Animu movies from the year of our Lord 2008
I finally got around to spending a day watching that Blu-ray stuff I downloaded from a while ago.
Sword of the Stranger
Sword of the Stranger is really cool. It doesn’t feature a terribly original plot: former samurai ends up being an amazing samurai with a dark past an ends up having to protect someone over the course of the movie. Surprisingly, the kid he ends up protecting isn’t that annoying. But where this movie shines is in the fighting. Fights are beautifully choreographed a lot like in Kara no Kyoukai, except there’s way more than one per movie. Definitely worth seeing for those.
The Sky Crawlers
The Sky Crawlers is directed by he same director that directed all he Ghost in the Shell stuff. That means that while there will be really cool action stuff to look forward to, there is also going to be a lot of philosophical wankery to wade through. The aerial battles are pretty amazing, especially the one major battle. The engrish that is inexplicably used is really weird. It’s not laughably bad, but it’s so close to being correct without being correct that it’s sort of a linguistic uncanny valley. Apparently, the movie is some sort of metaphor for how otaku are living self destrucive lifestyles.
Rebuild of Evangelion 1.11: YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE
I got around to watching Neon Genesis Evangelion for the first time within the last year some time. I didn’t like it. I probably put off watching End of Evangelion because I didn’t feel like it would change my opinion of the series. That and it was pretty noticeably old.
And so it may be considered heresy that I actually found myself enjoying Eva 1.11. It’s almost exactly the same as he part of the TV anime that it covers. I got the impression that they cut out a lot of Shinji’s crying though I might be mistaken. That combined with modern animation made it pretty good. I might come away from these four movies as an Evangelion fan.
Tags: Anime, evangelion, sky crawlers, sword of the stranger