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er: Funimation (USA)Format: Region 1 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English dub and English Subtitles
Length: 114 minutes
Production Date: 2009
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
I originally saw this film on it’s very, very limited Australian run as part of the “Reel Anime” mini film festival (which Madman puts on ever year) in the last quarter of 2010. Though the film was more widely distributed than some live action cinema releases. I think it got well over a dozen screenings in my city alone. Not bad for a subtitled anime film with practically no press and very few reviews. Then again the city had three anime clubs less than a half a decade ago (down to one now). Not bad for a population of about 340,000. Anyway, this is the second Madhouse feature from Mamoru Hosoda who directed “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time”. It looks like he’s kept a lot of the same staff including character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamato. There are a lot of fantastic elements in this film I loved. You have the hero of the piece who’s a scrawny but very likable nerd, an oddball extended family who were once big cheeses, but have come plummeting back down to the ground and the online work of OZ which is brilliantly realised.
While this movie is quite spectacular and shows off on occasion, especially in the world of OZ, Hosoda knows that the key to this film is its characters. It’s very much like a real family with its patriarch grandmother, a wonderful mix of relatives and the black sheep of the family. It feels so natural and real. The flipside of that, the online world of OZ, is amazing. You get it straight away. Best thing of all is that it’s pretty believable and in fact mirrors online community Second Life quite closely, including incidents such as the “flying penis” one in 2006. The “Love Machine” programme (terrible name you have to admit) is also done quite well. I felt that towards the end the actions and representations seems a little bit over the top, but the damage it causes is quite plausible, especially when you consider how much we rely on networks.
However there a couple of problems I had with the film. It does become extremely schmaltzy and sentimental at a couple of point in the movie. At one particular point it just felt so cheesy, which was such a shame as it was at a climatic point of the film. It’s a bit of a shame really. “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” was complete devoid of this. Actually other than that, it’s a fantastic family film. I was relay surprised at the number of parents bringing their children (mostly early teens and some a bit lower in age) to the screening I was at. I think it’s really quite apparent that Studio Ghibli made a very bad decision in not trying to keep Mamoru Hosoda at the studio. The Japanese anime industry needs to keep making films like this one. They’re a great antidote to mass produced animated CG films that Hollywood is churning out at the moment (even Pixar is losing its lustre. Do we really need “Cars 2” or “Monsters Inc 2”?). Along with “Ponyo” and Madhouse’s other family feature “Mai Mai Miracle”, it seems that 2009 was a great year for animated family films in Japan. Overall this film wasn’t as great as Hosoda’s last feature, but very good anyway 8 out of 10.
“The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya”
Publisher: I
ntercontinental Video Limited (Hong Kong)Format: Region 3 DVD, NTSC, Japanese Dialogue with optional English and Chinese Subtitles
Length: 163 minutes
Production Date: 2010
Currently in Print (as of writing): Yes
Yep, Haruhi. Uh huh… Look, I never quite understood what the hell the fuss was about with the first series came out. Once the gimmick of the out of sequence episodes was done with, well it’s a pretty looking but ultimately an empty vessel. For me it was way too overhyped and perhaps that’s why I ultimately felt ripped off in the end. The first episode was hoot, and the ending animation was cool (but draining after a while), but, yeah… I despised the fact it referenced parts of a series of light novels that at the time of its original R1 release weren’t available in English (at least legitimately that is) and the R1 didn’t come with any sort of liner notes. There’s something really not quite right about that. It’s like this show was deliberately excluding those who weren’t hard core fans of the show. Apparently the second season was the “worst thing ever”, but I enjoyed it more than the first for some reason and found the “Endless Eight” episodes to be hardly as awful as people made them out to be (repetitive, annoyed at the lack of progress by Kyon, and wished more variety could and should have been included considering the time span? Hell yes!). Anyway, supposedly the movie is to make up for that ‘orrible second series. Yeah, well…
The cardinal sin of any film is that it should not be boring. I don’t know what Kyoto Animation has done, but they’ve had a fantastic crack at making this film as dull as dishwater. First problem is the runtime. Some may claim this film is the longest animated film ever, but unfortunately kids both versions of “Final Yamato” beat “Haruhi”. I think at least 20 or 30 minutes could be cut out of the film without any consequences. Some of it seems really pointless, unless there is some insignificant detail in those scenes which reference some freaking obscure detail in the novels, which I’m never going to read anyway… The animation is extraordinarily good, but seems wasted on rather insignificant things. Like a tight shot of Kyon walking through a doorway, animated at 24 frames per second. I mean, why? It’s not particularly tense or suspenseful. Coming up to the 25 minute mark, we get to the actual plot of this film. I think it’s a really good idea for a film. I loved a lot of the middle part of the film. Kyon is put into a strange and confusing situation and he does exactly what you think he would. He leaves no avenue unexplored. I was starting to really enjoy this film, but alas it wasn’t to last for long.
For a film devoted to ESPer, time travellers, alien cyborgs and a horribly unpleasant teenage girl with suspected ADHD who can change reality at will unconsciously, it does seem to be very unexciting and told in a very straight forward way. The colour palette is very muted (yes, I know its winter, but still…) and there are only a few select settings the film takes place in (pretty much the same as the first two series). There seems to be a few plot holes in the story as well. The big glaring one for me is why was Mikuru there? Oh what? Was there something in the fucking novel that I need to know about? You also have the big reveal as to who caused the problems in the first place. Wasn’t exactly too enthralled with that sequence. It requires a massive leap of logic and a great big helping of disbelief. If Yuki can change this much, isn’t just as much of a danger as Haruhi? (Yeah, I know this dealt with later on in the film, but still...) Why can Yuki just change Haruhi so she’s less of a threat in that case? These selectively applied rules to this world and lack of logic really shat me to tears. Yuki’s actions are just a deus ex machina for this film. Yet the fans seem to just lap this stuff up mindlessly and point to the light novels if anyone points out the gaping holes in the plot of the anime adaptation. Call me weird, but I kind of expect a film or a TV series to have all the information in it. I shouldn’t be expected to search out and read novels to understand it. If you can’t transfer the story from the novel into a film, than that’s a poor screenplay. Though this obfuscation is probably a deliberate attempt to make people seek out the novels. Yeah, I’m rather cynical, huh?
Most annoying part of the film is Kyon’s little post-Evangelion navel gazing sequence. Oh, that felt so damn tired and forced. It was like they were saying “Look! This film just isn’t a vapid, empty, overly long but extremely good looking film about the misadventures of some moe characters and a sarcastic boy. It’s intellectually stimulating and deep too!”. Yeah, uh huh… And then we get to the ending which is so very much a whimper rather than any sort of bang. Then some more sarcastic commentary narrated by Kyon, a mournful a Capella to drive you nuts during the end credits and some bizarre post script with Yuki in a public library which is meant to be cute or something. I just went; “What, that’s it?!”.
Like a lot of the Kyoto Animation stuff, I don’t get this one either. I’ve tried and can’t see what others see. The problem is with the characters that are pretty much the same stereotypes we’ve seen before, except they’ve given little tweaks and disguised a bit. The core story of this movie is a fantastic one, except it’s told in an extremely dull manner. Seriously, there’s ESPers, time travellers, alien cyborgs and an annoying girl who can change reality on a whim. This is the best they could do?! Seriously? Perhaps the problem is they boxed themselves in it terms of story. Its shoe horned in around events in the second series, and that series takes place with in the first series. Perhaps if they created a brand new original story set after these events, maybe we would have had a better film. The Hong Kong disc has some great subs, but has a couple of formatting problems (the translator/subtitler talks about it here on the Mania.com forum). It’s good enough for me, and I shall not be buying Bandai Entertainment’s release when they eventually set a release date (plus the usual constant rescheduling, delays and possible mono audio or disc fuck ups and eventual recall… etc, etc). It’s really not a bad film per se, but could have been a whole lot better. 6 out of 10.
Remaining Backlog: 23 months (it's much easier this way than listing the number of discs).
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