Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - Anthology Chronology
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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Thank you for this article! You have covered the full breadth of this under-appreciated medium of anime.
With respect to Neo Tokyo, I do agree that the biting satire underpinning The Order to Stop Construction deserves more praise than the grim indulgence of The Running Man, though I cannot second your preference for similarly comedic Stink Bomb over Magnetic Rose. Stink Bomb’s stroke of genius, you contend, consists of its way of introducing humour to an atrocity. My own view is that this feat falls short of eclipsing the sheer poetry with which Magnetic Rose conducts its own horrors on a smaller scale, due to the latter’s highly aestheticised choice of motifs making for a more memorable and appreciable watch. Indeed, we are never invited to take the premise of Stink Bomb at all seriously, whereas the sense of disoriented fear in Mangetic Rose is quite sobering. One is both unnerving and majestic, the other merely amusing, albeit darkly so. It is unusual that you deem Starlight Angel from Robot Carnival as being worthy of any attention whatsoever. We can both agree that its utter dearth of substance clashes almost embarrassingly against the mournful, pensive beauty of Presence. If there is anything in this particular anthology that can compare, it is surely the novel parody of super-robot mecha combat found in A Tale of Two Robots. It is a pity that Sweat Punch remains unlicensed in the English-speaking world, given that both the Genius Party collections managed to receive an affordable Australian release. One of my less-than-popular views is that Baby Blue from the first Genius Party collection is the tenderest, most stirring individual work that Shinichiro Watanabe has ever directed. Fans of Makoto Shinkai would be wise to see it for themselves. Many of the other Genius Party contributions, I hold, are either inconsequential or impenetrable to varying and sometimes infuriating degrees. Gambo is my choice for the pinnacle of the Short Peace collection, simply by it attaining such careful poise amidst its extreme violence. Combustible, conversely, was symptomatic of Otomo’s limits as a director: an intense momentum is crafted, which quickly and quite literally burns to nothing without any sense of thematic closure being provided. A Farewell To Weapons was a refreshing finale, insofar as its decidedly masculine depiction of contemporary warfare ultimately reduces into a risible farce.
Well, there was a Gundam screening at MCM! The panel's target audience must have been elsewhere—I certainly was. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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If you'd seen it in the theater, you WOULDN'T ASK why. 
Starlight, Tale and the title-wraparound were the only segments done with any actual audience appeal whatsoever, and we remembered Starlight for being less Mournful and Pensive than "Presence". Welcome to the punishing world of the Ebert-List arthouse favorites, and Streamline Pictures is your guide. I remember when Sci-Fi Channel used to rerun just Carnival segments as filler for when some of their other anime movies ran short, and Presence and Clouds weren't one of them. (And even if Starlight is thin on plot, it makes up for it with shojo sentimentality and some of Hisaishi's best and most earworm music in the movie...Apart from Tale and the title segs, of course.) |
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