Marvel's Biggest Mistakes

ANI-MOVIES, *Suzume

Originally titled Suzume Looking Up, Makoto Shinkai's latest addition to his international winning list Suzume follows up the success of Your Name and Weathering With You, even though this feature doesn't take place in the same universe of The Garden Of Words like the past two releases. Suzume is another fantasy romance about doomed lovers who keep having everything in the world working against them to get together. There is of course the average amount of Shinkai's selling out to McDonald's, but decidedly less than usual. Comix Wave Films once again was the production company behind a visually arousing film by Shinkai, even though it does have some problems with pacing and knowing exactly where to end. Shinkai keeps adding more and more plot points on as it already had enough after all what happens in just the first act, which did work against Shinkai slightly in Weathering With You as he was compelled to pile further story elements into an already rich plot. It is in fact one long road trip between two strangers that are trying to avoid natural disasters which is interchangeable from Shinkai's previous two outlets.

Suzume is a high school girl under the care of her aunt Tamaki in the countryside since her mother passed away a decade ago after the disasters that plagued real-life Japan in 2011. On her way to school one day, Suzume encounters a handsome young man named Souta who asked her where any nearby ruins might be. Suzume points out an abandoned resort and then goes to school but notices a dark plume of energy coming from the uninhabited park. She ditches school and finds a single doorway sitting in the middle of an empty area that the energy comes out of. The doors are portals to a realm called the Ever-After where a titanic spiritual worm exists and unless these portals are periodically sealed off by otherworldly specialists called Closers of which Shouta is the last one, the worm will leak into our world. Shouta manages to close the door with Suzume's help, although Suzume finds a small cat statue that turns into a real cat. She takes Shouta back to her place to nurse an injury he got from the experience and the cat appears then surprisingly talks to them. The enchanted kitty changes Shouta into a child's chair Suzume's mother made for her, and then the cat named Daijin quickly runs off. Suzume and her newly transformed comrade follow the cat across the Japanese islands as Daijin goes from one portal after another seemingly to release the giant worm. Suzume makes a lot of comrades along her journey in trying to finally track down this troublemaking tabby and its campaign that leads to Tokyo where the head of the worm resides which could cause a massive earthquake. Suzume and Shouta have been under the impression that Daijin is one of the two keystones that hold the worm in place, but there's a shocking reveal that Shouta has been given that task instead, even as an animated small chair. Shouta sacrifices himself, leaving Suzume heartbroken thinking that her would-be love interest is now dead. The title heroine gets new hope from Shouta's grandfather who tells her that she might be able to bring him back if she goes to where she first entered into the Ever-After. This whole thing turns out to be a causality loop where Suzume's present-day self meets with her past self just after her mother's death and gives her the chair after Souta is free from the curse. Suzume heads back home as she eventually runs into Shouta again hinting that the two of them will begin a romance together.

There is a ton of unexplained lore behind this story, like what started the whole ritual of Closers, and why Daijin changed Shouta into a chair in the first place. Shouta's curse was an excuse for the plot to have a teenage girl travelling on a mystic quest around Japan with a man in his early 20s without it looking suspicious. Makoto Shinkai's story can get slightly cringey at times with the main characters' age difference, plus the legendarium not being all fleshed out. There are several nods to the works of Hayao Miyazaki in this like the worm being a stand-in for the demonic curse from Princess Mononoke, or background characters confusing Daijin for the cat from Whispers Of The Heart. Suzume might seem like the third part of a themed trilogy that Shinkai started with his last two theatrical creations, despite the fact it leaves out the romantic overtones of either Your Name or Weathering With You. The visual look of the film is wondrous and makes you want to visit all the places in Japan that it covers. The stratagem of Suzume does work even though the plot seems stretched out longer than it became. It's not a masterpiece, but still a must see for fans of Shinkai's library of works.

R.I.P. Joe Flaherty

 

Professor X says "Relax"!

 

ANI-MOVIES, *Ghost Messenger

"What was the point?!" is probably what most American viewers thought when the first saw this Korean animated feature. Ghost Messenger was supposed to be a 3-part OVA series with serious homages to existing anime like Evangelion and Fate, but only two episodes were ever completed. The final one has been in production limbo for over a decade with no sight of it finishing up anytime soon. So, streaming companies like RetroCrush decided to make urine out of lemons and just combine the existing episodes into a single feature with no dub and a translated that is critically below professional standards. Most of the dialogue reads like it was an AI script written by another AI program while tripping acid. The timing for the subtitles is atrocious with several words glued together making for incomprehensible compound words. This and the whole thing ends with a hugely unresolved conclusion makes it one of the most meaningless releases on the western market.

Set in Seoul, the spirits of the departed get caught in the world of the living that feed off other spirits. To ferry these spirits along, there is a special network of agents called Ghost Messengers that hunt down rogue ghosts. Kanglim is one of these agents and uses a special cell phone to wrangle the stray ghosts by taking pictures of them. Kanglim goes missing from work and his girlfriend Bari is covering for him while keeping an eye out for him, at least when she isn't going on excessive shopping sprees. A young human psychic boy also called Kanglim finds the GM Kanglim's phone after he got caught in his own phone that the "Little Kanglim" uses for his own selfish needs while keeping the "Big Kanglim" a prisoner that he lets out every so often to help him fight ghosts, as if the Ghost Messenger was his own personal Pokemon. A senior officer among the Ghost Messenger agency named Sara gets called to find out what was really going on, and we learn that Little Kanglim was keeping his grandfather's deceased spirit tied to his family's store since his mother who was also psychic got killed by spirits. Sara also uncovers that regular Kanglim has been missing because he is under a curse that makes him a potential abomination. The dueling Ghost Messengers take their battle to epic heights while Little Kanglim enters the spirit world looking for his grandfather's ghost. The feature ends on a severe cliffhanger of Bari leading the charge of an army of Ghost Messengers riding on chimeras launching an assault on an unseen enemy.

Ghost Messenger is insanely difficult to navigate the plot to and only those who have seen bad fansubs could even have the most remote chance of figuring it out. The animation and fight choreography are somewhat impressive, but considering that the production never reached its ending, you really have to wonder why someone bothered to do an English adaptation of it, and with such inferior subtitles to boot.

MISC. MANGA, *Devilman

Shin Devilman was an early 80s spinoff of the original 70s Devilman manga by Go Nagai and was one of the first pieces of printed material from the franchise that got an English release. Glenn Danzig of The Misfits started his own comic book company specializing in adult titles, one of which was this manga relabeled as just Devilman which confused people when it was released in the mid-90s that confused it with the storyline established in the OVA series from Manga Entertainment. Shin Devilman was a self-contained story that only tangentially connects the with original manga. The plan was to release it as separate comics book issues and then in a collected edition later on, but only three issues actually got released it with Nagai being displeased on how the coloring of it was handled with a shaky translation.

Taking place sometime after Akira had already bonded with the demon Amon to become Devilman, but his friend Ryo secretly being Satan the whole time has yet to be revealed. Akira visits Ryo's mansion when they both conveniently fall into a time warp that the spend the rest of the series in, making Devilman into a remake of Quantum Leap. They're first stop is none other than Adolf Hitler when he was a young artist and the devilish duo cause the future-genocider from making his first being commission and swears vengeance on all Jewish people. Akira and Ryo then travel to a time when Joan of Arc is under trial by the lords of Hell for causing the Hundred's Year War, but Devilman acts as the ultimate defense lawyer and calls the demonic court on their double-standard dung. The last issue has Devilman stopping a demon disguised as an angel who is handing out shotguns to people several centuries before they logically should have existed in the first place. Apparently, Hell can just rev up their own Tardis and use time travel to screw up human history even further than it already was.

Danzig's attempt to bring early mature manga to American readers in the 90s was a noble effort as Danzig himself was a huge fan of Devilman, so much so that he created his own female counterpart in a series titled Satanika that was slated to have its own genuine anime along with a fully produced trailer by a professional Japanese studio. Go Nagai was seriously not impressed with how Verotik handled his work causing the American Devilman comic book series getting cut short. Nagai's artwork is still impactful and highlights the maturity missing from most other manga getting an English release at the time. The idea of taking a horror-based superhero and having them go travel through time and causing the events that they tried to prevent is an original idea, but it just doesn't work well here for someone not familiar with the previous versions of Devilman. It would be like introducing Godzilla for the first time as being a Time Lord instead of a mutated dinosaur. The 3-issue run has been long out of print, even though its is still available directly through the Veroitk website. If you want to see how to do a lousy job of given a coveted manga series an English release than Danzig's Devilman should help your masochistic machinations.

You dense motherbat!