Mushi-shi: A Beautiful, Contemplative Anime Series

Mushi-shi is an anime series about a man named Ginko who travels the countryside to learn more about mushi, creatures that are neither animals nor plants that are invisible to most people. Ginko can see mushi and has studied them, so he can help those people whose lives have been affected by mushi. Ginko is a mushi-shi, part biologist and part doctor, who helps people learn to live in balance with mushi, curing the illnesses and other phenomena that mushi can cause when they come in conflict with humans.

Madoka Magica: A magical girl anime that will blow your mind

Yes, this is the cover. For real.

Before you start saying "Baron von Chop has lost his mind" (or something else), yes, this is a magical girl anime, and yes, I thought it was brilliant and you should go watch it. Puella Magi Madoka Magica is an anime about young girls who are given a chance to become magical girls. In exchange, they have to fight witches, who represent fear and despair while magical girls represent hope and love. The brilliance of Madoka Magica is that it looks, at first, like any other cute, brightly colored magical girl anime. But as the show progresses, the characters start to learn what it really means to be a magical girl, and I guarantee you that you will not see it coming.

Cyber City Oedo 808: bluefish's thoughts

Like my friend Monsieur le Baron, I enjoyed Cyber City Oedo 808 for the flawed gem it is. With only three episodes, it's short enough not to outstay its welcome. I don't have too much to add to his review, but I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the show.

Produced in the early 90's, Cyber City Oedo 808 comes a little after the first cyberpunk books came out. I can't call myself an expert, but it seems to me that cyberpunk in Japan is often about cops and crimefighters: Ghost in the Shell, Bubblegum Crisis, AD Police, and Appleseed. In my mind, cyberpunk should have an anti-authoritarian edge; after all, it's the megacorporations that tell us what to do, what to think, and what to feel. You shouldn't be protecting them and the social order. But my definition is probably too narrow. Like any genre, you take a setting and a series of tropes and you tell your own story with them. The way you shape the fantasy world often expresses even more than how you talk about the real world. Perhaps it says something that in the minds of these storytellers, change is best made from within, by organized groups of right-thinking individuals holding the line. It's an inherent trust that the system isn't flawed, individual corporations and people are. And sometimes you fix them with bullets.

Cyber City Oedo 808 - It ain't perfect, but I'll take it

When the teaser trailer to Cyberpunk 2077 came out, I was reminded of how much I love cyberpunk. I hit Wikipedia and started looking through the various examples on the page for Cyberpunk. I looked at the various examples of cyberpunk anime, and one of the titles that caught my eye was Cyber City Oedo 808. It was old enough to be "classic" cyberpunk without being so old that it looked awful. Its UK dub had a heavy metal soundtrack. And perhaps best of all, the whole series was only three 40-minute episodes long.

Before I saw the series, bluefish watched it first. He knows a lot more about cyberpunk than I do, having read just about everything by William Gibson as well as loads of Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and authors I've never even heard of. As he was watching the first episode, he sent me an IM saying:

OEDO just referenced "ICE: That's intrusion countermeasure electronics"
Said by a guy with a mohawk and shades

That was a good enough endorsement for me.

First Squad: The Moment of Truth - Fantastic Idea, Mediocre Execution

When I first heard about First Squad: The Moment of Truth, I was elated. A joint Russian/Japanese anime set in World War II, featuring Soviet kids with superpowers fighting the Nazi occult menace? It sounded like it was being made specifically for me. As I heard more about it, my excitement continued to grow. But then the film ran into distribution trouble, and it was several years before the DVD made it to America. By the time it appeared on Amazon, I had seen several lackluster reviews that somewhat dampened my spirits. Still, the idea behind it was so relevant to my interests that I had to watch it, so we got the DVD from Netflix and gave it a watch. After such a long wait and so much anticipation, the movie wasn't bad, just sort of underdone.

Redline: So good it will traumatize you

 

In the DVD special features for Redline, the director comments that he wanted to make a movie that used only hand-drawn animation to recreate how he felt watching anime as a child. He goes on to say that he wanted the animation to be so good that it would traumatize the audience. He has a point: everything about Redline is over the top: the action, the vehicles, the characters, the setting, and the music will make sure that the audience does not spend a fraction of a second being bored.

Movie Review: Summer Wars

Summer Wars is a film that fits a lot into two hours: there's action, romance, humor, tragedy, and wisdom. The film tells the story of a young man, Kenji, who agrees to accompany his classmate Natsuki to her grandmother's estate. When he gets there, he discovers that Natsuki plans on passing Kenji off as her fiancee for her grandmother's 90th birthday party. Natsuki's grandmother is a formidable woman who is proud of her samurai ancestry, so poor Kenji will have his work cut out for him if he is to impress her. But after the initial shock of being introduced to Natsuki's large family wears off, he realizes that he's never been part of such a vibrant and charming family before.

This sounds like the setup to a charming, light romantic comedy, and it sort of is, but there's something more to it: Kenji is a math whiz who works on Oz, a sort of mix between Google, World of Warcraft, and AT&T. While he's staying at Natsuki's grandmother's, Kenji receives a mysterious message that was sent to his cell phone asking him to solve a math problem. Kenji solves the problem in a night, then learns in the morning that Oz's supposedly unhackable security system has been compromised. As the intruder takes over more and more of Oz, it becomes a race against time for Kenji to undo the damage and restore Oz before the communications chaos causes permanent harm.