ANI-MOVIES, *Isle Of Dogs

Whern are The Fantastic Mr. Fox was based on a Roald Dahl book, Wes Anderson's second stop-motion animated film was an original idea thought up mostly by him in Isle Of Dogs. This is a futuristic future fable set in a fictional Japanese city but told through the perspective of American viewers. Wes Anderson's auteur-driven filmmaking is on full display here with distinctive symmetery, unique color palletes, quirky writing, and introspective dialogue. The animation is more fluid than Mr. Fox with a better frame rate which takes this up to Laika levels of productions, although there is some 2D animation thrown in whenever they have the occassional shot being shown a video display. Anderson was inspired to do this from the old Rankin-Bass 3D specials, plus borrowed some plot elements from various Disney films shown from a dog's perspective as well as The Plague Dogs. The film was PG-13 and intended for older audiences as there is some animal cruelty and mature themes which wasn't as cohesive as most people with families might of hoped for, but despite its limited theatrical release it gained numerous accolades. There was some controversy as the plot was catered more for Americans which incorporated colonialism as well as ingoring genuine Japanese culture as the film has stereotypical elements like sumo wrestling, kabuki theater, and haiku is apparently the ultimate form of speechmaking, plus the addition of a blonde American transfer student to advance the story who was ultimately pointless.

Happening in the 2030s, the Japanese town of Megasaki is under the corrupt rule of Mayor Kobayashi who has been planning on ridding their streets of dogs as most of the people running the town are huge cat lovers. To accomplish this, they design a flu specically intended for dogs, have all the dogs banished to the neighboring garabage-ridden Trash Island, and surpress any chances or protests to thwart their plans, including poisoning a professor who had developed a cure for the flu. Kobayashi inherited his position of mayor from his brother who passed away and he adopted his rebellious nephew Atari who has created his own self-repaired plane to rescue his guard dog Spots. Atari crashes and is found by a pack of five dogs who decide to help him find Spots, even though the one stray of them named Chief isn't totally with the others on their decision.

ANI-MOVIES, *Angel's Egg

For the first original movie by Ghost In The Shell director Mamoru Oshii, Angel's Egg is probably the most surrealistic anime movie ever made. Coming out in 1985, Oshii partnered with Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano to make an enigmatic fantasy that to this day people are still trying to figure out. Studio Deen who first broke out in the Urusei Yatsura TV series was the production company behind this multi-layered film. This was an original story dreamt up by Oshii and Amano to which there has yet to have been anything to compare it to, and it has only recently become available in English thanks to GKids. After 40 years of escaping American localization, Angel's Egg had finally been cracked open for otaku everywhere to discover and dissect for themselves. The animation and design are incomparable to nearly any other anime of the time, and its visually breathtaking imagery could only have come out at the dawn of the OVA market when experimental production was at its peak. Titles such as The Time Stranger and Nausicaa would blend otherworldly elements together, but Angel's Egg was a bold new direction taking place in a completely original world of its own. However, the films esoteric perspective made it a hard sell for Western release despite its hypnotic appeal. The slow-moving animation coupled with the slightly muffled musical score creates its own world for the viewer to get lost in and either brush off as being dull or to be thoroughly analyzed in ways that make Evangelion look like a list of cheat notes.

Set in an undetermined time and place, an unnamed girl dwelling in an abandoned city collects water for herself while taking care of a large egg she found and carries with her. The girl come across a wandering older boy carrying a strange crucifix-shaped weapon, and the two of them watch as numerous fishermen throw spears throughout the city in the chance of spearing schools of non-corporeal giant fish which only cast huge shadows with no physical trace of their existence. The girl tells the boy that she believes the egg is that of an angel which might bring new life to the world, although the boy believes that the egg symbolizes that they are all caught in an endless loop, so he smashes the egg when the girl finally sleeps. The girl awakens to find nothing but a cracked eggshell, so she chases after the boy leading to a very ambiguous ending which depending on your perspective either shows the dystopian landscape either being freed from despair or it's just a moebious strip ensnaring all within it in repeating purgatory.

Prior to GKids, Angel's Egg did get a physical release in America in 1988, but this was a totally different beast. The film was a blending of the anime along with original live-action segments in a forgotten project titled In The Aftermath which diverts the story in an even more incomprehensible way. New Line Cinema premiered this with a VHS found usually only in video rental stores, and Arrow Video gave it a Blu-Ray release in 2019, but a majority of American otaku were blissfully unaware of this Frankenstein creation. Even though anyone who watched this version of the movie was probably confused out of their mind when comparing it to the original anime, hardcore anime fans became familiar with Angel's Egg thanks to good old reliable fansubs. The new GKids release has the entire unedited animation motion picture with its first ever English dub, even though it did take its sweet time getting here considering the caliber of talent behind it. New Line's slapdash rehash of the anime kept the film in licensing limbo for years, but now its overdue homecoming has arrived and available on Blu-Ray and streaming.

MISC. MANGA, *Space Opera Xanadax Across The Unknown Dimensions Of The Galaxy

Original graphic novels are still as strong on the comics market as ever, and Space Opera Xanadax Across the Unknown Dimensions of the Galaxy gives you a gripping cinematic experience. Created by Tom Scioli who did the kaiju ode to literature in Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theater, his latest hardcore sci-fi epic has probably one of the longest titles for an American comic book to date. The character designs appear as if they're out of the box cover to an NES game, and there's two concurrent storylines going on at the same time, although the plots never actually seem to meet up before the end of the book. There's is also the bonus story of Princess: The Space Princess From Outer Space which also has an abrupt conclusion. No word as yet if this was intentional for either story or if there are plans for a future volume to continue the saga.

The story is broken into two parts. One involves a cyborg named Xanadax who was given bionic parts to become a more effective minor after his brother sentenced him to work in the mines while he kept his cozy command job. Among other gizmos like a mechanical eye, Xanadax also gets a pair of laser claws similar to Wolverine which he uses to bust out of jail. Along the way, he gets into a bombastic slugfest with the escaped supervillain Vokonokov which takes him the majority of his story to defeat while avoiding his pesky brother's troopers. The other story has a pair of space pirates first taking over a farming planet but then getting conscripted into stealing a powerful treasure which accidently kills their benefactor, so the stellar swashbucklers decide to keep the deadly secret to themselves.

The story of Xanadax plus the space pirate subplot make you feel like you're really watching a sweeping motion picture with action scenes going one after the other with no time for exposition or character development. Tom Scioli's style is an homage to the works of Jack Kirby while simultaneously giving off the appearance of a shonen manga with mainly just the colors of red, white, and black throughout the entire graphic novel. Again, it's unknown if this setting up a series because the cliffhanger ending for both Xanadax and the Princess backup stories, but hopefully it will continue to highlight Scioli's beautiful illustrations which are a throwback to 80s action movies.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Croods: A New Age

Joel Crawford was given the reigns of the Puss In Boots sequel which took everyone by surprise, but before that he directed another DreamWorks sequel, The Croods: A New Age. Released 7 years after the original, this continues the prehistoric sitcom as the titular family finally reach some other humans. This took longer to release because of the pandemic which caused much of the work to be done by creators working in lockdown from home. The Croods was doing good enough as a franchise with an animated TV prequel, and was given a follow-up taking place after The New Age. All the original cast returns with this being Cloris Leachman's voice over swansong, plus the addition of Peter Dinklage and Kelly Marie Tran makes the new talent welcoming.

Still on the look for a perfect settlement in their new country, Guy and Eep get further along in their young romance. Conveniently, Grug discovers a family called the Bettermans made of Phil, Hope, and their daughter Dawn who managed to create their own sealed off paradise all because they cut off the water supply to a valley to their home. The Bettermans were friends of Guy's family and they got separated before his parents died, and now Phil along with Hope plan to get Guy to be Dawn's husband, even though he's already betrothed to Eep. Grug and Ugga pick up that the Bettermans are trying to push them away, so get back at them for eating all the bananas which is the one forbidden fruit the Bettermans have a rule for. Turns out, Phil would give all the bananas to an army of punchy monkeys who in turn offer them to their giant mandrill overlord, and they all kidnap all the mens. So now, it is up to the remaining females to rescue them as they ride in on wolf-spiders to defeat the primates and save their families.

The Croods: A New Age is a good animated movie sequel with an noticable upgrade in the animation, although the designs on the Bettermans seem like they were copied from a cache of unused DreamWorks background characters. A large number of the jokes fall flat, and the movie is overly reliant on needledrop moments for their soundtrack. It's an amusing feature, although whether or not you'll find much replay value out of this is up to the viewer.

ANI-MOVIES, *Lu Over The Wall

After The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl came out in 2017, Science Saru had their second anime film released in the same year, both put out by Toho. Lu Over The Wall might seem like yet another anime take on The Little Mermaid, although this one is not a romance, however you will notice the film bears a resemblance to Ponyo as the mermaid here is more of a little sister to the male protagonist. Even the creator Masaaki Yuasa began to see how his story reflected Ponyo as he was making it, and he took the same approach a few years later when he directed Ride Your Wave. Science Saru really experimented with different styles of animation with hand-drawn key frames with all the in-betweens done with Flash, and keep in mind this was still the late 2010s, but the film still looks like a traditionally animated production. There are a few songs added to this movie too, but it couldn't count as a musical as its all performed by a band. GKids did gave the dub a good treatment, although for some reason a few of the songs were left in Japanese while some were dubbed in English.

Set in a bayside fishing village, Kai lives in emotional solitude with his father and grandfather while his mother left them to have a singing career in Tokyo. Kai has his parents' love for music and a talent for it which gets the attention of two of his schoolmates, Yuho and Kunio, and they form a band called Seiren. Kai's music attracts a Ningyu which is the Japanese equivalent of a mermaid, but instead of being a nice-looking redhead this mermaid named Lu looks more like baby Muppet, plus she grows human-like legs whenever she hears music she likes, and she takes a real liking to Kai and his music despite the fact that sunlight could kill her. Lu's existence becomes known to the rest of the village, and they want to use her as the mascot for their abandoned amusement park, so Seiren tries to help Lu along with her giant shark father, but the townsfolk prejudice evokes a curse which threatens to drown the village. Lu and Kai eventually lift the curse, then Lu along with the other merfolk creatures must leave the village coast because there's no longer anything blocking out the sun, but Kai resolves to pursue his passion in music until he and Lu can be reunited.

Lu Over The Wall is a fine movie for the whole family with no violence, even though there are some frightening imageries throughout the course of the film. Masaaki Yuasa took this comic fantasy in an unorthodox direction, both visually and tonally, plus the animation style can radically change which make it hard to keep up with figuring out whether the scene you're seeing is a flashback or not. Again, don't expect this to be a tale of star-crossed lovers like The Little Mermaid, although there is a small romantic element to it. If you've already watched Ponyo, then this isn't too unfamiliar, but it does pick up to slapstick levels of Tex Avery antics as it goes along. The plot is diverse as well as divisive among anime fans, but you might find something refreshing here.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Bad Guys 2

Being the franchise factory that they are, DreamWorks figured they'd apply the same arrangement for The Bad Guys. Coming out three years after the original, The Bad Guys 2 not only put the brand name back on tracks but also helped launch a prequel animated TV series on Netflix. The animation here reaches an even higher peak than the original did, and they literally raise the stakes by taking the premise and launches it into space which is usually where you take a franchise after you don't know what to do with it anymore (see Jason X for reference). The story takes a good approach on showing how reformed villains are treated after they renounced their evil ways by how no one wants to give them a chance at fitting into civilian society. The story does advance things a little fast as most characters seem to get more advanced in their personal progress that a single sequel should cover, although at least DreamWorks doesn't look like they'll keep this premise jumping through several hoops like they did with the Shrek movies.

Now being good, the Bad Guys have been trying to get legitimate jobs but keep getting shut down. Meanwhile, a crimewave hits town with a new thief called the Phantom Bandit when it's really a trio of female crooks referred to as the Bad Girls who set up Wolf and the others to join them in their latest caper by having them take the fall for a heist involving a luchador wrestling match. The Bad Girls include their leopard leader Kitty Kat, Pigtail the boar, and Doom the raven who manipulates Snake into falling for her. Kitty Kat's big scheme is to steal a space shuttle and collecting a made-up mineral called MacGuffinite to attract all the gold in the world to the International Space Station which for some reason is totally unmanned, and as leverage Kitty threatens to expose Governor Diane's criminal past. The Bad Guys go along with it, but the Bad Girls get the drop on them and expose Diane's hidden history to the internet. With nothing left to lose, the Bad Guys get a lift on the shuttle, win over Pigtail and Doom to their side, and stop Kitty's ludicrous plan. However, they along with Diane fake their deaths and are asked to become part of a special spy team called ISGLOP, while it turns out the entire caper was a plot by the villain from the first movie to get out of jail and is really an alien.

The Bad Guys 2 isn't a common sequel and leveled up the formula by taking it several steps forward. Normally, the first sequel to an animated film has the characters running through the same routine as in the original, but this film continues the story and levels it up to Super-Saiyan 2. The best aspect here is the animation which takes anthropomorphic characters with standard cartoon designs and blends it together with stunning action sequences. The CGI animation is dynamic and takes quite a few hints from Sony with their Spider-Verse outings. The only downside is that it tried to stuff too much into a single film meaning that the third movie will go ballistic with whatever outrageous plot it has in store.

ANI-MOVIES, *The Place Promised In Our Early Days

Makoto Shinkai's first full-length anime movie came out in 2004 titled The Place Promised In Our Early Days, and similar to his future works such as Your Name and Weathering With You this anime has star-crossed lovers separated by cosmic forces. This was also the first time Shinkai had worked with a full staff as opposed to when he started out doing his animated-short movies and OVAs all on his own, so when he hooked up with Comix Wave Inc. it was a match made in heaven as their combined efforts left its mark for years to come. This movie was able to bridge a great divide that still exists between anime fans and non-fans that anime is a media and not a genre, meaning its appeal isn't limited to simply a certain demographic, and this became much clearer as Shinkai's career went on as his productions went on to enrapture audiences, mostly due to the creator's work becoming more accessible to newcomers and when his films were given longer running tile, not that this hampered 5 Centimeters Per Second which was just under an hour long and got a live-action adaptation. The story itself is an alternate history yarn, and like most tales of that genre it involves WWII, but this is combined with a coming-of-age romance with heavy sci-fi overtones. It's almost like you're watching Evangelion minus the giant robots and monsters. In fact, most of the expository scenes that try to fill in the technobabble your used to hearing from Star Trek looks like all the high-tech facilities look like they take place in Tokyo-3, even the computer displays and control room layouts. Taking this parallel universe premise and fitting in a believable love story wasn't easy, but Shinkai managed to do it.

This is set in modern day in a world where Japan was split into two sections post-WWII, the north occupied by Russia, and the south occupied by America, also the Cold War is still active in this timeline. Two schoolfriends in the south, Hiroki and Takuya, are rebuilding an old aircraft they found and plan to make it flyable again so they can go to an enormous tower in the north region. Hiroki has a crush on his schoolmate Sayuri and invites her to see their progress. The boys promise to take Sayuri with her on their future endeavor, but then she goes missing and three years pass with Hiroki and Takuya abandoning their planned flight. After a time skip, Takuya is now a physicist working on a method of utilizing energy from parallel realities and finds out that Sayuri has been in a coma during all this time and her dreams are affecting the interaction between their universe and others. Hiroki has been living on his own but gets dreams from Sayuri who finally breaks through and informs him that her subconscious is trapped in a world where she's the only one in it, so Hiroki teams up with Takuya to free Sayuri from her mental exile. The two old schoolfriends meet up again to finish repairs on their plane and fly the comatose Sayuri to the tower which is acting as the nexus for all the multiverse mix-ups run by the northern faction. Since it's only a two-seater, Hiroki pilots the plane with Takuya stays behind all while both halves of Japan on the brink of war. Not to give away the ending, but it has a more satisfying conclusion than Shinkai's Five Centimeters Per Second.

The Place Promised In Our Early Days was first released in America through ADV Films but was later available on certain streaming servers and only subtitled. GKids eventually re-released it on home video format and streaming with the American dub. This was Makoto Shinkai's big theatrical debut, and it won lots of film festival awards, although in comparison to most of his other works this movie is slightly jumbled when Shinkai tried to combine a slice-of-life story with the overlapping interdimensional tropes. Shinkai managed to untangle this knot by the time he started his Disaster Trilogy as most of the otherworldly elementals are explained as simply being magic. Aside from the plot complications, this anime is glittering with Shinkai's particular style with lush horizons and backgrounds that make Ghibli look pale in comparison, plus the character designs are simple and reminiscent of 90s TV anime which at times works against the detailed landscapes. The film altogether is great but compared to Shinkai's future works it is not as memorable.