Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. This week my house finished our watch-through of Hayao Miyazaki’s Future Boy Conan, which unsurprisingly proved a delight from start to finish. It’s been nice getting back into just watching whatever strikes my fancy after scrambling for end-of-year screenings; Conan’s been on my list for far too long, and I’m planning to follow it up with Moribito, another long-awaited production. Aside from that, my house’s terrible experiences with Expedition 33 and inability to survive even a single day in Nightreign has led us to an old, reliable favorite: Final Fantasy X, which I actually haven’t played since way back in high school. Hanging out with Tidus and the gang has at last scratched our RPG itch, alongside giving me something to distract myself while I wait through the last, interminable week of Critical Role’s holiday break. I think that pretty much covers all the extraneous media I’ve been consuming, so let’s hone in on some films as we burn down the Week in Review!
First up this week was Rawhead Rex, the George Pavlou-directed adaptation of Clive Barker’s original story. The film centers on a sleepy Irish village, where a local farmer removes a great stone monument from a barren field, and thereby unwittingly releases a terrible pagan deity. Meanwhile, visiting researcher Howard Hallenbeck (David Dukes) is visiting the town to investigate its church’s pre-Christian origins, and gets more than he bargained for when he runs afoul of the rampaging god.
The film is a decidedly low-budget yet generally competent adaptation of a genuinely excellent Clive Barker story, doing what it can to capture the source material’s intriguing contrast of old-world powers and modern society. That said, this one really demonstrates how a makeup and effects specialist is basically the lynchpin of low-rent horror; Rex himself never looks like anything but a Halloween costume, and his “rampages” mostly consist of loosely scattered red food coloring. Between that and the loss of Rex’s own running commentary on societal change (yes, he originally had an internal monologue), I’d really suggest you just hunt down the source material, which has the additional benefit of being packaged alongside a bunch of other Clive Barker stories in his excellent Books of Blood.
Next up on our kaiju rampage was Godzilla vs Spacegodzilla. Not content to merely fuck up our own planet, this film sees our distribution of Godzilla and Mothra space-particles birthing a fresh space-asshole, the aptly named Spacegodzilla. Jetting down to earth, he swiftly takes Baby Godzilla hostage, necessitating a collaboration between Japan’s military and its temperamental lizard neighbor.
The momentum’s definitely flagging for Heisei-era Godzilla, which always seems to precipitate a space monster hail mary. Spacegodzilla certainly has an intimidating design, but this entry is otherwise both cluttered and unfocused, lacking a core dramatic thrust and largely just tossing various prior Godzilla flourishes together into an ultimately flavorless stew. Maybe I’m just peeved that Baby Godzilla spends most of this film stuck in a crystal prison, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that the series is looking ripe for a fresh reset.
We then checked out Rock & Rule, an ‘83 animated feature set in a post-apocalyptic world of mutant humanoids. Rock star and part-time mad scientist Mok Swagger dreams of opening a portal to a dimension of demons, which he believes will ensure his perpetual reign as a chart-topping legend. But to complete his evil scheme, he requires one specific voice – that of would-be rocker Angel, who’s currently working dive bars alongside her partner Omar and their friends. When Mok comes calling, Angel and her friends will have to summon all the powers of disorderly music to prevent the improbable end of the world.
Rock & Rule is a fun little fable with an extremely distinctive aesthetic, its look falling somewhere between Heavy Metal and a Don Bluth film. The film effectively marries rotoscoped sequences with more traditional animation, offering a diverse array of musical sequences in a cozily dilapidated cyberpunk setting. The actual story is a bit undercooked, and the humor is largely puerile, but all of that is pretty easily counterbalanced by the unique appeal of seeing lusciously animated performance sequences set to Debbie Harry, Cheap Trick, and Iggy Pop. An easy recommendation for any fans of animation curios or rock musicals.
Alongside our film viewings, my house also just finished a watch-through of Future Boy Conan, Hayao Miyazaki’s ‘78 directorial debut. The show centers on a future where magnetic superweapons have disrupted the movement of the tectonic plates, resulting in global catastrophe as the continents sink into the ocean. Twenty years later, an old scientist and the young boy Conan are the last survivors of a space ship that crashed while fleeing the carnage, and now live alone on the aptly named Remnant Isle. However, the discovery of a girl washed up on shore, and the subsequent arrival of a plane bent on reclaiming her, will thrust Conan into the violent drama of this brave new world, as humanity struggles to either reclaim its past glory or discard it and reach for the future.
Future Boy Conan is simply a delightful, lovingly constructed adventure from start to finish, showcasing Miyazaki’s stark environmentalism, fascination with technology, and love of old-fashioned, death-defying feats of strength and bravery. The series feels much like a twenty-six episode version of Castle in the Sky, brimming with spectacular adventure scenarios that gracefully guide us through its distinctive world. And with direction and storyboards by Miyazaki, Takahata, and Tomino, it’s easily one of the best-looking TV anime I’ve seen, never wavering in its dynamic layouts and fluid character animation.
The cast is also quite endearing – as you might expect from Miyazaki, though Conan is basically an invincible superhero, his heroics are frequently matched by the cleverness and bravery of his costar Lana. And the show never once loses its momentum; no peaceful paradigm within the narrative ever lasts for more than an episode at most, so there’s always some new quest to look forward to or threat to face. A clear early indicator of where Miyazaki’s passions would lead him in film, and also just a sturdy, ever-engaging adventure in its own right.
