When Bambi Saw the Heart of Darkness: Review of Ringing Bell (1978 anime)

People think so little of children’s minds. When talking of children’s movies, any tone bleaker than perpetual cheer is ‘dark’. Into the Woods is ‘dark’. The NeverEnding Story is ‘dark’. How fragile do they think children are? No, Ringing Bell is dark. Not dark like Pixar – dark like Animal Farm. With a childlike style the movie explores the cruelty of nature.

Chirin’s mother warns him about the wolf. Chirin must never cross their pasture’s fence, for the wolf would gobble up a little lamb like him. True to his promise, Chirin stays within the pasture, but for nothing. The wolf breaks into their barn at night, slaughtering Chirin’s mother, before stealing away. Chirin vows he will train under the wolf, so, one day, he may escape the law of nature which decrees lambs must die. 

Review: Yona of the Dawn Ep. 1-12 (2014-5 anime)

Yona of the Dawn does not prioritise excitement, nor intrigue, nor even adventure, but the show holds the viewer’s attention. The series front-loads the action and kingdom-rending politics, but those high-stakes keep to the background in the second act. Yona focuses on its growing party of adventurers and their internal struggles, at least for the first half of the series.

Yona is princess of the Kingdom of Kouka. Her two closest friends are her bodyguard, Hak, and her childhood friend, Soo-Won. Sheltered since birth, she is shattered by a coup. Soo-Won kills the King, her father, for the throne. Yona and Hak escape with their lives. To retake the kingdom, they search the Kingdom for four dragon warriors, the reincarnations of their Kingdom’s mythological founders.

Review: Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine (2012 anime)

[I will spoil large portions of the series, right up to the end.]

From the first scene where a geriatric cult-leader intoxicates his congregation by shedding white petals from his skin, we know we’re in for a weird ride. Fujiko Mine is pulp, but not trash; trippy, but not unhinged; 1970s infused, but not regressive.

We follow Fujiko Mine, cat-burglar, whose tools are deception and seduction, and whose only master is herself. Or is she? She disguises herself as a cult-leader’s wife, as mafia don’s best girl, as the governess for a royal family, as a teacher in an all-girls boarding school, but beneath these masks is there a face, or another mask? A mask not even Fujiko knows of? And who are these gentlemen in owl masks?

Review: The Handmaiden (2016 Film)

[This review will spoil the entirety of the film. The book is fourteen years old, though.]

Sook-Hee is a Korean handmaiden to a Japanese heiress. Sook-Hee is a thief who aims to lock an heiress in an asylum to steal her fortune. Sook-Hee is the heiress’ lover. Lady Hideko is a blushing heiress, set to marry her adoptive uncle. Lady Hideko is known for her live readings of high-class pornography. Lady Hideko is an unwitting victim to a thief. Lady Hideko would put her lover in an asylum. They hide themselves from each other and from the audience.

I warned of spoilers, but spoilers couldn’t spoil this film. The enemy of most twisting narratives is foreknowledge. If the audience knows every twist, the string unknots, and all that’s left are dead shocks. Not so here. Tension in The Handmaiden comes from dramatic irony, the audience knowing more than the characters. As the audience learns each characters’ secrets, old scenes acquire new subtext. On first viewing, the audience knows Sook-Hee is fattening a sheltered heiress for the slaughter; on second viewing, the audience knows Hideko plays the ingénue to fatten Sook-Hee. Far from spoiling the film, foreknowledge increases the dramatic irony, thus the tension. 

Review: Sweet Blue Flowers (2009 Anime)

‘Gentle’, ‘soft’, ‘tender’ – all apt words to describe Sweet Blue Flowers, yet imperfect ones. They make the show sound tepid. While this show may not boil with emotional intensity, while it may not even simmer with latent passion, one cannot say it’s tepid. It is warm, but not luk-warm. Its characters are gentle. They neither yell, nor spite each other, but not for lack of strong emotions. Its music and visuals are soft, but not saccharine. All relationships are tender, but not mawkish. This is a story about the symbiosis of half-false-loves and half-false-selves. It is slow-moving drama about characters too mature to misunderstand or despise one another. Sweet Blue Flowers trembles with empathy.

Our ensemble coming-of-age story begins with Fumi discovering her cousin is marrying a man. She feigns sickness to avoid the wedding. Fumi’s cousin, her first lover, has abandoned her love. Still-standing, but aimless, Fumi crushes on a Princely girl, Sugimoto; and Sugimoto seems to reciprocate. But just as Fumi’s heartbreak guides her lovelorn grasping, so too does Sugimoto’s. 

Review: Claudine at School, by Colette (1900)

‘Yes, they used to tell me, when I was little, that I had a grown-up person’s eyes; later it was eyes that were “not quite respectable”: you can’t please everyone and yourself as well. I prefer to please myself first of all…’ 

-pg. 254

How quaint to see what was once considered mischief. Time has outpaced the shock accompanying Claudine’s first publishing. The worst ‘crimes’, ‘excesses’, or ‘indecencies’ within the novel peak at insolence, physical torment, and a bite of bisexuality. The modern eye smirks, it smiles, but it does not recoil in scandal. To be fair, however, I doubt Colette aimed to write sensationalism. 

Review: Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (2002 Film)

[Slight spoiler warning: vague references to events after the midpoint.]

Ryu is a deaf-mute and fired factory-worker living with his sister. She needs a kidney which he cannot donate. Finding an advertisement in a public toilet, he pays for a kidney on the black market with his severance package, and his own incompatible kidney. Now that the hospitable has miraculously acquired a kidney, Ryu finds he has no money left to pay for the transfer. He and his girlfriend concoct an obvious plan-B: They will kidnap his old boss’s daughter for twenty-six million won.

Looking at my Madman/Eastern Eye DVD after watching, it amuses me how misleading it is.

Look at that. A man strangling another, about to stab him in the face, overlaid with a scratched-metal title design. ‘Hard boiled,’ raves Uncut. ‘Bites your head off,’ screams Screen International. They advertise the film as a grimy splatter-fest, where bloody bodies stab and bludgeon other bloody bodies in for rip-roaring revenge. And, yes, the film is violent, and dark, with visceral moments – but most often it’s blackly deadpan. A tragedy told as absurdist comedy.