if you like anime or even only science fiction then Magnetic Rose is a must watch.  If the entire film were up to the same standard then Memories would probably be the pinnacle of nineties anime; as it is, it's a minor classic at most.  It's fascinating, sort of a mess, often dazzling, and I really wish I loved it more than I do, but still I'd recommend it unreservedly.

-oOo-

Getting to the end of this, I find myself wanting to watch some more Dirty Pair Flash, which is just fine because there are two more volumes to get through.  And in retrospect, this was a fun batch, all told; if every low point was only as low as Red Hawk and every high point as high as Memories then I'd be a happy compulsive watcher of nineties anime!



[Other reviews in this series: By Date / By Title / By Rating]

Imagine A World Without Our Nostalgia

I went to see X-Men: Apocalypse a few weeks ago - yeah, not exactly a series high point, is it? - and as I was walking back out through the cinema, past the posters for upcoming movies, for the first time I realised something that had been boiling away in my subconscious for an awfully long time now.  Not only were there barely any original properties, there was barely anything that wasn't directed squarely at those who, like me, grew up in the eighties and nineties.  Every major blockbuster was aimed at me.  And that sucked.

What struck me in that moment is that, as a generation, we've failed miserably to offer ourselves our fair share of innovative concepts, let alone to do the same for those who've come after.  Many of my friends are parents, and I refuse to believe that all they want to entertain their children with is the chewed up cud of their own childhoods.  Yet that seems to be what we get, and oftentimes all we get: old toys, old cartoons, old films, old comics, glossed up to look just new enough that we can pretend we haven't seen them all before, but kept sufficiently intact that we can still persuade ourselves that not a whole lot has changed since our formative years.

Now, I'm as guilty of this as anyone.  Well, maybe not as anyone, but I'm not claiming innocence.  I mean, anybody who follows the blog even slightly will have noticed that I've spent a good part of the last year watching Japanese cartoons from two decades ago.  Still, I've come to a lot of new stuff too.  And I like that stuff as much, and usually more, than the things I value from my childhood and teens.  There are stunning films, books, comics and music being produced, right now, and there are uniquely talented new voices coming up all the time, just trying to make themselves heard.

So here's a thought: what if we just let it all go?  What if we could all unanimously accept that, yeah, the cartoons and video games and comics and movies and toys that were around when we were growing up were pretty good, some of them even pretty great, but that was then and this is now - and in any case, we still have almost all of those things, should we want them.  They're not going anywhere.  But nor are they the be all and end all.

Now I realise this sentiment gets aired a lot in one form of another - but it's usually coming from people with no affection for the properties in question, and I don't at all class myself in that category.  I have a lot of love for many of these things.  I'm as excited for a new comic book movie as anyone, I long for a genuinely good Transformers movie, and I'll be really happy if and when we get another G. I. Joe picture.  It's not like I hate this stuff, only that I don't feel altogether comfortable around it anymore.  More and more it seems that the influence of me and people like me is stifling, and that it's time we backed off, or perhaps applied our fannish energies in a more constructive fashion.

So ... imagine a world without our nostalgia.  Just spend a moment imagining how that might look.  Imagine that instead of Star Wars 8 we got a new science fiction property that was as thrilling to the kids of today as Star Wars was for us back in the day.  Imagine that instead of a new Ghostbusters movie with the genders switched we could have something fresh that bottled that same lightning and could have an all-female core cast without it being dismissed as a gimmick.  Imagine a world where new ideas and new attitudes weren't just trying to sneak through the cracks of our obsession with our own childhoods.  Imagine what would happen if we, as a generation, released this stranglehold we have over popular culture.

It's a pipe dream, sure.  But there are steps that we could be making in that direction, if we wanted to.  Maybe if we were all more open to new ideas then we wouldn't be here, staring at a box office filled waist deep with the slop of our recycled youth; maybe if we paid more attention, instead of seeing things that in all likelihood will be crap just because we recognize the brand, then smart genre movies like Ex Machina and Predestination wouldn't be such a precious rarity.  I guess, engage a little harder with your entertainment is what I'm suggesting.  Perhaps expect a little more, and realise that there's space in your head and in the world for new ideas.  Maybe don't tear into the Jupiter Ascending's of this world without even bothering to watch them.  You know, stuff like that.

Or don't, and maybe we'll finally get that M.A.S.K movie they keep promising.  Oh, and Thundercats, that's happening soon right?  And weren't they even talking about a Visionaries movie, even though no one ever gave the slightest damn about Visionaries?  You know what, actually I'm easy either way.  But could we at least all agree to keep Michael Bay away from these things?  Because Michael Bay's M.A.S.K is not a thing I have any need to see.

The Sign in the Moonlight: Launching at Edge-Lit

 I think that the last time I had a book launch was for my first novel Giant Thief, five or so years ago, and that wasn't much of a thing all told - more of a book hermitage, really - so there's no shortage of reasons for me to be looking forward to this coming Saturday.

The thing is, as I never tire of pointing out, it's not so long ago that it seemed as though The Sign in the Moonlight and Other Stories was never going to happen, as the collection I'd spent three years trying to make a reality swam around the edges of the sucking whirlpool that was the demise of Spectral Press.  Then, when I found a home for the paperback early in the year with the wonderful Digital Fiction Publishing, I had to try and accept that the hardback edition - which had been my dream for the project all along, and the reason I persuaded Duncan Kay to provide his gorgeous illustrations - was going to fall by the wayside.  Then, somehow, I convinced Ian Whates, head honcho of perhaps my favourite UK small press, NewCon, to pick up the project, and not only that but Ian fell in love with it enough to give the book the sort of deluxe treatment I'd barely dared dream of.  And now here we (nearly) are and it's my second ever book launch, and the book in question is a thing of almost obscene beauty.  Oh, and I'll be launching beside one of my favourite authors, Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose collection of short fiction from perhaps my favourite ever series, The Shadows of the Apt, will also be out from NewCon on Saturday, which makes a nice sort of poetical sense given that Adrian was kind enough to write the introduction for The Sign in the Moonlight.

Phew!

So that'll be happening between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., and alongside mine and Adrian's books are a collection from V. C. Linde and one from Mr. Whates himself, released by the ever foxy and ever spirited Fox Spirit.  Oh, and there'll be free wine.  Wait, I wrote that in lower case, didn't I?  What I of course meant to say was, THERE'LL BE FREE WINE.

Damn it, there must be a way to do flashing text in blogger.  No?  Really?

So do come along, please.  Even if you can't afford to buy anything, it's not often that getting drunk in the daytime at someone else's expense can be passed off as supporting the arts - but in this case it clearly is, and moreover it might be another five years before I get to do another of these things and I'd like to make this one count.

Oh, and if you really can't make it, please do consider picking up a copy here!  You'll miss out on the free wine, but you'll still get a gorgeous, fully illustrated book full of some of the finest short fiction I've penned, so there's that.