Detroit Metal City / Detoroito Metaru Shiti (2008, Leeds Town Hall)

basics...
Our second trip in 3 consecutive days at the Town Hall's Film Festival saw us settling in for a Japanese comedy-musical about Soichi (Ken'ichi Matsuyama), a young man who dreams of singing trendy pop songs but somehow ends up lead singer for a death metal band who sing about rape, killing and gore.

brilliant...
I had no idea what to expect from this - the blurb in the Festival programme made us want to see it but didn't explain a lot - and I'm still not quite sure what it was! Whatever Detriot Metal City is it's utterly hilarious - Matsuyama is alternately adorable, gormless and, when made up as DMC lead singer Johannes Krauser II, terrifying. The plot is wacky, unpredictable and oddly touching, while the rest of the characters are either bat-shit bonkers (DMC's sadistic manager, who likes to put cigarettes out on people and likes it when the band's music get her 'wet'), a celebrity cameo (Gene Simmons of Kiss plays DMC's biggest rival for death metal icon status), or sweetly adorable (Soichi's mother, who seems oblivious to everything but knows much more than she lets on). Full of day glo pastels in Soichi's perfect world, muted soft focus in his childhood home, and black dystopian goths in the metal clubs, Detroit Metal City is a visual treat. 

but...
It could have been shorter, losing some of the running around and overlong battle in the finale. 

briefly...
An odd delight, Detroit Metal City is daft and it knows it, which just adds to the enjoyment. I've not seen anything this camp and scary since Lordi won Eurovision.

Arrietty (2010)

basics...
It's a year since I saw the delightfully cute Ponyo at the cinema, and last week I saw Studio Ghibli's latest 2-D animated movie, Arrietty. Characters and aspects of the plot are taken from Mary Norton's The Borrowers: Arrietty (Saorise Ronan) and her parents Pod (Mark Strong) and Homily (Olivia Colman) are tiny people who live under the floorboards, and their very existence is threatened when sick Sho (Tom Holland) comes to stay with his aunt Haru (Geraldine McEwan) and spots Arrietty.

brilliant...
I've only seen a handful of Ghibli movies and of these Arrietty is easily the most straight forward, with an almost simplistic plot. To my mind this is a positive development as I find Japanese animation can be a little too obscure or left field on occasion, leaving me scratching my head over plot points. With Arrietty I could just sit back and marvel at the utterly beautiful traditionally animated scenes, which were at their best when depicting the veritable forest that is the garden surrounding the house inhabited by the Borrowers. These scenes could easily be freeze-framed and hung on the wall, so lush with detail and warmth were they. The sound design too was amazing - not something you can say about many films - with effective echoing and manipulated sounds to really make you get a Borrower's sense of life only a few inches tall. The voice cast were marvellous - particularly the incomparable Olivia Colman as nervous Homily.

but...
My only concern is that the film simply was not long enough, I wanted to spend more time with Arrietty, Sho and everyone else, to be enveloped in their world. Ghibli doesn't do sequels, but if they did, the further adventures of the Borrowers would be a fertile source of stories and wonderment.

briefly...
Utterly charming, a feast for the eyes and ears. This is a worthy reminder that 2-D, traditional animation is not a dead art. 

Panda! Go, Panda! (1972-73)

Last night we watched a DVD that I had bought as a gift for Andrew due to his interest in Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli movies. Panda! Go, Panda! is made up of two shorts of about 30 mins each stuck together, using the same characters and setting. It plays like two episodes of a TV show, although they are not stitched into one movie, rather when The End shows for Panda! Go, Panda! the next short, Rainy-Day Circus begins.

I was shocked to find the shorts were made in the early seventies as the animation and the whole feel seemed more modern, although I guess there is a timelessness to the whole. An incredibly cute but not too kiddified production, Panda sees young Mimiko abandoned by her elderly grandmother, off to Nagaski, and left to her own devices. Mimiko is looking forward to meeting burglars, and tells all of the townspeople she’ll be alone – a very unwise move I thought, particularly with the red-faced shop owner looking a bit too excited about this. Anyway, this isn’t a cautionary tale about leaving young children alone.

The movie is about pandas, an incredibly cute young one named Panny and a massive one with a strangely Caribbean accent named Papa, who Mimiko asks to be her father, if she can be Panny’s mother. I know, the girl’s clearly got some screwed up views on what family is, but hey, I’m not going to judge. There’s a cute adventure where the girl and her new panda family get up to some hijinks, and then in Rainy-Day Circus a baby tiger is added to the mix, who has escaped from a travelling circus (the clue’s in the title).

It’s all fun and cute, especially the rendering of Panny and Papa, and isn’t taxing on the brain. Involving to a degree, and never boring, Panda! Go, Panda! gives Ponyo a run for it’s money in the cutest anime stakes. 

Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva (2009)

Andrew's a big fan of the Professor Layton puzzle games for the DS, so he was delighted to receive the movie on Blu Ray & DVD for Christmas, and we popped it in the machine, after much nagging, last week. I think it's fair to say that he enjoyed it more than I did. 

A Japanese animation that follows the look of the game completely, the movie is a curiously uninvolving mystery, with an odd supernatural element, and only about 6 puzzles bunched up in the middle. There are some funny characters and the occasional humorous line, but there's far to much expositional gobbledygook and a lack of pace to the movie as a whole. 

The animation is good solid 2D with some pretty looking 3D CGI graphics thrown in, particularly in the impressive crown-shaped opera house/ship that Layton and his young assistant Luke find themselves trapped on. I was hoping the movie would be more like the old Where's Wally TV show that stopped every so often to let you look for Wally, but with puzzles. Apparently there will  be more movies, so I can still hope for this format to be taken on board.

Ponyo (2008)

Ponyo is hands down the cutest movie I've seen for ages! At least since last year's Up! The deceptively simple-sounding plot that mirrors The Little Mermaid in the central sea creature character's desire to become humour does little to explain how wonderful the experience of Ponyo really is. 

I've seen Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki's (sort of the Japanese Walt Disney) eariler animated films for Studio Ghibli and I'd enjoyed them, but with some reservations due to some of the inexplicable weirdness that Japanese animations often involve. Ponyo is much more linear, and simpler, but without being boring or childish in any way. I was completely entranced by the touching story of little Sōsuke and his new friend Ponyo, a tadpole-like creature, who, when she tastes human blood, begins to turn into a human child. Ponyo discovers she likes being human, and she loves her new friend, but her father, Fujimoto is king of the sea and doesn't want to let Ponyo go.

The 2-D animation looked gorgeous on the cinema screen, and the score was lucious. I saw the English-dubbed version that has been produced by Pixar creator and all-round animation messiah John Lasseter and it was a seemless blend of Japanese animation, with it's slightly jerky style, and an all-star American voice cast that includes Tina Fey, Matt Damon, Liam Neeson, Betty White, Lily Tomlin and Cloris Leachman (the latter I'd only just seen in the final 1978 episode of The Muppet Show: Season 2!). The rather twee song over the end credits with the lyrics 'Ponyo, Ponyo, fishy in the sea' has been in my head and not left for days! I walked out of the cinema beaming and when I think of Ponyo it still brings a smile to my face. Wonderful.