Mamoru Oshii… what exactly did you have in mind when you thought up the premise for this movie? What was the point? What did you want to prove? For God’s sake: why?!

I was actually looking forward to an anime documentary of Miyamoto Musashi’s life. Especially with the staff behind it. I’m a big fan of historical stories, and also of anime that put a heavy emphasis on dialogue, which is amongst Oshii’s trademarks. But this was just… too much. This movie is just… unbelievable. It’s seventy minutes of incoherent rambling that never seems to stop. As an anime, it fails. As a documentary… it fails as well. And as an experimental work… well it is unique, but this just didn’t work.

Ultimately, this movie has become “Musashi’s best fights animated, while some badly animated narrator gives a lecture about warfare”. And when I say badly, I mean that the animation for this guy is utterly terrible. There are so many things wrong with him, and he should never have been animated. The 3D CG he is animated in looks horrible, and the overall animation of this guy screams cheapness. He also has this strange female assistant who keeps making unfunny slapstick joke after unfunny slapstick joke in the background. These two distract way too much of what’s really important in this movie: Musashi himself.

Speaking of distracting… the dialogue also gets distracted by a ton of unrelated things. An example is one of the narrator’s seemingly endless monologues about warfare in Medieval Europe and Asia’s mainland. The topics he discusses are varied, but the dialogue itself is also so boring that I stopped caring about it it halfway through the movie, as it failed to give any characterization to Musashi himself, who really does nothing but fight as he’s shown on the screen.

Aside from the ugly CG, there also are a ton of live-action shots, and pretty much the only images where some effort has been put in is the shots of Musashi. Which basically amounts to 10% of the total airtime. And yes, this is coming from Production IG, Mamoru Oshii and the director of Otogizoshi. The music is pretty much the same: it’s catchy and nicely composed whenever Musashi is in the image. When he’s not, however, the music starts playing random classical tunes that have nothing to do with what’s being discussed, and were probably just chosen because they lack any licensing issues.

It’s also a joke how this show was advertised: “After years of movie hagiographies and mythification, the great Mamoru Oshii has seen to promoting this funny and profuse documentary that combines the most diverse animation techniques with historical rigor and rokyoku sung narrative.”. Mamoru Oshii originally thought of the premise; it’s no wonder he would promote his own creations. It talks down on all of the Musashi films and adaptations. It’s not funny. The animation is in no way diverse: it just has three styles: ugly CG, live-action backgrounds and traditional animation. Studio 4C could out-animate this movie to the moon and back in terms of diversity. And the “Rokyoku sung narrative” has been done by a ton of other series already, defeating the purpose of this experimental movie.

I hesitate in using the word ‘pretentious’, because I often see it misused by people for ‘a show with a ton of complex dialogue’. But I actually believe that this movie comes pretty damn close to it. It treats itself like it’s the best adaptation of Musashi out there, while the dialogue looks more like endless rambling rather than contributing to the characterization or actual storytelling.

Ah, what an episode. At this point the creators of the anime were standing for a major dilemma that hits just about every series out there: the fact that the story doesn’t fit exactly into 26 episodes. I’ve raged enough about this problem with other series, but with this series, they’re actually pulling it off to put the essence of the final novels into these final episodes without derailing. This series is everything that fantasy and steam-punk should be, and it seriously set the bar much higher for future generations. Even until this episode, it kept an excellent balance between plot, setting, characters, background and action. Each speaking to the imagination.

One of the major pitfalls of mystery series is the point at which questions have to be answered. Asking a lot of intriguing questions is one thing, but it takes skill to make all of eventual answers live up to the hype that these questions created. And this show even proved that these answers kick ass. We finally get a glimpse into heaven, and what it’s like. And we finally get to see the background story that resulted into everything: Ruruta Coozancoona’s. We already could have guessed that the Armed Librarians and the Church were created in order to create exciting books. This episode didn’t just show why this was all done, it also showed the story behind it. That it was all in an attempt to destroy the gods who kept destroying the worlds they created because they were unhappy with the continuous wars.

When you think a bit further, this had some interesting results: these Gods surely were short-sighted bastards. Thanks to Ruruta the world wasn’t destroyed and instead it continued to thrive. The result? A stable world full of actual democracies, in which most of the drama is caused by the guy who took god’s place: Ruruta, and his wishes to provide interesting books in an attempt to bring back his loved one.

The big question still remains however: what the heck is heaven? The people we saw gathered in the theatre: what exactly was their connection? Since the previous governor of paradise was among them, it may be a place where the true men gather: the ones who came closest to Ruruta’s ideals for the perfect book (which would also explain why Hamy ended up entering it even though her hook didn’t appear yet).
Rating: *** (Awesome)

I’ve been waiting for this episode: the point at which this series carries itself to a higher level. It’s here where it grabs the build-up of the previous episodes and develops it. And I have to say that it’s here where this series has become something truly unique. What an inspired episode.

It was a very interesting choice for the creators to make Mikado seem like your average teen-aged lead at first. At the time he was introduced, he indeed seemed like another one of those cliched leads that you see everywhere. But at the same time, he ended up becoming a perfect character to play around with, because of the expectations we have of these kinds of characters. Most notably, the fact that they never seem to have any background. It’s one of the many stereotypes of anime: your dull lead who’s supposed to be your average lead, but because he’s trying so hard to be average he never stands out at anything. Instead, Durarara has really shown that it’s a series in which all sorts of interesting people meet. Who in turn are just a small fraction of all of the interesting people that walk around in the city. I really have to applaud this series for that.

But what impressed me the most, and what set this episode really apart, is the execution, especially what happened after Mikado hit that send button, and every gray person suddenly started to get colour. It’s the kind of thing that never would have been possible without the previous build-up of this series. The way it was delivered, by showing the reactions of everyone standing in that street, along with Celty’s breakdown made this episode into a unique experience for me.

And yet you could also see a ton of stuff that’s borrowed from other series. The most notable was of course that the creators pulled a Clamp around the middle of this episode, with Isaac and Miria making actual cameos (I’d sell my hat of a shot of these two, going to the theatres and watching Baccano). There’s the flashback, just in the middle of a climax, explaining everything that just happened (a technique that’s also loved by the Armed Librarians), and the tons of pop culture references that had to be slightly modified due to copyright issues.

But most of all, I saw this episode as a celebration of the opportunities of modern social networking. As someone who’s also often on the Internet and who also has been involved in the creation of various communities, I could very much relate to Mikado as he and his friends created the Dollars. And meeting interesting and different people is exactly what I love about the Internet.

Despite its unique approach, this isn’t the first anime to focus on online communities. Mostly science fiction, series as Serial Experiments Lain, Master of Epic, .Hack//Sign and Real Drive also got to show their take on them (and yes, I’m a really big fan of those kinds of series). One thing that I’ve noticed however is that so far, there’s been one big part of the Internet that has been pretty much ignored: the idiot side of the Internet. There also are a lot of morons and spam-bots on the Internet, but you often see anime focus on the positive and progressive sides. While it might lead to a more complete image, but then again things like those would be rather hard to watch.
Rating: *** (Awesome)