天下制覇

Thank god it wasn’t laser anuses.

Impressions:

If I had to pick one word to describe this 130 minute monstrosity, it would be "gratuitous." In a way, it’s really a sum and total of everything A-1 has shown themselves completely incapable of doing in recent years. This is at least an hour longer than it needs to be with tons of characters that serve absolutely no purpose or point, and all the focus is on trying to make an interesting setting, leaving behind the problem that they forgot to make compelling characters. Nothing about the movie would have changed if they removed everybody but the cousins, although frankly, given that one had to inspect every anus she came within 5 feet of, I could have done without them too. I’m sure you think that I’m joking too. I have absolutely no idea what was with her and alien anuses.

Let’s move on to what they did right for now though. This is a beautiful movie. I don’t like the word, but it’s lush. Their attention to details is excellent and the movie rarely looks anything less than stunning. Of course, since this is A-1, it’s also full of really bizarre animation direction, particularly in the first 20 minutes or so, ironically enough, while they’re still on Earth. The frame rate will suddenly jump or certain things will gain really fine detail almost at random and it ends up being extremely jarring. There were also a few very noticeable times where it was clear that their background artists need to take a refresher course in perspectives. That does ease off later, but since the entire middle 60 minutes of the movie contributed absolutely nothing to characters or plot, I have mixed feelings about the entire space city/magic space dragon/bus bits. It looked good, sure, I loved the alien that was wearing a tophat that was another alien, but unlike say… Miyazaki, there was absolutely no point to any of it and it was further hurt by the writing making absolutely no sense from start to finish. Instead of using the setting to flesh out the characters, the setting was there primarily to fellate the artistic director.

Speaking of the writing… yeah… A-1 being A-1. If you thought any of their Anime no Chikara’s attempts at lurching random nonsense were bad, this is the same deal, maybe even worse. They could have just gone with kidnapping a little girl because aliens love crack, but no. They had to keep going to truly bizarre levels and explain the evil plan (broadcast to the whole galaxy, like all antagonist plots involving actors must be!) after the final battle to stop the evil plan had begun. The biggest piece of nonsense though… the one that takes the cake…… At the very start of the movie, a pet rabbit is missing and the cousins start fighting over it, which comes up again right before crack-addled aliens kidnap the girl as they’re trying to reconcile from that fight (keep in mind this is 90 minutes after the fact). It turns out that the aliens stole the rabbit. And brought it halfway across the galaxy. To have it sit around in their doomsday device. I… just… what?

Overall though, I have to say that it’s not bad. I made it through the whole two hours without anxiously trying to fashion a voodoo doll of the creators and I’m going to chalk that all up to the visuals. It really is a very luscious, lush, and any other number of adjectives beginning with "L" movie. In the end though, it strikes me as a fairly soulless attempt to imitate Miyazaki’s work by having really colorful settings but absolutely none of the soul or any kind of tact in giving any of it actual meaning. The writing is atrocious, so if you’re looking for any kind of compelling narrative or interesting characters, then you’d be better suited by muting this and playing Dark Side of the Moon backwards to see if either of them becomes more significant. That, or go with a bunch of pot.