The Wachowski Brothers movie adaptation of Speed Racer opened in the UK and US today, and as such I ventured down to the cinema to check it out. Of course, with the original series being pretty much unknown over here (I don’t think it’s ever even aired over here, though the terrible New Adventures of Speed Racer did for a while), and most of the reviews being fairly dire (one UK radio critic said it was basically a big-budget version of Lazy Town), I was one of the few who did - there were fewer than ten people in the screening I attended, which is pretty dreadful for a movie on it’s opening night. I guess most people are still filing in to see Iron Man, and with Indy hitting in a couple of weeks I can’t imagine many people over here seeing this.

I’m not sure if this is a shame, or if it’s just as well. I thoroughly expect that the vast majority of people who see this movie will really, really hate it. Screw them, though - I loved this crazy flick.

That’s not to say it’s particularly a good movie, at least not if you are looking for something with any kind of depth - there’s pretty much nothing in the way of a story. There’s more ham involved in this movie than you’d be able to exact from a small nations worth of pigs as well, and despite being intentional it’ll probably grate on at least half the audience. It’s really going to come down to the visuals as to whether you’d like this movie or not, ultimately, because it’s very, very odd. I’ve compared the trailers to Hideaki Annos live-action Cutie Honey before, which is pretty fair given that they pull off a lot of the same kind of weird visual techniques here - and then some.

Really, they have just tried to make an anime feature with actual people in place of the characters. The CG stands out about as much as much as it does in most of the CG heavy anime shows, but it’s so obvious, stylised and plasticy it can’t be anything but an intentional choice. What’s really funny, though, is the use of the kind of 2D effects used in anime - cut and pasted crowd scenes, static background characters and cut-outs of people and buildings are slid and zoomed around the screen. There’s even a few places where they’ve used what appear to be matte paintings for the backgrounds. Combined with the bright and over-saturated colours, it’s all rather, well, bonkers. Brilliant, but bonkers.

If you can stomach the visual mix, then the movie really is a whole lot of fun - fun enough that I’ll probably try and catch it again whilst it’s still in theatres, anyway. Even the comedy monkey manages not to be intensely annoying, which really has to go down as a major achievement.

Hmmm, I might be forced to take a break on the comics for a few days, largely because I’m pretty much tapped for things to comic about. The anime industry is being way too boring at the moment.

Also, I’ve been playing GTAIV, but I’m awful at it - really, really awful at it. It’s really showing that I’ve not played a GTA game since the original (and by original, I mean the top-down stuff, not GTAIII). Still, the radio is pretty funny, and I did manage to waste a good twenty minutes watching the games in-game TV.

Inspired by Hinanos’ post about the 2008 Sakura Matsuri. Apparently there were a lot of westerners incorrectly wearing cheap, yet overpriced, yukata, who no doubt attracted a lot of attention - not for the dress, but rather how they were wearing them (not least because it was cold, and being summer dress yukata really aren’t all that thick, it probably, errr, “showed”).

No bonus points for todays reference, as it’s rather more obvious (in that the show in question swings about as far in the other direction in popularity:quality ratio terms to yesterdays).

I got around to watching Appleseed: Ex Machina yesterday. It was a really weird experience for me for a number of reasons. The obvious one was that a lot of the storyline, including the final setpiece, was practically lifted from the first Patlabor movie, only with a little pop philosophy tacked onto in order to make it feel a little more Appleseedy. Then there was the fact that, outside of a few long-shots of Olympus, the visuals don’t really look that far beyond what we are seeing in real-time games at the moment made the whole affair feel like a video game cutscene, a feeling amplified by a number of sequences towards the end being highly evocative of Xenosagas Realien riots (something not helped by the parallels between Appleseeds Bioroids and realiens).

But, mostly, it was just really odd how familiar yet unfamiliar everything was. I’m a big fan of the Appleseed manga, and indeed much of Shirows work through to the first volume of Ghost in the Shell (the second book, alas, was pretty dire). Yes, even the frequently non-nonsensical Orion, which gets a pass for (a) looking fantastic and (b) being hilarious.

Anyway, back to Appleseed, well, being pretty familiar with the original work just means that everything they’ve done here which is slightly different really, really jarring. Every time I think a piece of knowledge I’ve retained from the manga is relevant, they throw a curve ball that invalidates it. It mostly comes into play with the characters - they are all familiar, but they might have changed their jobs, or tweaked their personality (well, beyond the removal of the sense of humour with goes with most Shirow adaptations).

Still, the movie does get bonus points for making the John Woo doves an actual plot point. That made me laugh.

Oddly, I didn’t really get that feeling from the first movie, though this second movie isn’t even consistent with the design from the first. Understandable in some respects, giving that technology has moved on since then, but I do wonder about the need to redesign so much of Olympus. Those solar panelled arcs towering over the city has always been an image I’ve found striking - removing all of them in favour of just the one of Tartarus seems like an odd decision.

Oh, well, the major effect of the movie is that it’s really made me want to re-read the manga. I’m not really sure where I’ve put them, though, so I might end up having to rebuy them all. I need to grab Hypernotes anyway - SMB! was getting hard to find over here at the point which it was being serialised in it, so I’ve only read parts of it.

Actually, they should really do an Appleseed TV anime - not the wholly CG one which is supposedly in production, but rather a straight, 2D adaptation of the original manga. It’s dated astonishingly well for something written in the 1980s.

I’m starting to think I should have just did a post about Ex Machina for all this rambling. Oh well.

Bonus points for anyone who gets the reference. These bonus points don’t actually have any real value, beyond allowing you to be smug in the knowledge that you are one of the few who understood this one.

Anyway, I’m off to watch the second Baccano OAV, my DVD having only just turned up this month due to being intercepted by UK customs.

Oh, and I’m back even with DS on the ABA Comic stakes today!