Black Gate

My third movie of July 27 was a live-action manga adaptation by the dauntless and prolific Shinsuke Sato. Having been thrilled by his previous work in past years (I Am A Hero, Bleach, Inuyashiki, Death Note: Light Up the New World, and Library Wars), I was eager to see something new from him. This year’s offering was Kingdom (Kingudamu, キングダム), which Sato scripted along with Tsutomu Kuroiwa, adapting the manga of the same name by Yasuhisa Hara. As of August, there were 55 volumes of the manga, which had already been adapted into a 77-episode anime. I am not familiar with the source material beyond those statistics, but they suggest that Kuroiwa and Sato had their work cut out for them fitting the story into a two-and-a-quarter-hour movie.

The setting is ancient China, where war swirls among feuding kingdoms. Two orphans are taken as slaves by a wealthy merchant. They grow up dreaming of a better life, and practicing swordplay on their own in the forest near their master’s home. One, Piao (Ryo Yoshizawa, Gintama), is bought by a government minister. Piao’s blood-brother, hothead Xin (Kento Yamazaki, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure), is therefore surprised some time later when a dying Piao returns with a mission for him — and the soldiers who gave Piao his mortal wound hard on his heels. Xin’s launched on a quest that leads him to the young king Ying Zheng, now deposed by a palace coup. The minister who bought Piao had used him as the king’s double, which saved Ying’s life. Now the ambitious Xin wants to keep him alive, and make his own way to a great destiny.

This is a well-told story. It builds nicely, through varied set-pieces that come at key structural points, are executed with flair, and move the story forward. It’s always colourful and fun to look at, though unsurprisingly the costumes show the manga roots of the film: major characters stand out through their eye-catching gear, to the point that we know a general we see at only a couple of points is obviously going to play a major role in the climax. But this fits into the overall tone of the movie, both narratively and visually. The choreography is strikingly effective, which is important, and the humour works, mostly coming in the form of Xin’s aggressive attitude toward just about everything.

If you look carefully, you might notice the film’s not actually as lavish as it seems. There aren’t any major urban scenes, for example. But there’s enough variety generally that you don’t notice any lack. Xin and company explore a lot of different places, and the story feels full to bursting. The sense of a vast kingdom containing a range of people and cultures and landscapes comes across, and that means more is not needed.

…

Read More Read More

For my second film of July 27 I stuck around the Hall Theatre for another animated feature, this time from Japan. Preceding it was a 13-minute animated short from Canada.

“Alexis Inside” was directed by Montrealer Brandon Blommaert. Alexis is one of a group of friends who play a VR video game. When one of the friends goes missing, the vampire-like force that afflicted her is passed on to Alexis, who shuts herself away from the world. Can her remaining friend save her? The short’s open to interpretation, and has a stylish look based on old-style computer graphics given modern details and animation. I read it as being about depression, and see an ambiguity in the title having to do with the insides of Alexis, as opposed to Alexis choosing to lock herself away from the world. The film’s an interesting, disconcerting piece, somewhat alienating due to its look but ultimately emotionally engaging.

The feature I’d come to see was The Relative Worlds (Sotai Sekai, ソウタイセカイ). Written and directed by Yuhei Sakuragi, it’s adapted from a series Sakuragi did for Hulu Japan. Shin (Yuki Kaji) is a Japanese teenager whose mother died a sudden inexplicable death when he was a child, part of an ongoing wave of inexplicable deaths across Japan. His date with Kotori (Maaya Uchida) is interrupted by the death of his father, which we in the audience see is connected with something far stranger. It turns out that Japan is linked to another reality, where history took a very different turn. Everyone in Shin’s reality — or at least Shin’s Japan — has a doppelganger there, and when somebody in one reality dies so does their doppelganger in the other. Shin’s double, Jin, has crossed over to this reality to kill Kotori, because in Jin’s reality Kotori’s double is the despotic Princess Kotoko, who rules the dystopia of that world and also has dark schemes for this one.

This is not a bad plot, and the deaths of Shin’s parents are unsurprisingly tied in with the core plot of the conflict of the two worlds. There’s a solid emotional background, in other words. The problem is the rest of the story. It’s uninvolving, playing out on a small scale. This does change in the last third or so of the film, as the other world deploys the full strength of its forces, and organisations in this world get involved. But the build’s erratic, too slow for too long.

What I think the movie is trying to do is keep the story focussed on the teen protagonists, Shin and Jin and Kotori, and that’s not a bad idea. But there’s an asymmetry. The bad guys from the otherworld are too powerful to stop. You understand why Jin planned to kill Kotori, and the movie doesn’t really come up with a better alternative. Nor does it effectively explore the morality of killing an innocent for the greater good, partly because the science fiction aspect of the story is so outlandish, and partly because the greater good is abstract. The movie doesn’t really dramatise either world; doesn’t make us believe in a society of individuals in either reality.

…

Read More Read More

Saturday, July 27, was going to be a long day for me at Fantasia. Hopefully a good one, too. I had five movies on my schedule, starting at noon with the animated Chinese fantasy-adventure White Snake (白蛇：缘起, 白蛇：緣起).

Directed by Amp Wong and Ji Zhao from a script by Da Mao, it’s a prequel to the Chinese legend of the White Snake, one of China’s Four Great Folktales. That story was first written down in the Ming Dynasty but originated in the Song Dynasty; the film’s set hundreds of years before that, in the Tang Dynasty. As the movie opens, snakes are being hunted to make immortality drugs for an evil general. A snake demon, Blanca (Zhe Zhang), tries to assassinate him and fails. She escapes, and wakes as an amnesiac in a village of snake-hunters. She’s cared for by a scholar-hunter named Xu Xuan (Tianxiang Yang). They try to uncover Blanca’s past, and in the process struggle with various supernatural forces, the machinations of the wicked general, and the plans of Blanca’s own family.

This a lovely film, colourful and action-packed with fluid 3D animation. It builds a spectacular fantasy world of misty mountains and wide rivers and thick forests and ancient ruins. Then it fills that world with spirits and demons and magic. And engaging heroes. The characters are well-designed and cartoony in a good sense; they move a little like marionettes in the hands of a master puppeteer, not stiffly so much as stylised. To me there’s a slightly classic feel as a result, though I can see other opinions varying.

Importantly, action scenes aren’t stiff in the slightest. This is a film that takes full advantage of animation’s capacities, using its medium to tell a magical story brimming with metamorphoses and impossible motion. Battles are large-scale events defined by supernatural tranformations. Even quick editing rhythms in those set-pieces don’t obscure the story, and still give us time to feel the impact of magic at work.

Which I think is important, as this is to me a literally wonderful film: that is, filled with wonder. It evokes that wonder by having a strong story with solid characters moving through a world of magic, but then also by presenting magic and monsters in a way that emphasises what is astonishing about them. It’s a fantasy story that knows how to present fantasy, which can be trickier than it sounds; it’s not just having characters stand around in shock at what they see. It’s that they, and we, keep seeing new things. The world expands, at just the right rate of change.

…

Read More Read More

My second film of July 26 was in the big Hall theatre, a science-fiction anime called Human Lost (人間失格). Directed by Fuminori Kizaki, it was scripted by Tou Ubukata based on a novel by Osamu Dazai. The movie’s set in 2036, when advanced nanotechnology has given human beings a lifespan of 120 years but turned Japan into a deeply unequal society, with the wealthy sequestered inside a vast citadel called “the Inside.” Some people, for unclear reasons, metamorphose into monsters: the ‘Human Lost’ phenomenon. A troubled young artist, Yozo Oba (Mamoru Miyano), gets involved with his cyborg friend Takeichi (Jun Fukuyama) when he attempts to break into the Inside, and sets off a complex series of events which bring to light the truth about the Human Lost problem and the future of 2036 — but which also might drive Yozo over the edge of sanity.

Osamu Dazai was one of the most celebrated Japanese writers of the first half of the twentieth century; he died in 1948. I have not read his novel No Longer Human (which has the same name in Japanese as Human Lost), but Wikipedia tells me it is considered his masterpiece. Wikipedia also tells me that an alternate and perhaps more faithful translation of the title is “Disqualified From Being Human,” which is closer to the film title. I mention this because a glance at the plot outline suggests the film is otherwise pretty far from its source. More explosions, to start with.

The film takes the idea of a troubled, self-destructive young painter at odds with a stifling society in some counterintuitive directions. Let me put it this way: I had no idea while watching this film that I was watching an adaptation of a twentieth-century novel about alienation and anomie. I can see some connections, even with only the most cursory knowledge of the book. For example, the biotech that keeps people alive forces them to stay alive; suicide is effectively impossible, which is an interesting twist on certain things from the original story. The future society is something of a straitjacket more generally. Some characters have the same names and characteristics as those in the novel. The story’s divided into “notebooks,” which is a structural choice taken from the book.

There’s certainly a kind of ambition at work here. There’s an unusual feel for a violent cyberpunkish dystopia, a strange pacing that puts an emphasis on Yozo rather than on bigger and wilder battle scenes — for better or worse. The problem is, the movie never really manages to find a connection to something recognisable as real life. The action and futuristic plot points are what draw interest, and Yozo’s not charismatic or interesting enough to be intriguing on his own without reference to the larger plot.

…

Read More Read More