Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week I’ve been keeping busy by tormenting my players as usual, as they continue their trek through a temple that has swiftly proven itself some sort of cult initiation center, demanding personal revelations and demonstrations of faith and trust fall-adjacent exercises all the while. It’s the sort of concept that demands a party who have total confidence in both their characters and their ability to embody them, making for a nice payoff now that we’re mostly communicating in character voice, rather than above-table strategizing. I basically snuck the whole Nadeko-reassembly arc in as a way to fill out my own player character’s psychology, and am proud to report my players greatly enjoyed reassembling her psyche one fragment of identity at a time. And of course, there was also plenty of movie screening to be had, as I charged through anime and kaiju collections alike. Let’s get to it!
Our next kaiju feature was Mothra vs Godzilla, in which humanity once again fucks around with Mothra for no discernible reason. This time our action begins with a giant egg that washes ashore in a sleepy fishing village. The locals sell the egg to Happy Enterprises business magnate Kumayama, who elects to make it the centerpiece of his in-development Shizunoura Happy Center (a plan that seems roughly as sound as Pacific Pharmaceuticals’ ploy to make King Kong a newspaper mascot, but I digress). Soon Mothra’s fairies show up, saying the egg contains Mothra’s baby, and that she demands it be returned. The capitalists refuse, of course, but when Godzilla subsequently pops up to terrorize the countryside, our heroes must nonetheless beg Mothra to come save our dumb asses.
Mothra simply cannot catch a break, but her successive trials at least give us plenty of time to hang out with the fairies. Also fun: watching Kumayama and his financier squabble over residuals while Godzilla smashes the scenery outside their window, offering perhaps the franchise’s most on-the-nose metaphor for the dangers of unchecked greed. Though the overt battles between Mothra and Godzilla are a little clumsy in their execution (have you ever seen a moth try to fight a lizard before?), the philosophical arguments preceding Mothra’s emergence from Infant Island do a fine job of maintaining her messianic aura, providing us the two-cakes delight of a morally tormented Mothra movie and an indulgent Godzilla movie in one. I believe it was at this point in the franchise that I began cheering and clapping whenever one of my favorite monsters entered the scene, so I think it’s safe to say I’m thoroughly infected with Godzilla fever.
I also continued my journey through the Dragon Ball Z films, which I’m happy to report have improved significantly as we move into the later entries. After the reasonable-yet-unassuming Cooler’s Revenge, the films offer their first essential entry in the form of The Return of Cooler, wherein Frieza’s brother imperils New Namek in a sleek metallic body.
Cooler alone is a marvel of design here; his silver body is a wonder of shading and reflection, a preposterous object to animate that is nonetheless brought to life in constant, fluid, and often grotesque movement. This film’s key insight is that in a ninety minute frame with a requisite fifty minutes of fighting, Dragon Ball should be envisioned as a horror story – an implacable foe faces our heroes, and their battle is not glorious, but desperate and terrifying. Return of Cooler’s mixture of ominous storyboarding and outright body horror prove the worth of this revelation, which combined with its superior animation make for a genuinely satisfying action film.
After the so-so Super Android 13 (notable mostly for the moment where 13 mocks Trunks’ “thirty dollar haircut”), the DBZ films rally again with Broly, which once again embraces a horror tone, setting our heroes against an implacable creature that seems to imply a fundamental beastliness within all Saiyans. The film is constructed as one long, ominous fuse, with the seemingly mild-mannered Broly serving as Chekhov’s Saiyan until things explode in characteristically violent fashion. Broly is a genuinely frightening character here, and while I can see the logic in humanizing him for the remake, I can also understand easily why this particular Broly earned two more film adventures. I’m looking forward to them!
I then checked out Genius Party, an animator anthology featuring a staggering collection of top talent. With Shoji Kawamori, Shinji Kimura, Masaaki Yuasa, and Shinichiro Watanabe all in attendance, the film has an exceptional hit rate and only one glaring misfire.
After Atsuko Fukushima’s wordless intro sequence, we start off with Kawamori’s retro-futuristic Shanghai Dragon, wherein a young boy essentially finds Harold’s purple crayon, and is swiftly tasked with defending reality from robot invaders. The segment is playful and action-packed, contrasting the vivid yet familiar imagery of Kawamori’s scifi classics with the unbound invention of the protagonist, and in the process celebrating a richly detailed vision of Shanghai. From the character acting to the dynamic, Attack on Titan-presaging chase sequences to the sheer playfulness of the whole affair, there is a ton to love in this one.
The film then slows things down with Deathtic 4, a Nightmare Before Christmas-adjacent ramble through an ornate, deliciously grotesque zombie-populated city. This one is all about the texture of this intricately detailed gothic landscape, which is little surprise; director Shinji Kimura is one of the greatest background artists of animation history, with his credits running from Angel’s Egg to Tekkonkinkreet to My Neighbor Totoro. The story attending these visuals is thin and irritatingly scatological, but it’s a treat simply to spend time in one of Kimura’s lushly illustrated worlds.
Next up is Doorbell, a tale of youth in disjoint directed by mangaka Yoji Fukuyama. The sequence is sparse yet atmospheric, using the device of a young man who seems to have been replaced by some kind of doppelganger to explore the general feeling of dislocation and identity-reassessment intrinsic to adolescence. In spite of its simplified aesthetic, I found myself quite taken by Doorbell’s inviting world and relatable protagonist; one particular sequence near the end seemed to embody the sense of wistful longing that Makoto Shinkai always seeks, contained entirely in a soft breeze wafting through leaves beneath the stars.
We then reach the film’s one absolute dud, Limit Cycle, which basically just involves a sub-Tyler Durden prognosticator waxing juvenilia about life and god and whatnot while the screen assaults you with a variety of flashing neon colors. It’s essentially the Ludovico technique applied to pseudo-philosophy, and framed in that light, it has indeed convinced me to never again sit and listen to a stoned midwit articulate his shower thoughts.
Fortunately, the film rallies magnificently with its last two segments, directed by Yuasa and Watanabe in turn. Yuasa’s Happy Machine neatly embodies his various interests, largely concerning a toddler whose “happy machine” nursery breaks down, forcing him to find meaning and sustenance in the outside world. The result feels much like an early Kaiba episode, combining wildly playful animation with a sobering philosophical question, and through doing so calling into question the ultimate value and meaning of our lives. That’s Yuasa for you!
We then conclude on Watanabe’s Baby Blue, which follows two childhood friends who drifted apart in high school, reuniting for one flourish of rebellion as they skip class and head for the beach. The sequence is poignant and well-observed, a repeated blues standard that rises to anthemic crescendos of adolescent longing, and clearly echoing both the Born to Run-esque hopelessness of Terror in Resonance and the understanding of youthful impermanence embodied by Kids on the Slope.
So yeah, opens with Kawamori’s scifi thrills, closes with Yuasa and Watanabe’s personal reflections, and decks out its interior with compelling artifacts by Kimura and Fukuyama. All of that makes for a truly outstanding animation anthology, likely only rivaled by the unimpeachable Memories.
