Review: Kotatsu Japanese Animation Festival 2014 @ Chapter
Chapter is one of my favourite places in Cardiff. The cinemas are great, the food is great and the staff are great.
I like to pick up their brochure every couple of months to see what shows they have coming up, and when I saw the listing for the Kotatsu Festival, I immediately got excited. I had known about the event since Christmas, but had never really known the date, so seeing as it had suddenly jumped up, I completely rearranged my plans to fit in a day of anime.
For those who are unacquainted with the Kotatsu Festival, the festival began in 2010 to try and bring more Japanese animation into Wales, premiering in our own lovely Chapter, and has been a yearly staple ever since. This was my first time attending the festival and it was the most fun I had had in a long time; I am already looking forward to going next year (Kotatsu also has a festival in Aberystwyth before the end of the month).
If you have the time to spend an entire day watching anime, and want to help support the scene in Wales, I would highly recommend going to this festival.
The showings this time around were:
- By Your Side
- Colorful (I’m sorry for having to write it without the ‘u’, but that’s how the title is spelt - sorry spelling/grammar enthusiasts!)
- Patema Inverted
- Mai Mai Miracle
- and Evangelion 3.33
There was also a variety of stalls selling Japan-themed goods and a raffle, where my name was read out an embarrassingly large amount of times (Huzzah for three painting stands).
Without further ado, here’s my two pennies of the wonderful films shown at this fantastic festival.
By Your Side
By Your Side is a short film. This shall then be a short review. You can watch it on YouTube above. It’s pretty good, a nice show of how music can make you feel the emotions, very well animated, and heart-warming. Take five minutes out of your day, watch a short film, act pretentious to colleagues. Also, enjoy a short film.
Colorful
My personal favourite film from the day, and one I can highly recommend. Colorful follows the story of a dead soul that is given a chance to regain life by trying to piece back together the life of a young boy, known as Makoto, who commits suicide, whilst also trying to figure out what crime the dead soul committed that would have sent him to hell if the soul hadn’t chosen to retry at life. The film is moving, funny, charming, and instantly one of my all-time favourite.
The angel character of Puripuri had the whole cinema laughing at his interactions with Makoto, as well as having us swell with emotions at some of the deeper moments, showing how humans aren’t just black and white, and people are, as the title says, colourful. The film is stunningly gorgeous, bursting with colour at some points, and then muting at others to fit the mood, going from sunny railway tracks to dingy sex hotels (oh Japan).
Each of the characters is multi layered and interesting, with the cast perfectly fitting their characters with their voices, making each of the characters feel real (Note: All of the films were subtitled with the original Japanese casts, so comments on the voice actors are based on them). I really felt for Makoto over the trials and tribulations of the story, despite him being a very hard character to like, being generally anti-social and mean to some people, though this could be because he’s very small in size, so I can easily relate to that.
The film presents so many interesting ideas about what it means to be human, it is the film that has stuck in my head the most from the day, making me even considering paying the ludicrous costs to get the Blu-ray imported from America. I had never heard of Colorful before, and neither had most of the other viewers before hearing it was showing at the festival, and I think that is criminal. Colorful should be on every top anime list, it is as good, if not better, than the vast majority of the Studio Ghibli works. You owe it to yourself to watch Colorful; it is a masterpiece not to be missed.
TL;DR - Very good film about the multi-faceted personalities of humans, well worth your time
Patema Inverted
How sick did Gravity make you feel, in the queasiness sense of the word? If your answer is ‘very’, just as I was whilst looking at the first few adverts, then I don’t think you’ll be able to watch Patema. Patema, at least in the storyline department, is a fairly straightforward Romeo Meets Juliet sort of set up, a boy and a girl from two different groups of people meet and fall in love and try to fix the gap between the two, with each older members of the two parties disapproving of the other group.
Patema puts a very original twist on this concept though. Instead of the boy and the girl being from different families or different races, in Patema, the two are divided by opposing forces of gravity, with the boy, Age, living like us, feet firmly planted onto the ground, whilst the girl, Patema, and her people have been forced to live underground, as they will be sucked up into the sky if they reach the surface. It’s hard to explain without an appropriate image.
It’s all done very well on an artistic level; I felt real fear when Patema peers over the edge of an abyss to see the sky, and having the two desperately clinging onto each other so they don’t float away is quite moving. Apart from this, however, the story of Patema isn’t too original, with parallels being easily drawn between similar films, with most of the characters fitting the basic archetypes for this type of story. Thankfully the storytelling is really strong, making you feel for the characters' struggles, unsure of what turn the story might suddenly twist, with some moments extracting a shocked gasp from the audience when we thought we already knew how the story was going to go.
If my brief description of the film has caught your interest, I’d recommend you watch it, but if you don’t want to see another Boy Meets Girl film in yet another setting, I wouldn’t be too annoyed at you wanting to skip this over.
TL;DR - Typical Boy Meets Girl, but with a twist in gravity. Enjoyable to watch if you aren’t afraid of heights
Mai Mai Miracle
Sadly, this is not the eagerly anticipated film of Link from Link Between Worlds running into walls to catch tiny octopuses. Instead, Mai Mai Miracle is a coming of age story of two girls in rural Japan, mixed in with some historical information for those who wondered what little Japanese princess girls did one thousand years ago (and who wouldn’t?).
Before you wonder, the film describes a mai mai as a curl of hair that will never sit down (which I personally have and it’s very frustrating because you know it’s moving and people always look up to look at it). The film is very heart-warming, if a bit predictable. The main friendship between Shinko and Kiiko is very convincing, and how the two then interact with the adults in the story, such as Shinko’s grandfather, makes the characters very believable
As with all childhood stories, there must be a darker underlying theme, with Mai Mai throwing the dart and getting the double whammy of both loneliness and death. The film sparkles with character and life, with the cultural differences of the two girls reflecting into their surroundings, with Shinko playing in the lush green wheat fields and Kiiko dressing in bright greens and pinks, these then suitably contrasting the darker moments towards the end of the film.
I did enjoy Mai Mai a lot, with the audience and I finding humour through the quaint interactions of the children and the supporting cast, and aside from Colorful I find it the easiest to recommend to watch with friends, but looking analytically back on it, it does have its fair share of flaws, probably objectively being the least good film of the bunch, but seeing as how the rest are solid films that deserve watching, that still makes Mai Mai a pretty darn good film.
If you want a quaint childhood comedy about friendship in rural Japan, with some historical elements mixed in, I suggest you find a Thursday night sometime and snuggle up to watch Mai Mai Miracle.
TL;DR - Story of two girls growing up in rural Japan. Enjoyable whilst watching
Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo
The main highlight of the entire day, the busiest film, the only one I had to queue to get into, and the one that made me skip dinner. If you are not acquainted with the Evangelion series, I shall scoff at you and say ‘Ha! How can you not have seen Evangelion? I’ve been a fan since I started watching it last week’.
I never managed to get into the original Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series, likely because I had just finished the original Berserk TV series and needed something with little more production value, and upon viewing the first Evangelion film, I thought it was pretty good, worth watching but definitely not one of my favourites.
And then I watched 2.22. Oh, 2.22, aren’t you just the most fabulous. If you have not watched Evangelion 2.22, I give it my highest recommendation (Buy the DVD cheap off That’s Entertainment), as it is one of the greatest movies I have ever seen, anime or not. So, as you could expect, I was very excited going into Evangelion 3.33, as I had decided to not watch it until the festival.
And, sadly, I was disappointed.
Sure, the film is still very good, but it’s just not as good as 2.22, or even 1.11. All the fun comedy and human elements have been removed, replaced by pianos and homoeroticism, and the Angel fighting set pieces are now the entire movie. Shinji is still one of the most annoying protagonists, but I feel this is the first film where he can really whine about the predicament he has got himself into. We have reason to whine as well, as the film doesn’t do a great job explaining what happened and why in the fourteen year time gap between 2.22 and 3.33. Sure, that’s probably going to be revealed in 4.44, but I would have much preferred 4.44 to be the big fighty mech one, and 3.33 to have a bit more substance (I know purists are going to complain about my wanting to disrupt the original canon, but very little actually happens in 3.33).
I didn’t always understand exactly what some characters were talking about, but I guess if I read the books or watched the original they likely have more time to properly explain it. Comparatively to the other Evangelion films, and especially the original anime and manga that I have started to absorb, 3.33 is kind of a drop in story quality, with very little explained development of the characters, and very little seen change to the world, all described by exposition.
Aside from this, Evangelion 3.33 is still a top notch film. It looks drop dead gorgeous, the Evangelion fight scenes are jaw dropingly awesome, the music is astounding, the voice actors nail the characters absolutely perfectly and the production values (which is important to someone as shallow as me) are through the roof.
As a mecha fighting anime, 3.33 is great, with near constant combat ranging from oceans to space to creepy underground lairs. The use of the piano music to show the relationship between Shinji and Kaworu is very effective, and their interaction nears fan service at times, though it is nice to get some kooky guy on guy one sided closeness in this style of anime, against the seething tide of short skits and low cut tops saturating a lot of anime (Free! and Kuroko withstanding).
As the third film in a famous franchise, Evangelion 3.33 is a very hard film to recommend, as it is not as good as its predecessors, and cannot be digested as its own piece of media given how serial the Evangelion series is. That said, I eagerly await 4.44 only slightly less than I wish for the next HakoMari or a Steel Ball Run adaptation, and 3.33 still remains a better adaptation of original source material than the Berserk movies (shudder).
I can give it to 3.33, however, that this might be a hard section of the original to convert into a similar film as the others, but as someone who has yet to see the original, 3.33, and the whole remake series in general, should be able to stand apart from the originals without their support. But then again, if you’ve watched the first two Evangelion films, which I highly recommend you do because they’re tippity top, you’re going to be watching 3.33 anyway.
TL;DR – Third film in the Evangelion Remake series, unfortunately the weakest film released so far, but still very worth your time if you’ve already watched the other two
Conclusion
Four films, one day, a heck of a lot of cosplay. The Kotatsu Festival has been the most fun I have had in a long time, and has given me a new favourite film that I would likely have not discovered if not for this event. I wish there were more events like this, and there probably is around Comic Con, but I eagerly await next year for another batch of fantastic movies (fingers crossed for Evangelion 4.44 and/or a HakoMari adaptation) for another day of fantastic anime.
Oh, and go watch Colorful now. Seriously, it’s great, well worth your time. It’s fine. I’ll wait.
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3 Comments – Postiwch sylw
Sam Sprout (Editor)
Rhoddwyd sylw 23 mis yn ôl - 11th June 2014 - 10:40am
Excellent and thorough review Mr Fridge! I like the use of TL;DRs for the skimmers.
CeefaxOfLife
Rhoddwyd sylw 23 mis yn ôl - 11th June 2014 - 11:12am
I was really disappointed with Evangelion 3.0. As a fan of the franchise (I've even been to the Evangelion store in Harajuku) I thought the reboot would fill in the gaps left by the TV series.
From what I understand, the budget for the TV series was dratically cut so the final couple of episodes are like these montages with lots of philosophical mumbo-jumbo voiceovers and I hoped the films, with proper backing behind them would flesh the story out, but it seemed the budget was blown on making a spectacular visual feast and forgetting the story. Some clues to the 14 year gap would have been nice in this film (I'm sure it'll get wrapped up in 4.0 but still), as would how battleships can now float in the sky.
Finally, it doesn't help Shinji Ikari is such a whinger and doesn't seem to develop or learn anything. Just mopes about listening to that ruddy tape - how did that survive all the impacts and angels?
Will still watch the fourth one though. Damn it.
thatisme
Rhoddwyd sylw 23 mis yn ôl - 14th June 2014 - 20:52pm
cool picture