I didn't know what to expect of $9.99, an Australian-Israeli co-production released in 2008. It sounded like a project that would be right up my alley - a realistic, modern-day fable for adults done in stop-motion animation - but I haven't really heard much hoopla about it in the two years since its release. Well, I just checked it out, and for my money it's a pretty good film. Anyone interested in serious animated filmmaking should watch it without hesitation. This is the sort of film I'd hope the animation community would rally behind: a sincere attempt at creating an animated film for adults, one that doesn't pander with lowbrow humor or try to compensate for a shallow, lowest-common-denominator story by using quicker and quicker beats and jam-packing every second with lame jokes or action or eye candy and smothering it with a generous helping of pompous, overbearing music. Oscar fodder this is not.

That's not to say I think it's a perfect film. I found it lacking in dynamism in terms of the visuals and pacing, and I wasn't completely convinced that this was a film that had to be done in animation. I feel that the animation in a film should somehow be a reflection of the theme and story, and should push boundaries in some way. The animation was well done, but orthodox. The puppets were certainly well made. It was nice to see human beings depicted in a realistic way in claymation for once rather than in the usual cartoony style. They did a very good job of creating a whole cast of individuals that looked like actual individuals rather than some kind of generic 'person'.

But what really made this film work for me wasn't the animation, though I did enjoy the animation. It was the story told by the witty and literary script. It made sense to learn that it was adapted from a short story. It's not enough to say that this film is quite unlike most animated films that adults might find themselves going to see in the theater today - it is the antithesis of such films. This is a thinker's film, rather than a hollywood animated feature. For once, this is a film that pays its audience the respect of assuming they are smart enough to handle a complex, ambiguous narrative that is not meant to be taken at face value. It's filled with subtle and believable everyday detail, as well as layer after layer of enigmatic meaning that the viewer is left to parse as they will, rather than presenting a black and white clash between good and evil. This feels like the sort of film you'd find on the indie circuit rather than in multiplexes.

I salute the ambition of even attempting to create a film that they must have known from the outset would have a fairly small audience. What's the definition of great art? Is it a film tailored to be enjoyed by the many that keeps them peeled to their seats with visuals of awesome beauty created by a huge team of craftsmen? Or is it a small film that tries something a little weird and a little unsettling, that follows an artist's vision wherever it leads, regardless of whether people want to see it? Both sides can be plausibly argued, and there's a time and place for both, but the latter is underrepresented.

The shots were very carefully crafted. It feels like they framed this film the way you would a live-action film. It's a bit counterintuitive, because of the ingrained dogma that you should only do things you're only able to do in animation in animation, but I think it worked for their purposes. Watching the film is this destabilizing, uncomfortable experience where these obviously artificial characters are rendered in an unflattering, ugly, realistic way, and they act not like cartoon characters but in a very low-key, realistic manner. It's a deliberately artificial simulacrum of reality that complements the surreal, fable-like story and gives the film a unique atmosphere.

Technically speaking, the shots are remarkably well put together, with the placement of the characters in the frame, the lighting and the depth of focus immaculately fine-tuned to achieve just the right balance. The shot above is a perfect example. You could almost mistake it for a life-sized shot from a live-action movie. This is truly exceptional miniature craftsmanship. The voice-acting is also very strong in the film, bringing the excellent script to life and making the characters feel real.

On a slightly different note, I watched Ninja Gaiden, an OVA from 1991. Artsy Sundance fare this one is not. 'Cheesefest' is the more appropriate term. This one's based an NES video game I used to play as a kid, and though it doesn't in the slightest resemble the game, it feels 100% like the lazy animated game cash-in it is. I'm not hating on video game anime. That Street Fighter Alpha Generations OVA was pretty interesting, and there are plenty of other video game anime that are worth watching, if not masterpieces of animated filmmaking.

This isn't one of them. It's about a mad scientist who creates monsters with the aid of a demon and wants to take over the world, and it's as lazy as that plot summary. The directing is inept and boring in the extreme, the designs are rote and unoriginal, the background art is an afterthought, the characters are bland objects that utter words but have no personality, and the story must have taken five minutes to write, mostly by filling in a few blanks on the template of standard throwaway sci-fi anime OVAs.

Redeeming feature? Toshiyuki Inoue! This was a Studio Junio production, and Studio Junio was Inoue's alma mater. I don't know whether he was still there in 1991, or whether he did this as a parting gesture or what, but it's almost laughable the extent to which his skills put those of the other animators at the studio to shame. His scene is easy to spot. I'll leave it up to you to figure it out. I'm not completely sure whether he did any other scenes. There's a fight with some monsters that takes place in a "Japanese shop" (that's the actual name of the shop according to the background art) midway through that has some interesting animation, but it doesn't really feel like Inoue. There's a car chase right after that has a few shots that are rather nice, but I can't say for sure whether he did it or not, though they do have a bit of the flavor of the bike chase scenes in Akira, especially this one shot that resembles the shot where Tetsuo drives his bike through a narrow alley filled with garbage, just before wiping out.

There are some other talented animators in there, so the shop fight and car chase might be by one of them. Hiroyuki Morita, who despite coming off as something of a buffoon with his immature blog antics while directing Bokurano, animated the unhinged swordfight in the rain in Hamaji's Resurrection, which I absolutely adore. It's the most beautifully ugly and unglamorous and hair-raising swordfight ever animated IMO. I like him way better as an animator than as a director. He was also in the likes of Innocence, The Cat Returns, Spriggan, Perfect Blue, Golden Boy, Rojin Z and Peek.

Also present:

Shigeo Akahori, who was in Metropolis, Cat Returns, and designed and supervised Porfy's Long Trip. He's got a blog.

Hisashi Eguchi, who besides having animated the early part of that great fight on the tower in the Cowboy Bebop movie also did work in Gits, Memories, Spriggan, Steam Boy and Paprika.

Mamoru Sasaki, who was in Peek, Ran, Catnapped, Memories, Master Keaton, Jin-Roh, Palme, TokiKake and Stranger.

Just about the only announcement at the Oscars the other day that didn't make me want to throw fistfulls of popcorn in impotent rage was when Logorama won. Now there's a film that felt really bold and daring and new, while still working as a fun action movie. It's kind of neat that it won because it's not so much a film as it is an act of provocation against the underpinnings of western consumer culture - and a pretty damn brazen and cleverly crafted one at that, considering that they managed to appropriate all those logos without getting 300 lawsuits filed against them.

It sucks. Gone is the loving care of Ayumu Watanabe, replaced with the infantile pap of Nippon Animation. There's a song and dance sequence that crushed my soul. It took no less than three directors to maul the blue robot cat: Chief director Kozo Kuzuha, director Shigeo Koshi, and line director Shinpei Miyashita. This film is actually a remake of an older Doraemon film, like the first 'revamped' one from 2006 directed by Ayumu Watanabe, but the difference is vast. The film is flabby and by the book. The framing of the shots is kind of boring, with a lot of close-ups and uninspired TV-style layouts. The villain is (yet again) a westerner with an offensively large westerner nose. It's watchable (barely) but forgettable. You don't feel any particular love for the characters. Everything feels generic. And it's not just because the directors are Doraemon newbies. This is a typical problem with Nippon Animation productions. They talk down to kids. Even the colors feel dumbed down for kids, with lots of bright primary colors. It's Doraemon, you'll say, of course it's for kids. Maybe so. But I think the great kids films are those that are solid works of art and not just condescending pablum.

The animation isn't as lively or full of character in each sequence. There aren't really many sequences that feel there to showcase how fun a scene can be when you choreograph it well, do some great layouts, and get a great animator to animate it. Shizue Kaneko was the chief animation supervisor this time around, and there are three sakkans, which accounts for why it doesn't feel like it has as much of her character. I assume she must have taken a step back in the actual work. I was actually able to ID a number of sections pretty easily this time around. Masami Otsuka did the whole baseball scene before and after the opening sequence. Kind of lame casting him right at the beginning. His work was scattered around more in the last film. The bedroom scene right after this scene was nicely animated, though I don't know by whom. The tidal wave scene was obviously Yuichiro Sueyoshi. Sueyoshi's not new to Doraemon, but this is the first film he's done since the upgrade. The baseball sequence was by... surprise... Satoru Utsunomiya. I haven't seen a new sequence from him in ages. Where's he been hiding?? I assumed he was working on some big project, but nothing yet. Surprising to see him here. But frankly, the work didn't feel that good. It felt stale. More interesting work is being done by younger faces today. The running away part right afterwards was really nice, in fact better than the baseball sequence, sadly. Other good animators include Shizuka Hayashi, Motonobu Hori, Masashi Okumura and Fumiaki Kouta, so maybe it was one of them.

Sad to see the movies taking a nosedive like this, but not unexpected.

One thing I did still like about this film is that there were a number of scenes that continued to showcase the new concept behind the animation of the new show - 'yawaraka Doraemon' or 'soft Doraemon'. This idea first showed up in the 2007 film, in which Doraemon seemed like a plushie rather than the robot he is. It doesn't really make sense to make him seem all fluffy, but it actually works in some strange way. Anyway, it's real fun to look at. The pic here from the 2009 film is a great example. This new approach isn't just limited to the animation of Doraemon, of course. It's the general mindset towards animating all of the characters - they're more three-dimensional and pliable than before. Things were way more rigid in the old show. They've given themselves permission to take more freedoms with the forms, and it really enlivens the animation. Oh, and apparently Doraemon has teeth now.

Went through a few of the many episodes of Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi that are up on Youtube the other day. I was looking specifically for the ones by the interesting faces, and found several. This one was done by Shinji Otsuka in 1986. It's not quite what you'd expect from all of his work over the last decade in the big Ghibli & Kon movies, but you can still sense that an animator who knows how to make things move is helming this one, as there's more of a fundamental sense of character animation than in many of the other episodes, most of which have crude designs and move very sparely.

This one is by Hidekazu Ohara from 1989. He's the one responsible for the visual side of the wonderful Cannon Fodder episode in Memories, not to mention the awesome Professor Dan Petry's Blues. He's one of those creators who really stands out in anime for having a visual sensibility that's way, way different from all of the usual design cliches that dominate anime. He did quite a few episodes in Manga Nippon Mukashibanashi actually, and each one is pretty nice and different. I like the sinister mood and insane designs in this one, for example. He directed, animated and did the art for the latter, so it moves less, but it's great what a sense of integration he achieves between the art and animation. That's something that characterized Cannon Fodder. Like I said before, a lot of the designs on the show, though a refreshing change from the usual anime look, tend to be kind of crude, but you can tell Ohara is a great illustrator and animator who has a great sense of how to create a design that's interesting and well drawn. I mentioned before that Hidekazu Ohara started out at Topcraft, and I think that's what gave him that edge. I just noticed that another ex-Topcraft animator is in Cannon Fodder - Tadakatsu Yoshida - so maybe he was invited by Ohara.

This one is by Yoshiaki Yanagida from 1991. Yanagida is an interesting animator, though I know less about him. He did the Spirit of Wonder (AKA Miss China) OVAs, which are quite well made, despite the original designs from the manga on which the anime is based being kind of weird and the content of questionable taste. (what the hell is it with westerners with big noses in anime?!) The animation is rich and the drawings very well rendered. He started out at Ajia-Do and I think he's still there now. So he's been there on all of those shows that people over here watched many years back like Urusei Yatsura and Kimagure Orange Road and Nadia of the Blue Water and Fam and Ihrie. More recently he's done NieA_7 and Kaiketsu Zorori and Emma and Genshiken 2 etc. He was even in a few older Doraemon movies. Designs here are quite interesting, and he's good at effectively using very few drawings in the way that A Pro-school animators were so good at, alternating it with more fluid moments, like the dance bit followed by the kettle fall. (this episode is directed by Osamu Kobayashi, who did many episodes)

In the 54 years from his sexual awakening at the age of 7 until the age of 61, Yonosuke had relations with 3740 women and 725 men.

So we learn about the protagonist of Ihara Saikaku's 17th century novel The Sensualist in this animated adaptation, which is directed by erstwhile art director Yukio Abe, best known as the art director of the great Sanrio films of the 70s and early 80s, and scripted by erstwhile director Eiichi Yamamoto, best known for directing the experimental adult epic Belladonna.

Armed with those stats, Yonosuke makes Casanova look like the 30-year-old virgin. The 18th century Venetian and patron saint of latter-day Venutian artists such as Neil Strauss proclaims in his autobiography to have had relations with a mere 200 or so women during his lifetime. Yawn. But Casanova's autobiography is an engrossing and ethnographically invaluable piece of writing, and Yonosuke is a fictional character, so we'll call it even.

Better known as The Life of an Amorous Man, the novel was the first in a series of tracts that Ihara Saikaku published in the 1680s recounting the amorous escapades of the denizens of his Edo-period merchant class demimonde, who were apparently quite the libertines. I'm sure there are some juicy parallels waiting to be drawn between 17th century Japan and 18th century Venice by an enterprising student of comparative cultural studies.

Edo-period Japan was one of the most enlightened and liberal societies the world has ever known when it comes to sexual matters, with its sophisticated amalgamation of sexual openness and artistic expression. Rather than clients visiting prostitutes in dingy dives for a slam-bam-thank-you-mam exchange of fluids, Japan's geisha were government-sanctioned master artists who engaged clients in a classy, ritualized form of intellectual foreplay involving conversation, music and poetry.

The crème de la crème of geisha was the tayuu, and it's one of these creatures that is the object of the chase in this film. The Sensualist tells the story of a fumbling young man who seeks Yonosuke's assistance in getting with a renowned Edo tayuu. Flashbacks weave in and out of the narrative thread, filling us in on Yonosuke's respectable history of romantic dalliances.

The visuals of the film are exquisite, creating a sumptuous homage to the art of the Edo period. The characters are modeled after the style of Edo hanga, and are animated with great care under the supervision of the late great FX animator Mikiharu Akabori. Quite simply, the film is a feast for the eyes. Abe Yukio was first and foremost an art director, and the focus on the film is understandably on creating a sequence of beautiful images, which it does marvelously. There are few anime films as beautiful as this one out there. The film feels like a moving hanga.

Rather than gliding through a crude naturalistic approximation of Edo Japan, the characters inhabit the actual art and expressive symbols of the era. The ocean undulates like an ink painting, white lines on a black background. Naked bodies entwined in an embrace float through fields of lotuses. Shadows of long-eared rabbits hop across folding screens painted with stormy waves. Prints of Edo beauties or landscapes by the great masters pan across the screen, creating a heady and intoxicating atmosphere in which art, sex and life intermingle, rather than simply telling a story.

Although this is definitely a film for adults, and there is a good deal of nudity, a bit of rubbing, and a whole lot of bobbing, none of it is explicit. Actual shunga from the same period as this novel are far more explicit. Instead, symbols like the turtle and the camellia that were used back then to hint at sexual matters are used in a similar spirit during lovemaking scenes. The only time the film borders on funny is when they use the same strategy as 1001 Nights and Cleopatra and suddenly coyly shift from a shot of the couple embracing to a shot of abstract animation showing a suggestively shaped flame, or a clap of lightning that sends birds flying off of a tree. But for the most part, these shots of abstract animation are subtle and creative, and they feel like a modern extension of the traditional Japanese symbolic tradition.

Originally released in Japan around 1990, this 54-minute film was presumably a direct-to-video release. Gone were the days when a film like Belladonna, this film's only real analogue in anime, could be released in the theaters. It appears to have disappeared into obscurity fairly quickly, and it's hard to find almost any information about it anymore. Needless to say, it has not been re-released on DVD.

This film deserves a better fate. If ever a film qualified as a buried gem, this is it. There is quality work here. This was an ambitious project that was clearly a labor of love. Director Yukio Abe masterfully handles a complex narrative that flows between the present, the past and the abstract, making every image count. Mikiharu Akabori's character animation is subtle but nuanced, authentically reproducing the complex dress of the era and the styles of physical representation of Edo-era prints. And Eiichi Yamamoto deserves a lot of credit for penning an excellent script tangled with poetry, authentic inflection and subtle wit. Together, they did a good job of visualizing some pretty difficult material in a way that remained true to its explicit nature without teetering too much into the realm of bad taste.

More importantly, they fully utilized all the means available in animation to create a thematically and visually consistent interpretation of the spirit of the novel. They channel the actual art of that period into the modern means of animation, achieving an sense of artistic unity that could not be achieved in a live-action adaptation.

Despite being an erotic film, it's not meant to be titillating. The film has a sense of spiritual and literary depth that goes beyond mere sexual exploitation. It reminds me of the themes invoked in 1001 Nights, the first Animerama film, which was also directed by Eiichi Yamamoto: Ambition, lust, curiosity. The desire to push yourself to be the best YOU you can be, to go higher and higher, just to see if you can do it. That is one running themes that seems to occupy Eiichi Yamamoto in the three characters of Yonosuke, Belladonna and Aldin. 1001 Nights was intended as a film for adults addressing complex adult themes, not as erotica, and I find that that's the case with this one, although the erotic element is unmistakably more dominant here. The film feels like an homage not only to the art of Edo Japan but to the erotic sensibility of that era.

And lest all this make the film sound like a stuffy art film, it's clear that they don't take themselves too seriously. It's entertaining to watch the protagonist, a bumbling stand-in for every ordinary loser out there who isn't a Don Juan like Yonosuke, fumble his way into the arms of this goddess.

Alongside Belladonna, The Sensualist is one of the rare attempts to do tasteful and artistic adult fare in animation. The studio that produced this ambitious film might come as a surprise: It was Grouper Production, a short-lived studio that was co-founded in 1986 by Masami Hata, the director of many of the very same Sanrio productions on which Yukio Abe acted as the art director. Hata directed several of Grouper's productions, including the Hobberdy Dick TV series, the Super Mario Brothers: Princess Peach movie, and the Ping Pong Club TV series. As far as I know, this is the only film that Yukio Abe directed. Since then, he has returned to art directing, most recently working again under Masami Hata on the Stitch TV series produced by Madhouse.

How did this project come about? It seems so out of character with everything else done by the studio as well as the director. Was it a project he had always wanted the chance to direct? So many questions. Grouper continued operating for several years after this film was released, so at the very least, it didn't put them out of business, which is a relief. Belladonna was produced 20 years earlier. Films like this only seem to come around in 20 year increments. Hopefully that means we'll be getting a new one soon. It's understandable that most studios don't have the daring to try their hand at something a little more ambitious like this, but it's still a shame. The talent is out there to make a new adult epic. It only makes me all the more grateful for the occasional aw-the-hell-with-it moments of indulgence like The Sensualist.

Though you might be surprised that I'd expect otherwise, this year's Doraemon movie looks terrible. The series had a streak of solid films starting with the revamped 2006 film directed by Ayumu Watanabe and featuring a bevy of great animators headed by animation director Kenichi Konishi. The new film is headed by the guy directing the revamped TV series, Kozo Kuzuha, a Nippon Animation expat who directed many of the studio's World Masterpiece Theater shows during the 80s and 90s, when the shows sucked worse and worse and ratings tanked. Coincidence? Either way, I'm not too sure about the decision to bring him onboard, because I never liked his directing. The previous film from 2009 was directed by Shigeo Koshi, another longtime Nippon Animation figure. There seems to have been a big exodus from Nippon Animation to Shin-Ei in the last few years. I'm not sure how I feel about that, although I view Koshi a little more favorably because he directed the second half of Rascal Raccoon and all of Perrine, two of the only watchable non-Takahata World Masterpiece Theater series. Ex-Nippon Animation director Shinpei Miyashita helped Ayumu storyboard the 2008 film. Their pedigree definitely fits the material, but I'm not too sure it's a good thing. Ayumu Watanabe had real fire, and he elevated Doraemon beyond what you'd expect from such a show.

I just watched the 2008 movie, entitled Nobita and the Legend of the Green Giant (no, not that one), which Ayumu Watanabe directed, and I was very impressed. I seriously think it's a little buried gem. I can't believe it didn't win any awards in Japan. It's every bit as impressive as his 2006 film. The 2007 film was directed by Sachiyo Teramoto with animation supervised by animation director Shizue Kaneko. It was an eminently watchable film, though definitely a step down in terms of the directing. In terms of the animation, it was quite impressive throughout thanks to Shizue Kaneko. The 2008 film features Shizue Kaneko working this time under Ayumu Watanabe, and the result is pure gold. They make a superb team.

I think Green Giant is a pretty successful film - the best after the 2006 film. Ayumu Watanabe goes for something different from the 2006 film, AND it doesn't feel like any other film in the series. Instead of the close realistic observation and deeper character psychology of the 2006 film, Green Giant is Ayumu Watanabe creating expansive fantasy adventure. That's something that's been seen before in the Doraemon movies, but I think he does it better than longtime director Tsutomu Shibayama, great director though he is. It felt like Shibayama got out of touch after a while. Ayumu Watanabe is more modern, bringing new blood into this material. He has a great sense for gear-shifting between different moods and tones and paces that really feels good and believable. He makes movies that feel like movies, not just hopped up TV shows. The detail of the layouts is toned down from the 2006 film, and there's more of an emphasis on coming up with a rich array of interestingly designed alien flora and fauna and bringing them alive in very fun and active animation. There are long sequences with no dialogue and only the characters going through interesting antics on the screen. The staple characters are absent throughout much of the film. And it's an original story not based on one of Fujiko F. Fujio's manga, which is unusual for the series. It really feels like Ayumu Watanabe's baby. Again. That's what I like about Ayumu Watanabe - he creates a film from the ground up, investing it with tremendous love for the material and characters. What I felt watching this film was that Ayumu Watanabe should direct a Ghibli film. I'd love to see him not constrained by these characters and the tone of the show he's worked on for so long. His approach is very much a fit with Ghibli IMO, and I think he would do a great job directing a film there.

The animation is a joy to watch at every moment thanks to Shizue Kaneko and the animators working for her. I love what Shizue Kaneko has brought to these characters. She fills the scene with acting that conveys the characters' personalities and feels good as animation, without going overboard. The forms and volumes of the characters are freer and more pliable than ever before. For a while Doraemon characters felt very static. Here they explode from the screen in lively action sequences, their bodies bending and twisting. They kept the hand-drawn touch of the 2006 film, though here's it's less of a pencil-style line than a sort of ink line that grows thinner and thicker at various places. It gives the drawings a wonderfully tactile feeling, like they were just born from the pen of the animator, and keeps the shapes from growing monotonous and rigid.

The very simple but imaginative character designs are reminiscent of Kaiba, which not coincidentally featured a lot of work by Shin-Ei animator Ryotaro Makihara, who is also here. Like in the 2006 film, there are a number of talented outside animators present livening up the animation. Tamotsu Ogawa, Norio Matsumoto, Masahiro Sato and Fumiaki Kota are present alongside in-house regulars like Masami Otsuka and Shizuka Hayashi. Masakatsu Sasaki has been in all of the recent Doraemon films and he's here, too. Also present: Yoshihiko Umakoshi, Ikuo Kuwana, Kiyotaka Oshiyama, Shigeru Kimishima and a mysterious name: Nobutaka. Could this be a pen name of Nobutake Ito poking fun at how people were misreading his name? I've seen it somewhere else. There's also this young animator named Naoyuki Asano who was praised by Yasuomi Umetsu for his work on Umetsu's recent Kite Liberator TV series. He's been in Kaiba, TokiKake and Summer Wars. There is an effects animation supervisor: Hiroshi Masuda. The effects throughout are nice. Shingo Natsume is there as co-sakkan.

I'm really looking forward to Keiichi Hara's new film Colorful, which hits theaters this summer in Japan. It's a committee production film, but supposedly Sunrise is the studio behind the production. What a change for Hara. Sunrise is the last place I expected him to go after Shin-Ei. The film is based on a novel by a Naoki Award-winning novelist, so it should be interesting. I just hope Sunrise doesn't ask him to change the story so that the protagonist has to pilot a giant walking robot or something. To a lesser extent, I'm also looking forward to The Space Show movie from A-1 Pictures. They're a great upcoming studio, and it's directed by Koji Masunari with long-time collaborator Masashi Ishihama on character designs and animation. I don't really like the character designs, but I'm sure it's going to have a lot of good work in it, as always with this director, so it will be worth a look. The trailer is filled with detailed work.

They're doing this thing with different endings in each episode of the new Gainax show Hanamaru Kindergarten, and Osamu Kobayashi did one. I like it.

Masaaki Yuasa has a new TV series starting in April entitled Yojouhan Shinwa Taikei, again made at Madhouse. I haven't seen an official English title, but it needs one, cause it sounds interesting in Japanese but is pretty unwieldy to translate: Four and a half mat myth compendium. But then again, maybe that's a perfectly sound anime title, if A Certain Scientific Railgun is kosher. Nobutake Ito is again the character designer. The designs are extremely attractive, with the visual sensibility of Taisho-era illustrations, and again a big change from everything the team has done before. Judging by some of the movement in the second half of the video clip visible on the site now, I'm sure Nobutake Ito and the animators will be creating some great movement with these designs. The color design looks vivid and wild in the vein of Mind Game, and the chamber music is quite an interesting and unusual sound for anime. The script sounds cerebral and witty, the series being based on a novel this time around. This promises to be the best thing since... well, Yuasa's last project.

Te Wei, one of the great animation artists of the last century, passed away a short time ago. He was the originator and master of the brush ink animation style. He didn't produce many shorts in his patented style, but the three that he did shine on decades later as unsurpassed masterpieces of serene beauty. They seem to me to bridge the centuries and channel the poetry of another age. Watch them if you haven't. It's time for me to revisit them to remember this great artist.

I'd like to see another good feature from Korea. Mari iyagi was great, but Yobi was disappointing, and Wonderful Days I didn't like as a film because I felt it too indebted to anime, remarkably technically adept though it was. Aachi & Ssipak, if you're able to stomach the over-the-top crassness and violence, was much more creative and interesting as a concept and just plain fun, with some excitingly choreographed, well-animated action sequences, and a much more original vision.

On a related note, I just saw the crass and violent Dante's Inferno, and it featured work by a number of Korean studios, some of it quite good. It's an awful film that's jettisoned the original's poetry for a linear first-person slasher video game with one level boss after another, and is interesting almost solely for the variety of styles brought to the table by the different studios. I usually like this sort of thing by default because I enjoy the idea of seeing the same subject interpreted by different visual artist, and I did enjoy it in that sense, but in the end it's more one of those films you feel obliged to see because there happens to be some technically worthwhile work in it than one that you watch because it's actually good. It wasn't even the violence and crass visuals that put me off so much as the inept script that yammers away constantly, non-stop in every single solitary shot. That's one thing that makes it patently obvious that the script was written by a westerner - American animated features don't know when to shut up. They're uninterested in or incapable of letting the visuals or the atmosphere do the talking, Pixar being a notable new exception.

There have been a number of multi-studio anime omnibuses in the last few years, but where this differs is that it's one continuous story, so that from one moment to the next, in the same uninterrupted narrative flow, the character designs, art, animation and directing suddenly do a 180. I personally enjoyed it. And I'm actually inclined to suspect that this approach wouldn't be that shocking or off-putting to general audiences, as people have become much more acclimatized to visual experimentation in recent years. Heck, seeing these different approaches side by side was the only redeeming feature of what otherwise just felt like a stupid video game - and what's worse, a video game where you don't even have any control. Which is ironic considering the source material is one of the great poems of western literature. Sadly, there's some decent work in this film. I just hope that it doesn't always take shallow projects like this for talent to get work.

The opening by Film Roman sure isn't where the decent work comes. The good work starts quite a ways in after the Saturday morning cartoon animation, with the section from Manglobe directed by Shukou Murase, which is visually the sleekest and overall one of the strongest in the film. The pacing is cinematic and the staging elegant and formal. The drawings are delicate and the faces realistically drawn, albeit in a somewhat 'generic western face' kind of way. Ironic that the Japanese can draw a better westerner than a western studio. (though the first section, too, appears to have been entirely animated by Korean studios) Murase not only directed but was character designer and his own sakkan, so he's in large part to thank for the exceptional quality of the section. Nobutake Ito is one of the animators in his section.

The next section from Dongwoo directed by Jong-Sik Nam, looks very different, much more loose and cartoony, with lots of movement going on constantly. The drawings were a little too crude for my taste, but there were a few moments that stood out as having interesting movement, and generally I appreciate that it moves a lot. The first section moves a lot too, but all of the movement sucks.

It was the next two sections that most impressed me. The fourth section looked to me like the work of a Japanese studio, with its very Kanada-ish approach to movement, while the fifth section immediately struck me as the work of a Korean studio. Surprisingly, both were the work of the same Korean studio - JM Animation. Looking into it, I now see that JM Animation is the studio behind Wonderful Days, which makes sense. I haven't watched it, but JM Animation produced a piece of animation for MTV last year on the subject of human trafficking. (important subject, but looks lame) Both sections four and five are very strong in terms of the visuals and directing. I particularly liked section 5, directed by Kim Sangjin, with its excellently rendered grotesque character designs. This section's visuals are some of the more unique and assured in the film. Section four, directed by Lee Seunggyu, is quite well done, with a more unified stylization of the characters than the previous section, where the characters just look kind of sloppily drawn. I thought they were a little too ruly and clean for this material and preferred the edgy shapes of the fifth section.

The last section, from Production I.G. and directed by a surprising face for the studio, Yasuomi Umetsu, was well-produced but surprisingly dull considering the pedigree. 'Stolid' is the term that comes to mind. The pacing was sluggish and the staging seemed badly done. There are way too many distant or oblique shots striving for a cinematic feel that comes off better in the Manglobe film. The Korean and Japanese films here batray a clearly different approach to presenting the material, with more of a focus on the characters acting things out in the Korean films, but more oblique framing and slow pans or moody distant shots for you to savor the drawings and framing in the Japanese films. It's like the Japanese approach their animation with the mentality of live-action cinematographers, and they try to animate things in a realistic way to achieve impact, whereas the Koreans know they're making animation and achieve impact through more expressive animation and less of an obsession on detail and realistic timing and careful framing. Animators include Koichi Arai, Seiichi Nakatani, Nobutoshi Ogura, Nozomu Abe.

Continuing in my quest to dig up obscure old OVAs, Bounty Dog maybe isn't that obscure but it's another older OVA I never saw back then but just checked out. What jumps out at you first about this thing is the color. For some reason the whole thing has this weird sickly yellow sepia tone that's kind of nauseating to look at and doesn't really make any sense artistically. There is some decent mech drawing and animation, but nothing extravagant. The character drawings aren't interesting, and the directing aims for a sort of gritty low-key realism seemingly inspired by Patlabor 2 from the year before, but it doesn't work, not helped by bad art and an uninspired story with no interesting characters, and just feels sluggish and boring. Not nearly as interesting as some of the other OVAs made around this time. Animators in ep 1 include Toshiyuki Tsuru and Takahiro Kishida. Animators in ep 2 include Yasuhiro Seo, Hiroyuki Morita, Masahito Yamashita, Masahiro Koyama, Nobuyoshi Habara (under his Mamoru Konoe pen name), Toru Yoshida, Toshihiro Kawano, Tomohiro Hirata, Tadashi Itazaki.

Riki-oh is another 2-episode OVA from this period - this one from studio Magic Bus from 1989 and 1990. Toei did a great 6-OVA series called Crying Freeman in this vein of big manly muscle men committing acts of gory violence right around the same time, and theirs is infinitely better in all respects - story, directing and animation. Riki-oh is like a lame knock-off of Crying Freeman. The two episodes are an interesting study in contrasts in terms of how to handle the 'macho style' - in episode 1 the drawings are by Yasuhiro Seo, whom I remember for a solo episode he did in Gankutsuoh, and they're great, really bringing alive the personality of the villains through densely rendered drawings full of lines and ruffles that give each of the grotesquely ugly villains' faces a unique look. The second episode is very different, with character designs by Akio Sugino. The bodies and faces are drawn a lot sleeker and smoother and without the grotesque detail that's the whole raison d'etre of this drawing style, and without good drawings, there's very little to maintain interest. The animation isn't particularly remarkable per se; it's more about the drawings themselves, which make this ridiculous material kind of fun to watch with an ironic mindset. I noticed two interesting faces in the inbetween credits: Kenji Mizuhata in ep 1 and Shuichi Kaneko in ep 2.

Three animal shorts for you:

Sankichi and Kojoro from Manga Nihon Mukashibanashi, by Hirokazu Fukuhara.

Dreams by Chie Arai.

Old Fangs by Adrien Merigeau.

The last one was sent to me by 'sanafabich', and I really liked it. A number of commenters have noted some astute criticisms, and I agree with some of them, but lack of quicker beats isn't something that bothered me about the film. In fact, I think that that is one of the film's main assets. Slow pacing can be a hard thing to pull off, and a shot without dialogue is anathema to most ADD-afflicted western animation, but good filmmaking isn't just about cramming in as much as possible. It's about creating a space for a story to breathe, and I think they've found a nice style for the material they wanted to convey. I like that they inserted those shots of live-action leaves at the beginning. I think the designs are great, meshing well with the stylized, angular backgrounds. The music is spot-on. I think it's a pretty ambitious subject to tackle, especially using those designs, and I like how the film creates an atmosphere midway between real life and a fable. It does a decent job of evoking some weighty themes with very few words - the chasm that separates us from our memories of the distant past, the desire to reconnect with our estranged loved ones. Of course, it does feel like something is missing, as it doesn't quite achieve a strong enough impact. It all remains a bit too oblique and hinted-at. Maybe it's that the two friends accompanying the young wolf don't seem to serve much purpose, or the storytelling is a little too clipped, or that I don't know what the little wormy thing the father was holding was, or the brief glimpses of the boy's childhood seemed kind of random and unnecessary, or the dialogue wasn't necessary... not sure. But I still love the visuals and the directing sensibility - the way that random shot of the crows scuffling was inserted at just that moment was just magic. I find it a much more interesting and enjoyable film than a lot of more popular and laboriously produced shorts I've seen in the last year.

I'm with Charles Huettner about this list of the top 10 animated features of the 2000s. Here's my list:

Waking Life
Mind Game
Waltz with Bashir
My Dog Tulip
Persepolis
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Azur et Asmar
Secret of Kells
Mari iyagi
Les triplettes de Belleville

I think the other list caters way too much to classical western animation aesthetics. Even Spirited Away seems like it's there only because it's the closest fit of any non-western animated feature within that aesthetic. The key thing to remember is that each list is a reflection of the writer of the list, which is why I prefer not to pretend to be objective. These are ten of the 'more interesting' animated films made in the last decade. IMO. I feel bad leaving out a lot of the great anime films, but that would probably be a different list. What I value is when a film carves out its own narrative and visual ethos and its technique complements the material, rather than simply relying on some classical template the way most big-studio western features do, and I think most of the films above do that to a greater or lesser extent. So many films are made each year around the world now, though, so I wonder if there are any really great films that I missed. I know of a number of interesting-sounding features from the last few years that I'm curious to see: $9.99, The District, Princess, Mary and Max, Legend of the Sky Kingdom, We are the strange, Blood tea and red string... It would be nice to hear what people with a more international bent think are the ten most interesting films of the last ten years.

I discovered another OVA from the early 1990s that I hadn't seen before but that I enjoyed: Madara. It's directed by Yuji Moriyama, the extremely prolific director/animator who I remember primarily for his work on Urusei Yatsura and Maison Ikkoku but who's been in scads of other stuff and continues to be very active today. He also did Project A-Ko, one of the defining OVAs of the period that in retrospect seems to have portended the future of the industry. Despite the unmistakable soundtrack by Kaoru Wada and otherwise seeming very similar in spirit to 3x3 Eyes, the drawings are not nearly as impressive, coming across as more generic compared to Koichi Arai's highly original approach, nor the directing as strong. But it's still enjoyable and entertaining and has some nice movements and drawings here and there. It's in the vein of the many shonen fighting shows that came before and after, but the OVA format permits some slightly higher quality. It's still fairly watchable after all this time. You see a lot of people who worked on Nadia just before - Takeshi Mori on storyboard, Shunji Suzuki as co-sakkan w/Moriyama (the girl's drawings remind of Nadia), and even Kazuya Tsurumaki as a gengaman. It's weird, but there's this shot where the protagonist's female companion is holding up her hand at his face and it's trembling and for some reason I get the feeling like I've seen exactly that same way of drawing the hand in Nadia before. It has this distinctive round way of drawing the fingers that I actually kind of like. Other notable animators include Yasuomi Umetsu, Suganuma Eiji and Takeuchi Atsushi in ep 1 and Koji Ito and Atsushi Takeuchi in ep 2.

I actually sampled another show. So-ra-no-wo-to (is it just me or are titles becoming more obnoxious with each passing year?) by A-1 Pictures, who did the well-animated baseball show Ookiku Furikabutte, had some decent animation. I say only decent because it was actually good, but hard to see, because the characters, character designs and general content were obscuring the view. Toshifumi Akai was the animation director and he did the opening and closing, and I salute the man because clearly a lot of work went into the animation. Some of the scenes actually came alive quite nicely thanks to the animation. For a fleeting moment, I sensed the specter of a good anime that might have been. The directing by Mamoru Kanbe did a pretty good job with the material. The background art by Easter was strong and in some places shined. But it was sad to see all this effort going into material that did not support the weight. It felt like an attempt at a World Masterpiece Theater-style atmosphere, with moe girls in uniform, since that's apparently what you need to have to be able to make anything these days. This doesn't feel like a story that had to be told; it feels like 'What new situation could we shoehorn a cavalcade of moe girls into?' Outsiders already think anime is a big joke as it is. Why make it worse? I think someone unfamiliar with anime who watched this would feel confused and anxious. I would have liked Toshifumi Akai's laboriously worked animation to have been put to the task of bringing alive acting that bore some relation to human beings. The people who write this stuff need to go out and meet some real women.

Supposedly this is by Yasuo Muroi. The running does remind of his running in Xam'd.

Just to keep track of all of the deluxe Naruto episodes, the next one is episode 143 of Shippuuden. Pretty solid drawings throughout, and several excellent fighting sequences, notably the pre-op, immediately post-op, and about four shots of interesting wobbly-style animation a bit before the midpoint that seems clearly inspired by Hisashi Mori or Shinji Hashimoto. Effects throughout are pretty nice, with some rich smoke shots a bit after the wobbly fight. It's weird, but a lot of the shapes remind me of Norio Matsumoto. I think a lot of the staff working on the show must have been influenced by him, not surprisingly. That applies to a lot of the young animators I see today. I see something that looks like Satoru Utsunomiya in the op, and I see the credits and figure it's probably Kenichi Kutsuna or Niho Tomoyuki, who worked under Utsunomiya. Styles are being passed down and reinterpreted over and over at a very fast pace these days among new animators.

The sakkan was Sesshagoro, who's also listed top in the genga credits, and Hiroyuki Yamashita is there later. These two longtime regulars (mentioned them before) are the only two names I recognize in the creds. The fight after the op is the coolest part in the episode, with a variety of well-timed moves packed into the short scene (maybe even a bit too much too fast, but I like the ambition), and an interesting way of drawing the rapidly swinging sword as this bold triangle, something Masaaki Yuasa first did in his Buriburizaemon shorts. I don't know their styles well enough to guess which one did it, but I guess it's one of the two. Yamashita did the ending, so you can get a feel for his drawings there, but I couldn't correlate that slow ending positively with the fight. Really curious who did the amorphously drawn scene later on. That and that one wonderfully dense shot of the rolling cloud up on the cliff above the Sasuke character. The latter reminds me of Toshiaki Hontani.

Haven't watched much of the new season but just checked Durarara 1 from director Takahiro Omoro. Watchable actually, if nothing new or particularly memorable. The music was my favorite part of the episode. Loved it. It's by a guy called Makoto Yoshimori. Respect to the fansubbers for translating the opening credits instead of putting their names under them. Only names I recognized in the genga credits was Satelight regular Tomoyuki Niho (infamous blocky action sequence in Birdy) and this guy Hideki Nagamachi who I remember was the sakkan on Yasuhiro Aoki's Tweeny Witches OVA episode, which had this really cool sketchy style line thing going on. Maybe one of them did the action sequence at the end.

Heard the last episode of Trapeze had good animation. Need to finish that.

Haven't been watching much lately other than going through my box set of Hajime Ningen Gyators, which continues to entertain me to no end. I find I can watch an episode a day and never get sick of it. Can't say that for many other shows. Even Ganso Tensai Bakabon or Dokonjo Gaeru, other A Pro shows from the same period, get kind of repetitive if you watch too much, but I never tire of the stone-age family. The drawings are always lively and spontaneous and the stories crazy and fun. Though as the series progresses I find that it becomes a little tamer in terms of the stories, which lose a bit of their edge and become kind of watered down and cliche where once they were unhinged and unpredictable. It seems like the classic case of station complaints changing the course of a series, as happened to a show similar in spirit, Goku no Daiboken, though it's not as extreme here. It happens right around the time this cutesy and unneeded Amanojaku character is introduced.

Minoru Maeda, an animator who wasn't on my radar up until watching Gyators, is one of my favorite animators from the series. He's got one of the more pronounced styles on the show, drawing the characters with huge blocky limbs and really sharp angles, putting the characters through inventive distorted poses, and coming up with interesting layouts. It doesn't move much in his hands, in contrast with Yoshiyuki Momose or whoever, but he carries it with his drawings. In the first three quarters of the show he usually draws a half episode by himself, but in the last quarter he draws four full-fledged solo animator episodes. (by which time the show switches to a single-story format, rather than two 10-min stories) I've long associated him with Group Tac, as he's been a mainstay in their projects over the years, but he actually worked at Gyators sakkan Takao Kosai's Studio Junio from Gyators onwards and throughout the 80s, until co-founding his own subcontracting studio, Synergy Japan, in 1988 (together with Hiroshi Azuma and Minoru Okazaki, the latter of whom was one of the regular episode directors of Gyators). He's most well-known perhaps as being the character designer of Dr. Slump, directed by Minoru Okazaki, and then Anpan Man, as well as sakkan/"chief animator" of Dragonball & Dragonball Z.

I watched Cencoroll, an episode-length one shot produced based on a pilot from a few years back that impressed me when it made the rounds because of its skillful animation. Even the FLCL-inspired sensibility seemed fairly well executed, albeit not particularly original. Drawn out to nearly thirty minutes, it's a languid and desultory bore with no real reason to exist. It's amazing and all that Atsuya Uki could do all the animation, backgrounds, etc. by himself, but I don't quite see the point if he doesn't have anything to say other than rehashing anime cliches and making them more boring. There are some genuinely creative indie animators working in Japan who have created their own conceptual worlds and idioms, but when it comes to people who think in anime tropes like this, and who are actually quite talented in the technical aspects, I think the world would be better served if they worked as a cog on a worthwhile project rather than creating a short that did nothing much more than to seem like a failed attempt at grandstanding when they just don't have what it takes as an artist to be directing, at least at this stage.

I said I didn't particularly enjoy the sexy nurse schtick in Trapeze, but I've changed my mind. I now think it's one of the best things about the show. The reason being it's quite clever how they've subversively replaced the element of 'moe', with its sexualization of a nonexistent drawn character, with an actual human female (though of course she's rendered as a drawing most of the time). I would hardly call Gyators the pinnacle of artistic expression, but it's testament to the astonishingly limited range in which the industry has now boxed itself partly by catering so obsequiously to the fad for this peculiar genre (although that is certainly not the only reason) that something as harebrained as Gyators seems so amazingly fresh and different from everything being made today. It can't be healthy that there doesn't seem to be freedom anymore in the industry to explore different styles of material and visuals.

I re-watched Arion a few days ago and find that despite being a failure as a film, it's a valiant attempt, and it's directed with conviction and passion that I don't find in many films these days. One part stood out to me in terms of the animation - the part where Lesphina breaks the bonds of Arion and allows him to escape. It's short but stands out from the rest. At first I suspected Norimoto Tokura or Shinji Hashimoto, because it has that proto-realistic but strange feeling to the timing and a rich, fluid motion. It feels like it's conceptualized differently from the rest of the animation in the film. It even had a bit of Utsunomiya feeling to it, though I know Utsunomiya did the part on the flying monster later on, so it couldn't be him. I couldn't find the full credits, though, so I don't know if they're involved. The only name in the truncated credits I've found that seemed a possible fit was Toei animator Yoshinobu Inano, and that turns out to have been correct. Okiura, who cites Inano as an influence, mentions in an interview that he'd similarly been impressed by the scene when the film came out. Inano seems to have been one of those seminal proto-realistic animators who paved the way in the 80s for a whole slew of more well-known realistic animators who built on his approach.

Cool beans. Charles Huettner, the guy who made a fan-made music video for Animal Collective's awesome song Water Curses that knocks the stuffing out of the boring official music video (and a great official one for DM Stith to another awesome song - he always animates awesome songs, which is better than making an awesome video to a song that sucks), says he's working on his first ever full-fledged Animated Short. Looking forward to that. He says he's got no schooling or much experience in 2D animation. And I friggin love his two music videos. How messed up is that? So I'm looking forward to it all the more. Some of the most refreshing animation I've seen has been from the unschooled. I think schooling can be good and bad. Charles talks about the process for making his great music videos on his blog too. Worth a read. And I love all the random crazy experimentation and stuff on his Vimeo account.

I watched the second episode of Trapeze and it was way better than the first one in my opinion, or at least better. They did a great job of focusing on the guy this time and digging deep into the root causes of his problem. Very funny and psychologically probing. Original script is really funny with its suggestive phrases, and kudos to translators of fansub for doing a good job conveying those in English. Though it's interesting how the whole basis of the story - his getting a permanent hard-on supposedly as some kind of post-traumatic reaction to his wife leaving him - seems undermined by the way the real-life doctor dude felt the need to interject to point out that such a thing in fact never has psychological roots. But whatever. At least they're honest! And you know what I'm warming to the use of real-life actors. They do it much more copiously here than in Kemonozume, so it feels like a different strategy, and I find that in this case it actually serves to make you relate to the character more. Who can relate to a drawing? I like that they're doing animation that kind of rejects itself at the same time.

I haven't watched anything from the new season for once. The only show I've checked out is Trapeze. Anything I missed? I had kind of high expectations for Trapeze going in, and honestly they weren't really met. I think I have a pretty good idea from the first episode what they're going to be doing stylistically for the rest of the show, and while I'm sure I'm going to enjoy the directing and the stories, I'm disappointed there's nothing that strikes me as really new in Kenji Nakamura's new show the way Bakeneko and its continuation Mononoke did. It felt like I was watching Kemonozume or Mind Game with the way the live-action was integrated, mostly in close-ups of the face, just like how Yuasa did it. Yuasa's film and shows each felt like they were exploring their own unique stylistic universe, whereas Trapeze doesn't really feel anchored to any strong visual concept. If anything, it just feels like a free-for-all. It's certainly fun, but I can't say I was too convinced by the first episode. I felt it was a little too ditzy and over-the-top with all the colors and the random strangeness without any of the things they were doing having any impact or actually meaning anything other than being there just to look weird. That, and the whole story was kind of boring. The next episode is about a guy with a permanent erection - killer-sounding material. I really like the concept overall of exploring a new person's mental or physical complexes or illnesses in each episode, which is what I'm guessing this is going to be, but I kind of feel like there needs to be more actual exploration of the psychology of the person and less random strangeness for it to really work. That was the real problem, more than style - that we didn't come away feeling like we knew the inner workings of this guy's psyche very deeply.

Yuasa's shows similarly were very daring with the mixing of media in the animation and the vivid and bold use of colors, but the combination actually felt balanced and harmonious in his hands, whereas in Trapeze the gaudy colors and random mixing of media just feels a little gimmicky and even tacky. I'm sure part of that is deliberate, though, so I don't want to dismiss it out of hand. Nakamura is a sophisticated director, and I'm sure that part of the syrupy synthetic feeling of this episode is intentional. At the very least, the show has a unique tone like nothing I've ever seen before.

And I was really not too impressed by the characters by Takashi Hashimoto this time around. The characters worked fairly well in Mononoke and its predecessor, but I didn't much like the designs here. It's not even about the animation so much as just the designs of the faces, which just don't do anything for me.

Anyway, it's still entertaining and definitely strange and like nothing else out there at the moment, and that can only be a good thing. Part of why I haven't watched anything this season is that I've been too busy. But that's the surface excuse. Mostly I just don't have the patience to wade through the ocean of same old same old anymore. At least this show is refreshing and unpredictable. It's quite amazing how literally dozens of shows are made every season and usually only one or two max actually attempt to do something that doesn't look and feel like everything else that has come before.

The subject of the next episode reminds me of something I overheard while I was in a coffee shop one day: "It's a problem when you can't get it up, but it's even worse when you can't get it down". It was raining outside, and the person was apparently having trouble with the latch on their umbrella.