Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!

Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:

Let's split that up a bit.

So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.

Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.

I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.

After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.

Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.


"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.

Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.


"Lola"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.

Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.


"First Sight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.

I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.

Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.


"Disappeared"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.

I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.


"No Nation"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.

The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.

"Weird to Be Human"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.

All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.


"Fingerprints of the Gods"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.

"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.


"Filther"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.

I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.


Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon

The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.

Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.

It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.

They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.

It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.

And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.


Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.

(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)

As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.

I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.

There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.

Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.

So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.

Fantasia 2025.04: Anime no Bento, "The Story of the Three Sisters", The Devil's Bride, "Check Please", Blazing Fists, "Look Closer", and Good Boy

Busy Day!

Programmer Rupert Bottenberg was justly proud of having the anime shorts program all independent works by up-and-comers, which probably makes getting four of the six to Montreal - Yasuteru Ohno ("Mamiko's Poop"), Shuzuku ("Dreaming of a Whale"), Ryusei "Vab.png" Hasegawa ("Beyond the Trail"), and Kim Sung-jae ("Redman") - even more remarkable. It was a fun introduction, although one that kind of underlined for me just how odd doing an event like this in a foreign land must be: You stand there kind of stoically while folks are going on in another language, and then become very animated when given a chance to speak about your film. Must be a crazy thing to do so young. Still, they had fun with it, including Ohno challenging the whole auditorium to rock-paper-scissors for a copy of a compilation DVD containing all the final film projects for his school (which you may not be able to play in North American players because it's Region 2, although at least it's NTSC).

After that it was across the street for The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.

Then back across the street for the rest of the night, with programmer Steven Lee (man, seems like he was just an intern yesterday!) introducing "Check Please" writer/director Shane Chung and director of photography Tristan Baumeister. It's one he pushed for, because apparently picking up the check is a Big Deal for a lot of Asian and Asian-American folks, especially Korean[-American]s, which I've seen referenced occasionally. They got a nice slot ahead of the new Takashi Miike film, Blazing Fists, which was cool.

Although, about Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of Blazing Fists, the press line for Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:

Not really complaining - I try to just be grateful the festival thinks this blog is worth a pass in these situations - although I was glad that this was a really quick short and feature because I didn't have a chance to prioritize an easy exit from my seat should my bladder act up.

Crazy the zoom the camera in one's phone has, huh? Here we've got actor Thompson Sewell, producer Mackie Jackson, and writer/director/DP Tyson Edwards of "Look Closer" (and programmer Mitch Davis on the side) talking about their nifty little short; I gather Jackson created the painting in the center, which they built the short around.

And here, Mitch welcomes director (and co-star) Ben Leonberg, who left the titular good boy Indy at home because this situation would probably freak a dog out and it's not like his dog knew he was starring in a movie anyway. As he put it, there's a good reason why most folks make movies with humans; this was apparently 400 shooting days over three years, with a mind-blowingly ratio of usable footage to what was shot. The set-up often took longer than shooting time because dogs don't actually have a great attention span.

It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.

Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.

Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are Stinker, Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens, with Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.


"Loca!"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Maybe not the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.

Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.


"Dreaming of a Whale"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.

It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.


"Mamiko's Poop"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.

Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.


"Dungeons & Television"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.

How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.

Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.


"Redman"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.

As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.


"Beyond the Trail"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.

There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.


"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.

The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.

Neat.


Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon

I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.

I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.


"Check Please"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.

The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.

Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.


Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.

He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.

If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now, Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).

The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.

Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.

It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?


"Look Closer"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.

It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.


Good Boy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.

Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.

What's perhaps most surprising about Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.

And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.

Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.

I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.

Fantasia 2025.03: "Sounds of Glass", The Bearded Girl, Nyaight of the Living Cats, and Find Your Friends

Check it out - North American guests!

Up first is Morgan Abele, who stood up quickly to introduce her short film "Sounds of Glass", playing before The Bearded Girl. It's pretty nifty! She didn't have a lot of time to tell stories about the shooting, but did mention that their location had apparently been a meat market before closing not long earlier, and shooting was interrupted a few times as people would see activity in the shop and walk in to try to buy steaks and the like.

Here, we meet The Bearded Girl director Jody Wilson, producer Amber Ripley, and cast members Anwen O'Driscoll & Harrison Browne. It was a fun conversation: O'Driscoll was apparently cast as the title character in part because there was riding involved and she grew up with horses, while Browne was very excited to explore what sort of masculinity his Masked Cowboy embodied. One other fun fact they mentioned was that Jessica Paré, who plays the title character's mother, was one of the last people cast because the film was set to be a Belgian co-production until just weeks before shooting and they'd maybe had ideas of Lady Andre being European, but once that fell through, the whole cast and crew had to be Canadian (and mostly from British Columbia) as part of their funding. I tend to think of Canada as having a deep talent pool, but apparently it was tricky to find women in it who are the right age and appearance that someone says "yeah, obviously Anwen O'Driscoll's mother" that are willing to have the make-up team give them a beard for the entire film.

(Tying into that, Wilson also mentioned that while she envisioned this as kind of taking place anywhere in North America, if anybody from Telefilm was in the audience, it was obviously set in Alberta. Canadian!)

After that, it was across the street for Takashi Miike-produced anime Nyaight of the Living Cats, which is kind of cute, but I think the best part was the introduction by "general director" Miike and actual director Tomohiro Kamitani sort of deadpanning around how this is a very silly show, and that maybe DIsney will call them ("like that'll happen"). It was kind of neat seeing Miike wearing regular glasses and relaxed, with salt-and-pepper hair, because when he came to Montreal to accept a lifetime achievement award, he was kind of funny, promising that he'd make enough new movies for them to give him another one in time, but he definitely had the sunglasses-indoors/black-hair-dye thing going.

Finally, programmer Carolyn Mauricette welcomes Find Your Friends director Izabel Pakzad, actor Jake Manley, and producer Allison Friedman. Pakzad's film was based on an incident that happened to her on her first visit to Joshua Tree, although in the film everything obviously goes much farther. They talked a bit about life imitating art during the shooting - there's a local-annoyed-with-kids-visiting-to-party character in the film played by Chris Bauer, and they would occasionally get interrupted by locals who were annoyed with the hubbub of a film shoot - and getting specific locations: Apparently one house they used is kind of famous, and getting to shoot in certain beautiful spots meant negotiations with both reluctant land-owners and the National Park Service.

Also, a lot of talk about prosthetics!

So that was Friday. Saturday would be the Anime no Bento 2025 program, The Devil's Bride, Blazing Fists, and Good Boy, although the end of the day got hairy. Sunday's plans are the sci-fi shorts, either The Battle Wizard or Terrestrial, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark.


"Sounds of Glass"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Morgan Abele's "Sounds of Glass" has a kind of nifty idea - a store that sells "soundscapes' in liquid form - with the key being that today it is minded by Enna (Zoe Wiesenthal), who is feeling depressed and not really comfortable with these sounds acting as memory triggers, until an an accident gives her a new perspective. It's a neat fantasy hook that nestles into a familiar world better than most, even if there is a bit of "has nobody done this before?" toward the end, and it makes the shop into a colorful, fantastical setting that's still grounded in the familiar.

Also, Wiesenthal has a great, expressive face, which is necessary for this sort of dialog-free story but not all it needs. Her expression dances between vaguely low, irritated, and wondrous, and she's also well-able to make the lack of dialogue feel more like people naturally not talking than pantomime (though her customers sometimes being awkward may be more on Abele's script working too hard rather than their performance). On the other side, Abele and company do nice work with the finale, smartly not leaning any further into synesthesia than they already are but letting the sound do the job.


The Bearded Girl

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

You can't really miss what the filmmakers are doing here, but they do it in such amiable, low-key fashion that it comes off as just about as natural as the high concept can. Indeed, most of the time The Bearded Girl manages the trick of playing it straight without being too deadpan, which can be tougher than just making absurdist jokes.

Ten years ago, young Cleopatra felt the first bits of peach fuzz on her chin, which may sound alarming, but in the community of sideshow performers where she lives, bearded ladies like her mother Lady Andre (Jessica Paré) are sword-swallowers, magic users, and leaders, going back 80 generations. Now, Cleo (Anwen O'Driscoll) is about to be invested as leader, but the two have been constantly at odds, with Andre ignoring Cleo's desires to modernize the show and her arguments that her beardless sister Josephine (Skylar Radzion) is much more suited to the role. On the eve of the ritual, she snaps, shaves, and runs away from home, developing a major crush on Blaze (Keenan Tracey), who isn't particularly excited about being part of his family's business either. What she may not realize is that the deed to the family's land and theater transferred to her on her birthday, and if she doesn't claim it, a local businessman planning a casino resort (Robert Hakesley) will be able to scoop it up.

There are bits that maybe don't quite work for me; for a story about a frustrated kid who must find her own way, it could maybe give going full circle a slightly wider radius. The story is also such that nobody really has to do anything, which is sort of fine - it's got pleasant and eccentric enough characters to keep the audience entertained as they banter and interact in unusual ways shaped by the world they live in, but the film ends with a soft a landing as it can have. Did anyone actually accomplish anything, or really have to struggle to accept themselves and each other, or did they just get put in places where they couldn't do anything else?

It is enjoyable enough, though. Jessica Paré and Anwen O'Driscoll are especially good as the bearded mother and daughter, very much capturing the vibe where they've got clashing personalities and ways of expression but clash because they are very much alike underneath. It's a bit of a shame that the boyfriend played by Keenan Tracy is kind of bland, the sort of motorcycle-riding bad boy who you never see actually do anything bad but isn't far enough off center to feel like he could fit with Cleo's family and friends (it doesn't help that he's got to try and sell an exceptionally dumb thing to create a misunderstanding). He really can't compare to the oddball supporting characters back at the sideshow, whether they be Skylar Radzion's live-wire sister, Linden Porco's short-statured clown who probably holds everything together, or the various folks in the background.

The film does look pretty nifty, considering its makers are on a tight budget, with the beautiful vistas and stylized locations creating a nostalgic image of small-town North America where everyone took pride in their specialties, though the filmmakers are keenly aware of just how much these groups would come into conflict. There are times when I wondered if there was a draft of the screenplay that had a larger scale at some point, one where the sideshow seemed like some sort of viable business or the talk of magic and adventure was more than idle references not followed up on. That road can lead to pointless CGI that takes a viewer into the uncanny valley rather than the movie's world, but it's a bit of a tease here.

Still, the family dinner scenes feature lines about clowns being a viral part of the community, and the film is filled with other genuinely odd moments. Indeed, it's got enough charmingly screwy moments to fill a movie right up to the point where you go "huh, we're done?" instead of a grander finale.


Nyaito obu za Ribingu Kyatto (Nyaight of the Living Cat) Episodes 1-4

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser digital)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link)

It's not terribly surprising that Nyaight of the Living Cat reveals that there's not necessarily as much potential to its jokey premise as one might think fairly quickly, but it's still nevertheless disappointing in execution: It's the kind of self-parody that chooses to underline its gags rather than trusting in a deadpan commitment to the bit, and after four episodes, I can't say I'm particularly tempted to subscribe to Crunchyroll to see the rest.

Part of the trouble is that the series not only succumbs very quickly to "this stretched-out limited series could have been a good movie" syndrome, where the opening that throws the audience into its crazy world and teaches the audience what's going on quickly is followed by three and a half episodes that barely take it full-circle, never really creating a lot of suspense about how the characters get to their previous situation or surprising twists along the way. A large part of the rest is that the group by and large seem like anime tropes - the stoic/emotional modern samurai, the schoolgirls, the often-silly tough guy - rather than actual personalities. Indeed, all of them have a personality of "I really, really, really like cats, you guys", and that means there's not a lot of contrast between them in one situation or their reactions to different situations. It's a very one-joke show.

That one joke - there's a virus going around where people who touch a cat are turned into one, which kind of short-circuits a cat-lover's survival instinct in what's essentially a zombie movie situation - is pretty good, and the creators hammering it constantly results in them hitting one or two really good riffs for every ten "meh" ones and spread them out rather than using them all up at the top. The animation is decent (although the static backgrounds and the kinetic, computer-assisted action work against each other), and when things slip into absurd-horror mode, you see how clever this could be if the character work had clashing tones that worked nearly as well as the wordless bits do.


Find Your Friends

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Confession: Even when I was these characters' age, I probably would have hated the parts of the action that they were supposed to find fun, much less the rest of it; I was a boring kid. As a result, I spent much of the first half torn wishing they'd get to something interesting, or at least waiting for the promise of the title to kick in, not sure whether the film's target audience felt like they were killing time or getting invested for when things went pear-shaped.

That first half has five college seniors going to spring break and a big concert in Joshua Tree, California: Amber (Helena Howard), just out of a long-term relationship; Zosia (Zión Moreno), tall, friendly, and mostly nice; sporty tattooed Maddy (Sophia Ali); Lola (Chloe Cherry), a blonde who revels in her crassness; and Lavinia (Bella Thorne), the curvy ringleader who knows one of the musicians. During a stopover at a yacht party, Amber spots her ex and her spiral isn't helped when the guy flirting with her goes further than she wants once their alone together, and once at their rental, there's a hostile neighbor and the party leads her to both a musician and some locals who make her feel endangered.

I admit, acting like I didn't like the first half is unfair, because I did actually enjoy the film when it zoomed in on Helena Howard's Amber being more openly fragile than her brash friends and trying to keep up, while maybe realizing she's outgrowing them. Howard communicates her discomfort and how she's trying to ignore it well, without words much of the time, and it maybe hits even better for how much the film seemingly attempts to smother her with noise and strobes and her louder, crasser friends. Writer/director Izabel Pakzad builds things up well underneath the cacophony, building it so that the audience is very sympathetic to Amber even though one can't entirely say her friends are wrong when they later throw her own actions back in her face.

Granted, those friends are portrayed broadly enough that they're going to seem callous anyway, for better or worse. The other four actresses understand the assignment, and despite playing it big, they play it big in a way that feels natural for young people who have had enough privilege and good fortune to have so far partied hard and remained relatively unscathed. Pakzard does seem to run out of material for them, though - for all that a viewer will look at them all and say they know or knew that girl, Sophia Ali winds up playing "the other one" compared to Chloe Cherry's approaching trainwreck, Bella Thorne's rich bitch, and Zión Moreno's wide-eyed people-pleaser.

It takes a more overtly, physically-violent turn on the way to the end, even with some material off-screen and/or random to keep folks from enjoying someone who is just unpleasant rather than deserving monsters getting their comeuppance or whooping at gore effects. There's a terrific white-knuckle chase, though it's followed (after a weird jump-cut) by a sequence that feels a bit like it's there more to be gross and chaotic than anything that springs from what we've seen from the girls, even when the point is supposed to be the ones who project squeamishness have spines and vice versa. It's violent and visceral and seems like it should be satisfying, but doesn't feel right in a movie, especially since these guys are just anonymous marauders and it almost feels like this sort of violence can be meaningless in real life but not in a movie where there's been something to what we've seen otherwise.

That said, I know I've never been where this movie starts from and have to sort of analyze my way into something visceral. This movie just isn't for me, but for women half my age, which is a good thing; I'd rather see a dozen horror movies like Find Your Friends starting from what young women fear than slasher retreads built on nostalgic tropes.

Fantasia 2024.03: Anime no Bento 2024, "The Future Is Now", Brave Citizen, and Mononoke the Movie

First guest of the day is Naoki Arata (center), whose "The True Shape of a Daisy" is part of the Anime no bento" program. It's a nifty looking film that programmer Rupert Bottenberg found interesting because it was ripped in European folk tales rather than Japanese mythology, to which she replied that a lot of the finding for the film came from a UK-based program, so…

Also on hand were the team from "The Future Is Now" (with programmer Steven Lee on the left): Writer/director/producer Jung Jong-min, actor Koo Jaho, and producer/cinematographer Park Wonjo. They had been at Fantasia last year with a horror short and were eager to come back. They've got some slick chops, so maybe they'll eventually come back with a feature.

After Mononoke the Movie - which has nothing to do with Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke, which threw me when programmer Rupert Bottenberg showed a teaser last year (he aims to end the animation section of each festival by showing something he hopes to program at the next, which I suppose is kind of feasible considering that these things gestate long enough that festivals can be in contact early) - I had intended to catch Shelby Oaks, but it was a case where I walked out of the theater and there was already a sizable line, and there's no guarantee with a badge, especially when everyone wants to see it with the director and executive producer and a bunch of other folks on hand.

Ah, well. Neon has picked it up so it will probably play Boston later this year. I hadn't really eaten all day anyway, so it was kind of a relief to go across the street to a burger shop that just happened to be have the Red Sox game on.

Today's plan: The Avenging Eagle, International Science-Fiction Short Films, Ghost Cat Anzu, The Old Man and the Demon Sword, and Mash Ville.


"First Line"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Wrote what you know, they say, so this short's creator Tina gives the audience a story of a young animator who is running late with the segment he's been assigned but is nevertheless given a crucial final sequence on a tight deadline by the project's mercurial director.

It's a bit of a love letter to the medium, of course, with careful attention paid to how the work gets done, the flights of fancy possible, and the modest pencil-on-paper origins of what the audience is seeing. What's more intriguing, though, is the way she examines the push and pull of it. People like Mito get hired because they've got talent and creativity and are then pushed into a system that subordinates this to someone else's vision. How do you work as a member of the team but still stand out?

I'm not sure the film really answers this, but it at least makes me think of the question, and certainly feels genuine enough around that.


"Maidens of the Ripples"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

I feel like this is far from the first time that I've watched an animated short from Japan where two girls draw closer because nobody else understood that they were "different" and had it not be about being gay but (I guess) depressed, to the extent that I wonder if the one is a euphemism for the other in Japan.

At any rate, this one has a teacher giving the class president, Haruka Arima, printouts for frequently-absent Rin Takitani, and while Haruka is initially shocked at how beautiful Rin is with her dyed-blonde hair, she soon finds these times meeting her the best part of her day. They've got more in common than they think, especially as Haruka talks about how she wasn't always a focused, organized student, and in fact that may be a facade that is wearing down.

The story here is the sort I often have trouble relating to, with its teens so cognizant of how heavy everything is and how much emotion they are investing in small things, but I love the art here: Watercolor backgrounds for what appears to be a harbor town and human figures with a pleasing sketchiness, not invested with much in the way of excess movement but not unnaturally still. Creator Michiko Soma knows we're going to be looking at the hair right away and does good storytelling with it: Rin initially appears ethereal and fragile despite calling it her "golden armor" and it feels like an early warning for Haruka about to break down as it gets a bit out of control.


"Yoruwohiraite" ("The True Shape of a Daisy")

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

This is the first film in the package that feels kind of like a proof-of-concept, with director Naoki Arata introducing some characters and hinting at world-building but stopping short of its characters actually having an adventure. It's one that looks like it could lead to something, though, with "Child of the Night" Nycteris following a firefly through a mysterious door to find a bright, colorful valley and making friends with the boy there, before being pulled back home where her mother (I believe; the relationship is never specified) scolds her.

The story could use a bit more detail - maybe Arata will have the chance to expand it sometime - but mood is nailed very well, while keeping things somewhat mysterious. The nighttime and daylight worlds look very different but Nycteris doesn't look like something pasted onto the wrong background when brought into the daylight, even though the halo around her new friend becomes overpowering to her as the sun fully rises, the world seeming to become a van Gogh-like riot of color. There's a sort of nervy uncertainty in the scenes with her mother, even as she radiates authority; is she a giantess or is Nycteris small, or is Arata exaggerating for effect?

It's a nifty start; I hope we can see more adventures with them.


"Kamigoroshi: Prologue"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Another movie about animators, although rather than the nervous fellow working on one small sequence of "First Line", "Kamigoroshi" gives us a capricious god: A wolf-man who takes the figure of a generic girl, then refines her into the figure of a black-clad teenager, breathing memories into her and placing her in a model city. The only trouble is, this city is meant to be the setting for a sci-fi/horror epic, with something above pulling the souls from the other figures, while elsewhere, freedom fighters are breaking out of the model and into the workshop.

Creation and destruction go hand-in-hand with this sort of tactile animation, and really any form of storytelling, as the things you make will eventually be undone, or have violence done to them, even if you like them and would wish them well in real life, and at least in this prologue, Niho Tomoyuki seems enjoyably unrepentant, having his fox-god scoop up his attackers and use their clay to seal the holes they've made, and there's something kind of interesting about how, while he apparently struggles with rebellious characters, other parts of the story go on, which is certainly what the writing process feels like at times.

He does it in snappy, fast-paced fashion, too; while there's a little time given up front to him crafting the heroine, once the camera moves inside the city, there are several things happening at once without dialogue to explain it. He's great at using visual shorthand like the breathing life into his doll segment, and the escape from the model city is nifty for how it uses images often played for laughs as an adventure that quickly veers into horror. I don't know if this pace can be kept up for a full feature, but I'm certainly intrigued.


"Okuninushi and Sukunabikona"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Is there a more exciting logo to pop up before a film, whether a feature or, in this case, a sort of micro-short, than that of Science Saru? There's a gleefully cartoony chaos to their work even when they are tackling heavier themes, and "Okuninushi and Sukunabikona" is not them doing that, as it features the two title characters, gods in some local pantheon, making a goofy bet while on a walk. It's silly, sure, but it's also really good character work, sketching these two quickly enough to sell a gag beyond just what's universal. Quality cartooning.


"String Dance" ("Roots") from the film Taisu

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Made for another anthology (TAISU) which is apparently not far off, "String Dance" introduces us first to an elfin girl, seemingly alone in a world where trees connect in a wild tangle, north, south, up, and down, living a carefree life flying with her giant bird Mau, before shifting the scene to a castle, where Princess Tesin laments how her father the king has shrunken from the world since the death of the queen. Somehow, a pair of flowers in their respective homes serves as a telephone, and the two become confidantes. Her new friend encourages Tesin to take a stronger leadership position herself, but her city-state is at war, and the attackers…

Of the shorts in the package, this is the one most obviously done with digital tools, and it's got what seems like it must be a deliberately plastic realism at this late date; it reminds me a bit of French comic artist Fred Beltran when he started using those tools later in his career: Uncannily smooth yet nevertheless solid, somehow heightening the sense of depth and the inhumanity of war. For all that it helps to create impressive imagery, it doesn't harm the character work at all; both protagonists are given heightened personality and voice work, but it works, even as their friendship leads to tragedy because they don't know the full story.

That full story is somewhat elided, not just in terms of the audience not getting the full background but in how there's a bit of a fast forward that one might not realize until after the fact (this style is maybe not ideal for showing aging). There's also a reincarnation angle that isn't necessarily extraneous - I can see where filmmaker Shuhei Morita is maybe trying to demonstrate the bond between these two despite everything - but it's maybe one thing too much in a short that doesn't have a lot of time to explain.


Mecha-Ude (Mechanical Arms) Episode 1

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Anime no bento, laser DCP)

Watching something like Mecha-Ude, I kind of wish I had more time for anime and manga, or that the likes of this had been more available in my small town when I was a kid. It's a delightfully dotty sort of premise - there are apparently alien robots that take the form of mechanical arms that can fuse with humans, although it's kept pretty hush-hush, and when young ARMS agent Aki Murasame (voice of Yu Shimamura) tries to liberate one from a lab, it winds up lost, only to be found my mostly-good-hearted teenager Hikaru Amatsuga (voice Toshiyuki Toyonaga). They connect, but it turns out his new hand (voice of Tomokazu Sugita) is amnesiac and pacifistic, which does not necessarily help with two secret agencies after them, culminating in Aki being placed undercover in Hikaru's school.

That's close to the plot of the whole first episode screened, but it's the cheeky attitude that feels like it will be the real fun here, with Hikaru's general decency tending to include a bunch of hand-wringing about whether something is a good idea or if he's being selfish, contrasted with Aki's jaded pragmatism. There's room for a sort of whimsical cartooniness to "Alma", the big ol' hand Hikaru gets saddled with, compared to the "cooler" snakelike arms others are wearing. We get hints of fun supporting casts and various subplots and conflicts, enough to see that things will probably get more serious, eventually. The animation is slick and the fights nicely kinetic.

Nine-year-old me would have absolutely eaten this up; fifty-year-old me is not going to look to see what streaming service this is on because once you start following one show, there's a million others and I've already got more pop culture on my shelves and Roku than I can get to. I'm sure the audience it's meant for will have a blast, though.


"The Future Is Now"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

At some point, between writing "The Future Is Now' and it premiering at Fantasia, the idea of a big cryptocurrency heist as a motivator in this sort of action/adventure flick went from feeling coolly futuristic to an instant anachronism, and it does something to this short's vibe that I can't quite put my finger on. It's already sort of pushing through on excitement and enthusiasm, only now it's slightly misdirected. The story has Jaho finally being given a tip that will allow him to track down former friend Paul after he stole a fortune in crypto from him a year ago, but the other partner he had expected to help has moved on while the underworld figure that loaned Jaho the money needed for this crypto play back then is ready to move in on both men. I suppose you could substitute any Macguffin, but we're at a spot right now where anything techy enough to make this seem futuristic seems to have an expiration date.

That doesn't really matter, I suppose; the point of the film is the vibe. There's some pretty slick camerawork and well-communicated speed as Jaho drives through the city, with the neon colors popping and most of the story being told in phone calls. It's not hard to see Jaho as a guy with a lot of online contacts but maybe in over his head trying to actually accomplish something on the street. It's rough at spots - there's enough talk to make you aware that the slick veneer is covering a relative dearth of action - and it doesn't quite make up for the could-be-worse-but-could-be-better acting in a way that makes Jaho and Paul reconnecting work.

For a semi-homemade film - the on-screen and behind-the-camera talent appear to be the same folks - "The Future Is Now" is polished and energetic. It could probably be better with a cast that's not also trying to set light levels and handle blocking.


Yonggamhan simin (Brave Citizen)

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024, laser DCP)

I can't really argue that Brave Citizen doesn't commit to the bit, but I can't help but wish it had gone further. Maybe the filmmakers couldn't because they had to thread a certain needle - there have been enough stories and films out of Korea about teachers lashing out at students or using corporal punishment that the filmmakers don't want to be accused of Being In Favor Of That - or maybe I'm just imagining that, but this is a film that does okay for itself being moderately weird when it actually needs to be crazy.

Mooyoung High, we are told, has been recognized as an Exemplary Anti-Bullying School for two years running, but that's a facade - those two years line up with rich kid Han Su-Kang (Lee Jun-young) being suspended, and he's a terror, not just making other kids' lives miserable but avoiding accountability because his parents are rich, connected with the police and prosecutors, and on the school board. His current favorite target is Go Jin-hyung (Park Jung-woo), a good kid being raised by his street-vendor granny. Han is obviously not in the ethics class taught by So Si-min (Shin Hye-sun), a new teacher on a three-month contract hoping to latch on permanently and advised not to make waves. And she tries, but she's also a former rising star in boxing who has also trained in taekwondo and hopkaido, and probably isn't as different from her father and coach who once won a "Brave Citizen" award for standing up to street crime as she'd like to think, and the masks her father keeps in his gym for his young students does offer some anonymity.

I appreciate the filmmakers pointing out that the Su-kang was suspended for two years and this isn't a minor, because it means one can watch the film without being uneasy about his teacher eventually beating the shit out of him, as must happen because otherwise why are you paying for a ticket. On the other hand, it also means getting very impatient to see Si-min beat the shit out of him. It also kind of messed with the structure of the movie; this feels like the sort of film (or comic, as it's based on a webtoon) where the heroine climbs a ladder to get to the final boss, but what's she going to do, beat up a bunch of kids? So you get a kind of static situation until things jump from masked vigilante to pro wrestling tropes (as they kind of have to, because the resolution can't happen somewhere off in the background). It never quite feels right, and the movie is a bit long to have relatively little happening to move things forward.

Maybe if it had been zanier for longer? The filmmakers get a lot of mileage out of Si-min looking the part of a sunny, idealistic young teacher who is actually a skilled martial artist with anger issues in the start, but ease back on that contrast later. It's hilarious, though, and every time the filmmakers go big with introducing a character or showing student reaction, they hit on something that at least kind of works. It's tough to sustain that when you also want to have major stakes and treat a real-life issue with respect, I suppose, but you're already having a teacher pummel a student; might as well stay in that sort of obviously exaggerated zone.

The fun of it is that Shin Hye-sun has a good enough handle that SI-min never seems to be putting on a facade - she genuinely seems cheerful and like someone who has the right attitude to be a teacher with obvious enthusiasm and empathy, just apparently not squeamish about using violence to deal with people who are making things worse for everyone. She's kind of interesting even as the other actors are mostly playing types, although I suspect that the way they jump from terror to poorly-contained glee when Su-kang starts getting a little of what's coming to them helps make Shin's performance work, because it feels like human nature and she's just able to express it more actively.

That active expression (by which I mean fighting) is okay, although as mentioned, one wishes there was a bit more of it, because it's almost all quick encounters between Si-min and Su-kang which can't really have a definitive ending. The final match is a little more pro-wrestling than MMA, which might be a bit of a disappointment, but there's some good storytelling in it as Si-min can't exactly take Su-kang apart because he is bigger and more muscular but she and everybody watching realize that he's probably never been up against someone who knows what they're doing and isn't afraid of upsetting him or his family before.

It works well enough, and when it leans into how the audience knows they shouldn't be in favor of something but enjoys it anyway, it's great fun. It could just use a bit more of that.


Gekijouban Mononoke Karakasa (Mononoke the Movie: Phantom in the Rain aka Mononoke the Movie: Paper Umbrella)

Stars? I dunno
Seen 20 July 2024 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia 2024: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

I'm not entirely certain what it is that I just watched but I'm glad that I got to see it on the big screen with good sound. It is some amazing animation outside the usual mold and, hey, I knew coming in that this was a spin-off from a cult show and if I didn't get caught up beforehand, that's on me.

Near as I can tell, the Medicine Seller (voice of Hiroshi Kamiya) wanders around feudal Japan looking to slay demons ("mononoke"), but his Exorcism Sword will only unsheathe if he knows the Form, Truth, and Reason that connect them. His latest target is Ooku, a palace that only women are allowed to enter, which has some strange omens about it: A parade normally scheduled to occur before a princess gives birth has been mysteriously delayed, and there are rumors that someone has left the palace unrecognizable. As he arrives, two young women arrive for their first day as servant girls there: Asa (voice of Tomoyo Kurosawa), a serious girl who wishes to be a scribe, and Kame (Aoi Yuki), bubblier and taken with the glamor of Ooku, which she has obsessively studied as a true fan, and immediately find themselves involved in things far more sinister than they anticipated.

I'm going to have to assume that phantom in the Rain has the basic shape of an episode from the Mononoke series, just writ larger and with fancier effects work, because while there's a sort of token effort to say "I've got to do A, B, and C", it feels more like a reminder for folks who haven't watched it since it premiered in 2007 than exposition for newcomers. Maybe there's material from the larger world that informs what's going on; there certainly seem to be a few characters on the outskirts of the narrative. Otherwise, though, it is throwing a lot at the audience and presuming we know how it fits together.

Even without that knowledge, though, a viewer can get caught up. The design of everything is great, very reminiscent of traditional woodcut illustrations, and indeed, you can see grain behind the image, which sometimes ironically makes everything look even less solid, like a floor is actually a pool until someone steps on it. There are wisps that maintain shape and sparks that indicate constant and momentary smells and tastes, and an unnerving tendency to draw eyes as unblinking pupils. This all stands beside psychedelic imagery that mixes better than one might think - the evils being committed are ancient and incomprehensible.

Writer/director Kenji Nakamura does neat things with the pacing, too, sometimes lingering just long enough to make one wonder about something, other times making things eerie with a bunch of quick cuts or ending sequences by slamming closet doors shut on them. Action is fast and almost overwhelming as the traditional imagery is enhanced by digital 3-D renderings and anachronistic electric guitars show up on the soundtrack.

The folks around me who were familiar with the property seemed to love it. It's probably a bit of an acquired taste and a bit of work if you haven't previously done that acquisition, but unlike a lot of anime films picked up from something that ended a while back (such as Rebuild of Evangelion), it never gave me the sensation of being something only for a niche audience that doesn't include me.

Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.11: "Innermost", Motherland, "Architect A", The Concierge, Tokyo Revengers 2 - Part 2, "The Influencer", and Late Night with the Devil.

Huh, did the Tokyo Revengers guys go home after part 2.1? I have no photos or notes from a Q&A. Weird!

I did get pictures of some guests from Japan, with The Concierge director Yoshimi Itazu and character designer Chie Morita between the hosts. Amazingly, their film showed up at the festival three months coming out in Japan, and I'm hoping it does pretty well. It's a cute little movie and everybody seems to have had a good time making it.

The makers of Late Night with the Devil didn't come from Australia, but the folks who made the short before it, "The Influencer", did, with director Lael Rogers and several members of the cast & crew.

It was a relatively short day for a weekend - usually there's something early - so I could use the morning to rest up. Next up: Hundreds of Beavers, What You Wish For, Kurayukaba, People Who Talk to Plushies Are Kind, and #Manhole.


"Innermost"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)

Maing Caochong just mashes a whole bunch of my favorite things together in his short, being a stop-motion post-apocalyptic sci-fi martial-arts adventure, which is not necessarily a guarantee that I'll love something, but this is a ton of fun. Maing and his crew build a bunch of distinctive fighters with fun weapons and fighting styles. It feels like folks playing with their custom action-figures, throwing them all together and imagining a crazy story.

It's dialogue-free, which often has the odd effect of the story leaning heavily on familiar tropes so that a viewer will quickly recognize the shape of it, especially since the characters tend to be stoic even beyond fixed expressions, and it still can feel like one has missed something that's meant to give the film a little more weight than "cool!" on occasion. Mostly, it strikes a good balance between implying lore and putting too much weight on the story that really isn't why you're watching.

And the stuff you did come for is pretty spiffy, with neat choreography that uses the sci-fi stuff well, and the world-building is full of cool environments and kind of nasty body horror, as transplant organs are apparently both much-needed and hard to come by I'd love to see Maing do more in this vein.


Eommaui Ttang (Mother Land)

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Axis, DCP)

A lot of Mother Land's story is familiar - indigenous people maintaining a traditional way of life despite encroachment, a quest to gain the favor of a creature of myth, an idiot tag-along kid brother. Add a cute animal and it ticks a lot of boxes. It does well by them, though, and it's the sort of animation where the filmmakers recognize how precious every second is and squeeze all they can out of each.

It follows a family of Yates, nomadic reindeer hunters of Siberia - father Tokchya (voice of Kang Gil-woo), mother Shoora (voice of Kim Yu-Eun), daughter Krisha (voice of Lee Yun-ji), son Kelyon, and grandmother/shaman (voice of Lee Yong-nyeo) - who find themselves imperiled when Shoora is injured after their tent collapses. Tokchya opts to make his way to the city to find medicine, while Krisha and her baby reindeer Seradeto disobey him to seek the "Master of the Forest", a legendary and all-powerful red bear. Kelyon inevitably tags along, but there are others looking for this beast: Soviet officer Vladimir (voice of Lee Gwan-mok) and Yates hunter Bazaq (voice of Song Cheol-ho) also seek the bear, with Vladimir feeling that this will help solidify the USSR's control of the area.

It's a simple-seeming story but writer/director Park Jae-beom tells it well, taking a child's point of view and presenting things in uncomplicated fashion without ever feeling like the story is being over-simplified. As much as Krisha's quest is in many ways as straightforward as possible ("follow Polaris") and the pieces are familiar, Park makes the hardships clear and presents the various points of view in such a way that young viewers can see what drives each character. Though often tending toward the spiritual, Park is restrained with his use of the supernatural for much of the film, and even when the story does become more fantastical, magic is presented as being both as fragile and powerful as nature when faced with humanity's very focused science and technology.

Park animates his film using stop-motion, and a thing I like about the medium is that style often comes about as a problem-solving necessity, emerging in different ways as various animators solve the problem of building these characters so they can emote and talk. Here, there's a big seam across the face, which on the one hand marks them as artificial but also suggests the cracking and weathering that even children will endure in the tundra, as well as some stoicism. I wonder if this crew would design their puppets differently for a different setting.

The film is generally out together well, with voice acting that mostly sounds like kids who are smart enough to know their world is dangerous but childishly brave regardless of that and adults with personality despite being quietly capable. The animation looks great, even things like an unstable swamp that, when you think about it, are likely tricky, while things like the smoke belched by Vladimir's armored truck seem especially unnatural. The empty tundra provides scale and it getting busier toward the end is enjoyably striking.

As is often the case with movies in this medium, Mother Land is in many ways something very familiar produced in a manner that makes it utterly unique. It's well worth checking out for fans of the medium and would probably do very well if someone like GKids picks it up and does a quality English dub.


"Architect A"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: Axis, digital)

Lee Jonghoon plays with a bunch of really delightful concepts here - the home as the representation of one's life, building the new upon the remains of the old, ultimately being unable to abandon one's calling and how, ultimately, something like a house will inevitably be drawn from both the commissioner and the builder. At least, that's why I get out of this story about an architect who is called out of retirement to build a new house for an old lady who is finding her last home after a big, adventurous life, insisting upon the titular Architect A, though he is now working as a delivery man after the loss of his wife.

There's a nifty set of contrasts here, as Lee places in A in a fantastic world, where buildings are already representational of their purpose, which means that what is shown both as we dig into the characters' memories (in this world, an important part of planning construction) and when A finally builds the dream house must be truly spectacular, and it is, especially since Lee doesn't opt to change styles or depict an alternate environment as clearly digital. The characters, meanwhile, are nicely understated, designed to be part of their world in such a way as to treat it as normal without seeming blasé. A, especially, is impressively likable but sad, clearly less than he could be but not a walking dark cloud.

The film goes by at a comfortable pace, too, never seeming small nor rushed but never leaving the audience taking its visual wonders for granted even after 25 minutes, even as the filmmakers opts to ground things a bit. It's a careful balancing act that makes this vilm a real delight.


Hokkyoku Hyakkaten no Concierge San (The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store aka The Concierge)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival: AXIS, DCP)

The Concierge is a a quickly-watched movie that can easily break down into even smaller segments, presumably ideal for a small child up for some cute anmals and gentle slapstick but maybe not up for a terribly complex story. It shouldn't frustrated adults too terribly much, though, although it is potentially one that kids will watch on loop, at which point all bets are off, though the first few times should strike parents as cute and plenty enjoyable.

It centers around the sort of old-fashioned department store that not only has everything, from casual clothing to top-class jewelry, with restaurants, cafés, and uniformed staff who can answer specialized questions or simply help one find the proper department in the sprawling maze. Akino (voice of Natsumi Kawaida), whom the audience meets on her first day of work, is one who does the latter, a young woman eager to help but easily intimidated and overwhelmed. Making Hokkyoku Department Store even stranger is that despite its mostly-human staff, it caters the extinct animals, which means Aiko must help a sea mink model find a gift for her down to earth father (and vice versa) without their seeing each other, or a Japanese fox nervous about proposing to his girlfriend, on top of the store having to occasionally accomodate customers from rodents to mammoths.

A adult or older child may ask how all this works - does this take place in some sort of afterlife limbo, or are we to presume that anthropomorphic creatures in funny-animal world die out at the same time they do on Earth (dark!). Indeed, there's a moment in the middle of The Concierge where one character basically points out that this whole situation is messed up, since these animals going extinct and the rise of department stores are linked to the same rise in consumerism, and then the whole movie basically shrugs and goes "anyway..." Weird, right?

Anyway... Once you get past that (and the kids for whom it's made probably won't worry too much about this, even with it explicitly brought up), It's a really charming little movie that does a nice job of taking what were probably one-off stories in the manga and building a narrative out of them, spending enough time on one thing or another to give the movie an enjoyably episodic feel rather than jumping back and forth, though things eventually come together in satisfying ways. It's also something that is deliberately open-ended enough that kids can continue imagining and making up new stories after the movie ends, whether about Akio, her human co-workers, the various animals she meets, or any of the other extinct creatures in the background or that they otherwise learn about.

It's also downright entertaining. The physical comedy is a delight, the characters are mostly very nice, with Mr. Elulu (voice of Takeo Otsuka), the kindly member of senior management who would rather ask Akino for a firm push with her foot so that he can slide where he was going on his stomach via thae waxed floors than make her feel bad about clumsily knocking him over (even if she does mistake him for a penguin). Visually, it will likely remind American audiences of Richard Scarry and other children's books more than much of the manga and anime that reaches these shores. It is incredibly fun to look at, with a whimsical score to boot.

I'm not sure how I would go about giving a copy of this to my three-year-old nephew, now that his family no longer has something that plays discs hooked to their television. I'd like to try, though - it's a genuine delight worth sharing.


Tokyo ribenjazu 2: Chi no Haroin hen - Kessen (Tokyo Revengers 2: Bloody Halloween - Decisive Battle)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

The funny thing about splitting the "Bloody Halloween" arc of the Tokyo Revengers manga into two 90-minute movies is that I can easily imagine them not necessarily being edited into one when they show up in American theaters for midweek Fathom Events-type screenings, but maybe being presented as a double feature. It probably plays well that way, too, as the first ended on the sort of cliffhanger that is a great spot for an intermission but doesn't play as the climax for what came before.

What came before is fairly convoluted - .after seeing the girl he'd somehow time-traveled back ten ten years to save killed in a car bomb, well-intentioned dork Takamichi (Takumi Kitamura) intends to prevent the gang of mostly-harmless brawlers he'd idolized from becoming the bona-fide criminal organization they are in the present. Unfortunately, a lot of the people who know what happened to cause this are dead, and Takomichi only remembers the events of the original timeline. So he returns to the past, only knowing that his idol Mikey (Ryo Yoshizawa) was killed in a massive rumble on Halloween, and that Mikey's best friend Baji (Kento Nagayama), who defected to another gang with the guilt-ridden Izaki, and Tetta Kisaki (Shotaro Mamiya), the leader of the present-day group.

I don't know that what anybody in this movie does makes any sense at all, but then, these guys all get hit in the head a lot.

Okay, that's not entirely true, but this really isn't complicated enough to be two movies, especially considering that the hero, who has traveled back in time to have an effect on the past, really doesn't wind up actually doing much of anything that would have a clear effect on the future, which could be an interesting story, with his small but well-intentioned actions at the margins having a big effect positive or negative, depending how important the fact that he's a dimwit who doesn't really know what's going on is, but screenwriter Izumi Takahashi and director Rsutomu Hanabusa don't particularly emphasize that. There's a fair story of loyalty and brotherhood here, but it's competing for time with the one that actually involves the nominal protagonist, and is still very reliant on dumb-guy logic.

Of course, this isn't really a time-travel story at heart so much as it's a street-fighting story, and the second half is anchored by the "Bloody Halloween" brawl that's been teased since the beginning, and it's kind of worth waiting two movies for: It's big, but also perfectly fitted to the junkyard environment where it takes place so that it's swarming with people but giving them room to move and make big swings; the piles of junk give them a little terrain to work with and corners to hide in, and the fact that it's a brawl means that the cast letting their characters' big, deranged, not-too-bright personalities fly feels more natural. Sure, these guys are going to be like this all the time anyway, but the testosterone overdose works better in this context.

It's just enough for the film to send the audience out on a high and set a jumping-off point for the next arc of the manga to be adapted. Maybe that will be the one where they do something with how Kisaki has to also be time-traveling, right, even though they don't even seem to be hinting at it. Anyway, it's fun enough, although I imagine that the various versions of this franchise must have inspired a whole ton of slash fan fiction which probably makes a lot more sense.


"The Influencer"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

"The Influencer" is listed as "horror", because it technically does horror-movie things and likely feels like a horror movie on the page, but is so banter-y and good at zippy comedy in the first stretch that when it does take a turn for the violent and gross, it almost feels like a parody of movies that start comedic and jump genres. The horror material isn't bad, at all, so much as the start of the movie being good enough to resist the switch.

And that's kind of impressive, because the start is the sort of fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that I can find hard to parse, while the Instagram influencer material that kind of bounces off me because I have more or less curated my internet experience to avoid such things by chance but often still sense that the spoofs are too broad. It's got an entertaining, chatty dynamic that still plays these characters as shallow and awful in a familiar way that doesn't quite push one away, and the switch to horror is just off-putting that even when one doesn't really feel like the genre is doing a complete swerve, there's a good, uncertain sense of not knowing just where writer/director Lael Rogers is going with it.

It's often the case that one looks at a short that works this well and say one would like to see more, but truth be told, ten minutes is the right length and it would die going longer. Still, if director Lael Rogers wants to do something longer, I'm interested to see what it is.


Late Night with the Devil

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 30 July 2023 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Théâtre Hall) (Fantasia Festival, DCP)

Late Night with the Devil is a minor miracle of a movie: A dead-on recreation of something kind of silly that starts out looking like high-concept parody but excels because nearly every character is not just very funny, but also fits into the horror-story and drama parts of the movie seamlessly. That's a thing that not a lot of horror-comedies manage, usually having one side undercut the other, and fitting it into note-perfect pastiche is almost showing off.

The film gives us Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) as a former disc jockey who in the 1970s became the host of UBC's "Night Owl", a late-night talk that for a white rivaled that of Johnny Carson, though he spiraled between questions about his involvement in a mysterious mens-only club ("The Grove") and the loss of his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) in 1976, and was facing cancellation a year later. For Halloween, he's doing a special live show, as he and sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri) welcome illusionist and skeptic Carmichael Hunt (Ian Bliss), traveling medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), psychologist June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon), and her ward, Lilly D'Abo (Ingrid Torelli), the sole survivor of her father's Church of Abraxas cult, said to have been possessed and the subject of June's book Conversations with the Devil. Putting them all on stage together should make for great television. But is Jack more motivated to save his show or contact his wife, and how much of what he's doing is real?

Brothers Cameron & Colin Cairnes play with that sense of reality, nesting the events a couple layers deep, as Late Night is presented as recovered footage of the fateful broadcast that has had some documentary material prepended and also shows the camera continuing to run during commercial breaks, with the whole thing playing like an exposé from the 1990s even as the main footage is a dead-on recreation of the mid-1970s. It's impressive just how straight they play it, though - for all that the guests map to common types from the era (or specific people) and the set features just the right sort of garish coloring, the film never points and laughs. It works in part because there were all these different sorts of fascination with the paranormal and occult at the time. The whole thing is kind of silly in retrospect, but was done sincerely.

The other thing that works is that David Dastmalchian is really terrific here, which isn't necessarily surprising - he's been a reliable presence giving genre films a little more than expected for a decade, but often in the sort of supporting role where that effort makes things smoother rather than standing out. Here, though, he's always got a camera pointed at him, and captures this really terrific spot where jack's intentions are believably muddled, more and more nervous about how what is going on may actually work once he's in it, the sort of antihero this genre thrives on but seldom offers its audience. He and Laura Gordon play off each other especially well; there's a spark of attraction there and also seemingly-complementary bits of ambition that develop friction as the broadcast goes on; they're genuinely interesting characters who come across as having more to them than what the story needs.

I don't necessarily love the finale completely, but that is probably down to my personal preferences for people being accused of possession over actual supernatural entities than any failure of execution. And the Cairnes brothers do execute very well, leaning into the period trappings to make what happens feel more real because one's brain is thinking in terms of what live television could do in 1977 rather than what a movie can do 45 years later, making the violence nasty and indiscriminate, and always linking the supernatural strongly enough to something in Jack's psyche that the audience can feel the connection to what's going on even if it could all be in his head.

It makes for a heck of a ride, and it's a rare horror movie that transcends its gimmick the way this one does without abandoning it.