Think I'll go for a walk
Sep. 19th, 2009 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanetOh god, this poor neglected blog! Between my thesis and my fiction, I just don't have time to write dedicated posts like I keep meaning to. But I do write short (for me!) reviews/notes on all the anime and anime criticism that I come across. So maybe I'll just start posting those here every week. I can't say they're any good to anyone else (don't look here for plot summaries!), but at least it's something.
Starting alphabetically, then, here are some thoughts on Appleseed, cyberpunk, and heteronormative romance.
Appleseed. Dir. Shinji Aramaki. Original manga by Masamune Shirow. Appleseed Film Partners, 2004.
Shinji Aramaki is well-known for his work as a designer: he did production design in Fullmetal Alchemist, mechanical design in Wolf’s Rain, and much more. Now, I don’t want to say you can’t jump from design to direction, but I think this film was definitely stronger in design than plotting.
Appleseed is solidly a cyberpunk genre film: it starts with a big action scene, and follows up with some flashbacks to set up the relationship between our heroes Deunan (tough fighter chick) and Briareos (cyborg guy, Deunan’s ex). Then the cute “Bioroid” Hitomi does some exposition in a car, it turns into a car chase, and of course in the end they have to save the day by protecting humanity’s capacity to love even in a ruined urban landscape. I hate to sound dismissive, because there’s always a place for cyberpunk films in my heart. But I just kept thinking: oh, there’s some Matrix bullet time shots, here we have a Blade Runner-like concern with emotion, that’s a Ghost in the Shell-style focus on mechanical reproduction…with nothing really original coming out of them. I suppose I might enjoy seeing these issues addressed again if I hadn’t seen a movie that really did take a different tack on the politics of (in)humanity -namely Jin-Roh- just recently. Jin-Roh (1998) feels like a post-9/11 movie, while this post-9/11 movie still seems stuck in the 20th century plot-wise. It wasn’t bad, just unsatisfying.
Visually, Appleseed is one of those movies, following after the two Final Fantasy films, that's still struggling with how to blend the flat, graphic properties of anime with the high-tech 3D look of cg. (2007's Vexille has the same style, and the same problems.) It uses matte cel-style shading and anime anatomy on cg-animated characters, with very detailed, 3D machines and cityscapes. As a result, the people blend well with their wonderfully rendered surroundings, and the whole thing looks slick and impressive. But their movements and expressions have no life of their own. They’re not even uncanny, just awkward. The Bioroid Hitomi is the most appropriate and also the most annoying example. She isn’t human, so she shouldn’t look it. That's alright. Unfortunately, what she does look like is a cute Asian magazine model set on permanent Photoshop, complete with sweetly blank expression. The expression she pulls off best is “dreamy,” in a scene where she asks Deunan what it’s like to love.
On that note, I also had issues with the whole idea that the Bioroids needed to be “fully activated,” or, gain a human-style (hetero)sexuality and life cycle to be liberated. When Hitomi is half-activated and knows love only abstractly, she seems aesthetically attracted to Deunan. She calls Deunan beautiful upon first seeing her, and makes remarks about how pretty she is when she sleeps. As I said, her “warmest” moment in the whole movie is when she asks Deunan, in a sort of strange, dreamy way, to describe what love is like. I was kind of starting to ship Deunan/Hitomi there for a bit. But at the end of the movie, the Bioroids are granted the capacity to reproduce, the humans retain theirs, and the couples split up into –at least implicit- male/female pairs: Deunan hugs the “machine but still a man inside” Briareos, and the male Bioroid Yoshitsune Miyamoto admits his love for Hitomi (Hey, wait, Yoshitsune Miyamoto? Sounds an awful lot like Yoshitsune Minamoto. What’s up with the markedly Japanese Bioroids?!)
So, finally, I think that even with all its post-human influences and proclamations about the “shinjinrui,” this film (like Vexille) still comes back to some rather conservative ideas about humanity and sexuality. Maybe a second watching would let me pick up more subtleties, but that was my first impression of it.
Starting alphabetically, then, here are some thoughts on Appleseed, cyberpunk, and heteronormative romance.
Appleseed. Dir. Shinji Aramaki. Original manga by Masamune Shirow. Appleseed Film Partners, 2004.
Shinji Aramaki is well-known for his work as a designer: he did production design in Fullmetal Alchemist, mechanical design in Wolf’s Rain, and much more. Now, I don’t want to say you can’t jump from design to direction, but I think this film was definitely stronger in design than plotting.
Appleseed is solidly a cyberpunk genre film: it starts with a big action scene, and follows up with some flashbacks to set up the relationship between our heroes Deunan (tough fighter chick) and Briareos (cyborg guy, Deunan’s ex). Then the cute “Bioroid” Hitomi does some exposition in a car, it turns into a car chase, and of course in the end they have to save the day by protecting humanity’s capacity to love even in a ruined urban landscape. I hate to sound dismissive, because there’s always a place for cyberpunk films in my heart. But I just kept thinking: oh, there’s some Matrix bullet time shots, here we have a Blade Runner-like concern with emotion, that’s a Ghost in the Shell-style focus on mechanical reproduction…with nothing really original coming out of them. I suppose I might enjoy seeing these issues addressed again if I hadn’t seen a movie that really did take a different tack on the politics of (in)humanity -namely Jin-Roh- just recently. Jin-Roh (1998) feels like a post-9/11 movie, while this post-9/11 movie still seems stuck in the 20th century plot-wise. It wasn’t bad, just unsatisfying.
Visually, Appleseed is one of those movies, following after the two Final Fantasy films, that's still struggling with how to blend the flat, graphic properties of anime with the high-tech 3D look of cg. (2007's Vexille has the same style, and the same problems.) It uses matte cel-style shading and anime anatomy on cg-animated characters, with very detailed, 3D machines and cityscapes. As a result, the people blend well with their wonderfully rendered surroundings, and the whole thing looks slick and impressive. But their movements and expressions have no life of their own. They’re not even uncanny, just awkward. The Bioroid Hitomi is the most appropriate and also the most annoying example. She isn’t human, so she shouldn’t look it. That's alright. Unfortunately, what she does look like is a cute Asian magazine model set on permanent Photoshop, complete with sweetly blank expression. The expression she pulls off best is “dreamy,” in a scene where she asks Deunan what it’s like to love.
On that note, I also had issues with the whole idea that the Bioroids needed to be “fully activated,” or, gain a human-style (hetero)sexuality and life cycle to be liberated. When Hitomi is half-activated and knows love only abstractly, she seems aesthetically attracted to Deunan. She calls Deunan beautiful upon first seeing her, and makes remarks about how pretty she is when she sleeps. As I said, her “warmest” moment in the whole movie is when she asks Deunan, in a sort of strange, dreamy way, to describe what love is like. I was kind of starting to ship Deunan/Hitomi there for a bit. But at the end of the movie, the Bioroids are granted the capacity to reproduce, the humans retain theirs, and the couples split up into –at least implicit- male/female pairs: Deunan hugs the “machine but still a man inside” Briareos, and the male Bioroid Yoshitsune Miyamoto admits his love for Hitomi (Hey, wait, Yoshitsune Miyamoto? Sounds an awful lot like Yoshitsune Minamoto. What’s up with the markedly Japanese Bioroids?!)
So, finally, I think that even with all its post-human influences and proclamations about the “shinjinrui,” this film (like Vexille) still comes back to some rather conservative ideas about humanity and sexuality. Maybe a second watching would let me pick up more subtleties, but that was my first impression of it.
