Brief Thoughts on Space Battleship Yamato
The live-action adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato hit theaters in Japan on Dec. 1st, and if the video below is any indication, the film is all kinds of awesome. Hopefully U.S. theaters will be smart and bring this one to us before the end of January, but I highly doubt that will happen. Before I talk about my more sophisticated thoughts about SBY, I think you all should watch the trailer and the brief clip from the film: First: Apparently the budget for this film was roughly $20 million. How they managed to produce such a visually impressive film for that amount is beyond me. Even films in the U.S. with awful CG often cost more than SBY. Maybe IMDB has it wrong. Second: Based on the two clips above, the one thing that I am most impressed about SBY is how much effort has gone into maintaining the feel of the anime it’s based on. The battle scenes are all high-octane action, with an extraordinary amount of detail; they actually seem to overload the senses, which real war has a tendency to do, and films often downplay. Likewise, the bridge scenes follow a very traditional anime structure–a kind of very personable back-and-forth style that highlights both the emotional hypersensitivity and the hyper-authoritarianism found in anime representations of the Japanese military. They remind me of scenes from Crest of the Stars and Banner of the Stars, though these connected series came some thirty years later than the original SBY and likely took a few pages from the 1970s classic. The creators of the adaptation of SBY seem to be going about this rather intelligently. They’ve acknowledge the source material, updated it, and amplified the emotional output from the characters. SBY simply looks beautiful and anime-lover-friendly. It’s the kind of film that tries to reach a wider audience while always remembering where it came from. Granted, in Japan, live-action anime adaptations really don’t have to appeal to a non-anime audience. Japanese anime is, well, huge in Japan, which is in contrast to America, where animated programs are largely the domain of children. Exceptions exist, but they are dwarfed by the number of programs designed for younger generations. Third: Am I the only one looking forward to this film? I know it’s in Japanese and dubbing it will be awful, thus forcing most of us to watch the film with subtitles, but it just looks so tasty. Do you agree? I want to know what you think about SBY, so let me know in the comments!
Science Fiction and Reptiles: A Very Strange Email, Updates, and a Question
(There are two sections for this post. The first is about SF and reptiles and the second is on updates about what I’m up to and a question that I’d appreciate answers for.) I. Science Fiction and Reptiles I’m hazarding a guess that the following email is a joke, since the author’s name is Warren Peece (i.e. War and Peace). The content, however, is interesting enough to approach. Here’s the email: Is it my imagination or are there a lot of lizard stories out there? I just read a really creepy and sexy piece, but insightful and funny, where the protagonist goes from starting out as comet and ends up reptilian! Pretty terrific – it’s called “Modern Malice” Just curoius, Warren I’ve never heard of the story referenced in the email, but there have been a few lizard-related stories out there in the last few years (well, some of them were dinosaur stories, but so be it). Plus, one of the top science fiction shows at the present moment is about lizard people invading Earth–V, in case you didn’t know. The thing that gets me about the email is that it isn’t the usual kind of spam that I received in my inbox. This particular email is remarkably cogent, and only seems to be selling me something that is poorly defined (the story mentioned). So, the question I have is this: what stories have you read lately about lizards or other reptilian creatures? Let me know in the comments! Maybe there’s a trend going on that nobody realizes is there. II. Updates and Things I’ve had some issues writing things for this blog (let alone for anything else) lately. There are three reasons for this: School The semester is practically over, but I have a 25-page paper left to write and 30 papers to grade (that’s about 220 pages of stuff to mark). Lack of Inspiration I have some ideas, but I’ll talk about those in #3. My problem has been in finding things that haven’t been talked about elsewhere or that aren’t too simple/boring/old/uninteresting. Hopefully it’s just the winter season at work. Biting More Than I Can Chew At least four things I’m working on right now require more research and thought than I originally hoped. As a result, they’re not ready, and probably won’t be until next week. I don’t know if anyone else has ever felt like this about what they’re doing, but it is sort of frustrating when you start on a project that you think will be done in a few hours, and realize that actually you need to spend another week thinking about it before you can get it in good shape. That said, I do have some things lined up. I’m going to talk about the recently released Japanese live-action adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato (a.k.a. Star Blazers to U.S. audiences), followed by a discussion of live-action anime adaptations and why films like Transformers and upcoming adaptations seem to work so well. I’m also starting to consider submitting some of my articles to places like Strange Horizons and other magazines. Why? Because if I’m going to be a critic and an academic, I might as well start getting myself out there. That doesn’t mean the quality of work posted here will lapse, but it does mean that some things may be sent to magazines first to see if they’ll bite. Either way, content will keep appearing here. That said, I do have a question for anyone willing to answer it: which content do you most enjoy on this blog, and which content do you least enjoy? Honesty is appreciated. Alright, I’m out. See you all tomorrow with something other than random complaining!