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Reviews
Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts (2020)
California-nized Gurren Lagann
"Damn this anime world and concept is sick as hell. Let's make it literally gay and turn it into an allegory for racism"
The art is fantastic, the animation is great, the music is pretty rad, and the sound design is awesome- but I couldn't help drawing parallels to a far better story using this same world type. This review was made after only watching the first 6 episodes, so who knows, maybe it just has a tough start to get through, but god it's annoying. And episode 5 was so rad too.
Just watch Gurren Lagann. It's the original, and far better. Unless you need all your stories to spoon-feed you wokeness.
The Hug (2018)
Dumb but entertaining
I only watched this because the banner on Hulu showed what was clearly a Billy Bob animatronic mask from Showbiz Pizza, poorly spray painted to look somewhat like a panda. And that's about as far as the value of this thing goes. It's clearly just trying to bank off of the popularity Five Nights at Freddy's had for like 2 years and was made way too late, but I really love the homages to Showbiz, with even the logo for the pizza place being a bit too spot-on to the Showbiz Pizza logo. I just wish there was more passion in it than that. VERY cheap, and with delightfully campy acting.
Fushigi no Umi no Nadia Gekijou You Original Ban (1991)
Anno's Stumbling Block
While definitely not a "blemish on Gainax" like some fans and critics would imply, Nadia The Motion Picture falls so far behind the beauty and power of Secret of Blue Water that it shouldn't even be considered the same story. And, for all intents and purposes, it isn't.
Aside from the characters (all of which are written as if the second half of SoBW never happened), the villain being a follower of Gargoyle and learning from his mistakes, and the expansion of the body horror science seen aboard Red Noah, this is an entirely different story. However, due to being set after SoBW and before it's epilogue, it can't stand as a self-contained story.
The animation has seen a considerable downgrade, not as bad as the Island Arc, but still quite obviously cheap. The first 30 minutes or so aren't even new material, it's a glorified recap episode showing what happened in SoBW, but unlike how this was done in Evangelion Death years later, there's not even a tiny bit of new animation or a sense of presentation, it's just a clip show.
The villain, Dr.Geiger, is a cheap imitation of the terror that Gargoyle inspired (which is ironic considering the story and it's themes). Whereas Gargoyle was subtle and cunning, Geiger is more like a Saturday morning cartoon villain, randomly killing his own henchmen if they're not perfect, despite his philosophy that "humanity is doomed to fail".
However, it's not all bad. The story, set before WWI, delivers a message of hope. The updated character designs for a slightly older Jean and Nadia are nice to see, even if they're pretty subtle. The smaller scale action is still as well directed as it was in SoBW, and the dub is actually even better than SoBW, Fuzzy's father especially gives a fantastic performance. The track Blue Water alludes to Twilight by Electric Light Orchestra, which is a great callback to Daicon IV, hell the entire score is just as great as SoBW's was, you can tell even if Anno was disillusioned and depressed that Sagisu was still doing just as well as he always had been.
Overall, while nowhere near as good as the series, The Motion picture is still passable, even if inconsistent with SoBW, and it's a far better epilogue than the one the series had (I'm still trying to forget about Marie and Sanson oh god)
Ralph Breaks the Internet (2018)
I made an account just to say how much this movie sucked.
If this is the kind of safe, mass audience appeal, soulless, product placement-filled, immediately outdated meme-referencing, lol teh randumness-vibing, 'sooo relatable', clearly written by 40 year olds, visually boring, tonally inconsistent, cat videos, aesthetically unappealing, breaking the rules of its own universe, MULTIPLE TIME FORTNITE-REFERENCING CRAP that gets an Oscar nomination, why even make films at all?