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\nAs it turns out, there’s a second one at the end of the movie too. Hard to make out here, but t’was much clearer on my TV.<\/i><\/b><\/center>
\nWelcome to the SPACE SHOW was a movie which really didn’t do very well, shifting only around 7000 copies when it was released on home formats a few weeks ago. For a movie, that’s pretty bad. For a movie that’s been in production for about four years and quite clearly had a pretty huge budget, that’s kind of disastrous.<\/p>\nThere’s a bunch of reasons that would probably go to explain that – the movie itself has something of an identity issue, in so much as it’s hard to work out if it’s aiming for a mainstream or an otaku audience. The character designs in particular straddle an awkward middle ground which probably doesn’t appeal massively to either – in particular, I think the promotional art gave a little too much of an air of “pre-teens only” to it. Hideyuki Kurata’s writing also has, as always, a slightly off-beat sense of humour which probably appeals more to an otaku audience than it would a mainstream one. It’s really a movie that’s hard to fathom the target for, and I rather imagine the promotional department had just that issue.<\/p>\n
Throw that into a year which opened with fanboy-blockbusters like Haruhi, Nanoha and Unlimited Blade Works (which between them cover a huge swath of fandom), had a new Ghibli movie and also contained a few amazing curveballs like REDLINE and Western favourites like Trigun, and you’ve got yourself a year where its going to be very hard for an original work by a first-time movie director to get column inches even in anime magazines. This is doubly true for a movie with designs which preclude it from the most nerdiest of publications.<\/p>\n
So it wasn’t really all that surprising when the home release was met with a rather muted reaction by Western fandom as well, many of whom seemed to be oblivious to the movies existence.<\/p>\n
To be fair, it’s not like the film is free of problems in itself. The film is clearly too long to the order of fifteen to thirty minutes, and for a movie that’s running over two hours, that means it rather drags in places. What doesn’t really help is that there’s a raising of the stakes towards the end which doesn’t really add to anything other than the running length – there was a perfectly good evil scheme going on without needing another layer ontop of it. It’s a needless complication that works to the movies detriment rather than it’s benefit.<\/p>\n
In it’s defence, though, the movie is really, really pretty. Astonishingly so. I mean, it’s not quite REDLINE levels of stunning – there’s a few sequences where objects don’t move quite like they probably should in a slightly jarring fashion – but the animation is largely incredibly fluid, and the backgrounds highly detailed with a lush colour palette. There’s also a certain, amazing density to the visuals, particularly in the movies first act. The production staff pretty much chained designer okama to a desk for a couple of years whilst he churned out literally hundreds of pages of alien designs to fill out the backgrounds of the lunar cityscape.<\/p>\n
Welcome to the SPACE SHOW is definitely a movie that’s worth seeing at least once. To be honest, and this is likely to be an unpopular (or at least uncommon) view of the matter, but I do kind of prefer this movie to a lot of the anime flicks I’ve seen in this last year. Not Haruhi and REDLINE, of course, but faced with a choice of rewatching Summer Wars and Welcome to the SPACE SHOW, well, I’d go for the latter.
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\nIs this a Kamichu reference I see before me? Someone who doesn’t have to dig out their copies check, please… ^^;<\/i><\/b><\/center><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On top of the shoe-locker there, to the right of the screen, though the box on the left could possibly be one too. This post has been a long time in coming. Well, possibly a long time in coming, which is why it’s kind of a relief that I’m actually able to post this. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2468","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mikan-watch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2468"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2476,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2468\/revisions\/2476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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