Animation in August: Vampire Hunter D (1985)

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This is one of those films I thought I had seen. I remember hearing about in college or thereabouts. It generated some buzz because it was a very adult animated film with lots of sex and violence. That seemed very unusual to me at the time. I have a vague memory of renting it and watching it, but no actual memories of what the film was about. Watching it yesterday brought back no memories whatsoever.

Which is good as had I remembered any part of it I would not have watched it again. Vampire Hunter D is a bad film. It is poorly animated, the writing is awful. It takes what could be a cool concept and absolutely does nothing with it.

A young woman, Doris Lang, is attacked by Count Mangus Lee, a 10,000-year-old vampire while taking a walk . He lets her go but within a few days, she will turn into a vampire and be forced to marry the Count.

She hires our titular vampire hunter to help kill Count Lee and thus be freed from his spell. D is a human/vampire hybrid (or a Dhampir if you will), his mother having been seduced by a powerful vampire many years ago. He’s also got a symbiote living in his hand. It has a mouth and is quite chatty. It reminded me of the silly animal sidekicks in Disney movies.

He’s super powerful. He agrees to help Doris. He goes on a quest to defeat the Count, encountering a number of grotesque magical creatures along the way. This includes the three sisters – siren-like creatures who turn into snakes and suck the life force out of anyone. There’s also the Count’s son and daughter who are conniving, scheming, and totally at odds with one another. He wants to usurp the Count, she thinks his desire to marry a commoner is ill-advised.

I love a good quest story and there are some interesting ideas here. It is based upon a series of books by Hideyuki Kikuchi and it has that feeling of containing a deep mythology, but the movie botches pretty much all of it.

The biggest failure of the movie lies in the animation. It looks cheap. It looks like those cartoons I used to watch on television after school. Think GI Joe or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Some of the character concepts are interesting – especially that of D who is fitted with a good hat and long cape – but the animation looks sloppy. During action scenes the characters strike a pose while the background turns into a generic set of constantly moving lines. It is meant to denote movement and action, but really it just looks like an easy way for the animators to save a little time and money. Any sense of location and actual movement is lost.

In 2000 they released a sort-of sequel, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. From the trailers, the animation looks much improved. I dig vampires and vampire hunters/slayers so I might give it a shot. It surely will be an improvement over this garbage.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Wicked City (1987)

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Renzaburō Taki has been chatting up Makie at a Tokyo bar for months. Finally, she agrees to take him home with her. As soon as they arrive she strips off her clothes and they have passionate sex. As soon as he is finished she shows her true colors. She’s a demon. She morphs into a spider-like creature with long appendages and a mouth-like vagina that’s full of teeth. He manages to pull out before she chomps his member off and she flees out the window.

Outside, in the dark edges of the city live the creatures of the Black World. They are demons from an alternate dimension who can look like humans when they need to and live among us. Centuries ago a truce was made between the humans and the demons and they’ve lived peaceably together. Within a few days, a new pact must be signed, but there are rebel factions on both sides who want to stop that treaty from being signed.

Taki is a member of an elite organization known as the Black Guard designed to keep the peace between humans and demons. He’s assigned to protect Giuseppe Mayart, a 200-year-old mystic who signed the last treaty and will be instrumental in ensuring the new one is signed as well.

Taki is teamed with Makie a Black Guard from the Black World. They go through a series of adventures battling an assortment of demons trying (and often failing) to protect Giuseppe.

Wicked City is an inventive, beautifully designed bit of animated horror. Taki acts like a gumshoe out of some old film noir. Makie is cool as a cucumber. She’s not exactly a femme fatale, but she has that ice-cold attitude. The look of the film is a mix between neo-noir and steampunk. The demons are pure Japanese tentacle monsters.

I loved most of it. The story is good, the characters interesting, and the filmmaking is mostly spot-on. I love a good mix of crime stories and fantastic monsters.

However, if I may issue my first-ever trigger warning in a movie review the film is quite misogynistic. Nearly every man oggles Makie and whenever she is sexually assaulted (and she is sexually assaulted more than twice) the film lingers on her naked body. It is obsessed with her breasts. Even while being gang raped they make her moan with pleasurable noises.

Now I’m not against sex in cinema, and I’ve enjoyed the male gaze in more than a few movies. I’m fine with characters who do evil things and there are times when sexual assault and rape can serve a purpose. It sometimes does serve a purpose here. But the way those scenes are filmed made it more than a little gross.

If you can get passed that though, it is quite a good film. The world-building is excellent and some of the demons are truly terrifying, and weird, and imaginative. The animation is beautiful (and weird, and imaginative). Definitely recommend it for those who think they can stomach it.

Earth to Echo (2014)

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I truly have no memory of watching this. I did enjoy reading my review and noting how movies had kicked into nostalgia overload (the review was written in 2014) and chuckling about how quaint that sounds today.

I guess the movie was a mash-up of a bunch of 1980s family adventure films, but not nearly as good as any of them. This is probably why I don’t remember it. I’m sure I sold the Blu-ray so all I have left is this review.

The Jungle Book (1967)

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Is there anybody who sees the above cover art, or reads the title and doesn’t immediately start singing “The Bare Necessities”? I don’t think I want to know if the answer is “no.” The Jungle Book is a delightful film. I got this Blu-ray addition when my daughter was quite young. She immediately loved it and it became a staple of her television watching for a few years. If you’ve ever been a parent you know the joys of finding something your kid loves that won’t drive you completely insane after more than a couple of watches.

You can read my full review here.

Madagascar (2005)

madagascar movie poster This review was originally written and posted on January 17, 2007.

Living during the animation renaissance is not always the wonderful experience people who call it that would have you believe it to be. There certainly have been some amazingly designed and animated films in the last ten years, and yet there have also been plenty of copycat clunkers, as there will always be.

Pixar seems to be at the forefront of the Renaissance creating beautiful films that are fun and entertaining to the littlest tikes to the oldest adults. A difficult task to achieve given the constraints both of those two groups place together – it can neither be too juvenile to bore the adults nor too progressive as to offend those same adults around their children.

Dreamworks has been much more hit-and-miss in their animated kid fare. With Shrek, they nailed a series that rivals the best of Pixar’s work, yet by all accounts a Shark’s Tale was disastrous, and having just seen Madagascar I must say they have struck out again.

All is not rotten in the state of Madagascar, but its flaws are detrimental enough to keep me from watching it again. The jokes are mostly funny and most of the characters are enjoyable. The basic storyline is a good one with plenty of potential, but they run out of gas too quickly and things run aground about the halfway point.

The basic plot is that a bunch of New York City zoo animals escape the confines of the zoo and flee into the city only to be captured, and shipped off to a Kenya wildlife preserve. Unfortunately, before the ship lands it is hijacked and the animals are plunged into the sea, winding up in Madagascar.

From there it is a classic fish-out-of-water tale with these city animals having to deal with life in the wild. My problem with the story is that once they get to Madagascar they take the story into serious territory, but, due to this being a family story, chicken out before coming to its plausible conclusion.

The lion, you see, has been living large at the zoo as the most visited animal. He lives like a king, basking in the love of the humans and eating as many steaks as he can. Once he is in the wild he begins reverting back to his natural state – for there are now no processed steaks – and starts to have thoughts of slaughtering his friends for lunch.

However, since kids would be very upset to find the lion eating the characters they have grown to love, the filmmakers must create a different kind of solution. Since there are no likable fish characters in the picture the lion is able to chow down on raw sushi. It is a ridiculous, tacked-on solution. I understand the need not to cause undue mental stress to children, but making him devour the fish – who are also very much alive and cute – seems a bad choice. Besides not fitting with the character, it doesn’t really resolve anything other than he’ll no longer eat his friends.

The main characters are mostly unlikable. None of them were particularly funny or interesting, and two of them were underused and annoying. It’s not hard to realize that the lion’s reluctance to leave the zoo will result in him eventually accepting the wild and becoming the true king of the jungle. But the transformation winds up being barely existent, and the character never becomes really likable.

The only truly interesting characters were the secondary ones. The penguins were great fun, and it is good to see the filmmakers realizing this by placing them in some short films. Likewise, the monkeys as sophisticated socialites (who still throw poo) were brilliant. Too bad they had such short screen time.

The animation felt too clunky and stylized to my eyes. There are lots of odd, stiff angles and lines that made the characters look more like plastic toys than living creatures. The lion was also full of kinetic energy, causing him to jump around like crickets on crack which got annoying really fast.

It’s not a bad film. There were numerous funny moments and the basic concept is a good one. The plot falls apart in the second half and the main characters never gain the dimensionality that their animation would suppose. I’d categorize it as an enjoyable kids’ film that adults will get a few laughs out of.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

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Originally written on Mary 12, 2006

It seems Japan is the country of mention when it comes to film these days. Not only have they produced some of the best horror films of the last decade (see Ichi the Killer and Ringu) but they’ve made some incredibly imaginative animated films as well.

The most well-known animated director is a man named Hayao Miyazaki. A few of his films to make it over the pond are Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and most recently Howl’s Moving Castle.

Most of his films live in a fantasy world where mysterious, enchanting creatures roam freely with humans in a land where time seems to have escaped. People use modern conveniences along with ancient methods of living. There is usually a small, weaker protagonist up against massive odds.

In Howl’s Moving Castle, a young, unconfident girl, named Sofi has a spell cast upon her by an evil witch causing her to appear as an old woman. As this woman, Sofi gains some confidence and takes off for the moving castle which wanders through the countryside.

In it, she meets up with a young boy, a demon living in the body of a constant fire, and Howl himself. Howl is a wizard, who has nearly slipped into oblivion over self-doubt. He does, however, slip out of his castle to help stop a war going on between his own country’s land and another.

It is a moving story of characters finding their own character and becoming strong humans. It is told in a creative, beautiful way and is truly a cartoon that means just as much to adults as children.

Miyazaki creates animated features that are fit for the whole family in a way that is entirely different than those films from American companies like Pixar. Films like Toy Story appeal to all ages in that they are hilarious to everybody. The jokes hit on kid levels and adult levels without ever becoming saccharine or too mature. I love Pixar films, but Miyazaki films are so incredibly different.

There is humor in his films, but it comes from a very human place. In Howl’s Moving Castle, the only really jokey character is the demon fire, and that mainly comes from the fact that Billy Crystal does the English voice for the character. Mostly, there aren’t a lot of jokes as much as humor that comes from the situations.

It is more of a fantasy than a comedy, with fantastic characters and mesmerizing animation. Fully and highly recommended for anyone.