Anime

I don't review anime among regular movies unless they really merit it, but I do watch some. Mostly the movies stick with certain clear formulas, being about kids or at least young high school students. What I have done recently is check out the list of award winning films to try to get caught up with recent work.

Summer Wars is this year's top anime award winner in Japan, and it's pretty interesting and exciting at times. It's cyberpunk lite - an escaped hacking bot gets loose in the digital infrastructure and it's up to a high school boy with the ability to perform rapid high-level mental calculations and an eccentric and resourceful family to stop the multiple countdowns that threaten to crash the internet and drop a space probe on a nuclear plant. Some of that world-saving involves making virtual-world avatars punch each other in the face. If you can get into it, it's pretty fun, with elaborate virtual scenes and beautiful rural realworld scenes. Also gets quite touching and everybody learns the value of family. 7/10

Tales of Earthsea is a recent Studio Ghibli production based on Ursula K. LeGuin's creations. The character design is recognizably Miyazaki but I didn't really look at the credits. Two young kids, two grownups, a bad guy and some lackeys. Quite beautiful and elaborate at times, there's some magical conflict and dragons, and the obligatory dangling one-handed over an abyss. No big surprises, just good workmanlike anime. 5/10

Summer Days with Coo is about a schoolboy who finds a kappa, an amphibious water spirit, who has been hibernating for a hundred years. Pretty much follows what might happen if that occurred, with photographers surrounding the house, TV appearances, etc. Again no big surprises - quite long at almost 2 1/2 hours, takes you through the whole experience of happy, sad, then sadly happy that they like to do in these. 5/10

Oblivion Island - Haruka and the Magic Mirror - the previous films used 3DCG for certain things - effects, vehicles and landscapes, but they kept it all looking pretty cel-animated. This one is full 3D and they go all out. A schoolgirl ends up in the place where fox spirits take forgotten things, trying to find the hand mirror her late mother gave her, but it's the most magical mirror there is so it's complicated getting it back from the bad guy. The Island of the Forgotten is built entirely out of stuff - everything is intensely layered, colorful and detailed, and there are often hundreds of moving characters or objects. It's all so elaborate it soon becomes a blur of excess detail and sometimes gets too complicated even to decipher. In addition, there is a great deal of roller-coaster action with lots of sparks flying and zooming through tunnels and screaming and almost crashing into stuff. Since it's about a girl, her dead mother and widowed father it gets super touching at times, and then there is suddenly a lot of chasing and crashing. Too much detail and excitement for me. 4/10

Tamala 2010 - A Punk Cat in Space is more an indie comics art film with a distinctive and deliberately cartoonish style, super-simplified design, and most of it is in black and white. Abandons formal storytelling, but remains interesting to watch and is a thought-provoking experience. 8/10