Anime Review: Rose of Versailles

When I first started hearing about this show I of course heard about how great it was, how much of an influence it had on later shows, about the Tarazuka performances but one other thing I heard was that even fansubs were apparently hard to find, hence why I never looked around for the show itself. So when Nozomi announced last year that they had licensed the show (a feat that took them literally ten years, holy hell how do you have the dedication to do that?!) and that they were streaming it I figured this was a pretty good sign that I should watch it. Started watching the streams a bit after they started but once I got a few episodes into the show I found that I was enjoying it quite a bit for a show that was over 10 years older than I was, making it by far the oldest bit of anime I've seen and also a rather unique one in some ways.


Rose of Versailles

Summary: When his fifth daughter is born General Jarjayes of France decides that if he and his wife can't seen to conceive a son then he'll just have to raise one of his daughters as one and christens his last child Oscar and raises her as his heir. Her gender is fairly well known, and she seems quite comfortable not having to deal with the petty squabbles of 1700s French court women, although with the French Revolution building that inane life might have been a safer one for you.

The Good: I was a bit worried when the story started with Oscar being just 14, no offense to 14 year olds but you guys just aren't the best main characters for epic stories, so I was pleased to see that this story takes place over years and years with a good sized cast coming in and out of the story. The show is also surprisingly faithful in regards to real history, you can look up just about any of the major events in a book (or wikipedia) and see just how similar it all was. The story takes bigger liberties with it's characters, certainly there was no one like Oscar around and several characters had their backstories changed or expanded upon, although ultimately none of these changes were enough to influence the history which is exactly what I hope for in good historical fiction, a very solid and well-researched setting with characters who are influenced by it but still have their own problems and goals.

The Bad: My biggest gripe here is how hard it is to figure out how much time has passed from episode to episode. As far as I can tell the show starts when Oscar is about 14 and ends sometime in her late 20s/early 30s, if I had really and throughly studied French history I could have picked up more clues in context and figured out her age but I haven't and the voice actors remain the same for all the characters, plus some of the characters look young/old for their age, so it was a bit frustrating to try and keep track of that.

The Audio: The show uses the same voice actors for each character regardless of age (which certainly didn't help me with keep track of Oscar's age but I can see why they did it) and the music didn't change much over the course of the show either. It kept it's opening and ending theme throughout and it's most distinctive themes should be quite familiar to the viewers by the end of the show. Everything sounded fine, the music was a bit overly dramatic at points but that's just a matter of taste and the acting was certainly fine, no problems here!

The Visuals: This is a show that's been around longer than I have so obviously it's not going to look as pretty as a show produced in the last two or three years and very stylistically different from a show produced in the last decade or two. The show uses a lot of still images for dramatic effect (usually with the camera moving out or in to dramatic music) yet at the same time it doesn't shy away from having quite a few sword fights between characters which are fully animated (I'm sure some people who know more about animation than me can say if they're as fluid as fights in more recently shows, they didn't seem quite a fluid to me but regardless my point is that even though the show cut corners in some places they went all out in others). There wasn't as much shaking as I expected (or maybe I just got used to it, in the past shows I've seen from the mid-90s earlier had so much shake it was like they decided to scan in the frames during an earthquake) and again the colors aren't quite as vibrant as something painted digitally but given the setting of the show that's perfectly fine. A lot of the characters look alike (to be perfectly frank, I'm still not 100% sure who a few of the characters in the above image are) and a lot of the, apparently, lavish outfits of the cast look plain to me, probably because the coloring is a bit flat so a peasant's outfit seems to be made out of the same fabric as Marie-Antoinette's (which might sound weird to some people yet after years of cosplaying I can figure out the texture of an outfit in a show from looking at it for just a few minutes, here I really couldn't do that). So yes, the art is dated and animation is limited from a modern viewers perspective but I could just as easily pull out a show from the past few years and show where RoV surpasses it in both departments, whether you can get used to the art or not is going to be a matter of how willing you are to give it a shot and try to overlook or understand it's shortcomings.


So I'm giving the show a solid 3.5 out of 5 stars and recommending it to anyone whose ever been even vaguely curious about it or who really enjoys modern day shojo, it never hurts to see how the genre has progressed over the years and all 40 episodes are streaming for free on Viki (Nozomi will be releasing it in two sets sometime this year). Heck, after seeing this I really want to pull out of my Revolutionary Girl Utena sets and rewatch that show now that I can see where Utena must have gotten a lot of it's influences (I'm told that both of them were influenced by Princess Knight and I'll probably watch that someday too, just with a bit of a ranty write-up based on what I know about it....). Also feel like rewatching Le Chevalier D'Eon for comparison's sake too, which now that I think about it must have been at least partially inspired by RoV. In any case, will I buy this? I don't know, I liked it quite a bit but I just don't know if I want to rewatch it and I only buy stuff that I want to rewatch. Hopefully Nozomi will have the sets for sale for a while so I'll be able to think more about it, I'm sure my wallet will be happier for that too.   

Movie Review: Hugo

I only heard a bit about Hugo when it first came out but during movie award season (which I don't care about but can't seem to avoid hearing about on twitter) I heard a lot of buzz about the movie and it sounded like the movie was a really good one. I'd already been planning on catching it at school but tried to get too hyped for it, after all it's unusual for me to enjoy movie on the same level that I love my favorite book and anime series, what were the odds of that happening here?

Hugo

Summary: Based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brain Selznick, Hugo is a young boy who after the death of his father and being taken in by his uncle takes care of all the clocks in Paris' Gare Montparnasse train station. Whenever he has a moment however he is tinkering with an automaton that his father discovered in a museum and was unable to fix before his death. To find the parts for it Hugo has stolen a few toys from a toy store owned by the bitter old Papa Georges who one day catches him and takes his father's notebook in retaliation claiming it couldn't be his anyway. Hugo enlists the help of Papa Georges' young ward Isabelle to get his notebook back and in the process they discover that Papa Georges' is far more than he seems.

The Good: This is a very strongly plotted story that starts off with a small idea, Hugo trying to repair the automaton, and expands to a very grand scope by the end. The story does not rely on action or romance or over the top explosions to move the story along and distract the viewers but instead carefully paces itself and builds up parallels and metaphors along the way to make the story deeper. Part of this might be because it was based on a book, perhaps I'm biased but I often find richer writing in books than I do in screenplays, but the movie never feels like it's compressing the plot/adding in details to fill out time so it feels like a very smooth adaptation. Hugo and Isabelle come off as realistic kids, Isabelle in particular with her large vocabulary that could easily be explained by her reading and how she enjoys adventure but isn't too reckless*, although it did seem like Hugo was able to repair the automaton a little too easily for someone with his experience. I was pleasantly surprised to see that this film turned out to be a movie about making movies and even more so when I did some research later and discovered that many of the characters were real people and that all of the films they showed were real ones from the period. While it still doesn't justify some of the actions by Papa Georges his back story made him much more sympathetic and I found myself completely empathizing with what was really a tragic story. 

The Bad: As I was glancing on tvtropes I was reminded of a few subplots that the movie failed to fully explain by the end (such as the fate of Hugo's notebook) and it sounds like some of those details were resolved by the book but not the movie so that would be the fault of the adaptation (and in it's defense the movie did wrap up quite a few other subplots successfully, it had a lot on it's plate by the end). There are some other small inconsistencies in the movie (if Hugo's uncle was gone who was getting paid/how was Hugo eating) but I don't see those problems bothering anyone but the most detail oriented.  

The Audio: I didn't pay quite as much attention to the music as I did the visuals but the music was rather sweet and matched the film well. The music sounds a little whimsical and old-fashioned, I swear it sounds like there is a hand-cranked organ in some of the pieces, and the music helps the movie from becoming too dark overall. It doesn't attempt anything too grand or over the top and that's just fine for this movie and works wonderfully.

The Visuals: I'm a little sad that I didn't have a chance to see this movie in the 3D version since I've heard some surprisingly good things about that but I also didn't feel like I was missing out with anything in the 2D version. It may sound odd to say this about a movie that wasn't overly arty or made copious use of CGI and other grand effects but this movie looked really good. The details in the props, clothing, and locations really add to the setting and manage to establish both the time and the location** without the story explicitly needing to state them. The physical setting of the movie looked gorgeous and the costumes looked like authentic clothing, like someone spent some time researching clothes and didn't raid a costume store and make all the female cast wear flapper dresses.  




So in short, I adored this movie and when I was home recently and came across my family watching this film I was unable to sit down and focus at my computer and instead just watched about half of the movie again with them. This is hands down the strongest plotted movie I have seen in years and I'm going to try and read the book this summer to see how similar and different they are (it sounds like the author really liked the adaption so I'm hopeful, also when looking up a few things for this review I came across the book and facepalmed quite hard when I saw the cover since I have seen that book a dozen times yet never made the connection).



*I will admit that I was partially biased to her character from the start since I always love the bookworm characters and it's been a bit of a while since I saw one. Isabelle's balance between obviously loving stories and wanting to have adventures of her own with the carefulness she shows because she knows that her life isn't one of those stories is refreshing since so many people take shortcuts and write bookworms as characters who can't tell reality from fiction which in my experience isn't true at all.
**the location actually wasn't that hard, all you need is a shot of the Eiffel Tower and everyone knows it's Paris but I digress. 

Anime Review: Croisee in a Foreign Labyrinth

Back during the summer round-up I said that I had seen the first episode of this series, thought it was cute, but was going to have to drop since there wasn't a legal stream for it. Lo and behold only a few days after I posted that one did appear, it had been licensed by Sentai/Section 23 and I quite happily watched a delayed stream of that all summer.

Croisée in a Foreign Labyrinth (Ikoku Meiro No Croisee, Crossroads in a Foreign Labyrinth)

Summary: Claude is a young blacksmith in 1880s Paris who is trying to make a living in a mall made up of traditional stores while they lose more and more business to a new department store. So he’s obviously frustrated when his grandfather Oscar brings back Yune, a young girl, from Japan and suddenly has this new problem to deal with as well. But Yune really wants to learn about her new home and slowly Claude begins to open up to her as they both deal with culture shock.

The Good: With Tamayura~Hitose I complained that the show was trying too hard to be a sweet and “healing” show, it never felt like Croisée had to try to do either of those things but simply was a rather sweet show. From what I’ve heard the show expands a lot on the original manga but I wouldn’t have known otherwise, the story flowed well and, even though it’s an episodic show there is an overarching theme to it and it feels like the show both starts and ends at logical points. I was surprised at how much I liked Alice, a French girl who comes off as rather grating at first, by the end of the show. She gets more character development than I had expected and there were times when she sounded like an early feminist so I’d love to see how she grows up and who she grows into. Heck, I’d love to see more of all the characters, I feel like this was just Act One in their stories and there are still several more acts to go.

The Bad: That said, it sounds like there probably won’t be a sequel (sold badly, not a lot of manga material left since it comes out so slowly) which makes me rather sad. I’ve tried some of the manga but, much like Kamisama Dolls, there is something about the way the anime is directed that I find much more appealing than the source material. I also hope that Section 23 puts the extra episode (I believe it’s called 4.5) on their DVDs since it sounds like that added in some extra back story between Claude and Camille (Alice’s older sister), although I am curious why it wasn’t in the anime proper if it was as important as everyone has made it out to be. So while I do like the series quite a bit I feel that if it isn’t continued that it will feel a little weaker, it’s a good stopping point but obviously not the stopping point for the entire series.

The Audio: I was surprised at how well the opening and ending songs worked for the series. I didn’t think that a Japanese song in a French setting would work well but both of them managed to be cheerful songs without being overly bubbly and fit the show nicely (the opening music also sounded a little more European than normal which also helped). The voice acting was also good, Yune sounded sweet and young without that artificially cute voice you hear in so many places and everyone else's voices matched equally well. The first episode was a bit awkward (since you have to remember that every time Yune talks to Oscar they’re speaking Japanese but everyone else is speaking French) but after the first episode it’s no longer an issue, would be interesting to hear a French dub of the series but I don’t know if this series has even been licensed in France yet.

The Visuals: Appropriately enough Croisée had French animators working on parts of the show as well (you can see some of their work on the backgrounds here) and the backgrounds are beautifully detailed. All of the visual details seem to be era appropriate as well, from the props to the clothing, the color schemes worked well, and overall the series was just gorgeous to look at and I would love extras on the US DVD(/BR?) release that has a closer look at some of the work that went into making this.

I'm looking forward the US release for this series quite a bit, even if I do think that Sentai's sub-only, not many extras releases are priced a bit high. I suppose that's what sales and coupons are for, plus a release date hasn't been set yet so I have until at least next spring to save up which is also plenty of time for everyone else to check out the show streaming on TheAnimeNetwork (it's free to subscribers and it's free to sign up).

 

Summer Anime 2011 Reviews: Part one!

In half the world summer is well under way (I swear that where I live summer starts mid-May and then alternates between hot and unbearable through late September) and a new crop of anime is out as well! As with the spring anime, I'm trying out so many that I'm splitting this up into two parts and the second part will go up tomorrow. All of these reviews are based on the first episode (even though many of these shows already have a second episode out) and I was wondering, would you guys like to see me post reviews of the individual shows in the future (like how most anime blogs do the new seasons) or do these giant posts work just fine?

Baka to Test 2 (Baka to Test to Shoukanjuu Ni or Idiots, Tests and Summoned Beasts! Fuimation doesn’t use that translation but that’s what it actually does mean):

Well, Funimation has SAID that they licensed the anime for simulcast (in addition to DVD/BR rights, which is strange since they still haven't released the first season yet) but they haven't said anything else yet so I haven't seen it. Although, it sounds like the first episode was a less-than-stellar beach episode which hasn't made me all that eager to start in on a new season....

  

Blood-C:

To start with, it sounds like people who are already fans of the Blood franchise (especially Blood+) don’t like this show very much but people who aren’t/are big CLAMP fans (like me) are enjoying it more, very interesting. I’ll admit that I’m not as enamored with the show as many other people are, I really want this show to be at least a bit darker (and there are some hints that it’ll do just that) but the high school parts aren’t bad right now (the twins actually remind me of the twins from Otome Yokai Zakuro). So I’m not sold on the show but, since it is streaming on NicoNico, I have absolutely no problem with giving it a few more episodes to see what happens.  

Bunny Drop (Usagi Drop): 

First off, NO DISCUSSING THE ENDING OF THE MANGA. If you don’t know it, DON’T LOOK IT UP, I'M VERY SERIOUS ABOUT THIS. It’s not like the anime can cover 55 chapters in 11 episodes anyway, we’ll be lucky to get through the first four volumes if that much.

Ahem, sorry, the ANN forums have been freaking out enough over that, as for the show itself it’s sweet. The background visuals are gorgeous in a watercolor/crayon style (similar to Aoi Hana or Wandering Son) and it looks like the manga character designs translated well. Rin is an adorable child and it’s a nice choice to have a ten year old voice a child (again like Wandering Son, although there is a bigger age difference here since Rin is just 5). It’s streaming on crunchyroll and I’ll be continuing it for sure!

The Crossroads in a Foreign Labyrinth (Ikoku Meiro no Croisée or La croisée dans un labyrinthe étranger):

 Well that was cute, and hurray for a series set in a historical period that actually has period correct clothing and architecture! (Looking at you Gosick, and I have seen some people say that all the clothes are from the same decade, I’m not just assuming this). Set in Paris in the 1880s or so, blacksmith Claude is surprised to find that his grandfather has come back from Japan with not only souvenirs but with a little girl whose job is to act as the shop’s signboard. Yune is absolutely adorable (I really want to see someone cosplay her really fancy outfit now) and, after some misunderstandings, it looks like the show will turn into a charming and laid back slice-of-life show. I’ve seen some people worried that there isn’t a lot of manga material for it (two volumes when it was announced back in December so it’s probably got under 20 chapters now) but if it’s a one season show that shouldn’t be a problem (and, since I've seen a member of the French staff post and mention that all the work was done in the show now I imagine it is only one cour). I won’t be watching this since I try to only watch one fansub a season but if this does get picked up for streaming I’ll happily continue with it. 

God’s Notebook (Kamisama no Memo-Chou)

I’m trying out three different shows this season that remind me of Gosick: Ikoku (since they have the same manga artist+historical clothing), Dantalion (it’s the giant library+goth-loli with male sidekick) and this one (goth-loli detective+male sidekick). I had heard that the light novel series this one was based on is pretty well regarded among fans in Japan and the mystery here was better than some of the earlier mysteries in Gosick but the motivations for it basically amounted to person needs a therapist to deal with issues, doesn’t have one and then engages in self-destructive behavior which, well, had been done so many times before that it’s rather boring*. I found myself disliking all the characters (except the lady who ran the ramen shop but she had less than five minutes of screen time) although the episode was paced well (it was longer than a normal episode but I believe that’s only for the first episode). In the end, right now this just isn’t a show I’m interested in but, if the reviews for it are consistently good, I’ll give it another try someday (plus, no simulcast so I have to hunt down fansubs for it, not the show's fault but that is a minus in my book).

Five more reviews coming tomorrow, four of them are already written and I'm just waiting on Dantalion to finally show up. CR has it listed at 12:30 EST so hopefully that's the same time as on NicoNico and I'll be able to grab lunch, watch and get a review written and the next piece up mid-afternoon tomorrow. See ya'll then!

*in fiction anyway, in real life it’s just terrifying