At the local anime club, the film _Whispers of the Heart_ was indulged in. It was chock-full of Miyazaki goodness (note to self: Find out why people actually laugh at comments like that), Miyazaki being the director of a good solid 30 percent of the anime that doesn't suck.
We take a moment to digress here, as a brand new Gateway computer of mightiness was delivered to my desk. Four hours later, I continued my journal. More on the Gateway in a moment.
Ahem. Where was I. Miyazaki. Anyway, this was a "Type One" Miyazaki film, of the sweet (yet not saccharine) and insightful kind (as opposed to a "Type Two" Miyazaki film, which is of the "My god! His arms just popped off!" kind), involving the trials and tribulations of high school students, especially the main character, who inexplicably develops the drive to complete a project (she wants to write a book) in the middle of the school year, and this sort of thing isn't condusive to, well, studying...
It amused me. Next, not having had enough anime, I rented a few videos from the local rental place. Among them were "Tenchi Forever", the (thankfully) last of the Tenchi Muyo movies, in which we run through the EXACT SAME PLOTLINE as VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER Tenchi Muyo story, namely, random girl shows up and fixates on Tenchi. Although this is the first one who manages to whisk him away to another world. Meanwhile, everyone else runs around trying to save the little putz. And, despite the fact that it's the last movie, he doesn't end up picking one of the many available women. Although it's implied that Ryoko finally seems to have established herself as being up to bat in that regard. Anyway, yet another random girl. For a while, it looked like she was completely random, which would have been a pleasant surprise, but no, she was conveniently tied into the pasts of the various characters. Damn! Just once, I want to see someone completely out of the blue show up. Is that too much to ask?! ... Anyway, barely adequate.
Let's see. Next was, on a whim, Variable Geo, which can be succinctly described as a Fighting Game Anime. The only good Fighting Game adaptation ever was Mortal Kombat, because they realized how stupid it was. This one fails to realize how stupid it is. On the other hand, the characters taking everything seriously was unintentionally amusing. When the lead character complains about her bust line being too large, I knew it would be bad. I just didn't realize HOW bad until the wrestling ring rose up, spontaneously, out of the middle of the street, and nobody thought it was at all unusual. And then there was the usual schlock inserted to try and make there be a point to all these people booting each other in the head. Schlock-a-riffic.
Next, we had Bubblegum Crisis 2040, which was surprisingly good for a dubbed anime. Perhaps because they could use the dubbing to correct many of the more awful mistakes of the Japanese version. With much more air time to work with, they were definitely able to engage in more acts of spontaneous characterization than the original, which merely stuck to the surly character/ cute character/strong leader character/other character formula. This time, Linna (the space-out faceless poster girl in the original series) has an actual personality. Although the leader, Sylia, now has TOO MUCH personality, tending to space out while on missions (this is a Bad Thing), and engage in more mood swings than... well, most anyone sane. Not too bad. And they turned the music from 'perky J-Pop' to 'surly garage band', which is much more appropriate. Although I hear that the writers gave in to marketing about half-way through and turned it into a magical girl show, the early episodes contain only a moderate amount of wackiness. Such as the "The Knight Sabers are an Urban Legend" bit, which makes about as much sense as the DC Comics editorial edict about Batman. Oh, sure, it's cute, but people have MET them. They've been CAUGHT ON FILM. They've been seen on TV, for crying out loud. Urban Legend, my butt. Also, the suits are launched into battle out of a giant electromagnetic cannon in their secret base. Now, while I'm in favor of people being shot out of cannons, I have to wonder - wouldn't they pass out? How did Sylia get that thing built into her lingerie store/secret base? Doesn't anyone NOTICE them shooting up out of the roof? It's not as bad as the Bubblegum Crash adaptation (how secret a group can you be when you ride into battle in a helicopter called the 'Knightwing' that launches, very noisily, from the roof of your secret base), but still.
In other news, I now have a shiny new Gateway system on my desk. It's shiny. It's new. I don't know how fast it is. It has a frickin' huge monitor. Unfortunately, there's a down side - Windows 98. Fear its' might. What kind of half-assed operating system takes half an hour to shut down? Win98, that's what! Well, I only spent a modest 4 hours getting everything reinstalled and all that mess. It could be worse. Damn, that's a big monitor. Eeeegads. It was astonishingly painless, though. Just very slow. Which probably means it's conserving its strength to die horribly soon. Gadzooks.
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