Spam From Japan

Cast:
Kasumi Ishiki: Hanazawa Kana
Marco Owen: Morikawa Toshiyuki
Shizuku Ishiki: Sendai Eri
Katherine Turner: Oohara Sayaka
Timothy “Tim” Laisenbach: Yajima Akiko
Ron Portman: Nomura Kenji
Peter Stevens: Miki Shin’ichirou
Ivan Coral Vega: Isobe Tsutomu
Alessandro Peccino: Hirota Kousei
Laura Owen: Kawasumi Ayako
Alice: Kuno Misaki
Walter: Fujita Yoshinori

The following review has mild spoilers for Ibara no Ou: King of Thorn. I enjoyed the movie, but major spoilers will kill it for you. Go see it first.

I came away from Ibara no Ou: King of Thorn feeling elated, like I’d seen something amazing. This was primarily due to the movie’s climactic ‘genre twist’ that previously had many fans giving up on the manga. Essentially, the thing that sold it for me was the reason why other people didn’t like the original work.

The anime begins as creepy science-fiction survival horror. In the first scene (as shown in the trailer), a woman plunges to her death from a New York skyscraper and smashes into the pavement, having been turned to stone. There then follows a massive infodump in the form of TV news footage describing the so-called Medusa Virus’ spread across the world.

The action then moves to Scotland, where busloads of people infected with the Medusa Virus are travelling to a cryonics lab run by a cult called Venus Gate in the hope of finding a cure. What could possibly go wrong?

When these people wake up from their induced sleep, they find monstrous bats nesting in the cryonic pod chamber and thorny vines grown up around the pods. The monsters quickly dispose of the generic characters, leaving behind those with distinctive character designs. The survivors decide to fight their way out.

Up until halfway through it was generic survival horror with the main characters alternately fighting and running away from monsters. In fact, it’s so generic that you can predict who will die and in what order with this handy chart. Consider the African-American man (Ron) and the little boy (Tim). Do you know which will die and how soon? No? Then clearly you don’t watch many horror movies.

What stops this section from being a step-down from standard Hollywood horror (which at least knows its genre well enough to try to subvert it) are the hints that Something Deeper Is Going On. One of the first clues is that the female lead’s name is Ishiki, meaning awareness or consciousness. Furthermore, the male lead has visions of her surrounded by thorns which seem to be connected to her. Oh, and she’s a twin. That’s suspicious in its own right. We also know the lab is run by a cult. Those genre-savvy enough to be bored by the paint-by-numbers handling of the first half will probably realise there’s more to the plot.

I’ll leave the review here. The revelations soon start piling up, throwing everything that went before it in a new light. Just about everything in the first act, even the annoying reporter trying to interview people as they entered cold sleep, was a Chekhovian gun waiting to go off later. That’s why I left the cinema feeling the way I did. I love massive, complicated mindscrews and this did it well. But the ending is key and to describe it would be to ruin it. You’ll have to sit through the generic horror to get the payoff and that’s just the way it is. If you really must know, the Wikipedia page for the manga will point you in the right direction.

The movie is almost certainly heading overseas (America, at least). There’s an English version of the official site and a great deal of the onscreen writing is in English. But if the wait makes you feel bad, just remember we don’t get Iron Man 2 until June 11th.

This review contains spoilers for Trigun: Badlands Rumble.

Back in the day, if you wanted fansubs, you had to look up providers in a big database which would show you which fans had what series and whether they’d ship internationally. You’d then send off your money to somewhere in America and about a month later, no more than eight VHS tapes would arrive in your mailbox.

That’s how it was and we liked it that way, dammit. It’s also how I discovered Trigun.

I’d heard the hype first (that’s how we knew what to order), but I was still surprised how much I liked it. I’m not usually a fan of the main character(s) in a series, particularly if they’re the good guys. But Vash was fun and whimsical with a dark side. He’s probably one of the more complex characters in anime and it’s difficult to get a grip on his personality.

Fast-forward ten years; I’ve moved to Japan and am now sitting in a charmingly shabby third-floor cinema in Shinjuku, waiting for the new Trigun: Badlands Rumble movie to start. Funny how life works.

The movie starts with Vash getting between a legendary bank robber named Gasback and his cronies, because he can’t stand any kind of violence.

Twenty years later, rumours suggest Gasback plans to target Makka City and so the mayor assembles the most unsavoury characters he can find to protect it. Milly Thompson and Meryl Strife are in town in their professional capacity as insurance auditors, and try to drive Vash out of the city, but he only wants to flirt with at Amelia.

When Gasback finally arrives, however, Wolfwood is amongst his entourage and it’s revealed Amelia’s plans to kill Gasback are based on more than just a desire to collect the bounty on his head.

[Note: Gasback, Amelia and Makka are my own romanisations. They may well prove to be wrong when official translations are released.]

They’ve kept the original seiyuu from the anime and, so it seems in some scenes, some of the ineptness of the animation between the key cels. That’s not really a criticism. Computer modelling is used extensively, but not in a way that made me think it didn’t fit with the rest of the anime, as I’ve seen in the past. The backgrounds are well-drawn and they often used interesting angles to tell the story. The character designs for even incidental characters are bright and varied.

Despite all this, I didn’t like it in the same way I did the anime series, despite the movie staying within the anime timeline. The key problem is the relationship between Amelia and Vash. They meet when he rescues her; he falls in love immediately and proceeds to follow her everywhere. He follows her from her hotel room into the streets and when she kicks him away, he nuzzles her legs. It’s too much.

The best scene is without Vash, when Wolfwood (wearing Vash’s glasses) and Amelia take the fight to Gasback. It just seems that Vash is always there to undermine what would otherwise be a strong character.

Is this movie at fault, or is it my memory…?

Cast:
Vash The Stampede: Onosaka Masaya
Nicholas D Wolfwood: Hayami Sho
Meryl Stryfe: Tsuru Hitomi
Milly Thompson: Yukino Satsuki
Amelia: Sakamoto Maaya
Gasback: Isobe Tsutomu

Official site

Cinemas:
Tokyo: Cinema Sunshine (Ikebukuro) and Shinjuku Musashino-Kan (Shinjuku).
For cinemas showing Trigun outside Tokyo, please click here

This review contains spoilers for the movie Kamui Gaiden (カムイ外伝).

Kamui Gaiden is based on a manga started in 1965 by Shirato Sanpei, about a ninja who is on the run having left his clan. Kamui is played by Matsuyama Ken’ichi, who is probably most famous for his role as L in the live-action Death Note movies. Matsuyama also appears in Kaiji ~Jinsei Gyakuten Game~, out this weekend in Japan.

This movie starts out with child Kamui watching his master fight against a strong female ninja (Sugaru), which quickly introduces the way fights are choreographed. Ninja can jump-fly as a matter of course, similar to the wire work used in the wuxia genre. This time it looks like CGI, but my partner gave me a suspicious look when I referred to it as CGxia.

Both Kamui’s master and Sugaru fall from a cliff, but the former hangs on, while the latter is presumed to have drowned. Kamui’s master climbs up and pulls a throwing knife from his eyeball, eyeball still attached. He throws it at Kamui’s feet to teach him a lesson. What lesson? Only ninja know.

That sets the pace for the first half hour or so as adult Kamui encounters and fights other ninja and bandits in a bloody but non-gory way. I got to admit, this was often pretty cool and I love this style of cinema, even when it’s not done particularly well.

But then the plot starts. I feel terrible for typing that. For the next hour or so, there’s no more fighting and Kamui learns to fish and falls in love. Not with the tough female ninja we saw earlier, but a teenage girl called Sayaka. This is possibly more realistic, but not very interesting. However, Matsuyama does spend a scene walking around in a fundoshi and I suspect there’s someone out there for whom this will make the entire movie. Me, I liked the wuxia sharks.

Okay, they’re not technically wuxia sharks. After all, they don’t practice martial arts or exhibit chivalrous or ‘xia’ tendencies. But they linger and pose in the air as they jump. They might just know kung fu.

Then there are the ninja-pirates, confusing all internet debates forever. The pirate ninja leader is played by Itou Hideaki and the fighting resumes in the impressive final showdown between him and Kamui.

Overall, I just wanted to cut out much out the middle part and leave in all the amazing silliness and ridiculous ways of offing people. More beer would’ve been nice too.

This review contains spoilers.

Kenji is upset. He’s upset because the plans made by a club that he formed when he was a kid are now being used to destroy the world. Successfully.

The leader of the revolution is Tomodachi (“Friend”) and his political party called Yuumintou (“Friendship Democratic Party”). Step by step, his plans for world domination follow the crude drawings of Kenji and his friends. These illustrations depicted terrorists and the boys (and one girl) imagined themselves as a superhero team who could stop them.

The beginning of the end starts when Kenji starts seeing the symbol that they designed everywhere, particularly in connection with the death of his friend, Donkey. You probably know it by now as the hand/eye emblem used in all the advertising for these movies. It’s creepy and mysterious as Kenji enlists his former friends to find out who is behind this and also functions as a (brief) meditation on childhood memory.

It’s so creepy that it’s almost a disappointment when the giant robots show up in the end. Having said that, you have to have a certain amount of respect for a movie trilogy that has already destroyed most of the world by the end of the first part.

What really struck me is that, according to this movie, Japan hasn’t really changed much from the late sixties to the present day. The 1970s school might well have been filmed without making any changes. The only difference I noted throughout the film was the size and technology of the mobile phones. I have no idea if this is accurate, or if they were making a point as the world only really changes after Tomodachi achieves power. Due to the movie’s depiction of time, you watch as the characters change and grow up, only to be murdered or end up working in a convenience store. That left me feeling quite unsettled, although I doubt that was the point.

Worth mentioning is that (so far), you don’t need to have read the manga to be able to follow it all. The movie explains everything you need as you go. I’m looking forward to the next parts.

Twentieth Century Boys: The Beginning of the End // Nijusseiki Shounen: Owari no Hajimari and Twentieth Century Boys: Final Hope // Nijusseiki Shounen: Saigo no Kibou are available to rent on DVD in Japan. The third and final part (Twentieth Century Boys: Our Flag // Nijusseiki Shounen: Bokura no Hata) will get its cinematic release on 29th August.

The official site is here. If you thought my review was fun, check out my review of G.I. Joe.