An Unusual Ascent: The Summit of the Gods
Dec. 16th, 2021 06:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerNovelty alone might have got my attention when Netflix began streaming a movie based on a manga but animated in France. A “live-action adaptation” would have been familiar enough. (A few years ago, I happened to see reports of a French movie based on a “localized” version of City Hunter from quite a while before.) So too would have been an “anime-esque cartoon”; the manga being adapted seemed rather different than the Western fan-creator “impressions of anime” I’m aware of (for all that I’m not opposed to them in principle). In being distinct from either of those possibilities, though, the movie did get me thinking again of the hand-wringing among English-speaking anime fans about animators in Japan being stretched to snapping. (I’ve seen interviews with European animators enlisted for the final ordeal of Wonder Egg Priority, although I do wonder if the writing was more of the ultimate issue with that series, and whether the three-month delay before the last episode was three months some people could still feel positive towards the show...) The notices for the movie seemed good even so, so I was willing to make The Summit of the Gods the latest thing eking my Netflix subscription along. I happened to watch it in the evening with wind audibly blowing outside, which might have added something to a movie about mountain climbing.
“‘Drawn entertainment’ from Japan gets translated into languages other than English” is something I’m aware of, but might not know as much about as I could. The same might apply to comics drawn in the French-speaking world (my familiarity only goes about as far as Tintin, Asterix, and the Smurfs). I did wonder how the linework of The Summit of the Gods might have been influenced by bandes dessinées and how its character designs might have been modified from the original manga for animation; at the same time, I could certainly suppose manga character designs could look the way the movie’s designs looked. Whether anything of the French I took in elementary and high school has stuck in my head to make the dialogue more meaningful or even altogether “different” than listening to Japanese dialogue, I don’t know; the subtitles dominated my understanding as ever.
For all of those technical comments, the movie’s story was quite engaging, another take on the familiar question of what motivates someone to climb mountains (the scenery on screen was quite impressive) or do anything similar. With what little I do know about mountain climbing I did wonder about a speedy transition from “investigating a story” to “tailing a solo climber up Everest,” but that could be just another part of the question of motivation. It did take just a little while to sort out the movie was set around the turn of the millennium; mentioning a character had started climbing in the 1960s was the first odd push there.
The question of just where The Summit of the Gods fits on a spectrum between “undeniable anime” and “anime-esque” seems more or less irrelevant to the interest I took in it. I suppose the bigger question now is “so when will an animated movie as casually impressive as it, but clearly not ‘anime,’ be made?”
“‘Drawn entertainment’ from Japan gets translated into languages other than English” is something I’m aware of, but might not know as much about as I could. The same might apply to comics drawn in the French-speaking world (my familiarity only goes about as far as Tintin, Asterix, and the Smurfs). I did wonder how the linework of The Summit of the Gods might have been influenced by bandes dessinées and how its character designs might have been modified from the original manga for animation; at the same time, I could certainly suppose manga character designs could look the way the movie’s designs looked. Whether anything of the French I took in elementary and high school has stuck in my head to make the dialogue more meaningful or even altogether “different” than listening to Japanese dialogue, I don’t know; the subtitles dominated my understanding as ever.
For all of those technical comments, the movie’s story was quite engaging, another take on the familiar question of what motivates someone to climb mountains (the scenery on screen was quite impressive) or do anything similar. With what little I do know about mountain climbing I did wonder about a speedy transition from “investigating a story” to “tailing a solo climber up Everest,” but that could be just another part of the question of motivation. It did take just a little while to sort out the movie was set around the turn of the millennium; mentioning a character had started climbing in the 1960s was the first odd push there.
The question of just where The Summit of the Gods fits on a spectrum between “undeniable anime” and “anime-esque” seems more or less irrelevant to the interest I took in it. I suppose the bigger question now is “so when will an animated movie as casually impressive as it, but clearly not ‘anime,’ be made?”