Tales from Earthsea
August 25th, 2007
Poor Goro. Could there be anything more thankless than taking over a project tailor-made for your genius father, a master of animation renowned for his grace and deep humanity, and attempt to match his best work? When it was announced that Goro Miyazaki, son of anime legend Hayao, was directing the adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea novels, you didn’t have to be Yubaba the Witch to know that it would end in tears.
Read the rest of my review of Tales from Earthsea at About.com.
Gedo senki. Goro Miyazaki, 2006. **
Appleseed
June 26th, 2007
Slightly above-average sci-fi anime that, as usual, steals liberally from Star Wars, Akira, Blade Runner, and whoever first came up with BattleMechs. Pacing could be tighter but storytelling is solid enough, and the 3-D computer animation is first rate eye candy. You could do worse for genre entertainment with a Paul Oakenfold soundtrack.
Appurushîdo. Shinji Aramaki, 2004. ***
The tell-all trailer:
Paprika
September 30th, 2006
Japanese anime director Satoshi Kon (Tokyo Godfathers, Millennium Actress) always struck me as overrated, and this new film is no exception. Lacking the preternatural grace of Hayao Miyazaki and the mind-bending concepts of Mamoru Oshii, Kon’s excursion into sci-fi is shockingly literal-minded. It’s about a prototype device, something called the “DC Mini,” that allows people to enter one another’s dreams. Much time is spent on making sure everybody in the audience catches the parallels between shared dreams and the movies.
Of course, the device is stolen and hacked, and suddenly no one is safe from a parade of stock surreal sights including circus clowns, endless hallways and creepy dolls that are supposed to create phantasmagoria but come across as faint echoes of better movies, such as sci-fi anime’s masterpieces Akira and Ghost in the Shell. (For a truly freaky, eye-popping parade, look no further than Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence.) Paprika amounts to unappetizing characters in remarkably flat animation talking epistemological gobble-di-gook. Every now and then, the title heroine appears as some sort of cloud-surfing dream warrior or grows a mermaid’s tail. From what I could tell, Paprika scored the NYFF record for walk-outs by insanely inflexible critics.
Paprika. Satoshi Kon, 2006. *
[tags]film, 1 star, anime, scifi, satoshi kon, nyff[/tags]
