Won Piece

September 19, 2023September 19, 2023 Christopher FLeave a comment

Seriously, what the fuck. Okay, obviously you don’t actually need me to come in here acting incredulous that Netflix’s live-action One Piece actually wound up working. We’re several weeks out from all the appreciable appraisals by audiences and critics alike, as well as confirmation already that we’re getting a second season of this thing. Which I find hilarious that we got the announcement of in basically the same amount of time it took Netflix to tell us that Cowboy Bebop was fucking dead after that one sadly shuffled out onto the runway. I can be petty. But overall it’s been an enjoyable few weeks of seeing both people familiar with these funny pirates as well as newcomers being pleasantly surprised by this weird, wild show. And it’s naturally provoked many refrains of an expected, often rhetorical question: How the HELL did they pull this off?! Many other critics and commentators have already made much of Netflix’s One Piece‘s full-throated embracing of its more outlandish, cartoony elements, with perfectly cast characters taking on the material with nary a wink or a nod. But if you’ll indulge me, I think there is another, additional reason why One Piece of all things managed to succeed in this arena where its inevitably compared forebear Cowboy Bebop flamed out. And the answer I have come up with is one where you would not believe me if I didn’t say I was being 100% serious about this: I think that One Piece is simply better suited to adaptation than Cowboy Bebop.

Supermoe

July 8, 2023 Christopher F1 Comment

Schedules are a funny thing. Here I have been, hoping I can make time to post more regularly, here on my blog where I’m ostensibly allowed to write about whatever I want. And I’ve got a couple big things I’ve been thinking about and working at, those being some observations I’ve had on my ongoing rewatch of The Venture Bros, and something on my recent love-affair with absurd ero-action-comedy manga Booty Royale. But crucially, both of those are dependent on me actually finishing going through those works (or in Booty Royale‘s case, at least getting current with the English releases), and I still haven’t gotten there with those, so no anticipated pieces for you yet.

But hey, there’s only two episodes of that sweet new Superman cartoon out just now, and that I could have some thoughts on, so fuck it, up up and away!

Holding Out For A Hero

June 5, 2023 Christopher FLeave a comment

A couple of months ago, upon the release of The Super Mario Bros. Movie by Illumination (of the illustrious Minions fame), they circulated a clip of the song “Peaches”. Performed by Jack Black in his role as Bowser, the supposed promotional efforts of this clip was in its alleged Oscar-contending song status, as well as the base appreciation that the folks behind this movie cast Jack friggin’ Black and made sure to allot him a musical number in the film. Mildly curious as I was about the movie, I abstained from watching the clip, because even though as you should know, I am a fan of both the idea of adaptive Mario fiction and the torrid potential of a Bowser/Peach relationship, I wanted to experience everything The Super Mario Bros Movie had to offer within its surely carefully constructed context. It’s fine. “Peaches” was just one of many driving potential appeals carrying me to conceptually make time for this movie at some point.

Anyway, the song lasts thirty seconds and is as underwhelming as the rest of this shite movie.

The Good Ship Astro

April 24, 2023April 24, 2023 Christopher FLeave a comment

S.S. Astro is a fucking cryptid.

I don’t mean that in terms of the manga’s content or style itself. What we have here is a perfectly amusing slice of life school comedy in the 4-koma format. The distinguishing focus on the grown-up teachers instead of the students does afford the series to occasionally get a bit spicier than we might expect from the Manga Time Kirara model, which we can dig into in a bit. But hey, it was 2006, maybe things hadn’t been codified as concretely at that point, and as must be discussed, creator Negi Banno was absolutely operating outside the institutions of anyone else being serialized.

Because what Banno did here was rock up, deliver this single silly volume of distinctively appealing material, then fucked off basically never to be heard from again. She had done some hentai doujins before and around the same time that S.S. Astro was coming out, which you can easily find if you know where to look. But S.S. Astro remains her sole professionally published credit. Outside of an episode preview illustration for the Dojin Work anime in 2007, and an apparent contribution of art for Manga Time Kirara‘s 100th issue in 2012, she doesn’t seem to have turned up anywhere else since.

Sophie

April 18, 2023April 18, 2023 Christopher FLeave a comment

Spoilers for Episode 14 of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

“Cry for the devil” is a reaction many a story has attempted to pull. And it’s an understandable desire, as storytelling is all about manipulating an audience, and getting them to sympathize with one previously presented as an antagonist or an outright villain represents an extremely impressive trick on the part of the teller. Sometimes the effect is strongly built up to over the long course of a plot, so when it comes time for that moment of sympathy for someone who was previously aligned as an enemy, there’s been enough runway laid out for it to land. Other times, stories just try to gracelessly drop a tragic backstory (even egregiously via the villain’s own dialogue, begging us to care about them here at the end) that does nought but feel like a shallow attempt at pathos for a plot thread that wants to be deeper than it was up to that point (shout-out to Billy from Stranger Things!).

Sophie Pulone from Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury proved an interesting case study in that effort at villainous sympathy. G-Witch in general has excelled at turning characters into fan-favorites through sheer force of base personality without giving them very much to actually do. You need only witness the figurative rise of Secelia Dote, whose complete lack of action apart from sitting on a couch and snarking at her council-mates itself became a memetic part of her appeal to the fandom. Sophie, though she got to make quite the splash across actual mobile suit action in the last arc of G-Witch‘s first cour, didn’t seem too far off from that approach: Here we have an adorable new Violence Little Sister, voiced with aplomb by Shiori “Heybot” Izawa, committing gleeful acts of terrorism in the name of inciting lead tanuki Suletta to similar murderous ends. I loved her already.

We Have Got To Learn To Talk About Art And Criticism

April 15, 2023 Christopher FLeave a comment

Some of you people are never going to be happy. You get a faithful, celebratory, cartoon Super Mario movie that you all love, and has gone on to make over half a billion dollars, and still the only thing you want to focus on is what that success means in the face of the perceived antagonism of the critics that didn’t like it. And like, I know there are people out there who can only subsist on having some sort of adversary to be aligned against, even if I personally can’t understand it. But even then there are causes and outlets in the world that are far more worth your time than spewing about how “owned” professional critics are because a movie they gave mediocre reviews to was financially successful.

And just getting into it, I know how easy it’ll be to take this tirade itself as coming from a critic with some sort of “I Mad” reaction to a movie they didn’t like turning out to be successful. So to be clear, I haven’t even made time to see the Mario movie yet! And the fact is it wasn’t the “negative” reviews that made me hesitant, it was the positive ones! The accolades thrown out by people who appreciated it seem mostly borne out of it being a ninety-minute slide-show of Mario Stuff, which really doesn’t appeal to me since I’m wholly capable of putting “Mario” into Google Image Search from the comfort of my own home.

What’s In An Adaptation?

December 28, 2022December 28, 2022 Christopher FLeave a comment

Well it’s official! A change.org petition to redo the Chainsaw Man anime got over 2,000 signatures, so you know what that means: We need to have discourse about it. Not that the kind of ground this covered had to wait for an inciting incident like this; Entitled nerds on the internet are always going to be entitled nerds on the internet, and an adaptation with the magnitude of Chainsaw Man was always going to garner a magnified response from those disappointed by its inevitable adaptational indulgences. When something you were looking forward to lets you down, one inevitable element in responding to it is going to be that sense of “What could have been”, especially when what could have been is staring you square in the face in the form of the original source material you feel was ‘unfaithfully’ adapted in the first place.

Top Five HasLab Transformers Projects I Think Could Work Or Not

November 30, 2022November 30, 2022 Christopher FLeave a comment

So HasLab Deathsaurus achieved its funding goal, avoiding being consigned to the same Shadow Realm as its failing forebears in that HeroScape set and the Ghost Rider car. That’s three-for-three on these big, crowdfunded Transformers, between Unicron and Deathsaurus’s BFF Victory Saber. It means we can probably count on more of these things going forward, and also means that future is ripe for that age-old nerd pastime: Predictive lists! Yes, the only thing more compelling that excitedly anticipating a quantifiably-demanded project like Deathsaurus is skipping past it entirely and getting excited for the theoretical Next Thing. To that end, I of course have my own Transformers opinions, and can compose a bit of a list of what I think the next HasLab TF project could/should be. Here’s the five of them:

A Very Dignified And Humane Murder

October 31, 2022October 31, 2022 Christopher F1 Comment

What happened to you, The Simpsons? You used to be cool. If you’re one who got to come up watching the immortal animated sitcom when it was actually in its ‘golden age’, I think any assessment of your favorite outings probably has to include at least a segment or two from the show’s ‘Treehouse of Horror’ Halloween specials. In fact I can anecdotally, personally confirm this, as a discussion of what we felt were the series’ most quintessential episodes saw one of my friends near-entirely referencing bits from those seminal specials. It makes sense when you think about it, the canon-non-compliant cartoony elements of the ‘Treehouse’ episodes pretty well made to stand out more to younger viewers growing up on the show compared to its usual (still outstanding) stories relatively more rooted in reality (as much as plots about musical monorail swindlers or selling your soul to your best friend could be, comparatively).

So with contractually-obligated allusions to the show’s glory days out of the way, it might seem easy to take shots at modern Simpsons for its well-documented slide into irrelevance. Yeah, ha ha (Nelson Muntz laugh) this series decided to parodize The Babadook, Death Note, and Westworld in 2022, really seizing that pop-culture zeitgeist, right? But I mean, the movie version of The Shining was already fourteen years old when the ‘good’ version of The Simpsons riffed on it in 1994, and that turned out great! Standing on the cutting edge of culture isn’t necessarily necessary for potent parody, and lord knows this sort of regular riffing is more preferable to seeing The Simpsons swerve into trying to stick it to the SJWs or whine about Bernie Sanders. So it goes that this thirty-fourth season’s ‘Treehouse’ promoted that fully-anime-style Death Note parody, which got promoted around my anitwitter circles, and after a three-hour car ride in the middle of the night last night, I found myself just morbidly curious enough to want to wind down watching it before I went to bed.

Kowloon Generic Romance Manga Preview

September 27, 2022 Christopher FLeave a comment

Another Manga Guide has come and gone with this fall over at ANN, with plenty of contributions from yours truly. And as with last time, there was a straggler in the mix: A manga that didn’t make the cut for preview posting due to its release date, but for which that wasn’t clarified until after I’d already written it up! But my loss is once again your gain, least of all because I liked Kowloon Generic Romance so dang much that I feel compelled to let everyone know about it. Read on!