This September, Madman Entertainment will host the visual splendour, unadulterated joy and eye-popping thrills of anime on the big screen for REEL ANIME 2010.

Featuring a hand-picked selection of animated feature films from Japan, REEL ANIME 2010 is a wholly different kind of event. NewsHit reviewer Kip Jordan has taken a glance at what the festival has to offer.

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone

Evangelion 1.0: You are (not) alone is the first of four remakes of the original Neon Genesis series into films. Released in 2007, it was received well by fans, with writer and chief director Hideaki Anno quoted as saying it was a "faithful remake of the original series". In the year of its release, it was rated as the 4^th highest grossing anime with a total earning of 2 billion yen.

For starters, I must say that I am a massive fan of Neon Genesis. Unlike others of my generation that managed to catch the series on SBS in 1998, I picked it up when my housemates wouldn’t shut up about it in 2007. From the moment the first episode went into the DVD player and the sound of crickets and the endless summer Japan experiences in the series filled my ears, I was hooked.

Evangelion 1.0, in short, is brilliant. Hideaki Anno has done a brilliant job of capturing the original essence of the series but makes them ‘more awesome’ with some of the Angels (the enemy of the series) omitted, changed and in one case, made very, very special. It’s a mixture of innocence, insanity, the occult, serious mental health issues and of course giant Angel-Human soulless fighting machines filled with the blood of Lilith and souls of the children piloting them geared towards Human Instrumentality. Sounds complicated? Well it is, but it is an experience that is very much worth taking. Once you get into this series, you’ll look back on something like Inception and ask yourself “what was all the rage about? That film is 100% straight-forward”.

This film will be a delight for already-fans of the series, and for those that haven’t seen it before, should turn into one of those series you end up watching several times.

Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance

Evangelion 2.0: You can (not) advance, directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki, Masayuki and most notably Hideaki Anno, was released to theatres late last year. It adds to a franchise that has grossed almost AUS $2 Billion and spawned off an entirely new generation of anime. 2.0 continues where Evangelion 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone had left us, and further reworks the original series. Coupled with a much larger budget than the series ever received (making most of its money through DVD and Manga sales), it’s hard to be remotely dissatisfied with the plot changes.

The franchise is notorious for confusing the humbug out of people, so first and foremost, I wouldn’t recommend seeing this film without first seeing the series, the original two movies, and Evangelion 1.0, or doing in-depth, hours long research on Wikipedia. That being said, this film was incredible. At moments I had to stop and call other enthusiasts just to be calmed down with their assistance of “I know, just you wait until further on”. The new visuals are amazing, the Angels are totally overhauled and they look incredible, in particular Sahaquiel. As for the plot changes, they are subtle but noticeable, like everything in the series, and emphasised well with Anno’s direction. Importantly, the changes are those of the creator, how Anno personally envisaged them in the beginning, and as a fan I’m enamoured by the attention to detail that has gone into it.

Another excellent addition to the entire film, working towards making battle sequences even more memorable, is the soundtrack. There are a lot of throwbacks to the soundtrack used in the series, but you’ll notice the use of an evangelical approach being taking during certain key moments.

All these elements combine to make something remarkably special for the fans of the series. It’s a comfortable watch, with many moments taking me right back to my original viewing of the series, and many new ones that effectively blew my mind. I would highly recommend this film to just about anyone that watched and liked, or loved the series.

King of Thorn

King of Thorn was originally released as a Manga from 2002 to 2006, and then in America with the final release being in 2008, and now on May 1^st, 2010 has been released as a theatrical feature length film written by Katayama and Hiroshi Yamaguchi and directed by Kazuyoshi Katayama.

Having read several fan synopses of the series, it seems that the story suited the comic medium much better, although here I can only talk of my impressions from the film.

I believe that the first mistake was made here; it was adapted only into one film. For a Manga series that took 6 volumes to actually explain a story that is (I personally think) unnecessarily complicated was a rookie mistake. Second mistake is that the film is just packed with motifs and themes that don’t interact with one another and work to make the film less coherent. Medusa, Sleeping Beauty, video games, maternal nature, military, conspiracies, evil pharmaceutical companies (anime 101), aliens, God, cults, suicide, twins, betrayal, Ancient Greece and then on top of all of these there are the typical ‘characters developing in stereotypical ways’.

That is just scratching the surface; if I wanted to I could break down this film into any range of themes. There is just so much in it that none of it has a chance to be fleshed out and in the end, amounts to nothing in terms of storytelling. Towards the conclusion, I was having a difficult time following the central plot with the film changing direction every 5 minutes towards the end, followed by a sudden but ineffective plot twist due to the amount of twisting that had already been done. If you’re a fan, I would suggest you go and see this and make up your own mind, if you’re a first time, I can guarantee that this will be a waste of your money.

Summer Wars

Produced by Japanese animation studio Madhouse, and directed by Mamoru Hasoda (Digimon [various]), Summer Wars was first announced way back in ’08 at the Tokyo International Anime Fair (as Untitled). The film had two years worth of media in the forms of Mangas leading up to its release, internet publicity and a trailer released in April 2009.

There are times when I wish that I could just regress into a pre-pubescent blissful ignorance and be surrounded by saturated colours and a world in which everything is simple and lovely. Unfortunately all I can do is watch a film that holds similar principles. Summer Wars, in my opinion, does an excellent job of capturing a degree of innocence. The protagonist, Kenji Koiso is asked by a slightly older girl, who he quite fancies, to come with her for the summer to her family’s home in the country, and thus begins his little 4 day adventure in which he plays video games, gets some wisdom from an elderly grandmother and gets arrested. Somehow this all manages to get out of his control, but with his super arithmetical brain it seems he can achieve anything he sets his mind to.

There were admittedly some problems with the central plot, in that it didn’t really stick to one. The film followed a series of different narratives that didn’t build up to a central climax, causing it to feel like a montage of conclusions.

Nonetheless, I did enjoy the film with its great sense of family, love and compassion. Every character was well defined and necessarily so as there were so many to meet. The animation itself was very attractive and the main character had that shy-boy charm. I would recommend this film to you if you enjoy seeing everything work out fine in the end.

Redline

A film that has been in development for over half a decade is hitting Australian cinemas this September. Redline is the directorial debut of Takeshi Koike who has previously been a key animator on Samurai Champloo and The Animatrix, and a lot of that shows in the film itself.

Redline is, in short, a really intense film, especially with the subtitles. The artistic direction of animation could be compared to the anime classic Ninja Scroll, a film that has powerfully detailed characters and environments, full of heavy dialogue and fast movement, while the narrative seems to be a beefed up, slightly more adult version of the recent Speed Racer. The visual flair is a non-stop action ride, even during the more subdued moments in the film, which in turn makes reading the subtitles a bit of a chore. At moments I realised I had actually just been watching whatever had just been exploding, and had missed minutes worth of dialogue. 

Luckily, the film is quite straightforward. It has a solid, self-contained storyline that follows a basic formula.  Renegade main character; getting the girl; winning the race. This isn’t to say that it’s a narrow-minded film; there are plenty of characters that are only briefly explored, however done in a way that explains their motivations well. Takeshi Koike has made sure the audience is never left hanging.  The conclusion of the film it is amazingly cheesy although it’s not necessarily executed in a bad way, and I ended up quite enjoying it. If it were an anime series I probably wouldn’t have dedicated much time to it, but as a movie of 100 or so minutes, it’s quite an enjoyable watch.

Kip Jordan

The REEL ANIME 2010 program begins September 2nd and is in cinemas nationally