Black Rock Shooter (2010)

Before I get into the plot and my thoughts I just wanted to admit that I had to look at a wiki to figure out who all the characters were since many of them are not really named. Check out the wiki if you are curious to know more about where the idea for this anime came from: (http://blackrockshooter.wikia.com/wiki/Black_Rock_Shooter_Wiki).

The film starts with a battle between two scantily clad girls with swords fighting in a checkered world. The red-eyed girl stabs the blue eyed girl through the stomach and a blue eyed girl, Kuroi Mato, wakes up and heads to school for her first day of junior high. At school she meets and befriends Takanashi Yomi. Over the span of a year they become best friends. As we are getting to know them, there are occasional glimpses of the blue eyed warrior from the intro (who looks like an older version of Mato) battling with a green-eyed scythe-carrying version of Yomi. In their second year, Mato also befriends Yuu, her basketball club’s manager, which causes Yomi to feel neglected and jealous. Yomi then vanishes, which makes the police and her parents think she was kidnapped.

At this point there is a confirmation of the warriors as having a relationship with the normal world when the blue-eyed girl defeats and hugs the green-eyed girl until the latter disintegrates and leaves behind Yomi. At the same time, Mato receives a blank text from Yomi’s phone and decides to go looking for her. Mato is taken into a blue light and meets the blue-eyed girl that looks like her. The Mato-looking girl offers to help her find Yomi and says her name is “Black Rock Shooter” as they merge into one being.

The film ends with an epilogue of Yomi, Mato, and Yuu hanging out and Yomi being friendly with Yuu now acting neglected. Earlier there was also a brief glimpse into an otherworld version of Yuu’s character so there is an implication that Black Rock Shooter would be needed again, but the movie ends before anything happens.

The story becomes clear at the end in the sense that one can assume that the events of Black Rock Shooter’s world interspersed through the story happened after she merged with Mato. What did not really make sense was how real they were. Did Yomi really go missing? Is this some crazy fantasy/sci-fi anime, or were these just metaphors of the character’s mental states? It is hard to tell since the film is short and there are no real clear answers. That may be frustrating for a viewer.

I loved it however. The animation is gorgeous. Except for a few somewhat awkward movements from Mato when we first meet her, it all feels very natural. In the other world, the animation is even better. The battle scenes are inventive and fluid. The backgrounds are fairly simple for the most part during the battles, which make it easy to focus on the characters and their movements. If they had been animated poorly this would be a drawback, but the battle scenes are spectacular so this becomes a benefit. That being said, the animation style is not especially interesting. Cute girls with large weapons and large eyes are fairly standard in anime. Still, if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it well, so the praise is deserved.

The music is not especially remarkable, but it does not detract either. Mostly, I did not notice it, which means I was focused on the story. It also means that with a thin story like this, the music is just not especially memorable.

And the story is thin, but thin with potential rather than overstretched thin. I really wanted to know what happened next. I liked the characters and wanted to see some more junior high drama portrayed as battles with giant weapons. That seems like the best way to hash out problems people have. So is this the best anime I have seen in the last few years? Certainly not. But it was entertaining and I would recommend it to those curious and interested in seeing some good animation.

Beautiful Girls (1996)

I saw Beautiful Girls a few years after it came out and only recently decided to compare my take on the story with some professional critical opinions. Reading these reviews, I find that they all missed an important aspect of the movie: the movie is an anti-romance.

In case you have not seen it and this is your first review, here is a brief summary of the plot. Piano player Willie C (Timothy Hutton) goes back to his hometown in snowy Maine for a high school reunion. There he meets with his high school buddies Tommy (Matt Dillon), Mo (Noah Emmerich), and Paul (Michael Rapaport). Willie, Tommy and Paul are trying to figure out their relationships while Mo, acting as their foil, is the happily married man with kids. Willie falls in love with Marty (Natalie Portman), the cute 13-year old girl next door, and has to decide between staying with his almost fiancé Tracy (Annabeth Gish) or waiting for Marty to grow up. Tommy is in a relationship with Sharon (Mira Sorvino) while sleeping with his married high school flame Darian (Lauren Holly). Finally, Paul just lost his seven-year relationship with Jan (Martha Plimpton) because his obsession with supermodels has prevented him from committing. Really, all three of them have commitment problems, but Paul’s is the most obvious and the only one that does not get cured at the end of the film. Uma Thurman plays a small part as Andera, a sage of wisdom on women, and Rosie O’Donnell plays Gina, essentially her boisterous, annoying self in a less effective version of Thurman’s Andera.

Most romance movies, and stories in general, are about exactly that: romance, love. This does not necessarily mean that they will end happily, but the basic theme is one of love. Either the characters are in love, or fall in love, or they have a love that cannot be, or was never meant to be, or, as in the recent 500 Days of Summer, were never in love to begin with but are still searching for it. What I find interesting about Beautiful Girls is how much it is not about love. The word is rarely spoken of in the movie because it does not apply. No one is really in love, and in many respects, no one believes that it exists. They use words like commitment and they talk about their feelings often enough, but not about idealistic love or crazy, suicidal love.

Willie C has an important conversation with Andera about “the big fade”, or marriage, and how passion dies eventually in the relationship. The conversation is a more general version of his problem with Tracy and Marty. Tracy represents the fade and Marty represents another passionate affair, but neither represent love. Marty may represent the possibility of love, but Willie recognizes that it is only a possibility and probably not a reality. Andera’s answer is a simple plea for commitment in the form of rejecting his offer and trying to show him that what he has is good enough.

But the real question that the movie leads a person to ask is whether good enough is good at all? Sure, the characters seem happy at the end, but one cannot help but feel that it is momentary, that nothing really has changed. As they say about the town, “nothing changes but the seasons”.

Tommy is another good representation of this point. Tommy eventually decides to leave the affair with the married Darian and stick with his girlfriend Sharon, but why? Because marriage is a sacrament? That certainly did not stop Lancelot and Guinevere. The real reason is because neither girl is really better than the other. The only reason given that he should choose Sharon is because Darian is married and Sharon has shown her love and devotion to him. So what? I am not defending his actions, or Darian’s, nor am I attacking the sweetness of Sharon, but I am attacking the notion that Tommy is doing something positive by picking her. It is clear that something is missing in his relationship, same as in Willie’s, and he does not do anything about it.

Paul just represents the idiot that the movie was trying to represent him as. He loses and there really is nothing redeeming about him. He chose to wait too long, subconsciously knowing that he would never get a supermodel, and yet never proposing to the girl that stuck it out with him. His example is simple.

The girls are like Paul in their simplicity. Sharon sticks with Tommy seemingly out of love, although her character is never elaborated on. Neither is Tracy’s. Darian says she loves her husband, but does not care about hurting him by sleeping with another guy, a guy she most likely does not love. Andera explains how sweet and nice her boyfriend is, but he is not her fiancé and there is no indication that there is a mythical love there. Marty’s crush is just her first serious crush, and she seems to get over it quickly. Jan, just like Tommy and Willie, settles for a guy that she does not love.

And that is the true, horrible, depressing point to the whole movie. It is about settling. Not commitment, but realizing that you will not get what you want. It is not about realizing how imperfect we all are and thus finding love in someone with faults, since some of the characters, like Tracy and Sharon, have no faults. It is about realizing that love does not exist. It is about realizing that growing up means foregoing love, a greater happiness, and the risk of greater suffering, for like, and ease, and a mild form of contentment, if that at all. As Willie C says the night before Tracy comes: “I got no feeling about that. I got a feeling of overwhelming ambivalence. But I would rather dread her arrival than not give a shit.”

And yet, he chooses to stay with the girl that gives him this feeling of ambivalence. Nowhere in the script is there a hint that his feelings have changed. Just that he has decided that what he has is good enough. Thus, I call this movie an anti-romance, because all of the events in the movie lead away from love, as do the characters. And thus, while I enjoy watching it, I find this movie to be one of the most depressing movies to watch.