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Reviews
Ôran kôkô hosutobu (2006)
The Anti- O.C.
I have waited a very long time for a show like this to come around. One that took just about every cliché from just about ever poncy, prancy, self-important high school drama ever made, and then urinated all over them for all the world to see. For starters it is set in an unimaginably rich and exclusive school, where as it states that entrance is based on:- 1) Great wealth 2) Great families. That somehow a poor student from a humble background is, well, only to be expected then. So far, so normal. But everything, especially, the animation shows you that something is amiss here. What we in fact have is a kind of dig at the upper classes and their infactuation with the lower classes that Oscar Wilde or P.G. Woodhouse would have understood. Tamaki (the most predominant of the rich students) could almost be described as coming from a very English line of clueless, yet lovable young aristocrats. The sort whose great monies have usually hid his many clear failings, yet is really what you would have once described as 'a decent sort'. I.e. he means well, and ultimately that enough sees him through whatever difficulty he may have got himself into this time. Not for a second does this show truly take itself seriously, yet, through that do you really get to understand and get to love all the characters on show. I could go on for hours about each of them and what makes them so good, but my advice is watch it for yourself and enjoy what you've been missing.
Friends & Crocodiles (2005)
Only January
and already we have a potential contender for TV drama of the year. Here was a two-hour one-off piece of work that created for so many people a world that they all knew all too well, yet imbibed it with a freshness and a vitality that made it utterly irresistible. When watching this piece, it is impossible not to think of the Great Gatsby and Bonfire of the Vanities. Like this, they were tales of luxury and excess, whilst around them (if they bothered to look hard enough) stood poverty and despair. Paul is an irresponsible self-made young millionaire a and a man of incredible potential. Lizzie is a dour young career woman of stoic determination and an incredible aptitude for organisation. It is clear from this that when the former hirers the latter as a secretary in order to fulfil all his grand ideas, that the relationship between the two is never going to be totally cosy. And so it proves over their respective ups and downs through 25 years of British urban life. Whether or not it is mainly about those two or the world around them depends on your point of view. It could simply be a basic drama about a very mismatched couple, but then that would not be very original. Instead, they become a conduit for Poliakoff to place his views about us since Thatcher. About our virtues, our vices, and - in all walks of life - our excesses. Utterly essential.
Shin seiki Evangelion Gekijô-ban: Air/Magokoro wo, kimi ni (1997)
Lou Reed would have been proud.
In 1975, utterly fed up with the press, with his fans, and with the entire music industry as a whole, Lou Reed delivered the nastiest message one could imagine. One that would tell everyone exactly what he thought of them. Such a message, coming out of such a fit or sheer artistic pique and frustration, is extreme to say the least, and also very rare. 20 years later, as the fallout from the original series began to bite, Hideaki Anno must have felt in some similar form of mood. The pressure, the fans, all that annoying unwanted attention for something he felt people were taking a little too seriously. He however was the man with the pen, and now he was going to have his say. The Result was End of Evangelion, a piece that moves from the crass and the nasty, to the flat out confusing. The utter brutality with which Nerv is destroyed beggars belief, and this is merely a curtain raiser. Everything now has the volume turned up, effects are sharper, the events grander, but yet something has been lost. When you watch the original series, you notice that time and time again, it is not through sheer brute strength that the Angels are defeated. Discussion, cunning, and subtlety are what won the day. And when the end did finally come, it was not with a bang, but with a dream. So End of Evangelion is much less a film than an indictment on the people that would want to watch it. Rather than subtlety, ambiguity, and a sense of mystery, it is sex, violence and pretty explosion that the people really want. Anno realised that, and so he made this film. Sadly, it stands to reason that the vast majority of people who went to this film never truly got it. I doubt if Lou Reed has even heard of Evangelion, but if he did ever watch it, I am pretty sure you would sympathetic smile shining on the work of a man truly after his own heart.
Tenkû no Esukafurône (1996)
Does the simple things, but does them well.
Escaflowne is not an original series by any stretch of the imagination. Just a straight-up, solid slab of old fashioned heroic, epic fantasy really. Yet for it to keep you gripped so intensely almost from the word go must suggest it must do something right. Now this would be the execution I would be talking about. To cut a long story short, Escaflowne is a thing of beauty. Beautiful in its design, beautiful in its style, its looks, its sounds and most importantly beautiful in its actions. What we have it a wonderful mesh of high-grade production, some fantastic set-pieces, a magnificent soundtrack, and all that tacked onto a story that actually means something. If you like your fantasy epic and old-school, then really there is not a piece of work on the small screen that I could recommend highly enough.
Shinseiki Evangelion (1995)
The biggest question of all.
Just how can a program with so many visible flaws and pot-holes be so watchable, enjoyable, and thus become so popular to the state that it is seen by some as the biggest ever?? Quite a puzzle yes, but if you try and compare the beginning and the end you may start to find the answer. There is no comparison, none at all, what we are left here with is almost two completely different programs entirely. The first one starts with episode one and reaches its glorious peak by episode nine. By then, it has somehow merged action, drama, and comedy so perfectly that you wonder what they are going to do next. The only problem is, so are the creators. So from episode ten onwards, we get diminishing returns from the literary cul-de-sac that the writers have written themselves into. Just where do we go from here? character development has died a sorry death, angels are coming and being dispatched with tedious regularity, and so it goes on. A drastic reinvention is needed, and by episode 18 it is finally delivered. For all those able to sit through the sag, it was not all actually bad. In one episode there was in fact no angel, no action of any kind. Just everybody having a good talk and seeing if they can actually get things moving again. As was just mentioned this just so happens. The magnificent cliff-hanger that rounds of the 18th episode almost got the show cancelled. That would have just ruined everything. Thankfully it didn't and we have now an entirely a new beast in front of us. This is no fun, frothy mix of bangs and laughs, instead things begin to get a little heavy, and a little more heavy after that. Now we have what has made the show so famous (or infamous to others). I doubt nothing has caused so many conflicting views in the anime world as the role of Religion, Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis in NGE. To some, it is what makes the show great, shows its true depths and marks it out from the pack. To others it is nothing more than pretentious window-dressing, a cunning disguise to make up for the general lack of everything else. In the case of Religion, it was just a way of searching for good plot-lines(If in need of a good story, why not look up in the Bible?). The philosophy part is a moot point, I am not really into all that stuff, but I know people that are. The psycho-analysis on the other hand is a different story entirely and where the story comes into its own. An earlier reviewer remarked upon how this was simply about the descent into madness, nothing more. Though that might be seen as a bit of an over simplification, watching the gradual mental disintegration of all the major players shows that this has a very large part to play. By episode 24, we are left with a very raw look at what happens when people's outer defence's are stripped away. Those that were the loudest, that were the strongest are now looking at the hollow shells of their existence. Not pretty stuff, but gripping nonetheless. Finally we get to the last two episodes and now were really are approaching the stuff of legend. 46 minutes of pure philosophical musings greets all those expecting the usual rounding off, but by now, you should have realised that this is no usual series. At the beginning I mentioned flaws and lots of them, what about all those flaws? the ones regarding how character development took a vacation after episode nine. Or perhaps the one that I forgot to mention about what an unlikable lead character Shinji Ikari really is. I could mention others regarding reuse of cells, and I have already given the sag in the middle a very good going over. But after the the final credits began to roll, I was beyond caring. Asking why is a darn good question, and I just hope all of the above should go someway to answering that question.
Mugen no rivaiasu (1999)
A truly fine body of work
Based loosely upon William Golding's ever-so bleak look into the fragility of human society, Lord of the Flies, this truly is an anime to be savoured. Like LotF, it sees how society would develop, and eventually breakdown if all those with the knowledge and the experience suddenly left. Who would take charge, who would there to look up to and to turn to when times become harsh. However, IR takes two spins on this. Whilst one is purely window dressing, the other allows for far more developments, more notions, and more complexities than it's illustrious inspiration. Firstly IR is a sci-fi. It deals with young astronauts at a training college in outer-space. A sabotage on the station leaves all the adults dead and the students drifting alone in space. Sounds familiar enough, it is. However, these students are on average 16 and are not innocent little children any more. And they are not neither stupid nor helpless. The prefect group (know as Zwei) immediately takes control and thus begins the first study into the first microcosm of society. From here on in, the whole nature of power, politics, and personality are put under the intense microscope of the events that constantly threaten to overwhelm the players. Possibly the most mentally taxing and demanding cartoon ever made, those that watch it must be aware of the grim realities of human nature that lie inside all of us. Truly essential ....... 10/10