Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts

Wolf Children

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Labels: , , , , , · Posted by Anonymous at
I finally got around to seeing Mamoru Hosoda's Wolf Children last week, and I'd really like to talk about it.

First off, can I just say that it's an absolutely beautiful movie. The animation is top notch and Hosoda creates an atmosphere as only a master can. I love all the character designs too, especially the wolves.

Can I also say that Hana takes home the award for one of the most badass anime characters ever? I think the only fictional mother figure that can compete with her is Mrs. Frisby. The lengths she goes through for her children are nothing short of amazing.

I liked the kids, too. Yuki is adorably spunky and fun and her brother Ame is adorably shy. Along with Hana, they are the stars of the movie and they are appropriately textured characters as main characters should be. I think Hosoda succeeded in his goal of making watching the movie like watching these children grow up.

Now, that's not to say it's a perfect movie. In fact, I actually had several problems with it, and while I enjoyed it (I don't get this engrossed in a movie often) I'm still not sure I'm going to invest in the DVD. So let's dive in!

I've heard criticism leveled at the fact that there's not enough explanation of the wolf-people, but I was actually okay with that because the movie is essentially a fairy tale that is mired in reality, and fairy tales don't really require explanations. Hana may have these strange circumstances surrounding her situation, but the reality of raising her children is shown with painstaking detail in the film, something I wholeheartedly admire.

There are two big problems with this movie, however, that prevent me from saying it is as good as the director's previous outing, Summer Wars. The first being the focus, which seems to change throughout the film. It goes from focusing on Hana and her love story, then to raising her children, then takes a quick detour to "how to survive in the country", before ultimately settling on the story of the children needing to choose their own paths in life. For the most part, I think it works, but it also makes the movie feel a little disjointed. There are also characters who are important to the story yet kind of drift in when they're needed and vanish when they aren't. The old man who teaches Hana how to farm is the most egregious example, but the wolf at the sanctuary and the fox that guards the mountain also don't get much development at all. Sohei didn't get much to do in spite of playing a huge part in Yuki's development. In short, I think the movie tries to tell more stories than it can handle at times.

The other issue I take is the manner in which Yuki and Ame each choose their paths in life. Perhaps this is because I was raised in America's culture and while I think there is some value in conformity, it certainly should not be to the exclusion of yourself as a person. If you are of the interpretation that the children's decisions are the result of them maturing and choosing their paths in life based off of who they are, then it's fine. But I think it comes off more as the kids feeling forced into their decisions (given how the girls react to Yuki initially and the bullying we see Ame endure). Yuki essentially ends up suppressing who she is in order to fit in and Ame runs away. In other words, the two kids end up choosing their paths in life not necessarily because it's what they want, but because they were never really given the other option.

I also find it hard to believe there's not some middle ground. Why choose one side at the expense of the other? At the very least, they should have had more time to make their decisions, as, let's face it, wolf kids or not, adolescents rarely make the best long-term decisions in regards to their lives.

So those are my thoughts. A good movie, to be sure, but I've seen Hosoda do better.

First Two Fall Anime 2014 Impressions

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Labels: , , , · Posted by Anonymous at

There are two new anime airing this season that I’ve pinned down to watch, now that Free! and Sengoku Basara: Judge End are over, and both aired their first episodes yesterday on Crunchyroll, so in between my power marathon of the last season of Star Trek: Voyager, I sat down to watch them. I figured I’d make a post about my first impressions (spoiler alert).

The first is Cross Ange. Sunrise anime tend to be hit or miss for me, so I end up watching most of them before making up my mind. (I’m currently watching 2013’s Valvrave The Liberator and am not sure if I’m going to like that one either.) I’ll admit I’m a little surprised by the intensely negative reactions the Internet is having to the first episode, and I say this as a woman who has had a very close friend be sexually assaulted. The two biggest things people seem to have an issue with are Angelise’s callous speech to the woman when her daughter is being taken away and the “cavity search” scene in the last few minutes of the episode. The vast majority of reviewers on ANN and viewers on Crunchyroll took these scenes as being salacious, misogynistic, and in incredibly bad taste (especially the supposed fanservice of the latter). But I feel like they’re missing something important: both of these scenes are horrifying and are meant to make you feel uncomfortable – neither scene is shown to be “okay” in the slightest. And believe me, I completely understand if someone doesn’t want to watch something that makes them feel uncomfortable – a lot of us, me usually included, feel that way about our fiction. I also understand the viewpoint that the rape scene is bad from a narrative standpoint because it’s essentially rape used as a cheap plot device to gain our sympathy for the main character. To me, it came off more as a shocking and disturbing twist to the usual “fallen from grace” events that befall main characters in anime, and that the horror of the scene subverted any fanservice, but YMMV.

As to the issue people have taken with the fact that all Norma seem to be female and have thus concluded the show is sexist: even if it’s later shown that all Norma are indeed female, the show is not portraying it as being an issue with being a woman, the issue is with being a Norma – it’s not as though other female characters are shown to be treated worse by this society because they’re female. Basically, I didn’t see the events of this episode so much as being about fanservice or misogyny, but more as to it showing us how crappy this world is and how our protagonists are hopefully going to fight to make it better in the coming episodes.

Controversy aside, I like Ange and I want to see where she goes from here. I don’t think she’s a two-dimensional character – she’s clearly under a lot of pressure to appear perfect for her perfect society, as evidenced by her dismay that she’s unable to rescue her teammate and win the game at the beginning of the episode, and how she reacts to the little Norma girl. She wants to be a good leader, even if she is misguided about it, and she’s obviously going to have to reevaluate the beliefs she’s been raised with after what’s befallen her. Her brother is clearly going to be the bad guy, incestuous advances towards his younger sister aside, and there’s not much to say about him yet. Her parents, however, seem to be decent – at best her father is cowardly by trying to cover up his daughter’s “disability,” and her mother obviously loved her daughter very much, to the point where she was willing to die so Ange could escape. We’ll see what the rest of the main cast is like in the coming episodes.

So with Cross Ange, I really do understand where other people are coming from with this one, but I’m interested enough to keep watching.

Gugure! Kokkuri-san is the other series I started yesterday, and I can already tell it’s going to be my crack for the season. I normally shy away from things based on four panel manga because they usually never have the consistent plot that I like in my anime, but this one was just so amusing and charming that I found I couldn’t resist. I love the main characters – both are hilarious and yet rather tragic, especially Kohina, whom is claiming she’s a being with no emotions when she is clearly trying to cover her feelings of loneliness and sadness up. The scene where she calls the cops on Kokkuri won me over, and I can’t wait to see what other weird characters are going to get added to this mix that we got hints of in this first episode.

Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear it in the comments, as well as any recommendations for other new series that just started airing. Both series are streaming legally on Crunchyroll.
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