Anime 20XX Gaiden 001: “Spider and Tulip”

“Spider and Tulip”

Directed by Kenzo Masaoka

Originally released on April 15, 1943 by Shouchiku Douga Kenkyuusho

Welcome to Anime 20XX Gaiden, where I cover interesting diversions that don’t fit into the structure of Anime 20XX proper.

“Spider and Tulip” has a long history of being released with Momotaro: Sacred Sailors, first appearing with Momotaro on its initial home video releases on VHS in the 1980s. While some of this may be because of their shared staff, as “Spider and Tulip” director Kenzo Masaoka was an animator on Momotaro, an equally likely reason is that both were produced by Shouchiku in the 1940s and their combined length running is a good 90 minutes, the perfect length for an attractive VHS tape purchase. However, it does provide a nice contrast to Momotaro, as we’ll see in a moment, so having the two distributed together is educational as well as entertaining.

But before that, what is the short about? To summarize: a spider tries to trick a ladybug into relaxing in his “hammock” (conveniently made of the webs he uses to catch insects) so he can eat her. The ladybug tries to escape from the spider with the help of the flowers of the meadow, eventually hiding in a tulip. The spider tries to keep the ladybug trapped in the tulip until he can eat her, but is instead blown away by a sudden rainstorm and drowns in a puddle. After having the remaining webbing torn off by a wandering fly, the tulip and the ladybug emerge unharmed, and short ends on a lovely shot of the spider’s rain droplet covered web.

“Spider and Tulip” was made independently from Momotaro, but the two’s long history of being packaged together makes it easy to compare the two and where their differences shine through. For example, “Spider and Tulip” is actually fun to watch! (I’m being mean, but I can say it’s a much better watch than Momotaro with no hesitation) Well, it’s mostly fun to watch. It has one big thing going against it, which is that the spider is clearly derived from the racist depictions of black people that were all too common in American animation during this time period. I’m not sure if this was motivated by any particular ideology or anything - I’ve seen at least one review that suggested the spider was supposed to be a stand in for the terrors of western culture at large - or if it was just used because it was a common visual trope in American cartoons that the animators liked and it’s obvious racist origins didn’t really matter to them. It’s a shame, because the short is really well done otherwise. It moves along at a good brisk pace and the animation itself is stellar. All the characters have their own distinct personality that shines through in how they are animated, especially the spider. You can tell the animators had a lot of fun playing around with all his limbs and making sure they always have something to do in each shot. 

The music is also a highlight of the short, as a chunk of it is told through songs the ladybug and the spiders sing to each other/the audience. They’re short, but well performed (racist stereotyping endemic to the spider aside) and invoke the kind of musical scenes you’d see in music based Fleischer Studio cartoon short (and avoid that strange, out-of-place feeling you get from watching and hearing the songs that Momotaro has). Its short length also works in its favor, it moves at a good steady clip and never has an opportunity to get too slow and overstay its welcome (another advantage it has over Momotaro). While it's unfortunate choice in character design does ultimately hold it back, it’s a really solid effort otherwise. Check it out if you like 1940s animation and similar throwbacks.

“Spider and Tulip” is available on the Momotaro: Sacred Sailors Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Funimation/Crunchyroll. It can be purchased on Right Stuf and other fine home video retailers.

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Anime 20XX 001 Momotaro: Sacred Sailors

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors

Directed by Mitsuyo Seo

Originally released on April 12, 1945 by Shouchiku Douga Kenkyuusho

In 1944, the Japanese Naval Ministry, presumably happy with the success of “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” rehired Mitsuyo Seo to make a loose sequel to that short, but with one key difference. This time, it would be feature length! 74 whole minutes of animation about the glory of Japan and the righteousness of their cause! Completed in 1944 and released in the spring of 1945, it was the first feature length piece of animation made in Japan, a true milestone in the history of anime and world animation in general. Like its predecessor, it uses characters from the Momotaro folktale to show the strength of the Japanese military, but also extends to showing the humanity of the soldiers who are in the fight. The film opens on a quartet of funny animal sailors, coming home to see their families after completing their military training. They catch up with their loved ones, impress their younger siblings with all the tactics and information they’ve learned, and even team up to stop the monkey sailor’s younger sibling from drowning in the river. But the good times can’t last forever, as the sailors are called away to an island in the pacific to plan and participate in a raid on Sulawesi, an island near Indonesia that has been taken over by The British a bunch of oni that look exactly like white men with horns and who all have British accents. After sending scouts to map out the island (and losing one of their pilots in the process), General Momotaro leads his funny animal soldiers on an attack that leaves The British the oni decimated and cowering until they agree to an unconditional surrender.

And how is this important historical milestone? How does it hold up?

Well, it’s…it’s okay, I guess.

You may recall from my last article that “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” while the longest piece of animation made in Japan up until this point, was noticeably sloppier and cruder looking than many of the shorter animated efforts that preceded it. For better or for worse, this trend continues into this sequel. It’s not terrible looking, but the quality of the animation is all over the place. Close ups in particular seem to suffer from this, as characters' faces will awkwardly shift around within a shot, a factor not helped by how odd looking some of the character designs are. (Momotaro and the monkeys especially suffer from this, as they’re all given prominent lips and teeth that end up being really distracting, in no small part because they sometimes resemble the rejected Sonic model from 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie). Admittedly, this can be forgiven given the circumstances that the movie was made under. In addition to its length, the film was made during a period where even the basic materials to make an animated film were scarce. There are even stories of director Seo washing off the cels of already shot scenes so that they could be reused, as that was significantly easier than getting new cels for whatever remained to be animated. I can imagine this didn’t leave a lot or room for corrections or general fussiness with how exactly the final product looked. And it is not as though the movie looks amateurish for its entire runtime. Much of the movie looks perfectly fine and is even beautiful in some parts. There’s several shots of dandelion seeds gently drifting through the air that look absolutely spectacular, even if they are soundtracked by the sounds of soldiers parachuting out of planes to attack their enemy.

Despite its wonky animation, if the movie does have a major fault, it’s mostly that it’s a little dull to watch. Unlike “Momotaro's Sea Eagles,” which for all its flaws at least packed a good amount of comedy and action into its 37 minutes, Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is much slower and surprisingly light on action, or even jokes. It feels like the tone it’s going for is more semi-serious drama about men fighting for their country than the nationalist-oriented wacky animal hijinks of the preceding short. The first fifteen minutes alone are dedicated to the quartet of animal sailors mentioned earlier and the actual attack the movie is leading up to doesn’t happen until over an hour into the movie. The attack itself is also barely a sequence, as it only lasts about 5 minutes and is mostly a one-sided trouncing of the oni by Momotaro. Even a random cameo by Popeye at the end can’t help give it any of the charge that was so abundant in “Momotaro's Sea Eagles.”  There is entertainment to be found, especially in the musical numbers and the nicer parts of the animation, but it’s so weirdly sedate it’s hard to say who this was supposed to entertain. It even lacks the surreal tone that “Momotaro’s Sea Eagles” had just because everything is so po-faced and serious. And even that doesn’t land all that well, as seen in a non-subplot where a bird sailor is constantly shown looking at a photo of his children (or maybe younger siblings? It’s not clear) which seems like set-up for him to tragically die on a scouting mission, but nope, he gets out fine. Maybe the animators got confused and killed off the wrong character.

I don’t want to make it sound like this movie fails on all levels though. Even for its faults, it still has some appeal outside of pure historical interest. As noted, some of the animation is quite beautiful and its flaws came across less as a sign of true ineptness and more a side effect of the movie propaganda piece that was cranked out quickly by artists who weren’t used to making anything this long. The music throughout is quite well done and the songs do bring back that surreal mood that made “Momotaro’s Sea Eagles” so fascinating. (Watching a bunch of animals the live on a South Pacific island, but not native to the South Pacific, sing about how happy they are to work for their new Japanese overlords is quite the sight.) The voice acting is also solid, with a special credit to whoever voices the cowardly oni during the surrender scene at the end, who has a very convincing British accent and grasp of English for a film from 1940s Japan (to the point some have speculated this might be an British expat or POW rather than a Japanese actor).

One of the more interesting aspects is how director Mitsuyo Seo’s own politics come through in the movie. While best known for these two propaganda pieces, Seo himself had pretty left leaning politics, to the point that he was briefly arrested and jailed in the 1920s for his involvement with the Proletarian Film League of Japan. His involvement in these much more politically conservative and nationalistic movies seems to be a function of that being the only real work he could get at the time. As a result, he tried to imbue the movies with a sense of optimism for the children they were aimed at, to look forward to the future and not give up on their dreams. This does come through in the movie, even if who was financing it means that it’s bolted to the pro-imperial and pro-war attitudes that the movie was always going to contain. This also ended up being something of a last hurrah for Seo, who’s next movie, an adaptation of of the Emperor’s New Clothes titled Ōsama no Shippo was unceremoniously dropped by it’s distributor, Toho, after it was deemed too leftist. Seo, along with a number of other major animators who worked on the movie, responded by quitting the animation industry and becoming an illustrator for children’s books. As Ōsama no Shippo was never released (and doesn’t seem to have survived in any form as far as my internet searching has found), it’s a shame that his last animated work is a movie that’s both so notable and such a mess for what it is, rather than something he made on his own terms.

All of that said, I am glad that this movie is now so readily available to watch for anyone interested in anime and animation history (even if it’s not anything I’d say you need to go out and see immediately). Frankly, that this movie survived to the present day at all is pretty astonishing, especially since its spring 1945 release meant that it was not widely shown, as there were few running cinemas left in Japan for it to play at. It was also not widely seen where it was showing, as much of Japan’s youth population had been evacuated out of cities or, if old enough, had been sent to work in factories for the war effort. (I would also speculate that an optimistic war propaganda movie was probably not exactly what people wanted to see in Japan in 1945, but that’s just a guess). It was actually presumed to be lost for many years, either destroyed during the war itself or by the occupying American forces after the war, until a copy was found in the 1980s and has been around on home video ever since. Heck, in the US it was put out by Funimation, at the time the longest lasting and biggest of the anime home video distributors. (And still technically are, since the current incarnation of Crunchyroll is mostly Funimation’s corporate structure with Crunchyroll’s branding pasted on top.) Indeed, you can still get this movie on Blu-ray/DVD from Funimation right now. (Only time will tell if the Funi/CR merger will affect this, so maybe snag it soon if it seems like something that would interest you.) It’s a nice package too, coming with a nice thick booklet that includes an essay on the film by anime historian Helen McCarthy and a piece on the film’s history and restoration by Mika Tomita of the National Museum of Modern Art and even comes with an acclaimed early anime short from around the same period called “Tulip and Spider”. If nothing else, it’s definitely the most “Criterion” home video release any anime I’ve bought has gotten, barring maybe a few of the fancier releases by Disctok and GKids/Shout Factory.

Momotaro: Sacred Sailors is available as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Funimation/Crunchyroll. It can be purchased on Right Stuf and other fine home video retailers.

NEXT TIME ON ANIME 20XX: THERE’S A NEW KID IN TOWN AND HIS NAME IS TOEI DOGA.

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Anime 20XX 000. The Roots of Japanese Anime Until the End of WWII

Before we can talk about animated feature films made in Japan, we need to take a look at what came before that. Namely, non-feature length animated films made in Japan, which had had a fairly long history prior to the release of Japan’s first feature length animated movie in 1945. The probably oldest  piece of surviving Japanese animation is a 3 second clip of a boy writing “活動写真” (“katsudō shashin'' which roughly translates to “moving pictures”) and bowing to the camera, created by an unknown animator around 1907 who probably created the clip by impressing the drawings directly onto the celluloid with a stencil. Beyond this early curiosity, the oldest known Japanese animated shorts started appearing around 1917, when noted animation pioneers such as Junichi Kouchi, Ōten Shimokawa, and Seitarou Kitayama began making their first shorts. Sadly, much of these early pieces are now lost, through some a combination of the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, the destruction caused during World War II, and the generally poor contemporary preservation efforts that much early film has suffered form. Of this very early group, Junichi Kouchi’s “Hanawa Hekonai Meitō no Maki” (known in English as “The Famous Sword” or “The Dull Sword”) is the only readily available surviving short.

The availability of early anime does get much better for films made after the 1923 earthquake and depending on where you’re willing to look, a surprisingly large number have made their way to home video. Some of these are...not terribly accessible or easy to get, such as the long out of print Nihon Art Animation Eiga Senshuu DVD collection that was released to tie into the "日本アニメーション映画史" ("A History of Japanese Animation") film exhibition that the National Film Center of the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo ran in 2004 or the Japanese Anime Classic Collection, which is easier to get but will still set you back over $100 for 4 DVDs of animation history. So instead we’re going to talk about a much easier to get DVD set, Zakka Films’s 2008 DVD release The Roots of Japanese Anime Until the End of WWII.

This set provides a nice little overview of anime shorts made between 1930 and 1942 in a variety of styles and genres. The most represented creator is Noboru Ofuji, who directed the two musical sing-a-longs “The Village Festival” (1930) and “Song of Spring” (1931) as well as the short comedy “Chinkoroheibei and the Treasure Box” (1936). (Chinkoroheibei is the rounded, mouse-ish looking dude on the cover up there. If you were ever wondering around when anime started featuring cute, mascot-ready characters, now you know). The two sing-a-long shorts, designed to be played in tandem with a record of the song they were set to, are fun examples of the kind of cut-out animation that was popular in Japan at the time, where all the animation was done with paper cut-outs that would be moved around, stop motion style, between shots. (This was more or less the norm in Japan for years, as animation cels were expensive to import and didn’t become widespread in the industry until larger companies started to get into the animation game.) Despite how primitive this sounds, Ofuji is quite adept at the style. If you didn’t know this wasn’t cel animation, nothing would really tip you off to that fact and Ofuji clearly has a lot of fun literalizing and visualizing the lyrics of the songs. The Chinkoroheibei short, on the other hand, was one of the first pieces of anime to be made with cel animation and shows a very strong influence from contemporary American animation, in contrast to the earlier sing-along shorts that were, at least in subject matter, very Japanese. If it weren’t for the music and some of the character designs, this could easily be mistaken for a forgotten short from Fleischer Studios or one of their contemporaries, right down to the weirdly grim violence and silly cartoon shenanigans.

He stole the fish's skin to sneak into an underwater palace. How horrifying.

The other two early ‘30s cut-out animation shorts, Yasuji Murata’s “The Monkey Masamune” (1930) and Kiyoji Nishikura “Chameko's Day” (1931), are also interesting in their own ways. “Chameko's Day” is essentially an adaptation of the 1929 hit song by Hideko Hirai, who plays Chameko in the short, and features Chameko going about her day, interacting with anthropomorphized objects around her house, and going to school and the movies. The whole short comes off as more surreal and artistic than it seems like it was intended to be: Chameko gets dressed by having her cloths grow onto her from her extremities, the anthropomorphic objects all have a unnerving, uncanny vibe and look about them, and the movie she sees at the end of the short is surprisingly violent for something ostensibly aimed at kids. (Assuming this was indeed aimed at children rather than just starring a child. It’s hard to tell sometimes with these old films that date from when things like “intended audience” wasn’t the thing it is now.) It still provides a wonderful example of cut-out style animation and gives some insight into Japanese popular culture of the period, with its references to contemporary movies and celebrities and even features a plug for Lion Toothpaste in what appears to be the earliest known example of product placement in an anime.

Advertising!

While there are a few moments in “Chameko's Day” where you can tell that this is all just pieces of paper being moved around in front of a camera, “The Monkey Masamune” stands out in part because it’s hard to tell that it was done with cut-out animation at all. The characters and action all move with a fluid grace that one usually associates with more technically complicated cel animation. It's a testament to Yasuji Murata's talents as a director that he can make what seems like a less sophisticated animation style look just as good as its nominally more accomplished peers. It’s also interesting to see Murata use techniques that wouldn’t become common in any film medium until much later, such as a scene where a POV shot of the main character looking at the countryside is accomplished via a shaky-cam style shot of the scenery he's looking at.

The final three shorts on the disc, Yoshitaro Kataoka’s “Danemon Ban - The Monster Exterminator” (1935), Kenzo Masaoka’s “Benkei And Ushiwaka” (1939) and Mitsuyo Seo’s “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” (1942) are all cel animated and draw on Japanese folklore for their characters, but use them to extremely different ends. “Danemon Ban” and “Benkei And Ushiwaka” have more in common, being relatively straightforward shorts starring characters from Japanese folklore. Both illustrate how well Japanese animators took to cel animation once it became more readily available in Japan and each shows off the prowess of their respective directors in setting up and paying off action and comedy. “Danemon Ban” in particular shows the the influence of western animation hadn’t died down by the mid-1930s (though as we'll see that will soon change). Danemon Ban is presented as an almost Popeye-esque character, comedic while still being strong and tough (and willing to beat up tanukis who disguise themselves as similar-to-but-legally-distinct-from-Betty Boop) and as much a source of action and fighting as he is jokes. While the obvious western influence isn’t nearly as prominent in “Benkei And Ushiwaka,” it still provides a nice balance of humor and combat. I particularly enjoyed the section when Benkei, a monk on a quest to win 100 swords for Buddha, gets into a few rounds of “But WHY?” with his young apprentice. The fights are equally enjoyable, as Masaoka’s sense of timing and choreography make this feel like version 1.0 of every great ,fantastical fight you’ve ever seen in anime.

I was going to show one of the fight scenes, but I decided showing this neat looking boar would be more fun. Look at him and his little tusks!

But the real noticeable shift in style comes with “Momotaro's Sea Eagle”, at the time the longest animated film created in Japan (though still a few minutes shy of being truly feature length). Unlike the other shorts in this collection, which are clearly made as light entertainment first and foremost, “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” is propaganda for Japan’s involvement in World War II and features Momotaro, the Peach Boy of Japanese folklore, leading a navy of cute, anthropomorphic dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and birds in an attack on “Demon Island”. Demon Island is, of course, an obvious stand in for Hawaii, so much so that I’m almost not sure why they didn’t just straight out call it “Hawaii” outside of wanting to mimic as many elements of the original myth as they could. As propaganda goes its...really weird. The first third or so of the short is made up of the animals preparing for the attack, and by “preparing” I mean “engaging in silly animal hi-jinks,” such as a section where a dog struggles to tie his Rising Sun headband onto his head without it slipping off his ears and a monkey makes fun of him for it. These antics continue into the battle itself and the effect is bizarre, with monkeys running around lighting airplanes on fire and riding torpedoes like horses so that they’ll hit the battleship they’re aiming for. The attack on the stand-in United States even extends to its own animated creations, as the most prominent American sailor featured in the attack is very obviously based on Bluto from Popeye, no doubt picked because his size and general temperament make him the most oni-esque of American cartoon characters and thus the perfect dimwitted foe for the Momotaro navy. Overall, it’s a very surreal experience, made stranger by the quality of the animation itself.

I don't think I care for Momotaro's design in this, he's a little to...realistic(?) looking among all the cartoon animals.

While this was the longest animated film made in Japan at that time and a lot of effort and energy clearly went into it, the animation itself is something of a mixed bag. Some parts look fine, but others seem shockingly amateurish, with characters warping and failing to stay completely on model, frequently within the same shots. None of it looks especially deliberate and suggests that these sections were done by a less skilled animator and that whoever was supervising the movie didn’t feel the need to clean any of it up. Notably, this is the only short on the DVD that has more than one animator credited with working on it and it really shows in this instance. The whole effect reminds me of things like “Story from North America” and similar deliberately crude-looking animated shorts one finds on YouTube, rather than something that had the official backing of the Japanese Ministry of the Navy. It’s certainly an interesting historical piece, especially since Japan’s first feature length animated movie was more or less a sequel to this short made by much of the same staff, but it’s also more of a chore to watch than any of the other shorts featured here and doesn't feel nearly as polished or cared for.

Having said that, I would recommend tracking this DVD down. It's a fascinating piece of animation history and most of the shorts are legitimately entertaining in their own right. Even “Momotaro's Sea Eagle” is worth watching at least once just to see what a weird piece of cinema it is. The DVD is readily available from Zakka Films website and is worth exploring if the history of anime or early cinema in general interests you. It comes with a nice informational booklet that gives background on the early years of anime and gives historical context and trivia about each of the shorts. It even comes with a small photo gallery on the DVD that shows contemporary ads for “Momotaro's Sea Eagle”, including one that literally features Momotaro bombing American cartoon stars and what appears to be a caricature of FDR, which is just something isn’t it.

Wild

If you want to watch more early anime and don’t want to track down either of those box sets I mentioned earlier, you’re in luck! In 2017, the National Film Archive of Japan set up the Japanese Animated Film Classics website, where they host a large number of early anime from the 1910s-1940s, many subtitled in English (assuming they need subtitles) and all with historical notes on the films and their creators. It’s a valuable resource and I highly recommend checking it out.

NEXT TIME ON ANIME 20XX: MORE FOLKLORE-BASED PROPAGANDA.
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Anime 20XX: An Introduction

A few years ago the digital magazine Paste ran an article about the top 100 anime movies of all time. It’s a solid list, if a little predictable, but it did get some traction for being co-curated by Jason DeMarco, the man who co-created Toonami on Cartoon Network and the guy in charge of selecting all the anime that airs on Toonami and Adult Swim (or at least all the anime he suggests that network thinks will do well). You can find the list here if you're interested in reading it yourself. A few months after that ran, Anime News Network writer and all around great guy Mike Toole wrote a series of articles in response to that past article. Essentially, he noted how lists like “Best anime movies” tend to be easy to predict since almost half of it will inevitably be some combination of films by Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki, Satoshi Kon, Mamoru Oshii, Mamoru Hosoda, and Makoto Shinkai. After thinking about it and getting an indirect challenge about it on Twitter, Toole decided to see if he could write an alternative top 100 list that didn’t repeat anything from the Paste article, which he did. You can read part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 and I recommend you do, because they’re good lists, like anything Mike Toole writes.

Reading these got me thinking about anime films, specifically that of the 200 movies and OVAs listed in those articles, I hadn’t actually seen all that many of them. Sure, I’d seen a bunch of the obvious ones, but that was still a small minority of both lists and even some of the obvious ones that “everyone” has seen had still managed to slip by me. So I decided to put a little project together that I’m calling “Anime 20XX” where I’ll combine the Paste list and Mike Toole’s list together, arrange them in chronological order, and watch and write about as many as I can until I finish or get too busy to continue doing this. And then it took about 3 years for everything to get off the ground cause I need to see what was in print in the United States and how easy it would be to get some of these movies and suddenly it’s 2020 already. But hey, at least I’m finally starting it. So come back here later today (probably) for the first entry in Anime 20XX, which according to my notes will be about...none of the movies mentioned in either list, but a short overview of some notable early anime shorts that predate the first feature length anime film.

…Yeah, that sounds like something I’d do. See you later today!

The Amazing Spider-Man (A Movie Review)

Successfully answering the question "What if Spider-Man was a generic, mid-grade young adult novel?"

I don’t recall if I had any expectations about The Amazing Spider-Man when it was released. I do recall that whatever interest I may have had in the movie disappeared once I read Ty Burr’s negative review of it for the Boston Globe. According to Burr, the film was essentially a lesser rehash of the Sam Raimi-directed/Tobey Maguire-starring Spider-Man movies with bad dialogue, cruddy special effects, and a wasted cast. He suspect the movie was probably made so Sony could hold on to the film rights for Spider-Man. This is supported by how it’s mercenary nature bled through every aspect of the film. As a consequence of this profoundly negative review, I gave the movie a skip and didn’t really think about it that much since then. But, I recently had an opportunity to see it, thought “Why not?”, and gave it a shot. So what’s my takeaway?

I didn’t hate it as much as Ty Burr did. I also didn’t like it nearly as much as Roger Ebert, who gave it a surprisingly glowing review where he praised the film’s action scenes and rather relaxed pacing. Despite some strong elements and a good cast, I mostly found The Amazing Spider-Man to be...frustrating more than anything else. For starters, the movie is a reboot (at least technically speaking) of a series that was only a little over 10 years old at the time. Much of that first half of the movie spends its time going over material that this movie’s target audience is likely already familiar with, if only in a general sense. I realize that the movie wants to be as accessible as possible and not just assume the audience already knows Spider-Man’s backstory well enough that they can just skip it or gloss over it. That is, in of itself, not a big problem, especially since The Amazing Spider-Man wants to establish a different status quo than the earlier films and, if nothing else, be its own thing separate from the Raimi-directed movies.

However, this desire to make themselves distinct from the Raimi movies often ends up backfiring on them. The movie makes several changes to how Spider-Man’s origin story plays out. Most of them, like how Peter encounters the spider that gives him his power and how he first reacts to having powers, are fairly minor, mostly differing in terms of specific details. The changes they make aren’t bad, per say, but hey do feel a little arbitrary and unnecessary.  Again, it seems like an attempt to make the film not feel like a complete retread of first Raimi movie, which is fine. But this is undercut by how some of them pay off. For example, The way that Peter reacts to getting his powers is played for both for horror and for comedy, but doesn’t succeed at selling either feeling very well. When his new powers cause him to stick to bathroom sink and accidentally tip it off the wall, it works okay, but comes off as more goofy rather than actually funny. Similarly, when the film shows how painful and weird the changes that Peter goes through when he first gets his powers are, it ends up being too brief to have any real impact for the audience. They just end up feeling like difference made for the sake of being different, without any significant weight behind them.

And then there are the changes that really don’t work. Such as how Uncle Ben dies and how that affects Peter’s motivation and his decision to become a superhero. While I’m not a huge Spider-Man fan personally, I do like him enough that I have opinions about how what makes him an interesting character and how he should work within a piece of fiction. And, as far as I’m concerned, Spider-Man has some pretty good motivation and backstory: being a selfish jerk who only cares about himself got one of the most important people in his life killed and trying to make up for that by being a superhero is what drives him. Now, broadly, that is what happens here, but there’s one big difference that significantly changes the character of Spider-Man and how the audience view him.

In this film adaptation, Uncle Ben getting killed has nothing whatsoever to do with Peter being Spider-Man. Which, as far as I’m concerned, completely misses the entire point of what makes Spider-Man Spider-Man.

In the original comic, and the Raimi movies for that matter, Peter has already become Spider-Man when he first encounters Ben’s killer and infamously refuses to stop him for incredibly petty reasons. I like this! It helps emphasize how Peter isn’t using his power in any particularly special way outside of getting famous and making money. It’s a blatantly selfish use of his gifts and when it ends up biting him in the ass and indirectly causing the death of one of the most important people in his life, it gives his change of heart and behavior far more weight. In this telling, Peter fails to stop the thief for equally petty reasons, but it has nothing to do with his powers, being Spider-Man, or anything even vaguely related to that aspect of his life. Furthermore, he only becomes Spider-Man and goes after the thief in order to get revenge. I think that being motivated by guilt and wanting to use his powers for more productive reasons than “make money” is one of the thing that make Spider-Man an interesting character. Removing that aspect of the story and failing to replace with anything even slightly as compelling is a big failing on the movie’s part. It just ends up emphasizing that this film seems to have been made largely so Sony could keep their film rights and not because anyone involved particularly cared about Spider-Man and what kind of stories you can tell with his character.¹ In addition to all this, it also serves to make Spider-Man a less distinctive character in another way. Tell me: does a hero who becomes a costumed vigilante driven by vengeance because he witnesses a loved one get murder in front of him sound familiar? It should. It’s the origin story of Batman, one of the most enduring and popular superheroes of the 20th and 21st centuries and main character of what was, for a while, the highest grossing superhero movie ever made. Look, there are a lot of ways that you can change Spider-Man origin story to make him an equally, if not more, compelling character than he already is. Turning him into Batman isn’t one of them.

This leads to another of the film’s issues, which is that the movie clearly takes a lot of cues from various of movie adaptations of popular young adult novels. In particular, this means a more melodramatic tone, a greater focus on the more “teenage” aspects of Peter’s character (i.e. whenever he fights with his aunt and uncle, his angst over his missing parents, etc.), and a romance plotline that seems to be given more prominence that it probably needs given that this is (at least in general) an action movie. Now, none of this is a problem by itself, as this is a movie about a teenage superhero and all of those elements can work in a setting like that without any problem. It might even help the movie, as YA tropes and the concepts could be used to highlight and strengthen the aspects of Spider-Man and his world that would already pretty YA-compatible in the first place (again, teenage superhero). Unfortunately, the YA-derived aspects of the film aren’t particularly well done. Instead of helping the movie, it just makes it feel like the creators took a generic young adult-oriented superhero story, changed all the names to their appropriate Spider-Man equivalents, and didn’t even try to rewrite anything so it felt more distinctly like a Spider-Man movie. As a consequence, the movie often feels very generic. Not necessarily bad, but also lacking a real identify, which ends up significantly hindering the movie. It almost suggests that the studio came to the rather condescending conclusion that the primary audience of teenagers and young adults would watch any superhero movie they put out so long as it resembled other popular movies that appealed to that age bracket.

Aside from these story issues, there are some weird structural problems that movie has. For one, the whole movies feels needlessly drawn out. It spends a lot of time going over Peter’s motivation and backstory. Apart from one brief action scene that mostly played for comedy, almost an hour passes before he gets to put on the Spider-Man suit and do anything remotely resembling, you know, actual Spider-Man behaviour. Swinging around, making dumb jokes, hassling criminals, etc. Now, this would not be a problem in of itself...if the movie were about three or four hours long or if this was the pilot to a longer TV series. As it stands, the movie is only a little over two hours with credits and spending half the movie going over character beats that the audience is likely to be already familiar with doesn’t do it any favors. Worse yet, all this early character-building and plot set up is just...okay to watch. It feels very workmanlike, competently made without having an particularly spark or punch to it. It’s not painful to sit through, but it does feel like time that could have been spent on almost anything else instead.

Another issue is that, ironically, the second half of the movie feels very rushed.² Once Peter becomes Spider-Man, it speeds through a how bunch of plot and character development. This includes setting up and developing the main villain, exploring Peter’s relationship with Gwen Stacy and her dad, Captain Stacy, dropping hints about villains and plot lines that are going to pay-off in future sequels, examining the effect of being Spider-Man on Peter’s relationship with Aunt May, how the public reacts to Spider-Man, and it just never ends. It’s like the movie suddenly realized it had spent too much time on the pre-Spider-Man story and had to go through everything else as quick as it could so the movie could still clock in at about two hours. This is compounded by the apparent shift in the genre at the center of the movie, which makes the film feel unbalanced. As it stands, the movie watches like half of a teen drama movie and half of an action movie that were badly edited together rather than a successful blending of the two styles.

Additionally, none of this meshes well with the movie’s attempt to be a kind of  “Spider-Man’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1,” what with introducing a love interest that knows Peter is Spider-Man and Captain Stacy dying, as well as doing a surprising amount of set-up for both future sequels and the now cancelled Secret Six movie that Sony was clearly hoping this series would lead to. As you might guess, most of this doesn’t work very well due to the aforementioned pacing issues. The whole things comes off as being just crammed full of various badly-executed highlights from Spider-Man’s long history as a comic book character. Case in point: having Captain Stacy die is indeed a dramatic climax to the movie, and is a famous enough bit from the comics that you can buy multiple collections that contain that storyline, but it probably would have worked better if we hadn’t first met him only an hour or so before he kicks it. Why not save his death for a sequel or at least introduce the character earlier in the film so his death has actual impact? Similarly, while Curt Connors/The Lizard’s motivation is explored during the movie, it feels rather haphazard and thrown together in a way that makes a lot of what drives the character seem underdeveloped and not terribly compelling as a result.³

However, I don’t want to give the impression that this movie is all garbage; if it were that bad, I wouldn’t have bothered writing such a lengthy review. There are good things about the film which prevent it from being a complete slog, although they do make it a little frustrating instead. Most of the cast seem to being doing the best they can with the roles they have. In particularly, Andrew Garfield does an excellent job as Peter and Spidey. He really captures the kind of smart-alack energy that helps makes Spider-Man superheroics so fun to watch and read. Another highlight is Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Uncle Ben and Aunt May, who make the couple seem real and believable and give the early scenes of the movie some nice, if perhaps overly drawn-out, dramatic heft.⁴ There’s also quite a bit of talent behind the camera as well. In addition to well regarded director Marc Webb, the movie was co-written by Zodiac writer James Vanderbilt, two-time Oscar winner Alvin Sargent, and Steve Kloves, best known for writing the screenplays of the Harry Potter movies. (Though one does wonder if some of the movie’s flaws may be a product of a “too many cooks in the kitchen” kind of problem.) Beyond that, most of the film’s action scenes are very well done and a lot of fun to watch. Unlike so much of the film, which are often content to present this Spider-Man story in the most bland and generic terms possible, the fight scenes seems to have been made by people who wanted to focus what makes Spider-Man unique and choreograph fights that you could only see in a Spider-Man movie. They never feel strongly derivative of any of the recent Marvel Studio movies that the film so desperately wants to be and actually succeed at being their own thing. If you are a fan of solid action film making, you may want to seek the movie out just for those sections, which were by far my favorite parts of the entire movie.

Sadly, those highlights aren’t enough to save the film. I can’t really recommend The Amazing Spider-Man. In the end, the few things that it does well can’t make up for the many flaws the movie has. You might seek it out if the actions scenes sound like your thing or if you’re just interested in seeing adaptations of well-known stories play out, but there isn’t a lot else to commend. The movie doesn’t even have the benefit of being part of a popular franchise anymore, as Sony is rebooting Spider-Man yet again following the relative box-office failure of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the agreement they reached with Marvel Studios to have Spider-Man start appear in Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The Amazing Spider-Man simply remains a strange, vestigial stump from a franchise that tried to build itself up far too quickly and ended up destroying its own future before it really got off the ground.

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¹ Ironically, Sony seems to have had the same motivation for making this movie that Peter had to become Spider-Man in the comics: to make money with little regard to the consequences.

² Curiously, this is a problem this movie shares with Fox’s 2015 Fantastic Four movie, an equally disappointing Marvel adaptation that has many of the exact same issues despite not having any overlapping creative people.

³ Also: not a big fan of the Lizard’s design here. Aside from looking a little too much like either Voldemort's green cousin or one of the Koopa’s from the 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie, I miss the reptilian snout that he usually has in the comics and cartoons. It was a nice design choice there and its presence here may have helped the movie, if only in a very minor way.

⁴ That said, their presence does feel like some kind of weird stunt casting, given the ratio between their own star power and how much they appear in the film. Plus, Sally Field is basically wasted on what ends up being a pretty minor role in the overall movie.

Some brief thoughts on "Parasyte -the maxim-", episode one

I’ve been looking forward to this show since I heard it was being made a few months ago. I’ve been a fan of Hitoshi Iwaaki’s original manga ever since I read Shaenon Garrity’s review of it (http://shaenon.livejournal.com/40665.html#cutid1) way back when and was excited about seeing an anime adaptation. Surprised, since you don’t see a lot of 90s manga getting adapted in this day in age, but excited non-the-less. As a result, I had some expectation for the show when I started watching the first episode.

Of course, those expectations consisted of:
1. There would be lots of horrifying body transformations and violence
2. There would be weird humor involving the sentient hand-thing
And I was not disappointed.

For those who haven’t seen the show or read the comic, Parasyte is about Shinichi, a Japanese teenager, who wakes up one day to find that an alien parasite has burrowed into his right hand and taken control of it, allowing said parasite to turn the hand into whatever amorphous blob it needs said hand to be. Shinichi is, understandably, a little off put by this, but puts up with it for the sake of not being taken in by the authorities or having to chop off his hand. Sadly, the parasite doesn’t know what exactly its deal is, other than it was planning to take over Shinichi’s brain rather than his limb and tries to find another one of his species in order to get some answers. This ends…interestingly.

My first thought on seeing the show was that all the character designs had been updated and cleaner up some, as Iwaaki, while an excellent artist when it comes to body horror and similar grotesquities, is only okay at drawing people. Admittedly, these redesigns weren’t as major as I thought they were, but everything a little nicer looking regardless. Happily, the more gross parts of the show are still done in the same wonderful style as the manga, which means stuff like this:

It’s great.

I’m also just happy to see that this show (at least for this episode) has at least a pretty good budget. All the a animation for the parasite stuff is great to look at and I REALY hope that it maintains this level of quality for the rest of the episodes.

As it is, it’s been a while since I read any part of the manga, so  I can’t comment to much on how the story’s being adapted and such, but I had fun and, frankly, that’s all that they part of me that still think’s John Carpenter’s The Thing is mankind’s greatest achievement wanted. So here’s hoping I like next week’s too.

                                                 (Awww. It's cute. Sorta) 

Iconblivious: Frank Sinatra - The RCA Years

I'll Be Seeing You (Bluebird RCA, 1994)

1. I'll Be Seeing You; 2. Fools Rush In; 3. It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow; 4. The World Is in My Arms; 5. We Three (My Echo, My Shadow and Me); 6. Dolores; 7. Everything Happens to Me; 8. Let's Get Away from It All; 9. Blue Skies; 10. There Are Such Things; 11. Daybreak; 12. You're Part of My Heart

Frank Sinatra & Tommy Dorsey – Greatest Hits
(RCA Victor, 1996)

1. Night and Day; 2. Imagination; 3. I'll Never Smile Again; 4. Blue Skies; 5. The One I Love (Belongs to Somebody Else); 6. Fools Rush In; 7. Stardust; 8. In the Blue of Evening; 9. Polka Dots and Moonbeams; 10. Without a Song; 11. This Love of Mine; 12. I Think of You; 13. Once in a While; 14. How Am I to Know?; 15. The Sky Fell Down;

Sinatra had been kicking around the music business for a while as a singer for various bands and orchestra before eventually catching a break and becoming the singer for Harry James’ Orchestra, which led to his first released commercial recordings in 1939. While touring with James, he was noticed by Tommy Dorsey, who asked to be one of the singers with his orchestra. Sinatra accepted, debuted with the orchestra in 1940, and started to make a name for himself, both for his talent as a singer and for his good looks, which earned him fame as a teen idol. He would leave Dorsey’s orchestra to try his hand at being a solo star in 1942, but not before recording around 5 CDs worth of material with Dorsey. These songs would be the start of his real evolution as the talented singer he would become and be remembered as.

Listening to this material, the first thing you notice is that…well…

Frank doesn’t really sound like Frank yet.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s still clearly Sinatra, but he sounds noticeably different than I would in his 50s/60s prime. Most of this is due to his age: he sounds very youthful on these songs and it certainly fits the teen idol image that he had at the time. More importantly, it’s clear, at least on the earlier songs, that Sinatra hadn’t hit upon his signature style yet. The confidence and brash attitude that’s so prominent in his later recordings hasn’t been developed yet. Instead, he sounds more like any other crooner from the period, especially Bing Crosby, who was clearly a major influence on Sinatra. As someone who’s way more used to Sinatra’s later material, it’s a really weird effect. Kind of like seeing a picture of someone who you only know as an older adult when they were a kid.

The material on these CDs, from what I can tell, paints a pretty good picture of the kind of music Sinatra and Dorsey made during their three years together. Both of the CDs have the same kind of material on it in terms of mood, tempo, feeling, etc., even if they only share two songs between them, and they illustrate what Sinatra and Dorsey did best (or, at least, what they were most famous for).  Of the 25 songs found between these albums, only 8 or 9 can really qualify as being upbeat in any way. Tommy Dorsey was nicknamed “The Sentimental Gentleman” and the songs here show why. Slow, moody, romantic ballads seem to be the band’s forte and dominate both discs. There are upbeat tunes, to be sure, but at least as far as Dorsey’s work with Sinatra goes, ballads tend to win out over more up-tempo stuff. Not that this is bad: Dorsey and Sinatra excel at these kinds of ballads, made with lush arrangements and filled with the kind of elegance and glamour that people associate with Hollywood movies and other entertainment from around the same time. Everything has a kind of glow to it, like it’s being beamed in from another, softer universe where romance was the worst problem anyone had to deal with. (Of course, given that this stuff is relatively light entertainment from early 1940s America, that’s pretty much EXACTLY what it’s supposed to sound like, so…good job, guys).

That said, a part of my wishes that Sinatra and Dorsey had done more upbeat stuff, if only it meant getting more stuff like “Let’s Get Away From It All.” Have you heard “Let’s Get Away From It All?” Cause you should.

It’s some good shit. Admittedly, this is less of a Sinatra/Dorsey song and more of a shared spotlight for several singer who were working with Dorsey’s band at the time (including Connie Haines and mixed-gender vocal group The Pied Pipers), but still, it’s SO GOOD. Everything just blends together so nicely. I kinda wish Dorsey had done more songs like this. All the singers here sound really nice together and I’m surprised Dorsey didn’t do more of these (to my knowledge at least).

The CDs themselves are about what you’d expect for short, inexpensive compilations. They’re both pretty basic: CD, case, and a small booklet/inlay in the front.  I’ll Be Seeing You has a fold-out strip made up of 8 panels, 4 on each side. One side is taken up by the cover art and a 3 panel-long publicity photo of the This Song Is You box set. The panels on the other side are made up of the track listing (on one panel), the liner notes, (on two panels), and a short written ad for the box set that lists all the songs and fancy swag that it comes with. The track list is well done, as it gives the usual writing and publishing credits, as well as when the songs were recorded and what, if any, other singers sang on the song other than Sinatra. The liner notes themselves, written by Will Friedwald, are short, but not too bad. They briefly cover the popularity of the Dorsey/Sinatra pairing and how working with Dorsey ended up influencing Sinatra’s singing style. In a touch I particularly like, it notes that the songs selected for the CD were specifically chosen to be a mix of big hits and more forgotten tracks. It also talks briefly about previous reissues of the Dorsey/Sinatra material and why this reissue improves on the earlier ones. The biggest weakness of the notes is that it’s clear that they’re meant to function more as an ad for the This Song Is You box set and not as much as an independent piece of writing. The relative sparseness of the liner notes certainly makes the box set’s notes, touted as being a “100 page full color book with many rare photos and memorabilia…[and] two major essays and complete studio sessionography” seem all the more appealing just for their (probably) deeper analysis of Dorsey and Sinatra’s music.

The Greatest Hits CD is more or less the same and has, if anything, even sparser information. Of the six panel booklet, one panel is given to the liner notes by Chick Crumpacker, which give a brief overview of Sinatra and Dorsey’s career together and a short biography of each man. Two more panels have the track list, including the songwriting and recordings date information and the credits for who worked on that particular reissue. The booklet and CD case also advertises other CDs in RCA Victor’s jazz-centric “Greatest Hits” line, which this CD is a part of. This suggests that this particular compilation was primarily aimed a neophytes, who would be drawn to the famous names on the front and the spiffy Al Hirschfield caricature on the cover, rather than more seasoned Sinatra/Dorsey fans.

Both of these CDs are technically out of print, but you can pick up inexpensive copies on Amazon and most other online marketplaces. (In store purchasing will, of course, be more of a crap shoot.) I could recommend The Essential Frank Sinatra with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra as a good in-print alternative to these two CDs, but I don’t think I can REALLY recommend a Sinatra/Dorsey CD that doesn’t have “Let’s Get Away From It All” on it. And, of course, the true die-hard can track down the out-of-print, but still fairly easy to find This Song Is You box set, which does away with the whole track list problem by just including everything. If you like this style of music and can find it for a nice price, I’d almost recommend going that route. (Buyer beware, though: This Song Is You came out when cassette tapes were still regularly sold and plenty of the cheaper copies floating around are of the cassette version. If format like that is the kind of thing that’s important to you, be wary if you decide to buy.) But again, unless you know of some particular favorite from that period, almost any compilation will do. No matter what songs are on it, you’ll still get that smooth, glowing Sinatra/Dorsey combination. And really, isn’t that why you’d buy one of these albums anyways?

I find it interesting/telling that that 2-disc Essential set only has a little over half of the songs that appear on I’ll Be Seeing You and Greatest Hits combined. That’s often the trick with these older, pre-33 & 1/3 album acts: their songs, while not always completely interchangeable, were often pretty samey. It’s sometimes more important that Sinatra, Dorsey, & Co. are performing A slow, romantic ballad rather than a PARTICULAR slow, romantic ballad. It also shows, in a certain respect, how little the specific track listings of CDs focusing on this era of Sinatra’s career matter. Each one only bothers to include one of the two biggest hits of Sinatra had with the band (“I’ll Never Smile Again” on Greatest Hits, “There Are Such Things” on I’ll Be Seeing You) and the success that a song had in the 1940s seems to have had little impact on whether or not it would be selected for a CD track list.[1] This is exacerbated by the fact that, well, this isn’t really a well-remembered period of Sinatra’s career in the first place. Unless you were listening to it as it came out in the early 1940s or are a real fan of Sinatra and/or Dorsey and/or big band music in general, you probably don’t have any strong feelings on a specific song that appears on any of these CDs. There aren’t any songs from this period that everyone would expect to be on it, no early ‘40s equivalent of “My Way.” However, don’t let that deter you from seeking out this music. It’s well worth listening too, even if Sinatra and Dorsey are better at capturing a certain kind of style than crafting a specific pop song that only they could have come up with.

(Fun fact: some of this music was mastered from glass parts. Didn’t know you could record sounds to glass. The More You Know!)

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[1] Of course, determining what qualified as a hit in American music prior to 1954, when the Billboard charts as we know them first got organized, is a crapshoot at best. Even the best (and, until very recently, only real) source I found, Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories 1890-1954, admits that its findings were cobbled together from a variety of sources and involved a certain amount of guess work and approximation to make any of the information useful.