Kimi no nawa vs Koe no katachi

Since the corona started, we haven't been able to go to the cinema, so instead we decided to relive our teenage anime years and have been obsessively watching the old anime crap we saw back in the day but also indulging (or torturing with, we're not really sure) ourselves in some new shit. The first movie we saw somewhere around January and the other one this month. They make a pretty natural comparison, since they both are about teenagers and involve a lot of drama (plus they came out like one year apart). And since we've been watching anime now with kinda new eyes, it doesn't really register as embarrassing or shameful anymore. So, now is as good a time as any to write about our thoughts on the stuff we were so immersed in when we were young. This will be first out of three posts on this subject. We're just gonna write indiscriminately how we see these movies, so we haven't divided the text into different areas.

Kimi no nawa (2016)

Character introductions are actually decent. It reminded us of the good bits of Ranma 1/2 (wacko, sort of out-there humour), since the idea is essentially a body swap - the boy sometimes wakes up in the girl's body and vice versa. Through that they then learn to know each other. It's not a very original idea, but if you can make it work, it can be good. The characters have funny interactions and there's potential for the girl to have some actual depth in her character with her relationship to her dad. But then...we come to the half-way point of the movie, where the plot takes over the characters and they start to act stupid. And when we say stupid, we mean mind-numbingly moronic. One of the things that ruin the characters is the stakes being too high for a cheesy romance flick. But we'll expand on that in just a moment. We're sorry though, we can't get over how goddamn stupid the boy is. When it has been made clear that they forget about each other the minute they change back into their own bodies, it is incomprehensible, and by no one's standards should be considered a grand gesture of romance that the boy writes 'I love you' instead of his own name on the girl's hand. The body swap is your basic cheesy anime romance idea, which, when executed well, can be quite entertaining. This is not that. The stakes are that the girl is dead and she and her entire town were destroyed by a meteor and the boy is the only one who can prevent that from happening. 

First of all, there are supposedly two main characters but when everything about the girl's past and her relationship to her dad is shown through the boy's eyes, that's no longer the case. So you see, the boy writing 'I love you' and not his name makes us eternally frustrated. It means that the boy didn't care enough to actually say it out loud to her when she might die and they can never see each other again. Also, that denies the chance for the girl to affirm her feelings for him, maybe the last time ever. Additionally, it's not just she who's dying but her entire town full of people. Yet her survival is more important for the boy than the other people. What a selfish brat. The most insulting part for us, though, if we're being honest, is when it's shown that the girl cares more and is more upset about forgetting some boy's name than her entire town being destroyed. A film that has as its main characters people who are more concerned about their potential relationship than a city full of people dying, is ludicrous. 

The worst part is that this movie tries to be so poetic and deep when it's simply a corny "destiny love" romance ("destiny love" is a term we coined for every story that wants to be Romeo & Juliet). Now, anybody who reads our blog knows that we love good romance. And romance that is truly well-crafted is deep and poetic. This "destiny love" crap is nothing but shallow and pretentious. Ultimately, perhaps we're just holding a grudge, since this movie has near universal acclaim from both critics and viewers and was finally the film to dethrone Spirited Away as the highest-grossing movie in Japan. That is fucking unacceptable. On the other hand, in the West, shitty movies have in the last 30 years made the most money, so it's about time Japan caught up. And we can't help but feel that part of the adoration for this movie is because it's anime and we hate that kind of thinking. Anime is like any other movie or series - it's entertainment, pure and simple. The positive we have for this film is that it is hand-drawn and it looks about 50 million times better than any CGI trash we are exposed to in today's cinema field. The music is some of the J-poppiest of J-pop we have ever heard and thus insufferable for us (sorry not sorry all J-pop lovers).   



Koe no katachi (2017)

An announcement before we begin: Our lived experience has made us biased for the themes presented in this movie. However, if this was shittily made, we might hate it more than the previous movie. 

The subject matters in this film are depression, loneliness, suicide, and hating and loving oneself. Is it any wonder that we felt an instant connection? Most characters are teenagers in this movie too, but they come across so much more real than in Kimi no nawa. Whereas the high stakes are never addressed in Kimi no nawa, this movie is completely prepared to deal with the high stakes it has set. In this movie, the main character is a boy and we see everything from his perspective - there is no false set up of two main characters. Nevertheless, that does not rob any of the other characters of depth. We were actually amazed how well this film used visual cues and imagery to convey emotion or build character. And though it clearly had a lower budget than Kimi no nawa and has way more CGI in the background, the animation is gripping and knows how to utilize its smaller budget to its advantage. 

The basic story of the movie goes as follows: the boy was a bully in elementary school to this deaf girl who transferred to his school.  He was so cruel to her, in fact, that she was forced to switch to another school. This acted as a catalyst for all his classmates to shun him for his actions. All that together turned him inward and made him consider his actions. But instead of dealing with the emotions and feelings healthily (like talking about them) he starts to live inside his head blaming and hating himself to the extent that he thinks he does not deserve to live. Before killing himself, he wants to make amends to the girl he bullied. In the process, he becomes friends with her and that kind of sets the movie in motion and is a starting point for the main character to begin connecting with other people around him. 

The film has actually bothered to make the girl into a real character - somebody who is self-loathing to the point that she believes she's a burden on everyone and that everyone would be better off if she just died. This is where a connection is created between the main character and the girl. They are, in fact, the same. The realization that two people who were introduced to us as complete opposites with totally different backgrounds and personalities can have the same human experience. The story's point is basically learning to love oneself and human connection. Simple and incredibly effective. We love all the characters and love that the film doesn't treat anyone as a villain. The boy's best friend is a particular favourite of ours. All in all, this movie is wonderfully heart-warming, uplifting and life-affirming in the best sense. We would unreservedly recommend this nugget of cinematic gold to everyone.       

Disney's artistic bankruptcy

Of all the Disney's mediocre remakes, I ( Jenni writing solo again) never thought it would be the Lion King that would actually make me so angry I wanted to bash a Disney excecutive's head in. Don't get me wrong, I love the original animation, but when I was a kid it was always the one I loved the least of the first four Disney reneissance films. However, this movie awoke a visceral reaction in me that the other remakes did not, even though they are all pretty bad. I would say, outside of Cats, this remake might be the worst movie I have seen from 2010's. And even Cats was gloriously, entertainingly horrible. This other cat movie, not so much. It is a lifeless, murky mess where you can't see anything when it's dark and the world is completely flat of distinctive colour even in daylight. At least the other remakes had some human faces that showed *some* emotion; here it is like looking at an empty vessel, devoid of any kind of recognizable emotion. Sigh. And Disney used to be really good at manipulating people's emotions with their blatant appeal to feelings.  

I make it no secret that I believe Disney has really gone downhill artistically since they adopted the "no more hand-drawn animation" rule in the 2010's. Even though most of their offerings in the 2000's were crap, I could still admire the artwork that went into their hand-drawn animation style. CGI does not offer me the same visual pleasure. In fact, CGI, unlike traditional animation, is fairly limited in what it can show - it can't switch animation styles all that much and looks mostly the same, the expressions in characters' faces can't really be exaggerated to the same extent and the colours are always flatter. Hand-drawn animation ain't perfect either by any measure and it is much more expensive to make, but it holds far more visual interest and potential to beauty than CGI ever has. To me, CGI has always been exactly the same as all other special effects - something that should enhance the film's visuals and not replace existing effects (be they actors, make-up, practical effects, etc.), which seems to be its purpose in modern cinema. By itself, CGI is nothing but one special effect among others and if one insists making the entire movie of CGI, The Lion King remake is what it will look like at its worst.   

The film differs in no meaningful way from its original animated source. That is a problem that plagues most Disney remakes but it is especially egregious in their Lion King remake. The events are the same, the music's the same and most of the characters are the same, except it all looks much much worse. I do not think I have ever seen anything more devoid of emotion than this film. There is not a shred of sincerity in this movie - which granted, Disney does not always have in their offerings, but even in those cash grabs I could at least admire the artwork. Not the case here. The film constantly slaps you in the face with how unbearably ugly it looks. That should not be - the original Lion King is one of the best looking films Disney ever made. It has breath-taking colours with sharp and detailed animation. Though it's no wonder that Lion King looks pretty good, when it took its inspiration from probably Disney's best-looking animation ever, Bambi. And Bambi, though its story and characters aren't the greatest, looks so damn beautiful that it makes you cry. And when we are talking about films, aesthetic matters. CGI is a big part why a lot of films nowadays have cheap aesthethic. They look like crap - colour is hard to distinguish even when it is supposedly daylight, when it is dark one can barely see anything and in general a lot of the background looks blurry. I've found that the older I've gotten, the more I have started to care about movies' aesthetic. The characters still reign supreme, of course, but bad visuals can affect characters as well - like in this remake. It is extremely hard to feel anything for characters that show no emotion whatsoever. At least in CGI - animations the characters do show emotion and real animals are real, so they are way more impressive than computer-generated ones.

From Bambi. Look at that and tell me it's not amazing.

In the original Lion King the characters were already kinda all over the place but here they have somehow managed to make all of them worse. They basically took away Simba's would-be character arc about learning from one's past (which, granted, didn't go anywhere in the original animation) or accepting his divine call and responsibility as king. Especially the whole mystical divine kingship theme is greatly reduced in meaning in the live-action version, since everything looks so reality based. Scar is greatly diminished as a character already at the film's beginning by cutting his song (instead of in the last 3rd like the animation) and trying to make him into an even more obvious version of Claudius than the animation. The bond between father and son, Mufasa and Simba, is not really focused on in the beginning, so once the tragedy strikes, it is hard to feel for any of the characters involved. Also, the remake trying to make justifications for why the hyenas are evil turns out lazier than just making them evil. And this remake did something that I did not believe was even possible - it made Nala worse. Nala is already a non-character in the animation (as an adult) so making her even less so is quite a feat. I should have guessed that they'd erase all of Nala's personality when she was a kid, since erasing female characters' personalities is pretty much a feature in these Disney remakes, but it did surprise me that they managed to unimprove her adult self. Instead, Nala is a nagger all throughout the movie and affects absolutely nothing or nobody in the story. Timon & Pumba I sort of enjoyed, but even they have this strange cynical undertone that they never had in the animation. All in all, I think this film is a perfect encapsulation of both Disney's complete creative collapse and the state of modern Hollywood cinema - endless sequels, prequels, remakes (or "reimaginations") and even when something original is occasionally thought up, it is usually full-to-the-brim CGI. Maybe I am old-fashioned, but I see it as a true tradgedy of the film industry that so much hand-crafted talent, like practical effects and traditional animation, has been almost completely replaced by CGI, where the work might not be as rewarding and fullfilling as creating things with one's own hands.