The Velveteen Rabbit
A shy boy learns important lessons from a stuffed rabbit come to life.
This was sweet. As expected, there were some differences from the book, namely giving the boy a character arc alongside the rabbit’s, but it was actually well-executed. They could have padded the runtime out with a lot of nonsense, or revamped the story to appeal to modern audiences. I would have inserted a quick line of dialogue when the rabbit was talking to the real (CGI) rabbits, something like “I would very much like to join you,” or something British like that. At the end, we see the transformed rabbit frolicking with the other rabbits, but having the velveteen rabbit wish to join the real rabbits would’ve made the rabbit’s final moments a little more poignant.
Final Fantasy VII Rebirth (Video Game)
After Cloud’s defeat at the hands of Sephiroth at the end of Remake, he escapes to Midgar with the rest of Avalanche to continue picking away at the edges of the Shinra Electric Power Company’s tyranny.
The modern trend of milking franchises and stretching them out because of updated tech continues apace, although I think updating FF7 is warranted since the all of the previous versions’ graphics are notably dated. The protracted runtime of the remake is obvious, and the ridiculous sidequests the protagonists can dive into get to be tedious. Maybe it’s because I watched a version of the playthrough that showed a lot of the sidequests alongside the cinematic cutscenes, and without a lot of the traveling and grinding that takes up a lot actual gaming runtime. I remember Xenoblade Chronicles suffered from a lot meaningless sidequests, the kind that reward you with XP or money, or maybe a rare-ish item that you could come across later in the game. I like how Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy 6 did sidequests: they were optional things you could complete that gave you unique items or forwarded a character’s story, or spelled out their backstory a little but more, or the overall narrative. It was less “I have the Big Sad and fetching me these weird items will restore my happiness” and more “here’s a little hint of a story that you could pursue to acquire something interesting.”
For that matter, how does a group of wanted eco-terrorists remain clandestine while making such a public nuisance of themselves? It can only be explained by a subtrope of Plot Armor, in which characters on the wrong side of legal standing can do whatever the galaxy they’d like to do out in the open, without repercussion from the Lawful side of the moral alignment catching them. The writers must have noticed how ridiculous it got because maybe around halfway through, they had that Reeve guy switch out the photos of Avalanche on the “wanted” posters.
I’m not too familiar with FF7’s original story, but the remake seems to introduce a multiverse or multiple timelines (sigh) that Sephiroth is constantly mucking around with. Aerith’s death, a notoriously tragic event in the original, is ambiguous at the end of Rebirth, which has upset some of the fans of the original. That reaction is to be expected, but they should be happy in a certain sense. Aerith, along with Tifa, are unofficially but nearly-canonically 10s, so more screentime for one of the weebs’ waifus in the upcoming final third part should be celebrated; yinz will get a lot more beloved fanservicing. I don’t mean to categorically poop on the multiverse/multi-timeline idea, since a skilled group of writers could do some interesting things with it. The final part of the remake will decide that, but you know folks will complain about it no matter how well it’s done.
The Karate Kid (1984)
A bullied teenage boy learns some important lessons in fighting and living life from a maintenance man.
I recently watched this with Son of Jay, and I noticed I hadn’t reviewed this. How did I miss this one all these years? This movie, along with Back to the Future, is probably one of the standout 80s coming-of-age movies for me. I wasn’t old enough to be into the teen romance movies (and I’m a dude) back then, and I wasn’t old enough to watch the ultra-violent action movies, so I tended towards the safer plot-driven stories.
One scene suffered from the “everyone openly laughs at the embarrassing accident” trope that I mentioned in my Carrie review. A ballroom full of people wouldn’t laugh at a high school kid and a server having a messy, noisy collision, even if said people were rich snobs. If anything, a few of those rich snobs, likely women, might get overly concerned and actually try to help them. But remember this is an 80s flick and audiences neck-deep in sitcom story dynamics and anti-yuppie sentiment would expect a ridiculous reaction. The current top comment on that scene’s video actually asks if this would really have happened.
This was unnecessarily remade recently, probably because of diversity reasons, and the current year’s “culturally insensitive” elements like Mr. Miyagi’s broken English, but I don’t care to learn enough about it to see how bad it is. I don’t want to willfully ruin the “show me ‘sand the floor'” epiphany scene for me.
Dragon’s Heaven
In the middle of a worldwide human-machine war, a self-aware mech revives when a girl stumbles upon it in a desert.
I came upon this after rediscovering Moebius’ art, and following a rabbit trail that ended up on a fan’s HD remaster of the short film on YouTube.
The animation was well-done, if a bit dated, and the pointilist/stipplist-inspired shading was a unique approach to the design language that worked well with the wartime desert aesthetic. The live-action model introduction was pretty atrocious and didn’t add anything except confusion. After the credits, there was behind-the-scenes footage of the introduction production, which mostly consisted of the set designers fiddling with the mechanical minutiae to get the dumb thing to work right for a few minutes to get the shot. Seems a lot more trouble that it was worth, and it made me think the budget could’ve been better spent on the actual film itself. It was really a missed opportunity for some sakuga animation, like what they did here in the beginning of the Metal Skin Panic MADOX-01 short film.
The story was thinner than rice paper. There’s a way to do this kind of story in a limited runtime, and this wasn’t the way. It was like a high school freshman with some latent talent saw Nausicaä on a Sunday night and rushed to get a creative writing assignment done for Monday morning: there was something there but it was just executed poorly. The most hilarious bit of dialogue happened right at the climax, when the mech, Shaian, is going to use his main weapon on Elmedain, the antagonist mech with the really complicated 110 film camera head. Elmedain tells him (it?) if he blasts him, Ikuuru, who lay near them, would also die. Shaian’s response was (paraphrased) “nah, she’s pretty lucky so she won’t get blown to hell.” LOL.
Miss Meadows
A quirky substitute schoolteacher hunts down criminals in her spare time.
The opening scene made me think this would be more absurdist than it turned out to be. A vigilante probably wouldn’t blow her cover by shooting someone in broad daylight on a suburban street that likely has front door cameras everywhere—although, this was released in 2014 and I don’t think Ring cameras or similar tech were as ubiquitous as they are now. The titular Miss Meadows was the only absurd character in play here.
This story really would have been better served as a series. Vigilantes, private eyes, and folks that work adjacent to official law enforcement tend to have complex and competing motivations, backstories, and ways of doing things that are hard to really capture within the runtime of a feature-length film. The premise of a kindergarten/elementary school teacher as a vigilante is great, though, but the absurdist take would have to be tempered a little. I would make her not so put together as she is in the movie. Put her in a middle bureaucrat position on an education board, somewhere where she might mingle closer with others who control the levers of power and who might have some skeletons they want to hide, but don’t make her stand out too much. She should appear to be barely competent for her position, a la the Peter principle. Bruce Wayne—before the 1990s cartoon that posed him as a dashing, competent millionaire—was portrayed more as a lazy and irresponsible, coasting on his inheritance. Miss Meadows could take a similar tack: kind of mousy, frumpy, under the radar, not making waves, not drawing eyes. She’d be the last one people would suspect is offing criminals in her spare time.
Gunbuster
Noriko Takaya learns to pilot the powerful Gunbuster mech against the alien creatures that killed her father.
Dark Herald’s reviews prompted me to watch this (“RE:Anime-tion – Gunbuster (Part I)” and “RE:Anime-tion – Gunbuster (Part II)“). It was only 6 episodes so it wasn’t a huge investment.
I have a feeling this series started out as a concept for a feature-length movie, since Gainax had released Honneamise and it bombed, so they needed a theatrical release which tend to make more money than televised or straight-to-video releases. To make a theatrical release do well, it needs some level of promotion and likely they promised writer-director Hideaki Anno the actual production budget before finding out they didn’t have enough for promotion, so it became a series.
Yes, it’s an Anno creation, so there are popcorn-seed hints of what Neon Genesis Evangelion would be. However, I maintain that Nadia is the superior Anno work and that’s a hill I will die upon. There’s lots of strong points Evangelion and Gunbuster has that Nadia doesn’t, like discontented discussions about whatever bureaucracy under which the characters are working under—it really adds to the world-building. Nadia is much more story-driven, while the other two are very much character-driven. Nadia didn’t suffer from a dwindling budget near the final episodes like the other two series did, and it’s a complete story all the way through; Evangelion had a few redos and “rebuilds” because the guy couldn’t get the entirety of his head out onto the screen the first go around, and there were noticeable corners cut in
Speaking of the budget, I imagine a lot of it was spent on the penciling and tweening, because there was a level of detail in the characters you don’t usually see in 80s straight-to-video productions. It makes for a good watch in 2025, although the infamous Gainax physics, obviously-for-the-guys leotard suits, and brief nudity are in full force here and will make some people uncomfortable. Noriko is 15 for the first part of the series, but please keep in mind that the age of consent in Japan was 13 up until very recently (it’s now 16), so it was not considered a serious break of social mores to depict females (I’m using that word because I can’t tell if I should say “girls” or “women” here) like that.
Some other random observations. We don’t know much about the aliens themselves, except they seem to be purely animalistic and hive-minded. Their designs are appropriately grotesque and it strays a bit from what audiences back then might have expected, like a super high-tech and intelligently dangerous enemy. The English voice acting wasn’t terrible, though I watched the series on Crunchyroll and though the history of the English dub is a bit convoluted, I don’t think it was done for the initial release, because it doesn’t sound at all like it was tracked in the 80s. The worst part of the dub was Jung Freud’s half-hearted Russian accent—you could barely tell she was from there when she talked. On the other hand, this series was written in the years leading up to the end of the Cold War, and any Soviets in popular, American-audience entertainment would absolutely not be depicted sympathetically the way Freud was. Coach Ohta’s voice was way too gruff and deep for his physique but that’s was par for early English dub standards. There was a Haley’s Comet reference, saying it would return in 2032, but in the real world it will return in 2061, so not sure the reason for that.
The opening is really fun, and with all the leotards it really inspires one to do some aerobics.