Re: Raxivace's 2019 List of Movies or: (Neo-General Chat III: Dream Warriors)
Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 12:58 am
Bunch of anime today.
29. Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (2001, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe) - Like the main show there's not much I can really add to the conversation here. I could understand people being disappointed that it doesn't continue the plot of the main series (And show what Jet and co. are up to after Spike's death. I'd have loved to see their reactions to that.), though on its own merits this is a very fun and well animated little caper.
30. Cowboy Bebop: Ein's Summer Vacation (2012, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe) -
Wut.
31. Cowboy Bebop: Don't Bother None (2012, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe & Presumably a large bottle, multilingual of booze) -
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsfkp3TKqIk&t=35s[/youtube]
Uh, seriously, wut? Both of these shorts are kind of bizarre for something made so long after even the Bebop movie came out. I've got nothing here.
----------------------------
Some series…
Gun x Sword (2005) - On the planet “Endless Illusion", we follow a widowed mecha pilot and drifter named Van, who seeks revenge for the murder of his wife at their wedding (Its very Kill Bill. Van even continues to wear his wedding suit throughout the entirety of his journey. It also easily doubles as a Sergio Leone-esque duster.), and Wendy, a young girl who's brother seems to have been kidnapped. Wendy starts tagging along with Van as they seek the man they believe to have done both of these things, who is only known as “The Claw", because he has a giant claw hand.
It's a fun little ride, though it seems like it got pretty heavily overshadowed by the director's next work which came out the year after- Code Geass. Still the way Gun x Sword combines tributes to mecha history (Most notably with the “Eldora V" crew of old men, who were 70's style super robot pilots in their youth and now spend their days drinking in a dusty saloon and thinking back on the female member of their crew who has died) with the space western elements is cool- like the villain of the first episode runs a gang called the “Wild Bunch" and during a card game even draws the “Dead man's hand". Even the pairing of Van and Wendy seems to evoke stuff like True Grit.
Anyways the revenge quest is fun and for a dude with a moniker as goofy as “the Claw" he ends up being a strangely ambiguous villain who we never get a full read on (Is his rattling about achieving world peace and love for all humans genuine or not? I couldn't quite tell if he bought into it, but his followers seemed to). I think the show never seemed to have quite much to say about the actual revenge element though- once Van actually kills the Claw and thwarts his Instrumentality-esque plan, everyone that's still alive just kind of goes back to their old lives, Van goes back to wandering random towns until he reunites with Wendy again years later by chance, and things in general seem better or worse other than not being tanged I guess. I wish there was just a little more going on here by the end of it, though I still had a lot of fun with the show.
Rayearth (1997) - While I previously compared the original Magic Knight Rayearth series to its contemporary Vision of Escaflowne, the Rayearth OVA then naturally is analogous to the Escaflowne movie since it largely reimagines the original series, following some of the same basic plot points while drastically changing other key aspects around. Here the biggest difference isn't the Magic Knight girls going to a fantasy world, but rather beings from the fantasy realm of Cephiro invading the Earth with monsters and mecha (A premise very reminiscent of the later episodes of Aura Battler Dunbine).
There are some other weird changes, such as the character Eagle becoming the brother of Princess Emeraude in the OVA, whereas in the series he was an unrelated foreign invader from an entirely different planet and far more sympathetic (He was also noticeably in love with another man in the series and that aspect seems to be cut entirely here). If I remember correctly, the character that was Emeraude's brother in the actual series is no longer actually related to her in the OVA either which is an odd change.
There's also the main character Hikaru, who goes from energetic hothead to someone who gets bullied in school over giving an umbrella or something to someone else who forgot theirs, I dunno. This whole part of OVA!Hikaru's backstory was kind of weird to me.
I'm still pretty shocked by what they did to poor Ascot most of all though, who goes from being a kid villain with a plethora of animal friends that changes sides once he develops a crush on one of the main girls to his OVA incarnation, who is a fucking psychotic murderer child who murders for the hell of it and dies an ignominious death in battle (At the hands of the girl his TV counterpart has a crush on, no less). WTF.
Despite the ostensibly more serious presentation (Noticeably muter color palette, no scenes with super deformed chibi versions of the characters for comic effect, basically no comedy in general, superficially bleaker subject matter), this honestly seems like the way less substantial version of the story that just doesn't stand up on its own merits. If you liked the original version of the anime then the OVA is kind of interesting to look at as a supplement, but that's about it.
29. Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' on Heaven's Door (2001, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe) - Like the main show there's not much I can really add to the conversation here. I could understand people being disappointed that it doesn't continue the plot of the main series (And show what Jet and co. are up to after Spike's death. I'd have loved to see their reactions to that.), though on its own merits this is a very fun and well animated little caper.
30. Cowboy Bebop: Ein's Summer Vacation (2012, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe) -
Wut.
31. Cowboy Bebop: Don't Bother None (2012, Dir. Shinichiro Watanabe & Presumably a large bottle, multilingual of booze) -
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsfkp3TKqIk&t=35s[/youtube]
Uh, seriously, wut? Both of these shorts are kind of bizarre for something made so long after even the Bebop movie came out. I've got nothing here.
----------------------------
Some series…
Gun x Sword (2005) - On the planet “Endless Illusion", we follow a widowed mecha pilot and drifter named Van, who seeks revenge for the murder of his wife at their wedding (Its very Kill Bill. Van even continues to wear his wedding suit throughout the entirety of his journey. It also easily doubles as a Sergio Leone-esque duster.), and Wendy, a young girl who's brother seems to have been kidnapped. Wendy starts tagging along with Van as they seek the man they believe to have done both of these things, who is only known as “The Claw", because he has a giant claw hand.
It's a fun little ride, though it seems like it got pretty heavily overshadowed by the director's next work which came out the year after- Code Geass. Still the way Gun x Sword combines tributes to mecha history (Most notably with the “Eldora V" crew of old men, who were 70's style super robot pilots in their youth and now spend their days drinking in a dusty saloon and thinking back on the female member of their crew who has died) with the space western elements is cool- like the villain of the first episode runs a gang called the “Wild Bunch" and during a card game even draws the “Dead man's hand". Even the pairing of Van and Wendy seems to evoke stuff like True Grit.
Anyways the revenge quest is fun and for a dude with a moniker as goofy as “the Claw" he ends up being a strangely ambiguous villain who we never get a full read on (Is his rattling about achieving world peace and love for all humans genuine or not? I couldn't quite tell if he bought into it, but his followers seemed to). I think the show never seemed to have quite much to say about the actual revenge element though- once Van actually kills the Claw and thwarts his Instrumentality-esque plan, everyone that's still alive just kind of goes back to their old lives, Van goes back to wandering random towns until he reunites with Wendy again years later by chance, and things in general seem better or worse other than not being tanged I guess. I wish there was just a little more going on here by the end of it, though I still had a lot of fun with the show.
Rayearth (1997) - While I previously compared the original Magic Knight Rayearth series to its contemporary Vision of Escaflowne, the Rayearth OVA then naturally is analogous to the Escaflowne movie since it largely reimagines the original series, following some of the same basic plot points while drastically changing other key aspects around. Here the biggest difference isn't the Magic Knight girls going to a fantasy world, but rather beings from the fantasy realm of Cephiro invading the Earth with monsters and mecha (A premise very reminiscent of the later episodes of Aura Battler Dunbine).
There are some other weird changes, such as the character Eagle becoming the brother of Princess Emeraude in the OVA, whereas in the series he was an unrelated foreign invader from an entirely different planet and far more sympathetic (He was also noticeably in love with another man in the series and that aspect seems to be cut entirely here). If I remember correctly, the character that was Emeraude's brother in the actual series is no longer actually related to her in the OVA either which is an odd change.
There's also the main character Hikaru, who goes from energetic hothead to someone who gets bullied in school over giving an umbrella or something to someone else who forgot theirs, I dunno. This whole part of OVA!Hikaru's backstory was kind of weird to me.
I'm still pretty shocked by what they did to poor Ascot most of all though, who goes from being a kid villain with a plethora of animal friends that changes sides once he develops a crush on one of the main girls to his OVA incarnation, who is a fucking psychotic murderer child who murders for the hell of it and dies an ignominious death in battle (At the hands of the girl his TV counterpart has a crush on, no less). WTF.
Despite the ostensibly more serious presentation (Noticeably muter color palette, no scenes with super deformed chibi versions of the characters for comic effect, basically no comedy in general, superficially bleaker subject matter), this honestly seems like the way less substantial version of the story that just doesn't stand up on its own merits. If you liked the original version of the anime then the OVA is kind of interesting to look at as a supplement, but that's about it.