Wandering the void between zero and infinity
You know you're a miserable, directionless mess when completing another stage of Tetris Plus is the highlight of your day.
I watched the entirety of Saber Marionette J back in July - that's three series, about 57 episodes in total. It had its ups and downs (some long, drawn-out, poorly-paced downs towards the end), but I quite enjoyed watching it. I enjoyed it so much that I'd made plans to cover it for Random Action Hour, and wrote up pages for the first four episodes... and then kind of lost the energy and motivation to keep it up. They've been kicking about for three months now, so I figure I might as well make them public. I wouldn't count on seeing any more episodes in the foreseeable future, mind you.
Personal tangent time! I've no idea what exactly led me to
discovering Saber Marionette J - all I know is that I was introduced to
it by the plethora of fansites and character shrines dedicated to it in the
Geocities age of the internet. The type where it was basically one person
love-gushing about it, and then splurging all the images and videos they'd
collected onto various pages, dotting ^_^s around hither and thither. Back then,
pages like that were charming!
I watched those few RealMedia video clips way too many times, because it was the
closest one could get to watching the series for a resident of a small European-ish
country. It's almost unsettling finally watching the episodes over a decade
later, and then one of the scenes you'd watched years ago would occur. And you
knew exactly how the scene would play out, line for line. In Japanese. It's one
part nostalgic and one part "holy crap, my childhood was dorky as all hell."
The first Saber Marionette J was a good watch; the 25 episodes are paced quite nicely, with enough focus on characters, settings and the overarching storyline to cover all the bases. It's got action, it's got slice of life, and it's got an episode where a character learns about love, loss and mortality through a squirrel. Oh, and the fact it wraps up all its loose ends quite well in a bittersweet fashion is worth commending. So of course they had to continue it with a six-episode OVA series!
Saber Marionette J Again was pretty freakin' dire. It begins as horrible, fanservicey fluff that struggled to fill its half hour runtime, and turned into a crummy, poorly-explained end-of-the-world threat. Seriously, its first few episodes were really unwatchable, but by the time it becomes vaguely interesting the pacing has barely improved - large chunks of episodes are filled with padding where nothing important (or interesting) happens. On the bright side, the artwork is pretty slick and colourful, having aged well thanks to the digital animation.
J To X is a mixed bag, and the root of the problem is that there's no series-spanning overarching storyline. That's why the first series worked so well for me - everything actually tied together one way or another, and the 25 episodes felt like a coherent story, with a beginning, middle and end. This series fluffs around for the first ten episodes, hastily throws in a plot featuring a former bad guy becoming a bad guy again, and then wraps it up with barely any notice. It starts a brand new plot immediately after, but so little is explained in each episode, not to mention all the cast are either struck with amnesia or trying to find each other that it turns into a miserable shaggy dog story. It does pick up once that's rectified, but then the series' conclusion is just so embarrassingly sappy that it ends up making you go "aw, jeez, why'd I even watch this in the first place?"
... okay, not quite, but the final two episodes really are so
sappy bloo-bloo that it hurts.
For saying I like the series, I do rant about it, don't I? (isn't
that what anime fans are meant to do anyway?)
Of course, when I summarise stuff I always end up focusing on the negative bits. I was looking forward to covering the series, but as of this writing I just don't have the energy for that kind of stuff. We'll just see what happens.
Well, September was a bit of a tizzy. Harking up and down across the country to attend a course during the week and then being too exhausted during the weekend to do anything. That routine hasn't exactly changed, it's just I had the pleasure of getting a cold and spending the whole week in one place, which helped me gather my bearings, I guess.
I watched Dark Star. This is the first film I've
watched since the start of September, and man, I didn't realise how much I
missed that little routine! (I think the last film I saw was
Dragon Ball Evolution. It was a decent little romp. My dad described it as
something to the effect of "Buckaroo Banzai on crack.")
You know it's a Ragey review when it wonders if it's even worth summarising the
movie's plot. Four guys are in space destroying "unstable planets" for a living,
and getting mighty sick of it. The crew miss Earth, their homes, their hobbies
and their ex-captain, who died and is kept in cryogenic stasis. Everybody's
getting on each other's tits and nobody gives a damn about anyone else's
problems, be it mysterious malfunctions or beach ball alien on the loose. The
only thing that grabs everyone's attention is a sentient bomb threatening their
mortal integrity.
I've read a lot about the movie before, but it's hard to carry across its unique atmosphere into text. Yeah, you've got the popular elements such as the sentient bomb and beach ball alien, but a lot of the movie is just of the crew trying to futilely keep themselves occupied and entertained between planet-busting. There's a ponderous, low-key feel to the movie that really captures the lonely isolation of these guys in the deepest space... and at the same time, there's a comic, almost Looney Tunes style of oddball humour that gives it a kinda surreal feel, such as explosive charges being set off to loosen an elevator floor, leaving Pinback smoking and blackened as he clambers out. In the thick of a crisis, Doolittle speaks to their frozen ex-captain, who comes across as slow and slightly senile, asks him why they don't talk more often, and is more interested in hearing about football than answering his questions.
Like I said, it's hard to carry across in text, but it's a vibe that simultaneously sombre and amusingly surreal, and I really, really enjoyed it because of that. Of all things, what cemented the movie as a winner for me was the catchy country and western song used for the title and ending sequences, especially in the latter instance. It's a complete shaggy dog story and nothing is accomplished by the movie's end, but the ending was somehow bleak, uplifting and darkly comical all at once, and that piece of music just completely nailed it.
Can we expect website updates soon? I wouldn't bet on it, I'm just too shattered to do anything beyond lying around like a vast slug. I am slowly working on the Bomberman shrine revamp with fleshed out content and fancy new designs, though given the scale of the damn thing, the chances of even porting over everything from the current site anytime soon seems comical. Here's one of the mostly-finished pages to satisfy anyone's curiosity, though. Everything but the reference section is done, and only because I'm still trying to work out what on earth I'm going to do with those pages.