Back in the sixties and seventies, before the age of Ghibli, Toei still had the ambitions to become the “Disney of Japan”, and was enthusiastically competing with Nippon Animation for that title. It’s not much of a surprise of course that a movie of the Swan Lake once was made. And I’m pretty impressed, actually. It’s obviously a children’s movie, but if you like this sort of stuff then Swan Lake will have you entertained.

The music for starters is fantastic. But really, how can you go wrong when you have Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake as your soundtrack? With some of the best parts of this classical masterpiece, this movie truly is a feast for the ears and it creates a great atmosphere to work with.

Well then, the story itself is a bit unrealistic at times (romantic love story between a prince and princess who happen to meet each other and fall in love. Oh, and let’s not forget the two squirrels who somehow make themselves into important characters…), but it definitely has its charms. The story is well paced and makes well use of its airtime. Although there’s one particular Big Lipped Alligator Moment with ballet-dancing eggs. No, really.

In any case, what made me like this movie the most was the villain: Rothbart. His motives are just plain wrong, but he’s such a fun guy to watch. The characterization for him is just excellent and he’s the one who manages to carry this movie from the moment he first gets mentioned. Now here’s a movie that manages to create a really enjoyable character. The rest of the cast is also pretty enjoyable. Odette may be a bit useless, but it doesn’t stand out too much because of Odin, the Prince and the squirrels (yeah, these two oddballs really have their charms) have their own colourful personalities.

Let me take a bit of time to talk about the ending, though. The progress of this movie is fairly linear and modern fairy-tale-like, but solid. At the end, there’s this big battle between good and evil, which is actually pretty engaging… until the creators suddenly decide to pull a completely random twist that comes right out of nowhere, makes no sense whatsoever and isn’t explained in the slightest. Seriously, there are Deus ex Machina endings, and there’s this. You really have to try to be that bad.

Nevertheless, I like kids stuff once in a while, and this movie perfectly satiated my thirst for them. That ending was just… weird, but the rest of the movie was very enjoyable. This obviously isn’t the movie you want if you’re looking for maturity, but if you like innocent and likable characters, then this movie has them.

So I was told to check out Garzey’s Wing. I can see why. It’s hilarious.

For all of the wrong reasons, though. Especially with the English Dub on, it’s just one of those shows that are so bad that they become hilarious. There’s no way that I’m going to rate this high, but it is an hour and a half of solid entertainment.

It’s basically just another one of those stories in which a teenager somehow gets warped up to a different world and somehow turns out to be the holy warrior who is the only one who can save the day. There are really tons of shows with such a premise, but this is really a particularly badly executed one. The pacing is just so incredibly erratic that 50% of the cuts don’t make any sense whatsoever. This OVA leaves no time to catch a breath, and the amount of plotholes that come out of it is just huge (the good guys, for example, for a bunch of people who are mere slaves, they surely collected quite a bit of ammo and supplies).

The dialogue is… just abysmal. The English voice acting in particular just way too stiff and camp. Seriously, I have no idea who was behind them, but while watching this, I could almost imagine the voice actors yelling all of their lines in an over the top manner. I have no idea who wrote the English dialogue, but it makes no single attempt to come across naturally. There are hilarious parts in which characters stop mid-sentence because the original Japanese dialogue was much shorter. It also leads to some absolutely priceless one-liners.

I’m not one to usually enjoy bad shows, but what sets Garzey’s Wing apart from most of the other really bad series is one person: Yoshiyuki Tomino. While this was his biggest failure ever, he at least tried: the movie’s concept is at least creative, the animation is at least good (save for a bunch of really obvious shortcuts) and the pacing at least doesn’t drag or become boring.

I respect Tomino a lot: this series really shows how bad his depression was, and it must have been horrible for him to go through this for around ten years, and I have respect for this guy for pulling himself out of it. He very neatly produced the good version of Garzey’s Wing with the Wings of Rean, which was a genuinely good OVA.

But Garzey’s wing was just crap.

When it aired, Higurashi no Naku Koro ni really blew my mind with its mystery horror combination, so obviously I was looking forward to its spiritual successor: Umineko no Naku Koro ni. It really managed to take the Higurashi formula, and take it into a new, fresh and original direction with a really mind-blowing mystery-story.

Umineko at heart is a murder mystery-story with so many layers, so many red herrings and so many times at which the viewer is forced to look beyond the box for new clues as to the identity of the real killer. Higurashi already had me forming wild theories about what was going on, but this effect is even more noticeable in Umineko. It’s a really thought-provoking story that makes you think you have a clue as to what’s going on, only to throw a plot twist that renders all of your speculation useless. This mystery really is why you want to watch this series, because it really does this like no other.

It’s just a shame that the story’s incomplete. There’s no second season announced at this point, so at the end of the series, you’re not going to know what the heck happened throughout the majority of the series. This really is the thing that I hate the most about modern anime: that the shows with weak sales don’t get their much-needed sequels. Umineko is at the verge of becoming yet another one of them. NOTE TO SELF: delete this paragraph in the unlikely event that a second season does get announced.

Okay, so how about the execution? Unfortunately, it’s a bit rushed. Apparently, the creators tried to stuff 50 hours of visual novels into just 26 episodes, so a lot had to be cut. While the cuts were made skillfully so that the entire storyline is still intact, the direction feels rushed at times, and not as captivating as it could have been. The animation is rushed as well, but thankfully neither are bad enough to get in the way of what’s really important.

Because of that, I can say that I really enjoyed this series. It’s a thought-provoking series that really brings mystery to a whole new level. But where the heck is that second season?

Okay, so apparently this episode was terrible for the visual novel readers. I however am just watching this anime, so I don’t care. This episode was pretty good, and the only thing I’m raging about is that bloody cliff-hanger, especially considering that that second season might not even come!

However, I do agree that Umineko was really, really rushed. How could this have happened, really? People keep saying “DEEN! DEEN! DEEN!”, but they’ve made plenty of great series and adaptations in the past, so that can’t be the only thing. In the end, my eye still falls back to Chiaki Kon, the director. I don’t like her. While she adapted the Higurashi novels really well, with nice balance and a strong direction, she was able to do so because she really didn’t have anything else to do at that time. It was her debut, so she really had to prove that she could direct something right.

But take a look what she’s up to from the past spring: 20 episodes of Hanasakeru Seishounen, 26 episodes of Umineko no Naku Koro ni, and when this is over she’s going to do Nodame Cantabile’s finale. That’s more than 52 episodes within one year! She really took way too much on her plate, and like Shinbo I’d wish that she’d just concentrate on one single series and make that one right, instead of trying to do everything at the same time. Now all of those shows are just going to be really rushed, and they’ll miss the strong direction that Higurashi had. Most directors manage to produce one series every two years, or perhaps even one series a year. Counting the upcoming winter-season, Chiaki Kon has directed six series in two years. Somebody stop her and hand those series over to some other directors. I mean, Studio Deen has enough other talents walking around.

At this point, I have a really hard time deciding how to judge this series. Rushed or not, Umineko has one hell of a backstory. It was always fun to formulate theories, trying to figure out what’s going on. This is why I’m not going to recommend this series to people who already played the visual novel. Not because it’s badly executed, but by far the best thing about Umineko is its mystery. When you already know what’s going to happen, then what’s left? What’s the fun in reading a detective novel if you already know exactly how everything is going to happen?

As for the people who haven’t played the game, it’s a bit trickier, though. It’s a great watch, but I sure as hell ain’t going to recommend this if a second season isn’t being produced. It’s like reading a detective novel, only to discover that someone ripped off the entire second half. This is probably the thing I like the least about anime: it’s “let’s just animate the first part so that we can only animate the conclusion when the sales are good”-mentality. Imagine if Monster or Legend of Galactic Heroes were animated this way.

EDIT: ah, forgot to talk about the episode. It’s interesting how Beatrice basically let Battler bombard her with theories that she could in fact just have blown all away, as if she wanted to lose. At first I thought that she was simply acting again, but for some reason I don’t think she really did that here. Kinzou’s death actually being confirmed was a major revelation, of course. The question really is: who the hell is this guy? If he is one of the seventeen people alive, the servants must be playing a really strange game.

At this point, it’s pretty clear that at least one of them is in on the game: there are only a few family members who knew about Kinzou’s death, while they were in on it all along since they lived inside his house, and otherwise the closed room murder in the third arc would be pretty impossible, but actually plausible: they knew that Kinzou was already dead, and made it seem that he was killed along with the other six to cover him up.

I also wonder, at the end we see Lambdadelta and Bernkastel talk about how Beatrice must never win. Again, big clue: the two are working together and somehow have interest in keeping the game going on forever. And how is Bernkastel’s magic going to play in, I wonder? I mean, her magic is to make anything happen as long as the possibility isn’t zero. If Beatrice is going to be able to win of her she’s going to have to be able to create such a lock-down that there’s no possibility for escape.

There. Happy now? ;)
Rating: * (Good)

And remember: even though the series is finished now, I still reserve the right to delete any comment that spoils beyond this point in the novel

Originally I didn’t intend to watch this movie, but many people pointed out that Macross - Do you Remember Love (which followed the original Macross series) deserved to be watched. Now that I watched it, I agree that it’s more than just a recap-movie, and actually a bit of an alternative retelling whose story is very similar to the original.

My big issue with recap movies is when the creators do nothing but copy and paste frames or storylines directly without any form of editing. Thankfully, this is not the case for Do You Remember Love: the creators made conscious decisions of what storylines to focus on, they actually improved the storyline to get rid of some of the plotholes of the original series, and the entire animation is redone. And how! This is 1984 we’re talking about, and the animation looks its time far ahead. This movie, along with Nausicaa is responsible for introducing anime to the big budget era, showing the amazing things that you can do with it. During its time, I’m sure that it revolutionized the animation industry. Even today, it’s still a beautiful movie, and a great recommendation for those who want to get into the look of the eighties and have only watched shows from the past decade. But how does the rest of the movie hold up?

In the end, however, I like Do You Remember Love less than the original TV-series, simply due to the inevitable: the characters and storyline have far less depth, and the storyline just isn’t paced well enough for a movie. Of course a lot of time is spent on the invasion of the Zentradi and their giant cactus that forms a threat to earth, but the main focus, especially in the second half, turns out to be the romance, and the love triangle between the three lead characters. Hikaru and Misa are fine, but I really didn’t like what happened to Minmay: her development is cheesy and angsty, wasting lots of precious time, and her romance comes from nowhere, and feels rather forced and unbelievable.

And, while the new storyline does fill in a few plotholes from the original TV-series, it also creates a lot of new ones. Why did Misa know the Zentradi language? Where did the ancient cities come from? How much of the movie actually happened in canon with the tv-series, and where did Minmay’s brother suddenly bugger off to? Seriously, for such a seemingly important character in the first half he completely vanishes without any explanation whatsoever during the second half. But yeah, those are minor issues. My biggest issue with the restructured plot is that it completely lacks depth as a standalone movie: you NEED to have seen the TV-series in order to fully understand its context, and the very few extra bits of depth it offers just don’t make any impact.

Nevertheless, whenever Minmay starts singing, you really forget about all these flaws. I’ve seen Macross being described as a music video, and after watching this movie I can understand: the singing scenes are without a doubt the best parts of the movie, where both the music and the animation excel beyond belief. It’s really there where this movie shows its true colours, and it’s somewhat a shame that Minmay doesn’t sing often enough.

To continue the experiment: how about this: a short blurb on each of the categories?