Movie #5: Ghost in the Shell – 5/5 stars

You can watch Ghost in the Shell online, for free, here.
Here's the Wikipedia page.

Hello, old friend. It's been a while. Shall we say around, I dunno, 10 years? Maybe more. Still, that music gets me right in the pit of my stomach and my heart is in my mouth for the first scene.

This film is exactly to my tastes: the animation style, the storyline, the themes, the fight scenes, the weaponry... So many things fall just right in all the right places to make a flawless piece of cinema that I haven't watched in far too long.

Kusanagi (I know, a FEMALE protagonist! In the 90's! Revolutionary, right?) is a cyborg and the leader of an assault team for Public Security Section 9. She gets naked pretty quick, and is unclothed various times throughout the film, but this is not always pretty, especially nearer the end. There's a hacker on the loose known only as 'The Puppetmaster' because of his particular taste for 'ghost hacking' various people, in particular politicians, and it's up to Kusanagi and her team to bring him down. Only things get complicated pretty quickly when all the leads they have turn out to have been people who have been ghost hacked by the guy. They get lucky and find him though, so it's all ok, only he's not really a he, he's sort of a sentient computer mind... and he wants to get jiggy with Kusanagi's mind. Mind you, she isn't exactly saying no, so various government departments are involved in stealing the body he is trapped in, and she hunts him down so she can see what's going on in there, which involves her fighting a tank on her own and almost dying FOREVER until Batou (her colleague – pretty sure he has a thing for her, he looks away when she gets naked and has the decency to cover her mutilated body later on) blows it the hell up with an RPG. So Kusanagi and the Puppetmaster have some 'alone time' and then everyone gets blown up, only they don't really and it's all pretty cool, but she isn't the original Kusanagi any more. The end.

It's a great work of sci-fi, no doubt about it. The themes of identity and gender running through the movie are unmissable, whole scenes and monologues are dedicated to drawing the viewers' attention to it. I mean, why would a cyborg go diving? Anyway, it's always nice to be reminded that it isn't what's on the outside that counts. The animation is gorgeous, wonderfully dark and detailed; considering how cutting edge it was when it was first released, there are still few things around now that can touch it in terms of animation quality, and indeed overall. The soundtrack deserves a nod too, without it the film would be missing something important. There is one piece of music that rears its head throughout that is some of the creepiest, most haunting stuff I have ever heard, and yet it is SO GOOD. And SO RECOGNISABLE. Just awesome.

Should anyone watch this movie?: Hell yeah. It's a given. Even if you aren't an anime fan, this is entirely worth it for everything it stands for. Forget the Matrix, or any of the Terminator films, this, THIS, is what the future holds. And you should be scared. Let's not forget this is only 15 years away...

Movie #4: Kai Doh Maru - 2/5 stars

You can watch Kai Doh Maru  online, for free, here.

Here's the Wikipedia page.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but there was not enough meat in this sandwich.

Slow, confusing story (and I LIKE samurai stuff.) and the animation was a bit too dainty and gently coloured for my tastes. It was like a wispy, genteel cover of a rock song, but with the occasional bloodstain. The whole film was grey.

To put it briefly, girl is brought up by father as boy, she is attacked by her uncle, this samurai guy saves her, years later she is in love with the samurai guy (nothing happens about it) and is living as a warrior, her cousin who was in love with her when she was supposed to be a boy is a bad guy, lots of people die, story kind of peters out around the time the guy with the pale hair loses his arm. Or at least that was where I lost interest. There's some really creepy kids with magic powers too, I'm not entirely sure where they were going with that, if it went anywhere I missed it.

The soundtrack was pretty good, that redeemed it slightly from the grey confusion that was the whole film (seriously, the only colours were used for blood and fire. It was like Schindler's list only animated and about samurai and there were no little girls in coats) but the couple of fight scenes were passable, I've seen worse, but I've also seen a lot better.

Should anyone watch this movie?: Um, I'm not sure? Maybe? If you like to be bored, this is for you. That's as nice as I can be about it.

Movie #3: The Place Promised in Our Early Days - 4/5 stars

You can watch The Place Promised in Our Early Days online, for free, here.

Here's the Wikipedia page. 

Within seconds of this beautiful film starting I had to pause it and sigh. Trains. There are trains in this film. And the style was instantly recognisable - Makoto Shinkai. Sigh indeed.

This film is wonderfully animated, is exquisite to look at and, unlike 5 Centimeters Per Second, has a storyline. Of course, Children Who Chase Lost Voices had a storyline, but that didn't have trains, or snow, or teenagers waiting alone in train stations. This, like the aforementioned, had ALL THREE. I know, JACKPOT, right? Well, yeah, to be honest it was a great film once you managed to remove yourself from the insane amount of monologues that constituted the storytelling.

Two friends (with a remarkable knowledge of physics and engineering for middle/high school kids) are building a plane, they make friends with a girl and they all promise to go to this tower in a forbidden part of the country once it is finished, only the girl has some weird thing going on where if she isn't asleep a parallel universe will overwrite the current universe, radiating from the tower. So she vanishes and neither of these two lads does anything about it for 3 YEARS and they go their separate ways. Then it all comes out that friendship is important and promises made as kids are OMGTHEMOSTIMPORTANTTHINGEVERANDWILLSAVETHEDAY, so they go find the girl and then, even though it isn't mentioned if either of them has had any piloting experience at all, fly their weird, weird plane to the tower and the girl wakes up. There's a pretty intense love story going on between the kid who flies the plane and the girl, they meet in dreams and so on, so you know shit is real and they'll be together forever now he's saved her from a 3 year coma and has blown up her grandfather's legacy.

It's a nice film, there's a lot of narration, but the story goes somewhere and I enjoy tales of teenagers being embarrassed, and growing up, and planes, and inexplicable knowledge of making your plane radar proof, and trains, and snow and both these things at the same time. If you liked (or watched, or started) 5 Centimeters Per Second, this is essentially the best bits of that film in a film that is worth watching for the story, not just because the animation is stunning. The music is pretty too.

One thing bothered me about it: one of the kids work colleagues says she will make tea, but clearly puts on a pot of coffee. No. Just... No.

Should anyone watch this movie?: Yes, but be prepared for trains, snow and monologues. The only thing missing is bananas.

Movie #2: Paprika - 4.5/5 stars

You can watch Paprika online, for free, here.
Here's the Wikipedia page.

Typical Satoshi Kon, marvellous story, beautifully animated.

I got about 5 minutes into the film before it clicked where I knew the animation style from, but given how much I enjoyed Paranoia Agent this only made me expect more. Boys and girls, the film did not disappoint. Not one bit.

In a nutshell some science types make a machine that allows people to share, and to some extent control, dreams. Machine is stolen while unfinished, dreams become reality (or does reality become dreams...?), hell breaks loose, day is saved. Not too many spoilers here, this one is worth watching.

The character of Paprika/Chiba is developed brilliantly, things get a little weird here and there, but it's to be expected. The attention to detail in the animation is fantastic, the kind where you will never notice all the little things on the first watch; you have to see it a few times to appreciate all the references and effort that has gone in to the production of this movie. The symbolism within the film is excellent, brilliant social commentary like I have come to expect from Kon over the years. A soundtrack by Susumu Hirasawa just wraps it all up in a neat little package (I mean, come on, you can't have one without the other, right?) and I can safely say I will watch it again.

Should anyone watch this movie?: Yes, unless you don't like creepy perspectives on modern life turned into disturbing cartoons, in which case don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Movie #1: A Wind Named Amnesia - 1/5 stars

You can watch A Wind Named Amnesia online, for free, here.
Here's the Wikipedia page.


I wish I could come across amnesia wind so I could forget this awful movie. It gets 1 star for the fact it was animated.

The premise of the film is that everyone except one person on Earth loses their memory thanks to a wind that causes amnesia. This one person is a child with a computer for a brain. Now, I know what you're thinking, how could this film go badly? Well, for a start, the kid DIES and he imparts only *some* of his knowledge to the most one-dimensional protagonist I have EVER come across, who is then expected to travel across the world teaching people how things like: how to speak again; how to not sacrifice women to demolition machines they think are gods; how to get naked at the beach. Turns out he's pretty shit at everything except the last one. At the outset of the film he meets a random woman who later turns out to be an alien (more on that later) while being attacked by the antagonist - the worst robot ever created.

So this guy and the random woman travel about, apparently trying to get to New York, and although at the start they make it sound like they'll be stopping off at loads of cities and having great adventures along the way, they only stop twice. With lame adventures. The robot turns up occasionally to attack, loses, and then goes off to repair itself. They end up in Las Vegas for some reason, I have no idea why, it isn't crucial to the story and nothing happens there (unless it did and I ignored it through being increasingly apathetic towards the film in general). So, it's about this point, maybe 80% through the movie, that nothing has really happened SO THERE IS A MONTAGE. Of them TRAVELLING ACROSS AMERICA. They go through Kansas (I really had lost interest by the time this happened) and various other places while some song is played that left no impact at all. Worst montage ever.

Anyhow, they get to New York, and the final ten minutes of the film is them having the most boring fight against a robot in history (during which they pretty much get lucky, there's some explosion, the robot falls to it's 'death' and is impaled by I-beams. Yeah, I don't even know...) and then, for the second time in the movie, there is boob because they realised they hadn't developed any love story or whatnot. The woman is an alien and it was her people that made everyone lose their memories, terrible suggestion at sex, the end.

Should anyone watch this movie?: No, don't fucking bother.