ANI-MOVIES, *The Monkey King

The story of Sun Wukong has been adapted more times than nearly any other character in the world. Journey To The West was turned into dozens of movie and TV shows both live action and animated, plus video games, some of the most popular being Saiyuki, Alakazam The Great, and a little something called Dragonball. The Monkey King is the latest interpretation of the Chinese legend produced by Netflix Animation and Pearl Studio in their follow up to Abominable and Over The Moon. Both studios pushed to make this a mainstream animated family adventure, although it didn't get the kind of reception that Netlix got a year later when they screened Sony's theatrically-rejected K-Pop Demon Hunters. Even though this takes place in ancient China, this was written to be a snappy comedy hoping to appeal to Generation Z which does work against it at times. The film is CGI, although there is an impressive 2D sequence that you wish got its own full movie. The computer animation is pretty fluid with some electrifying fighting scenes and fast-paced magic duels.

A monkey is hatched from a rock and immediately starts ticking off the other monkeys since he doesn't have any parental figure. A tiger demon has been feasting on the younger monkeys, so this unnatural monkey spends the next few years training himself to fight, and then swims to the underwater palace of the Dragon King to take the prized magical staff that our monkey hero can talk to. After using the staff he calls Stick to defeat the demon, he is proclaimed Monkey King by the other monkeys, he however doesn't want to just rule some simians and sets his sights on the heavenly palace and taking his place among the gods. In order to get their attention, Monkey King goes out and kills 99 more demons for an even 100, but his efforts go unnoticed by the gods, so he sets out to become immortal, and takes on a young girl named Lin as his assistant as they go to the underworld to erase his name on Scroll of Life giving himself no expiration date. This only makes him half-immortal, so he and Lin go to the heavens to get a special elixir to make him fully-immortal, but what Monkey King doesn't know is that Lin is secretly working for the Dragon King to get Stick so he can cover the world in water. Once he gets Stick back, Dragon King does a memorable evil villain song and grows to kaiju-size, but he is defeated by Monkey King who feeds of magic lightning and turns into a titan himself. After defeating Dragon King, Monkey King goes a little mad with power, so Buddha shows up and uses Lin as a speaker to get him to calm down and imprisons him inside a mountain for 500 years where he begins his quest to the West.

The Monkey King does grab your attention for most of the run time, although this can get tiresome after a while. After watching this the one time, it takes a sturdy frame to be able keep up with the unrelenting pace. There is too much ego-driven dialogue and situations that instantly escalate into world-shattering threats to keep a bead on any character progression. There is currently a huge amount of movies bearing Monkey King in their total, although this version of Sun Wukong can be slightly intolerable, he's no more narcissistic than any of the other revamp of the hairy hero.

MISC. MANGA, *American Barbarian

Before doing comics of Transformers, Gobots, GI Joe, and Godzilla, comic artist and writer Tom Scioli had his own original series titled American Barbarian which is a collision of Thundarr The Barbarian, Thundercats, and Masters Of The Universe. Indeed, this is a He-Man-themed take on the standard fantasy adventure hugely inspired by the works of Jack Kirby, which most of Scioli's works tend to as he's done the artwork on an entire graphic novel about the life of the King of Comics. Scioli worked on this while he was doing his Godland comic which was also Kirby-esque.

Set in the devastated New Earthea, the barbarian Meric is the last surviving member of a warrior clan who were all wiped out of by the mummy warlord Two-Tank Omen who has a whole working tank for each foot. Meric pretends to join Omen's forces while keeping his family's secret, the mystical Star Sword, hidden from evil. Meric meets up with a tribe of humans and sets them free from the scavengers and then reclaims the sword to have a cataclysmic clash with Two-Tank Omen resulting in the two of them getting sucked up into a black hole. All the remaining humans form the new United States of Barbaria with the hint that Meric will return someday.

With armored swordsmen, robotic dinosaurs, time travel, and sultry slave girls, American Barbarian grew from a webcomic to hit one-shot graphic novel. It contains terrific splash pages and just like Kirby would do when he was creating the New Gods and Thor. It has a real appreciation for the Bronze Age of comics. If you've recently joined the MOTU fandom, then this is a patriotic rainbow of fan nostalgia.

ANI-MOVIE, *Flushed Away

Aside from the fact the film was minus any hamster butlers as shown in certain previews, Aardman's first of only two fully-CGI animated movies wasn't the drowning disappointment most people thought it was. This was the last of three films Aardman did with DreamWorks before joining up with Sony, but instead of the studio's traditional stop motion animation as they did with Wallace And Gromit, Flushed Away was all done digitally which might seem like a stretch for them to take, but then even the Jim Henson Company got roped into doing a few direct-to-video bad 3D releases. It was chosen to go CGI because the majority of the animation takes place around water and would make it difficult to move around clay figures, so Aardman put aside their Gummy standards to give digital animation a shot. Upon first look, some might confuse this for being a Danger Mouse ripoff, but since Flushed Away was directed by animator David Bowers who worked for Cosgrove Hall, you'd be better off thinking of the film as an homage. Along with director Sam Fell, Aardman had a total of five screenwriters to write all of the "witty dialogue". The cast was stacked with Hugh Jackman in the lead role and finally singing, Ian McKellen playing the wannabe Bond villain, Kate Winslet as the inevitable love interest, Jean Reno as the standard French stereotype, plus Andy Serkis and Bill Nighy as a comical pair of henchmen.

Roddy is the pet rat of a rich family in London who leave home for vacation, and he gets literally flushed down the tubes by the intrusive Sid who takes over his pad. Roddy ends up in a rat metropolis within the sewers which is partially run by the criminal boss Toad who captures him and a female ship captain named Rita who he tried to gain passage with back up top. Rita and Roddy escape along with taking Toad's master cable to his apparatus which he planned to wipe out all the rats from the sewer, so Toad sends his cousin Le Frog and his team of French zipper ninjas to get it back. Rita eventually helps Roddy get back to his home, but after realizing that he was miserable being lonely in a such a big palatial estate and figuring out what Toad has planned for the other rats, Roddy gets flushed away again to save everyone.

Flushed Away doesn't have the most spectacular computer graphics in an animated film, however there is some particularly upstanding slapstick and rapid-fire dialogue that make it a comedic watch. It would have been better if Aardman had been able to pull off their usual claymation creations, but the 3D animation is acceptable even if it's not up to Pixar's level. A sample of something that definitely padded out the runtime longer than it needed to be is the singing slugs who show up to do a romantic ditty and demanding to be noticed, as if the slugs were the prototype for the Minions from Despicable Me that Illumination totally stole from. Your kids might just see this film as a fun sit to fill out an afternoon, but Anglophiles and animation fans should get a kick out of it.

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Gameoverse: Don't Call It A Pilot!

Glitch has become more than an independent animation studio from Australia. It has become a full-fledged juggernaut including scores of merch outside of the generic swag you usually see in niche markets and right up on the mainstream toy isles, plus getting a mainstream theatrical release for one of their series finales. Their latest pilot is by Ross O’Donvan titled Gameoverse which has taken the world by storm and was cowritten by Arin Hanson also known as Egoraptor. This all started back in 2009 on the springboard for wide-eyed animators known as Newgrounds as a mini-series and O’Donovan tried pitching it to Glitch although it was put in stasis for years as O’Donovan went to work for Game Grumps. Finally in 2024, it was announced that Glitch would make this a full series. The animation obviously got an upgrade, with real gaming and animation professionals backing the project, plus the shocking part is that even though it’s inspired by retro video games, the animation is done in 2D.

The pilot takes place in a universe where each planet is its own video game world inhabited by a variety of characters, featuring a hero and a villain. If at some point, if the hero defeats the villain, then the entire world is destroyed by an unknown source. This sets up competing factions, one is the Farcade who are essentially the good guys who try to help the villain win, while their counterparts of the Syntax are doing the opposite who gather the destroyed planet’s energy into something called Float which is supposed to be able to restore those who were killed when their planets got the finger. This sets up an original concept with rival organizations battling for simultaneous devastation along with keeping the status quo with no progress being made by the hero in his predestined struggle as the game’s lead character.

This might sound like a remake of the Wreck It Ralph movies with its concept of game hopping, but Gameoverse goes an extra step further outsiders from one reality altering the course of a world caught in its own loop. This can affect how each video game world works on its own physics, making for a diverse selection of game genres to choose from. It also digs into the morality of trying to go along with a program everyone in that world follows while having complete strangers show up and trying to either help or heed their progress.

Gameoverse does have a temple of talent behind the cast with anime actors like Erica (Netflix Ritsuko) Lindbeck and Chris (Not My Vegeta) Sabbot, although Egoraptor playing two of the major characters doesn’t blend well especially his Grunkle Stan voice as the Barney parody dinosaur. The writing also needed some tweaking by waiting to save most of the character motivations until a later episode. Many people don’t like it nowadays when they give too much exposition in the first episode and instead get right to the action, however this door swings both ways and not giving enough can work against it.

One thing that doesn’t most people don’t seem to notice that this is a pilot episode. The story ironically takes place after the original trailer with the Farcade team adding the Learnosaurus to their roster, but there is a big divide between a pilot episode and the first episode. It’s clear from examples like Hazbin Hotel that the pilot and the first episode made for streaming were separate in tone and theme with a totally different cast being added to the series than the plot, an alteration in the animation quality, plus less time spent on people going, “Who is this new character?”. It’s hard to say if Glitch is planning on changing much from the initial Gameoverse episode like giving it a completely redone beginning like what was done with Bee And Puppycat for Netflix. Even though the studio might make huge changes like making it as dark as something like Final Space with concepts like planetary oblivion looming over the characters, or they might make it an absurdist comedy out of a Douglas Adams novel. So, whatever goes on between now with the pilot and when it becomes an ongoing series might be one big chasm to leap.

There’s been some major criticism claiming the pilot relies to much on fan service. Not so much the appeal to old school gamers, but the fact that the two main female characters spend most of the episode in bikinis. This isn’t done in a leering way but in a G-rated cartoon approach. The heroic Kit and the wicked Miss Information aren’t drawn with overtly sexual designs and are instead very generic with a visually retro motif, so it’s nothing on the level of a Dead Or Alive volleyball match.

Gameoverse is still rough around the edges, but there is a ton of potential along the way. It’s not like they’re doing yet another bad video game adaptation such as the old USA Network cartoons based on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Instead, it’s an above average homage to gaming culture keeping otaku stimulated with the random comedy and overexaggerated personalities of the colorful cast of characters. It’s not yet at its peak, but the pilot did go out of its way to make a first impression, even if some narrow-minded people see it as a Pibby clone.

ANI-MOVIES, *Deemo: Memorial Keys

With all the movies animated and live action based on video games lately, only one of them is based on a rhythm game, which means we're never getting that official Dance Dance Revolution film. Deemo was a rhythm game with an actual story to it that was released in 2013 that gained a big following, which was adapted into full-length anime movie in 2022 by Production IG and Signal.MD as their last project before Production IG bought them out and just after they completed Words Bubble Up Like Soda Pop. The director was Shuhei Matsushita who also directed Doctor Stone, although there seems to be a supreme lack of effort put into this as its all CGI and looks like mid-2000s cel shading. The models from the video game appear better than those in the anime and the character movements are stiff like they're all lifeless puppets, plus the bad story pacing added to film's downfall.

The movie is split into two plots both playing out at the same time. One has an amnesiac young girl named Alice entering a fantasy world, so already they're just ripping off Lewis Carroll. The dream realm is like the inside of a castle with books and talking toys and a tall dark stick figure called Deemos who plays the piano. Whenever Deemos plays some memorable music other parts of the castle open up which eventually lead to the way out, so Alice and her friends are first thwarted by a masked girl who eventually joins in their efforts. After a while, Alice realized that all these characters were aspects of her life before an accident which killed her older brother who she lived with and the masked girl was an incarnation of her dream self, so this whole time Alice has been in a coma. Years later, Alice was adopted by her brother's old music instructor who teaches at an academy that she is a student at, but she had almost no memory of her time in the dream realm until she was given an incomplete song her brother left for her. With the addition of her finally gaining some friends in school, Alice's memories are restored and is able to finish her brother's piece.

Deemo: Memorial Keys is a below average production that stretches out a meager video game plot with the meandering antics of Alice's toy friends, and the narrative has an uneven flow to it as it switches between the modern-day events and those during Alice's extended dream sequence. The entire film is jumbled in its presentation and is difficult to keep cohesive with the only plus sign being the piano soundtrack which does help keep the movie's head above water. You can watch this on several free streaming services, but you'll probably instantly forget it after a single watch.

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