R.I.P. Monkey Punch (04/16/2019)

R.I.P. Monkey Punch

Punch's legacy and influence on animation is perhaps a lot bigger than the manga he famously worked on if people considered how much talent was being harvested in the 70s and 80s during the development of the Lupin III franchise.

The series revealed some of the best names in the history of animation. It helped set the stage for anime in the 80s in terms of animation quality, character development, and overall filmmaking. The manga might've done better as an animation series where the characters each had expressions that were more easily read than comic panels cutting between each action.

And, this attention to detail always seemed to remain consistent and loyal throughout it's history, even when the franchise would adopt to new styles between directors and animation houses. I might go as far as to say that with the release of Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro, more and more animation filmmakers recognized the more westernized approach of executing a story in character animation since there were more and more anime productions that began introducing an autuerism into it's pipeline. i.e. Oshii, Otomo, Takahata all notorious animators for leading this wave during the Golden Age.

What major villain in any media failed to live up to the hype?

Sosuke Aizen from the Manga “Bleach” was the former 5th captain of the Gotei 13 in the Soul Society. The introduction as the manga villain, however, was unanticipated and shocked many anime/manga fans during the manga’s titled “Soul Society” arc which revolved around the capturing of one of the series most beloved characters Rukia Kuchiki.

What Aizen looked like as a captain of the 5th squad in the Gotei 13

Image Source:

Sōsuke Aizen - Wikipedia

Soul Society Arc

At around volume 20 in the manga series, (SPOILER ALERT) Aizen’s betrayal pretty much puts Bleach on another stage after he steals the hogyoku, a device made by former captain Kisuke Urahara that can give hollows soul reaper powers, thus, transforming them into powerful characters known as the arrancar.

Essentially following volume 20, it is anticipated by all the Bleach fans that Aizen is the most mysterious character in possibly revealing more plot twists as the series progresses since both his knowledge and power as an antagonist seems to outweigh everyone else’s in the series.

Arrancar Arc

Following the Soul Society Arc—- as Aizen is seen at the helm of Hueco Mundo, he sort of is hinting at ideas that he knows even more about main protagonist Ichigo Kurosaki than he previously revealed when he betrayed Soul Society and stole the Hogyoku.

Bleach as a series was in it’s most popular phase in America during the Soul Society Arc but, things went downhill soon after when it took too long to first, get to Aizen in Hueco Mundo and then, defeat Aizen with all of the Soul Society fighting him and the espada (elite arrancar Aizen creates with the aforementioned hogyoku). Aizen who, at first, was the most mysterious manga villain of all time, became quite possibly one of the worst villains and the most annoying one for that matter.

• The Evolution of Aizen in Bleach

As we can see above here, Aizen changes quite a bit in the series. He begins as a dorky captain/lieutenant, (first image) then, takes off the Harry Potter glasses and reveals to be a powerhouse evolving into a lame butterfly (myriad of phases), a hollow-guy, and lastly, a prisoner.

Yes, with the hogyoku, Aizen transforms into a massive butterfly. Fans titled it “butterflaizen” on forums because well, that’s what he sort of was back in the day. But, the thing with the phases of Aizen’s Butterfly transformation is that at first, the artist attempted to draw his first stage as in being in this cocoon… shape… suit… thing, even though fans saw it as being sort of this giant condom draped over his head. And well, the pun here is that Marilyn Manson promotes unsafe sex in a way cooler butterfly costume.

Image Source:

Redirect Notice

Aizen’s second to last butterfly stage with the hogyoku in the arrancer arc

Image Source:

Butterfly Aizen

And to top things off, Bleach didn’t really end after Aizen’s “death” at the end of the Arrancar Arc. (the arc after Soul Society Arc) The writer Tite Kubo wanted to continue and drag this thing out for one last big war with the quincies (humans with supernatural powers)

Thousand Year Blood War Arc

In the manga’s last arc “Thousand Year Blood War”, Aizen is still seen living though, doesn’t have a huge role since he is mostly just a whiny prisoner since his fight with Ichigo. But, what is so disappointing is not just the fact that Aizen never dies, but, the manga creator never cared reveals his own bankai or why he may have perhaps not developed the skill to achieve one. This was, afterall, an attribute that most captains had. Aizen’s shikai Kyoka Suigetsu was what made Aizen’s mystique even more unusual because it gave him the ability to do the things he wanted to do in betraying Soul Society in the first place and getting significant ideas from powerful characters in the book such as, former captains Shinji Hirako and Kisuke Urahara.

Aizen as a prisoner at the end of the arrancar arc

Image Source:

Anime & Manga " Thread #133366014

Internet Sensation?

So, fans got so ticked off that they made jokes on the internet that Tite Kubo, the series creator was essentially Sosuke Aizen himself, the troll behind the manga always saying things like “just as planned” (the villain’s popular line) to the readers and killing off characters without a problem when we never got a clear explanation of why this character was so strong and just…. never died.

*slams head on table*

As we can see above, Captain Hitsuguya along with all the other captains in the series, surround this guy, try stabbing him, blowing him up in flames, but obviously all fail to do so because he’s Sosuke freakin’ Aizen.

Image Source:

Aizen- Motivational

Fans were super ticked off with the writer/artist Tite Kubo when chapters were released online through scans, fans just made fun of Bleach as a whole on a ton of forums. Bleach became widely known as the least popular of the three big shonen manga in America. (Naruto and One Piece being the others)

Image Source:

Who really is the manga artist here? | Kubo Troll

The idea that Aizen hardly had a backstory was frustrating enough too. If an antagonist knows so much about any character in a series, it essentially starts feeling like he is the writer of the book even though he’s fictional and making all of the decisions on who dies and who doesn’t.

“Vegeta, what does it say on this guy’s power level?”

“It’s ov—fuck! it’s Akira Toriyama!”

Read the full answer on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/What-major-villain-in-any-media-failed-to-live-up-to-the-hype

Twitter:

@LightsCamTalk

Is modern television and advertising patronising and overtly negative in respect to the successful mindset?

I had to Google search “successful mindset” just in case this wasn’t a title for some new kind of cynicism that started on the internet recently and that I wasn’t aware of or has a different context attached to it like conspiracy theory or any other kind of hallucinogen... This, being an example for my answer here in that I will say both yes and no. But, I’m going to mostly say yes if I had to pick one since the quote-on-quote ‘successful mindset’ as it pertains to the American dream was largely predominant in entertainment around in the 90s and some of the 2000s when Televison absolutely boomed and prior to the dominance of the internet with platforms like YouTube and Facebook taking hold. Back then, we had stuff like MTV and others really providing these outlets for ‘celebrity’ to be successful to mass culture. There was less significance on identity politics. Now, culture has a ton of opinions by different people all over the world, both higher and lower. Television back in the 90s, was also much for accepting if you were politically wrong, and no one was going to really object on a scale like they do now with a regressive left being more concerned with identity politics and social behaviors tied to everything. Television programs, if anything, are going to explore the chaos of the mind, to try as much as they can to postmodernize and fragment material to the viewership to reflect what the computer is doing to the mindset or perhaps cause for a sort of ‘interaction’ with the characters similar to a phone app so that the content can be recycled as memes or short gags in the form of images on laptops

A pretty good example of this was the popular show Rick and Morty where the creator of the show Dan Harmon felt like one day restructuring Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’ Model in how both main protagonists venture into one world and come back to the real one as different characters. This was an unusual feature for an animated sitcom since following the ‘irony’ days of a show like Family Guy. The culture now gets something a tad more intellectual that fans least expected. With a growing rationalist community in the US, fans could discuss, laugh, and argue online with perhaps the more irrational users (creationists, fantasists, etc.)

Another good example is the TV series Black Mirror which won an Emmy for it’s unusual and twisted writing in creating narrative loops. “Bandersnatch” was the name for an interactive film about the creation of a video game that you can watch on Netflix. Again, not a lot of emphasis on targeting a particular class. The emphasis is to outsmart it's audiences as audiences become more and more hungry for new information.

In a nutshell, it seems that television and movie writers are really obsessed with a sort of reconstructionism involving the user experience with the technology nowadays for that matter.

This primarily not just being the case because programs can’t really come up with anything else that’s new, but there is still very little for science to reveal in the subject of the mind involving consciousness, so the arts has seen this as an opportunity to use psychogeographic ideas or integrate them somehow if it involves metaphors or symbolism in the writing. There is a lot of content out there now that loopholes in a way for the viewers to relate in terms of the experience with modern technology. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter has just recently received the most dings in their reputations, so we are most likely seeing a shift in the culture in that it is in this reflective stage of questioning a lot of ideas online/TV with perhaps a tad more empathy of other people’s differences than before.

Read my full answer on Quora:

https://www.quora.com/Is-modern-television-and-advertising-patronising-and-overtly-negative-in-respect-to-the-successful-mindset

Twitter:

@LightsCamTalk

Suspiria (Classic Movies) 5/5

Suspiria (Classic Movies) 

5/5

An enigmatic German ballet house entraps visitors, unleashing a chaos filled with cacophonous screams and draconious swirls of apothic necromancy. Sinister, harlequin shapes backdrop in contrast to the harmony of cryptic terpsichoreans tiptoeing  in voluptuous motion. Beneath it's monumental design, is an orchestral eeriness evoked in Goblin's rock spells of demonic dissonance, amplifiying Argento's synthesizing arpeggio of spellbinding incarcerations, reaching a height in a Giallo genre that normally consists of hodgepodges such as, “The Bird with the Crystal Plumage” and “A Lizard in a Woman's Skin”. Shifts in illusion are hinted and represented in the robust mixtures of the aquatic-crimsons as it was trialed in the rowens of "Inferno" and "Mother of Tears". Nowhere in these workings though was Argento's poetic palette of phantasmagoric witchery more present than in each harrowing background constructed here in "Suspiria", the first part of "Three Mother's Trilogy".

In the center of any discussion on Gothic movie and television entertainment, "Suspiria" is mentioned, re-iterated, and re-visited. It's distinct flair in cinematography by Luciano Tovoli calls upon a dreamscape of noirs in color and the German silent film favorites like " Dr. Caligari", evoking familiarity in it’s blackened corridors; the unraveling of abstract shapes and figurines draped more-or-less in cast shadow. A moon illuminating each character’s appearance is present despite being ominously felt inside, invisible beneath it’s exterior, similar in any film-noir capturing of a subject for that matter.

Inspired by Disney's "Snow White and Seven Dwarfs", Argento seems to find the Queen the most interesting character to model on as the blueprint since it his her dark, menacing personality as a movie villain that seems to encompass what the overall tone of the movie relies on. Rainy weather, dead trees, eccentric airports, and smoky atmospheres crackle the dread and angst of this technicolor extremity. Flickering hallway lights meet and burst crimson, mixed with glittering obelisks and pasted death-florals, blossoming a shamanistic repertoire in vacillating verse.

Jessica Harper (Insects) plays the protagonist Suzy Bannon, an American dancer traveling to enroll at this academy. Discovering that the house is haunted by the witch, Bannon

 traverses through the house’s convoluted mazes comprising  outlandish, pop-out scares that the witch has in store. Joan Bennet (Scarlett Street and Dark Shadows) plays Madame Blanc, offering nostalgic trips to a Gothic past with her supporting role as the teacher. Barbara Magnolfi (The Suspicious Death of a Minor) as Olga, a female dancer participating with the team, adding onto the Gothic vibe.

Suspiria to this day stands as an orphan at the end of a grim paragraph as European cinema transitions from a golden age of nonlinear storytelling and into one that is  shoddy with low-budget B-movie thrills and cheap entertainment. Standing up to a lot of modern horror that have an over-indulged thought with CGI, Suspiria is a breakaway from that norm utilizing old school tactics to stage it’s focal point of fear. It is also a difficult one to age since most films released  around this time weren’t as daring in it’s visual appeal. We need more films that are far-reaching like it; films that can find a consistency and mature grasp on it's range of psychedelic opaqueness. Suspiria does just that; even going a little bit farther beyond what is expected before these moments of suspense and after. For it's sheer uniqueness alone, it is re-discussed and re-interpreted by film experts, remaining one of the genre’s hallmarks.

Twitter:

@LightsCamTalk

Wong Kar-wai - Godard

Wong Kar-Wai's work is a dark, sparkling diamond in the rough of Hong Kong cinema. Poetic albeit obscure, Kar-wai offers a refreshing, distinctive vision in an underground scene that has grown weary of the cliched wuxia flick. Unlike his contemporaries, Kar-wai breaks the mold by drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, in particular, the vibrant complimentary backdrops found in Godard's technicolor feats like 'Pierrot' and 'Contempt', or Demy's melodramatic love letters in the 'Umbrellas of Cherbourg' and the 'Sisters of Rochefort'. These films that may contain a senstivity to light and color from the cinematography department, are largely in contrast with Kar-Wai's choice of multi-layered narrative loops. Kar-Wai's work as a whole truly examines the possibility of what the New Wave would be if the style is resurrected in the present day with modern camera work that offers more sophisticated shot angles, slo-motion tracking, greater color scales, and bold visceral filters. 

Kar-Wai is the movement's ideal successor in adding to it's broad lexicon devices of dreams and memories to stream parallel with a subject's action making for a composited abstract poem. If Godard is the Picasso then Kar-Wai is like the extension of this with hints of arthouse flair. Contrasting from the New Wave's scatter mindedness, Kar-wai demonstrates sensitivity and growth  to this abstraction. Within a romance genre that has lacked a sophistication in it's execution, the enigma that Kar-Wai has presented to us and wants his audiences to solve while on a ride that consists of twists and turns, is a point of observance that the viewer must draw from introspection. Understanding is sometimes the farthest point from empathy here. What remains stagnant and cohesive is the feeling of attachment and attraction between each character interaction. Similar to the ambiguity in a Godard narrative, Kar-Wai adds emotion to his characters so that the viewer can leave questioning the story while marveling at a romantic bond that is conflicted by a forgetfulness of dreams and memories. This bond can only be entirely solved on a personal level just as any moment of isolation would inhibit the thoughts of a poet's voice in a dark apartment space like in '2046'. The events that occur before and after may be subliminal to the emotion experienced in between action.  What happens in the past, present and future is integral and doesn't necessarily apply here in a Kar-Wai film. Once we realize that occurence is rather blended with the hue of Kar-Wai's amtospheric backgrounds, the emotions expressed is the missing key to this chaotic metropolitan setting; words become more palatable through poetic verses than the third-person.

With the exception of Yimou, Kar-Wai may be the most prominent filmmaker to arise from Hong Kong's scene in the 90's. His work should be recognized as the very hallmark to cinema in China.

Magic Dance

Jump magic, jump (jump magic, jump)
Jump magic, jump (jump magic, jump)
Put that magic jump on me!

Japanese film list