Category: Ongoing Investigations

Ongoing Investigations: Case #109

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After a full year Katanagatari comes to a close and it has been an interesting journey. Nisio Isin is still very obviously Nisio Isin no matter what he does. That means playing the with genre, winking at the audience, bizarre and sometimes immensely annoying characters, and metric tons of dialog. With 12 swords and 12 owners we have gotten a good deal variation in how the episodes felt. Some of the owners and swords were far more interesting than others but that is expected with having to create 12 pairs of antagonists and weapons. Also some of the later swords only count as swords because the author says so. I am going to assume that the episode that completely threw out the formula completely and had Nanami as the main charter was a highlight for most people.  The ending has parts that will either be very shocking or super obvious depending on who you are. It starts with a  speech that exemplifies the fact that characters do not stop talking no matter what happens. The final episode also has the prerequisite Boss Rush that seemed inevitable from the beginning. In the end everyone who had a plan involving the swords had an immensely elaborate Rube Goldberg styled plan that could have been simply solved without the swords in reflection. In fact there is some extremely sketchy logic that will probably annoy the daylights out of anyone not drawn in by the story. I enjoyed the story and like the Monogatari Series it proves he can write something I don’t utterly despise like the Zaregoto Series. But his style is still a hard pill to shallow and I can easily see why people would avoid his work like the plague.

I read Natsume’s Book of Friends vol. 1 which I was very excited about since I loved what I saw of the anime. This is the story of Natsume who can see yokai and who has felt isolation because of it. When he moves in with yet another set of relatives he starts to learn more about his long gone Grandmother who had the same power and used it to dominate the spirits. Things get hectic as spirit after spirit comes after Natsume to get back their “name, ” which his Grandmother had collected into a book. So far the stories have all been ones I watched on screen. Each has a little humor, a little nostalgia, and most times a very quiet and melancholy feel. Natsume is a really gentle soul and its wonderful to watch him listen to the stories of the yokai while also learning about his Grandmother. The artist’s lines are quite loose which adds the whimsy I am so found of to the stories. Though I have to say I enjoyed the anime just a bit more, the soft color palette and light music really added to the stories. Nevertheless, I want more Natsume and hope to find stories that weren’t animated in its pages.

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #108

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Just about as soon as possible we sat down for the 14th Detective Conan movie, The Lost Ship in the Sky featuring a myriad of familiar faces and also the charming Kaito Kid. Things are pretty complicated this time around as bioterrorism rears its ugly head, a secret crime group reappears, a plot to catch Kaito Kid is hatched, and an airship is hijacked. As often occurs, Conan and Kaito team up for a good portion of the film to take out the real baddies. The airship is pretty impressive, and there are some thrilling scenes throughout, but the final confrontation seemed less flashy than usual. The mystery had a lot going on, and figuring out the motive was near impossible, in fact I’m still not quite clear on it, so it came off as more thriller than mystery as Conan worked to find the bombs and disarm the hijackers before it was too late. Of course the cast was stupendous, pretty much throwing in a cameo of everyone including most of the police officers we’ve seen, though truly this is a Conan and Kaito show. After all was said and done, the last scene of the film tricked me into thinking something extremely plot relevant had occurred but the extra after the credits clears it up and things go back to normal. While not the best of the films, still a good ride and it has Kaito Kid!

hisuicon I like to call this Detective Conan Movie 14: Die Hard on a Blimp. Conan and Kaito cross paths with their usual delightful mixture of rivalry and comradery. We also get some cute interplay between Kaito and Ran as well. I agree with Narutaki that while there was a good deal of action overall there was not that same huge action sequence at the end of the movie that pushes the budget to the limit. It was a bit odd that Heiji was toting around a self insertion kid for this movie when they already have the Detective Boys for that purpose. Also they did not do much of an introduction to the story, characters, and gadgets as they have done with past movies. This was especially noticeable since we watched this movie with someone who had never watched Conan before. They followed along fine but I wonder if they cut the normal extended intro for time reasons or because they no longer feel they are as necessary. It was a fun movie that was a bit of a change of pace from the normal murder mystery while still having a Conan feel. Although with no murder I am sure that S. S. Van Dine and Narutaki were both slightly disappointed. It is worth checking out and hopefully FUNimation will get around to putting it out in the US. On a side note, I think I have leveled up again as an anime fan by the fact that I noticed that they changed voice actors on Kogoro.

 

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Ongoing Investigations: Case #107

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hisuiconDaryl Surat went out of his way to recommend Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame to me, so the least I could do was check it out. It is an unusual hybrid martial arts mystery movie. Surprisingly enough it succeeds on both fronts quite well. The mystery is well executed and follows Knox’s rules to the letter expect for the 5th rule. But the story takes place in China there is no way to get around it. Also Knox’s 5th has always been very silly and is clearly a product of its time. I figured out most of the details of the mystery as the story went along but I felt the answers  were not glaringly obvious while still being solvable if you were playing attention. The fights were fairly cool and whenever they try to kill Detective Dee they do so with extreme prejudice. They don’t send an archer to assassinate him.  They send a legion of archers to cover ever inch of the house he is staying with arrows. I did find Dee’s choice if signature weapon unexpected but in a good way. His weapon actually says a lot about him as a man and a detective.  The only problem is that the special effects range from competent to horrifically cheesy. The effects never ruined the movie but they did make me chuckle on occasion. Dee himself has a gentle charm with just enough bite to mix it up. His Detective work is clean and he has a good mixture of scholarly knowledge, keen perception, and street smarts. His two assistants/rivals oscillated between being annoying and being cool especially when it came to the albino Shatuo (who I called the Chinese Malfoy.) I highly recommend it to anyone who likes martial arts movies, detective stories, or just wants something a little bit different. If they made a sequel I would definitely give it a look.

Despite my misgivings about Tangled‘s trailer, I went to see it over Thanksgiving weekend. I found myself pleasantly, and surprisingly, enchanted by the movie which I was giving the benefit of the doubt thanks to some articles I had read. The story is of course a familiar one, but it has its own additions like rouge thief Flynn and Rapunzel’s pet chameleon. Rapunzel is humorous and strong in her varying moods, and she is quite handy with her weapon of choice, a frying pan, which provides loads of laughs throughout the film. Though I will say that the humor is hit and miss especially when it comes to Flynn. While ignored in the trailer, the film does have musical numbers though they are integrated a little differently, such as Rapunzel’s introduction piece which for the most part doesn’t feature her visually signing. Actual on-screen singing is notably absent during the stunning boat scene between Flynn and Rapunzel, too. The songs themselves felt forced in the first half of the film, but really pulled together in the second part. In fact, the whole film is just much better in its later half. The visuals are the best I’ve seen in CG animated film and the scenes in town, the dancing, and the lights filled me with warmth and awe. The film rounds out with the right amount of magic and a happy ending. Also loved the ending credits with old-style story boarding. While Tangled won’t go down as my new favorite Disney film, if this is the level of quality that Disney will produce and make money, I’m more than pleased.

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