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In a little addition to Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya review, the second part(2009 version) is more difficult to watch than the first one, especially due to a plot arc called Endless Eight. I watched it alright and was able to enjoy it but most of the comments said the opposite, some even recommended skipping the whole arc (why would you watch a series and skip more than half?..) So if you didn't like the first thirteen episodes much, just dont watch the rest. It wont leave a good impression unless you really enjoy the show.

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Titan A.E.

(2000 movie)

This is one of those movies that I wanted to like but just couldn't. That's mostly because much like so many movies and other shows before it, it had so much potential that just kind of fizzled out and died. A big part of that is that this movie couldn't decide what it wanted to be, kind of like the Disney movie Atlantis. On the one hand, it wanted to be more of a serious grown up movie, and that's the part of it I liked and felt had potential to go somewhere. On the other hand, apparently somewhere along the way, someone decided this was a kid's show (probably because it's animated), so there was a lot of childish humor along the way, and to be frank it really gave off mixed signals. Just as an example, a character got shot by one of those fancy sci-fi laser guns that does pretty much whatever it needs to do in a particular scene, and in this case that was to reduce this character into a mass of green goo, which should have been a gruesome but instant death, but instead this character's mouth managed to survive long enough to say, "bulls eye." Then of course there's the scene where one character goes all mortal combat on the other and snaps his neck. For kids!

To be fair, though, not a whole lot about the movie really made all that much sense. Apparently humanity has developed this giant space ark they call the Titan, which has the capability of forming an entire planet out of nothing but giant ice crystals and cloning every other form of life that existed on Earth prior to some aliens showing up and blowing it up. This is where I, at least, feel not a lot makes sense, though this may be just due to a lack of a scene or something just to set things up. Because why would Earth ever develop the Titan, let alone have it all ready to go for a last minute escape? Sure, it could have been that the planet was overcrowded and they needed a colony to help ease that. It makes me wonder where they'd originally had in mind for this since they gave the Titan and FTL drive that gave it an interstellar capability. The ship ends up becoming humanity's last hope, but it would have been nice to find out more about why the ship was built to begin with, because it's also apparently the reason Earth was destroyed by the Drej, which are aliens made of pure energy. Apparently the Drej feel so threatened by the Titan that they decide to exterminate humanity, and the first thing they do is blow up Earth. I don't know how humanity knows this, but it's what we're told. I also don’t understand why humans seem to be able to understand what the Drej are saying when they speak, but they do, so I guess the Drej could have said something before they blew up the planet.

And that's just the set-up; the actual story doesn't make a lot of sense either. The story follows a character named Cale Tucker (seems to be a popular name in sci-fi), who we see as a small boy the day Earth died. His father was behind Project Titan and took the space ark off to some hidden location just in the nick of time. Fortunately he thought to give his son a magic space ring that had a map to where he'd planned to hid the Titan, and which also acts as the key which starts the Genesis Device-I mean the transformation sequence. So this is why his dad leaves the ship and ends up getting killed, apparently along with everyone else who had gone with him on the giant ship. That makes sense, as does the Drej's obsession with wanting to find Titan and blow it up, since they were apparently afraid of what it could do to begin with. This is where Cale comes in, because apparently the Drej have figured out he has a map leading to the Titan, and naturally they want it. This also apparently takes 15 years for them to figure out, but later we find out why, and it involves something else that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Which, speaking of sense, since the Drej want to find where the Titan is, one would think they'd want to capture him, and later on they try to and succeed. Except the first time they spot him, they try to shoot him, repeatedly, and they even manage to hit him a couple of times. This is where the magic sci-fi guns come in, though, as the same gun that reduced one character to goo just gives Cale a couple of flesh wounds that take like a minute to patch up.

Fortunately, this seemingly Han Solo type named Joseph Korso who shows up on his cool ship named the Valkyrie to rescue him. Naturally this isn't a coincidence, and it was all part of a plan to help the Drej to find and destroy the Titan. Now, I'm not sure if the Drej showing up was all part of the plan to get Cale to go with or not. Cale was somewhat reluctant to do anything that might get him killed and all, even if he's yeaning for a way to get out of the crappy salvage yard he calls both home and work. He's become very pessimistic, losing his planet and the only remaining member of his family (apparently) and all. So having the Drej show up just kind of lit a fire under his ass, quite literally. The thing is, as I mentioned before, they sure seemed to be doing their damnedest to kill both Cale and Korso. So, what, did no one tell the Drej foot soldiers about the whole "capture that human because he has the only key to the ship we want to blow up" plan? Later on it's more obvious that the Drej are just trying to grab Cale on their own, because Korso bitches about this to them after they managed to capture Cale and copy the map. This is also where the bullshit heel face turn takes place.

One of the other potentially good things this movie had going for it was the crew of the Valkyrie. They were a somewhat rag-tag crew that seemed like they could be interesting. Since Joss Whedon had a hand in writing this, it isn't all that surprising that this crew reminded me a little of Serenity's crew from Firefly, though this movie predates that series. The thing I liked about them was just how natural they seemed to be. They had some minor annoyances with each other, and their own little quirks, and that made them seem interesting. But while they had their own little conflicts with each other, none of them really seemed like they were just itching to kill each other. This is part of where the movie doesn't make sense, because that bullshit heel face turn I mentioned drastically alters two of the characters, who suddenly become evil. I understand that Korso and his first mate being in league with the Drej was supposed to be a surprise and all, it's just that their attitude and actions don't match up with everything that came before this heel face turn. Up to that point, Korso actually seems to genuinely care about Cale, and even indulges the young man by letting him fly the Valkyrie during this cool eye candy scene. The first mate, Preed, up to that point seemed like a somewhat sarcastic but otherwise likeable character up to that point, but suddenly he wanted to kill Cale along with his other crewmates, who have presumably been together as a crew for some time, and Korso seems to be in agreement with this. Not only does he not say anything when Preed mentions he's going to blow up the other two crew members who somehow aren't in the know on the whole evil plan thing, but he threatens and assaults those crew members before that, and during his whole bitch session to the Drej he mentions how he'd like to kill Cale, and then tries his damnedest to do just that. Also part of this heel face turn is that now Cale is suddenly the champion of humanity's continued survival while Korso is the pessimist who sees no way of beating the Drej or for humanity to survive beyond the near future, and really only cares about himself and getting rich. Of course at the end of the movie, Korso makes the heroic sacrifice to save the day because, surprise, Preed made another separate deal with the Drej for his survival provided he kill Cale and the rest of his crew, and this just makes Korso change his mind again for whatever reason.

Naturally there's also something of a deux ex machine in that whereas the Drej's weaponry has been devastatingly destructive up until now, the Titan can suddenly be jury-rigged to convert the energy of the Drej as well as the energy of the Drej themselves to simultaneously power its reactors and make the new planet while killing all the Drej in the immediate area. As the movie ended, I couldn't help but note that this was just one ship, and it seemed entirely possible that more Drej could just show up later. I mean, the movie wasn't suggesting that this one ship and its fighters were the entirety of the Drej species, was it? Well, Wikipedia confirms this is the case, but given all the other face palm worthy aspects of this movie, it isn't all that surprising, it's just that it's stupid.

There were some other nitpicky things I didn't like either and I'd complain about, but this review is getting to be long enough as it is. The sad thing is, this movie could have been so much better. If it'd dropped all the kiddy comedy elements and had a plot that made more sense, it would have been a lot better. There's also the Valkyrie's crew, which had a lot of potential that just ended up being squandered. Rather than learn anything more about them or allow anyone other than Cale to undergo a little development, they were pretty much just there to set up a few jokes and to conveniently come to the rescue when Cale almost managed to get killed a few times. Oh, and the hot chick to fall into insta-love with Cale, you know, because. But just think of how much more interesting it could have been if the entire crew had been in on the deal with the Drej from the start. Sure, it wouldn't have been as much of a surprise when the evil plan was revealed, but there's a difference between surprise and just coming out of no where for no real reason. It also might have made the crew more sympathetic had there been a more realistic reason behind their deal that wasn't just about getting rich. Say they'd actually been nice and reasonable people to start out with and were forced into it somehow, and had to play along with the plan, all while actually kind of feeling sorry for Cale, and feeling bad about the whole betrayal of the whole human race thing? The crew could've even tried to keep him at something of a distance so they didn't get to know him too well in order to spare themselves some of the guilt. And if the hot chick, Akima Kunimoto, found herself being attracted to him in a not completely out of the blue manner, there even could have been a scene where the captain warned her against getting too close, to foreshadow the coming betrayal. Then it could have been a running theme to have Cale trying to figure out what the deal was, and seeming to make some progress with Akima or maybe even Korso at some points before being shut out again. You know, drama.

Also wasted were the Drej. They were some of the most alien aliens I've seen in a sci-fi, and they had the potential to be really interesting, what with the whole being made out of energy thing. Like if the movie had gone into their origin somewhat, and gave them some motivation for wanting to kill every single human being beyond just being ass hats. Unfortunately they just ended up being generic bad guys who were hard to kill, at least with normal hand-held laser guns, what with the whole being made out of energy thing. They even had a queen Drej who made typical bad guy speeches about killing every human being. And apparently all the Drej could fit on that one planet-killing ship from the beginning of the movie. Lame.

The voice talent was ok-ish. I did recognize a few of the voices right off the bat, but everyone sounded somewhat bland. I guess maybe since they'd read the script and decided to not even really bother putting any real effort into it. Speaking of bland, while the soundtrack is somewhat decent to listen to in its own, it also really dates this movie. I'd normally says something along the lines of doing something instrumental, but really the movie wasn't worth it. I'm actually not even sure why I bothered to mention it, other than that it kind of made me roll my eyes at times.

I'll throw this movie a bone, but really it's only because I feel a little sorry for it. Part of what sucks about this movie is that there was some really obvious potential there, and it just got wasted, which in some ways is even worse than if it'd just completely sucked. 3/10.

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Today. :D

I'll try to get to Summer Wars later today, but Planetes is going to be the next review I write.

Moonlight Mile

Season 1: Lift Off

(12 episodes)

The opening to this series made it seem very interesting, and based on the description I'd read of it, it looked like something I could get into. The first thing we see as the show starts is a female astronaut who has crash-landed on the moon and is struggling to maintain a rigorous running pace in the low gravity so she can reach a distant outpost before her limited air supply runs out. That would have been enough to draw me in as it was, but then she runs into some robot soldiers who try to shoot her, only to back down and wait for someone in an EVA suit that hides their identity. The teaser then ends with this person pointing a pistol at the astronaut and pulling away quickly as she screams. Then the awesome opening sequence starts, promising space battles and political intrigue. Unfortunately the series never really delivers on that.

While I was hoping the series would go back to whatever was happening on the moon, it didn't, and I'm not entirely sure if that scene was set some time after the actual start of the story, or if it was meant as an in medias res beginning. I was given some brief hope when things started out in the International Space Station (ISS), with some crew members remarking on a blizzard in the Himalayas. Unfortunately this was only a set-up to introduce the main characters of the series, who are both mountain climbers. This is also our introduction to the fan service and the more immature aspect of the series.

Okay, let me take a break here and say that I actually like fan service to an extent, and if you've read my other reviews, you probably already know that. That being said, I appreciate it when it's more mature and isn't just there for its own sake, though to be honest I still won’t complain that much about being able to see naked women. The reason I call the fan service in this series immature is that it pretty much just is there for its own sake, since the only function it really serves is to show how immature the main characters they are. They both seem to have a "tradition" of a "good luck fuck," where they have sex with some random woman before going on a climb or whatever else they have going on. The series actually opens with both of the main characters having a foursome in some tent at the base of Mount Everest. But naturally this keeps up through the entire series, which splits up to mostly follow Gorou Saruwatari, the Japanese climber, and he literally has sex with a woman every time he changes location. Even when he finally ends up on the ISS, there happens to be a female astronaut there who wants to have sex with him.

But I'm getting a little ahead of myself there. After Gorou and Lostman, his American climbing partner, finish having sex, the blizzard that was going on during their introduction is over and they start climbing Everest. They are some distance off when a French climbing team is hit by an avalanche. Naturally, like any decent human beings, they go over to see if there are any survivors, though their conversation during this is our first hint that they're actually callous bastards. They do find one survivor, who just happens to be an attractive woman, and start dragging both her and the three dead men who were on her team back down the mountain. Another blizzard starts and they decide to stop, and this is where I really start to not like the main characters. For no reason at all, and despite having dragged them all that way, Gorou decides to just dumb the bodies of the French team off of a cliff instead of just leaving them on the side of the path they'd been following so they could be found later. As it turns out, one of these men was actually the French woman's husband. She's in pretty bad shape herself, and not long after she wakes up, she apparently hallucinates and sees her husband, and asks for him to "keep her warm." This is where Lostman and Gurou come off as especially callous, because not only have they basically been talking about this woman like she's just a piece of meat they want to fuck from the moment they found her, but they've already given her up for dead at this point. And rather than trying to actually keep her warm and alive, Lostman makes a comment to the effect of blowing her off, and suggests that Gorou give her one last pity fuck before she dies, which he then proceeds to actually do. Then they just burry her under a pile of rocks and continue their climb. The best part is that when they get to the top, both of them act like they're bored. And at this point I really don't like either of these characters. Later on, Gorou is at least supposed to come off as being somewhat more sympathetic and kind of a nice guy, but really I can't help but think of both him and Lostman as pricks.

Really, though, this has all been a set-up for these two to decide they want to be astronauts and climb mountains on the moon. So they split up and go about it their own separate and equally complicated ways. Lostman joins the US Navy and becomes a pilot, all so he can pilot the space shuttle. Gurou becomes a construction worker and turns down repeated attempts to promote him to an office job, all so he can become an expert at operating cranes and the like, because it just so happens that all the major space agencies have been combined to form the International Space Agency, and the ISA is interested in going to the moon to exploit resources there. Naturally, things work out for the both of them, though the series takes some time by throwing could have been interesting hurdles their way if I'd actually cared that much about either character, and had the pacing of the series not been such to basically just breeze right through all of this. Basically they take a span of years and breeze through it all in a few episodes. Lostman actually ends up getting shot down in a third war with Iraq and becomes a POW for a year, and the episode literally skips over this year during the commercial break. We are then introduced to an Iraqi boy who also appears in the awesome opening title sequence, but he never appears again for the rest of this season.

I'd say that the first season was basically just a set-up season, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed. In my opinion the pacing was actually still too fast for what it apparently wanted to cover, so it either should have started further along in the story, or it should have been a longer season. Of course it also might've helped if I actually liked the main characters, too, or if any of the secondary characters had been fleshed out a bit more. The only other one to get much attention is essentially the series' Ms. Fanservice, and she's a selfish unlikeable character herself, who actually tried to sabotage Gorou from being selected as their company's astronaut candidate for the sake of the guy she was having an affair with at the time. She does this by calling his cell phone to distract the already drunk Gorou, who is right in the middle of a very precise crane operation meant to rescue a man who has been trapped under some fallen girders at the top of a skyscraper under construction. She does this after being told that not only would this man be killed, but the girders would probably all fall, causing millions in damage, and probably taking the crane and Gurou along with them as they fell. Of course this not only makes me hate her (she later goes on to supposedly be a protagonist), but it helps me to not like Gurou that much more, because his reaction to this attempt to sabotage and possibly kill him was to want to have sex with this woman, which he does succeed at, by the way.

I guess you could say that while I wasn't interested in the main characters or their plight, I was still somewhat interested in the story. I liked seeing the different space agencies work together to colonize the moon and some of the different hurdles they had to overcome during this process. I was also hoping some of the things from the opening titles would come to pass, but they never did. Actually the closest the first season got to political intrigue was an attempt by a Japanese industrial boss to stretch out the development of the lunar construction robot his company had been contracted by the ISA to design and build so he could line his pockets, even if it meant the death of one of his divers and the ruin of the best developmental engineer his company had, and a bit involving Area 51 and a secret military build-up in space. Maybe everything that series seemed to promise is in the second season, but since the second season hasn't been picked up by anyone, has no dub, and apparently no one's bothered to sub more than the first four episodes, I guess I'll never find out.

So I guess overall this is an okay series. They do put some effort into being somewhat semi-realistic during the space sequences, though this goes out the window when we're introduced to a space fighter that Lostman gets to fly. The visuals are fairly good, though the CGI that's used stands out quite a bit from the traditionally animated elements. The dub is also somewhat decent, and one of the things I appreciated was the attempt at accents for the characters who were supposed to be from other countries instead of making everyone sound like they are from America with dialog suggesting that they are all speaking Japanese. 6/10.

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Planetes

(26 episode series)

This is a hard sci-fi which presents us with a fairly plausible future in which the world is a lot more interested in developing space in order to exploit a new energy resource located in the Moon and in Jupiter. This is slightly hampered by all the space trash that's been generated over decades of space development from the initial space race to the slightly futuristic setting of the series. The series actually opens with a consequence of this space trash, showing us just how dangerous something as small as a screw can be when it's moving at orbital speeds when it runs into a sub-orbital passenger liner. This sets the series up to follow the main characters, who all belong to the "Debris Section" of a company named Technora, whose job it is to go out and haul in space debris in order to make space a safer place to travel. Naturally, like everyone whose job it is to clean up after others, they get maligned quite a bit, even when they manage to save human lives.

The series follows two main protagonists, Ai Tanabe, a young woman who is a great example of how easy it apparently is to get a job in space in the future, and Hachirota "Hachimaki" Hoshino, a cynical, more experienced member of Debris Section who was the most junior member until Tanabe showed up. I both like and dislike both characters to be entirely honest. Tanabe us likable in the sense that she always has an optimistic outlook on everything with a kind of fresh innocence that any fan Star Trek can probably relate to. At the same time, she tends to be overly optimistic, thinking that love can literally solve every problem, and she tends to proselytize about it quite a bit. The writing also pretty much bears her out as being right, which reminds me of one of the aspects of Star Trek I actually hate, Hachimaki is somewhat more pragmatic, at least at first, having seen plenty in just the three years he's been on the job to know better. At the same time, he also dreams of owning his own ship, though later on he accepts the fact that his job as a debris hauler makes that an impossibility. On the other hand, his negativity about pretty much everything gets just as grating as Tanabe's constantly going on about how love will solve everything.

The secondary characters are somewhat interesting, though I think the two section managers were much too silly, even if they were supposed to be the comedy relief in a series that actually manages to get somewhat dark at a few points. My favorite characters are actually Fee Carmichael, the captain of Toy Box, the small ship Debris Section uses to collect space trash, and Yuri Mihairokov, a mature, seasoned member of Debris Section with a compelling background story. The show went over the top with Fee's smoking addiction and how she'll become not only cranky but actually somewhat insane if she has to go any length of time without being able to smoke, though I do appreciate the fact that the show acknowledged the fact that smoking in space isn't exactly to be taken lightly. Otherwise I found her to be likeable and a good leader who cared about her people and getting the job done. Yuri is more interesting than either of the protagonists in my opinion because he has a somewhat more substantial reason for wanting to become a debris hauler that actually involves the opening scene of the series. He also goes through a far more believable development as a character when he finally lets go of an old pain and the entire reason he became a debris hauler and decides to keep working his job as best he can.

I also found the story to be pretty interesting. Not only is it something of a character drama, but it also has a bigger story going on in the background at the beginning of the series which evolves naturally into something that directly involves the main characters. Basically we have INTO, a somewhat more militant evolution of NATO and the UN pushing into space to exploit resources to its own ends. They also seem to have a somewhat more annoyingly unrealistic side in that they not only like to invade other countries for basically no reason, but they apparently have a thing for planting mines that will mess up space ships' electronics in places that could harm ships from their own member states. This makes them something of a bad guy, though they aren't made out to be entirely evil either. There are also terrorists, who call themselves the Space Defense Front, who are given a fairly realistic back-story and motivations for doing what they do, despite being much more obviously bad guys. The thing is that despite how awesome all this space development is and the clean energy source and the advanced technology it provides, it's also acting to further widen the gap between the advanced industrial countries able to exploit these resources and the poor countries that can't even feed its own people. A couple of countries are made up to illustrate this by introducing us to a few characters who are from these countries. This helps to flesh the story out very nicely.

Most of the series follows Debris Section as they not only pick up space trash, but deal with illegal space dumpers, company politics, international politics, and terrorists. We also get to meet some interesting characters along the way, like Gigalt Gangaragash, a veteran astronaut and teacher to Hachimaki, as well as a former Debris Section member who is responsible for many of the nicknames various characters have, and Nono, a twelve year old girl who was born on the Moon. We also meet some of Hachimaki's friends, some of Tanabe's friends, and a few obnoxious comedy relief characters who somewhat tragically go on to die later on in the story.

The story ends up focusing on the construction of a ship called the Wernher von Braun. The terrorists do everything they can to blow it up, the guy designing and building it is being a complete bastard, and dirty politics are going on in the background. Also, out of no where, Hachimaki decides he wants to join the crew and goes really balls to the wall to do so, leading to an aspect of the series I didn't like because I really didn't think it flowed very naturally, but I'll get into that later on. The build up and climax of the terrorist attack on the Von Braun made the show very interesting to follow, and I was drawn in to the point that I had to watch the last half or so of the series marathon style until I got to the end. It also shows us the after effects of the attack on Hachimaki and Tanabe, who both nearly took very dark turns in order to survive, and then deal with the consequences afterwards. For instance, Tanabe was running out of air, and very nearly took the air supply from the character she was trying to save, while simultaneously coming to the realization that this character probably deserved to die anyway. Instead, she decides she won’t cross that line, and is only saved because someone just happens to come along, and the terrorist and betrayer she saved has a change of heart and attracts the attention of their rescuers. As a consequence, Tanabe suffers severe nerve damage that would have been permanent without the advanced technology of the series, and even with it took more than a year to recover to the point she could walk on her own and to venture back into space, even if it was just for a visit. This is especially interesting in that it does this with characters who are not a member of a military, but are instead just civilian space janitors, which is along the same lines of what Star Trek could have been if Starfleet had not actually been a military, which is something the creative talent behind that franchise often stated they wanted to be the case, only to turn around and have Starfleet act like a military. Toy Box is not armed and neither is its crew. Neither is the crew of the Von Braun, which depends entirely on an INTO security force for defense against being boarded by terrorists, and ends up improvising tools as weapons in order to defend themselves and save the ship.

This actually brings me to the aspects of the series I didn't like. It starts off with Hachimaki having a close call which very realistically leaves him somewhat psychologically scarred. In his recovery from this, he just up and decides to leave everything and everyone behind, including recent romantic interest Tanabe, so he can focus on joining the crew of the Von Braun. The way he does this, alienating all his friends, coworkers and family in the process just comes off as completely out of character and it literally comes out of the blue. To its credit, the series does try to explain his motivation, but I never really bought it. I also never really bought into the romance between Hachimaki and Tanabe. I know they were trying to go for that whole "opposites attract" thing, but it all came off as forced to me, and I'd really rather they'd never been more than friends rather than following convention by having the two of them hook up. Basically it's so the show can milk a bit more drama out of Hachimaki 's heel-face-turn when he just suddenly decides to leave everyone and everything behind. It was also no surprise at all when the two of them end up getting back together and actually get married. Incidentally, it's implied he got her pregnant in addition to marrying her just prior to leaving on a seven year trip to and from Jupiter, which doesn't seem very much like a happy ending to me.

Then there's Claire Rondo, who was Hachimaki's ex-girlfriend and who just happened to be from one of those small impoverished made up countries mentioned earlier. She's a member of Control Section who actually seems to come around and pull her head out of her ass when it comes to Debris Section. She's fleshed out more by the revelation that she's pushing herself so hard in order to escape her humble background, much like the temp worker Edelgard Rivera, who works for Debris Section while projecting a stern, professional exterior while trying to hide her unpleasant past. The difference is, while Edelgard grows to become more of a member of Debris Section, Claire ends up betraying them. She plans out how to hijack Toy Box after being demoted to Debris Section and apparently having joined the Space Defense Front, and then does just that along with her boyfriend and former security officer Hakim Ashmead. With both of these characters, their betrayal is actually handled fairly well, with some hints being given out before hand but still being very surprising without coming off as out of character. Where it goes wrong is in the aftermath. Claire betrayed the people who had come to trust her with every intention of them ending up dead along with everyone on the Von Braun and everyone in the Lunar city they'd set the Von Braun to crash into. She also helped her terrorist comrades gun down crew members aboard the Von Braun, making her every bit a bud guy as far as I'm concerned. Yet the show tries to make the audience feel sympathetic toward her, and even goes as far as to say that Fee and Yuri, the people aboard Toy Box she beat up and left to die, wouldn't have testified against her and that she's only in prison serving only a 10 year sentence because she decided on her own to confess. While I like the fact that she was a villain with a sympathetic background and had more than one dimension, once she'd crossed the line, there was no going back for her as far as I'm concerned.

Everything else I didn't like about the series comes down to nitpicks about Technora Corporation and just the way the characters were presented and the like. The thing about it is that while it wanted to present us with an international team of people, no on in it came off as anything other than Japanese, and I don't just mean how Tanabe calls Hachimaki "Sempi" or how he in turn calls Gigalt "Sensai", I mean how everyone acts. Everyone in Technora, despite supposedly coming from all over the world, acts exactly like people in a cut-throat Japanese company, treating everyone like they are in a caste-based culture, with everyone beneath them being treated as if they are sub-human. While it does make Debris Section the underdogs, it just doesn't live up to its supposed international nature, which admittedly is something most sci-fis are just as guilty of. Adding to this is the dub, which isn't bad exactly, it's just that no one even bothered to try to sound anything other than American. I know some people complain about bad accents, and to be honest when they are poorly done they tend to stand out, but I do appreciate it when the people making these shows at least go through the effort to try, even if it does turn out well. Moonlight Mile even does that, and it isn't nearly as interesting a show in my opinion.

Everything else about the show is pretty well done. The CGI used didn't stand out that much from the animated elements, and the animation itself was very well done, looking very smooth and capturing the motion of objects in space very well. That in itself makes this series stand out, because they actually portrayed how objects would move in space very well, and made a point of not having any sound in space, much like 2001: A Space Odyssey. In addition to that, they also had the only artificial gravity in space being generated through spinning portions of the various stations and ships seen in the series, with everything being zero-gravity, or in the Moon's case being very low gravity. At times they seemed to forget this by having people just walking around normally while on the Moon, but when they ran it was with the more familiar bounding motion that the low Lunar gravity pretty much necessitates. Overall the space aspect was very well done, and it only adds to the quality of the series as far as I'm concerned.

I think I'd consider this series one of my favorites, but I wouldn't list it very high because of all the negative aspects I mentioned. That being said, I would still very much recommend this series to anyone who likes character dramas and science fiction, as this is both, and actually manages to stick a lot closer to what science fiction is supposed to be about, which is how advanced technology effects humanity. 8/10.

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Summer Wars

(2009 movie)

I can honestly say that this movie didn't look that terribly interesting to me when I read about it, but it looked interesting enough to watch. So when someone requested that I review this movie, I guess I figured I could for the hell of it. Unfortunately I'm guessing this person will be disappointed, because they probably wanted to see what I thought because they themselves liked it. Or maybe they just wanted a second opinion on it before watching it, who knows? In any case, I didn't really like this movie, because the whole romantic comedy thing just isn't my thing. I'm the type of anime nerd who reminisces about the time anime was about giant robots fighting and explosions despite being fairly recent to the whole anime thing, but this movie is more along the lines of being socially awkward.

The movie follows protagonist Kenji Koiso, a high school math nerd who works as a system admin for this movie's version of Second Life, or something kind of like that, except that it's called Oz. This massive online game/marketplace/everything you can possibly connect to the internet thing is made out to be the most awesomest thing ever, but really it touches on a nerve that's kind of ironic for an internet nerd like myself to have, which is half of the story and half of the reason why it really isn't my thing. The other half of the story comes in the form of Natsuki Shinohara, who busts into the room Kenji and his friend/fellow moderator are working in. She says she's looking for someone to do a job for her, and that there's money in it for them. This being their place of work and all, Kenji and his buddy both tell her that they already have jobs. Of course it helps that she's an attractive girl, and when she mentions that the only thing they have to do is to go out to the country with her, they both volunteer. She only needs one of them, though, and a little game of rock-paper-scissors apparently sorts out which one of them gets the job, and touches on yet another thing that I don't like about shows like this.

I'm sure you're wondering what that could be, so this is the part where I mention that the job is pretending to be Natsuki's fiancé. It seems that her granny is turning 90 and like most old people she's having some health problems. Like a lot of old, traditional people, she apparently wants to see that Natsuki is married off like a good little Japanese girl before she kicks the bucket, so the job is to lie to this nice old woman's face. There are so many things that I don't like about that. I'm sure you can tell that there's a values dissonance there as far as the whole being a good little girl and getting married, so there's that. Then there's the fact that Natsuki is being dishonest and manipulative in order to look good to her grandmother, even if she thinks it's somehow for the her materfamlias (and the entire family) to think that they're adding another member to their family before granny buys it. She neglected to tell Kenji any of this on that whole long trip out to the place which made it super awkward for him, and in addition to that he was pressured to lie to a woman and a whole family he was trying to be a respectable house guest to literally within a few minutes of getting there and being introduced. I know this was meant for comedy and I'm sure a lot of people even found this funny, but I was actually a little appalled. How much was she going to pay him, anyway?

Now up to this point, everything seemed more like one of those domestic bliss fantasies many members of the fairer sex seem to have. There's a big house and a big family, with lots of little kids running around, and everyone mostly gets along aside from a few little comedic conflicts here and there to make things interesting, I guess. Now I don't come from a very big family or have a big house in the country, but my family is big enough for me to see this for the fantasy it is.. But then I'm biased because I really don't like most of my family, and to be frank the less I see of them the better. Oh, and I hate little kids, too, so the idea of a bunch of them running around being rambunctious doesn't make me laugh so much as leaving me somewhere between wanting to curl into the fetal position and wanting to growl at them to get off my lawn.

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The other half of the story comes into play when, later that night, Kenji gets a text message from some stranger with a code for him to figure out, and like a dumbass he actually solves it and replies back with the answer. I don’t know about any of you, but when I get a text from someone I don't know, I just assume they got the wrong number and delete it. So I was completely unsurprised that the next morning he was being accused of hacking the wonderful world of Oz, since it also apparently didn't occur to anyone that a hacker wouldn't be dumbass enough to hack using their own legitimate account. Conveniently, the big family happens to count a police officer among its numbers, so that saves them from having to make a phone call to take him away. Of course by now, things are going really wrong and they can't make it to jail anyway, so they just take him back home. All the while this is going on and things are being messed up by what appears to be a generic movie brand version of Second Life or World of Warcraft, I can't help but think how completely stupid it is to have all these things connected to the internet to the point that they can actually be controlled by it. This is that nerve I mentioned before, because as much of a technology nerd as I am, the idea of doing something like this stuns me. The sad thing is, you can already see aspects of this in that society seems to have forgotten to do a lot of things without the aid of computers, and, well, I'm getting of track here. Sufficed to say, the big emergency of the movie pretty much just made me roll my eyes because it was pretty much a problem of everyone's own making.

I will give them this, though, setting the real world portion of this sci-fi technological story in an old style, traditional Japanese home place with a 90 year old woman calling people on an old school rotary phone in order to help out was kind of funny. I totally see what they did there. ;)

In any case, the black sheep of the family shows up and it's revealed that he had gone to America for a while. He'd also stolen a bunch of money from Granny, so naturally everyone hates the guy, except of course Natsuki, who it is revealed had a crush on him since she was in kindergarten. Oh, Japan... ;) Well, he was adopted, so I guess that makes it not incestuous, technically. Of course the information we're given about him comes into play when it's revealed all the problems are being caused by an AI that's from an American university. Gee, I wonder if the two could be in any way related?

Of course they are. Granny get so mad about it, that in spite of the fact that while he made the evil AI, it as actually the US military that set the thing loose in Oz to test it out, you know, because it's not like you'd do something like that in a controlled environment instead of something that is apparently connected to everything, including a satellite in orbit, that she actually tries to kill his ass with a spear. But hey, let's just recognize this for the shot at that American military that it is. ;) Of course this immediately begged the question as to whether this guy would somehow redeem himself, like say by helping to destroy this AI. Since he wasn't the one who actually released the thing, I really never had much doubt there.

And then Granny dies, right after making Kenji promise to take care of her manipulative granddaughter. The conflict is then generated by most of the family naturally wanting to deal with the whole Granny being dead thing, while the few of them that actually know something horrible might happen struggle to solve that, giving Dell and a few other companies some product placement in the process. And so starts the online battle, which is one of the lamest things I've ever seen.

Now before anyone gets too mad at me, you have to understand that the whole social networking thing is just not my thing. So all these online games like Second Life and World of Warcraft are lame to me to begin with. What can I say? I like shoot people from the first person perspective, so give me Halo or FEAR any day. The thing is, even with something like that, when someone plays it, it's just some person looking at a screen. In this movie, it's represented more like a fully immersive virtual reality, with everyone having a cute little furry avatar (I don’t like furs either, by the way). That just comes off as that much more lame to me especially when people who are literally right next to a character in the room playing the same game actually use their little avatars to talk to each other, and at different points in the game they react as if they feel pain when their avatar is getting beat up in the game. Sorry guys, this just came off as lame to me.

Of course everything works itself out in the end, including the part where Natsuki decides she likes Kenji and he decides he likes her. The massive family even pressures them to get married and to kiss right there in front of them. You know, the sad thing is, this aspect of the movie I didn't like could have been very easily avoided had the two of them already at least kind of had a thing going for each other, and the reason Natsuki wanted Kenji to pretend to be her fiancé was because she, you know, actually wanted him to be her fiancé. Instead it was a 50/50 chance that it could have been Kenji's fellow nerd, since Kenji could have just as easily lost at that game of rock-paper-scissors instead of winning it.

But enough bitching; this just wasn't my kind of movie and my grading is going to reflect that. But don't let that put you off if this actually is your kind of movie. If you like romantic comedies, you will probably like this movie even if you don't like the computer game part of this movie, simply because the romantic comedy part is like so many other movies in that genre. Like how Twister and Sweet Home Alabama start out as just being a quick little diversion from the protagonist's regular life but turns into the whole falling in love thing. If you also happen to play Second Life and/or WoW, you'll probably really like this movie, because that's basically what it is. I, on the other hand, like neither, but I do recognize the work and talent that went into making it, so I'm not going to goose egg it even if I end up not giving it a very good score. 5/10.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni (When They Cry) &

Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai

(50 episode series)

This is an exceptionally well put together series, which approached the story from many different angles and kept me hooked from start to finish. That’s actually why I’m including both the first and second seasons together in this review, because it’s only together that they make a complete story. That’s what makes it that much more unfortunate that the second season apparently wasn’t picked up for a dub like the first season was. The story was just as good even if I had to read subtitles, but to be honest I’d gotten used to the dub cast, and some elements just weren’t as effective in my opinion as in the dub because what’s said has to be filtered through emotionless subtitles.

Moving on, as much praise as I’m giving this series, I’m going to say right up front that it’s hardly perfect either, though its flaws aren’t anywhere near being a deal-breaker, at least for me. While the story itself is actually made up of repeating time loops in which are main characters each tend to do things a bit differently and things tend not to end well for them, I can’t help but feel that there was also something of an anime within an anime here. While I liked the main anime, which was a murder mystery/psychological thriller, with plenty of drama thrown in, I didn’t much care for the anime within it, which was the kind of typical, cutesy, moe, slice-of-life anime I just don’t like. As the main character who serves as the primary protagonist for the first season, Keiichi Maebara is also the only male character among the other main characters, who also form an after-school club in their small, one-room school located in the village of Hinamizawa. This has all the makings of a harem anime, and to be honest the anime within the anime seemed to pretty much be that. The character designs kind of added to this, and was somewhat disarming to the horrible murders that take place in this series, while simultaneously making it somewhat amusing for that fact, just like Elfen Lied. I feel that the cutesy slice-of-life bits distracted from the story somewhat, but while I would have done it differently, I completely understand why this aspect of the story was done – so we’d care about the characters.

Since the story is pretty much TNG’s Cause and Effect or Groundhog Day with a murder mystery, it’s pretty important that the audience gets to know and care about the characters, otherwise, there is no point to watching them die and/or kill over and over again other than as gore porn. That’s what I feel is a major failing of the vast majority of most horror films, because it isn’t so much about the characters (who are usually too stupid to live anyway) as it is about seeing the horrible way they meet their end. Gore porn, in other words. With Higurashi, however, we learn a lot about the characters and their village each time the story makes its way through the fateful events of June 1983. Sure, it’s a bit over the top that each of the characters has some kind of a past shame that makes them kind of scary in some ways, and that the village has such a sorted history as well, but this is also what makes the story interesting. I also have to admit that this is where the moe slice-of-life bits actually help to add to being able to care about the characters, as we get to see them when times are good, and it makes it that much more tragic when things got to hell. Often it involves one of the friends losing it completely, betraying, and killing all of their friends.

The first season doesn’t really explain all that much. Actually this is where one of the more annoying flaws of the series stands out, because information we already learned as the audience tends to be constantly repeated. I’m cool with the way information was slowly learned with each new time loop, and in fact I actually liked that and the pacing it set, but I really hated hearing the same information repeated. It was better when the story changed to focus on other main characters, though. I also liked how each new time loop started with a vision of the horrible ending it would have, with everything then adding up to what we saw it start out with. The thing is, it becomes apparent very quickly that more is going on, involving a conspiracy of some kind with parties unknown committing some of the gruesome murders in Hinamizawa valley. At first we’re lead to believe that people in the village itself are responsible, but much like having Keiichi act as the protagonist for the first season, this is somewhat misleading.

The season ends with Rena Ryugu, one of Keiichi’s friends going psycho and killing a couple of people, who to be fair were conning her father for basically most of what he had. Her friends help her to hide the body, but eventually she gets paranoid and takes her entire school hostage, apparently intending to kill all of them using a gasoline bomb. Keiichi manages to talk her out of it, however, and the next season starts from here, only about 25 years later, with Hinamizawa being the abandoned site of a disaster that had apparently killed everyone but her, and which we see happen more than once with a different main character as the sole survivor each time. At the start of season 2, this is Rena. We also get the first really obvious clue that what’s going on here was definitely an external conspiracy.

While season 1 was the build up, season 2 is the climax, finally explaining all the mysteries. To begin with, as it turns out there actually is a Bill Murray character who technically then would be the true protagonist of the entire thing, though here she’s only the protagonist of the second season. Kind of surprising considering that in the first season we only got a few hints she knew more than she was letting on.

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Meet Bill Murray, aka Rika Furude.

Rika is the shrine maiden for the local deity, Oyashiro, a supposedly wrathful and vengeful god who has been said to be killing and disappearing people every year for going on the fifth year. This naturally isn’t actually the case, and as it turns out, Oyashiro is actually Hanyū, a meek spirit who was apparently an ancestor of Rika’s who was sacrificed to bring peace to the village, and who originally set the rules meant to keep the local disease or parasite from spreading further or getting out of control. She has been watching everything go down, though she is unable to do anything but watch, and it is because she wants the village to avoid being destroyed that she brings Rika back to some prior point in history after Rika is killed in June of 1983. Apparently this has added up to over a century of time, and the two of them have become somewhat jaded for that reason. Fortunately, and somewhat conveniently, other main characters start to remember events from previous time loops, and are able to fight their fate.

Along the way, we learn more and more about what is going on, who is involved, and what role they play. For the most part, the pacing is perfect, though at one point we go back and see how one character apparently became the monster that they are in 1983, and I felt the story dwelled a bit too long on that part. Seeing the conspiracy that was first hinted in the first time loop come together was definitely interesting and important to the story, however, especially when it becomes apparent that the event that kills the entire village is not the tragic natural disaster it was initially thought to be by authorities.

The final time loop and climax to the story is a fairly good payoff. The only disappointment in my opinion is the lack of any real punishment to the main big bad of the series, who is responsible not only for the massacre of the entire village in previous time loops, but for the butchery of Rika in order to set that massacre in motion, and for other murders which occurred prior to June 1983 and are not undone by Rika and her friends. Actually, one of the people she consistently killed in each time loop and tried to kill in the last one ends up being sympathetic toward her and lets her cry into his shoulder. How disgusting. Yes, the point of this last time loop was that there weren’t supposed to be any losers, but it’s also a little too perfect that not even any of the bad guys wind up dead in what was supposed to be a life and death battle. The final battle was kind of lame that way, because it consisted of a bunch of kids setting non-lethal traps for people who were instructed to kill all of them on sight and were armed to do so. But, the end was still pretty satisfying when everything that had been building up came together in the end and the grisly fate of Hinamizawa was finally avoided.

As far as other weaknesses, for the most part they’re nitpicks. Things like Mion and Shion Sonozaki packing a revolver and no one noticing or mentioning it, and never actually using it when it would have made sense to do so, or Hanyū showing up in physical form for the last time loop, but still having horns, only no one seems to notice and never get mentioned. The thing I personally hated and found to be the biggest flaw, however, was the sexualizing of the younger girls, and taking this further by having an adult character have a sexual attraction to one of these girls (we’re talking grade school age) and playing up his pedophilia as being funny and a joke. Fortunately this doesn’t come up very often, or it might have effected my ability to enjoy the show. The other major weakness of note is the ending. Basically it suggests that an adult Rika or Hanyū has gone back in time and has successfully managed to keep the major event that leads to the big bad becoming the big bad from happening. That actually kind of ruins things considering everything the story has gone through, and the way the characters fought so hard for their happy ending. Not to mention that it doesn’t make much sense in how the series established the time loops happened to begin with.

That being said, I can’t recommend this series enough for you to watch, especially if you’re interested in murder mysteries and psychological thrillers. However, be warned that many of the murder scenes are somewhat gruesome, and if the thought of cute little moe characters going crazy and killing people disturbs you, you might want to pass on this series instead. If that doesn’t bother you or you otherwise think you can handle it, definitely watch this series. Just skip the last season and don’t bother with the live action movie. 8/10.

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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Rei

(5 episode OVA)

This OVA is completely pointless and adds nothing to the series at all. In fact, it seems to forget or ignore aspects of the series. So basically this OVA does to Higurashi what Terminator 3 does for that franchise.

I started watching this wondering by wondering what could possibly happen to add to the series and manage to be wrapped up within 5 episodes, because while the end of season 2 has an odd sequel hook, it could basically be ignored since it didn’t make any sense to begin with. The story was over, we saw it end with a nice happy ending that had no losers. Now I was hoping that it might be another mystery/psychological thriller story that added on to the series proper and showed us some kind of consequence of what went down. Naturally, I was disappointed. The OVA is actually three separate stories, and really nothing adds to the series proper. It also seems to forget that Hanyū should have a physical human body now and that the big bad was, you know, the big bad. Instead she becomes the comedy relief for the two comedy stories that serve as bookends to the more serious middle story that takes up only three episodes.

Now, I won’t bash the first episode completely, because it was pretty obvious that it was never meant to be taken seriously even a little bit. I also have to admit to laughing more than once during it, despite it pretty much being the cutesy, slice-of-life stuff that I really don’t care for. Most of the humor for me pretty much just came from the absurdity of it all. I might have even forgiven this as just a fun little romp that didn’t mean anything, except that this wasted an episode of an already short OVA, and the fact that the next episode and the start of the serious story arc made it clear that the main characters’ day at the pool did take place and the absurd events from it did actually happen. I hate you, OVA.

The last episode was also a waste of an episode, and consisted of a story where some magical charm makes one of the main characters fall in love with whoever happens to have another magical charm that goes with it. You know, one of those stories… Yes, I know it’s just supposed to be a fun romp, but by now my patience was at an end and all I saw was a waste of an episode, and to be frank a waste of an OVA. Why? Why, OVA, why?

Okay, so I’ve bitched about it, now for the “good” part. The serious story arc that took up only three episodes of this 5 episode OVA actually does present a somewhat interesting dilemma, in which Rika, the Bill Murray of this blood-soaked Groundhog Day story, must choose between two worlds which each have positive and negative aspects to them. There’s the one from the series proper (aside from the mistakes I mentioned earlier), in which she and her friends fought to overcome fate and now live happily together, or there’s the alternate world she finds herself in. Basically, in this new time loop, the big fight over the construction of a dam that essentially started everything in the series proper never happened, none of the gruesome deaths happened, and none of the main characters have the tragic pasts they had in the series proper. Oh, and Rika’s parents didn’t die. This also serves to complicate her choice, as the key to Rika getting back to the familiar world she knew was trapped in the form of her mother, and the only way to use it would be to kill her mother. And it was also apparent that while initially she was unhappy with this new world, she could potentially be happy in it now, so it was an interesting dilemma, even if the choice she was going to make was pretty obvious.

The downside is that we’re basically cheated here. We started out getting cheated by having Rika act like a complete idiot in order for her to die and end up in what appears to be a new time loop. Her being an idiot aside, initially this is something of an “oh shit” moment, because it looked like she might have to go through everything all over again, and all because she was a dumbass and got herself run over by a truck. We’re then cheated again at the end of the story arc, because we never see her make the choice, we just see her wake up back in the timeline from the beginning of the story arc, apparently having recovered from having a truck run over her face (Hanyū’s doing, somehow, apparently). We then learn that apparently the entire story arc was a cheat, and that the entire point of it was to get Rika to respect and miss her parents again. I think. Thanks for wasting my time, OVA…

So you could definitely say I really didn’t much care for this “addition” to the Higurashi saga. It really didn’t add anything, and the one good part of it was basically a cheat. I can honestly say that even with the somewhat interesting dilemma faced in the three-episode story arc, I wish that this OVA just hadn’t been done. The series already has a decent enough ending and didn’t need this little addendum. 4/10.

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Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

(2008 live action movie)

This is unfortunately yet another example of a good animated series being poorly adapted into a live action movie. I was disappointed, because when I’d heard that there was a live-action version of this series, I was hoping that it would be as good as or better than the series itself. But, that’s not really being fair, because stories that originally took a lengthy series to tell rarely adapt well into movies. I guess I got my hopes up here because the first movie only told the story from the first time loop in the first season of the series, with another movie already having come out and it looking for all intents like this will be a series of movies. And hey, the first story arc from the first season was one of the creepiest ones, so really this movie could have been pretty good. But it wasn’t.

Now, I’m not going to bitch because this movie wasn’t exactly like the anime; I completely understand them taking liberties with the story in order to adapt it to a movie. What’s important is that the main point of the story isn’t lost, and here a rather important aspect of it was, namely that it was already apparent that there was some kind of conspiracy involving a mysterious drug in a syringe, with that fact being covered up by parties unknown. The conspiracy aspect was kept, and the syringe even showed up, but the ending was kind of one of the clues that came up later on, and here it was changed, as was Keiichi’s end, and it doesn’t look like for any real reason, other than perhaps to show that the town’s doctor might know that the nurse who was supposedly burned to death in a barrel was actually still alive. But we don’t actually see that, so having him die in the hospital instead of being found after he’d died doesn’t really add anything to the story.

Really though, the two biggest enemies of this movie are the seeming lack of budget, and the lack of acting ability of the cast. Now, I say seeming lack of budget just because that’s the impression I got – that of a low budget horror movie. It looks like everything was shot on location, and while that does add to the realism of the setting, it also makes the movie look cheap, and leads to some issues with a severe lack of room. You know, for things like wildly swinging a bat around to kill two girls.

Speaking of, I was disappointed that this scene wasn’t actually shown save for a few flashes in the beginning of the movie. That should have made a pretty good hook to make people want to watch this movie, you know, some horror to go with the creepy tone, like in the series. Maybe it didn’t shoot well because of the lack of space on the set, or maybe the special effects didn’t have a budget to speak of.

Anyway, as if the visuals kind of souring me on this movie wasn’t enough, the actors just couldn’t sell me at all on what was going on. I honestly couldn’t even tell you if the voice acting part of it was good or not, because I don’t understand Japanese and had to depend on emotionless subtitles. What I can tell you is that what I saw didn’t really sell me on anything even being creepy, let alone scary. It was like watching a pale imitation of the anime made by some college kids for a film class. As if to rub this in, the ads at the end of the movie didn’t just advertise the next movie, but the DVDs of the anime and volumes of the manga.

This movie was a waste of time, and doesn’t in any way encourage me to want to keep watching this live action movie series. If you liked the series, save yourself from having to endure a more boring, unconvincing version of what you already saw and liked. 1/10.

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When the Seagulls Cry (Umineko no Naku Koro ni)

(26 episode series)

When I first decided to check this out, I was actually thinking that this was Higurashi because I'd misremembered the title. It turns out the two are related though, going back to their roots as murder mystery games. As far as the anime goes, though, they just have a somewhat similar premise and tone. Oh, and a couple of characters who look and act like characters from Higurashi show up, and in the background at a couple points we see the creepy 9 year old girl watching the cheerier moe parts of Higurashi on TV. They were somewhat amusing nods to Higurashi, along with the title page they used for commercial breaks.

Anyway, since I'd seen Haruhi before I watched this, I couldn't help but be reminded of the episode where they all go to some rich guy's private island to solve a murder mystery, because that's exactly how this series started out. Well, that and by getting the fact that the protagonist, Battler Ushiromiya, was a perv who was obsessed with big breasts right out in the open as soon as possible. I may share his fascination that way, but I'm not into my cousins like he is. But then it's pretty obvious whoever made this series was a perv themselves since every female character except the three loli characters has at least D-cups and dresses like a slut. Kind of makes me think of Eiken, actually...

Moving on, the creepy 9 year old, Maria, just happens to be obsessed with witches and the supernatural and the like, which is handy. After all, she single-handedly moves the plot along at points, and to an extent actually got it moving to begin with. Up until she sees Beatrice the witch and reads the creepy letter she gave her after dinner, the show pretty much consisted of rich people being boring rich people while they set up this incredibly stereotypical scenario right out of the game Clue. For the most part, though, Maria is just there to be creepy and to simultaneously fill the moe quotient of the series.

So the murders start happening, and there's supposed to be a supernatural element to it that makes it creeper or something, and it kind of sort of was, except for the fact that I also found it kind of boring at the same time. The idea is that they're supposed to be figuring out this riddle so they can not only be spared their lives and get ten tons of gold, but they're all convinced that someone who is just a regular old human being like themselves is just killing them and trying to scare them into finding this gold for them, like probably any sane person would. So they spend all their time trying to figure out who the culprit is just so they can all die in the process, as Beatrice finally reveals herself and her magic for the audience and kills them. Why? Because she's a witch, and that's how she gets her jollies, apparently. Or something. Let's just say she isn't entirely consistent with how she's written.

As I mentioned before, this shares the whole time loop premise with Higurashi. The difference here is that instead of the characters just getting a new chance to avoid their fates, it's about Beatrice trying to convince Battler, one last skeptic among the family, that she's really a witch and that she's really using magic to kill people. Apparently it's really important that he believe in her or something so she can kill him and own his soul or something, I don't know. This could have been kind of interesting if it hadn't been basically an excuse to have Beatrice kill of everyone in different gruesome ways using magic, with the deck stacked completely in her favor, at least up until she basically gives up. Also, it's not like any sane person, having just heard that their skepticism is basically all that's keeping them alive is going to admit that they believe in magic so they can be killed. But then, there are a lot of missed opportunities in this series. Like at one point Beatrice puts on a little cannibal feast for the last rich Ushiromiya sibling made out of parts of her family, including her own daughter. This could have been disturbing as hell and actually live up to being a horror like it's supposed to be, but instead it was so over the top theatrically that it just comes off as funny. But I will say that the series did actually manage to have a few moments.

Like this:

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That's right. Witch? More like, "Bitch! Make me a sandwich!" (From the cannibal scene, FYI)

Unfortunately these doses of humor are somewhat sparse, and much of it is unintentional. Like say the opening and closing themes, which aren't bad, they're just completely over the top and disproportionate to the "drama" in the actual show. It's not for lack of trying either; it's just that I found the attempts at drama and horror to be much more amusing than any of the humor that was written into the series. Add to that the few interesting moments where it seemed like Beatrice might have lost, even with her completely stacked, messed up game, only to have her suddenly come out of it using some contrived countermeasure, and you could definitely say that I was disappointed by pretty much the entirety of what I saw. Then Battler's sister came along and it looked like he might succeed again, only Angie died and the series ends with an unresolved sequel hook instead.

There's also the matter of the conflict that takes place in the series. Yeah, there's the main one with Kinzo, the paterfamilias, being a complete ass who actually seems to want the majority of his family dead, along with all of his loyal servants and even his good friend and personal doctor, for reasons that are never really rationally explained. Also not really explained is the conflict between Beatrice and the two other witches who look like Higurashi characters. They are established to not like each other and to be engaging in a kind of competition over this matter with Battler verbally sparring with Beatrice about whether witches and magic exist or not, but the reasons for this are left very vague. Basically it comes down to me asking myself why I should care.

I think, aside from being boring, the next biggest problem with this series is that it never really solves anything. There are plenty of questions raised, but none really answered. I suppose I could be wrong, and maybe there's some upcoming season which will explain everything as with Higurashi, but I'm not seeing anything about a continuation. The next biggest thing is the slew of other characters we never really learn anything about, which makes it difficult to care about them as anything other than the tools Beatrice and the other witches use them as. The funny (and annoying) thing is, a lot of them actually seem to have constant heel-face-turns that are never really explained and are simply a plot convenience. Like say how the same seven demon sisters who helped to slaughter the Ushiromiya family in the main 1986 storyline suddenly care about Angie, Battler's sister who they orphaned to begin with not long after this and basically help her to grow up to be a witch herself in 1998, all so she can go back to 1986 (means never explained) and help her brother defeat Beatrice. Beatrice herself tends to bounce back and forth from being sympathetic and kind(er) to being just a monster.

These major weaknesses added to the often slow pacing (especially in the first half), lead me to suggest that even if you liked Higurashi, you might want to skip this one. I'll throw it a bone for trying, though. 3/10.

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