Godzilla the Monster World loses the chance it has of finally depicting ゴジラ destroying, bit by bit, everything. Is it to hope too much that one of the 3 movies be just that, total serpentine nihilism? Monster World has not the sheer great cinematography of the original 54 title (by Hasuda) neither the infra-structure, bureacratic meeting madness of the new one (by Anno). Also it probably does not pass the Bechdel test.
Terra Formars has to become a full blown battle shounen by the end, meaning that the great cockroach revenge loses impact, in endless fights. The sense of helplessness that the series begins is fabulous. But the right balance between the tragically human (the history of the characters, full of betrayal and despair) and the inhumanly cruel (the inversion of the relation between human and cockroach) unfortunately bends to the tragic at the second half. That’s why the two Bus-2 special episodes seem for me better (there is no time to get off tracks). And that ending soup, kept imagining an insect inside…
Hetalia conquers by force of stupidity. But some episodes forward, is not the World History from the point of view of nationality totally fucking stupid? In this sense Italians may seem to be the center of nonsense dumbness, but actually, it is everywhere – it is only that they are depicted as the unveiling of it. And of course, there is always this WW2 niponic thing in which, contrary to the West, Germans seem to be the pinnacle of respectfull citizens.
Early Toei stuff like Hakujaden (Panda and the Magic Serpent), Wanpaku Ouji no Orochi Taiji (Orochi, the Eight-Headed Dragon) and Nagagutsu wo Haita Neko (Puss-in-boots) are historically relevant and fun, though infantile, but there is too much Disney in them. Like a phase were it was too much influent but what was needed was to get rid of it. Cute funny animals all the time are a nuisance, by the way.
Inferno Cop affaire with being just horribly nonsensical bad is refreshing but at the same time perilously close to real shit. It is not really real shit, but we have to be assured of that by the short duration of the episodes. “That is just fooling around”, some say. I’d rather see it as a rehearsal for Ninja From Animation, which integrates some of this badness in its structural purposes.
Tamala 2010: what this amounts to, I beg the question. Not weird/surreal enough and not abstract at all. There is some narration, but no clear message. There is some craziness but as dealt from a tepid adolescent laziness perspective. As when people say about something: “wow that’s like, sooo into drugs”. Well, Tamala is indeed a great character and the 2D visuals in B&W are really nice, but I’rather see the more focused/consistent OVAs.
Franz Kafka’s a Country Doctor is brilliant animated and incredible well looking but the pacing and sound weights too much and seem just wrong – people should learn that when adapting Kafka’s paranoid narrations, themselves already dense enough, light treatment as contraposition is better for producing the strange humor that it should have.
