Hello everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. We have got a lot to get through today, and a bunch of it is actually anime-related this time! I finally checked out the Given movie, filled in one of the great remaining gaps in my Gainax knowledge, and even watched Netflix’s Death Note movie – along with which, of course, there was plenty of the usual horror and One Piece. Our One Piece momentum has slowed down just a tad, but we were still able to bound through the Sabaody Archipelago, while leaving more room to return to my crawl through cinema history. We’ve got a lot to break down and I assume you’re supposed to be working or studying right now, so let’s get right to the Week in Review!
We began this week with the Given film, which offered a concentrated dose of the show’s emotionally fraught melancholia. With Ritsuka and Mafuyu having sorted out their initial conflicts by the end of the show proper, the Given film turns to their two older bandmates, and digs into the messy history of Akihiko and his former lover Ugetsu. If you enjoyed Given, you’ll likely enjoy this continuation; the film maintains the property’s frank yet delicate approach to personal relationships, and its movie format allows it to even more directly engage with the conflicts of its sexually active older characters.
At the same time, the need for a clear “movie narrative” made the drama feel a bit less organic than its predecessor; Akihiko is moved some distance from his characterization in the TV series in order to prompt the central conflict, and its ultimate resolution felt a little too clean to me. Additionally, the film doesn’t really look any better than a series of TV episodes, and the final performance sequence is actually worse than the series’ climactic song, with heavy reliance on CG models. On the whole, the film is a perfectly fine continuation of one the best-written anime in recent years, while also indicating this franchise is likely better suited for TV seasons than individual films.
Next up, I checked out Island of Lost Souls, a 1932 film that I’d learned was essentially the definitive adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” and therefore also the definitive film origin of the “mad scientist reigns over a menagerie of monsters” trope. I’d been clued in to this picture by folks on twitter mentioning how Resident Evil VIII drew clear inspiration from it, and now that I’ve watched the film, it’s also clear that Thriller Bark’s Doctor Hogback is a direct visual reference to this film’s antagonist. But range of influence aside, Island of Lost Souls is also just a propulsive, engaging film in its own right, one which maintains a surprising degree of horror tension in spite of its age.
As a pre-Hays code film, Lost Souls delights in deviance, featuring an array of convincingly menacing beast men, just-off-screen vivisections, and a blatant challenge to the rule of god. Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau with playful relish, openly delighting in his devilish machinations, and commanding so much charisma that it’s no surprise he’d inspire future villains. Funnily enough, Laughton would later go on to direct Night of the Hunter, one of the best horror films of all time – it’s clear he has an appreciation for the genre’s forms, and here chews scenery with a flamboyant flair that makes it hard not to like him. On the whole, Lost Souls is definitely one of the most accessible films I’ve seen from this era, and not only a key slice of genre history, but an engaging, concise seventy minutes of horror.
After that, we jumped straight back to modern horror with Shortcut, a recent feature about a group of kids being attacked by some creature when their bus stalls out in a tunnel. Frankly, there’s not that much to tell about this one; decent direction, solid-enough performances by the young stars, and a script that convincingly sells them as likable enough to forgive the film’s lack of great horror setpieces. It was a fine background watch, but provides basically none of the exciting, terrifying, or gruesome setpieces you hope for from horror – it just sorta continues to chug along, with the kids being chased through a variety of tunnels. Fair enough execution, but not nearly enough bite to compare to similar films like The Descent, The Tunnel, or others.
I also caught most of Netflix’s Death Note film, which I… actually had a pretty fine time with? I know there was a lot of raging criticism when it came out, but I have to assume that aside from the reasonable whitewashing concerns, that was largely from people who really liked the original Death Note, and still do. And as someone who was also thirteen once, but now sees the original Death Note as silly, myopic, and overly self-important, this update felt like just what the material needed.
The original Death Note was basically pure tactical cat-and-mouse, with no particular interest in the moral questions it was dabbling with, and no desire to create any genuinely human-seeming characters. Manga Death Note’s Light was an inhuman sociopathic supercop from the first chapter, whereas this film’s Light is just a bright yet bullied teenager, alienated from his father, and provoked into an ostensibly “heroic” position he is in no way prepared for. Replacing Death Note’s characters with ones driven by genuine human emotions does wonders for contextualizing Light’s ideas of heroism and justice, and adds some nice panicked ferocity to his encounters with L.
Speaking of which, L is played by goddamn LaKeith Stanfield, one of the very best actors of our generation. Stanfield absolutely kills it as L, unsurprisingly, and is supported by energetic direction courtesy of You’re Next’s Adam Wingard. The film’s musical direction is basically the tongue-in-cheek cherry on top, consistently undercutting the ostensibly world-ending feelings of its adolescent characters with silly, on-the-nose needle drops. The script isn’t strong enough for me to call this a genuinely good film, and I’d have liked a tad more strategic back-and-forth harkening back to the original, but on the whole, I’d say they did a pretty entertaining job with the material they were given.
Finally, this week’s grand prize was Royal Space Force, the first production by the fledgling studio Gainax. In the heady days of the ‘80s OVA era, sponsors were eager to jumpstart massive new franchises in the vein of Gundam or Macross, and thus Gainax’s barely post-college crew were given the reigns and resources to create an unimaginably ambitious film, explicitly designed to let the new generation of artists craft their own voice. It’s a gambit that could only come out of its economic moment, and the result ended up being far less marketing- and tie-in friendly than its sponsors hoped. On the other hand, it’s also a goddamn phenomenal film.
Royal Space Force’s strengths begin with its jaw-dropping wealth of creative design work. The film imagines a world both like and unlike our own, where its characters are mired in the same anxieties and cultural shifts that haunt our lives, but the world around them followed an aesthetic and technological course far different from ours. As a result, Space Force’s buildings, clothing, artistic motifs, and vehicles look unlike any I’ve seen before, and seem to constitute a visual aesthetic unto themselves, combining splashes of a variety of scifi and fantasy influences. The film is an absolute marvel of visual invention, conveying a world that doesn’t exist with the same specificity and faded realism that Oshii frequently brings to our own world.
Along with its fantastic design work, Royal Space Force is also quite thoughtful in its storytelling, and thematically ambitious in a way that echoes the peaks of Gainax’s general oeuvre. The film begins with its protagonist Shirotsugh skipping the funeral of a close friend, who died when the space force’s last rocket exploded. Disillusioned with the very existence of the space force, and with the agency’s budget halved to support more funding for perpetual war, Shitotsugh grasps around for any sort of meaning or purpose – and finds it in Riquinni, a young woman with a pious fascination for his work. Bolstered by Riquinni’s support, Shirotsugh rallies back, and becomes determined to be his world’s first astronaut. But setbacks and the general weight of life haunt both of them, and eventually, Shirotsugh will have to come to peace with even the space force’s complicity in mankind’s crimes of progress.
Royal Space Force is at times funny or inspiring, but for the most part it is a deeply melancholy film, entrenched in the daily disappointments of adult life. It explores these disappointments on both a personal and societal level; as Shirotsugh fights for glory, Space Force emphasizes how individual striving is frequently co-opted by the state, as well as how scientific progress is never a morally neutral endeavor. It feels almost like a direct counterpoint to the unambiguously individualist spirit that fuels so many franchises and heroes, urging audiences to temper their expectations and acknowledge their surroundings, while still hoping for some fragment of earnest glory. Additionally, it shares Evangelion’s skepticism regarding the possibility of true mutual understanding, and is full of characters whose fundamental nature is destined to cause friction and pain.
Apparently, the film was intentionally designed as anti-escapism, urging audiences to turn away from the validating robots and heroines of popular anime, and commit to investing in their own physical world (so, Evangelion before Evangelion). As a result, it’s pretty much exactly my kind of film – stark yet incredibly beautiful, bleak without feeling hopeless, and determined to find reasons to live in our fallen world. Though its characters never genuinely connect, they leave the film with hope that they still might – and though Shirotsugh cannot fully justify the consequences of mankind stealing the fire of the gods, he finds the strength to seek his dreams in spite of that, and move forward with both ambition and humility.
If it’s not clear yet, I absolutely adored Royal Space Force, and with the warning that it includes a clear, brief scene of sexual assault, would recommend that basically any anime fans check it out immediately. The film is so good that it makes me a little sad; it’s feeling more and more like anime was at a crossroads in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, with its greatest directors and animators dreaming of evolving the medium into one with a wealth of great productions for adults as well as children. But then again, it’s undeniable that my rose-eyed view is highlighting the best films of that era as its exemplars – in our own time, we’re still getting fantastic films like In This Corner of the World, or Yuasa’s productions. Perhaps anime has always had a similar ratio of chaff to wheat; as long as a few creators have the means and the motivation to create truly great work, I suppose my love for it will similarly endure.
And of course, there was One Piece. With Thriller Bark in the rear view, the Straw Hats set off for the Red Line, and eventually arrived at Sabaody Archipelago. Even before the team actually reached the archipelago, it was a treat to return to more small-stakes adventures with the expanded crew. As fun as the massive arcs are, I personally need some time to breathe and reset between them – and beyond that, One Piece is frequently at its best when the crew are just dicking around on some random side quest. Because the show’s humor and cast are two of its greatest strengths, its downtime is actually a reward, rather than a chore – and after all their harrowing recent adventures, it was nice to see the crew get to flex a bit, and crush some foes like they were back in the East Blue.
As for the archipelago itself, Oda once again proved himself a master of dramatic scaling, as One Piece’s overarching camera eye expanded to catalog the entire emerging generation of pirate captains, as well as the power structure they’re rebelling against. Sabaody’s initial, relatively freewheeling structure embodied the highest virtues of One Piece’s worldbuilding, offering a landscape full of neat ideas, and a sense of cultural scale that at last put the Straw Hats’ exploits in some broader context. And then, once the true scale of this world was established, Oda pulled a trigger he’d been gripping for four hundred episodes, and let the full strength of the marines crash down on our heroes.
Seeing the Straw Hats genuinely, unambiguously outmatched was a thrilling experience, and hearing Luffy in particular admit that they had no chance of victory greatly increased my respect for him. One Piece has had an interesting relationship with power scaling, in that its crew started off far “too strong” for their initial opponents, and have only scaled into equivalent powers through their journey on the Grand Line. Because of this, its contrasts of power feel that much more grounded and inarguable than most shonens – characters still occasionally “find some hidden strength within them,” but they rarely end up defeating enemies they initially don’t have a chance against. And with the mechanics of the Devil Fruits equally well-established, the moment they introduced Admiral Kizaru, I knew the team had already lost. There’s a unique sense of satisfaction in watching a shonen push the boundaries of its powers without breaking any of its established rules, and in spite of One Piece’s fanciful powers, it’s done an excellent job of scaling in a clear, coherent fashion throughout. Seeing Luffy and the gang finally learn that the world is much bigger than them was a reckoning I’ve long been waiting for, and I was delighted by the results.
