21st Century Anime Movies Appendix
Jun. 21st, 2021 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAfter sampling “early animation from Japan” and sampling “anime movies from the twentieth century,” stopping by a few more films from the current side of a significant rollover of the calendrical odometer I’ve relied on would complete my whistle-stop trip through a full century from my starting point. Summarizing those movies now will, I suppose, make it a bit easier to get through an upcoming “quarterly review.”
For the first decade of the century, I did wonder if I was as short on potential films to watch as I’d seemed to be for the 1970s. Thinking that did remind me that as the distance from that decade increases, I have started wondering whether anime series from it have aged a bit worse for me than those from the twentieth century. For movies, though, the shortage was a bit more a matter of self-imposed limitations with Studio Ghibli and Satoshi Kon movies from that decade to be seen. Having watched some of them to represent previous decades, however might have nudged me towards thoughts of something else. At last, I decided on Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Made in between his “one-man OVA” Voices of a Distant Star (and its “that it was done at all is something in itself” boost) and 5 Centimeters per Second, which remains more talked up but might have pushed me away a bit with its low-key, downbeat ending, Shinkai’s first feature-length production still has a good dose of science fiction to it with the northern island of Hokkaido occupied by an enigmatic foreign power that’s built a mysterious tower visible from the main island of Honshu. Two teenaged boys are building a fanciful airplane to try and reach the tower when a young woman their age meets them only to later disappear in a mysterious fashion. A definite couple being set up but the initial friendship not being neglected by the story seemed a bit different from thoughts of “boy meets girl” being of prime importance in many of Shinkai’s other works. While the lighting and other background effects remained essential components of the work, the character designs, if sort of bland, weren’t as dismissible as I’d imagined they might be. I also noticed the final resolution involved that ever-popular idea of “refusing to sacrifice one person despite dire warnings about the sake of the whole,” which did bring the controversy surrounding Weathering With You to mind, where it’s not so easy to suppose “you really can have it all” but there’s not much of a “woe is me; I made the wrong decision” moral.
Having watched a number of films from notable directors, I got to thinking about taking in a movie from a notable studio next, and opened up my Blu-Ray of A Silent Voice from Kyoto Animation, a studio with a reputation built through work for television. The thought has come to me, though, that if I was as devoted to Kyoto Animation as others I’d know who’d directed the movie without looking at the back of the case, and be able to say more about Naoko Yamada. After the relatively compact animated features I’d been watching, a movie clocking more than two hours was lengthy by comparison, although it left out a subplot from Yoshitoki Oima’s seven-volume manga. (I suppose a case could be made this didn’t hurt the story, or strengthened to the point of suggesting the subplot could well be not missed.) Animation and story together did keep up the effect of this tale of a teenager trying to make things up to the girl he’d bullied back in elementary school after learning she was deaf.
It did so happen I was able to finish off with a movie from last year, although this dipped back into shady territory. “Fansubs” had been worked up for Shirobako the Movie, a continuation after several years of the adventures of a small animation studio. It did happen to start with that studio having fallen on hard times, although the characters of the original series manage to regroup when the challenge of producing a movie on short notice is pushed on them. With all of the characters being brought back, though, I did get to wondering if reviewing the original series would have helped me connect to some of them beyond the five “audience identification cute girls,” who don’t all seem to get the same emphasis in the movie itself. Some familiar bits of the series got reprised, although there were also full-blown musical numbers, which worked about as well as musical numbers ever do for me. I had, anyway, supposed “an animated movie about making animation” would be one appropriate way to wrap this journey up. So far as thoughts of “topping myself for all time” went, even if I don’t get back to “animation from Japan made before Mighty Atom” soon there’s only a year and a half left until the sixtieth anniversary of that series, and I do now happen to have at least bits and pieces of anime from every year since.
For the first decade of the century, I did wonder if I was as short on potential films to watch as I’d seemed to be for the 1970s. Thinking that did remind me that as the distance from that decade increases, I have started wondering whether anime series from it have aged a bit worse for me than those from the twentieth century. For movies, though, the shortage was a bit more a matter of self-imposed limitations with Studio Ghibli and Satoshi Kon movies from that decade to be seen. Having watched some of them to represent previous decades, however might have nudged me towards thoughts of something else. At last, I decided on Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. Made in between his “one-man OVA” Voices of a Distant Star (and its “that it was done at all is something in itself” boost) and 5 Centimeters per Second, which remains more talked up but might have pushed me away a bit with its low-key, downbeat ending, Shinkai’s first feature-length production still has a good dose of science fiction to it with the northern island of Hokkaido occupied by an enigmatic foreign power that’s built a mysterious tower visible from the main island of Honshu. Two teenaged boys are building a fanciful airplane to try and reach the tower when a young woman their age meets them only to later disappear in a mysterious fashion. A definite couple being set up but the initial friendship not being neglected by the story seemed a bit different from thoughts of “boy meets girl” being of prime importance in many of Shinkai’s other works. While the lighting and other background effects remained essential components of the work, the character designs, if sort of bland, weren’t as dismissible as I’d imagined they might be. I also noticed the final resolution involved that ever-popular idea of “refusing to sacrifice one person despite dire warnings about the sake of the whole,” which did bring the controversy surrounding Weathering With You to mind, where it’s not so easy to suppose “you really can have it all” but there’s not much of a “woe is me; I made the wrong decision” moral.
Having watched a number of films from notable directors, I got to thinking about taking in a movie from a notable studio next, and opened up my Blu-Ray of A Silent Voice from Kyoto Animation, a studio with a reputation built through work for television. The thought has come to me, though, that if I was as devoted to Kyoto Animation as others I’d know who’d directed the movie without looking at the back of the case, and be able to say more about Naoko Yamada. After the relatively compact animated features I’d been watching, a movie clocking more than two hours was lengthy by comparison, although it left out a subplot from Yoshitoki Oima’s seven-volume manga. (I suppose a case could be made this didn’t hurt the story, or strengthened to the point of suggesting the subplot could well be not missed.) Animation and story together did keep up the effect of this tale of a teenager trying to make things up to the girl he’d bullied back in elementary school after learning she was deaf.
It did so happen I was able to finish off with a movie from last year, although this dipped back into shady territory. “Fansubs” had been worked up for Shirobako the Movie, a continuation after several years of the adventures of a small animation studio. It did happen to start with that studio having fallen on hard times, although the characters of the original series manage to regroup when the challenge of producing a movie on short notice is pushed on them. With all of the characters being brought back, though, I did get to wondering if reviewing the original series would have helped me connect to some of them beyond the five “audience identification cute girls,” who don’t all seem to get the same emphasis in the movie itself. Some familiar bits of the series got reprised, although there were also full-blown musical numbers, which worked about as well as musical numbers ever do for me. I had, anyway, supposed “an animated movie about making animation” would be one appropriate way to wrap this journey up. So far as thoughts of “topping myself for all time” went, even if I don’t get back to “animation from Japan made before Mighty Atom” soon there’s only a year and a half left until the sixtieth anniversary of that series, and I do now happen to have at least bits and pieces of anime from every year since.