Momo e no Tegami, “A Letter to Momo”, is a technically ambitious and heartwarming success by Hiroyuki Okiura (Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade, Paprika) and Production I.G. that gives me hope for anime films in this decade. The film achieves what a good anime should aim for: fantastic and wonderful images which at the same time astound the viewer with their novelty and retain a touch of familiarity that makes them hauntingly real. It’s a meticulous effort that’s very much worth your time.

You may remember that I was underwhelmed by Shinkai’s Voices from the Other Side, which seemed be a hodgepodge of homages to Ghibli and surreal but poorly assembled spectacles. Momo e looks a little Ghibliesque on the surface, but this is really just because both Miyazaki and Okiura are drawing on Edo period grimoires for source material. Get into the theater and you’ll discover that the cinematography, character designs, and plot arcs are really quite different, and Momo e has its own personality.

The basic plot is rather predictable from the beginning, but it becomes fleshed out and made more engaging by a careful pacing. Unfortunately for me, this film contains a lot of dialect: the islanders speak a rustic, almost humorously archaic variant of Shikoku-ben, and the spirits speak a mixture of 19th century samurai language and other things I could not identify. The latter especially tripped me up a few times and probably requires a native grasp on Japanese, or familiarity with afternoon samurai dramas, to be enjoyed fully. But the archaicisms give the fictional setting a feeling of realism and physical location.

Language is far from the only aspect of the film where exhaustive research has born delicious fruit. I don’t need a “making of” video to know that the director and lead animators must have personally visited islands in the inland sea as a model for their setting. The streets and buildings boast accuracy at every curb, even moreso than Ghibli’s recent Kokurikozaka kara. See if you can spot the cleverly employed pillow shots. Every background has been based on real life reference down to the smallest detail. There must have been some serious observation of island life involved to capture all of the tiny moments we see in the film, such as families carrying water tanks up to their homes and gas-powered elevators running up through the terraced rice fields (棚田). The faces of the human characters also sometimes exhibit an uncanny realism, which can be seen in the trailer.

Another part of the film where background research was both complete and well-integrated is the aspect of the haunted house. The haunted house in Totoro, to use the most obvious example, is just a word used to introduce the cute characters. In Momo e, on the other hand, the number of parallels with real poltergeist haunting proves that the director and writers must have done some real research into the subject. Just as in a real-life poltergeist incident, the haunting begins with strange knocks from unoccupied rooms, then develops into spooky incidents such as invisible hands grabbing people, objects flying across the room, fires being started… or the weirdness witnessed by the adults in this film, which I will not reveal. The haunted family inevitably includes a young child age 6-14, in this case Momo. Eventually the child is named as the culprit, as is the case here (this is not a major plot point), but how a child could pull off such sophisticated conjuring undetected for such a long time, or why they undertook such an effort, is never explained. I don’t expect viewers to be familiar with this branch of parapsychology, but the touch of realism will surely strike a chord unconsciously.

These are just the aspects of the film that stuck out the most to me– I’ll leave other points to other reviewers. In any case, the film blended seamlessly with my experiences of rural Japan, with the result that when the drama reached its peak, I was completely submerged in its world. I was not the only one feeling this way–I could hear a lot of sniffling in the theater. It was one of those films that’s so good you lose track of time and you’re not sure whether you were watching for thirty minutes or three hours, even though in my case I didn’t understand all of the dialogue!

The feeling experienced by the viewer after the curtains close, in my opinion, is a crucial judge of the real quality of a film. When I came out of the theater I felt grateful and moved for having seen such an honest portrayal of life and death. I’m not sure if I would buy a DVD for extended replay, but I would definitely see this film again with friends. My reverie was temporarily interrupted by a theater employee handing out marketing material for the film, including a postcard inviting people to mail in letters they would want to send to lost family and friends. This struck me as a little insensitive, but it doesn’t affect my impression of the film itself, which I wholeheartedly recommend.

Click on a page to see the manga

197Q

Just Rain

Records Concerning the SCF Unique Insect Group

I don’t like video games. I like to read, a lot, and I like to think about what I’m reading. I think, in theory, there are a lot of people like me out there, people who would jump to pay good money for Analogue: A Hate Story if they realized what it was. But it’s a type of work that slips outside the usual categories of book and game, so getting people to realize that it’s something they should be looking for should be hard. I’ll do my best.

[Note: This review contains no spoilers, but figuring out what exactly is going on when you start up Analogue is a bit of a fun challenge in itself so if you want to play the free demo first you should go ahead and do that.]

Christine Love ought to be a familiar name in the world of interactive fiction, OEL visual novels, and really just indie gaming generally, but I have a feeling that she does not have the fame that she ought to have, because she puts a lot of time into each work and it is an unfortunate fact that this is an age of tweets rushing by us at fifty a second. In Love’s first story-game, Digital, a delicious sci-fi romance unfolds itself as you gain access to hidden nooks of the 1980s BBS world. It was noticed by bloggers writing for The Economist and The A.V. Club. Her next work, entitled “Don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story”, was picked up by The Daily Telegraph but it suffered a bit for having been written entirely within the month of March 2010.

Analogue is much closer to Digital in spirit than “Don’t take…”, but in fact when you launch the game you discover the format is completely unique. Digital was revolutionary in its own way, but the author kind of played a trick on her readers with that game. Enticed by the promise of a BBS world adventure, something with puzzle game elements like Uplink, typical readers don’t realize that most enjoyable part of the work is not playing the game but reading its story until they’ve been swept up in the narrative.

With Analogue there is no such deception, which makes it a bitter pill for gamers. You’re dispatched to an abandoned spaceship, break your way into their computers, and… suddenly you’re presented with a database of diary entries left by some kind of medieval Korean civilization. And that’s it, that’s all the game you’re going to get. What?? How do I click out of this?! Who do I shoot? It perhaps lands somewhere in the accepted range of interactive fiction, but in this case the fiction is its own, segregated body stuck inside the interaction.

Someone who is told Analogue is like an e-book will be similarly puzzled, but in a slowly delightful way. For you don’t have very much to read at the start. You have to ask the computer to tell you more, and the computer is not totally cooperative. Why not? That’s what you have to find out.

No, what you’ve stumbled into is magical and exciting at the same time: to the extent that this interactive fiction is a game, it is a game about sitting in a library managed by unreliable librarians. An unreliable narrator is someone who can’t be trusted to tell the story properly because of other interests in their head that compete with the truth. The use of this distrust to make a novel better was perfected about 60 years ago, and I would argue that nobody has really radically evolved that model before this game. Here, we introduce the concept of the unreliable librarian, someone whose job it is to simply supply you with a completed text, but for some reason is holding it back, and won’t tell you why for reasons of their own. The relationship between you and the library’s AI is meant to be maddening, and if you start falling in love with the obstinate archivists, well, that’s really your own fault because, as they keep reminding you, they’re only AI programs.

For a bibliophile, this is the perfect game: the object is simply to acquire information, and the driving structure that makes it a game is a literary device! And the more I think about it, the more devices reveal themselves. Because of the structure of the game, the only human characters are the dead Korean noblefolk whose letters you read. The interaction that goes on in the game portion is between you and a computer, and the intro screen gets some potshots in at that (“It should be asocial enough for you”).

Looking at the content of the text and the librarians’ reactions to it, we see a well-planned and grand narrative, too. Before anyone asks, no, this is not the sort of template period drama that clogs up Korean TV. Not to spoil too much of your reading, but in the text we witness a clash of cultures, between medieval and modern Korea. Love has not decided for us whether one has to be better than the other, but allows us to think about that for ourselves. Although her depictions aren’t perfect (come on, this is Korea in a spaceship), you start to see how the triumphs and failures of families are a beautiful reflection of the values of a nation.

The AIs are well-written as well. Hyun-ae is quicker to (over)share what she’d like you to do, and you might end up getting her route first, but you’ll also eventually realize how her selfishness is the root of trouble and reflects her modern upbringing. Mute, the medievalist, is the more difficult character: she focuses on duty first and foremost, and tries to recede into the background and “let you work”, forcing you to come to her and help clarify her duty. As a modern, you’ll see her flaws first but eventually realize how they form part of a coherent whole. And as an AI whose personal longings conflict with her duty, she makes an excellent tsundere.

Oh yeah, and underneath this entire story, and game, is an engine that Love wrote herself, based on RenPy. It’s definitely beyond anything I could program myself at this point and I’m much impressed by what she’s done as a one-woman production house.

I have to head off to bed now and I don’t have time to add any additional thoughts on this game, but I hope to read more reviews in the days to come, and I hope I’ve encouraged anyone on the fence to check it out already.

The 35th Japan Academy Awards nominated Ghibli’s flop “Kokuriko-zaka kara”, an adaption of Tezuka’s epic “Buddha”, a youkai story called “Toufu Kozou” based on a bestselling adult novel, and a movie from the Detective Conan series, which has the wonderful distinction of having been nominated for a Japan Academy Award every year since the “best animation” category was introduced in 2006. Oh yes, and K-On! The Movie.

Web tabloid Searchina notes that of these five, K-On! is the most unlikely nomination recipient, saying that the Kyoani production could “hardly be said to be a household name in Japan”. This is untrue in my personal experience. I mean, there’s a 12-year-old at one of my schools who has this attached to her pencil case:

In case you are puzzled by that image, that’s the girls’ character Capybara-san sitting on the head of a K-On! character (whoever she is, I don’t watch these moéblob shows goddamn you) who is sitting in her Houkago Tea Time mug.

There’s also a 10-year-old at that school who hassled me for K-On! merchandise every day until I found some to give to her.

So, K-On! is no longer otaku stuffs, it now belongs to everyone in Japan who likes cute things and is staying on top of… uh… whatever kind of cultural currents transmit the latest cute things to children. This certainly represents a new wave in mainstream anime, but it could hardly have been a controversial choice for the academy. I mean, “Toufu Kozou” was popular, but I imagine there are plenty of people who never heard of it.

So, congratulations to Kyoto Animation for their first Japan Academy Award nominee. I don’t think K-On! will win that Academy Award though. It’s an anime about girls who eat cake.

http://2chan.us/wallpapers.zip

Not sure I remember how to write in English at this point, but more contentful posts hopefully coming soon…

Shakugan no Shana III > Maji de Watashi no Koi ni Shinasai > Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon > Mashiroiro Symphony

Shana may actually have the worst script of the four, but at least it’s classically bad. The horrifying creature in Mashiroiro ensured it the lowest spot.

Speaking of horrifying creatures, I can’t seem to remember what the point of that scene in Fate/zero was.

Nationwide box office
1 . Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
2 . Pocket Monsters Best Wish/Victini’s Black Hero (Double Feature)
3 . Kokuriko Saka kara
4 . Andalusia Revenge of the Goddess
5 . ＳＵＰＥＲ　８
6 . Some Pirate of the Caribbean thing
7 . Full Metal Alchemist
8 . Ogawa no Hotori
9 . I Am Number 4
10 . Anpanman

http://eiga.com/ranking/

My review of the movie. I’m not going to spoil it this time, I didn’t understand parts of the dialogue anyway. The artwork is really nice. The Quartier Latin is on par with the magic and attention to detail of Spirited Away, but in a realistic high school setting and not a fantasy world. You’re guaranteed to love the scenes of cooking breakfast, riding bicycles down the hill into the fish market, hopping onto fishing boats, etc. Many scenes focus carefully on the technics of an era before computers and machines: the cooking of rice in a wooden basin, the hand-lettering and hand-mimeographing of a student newspaper (the first time I’d ever seen that), and so forth. These scenes are set up mindfully to put the focus of the viewer’s attention clearly on the device that the characters are focusing on. This is an accomplishment in directing, and I guess Miyazaki’s son should take credit for that.

The writing, however, needs work. The one-shot shoujo manga has some… interesting… plot elements that don’t make sense when translated to a major, big- screen anime. The viewer ends up going home thinking, “Why exactly was this story turned into a film?” It doesn’t really seem to have any message that applies to our lives. However, it works as a nostalgic portrait of student life in 1960s. Perhaps that portrait was all the director was aiming for when he chose this manga, but my girlfriend and I were caught a little off guard by the unexpected resolution to one of the major plot issues, and the other one seemed like a formulaic Korean-style drama that belonged on the small screen, not the big one.

The character animation starts out inoffensive but by the end you might notice that the mouths and noses are somewhat sloppy, and the baby faces feel more like K-On than Nausicaa. I hope Ghibli doesn’t turn into a moé blob studio.

Oh yeah, and little kids will not understand this film. It’s all about romance, rebuilding after the war, and family ties; a charming story, but quite complicated. They would walk out of the theater confused as hell. That’s a decent reason why Pokemon would triumph at the box office.

This year kransom and I (plus mdl and stephieku) helped run the panel and did song translations. We still ended up an hour late, since the previous panel had way more corporate sponsorship, but here’s the playlist.

Most of these links are to the unsubtitled versions, since I forgot to ask if we could upload the translations, so contact us or watch this space if you’d like them. But you should watch them anyway!

1. honey and clover club by yuuyu and baker, video by nagimiso

2. Aku no Musume Trilogy by nazyo, NazekorewoP, Yuuki

3. DYE/Re:reflection+ by Treow, remixed by AVTechNO, video by heki

4. Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya! by daniwell, and the MMD version

5. Rondo of possible world by millstones, video by masataka

6. Strobe last by Powapowa, video by masataka

This one’s translated!

7. Sweet Devil and Electric Love by HachioujiP, video by wakamuraP

9. Memories (unfinished video) by SmileR, video by wakamuraP

10. Innocent girl feat. Kaai Yuki (international edit) by KagomeP and rlldi

I have no idea what this video is about.

11. Ameyumerou by HitoshizukuP and Suzunosuke

12. Flower Tail by yuukiss and 25 KAITOs

13. My world by KuchibashiP

(not actually related to the next song)

14. World is Mine video (unfinished) by Sadamasa Shiika

15. Last night, good night by kz/livetune

Finally, there were three new songs presented by the special guest producers:

1. Galapagos by Penguins Project
You can find the English introduction at his blog.

2. The Socialist by ZANEEDS
Japanese title: “What if Kagamine Rin read Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’”?

3. Boring Bowling by SunzriverP
It’s a song about bowling, because Americans love bowling. No translation just yet.

My AX report is that instead of Day 4, I went to the beach. I recommend you do the same!
Photos (featuring several returning stars) can be found here or on the sidebar —>

They were shuffled around a bunch of airports to make it to LA in time for the concert and most people had a flight of over 1 day.

After the concert

I should note that someone with a gushing opinion of this movie put it on BitTorrent, which combined with what I already know about Happy Science, gives me a suspicion that they might actually approve of non-Japanese people downloading and watching it. Here’s a DDL link too. I’m bad at concealing spoilers so you might just want to forego the review and take a look for yourself.

tl;dr version: Do you want to see an evil Heian period demon reincarnated as a businessman riding on a UFO made of bats interrupting a major league baseball game to duke it out with CG angels and some guy riding on an elephant? Then this film is for you!!!

Who is John Galt?

Strengths

The animation and cinematography in this film is very good. Each of Happy Science’s productions seems to be an order of magnitude better than the last, technically speaking. And not even a Ghibli production could measure up to Happy Science’s evangelistic prowess: there are subtitles in 13 languages, and 4 audio tracks. I wouldn’t bother with the English dub, though you might try your luck with the Chinese or Spanish ones.

Unlike “The Laws of Eternity”, which was frankly unhinged in its references to Thomas Edison as a Bodhisattva and Space Hitler summoning an evil Megazord and all other kinds of craziness, “The Rebirth of Buddha” actually has a fairly coherent plot. It takes place in modern-day Japan, with realistic sensibilities and economic woes, and delves into Japanese thought on religion in ways that prior movies didn’t.

The realism is pretty much limited to that, unless if you think UFO attacks, telekinesis, and mass hypnosis are things that actually happen on an everyday basis in Japan. However, if you can suspend your disbelief that much, it’s a pretty interesting story and a good look into both Happy Science’s placement in Japanese society and its image of its own history (more on this later).

Plot Analysis

SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS – SPOILERS

The plot is a fairly obvious reimagining of the most famous event in Japan’s postwar religious history, the March 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gas attacks. Any Japanese person who was alive in 1995 will be able to identify that the film’s villain, the religious poseur Tousaku Arai, is a symbol for the cult leader Shoko Asahara who ordered the attacks as well as various murders and attempted assassinations. If you’re not totally sure whether this is intentional, some images have been snuck in to confirm it, such as the siddham script logo of his organization (shown above), paralleling the sacred Aum used by the real world cult as a logo. To summarize the two hour film, Arai tries to teach people a Nietzschean dog-eat-dog morality (“yakiniku teishoku“), and to make his teachings more appealing (?) launches a UFO attack on Tokyo. This plan is foiled, as well as his mass hypnosis plan, so he ends up kidnapping the main character and riding with her on a UFO into a baseball stadium.

Arai’s cartoonish, Doctor Evil-esque machinations are frankly less frightening than the memory of Shoko, an enigmatic figure with a long beard who cultivated ties to the Dalai Lama, the Russian government, and current Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara. Shoko projected a bold image of national and religious revival, even as he instructed his followers to obtain and research various forms of chemical weapons. With Tokyo subway sarin gas incident the country learned that this major religious group had been nurturing a psychopathic streak for years, and this revelation poisoned the image of religion generally. Since then, not even the biggest movement Soka Gakkai has recovered its pre-Aum levels.

What most Japanese people may not know is that the general layout of the history being represented in The Rebirth of Buddha is true. Happy Science was deeply opposed to Aum Shinrikyo, and as portrayed in the film, abused Aum members really did flee to Happy Science. In February 1995, a covert Aum murder team attempted to assassinate founder Ryuho Okawa with VX gas (they also tried to kill the Soka Gakkai leader, twice). Just days before the gas attacks, Happy Science held a public protest outside Aum headquarters. In a sense, the story of good and evil Japanese religious groups duking it out is kind of real.

It only makes sense that Okawa might be thinking his side of the story has not been told well enough, but this anime neither reveals that commendable history nor makes any similar boasts about Happy Science’s record. In fact, as with the previous anime, Ryuho Okawa is not portrayed directly; his altogether more handsome stand-in is a guy with the cute name “Sun Of-the-sky” (Sorano Taiyou). The religious identity of the film is thus anonymized, and the viewer is invited to learn about Ryuho Okawa and the true faith for his or herself. This is a pleasant bit of modesty that makes the film a bit easier to watch.

Where the film fails, of course, is its metaphysical nuttiness. Shoko boasted of supernatural powers. In this film, Arai really does have incredible supernatural powers, and the world can attest to them; the only problem is that he’s using them for evil. All that is needed, in the film, is for Arai to be countered with the superior supernatural abilities of Mr. Sun. Admitting the uncomfortable reality, that Shoko’s real evil power was to be found in his large stockade of poison gases, would have made the movie less entertaining. This does not do much to combat the easily reached conclusion that Happy Science is living in a fantasy land.

Post Tohoku earthquake, the tsunami scene is also a little uncomfortable. The tsunami is actually a hallucination caused by Arai, so Okawa’s Mary Sue character simply comes on the TV and tells people to wish the tsunami away, and just like that it disappears. It should go without saying that real disasters cannot be handled in this way. Perhaps some understanding of Okawa’s religious views can be gained from seeing people turn from fear and panic to calmness and resolve, but a scene that may have been fit for a silly disaster movie in 2010 just no longer works in 2011.

Weaknesses

Geegle

I hate the title of this movie, although it’s Happy Science canon, drawn from a 1989 Ryuho Okawa tome where he claimed to channel the spirit of Buddha. I don’t know how Okawa can think he’s getting away with messing up one of the most basic facts of Buddhism. Buddha has passed into Nirvana; he is not around anymore to be reincarnated. Buddhist sutras state that we are living in the post-Gautama Buddha age, and when another Buddha arises it will be a different person entirely. According to Happy Science, it seems, every Buddhist text throughout history was corrupted, and Buddha actually said that he was coming back to be reborn as Ryuho Okawa in 1945 or whatever. I guess if you’re a pledged Happy Scientist you’re willing to disregard all sorts of inconvenient facts.

And now let’s talk about the gross xenophobic twist the director put on the film. “Laws of Eternity” portrayed an impressively multicultural Japan, in line with Okawa’s belief that foreigners in Japan should be given an easy path to naturalization, and a general love of foreigners found throughout Happy Science literature. For some reason, in this film all that goes out the window, and instead we have the gag foreigner caricature who speaks with a horrible accent I’ve never heard a real gaijin use, and who does dumb crap for laughs like yelling in a hospital. Oh well, I guess this is just like any anime ever.

The shaman from the previous movie gets a cameo in this film, as a talking head on a variety show. I don’t know why they did this but it blew my mind.

Overall, this film is like a 7/10 on entertainment merits alone, but if you want to know about Happy Science, or if you already know about it and want to see what it’s pulled off this time, you’ll love it.