It's a Jungle Out There

Mamoru Hosoda is a strangely difficult director to talk about. Although just starting his career, he has a mountain of expectations heaped on him because Studio Ghibli happened to be petering out at the same time as he got popular. Why else would a relative newcomer be called “the next Miyazaki” despite his films being entirely different in message and scope? That's why many were let down by The Wolf Children, and why I walked into The Boy and the Beast with lowered expectations. How did it hold up? I enjoyed myself, but wouldn't call the movie any better than fine.

The story isn't anything groundbreaking. A young boy, Ren, running away from his foster family encounters a bustling society of monster-people hiding in the shadows of our own, and gets taken in by the bear-like Kumatetsu. He's loud, slovenly, and disagreeable, only taking Ren in so that his lord will consider him a candidate for succession. Both characters have a lot of growing up to do, and do it with each other's help. What I realized afterward was that you can split Ren's journey into six parts, and my enjoyment of each part differed greatly.

Part one covered the opening, of course, which I thought was very well done. The first few minutes of exposition dumping was carried by some fantastic music and CG work, and character introductions were effective as well. Less effective was the next part which focused mainly on Ren and Kumatetsu's clashing personalities. They yell at each other and make lots of funny faces directly into the camera, which basically lays the foundation for all their later interactions. The movie's actually quite weak here because not only is this not funny or charming, neither characters' motivation comes through strongly at this point. Why are these two shouting at each other across the table when neither really has a good reason to even sit at the same table? Too bad, because characters like mild-mannered monk Soshi and sorta-antagonist Iozen are introduced here, both of which feel like they'd be more interesting to watch.

Part three I consider to be when Ren and Kumatetsu both get serious about training, and here things pick up again. Realizing that they each can learn from the other, their relationship becomes one of sidelong glances and unspoken words underneath all the bickering. It's pretty cheesy, but it's the closest to human warmth those two get. Besides, training montages! Always a good thing.

And then things get weird with a timeskip of about ten years or so. Without giving too much away, Ren becomes suddenly involved with the human world again, specifically with a pretty young female student, with his absentee birth father, and with applying for college. Now the first one or two plot points I can understand, but all three at once? Out of the blue? This stretch is all over the place with ideas, but none of them stick. Kumatetsu then finds out Ren's been doing things in the human world, gets mad about some part of that for some reason, and the two predictably separate, leaving Ren to question his own identity and place in the world.

Just as predictably, he returns to encourage his father figure in part five, which encompasses Kumatetsu's battle with Iozen for lordship. This is handled well enough; Hosoda really isn't an action director, so the fight doesn't put you on the edge of your seat, but I was engaged enough. Sadly, the sixth and final part rears its ugly head as the fight ends with the reveal of the true villain, in a shocking turn of events only those with eyes saw coming.

Mamoru Hosoda's typically uplifting messages are found as expected in the climax, but boy do you have to dig through a pile to reach them. Plot holes abound as the human world is needlessly brought into the conflict; the villain really has no reason to rampage there for one thing. Also, the laws of passage between realms is casually violated by a group of low-ranking beastmen for the sake of a single line of exposition we already knew. References to Moby Dick, already a bit forced in this film, are hammered in way too hard. The CG looks good, but is overused to the point of distraction. The final battle's pace just drags. And as Ren's not-really-girlfriend clings to him throughout the end, she doesn't feel like she belongs in any of this.

In summary, I enjoyed The Boy and the Beast while viewing it, but afterwards the flaws jumped out at me more than the good parts. I've heard Hosoda lacked one of his usual writers for this film, and I believe it; lots of meaningless plot points could have been cut from the second half for a more coherent feel, and personalities should have been shuffled a bit so side characters weren't more fun to watch than the main duo. This was essentially a clumsier version of Hosoda's previous works, and he'll have to either make better-constructed movies about the importance of family in the future, or do something completely different to hold our collective interest.

You're one of the last well-known directors of original anime films. We're all rooting for you, man.

The Raid: No Redemption

I took another gamble this season by choosing to watch Active Raid. I usually follow the critics' reviews pretty close when deciding which shows to follow, and on this one they were somewhat evenly split. Mistakenly giving it the benefit of the doubt, I found Active Raid to be the kind of white noise I mentally flush about a week after the ending. But what did intrigue me now is why this show fails when other, similar shows succeed.

In Active Raid, X technology has revolutionized society, but also given rise to X crime. Enter Y, a police force that pilots their own X to counter this. But Y is actually staffed by a ragtag group of quirky individuals! Will justice prevail, or shenanigans ensue?

Sound familiar? You replace X with Will Wear and Y with Unit 8 in this case, but could just as easily substitute Labor and SV2 to get Patlabor from about 30 years ago. When comparing these two directly, however (since it's pretty hard not to), I find Active Raid falls far short in the character and plot departments.

To be fair, almost everyone is an over-the-top archetype in both shows. But Patlabor tends to feel just a tad less ethereal; while eccentric, we can still kinda-sorta see a gun nut like Isao Oota or an unpredictable prodigy like Kanuka Clancy existing in real life. Active Raid gives us diehard train otaku and former gambling legends, both cute girls of course. You wouldn't exactly find many people like this in real life, and yet these quirks are usually revealed and showcased over just a single episode.

This causes two problems: first, it kills the characters by not weaving their personalities into the show bit by bit. Haruka is a train otaku because it came in handy that one episode; personality established, moving on. Second, it kills the humor by not fully capitalizing on characters' quirks. If Haruka was constantly talking about trains, looking at pictures of trains, forcing her obsession on everybody, then maybe you'd have a decent running gag. As it stands, characters exist in a purgatory where they don't feel like real people, yet don't act out enough to work well as cartoons. How are they suppose to make an impression on us?

Patlabor lies firmly on the realistic end of the spectrum, a weird place for a comedy series. Not only could some characters be just like our own more eccentric co-workers, the world it sets up still feels like it could be our own ten years from now. The humor works because it's easy to imagine most off-the-wall scenarios happening, then being made worse by a gaggle of offbeat personalities. Even better, Patlabor can get serious when it needs to, establishing real stakes at times and introducing villains with genuinely scary worldviews. This stuff's compelling even today because it's still easy to see parallels between life and this particular piece of art.

Active Raid is anime imitating anime. You've got your easygoing slob of a male lead who always pisses off his trash-separating clean freak of a partner. You've got your good-looking hacker main villain, always smugly confident of his ideals even though we have yet to hear what the fuck they are (seriously, there is no hint of what he thinks is so wrong with society that it's okay to put thousands in danger). You've got your pop idol episode, your giant robot episode, your high-stakes gambling episode. We've seen all this done before, better, and guess what? Our investment in the show isn't really helped by the constant shifts in focus, especially since there isn't any clear message beyond “good guys stop bad terrorists!”

Despite my ranting tone, this is not a terrible series. There's no janky animation, intolerable filler arc, or backwards morality to be found. It just doesn't aspire to do anything but mimic a half-dozen shows it liked, once, without thinking about what made them work. The watered-down diet soda aftertaste it leaves is definitely preferable to other crap I've sampled, but doesn't need to be sought out by anyone. Don't settle for an imitation like Active Raid; go for a series that had ideas and did something with them.

Do the Robot

Whenever discussing the history of anime, Astro Boy usually comes up. Despite its unquestionable influence, though, you find few people familiar with the title beyond the concept and maybe a few characters. I sought to fix that a few weeks ago upon finding the 2003 reboot cheap at an F.Y.E. After all, this was a particularly high-budget production that made special effort to be accessible for all nations! Does it live up to the hype?

Uh . . . sorta-ish?

To acknowledge the elephant in the room, this show is Americanized, sometimes painfully so. I can understand making sure no one dies and using only “harmless” laser guns, even if it lessens the drama in many harder-hitting stories. But the episodes themselves are so obviously cropped that it's a constant distraction. This was clearly made for TVs larger than a little box, there's clearly stuff going on at the sides we can't see, and there's nothing we can do about it. Likewise, only the English dub is available, with no way of knowing what the more direct translation would have been. I say this because at some points dialogue doesn't seem to match the facial expressions; sometimes Astro will say a snarky line but look very sad and confused while speaking. Pretty sure he didn't have a dumb catchphrase like “Let's rocket!” in Japanese, too. I'm not enough of a purist to say any and all changes ruin a show, but these changes do sometimes take you out of the story.

The story itself is quite good. While not as dark as Tezuka tended to lean, the show mainly deals with anti-discrimination commentary, with robots taking the place of insert second-class race here. Mankind's somewhat delicate relationship with technology is also touched on. While the vast mojority of episodes are stand-alone, entries featuring the Blue Knight form a loose ongoing arc as simmering social tensions boil over into a full-fledged robot revolution. Yeah, for a lighthearted kids' show, things can still get pretty real.

The characters were a highlight for me. It was pretty cool to recognize a guest character and flip through The Art of Osamu Tezuka to confirm that, yes, they had appeared in dozens of other series in various roles. Not everyone was particularly fleshed-out, mind you; I lost count of how many bad guys hate robots “just because”. But at least there was a certain charm to watching famous character designs hamming it up (perhaps ham-and-egging it up in the case of Ham Egg?) that kept things entertaining. Besides, a surprising amount of heroes, antiheroes, and even villains are given the full spectrum of morality, considering this show is squarely aimed at kids. The aforementioned Blue Knight, for instance, fights for a good cause but threatens human/robot relations by doing so. Baddies like Rock and Lamp are shown to have sympathetic backstories which explain their misdeeds, as well as potential for redemption. Even the black-clad, charismatic main villain Dr. Tenma is often portrayed as a lonely, self-destructive man who teaches Astro many important lessons.

The voice acting itself is hit-or-miss. I never quite bought the gravelly, Ash Ketchum-ish voice the clearly female actress gave Astro, and kid characters in general sound kinda dumb with the possible exception of Reno. Most one-shot and recurring characters get similarly cartoony voices, but they usually come off as more endearing than grating. Dr. Oshay's actor seems to have the most dialogue behind Astro, and delivers it well enough that I wish his character had more meat than one-note good guy exposition factory. And I found myself wondering when Dr. Tenma would come back to say something with his cool voice. The music, unfortunately, is mostly miss. They replaced the Japanese opening theme with somewhat serviceable techno music. It gets less serviceable the more often it's used in-show as battle music, which is almost every episode; I can't say for certain how many other tracks were thus replaced, but none stand out. Animation is good for the time, especially given how often the camera movies through CG environments. They say each episode had roughly three times the budget of standard anime episodes, and I can believe it, but it does feel duller and more processed than its fully hand-drawn brethren. But hey, maybe the bit they cropped on the sides looked downright spectacular!

All in all, Astro Boy was a seriously flawed show that I can forgive because it remains fairly solid and completely well-intentioned. It reflects Tezuka's heavy themes as best as it can for the wide target audience, and throws plenty of bones to the author's diehard fans despite rebooting some aspects for maximum accessibility. The Americanized changes are by far the biggest problem, especially since I don't believe any alternate version has been or will be released. Still, the version I found was ten dollars for fifty episodes, so really who am I to bitch? The 2003 reboot of Astro Boy remains a competent introduction to a much larger world, and in the end that's just what the creators intended. Don't be afraid to check it out.