Labyrinth
An irresponsible teenage girl is whisked away to another land to solve the labyrinth and rescue her baby brother from the Goblin King.
A childhood staple of mine, but not nearly as much as one of the other weirdo Jim Henson 19980s movies, The Dark Crystal. I want to say maybe Labyrinth was geared more towards girls, because of the protagonist, so I didn’t take to it as closely. I don’t think there was a single teenage girl in the 1980s who didn’t babysit at least once and wish they didn’t have to. Having to contend with a tall and mischievously charming strange man to rescue your infant brother is much more of a girl thing than a guy thing. I should know, because I grew up with an older brother and I doubt he would’ve come after me if I was supernaturally kidnapped.
I never realized how much this movie had in common with isekai stories. Some of my favorite movies, like Spirited Away or Escaflowne (the movie and series) are isekais. Japan made them popular but it started more or less with stories in the west with Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. Modern western fairy tales don’t skew hard towards this angle often, I think because it requires the protagonist to look a little silly and incompetent for a time while they figure our their new surroundings and, essentially, learn to grow up. Teenage protagonists now are competent yet angst-driven adults in slightly younger bodies, but not always. Labyrinth‘s Sarah was a little angsty but it was more because of the fleeting, unfulfilled desires of young adults. The audience already knows she’s being a little bit of a brat about things.
Black Adam
The infamous champion of Kahndaq, Teth-Adam, is reawakened and finds that he must battle the descendent of his former enemy as well as a team of superheroes ordered to stop the conflict.
I suppose there was potential here. You had three, maybe four, conflicting sides in the battle, and that can be fertile ground for good storytelling. You had the Chaotic Good side of Adrianna and her son, trying to convince the Chaotic Neutral of Teth-Adam to kick the Lawful Evil Intergang out of Kahndaq, while the Lawful Neutral of The Justice Society ended up refereeing all of it. Wait, there’s actually a fifth party, Ishmael (Neutral Evil, maybe), who officially works for Intergang, but I doubt Intergang wanted the Kahndaqi monarchy to come to power again.
I probably got those moral alignment assignments incorrect, but that’s okay. The movie itself was alright, but I don’t think an occupying government would call themselves “Intergang” instead of a less sinister, more patriotic sounding name. That’s how comic book stories are, really. There’s plenty to gripe about in this movie, but I’ll just stick with that.
Baoh the Caller
A man, given superhuman abilities as a result of a secret Japanese government project, is released from his hibernation capsule by a young girl with similar abilities.
Classic 80s action anime, complete with graphic death scenes and questionable English voice acting. I wish the two writers (Hirohiko Araki and Kenji Terada) came up with a better idea of getting Baoh freed other than Sumire (the girl) accidentally turning a valve as she’s struggling to get away. An experiment that may cause “worldwide danger,” being overseen by a bunch of bureaucrats and military-types, would have way more security and precaution taken when being transported. This could be solved simply by having the valves locked, only unlockable by the angry Walter White-looking director guy. Although it wasn’t shown how Sumire escaped, if they knew the girl had special powers, she should have been transported separately. But we’re talking about people in power in a fictional universe. They usually aren’t as smart as they should be.
Also titled Baoh the Visitor, which doesn’t really make the protagonist any more menacing. It’s weird that “calling” in the first title version is meant in the upper-class European etiquette sense, when people would “visit” other households as a means of maintaining social ties.
Baoh’s design, at least his face, really reminded me of Vincent’s proxy form, from Ergo Proxy.
You can watch Baoh the Caller on YouTube for free. Barely over 46 minutes long.
Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01
A mechanic finds an experimental mech and gets trapped inside the night he is going to meet his former girlfriend.
Like Baoh the Caller, this had a short run time. The real good part in terms of animation quality comes in the first few minutes in a sakuga scene. There’s some nicely-detailed mechanical design and movement that you can only get from hand-drawn animation.
I thought the cockpit design of the mech, where its back opens up and the pilot simply steps up into it, was an excuse to show Kusumoto’s ass after the combat demonstration in the beginning, but it actually feels like an intuitive design choice. It’s better than making the pilot climb up and fall backward into the cockpit. It’s not a large mech but usually the pilot has to climb a stupid ladder or take an elevator, or the mech has to kneel down or something useless that wastes time if there’s an emergency.
I see this more as a coming-of-age comedy than a science-fiction story. A college-aged engineering whiz, who actually took the time to read the instruction manual, gets trapped in the mech suit but still finds the need to see Shiori off the night before she leaves for school. Why did she plan to be in a skyscraper before she leaves? I guess so Kouji can have another struggle as he’s being chased by the military. Such is the circular logic of fiction. She’s going to the observation floor, presumably one of the topmost floors. Maybe she wanted to view the city a last time before leaving for a few years? That’s plausible, but it’s never stated. I would have her father, a corporate bigshot, throw her a going away party in his office, with her friends and coworkers (maybe she worked or interned there). That feels appropriate to her situation, and there’s more opportunity for some humor. Imagine a slightly nerdy college kid trying to eat shrimp appetizers or drink campaign while he’s trapped in a mech suit?
Like Baoh, you can watch Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 on YouTube for free. This one is only 41 minutes long, but as mentioned, the first few minutes are some great animated eye candy.
G.I. Joe: The Movie
G.I. Joe must stop Cobra and a new enemy, Cobra-La, from using the stolen Broadcast Energy Transmitter to unleash a deadly organic weapon around the world.
I remember being sick from some plant disease when I was in middle school, where I got a lot of poison ivy and face swelling, and I watched this on repeat for an entire day. The opening scene is absolutely bonkers and a thing of legend, and it made me wish the Transformers movie that came out the year before had something similar.
I don’t think this aged well as the Transformers movie did, and despite watching this so often when I was younger, I didn’t like it all that much. G.I Joe as a franchise felt pandering; I knew even at the time it’s not at all how a military special forces unit would operate. Cobra was far too incompetent a terrorist organization to make seriously, even more so than the Decepticons. Every episode you watch isn’t so much wondering how the Joes will figure out how they’ll stop Cobra’s plans this week, but how badly will Cobra’s plans will be self-sabotaged by Cobra Commander’s buffoonery.
There was one nice sakuga scene, where Jinx spars with Beachhead. Relatedly, there was a scene afterward where Lt. Falcon flirts with her, before sexual harassment became a thing, and comments on her legs, but she’s wearing those loose-fitting Chinese style martial arts pants? Maybe he originally commented on her ass, because she was servicing a vehicle and it was kind of sticking out, but this was a kid’s movie. There was probably a scripting flub there. Either way, it always annoyed me, and now this movie made me say the word “ass” twice in one blog post. Nay, three times!
This was the first time for me ever seeing an entire civilization based on an all-organic infrastructure. Everything in Cobra-La was some gross oversized insect, or insect-like animal, that served a practical engineering purpose. Maybe that’s not done much because it’s harder to design and animate, even with computer graphics, than devices and structures of the usual materials.
Trivia: the death of Optimus Prime, and I suppose a lot of the other robot deaths in the Transformers movie wasn’t well received (not by me, I thought it was awesome that these things were being killed, as what happens in battles), so when Duke here in the G.I. Joe movie was stabbed by Serpentor’s snake, Duke was retroactively written into a coma. The original script had him killed off. That’s a shame, because it made Falcon’s redemption arc a little less impactful.
Luckily, you can watch G.I. Joe: The Movie for free on YouTube, in pretty good quality, too.
Aquaman
As the clandestine son of a lighthouse operator and the Queen of Atlantis, Arthur Curry is caught up in a brewing battle between underwater kingdoms and the surface world.
Nothing groundbreaking here as far as superhero movies go. I actually felt for the father and son pirates at the beginning, despite how callously lethal they were during the submarine invasion. It’s not easy to get the audience to be sympathetic towards murderous, pillaging villains, so credit is due to the writing and direction on that. The unexpected end of the bar scene was a nice twist, as violent sociopath bikers are among the most annoying tropes you could employ.
I did like how all the underwater scenes were depicted. There was a danger of just doing it like space except with some bubbles and maybe a little blue tint on everything, but it was more subtle than that. It made you feel like all this business was happening in the oceans without distracting you. The man-versus-man fight scenes like this one looked like they were an utter horror to plan out and film. Large scale army battles I don’t think are as strenuous because a lot of that can be handled by computers and math. But what do I know?