The last thing we watched, cartoon/animu edition

BrawlMan

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Lupin The 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979) & Lupin The Third: The First (2019) - Both are awesome Lupin movies toy should watch! I was never hardcore Lupin fan. More so with the TV series, but I tend to enjoy the movies more because of the better animation, along with the great voice acting. You're looking for great adventure capers? These are it!

 
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Johnny Novgorod

Bebop Man
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Twittering Birds Never Fly (Saezuru Tori wa Habatakanai)

Yashiro is a Yakuza boss who's all about sucking off his underlings. When he tries sucking off his new bodyguard, Doumeki, he realizes that he (Doumeki) cannot get it up, which throws an unexpected wrench into the sucking off all of his underlings. The description on the can says that their romance is at odds with the "hyper masculine world of Yakuza", but correct me if I'm wrong, internet - I never got the impression sucking off your underlings in the movie's criminal underworld was much of a faux pas. They all seem to be uniformly gay - Yashiro, his bodyguard, his whole gumi, the doctor that moonlights for them, his squeeze, his former boss, his main rival - and more than happy to scarf on male nethers out in the open, so long as you swap backstories about getting abused first (which, per the movie's logic, makes the rest of your life "not gay").
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This goes on for 90 minutes or so until somebody gets shot and the movie ends.
I learn "yaoi" is a portmanteau of the phrase yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi - "no climax, no point, no meaning". Indeed.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Arcane season 2, episode 5 second watch

Watching the second season again feels weird, because it makes the series make both more and less sense. I'm not going to keep reiterating the point of it being overstuffed and messy, but bizarrely episode 5 feels almost like a filler episode. I woud like to say that the core plot doesn't advance much, and then I realized that I don't even know what the core conflict is supposed to be. The show just keeps introducing new elements despite being past the halfway point of the season, and they're so disconnected from one another there's zero sense of cohesion. Mel being captured isn't affected by Viktor's messiah thing, Jinx and Vi looking for Vander isn't affected by Cait and Ambessa making ties with Singed, it's just a series of completely separate branches. I know they come together in episode 6, but this is setup, something you're not supposed to be doing in the middle of a season, and also almost completely disconnected from the events of act 1.

Not only is it incohesive, there's also a distinct lack of consequences. Jinx becomes a revolutionary icon and busts a crowd of people out of prison... and apparently can just waltz around Zaun like she pleases, and her deed has no effect on Zaun or inspire the crowds. Cait and Ambessa lead an (apparently, we don't really see it) harsh occupation of Zaun... but underground boxing rings and nightclubs apparenly are just balling. Vi leaves the enforcers (or gets fired, it's not exactly explained), and apparenly Piltover's finest are just fine letting the sister of the most wanted criminal in the city drink her days away in the gutter, no need to pay her any mind. It's planting without payoff. The show just skipping character beats like this leaves it confusing and unsatisfying.

Also only now did I also realize that not only is the season a mess, it's also told out of order in certain parts. Jayce returns at the end of episode 5 with his new hobo look, and we only find out in episode 7 what happened to him, after he's already fucked shit up for everyone big time. This seems to be the trend of the season: characters appearing only every other episode. And as I previously said, them just piling on the questions becomes completely overwhelming when you're not given any answers, and the answers we do get are to questions we never asked. Like how Cait discovering Singed's true identity and him revealing his motives is treated as some sort of great revelation, but that was never built up to at all. Or how we find out that apparently Vander tried to reconcile with Silco after trying to kill him, which is like... okay? What does that change? That Vander had regrets about what he did? We knew that from season 1 already.
 

Piscian

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Hot take, but I just watched Scavengers Reign on Netflix this last weekend. Honestly I thought it was mind blowing. Purely as art I think it's better than Arcane hands down. We need more of this jodorowsky/Mobius type stuff out there.

 

Dirty Hipsters

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Hot take, but I just watched Scavengers Reign on Netflix this last weekend. Honestly I thought it was mind blowing. Purely as art I think it's better than Arcane hands down. We need more of this jodorowsky/Mobius type stuff out there.

Yup, I posted about this show earlier in this thread, and it's absolutely fantastic.

If you want some sci-fi ass sci-fi, on a planet that feels truly unique and alien this hits all the notes.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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DanDaDan is so horny...but soo wholesome...but SOO horny.
 

Bartholen

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I have two episodes left on my second watch of Arcane's second season, and it's all coming together. It's an enormously ambitious, thematically dense and complex season, often to its detriment, but nowhere near as much of a mess as the first viewing made it seem. There are some serious pacing issues with it, namely that watching it in the wrong order actually makes it both make more sense and easier to follow. If you go the episodes in order 5-7-6-8-9 instead of the intended order, you get filled in on so much backstory and motivation without being spoiled on anything, and the last three episodes also become much more cohesive. The intended order leaves you with so many different dangling plot threads that it becomes completely overwhelming, whereas my suggested order answers one of the biggest mysteries of the season as well as clears up Jayce's motivation instead of him seeming like an unhinged, incomprehensible lunatic.

I think this is the result of the release format of three three-episode acts. You've got to leave the viewers on a big WHAM moment at the end of each act, but here it seriously hampers the story and its pacing. One thing that hasn't really improved is this season's overwrought misery factor. It's not The Last of Us 2 level, but it is consistently miserable, grim and depressing.
 

Bartholen

At age 6 I was born without a face
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Finished Arcane S2 again. It really kind of falls apart at the end. The timescale of things doesn't make sense, nor does the plan of defense against the Noxians, or how Mel and the subplot involving the Black Rose is kept nebulous at best right up to the end. The questions just keep piling up:
  • What was Jayce's plan supposed to be exactly? If shutting down the hexgates was supposedly so important, why didn't they just do that immediately? Why is Jayce seemingly the only one doing it?
  • Why was the cocoon holding Victor at the final battle seemingly just a distraction, seeing as the army of automatons show up anyway, right at the front line, and seem to be pretty much unstoppable?
  • If Jayce showing Victor the (alternate?) future was what prevented the nuking of Piltover, why did he hold out until the very end? Couldn't he just have waltzed up to Victor first thing and been like "hey, you pretty much told me to come to you and show how you fuck up everything"?
  • What the hell is the timescale of things supposed to be in episodes 8 and 9? From how things escalate you'd think it to be a couple of days at most, but in that time both Jinx and Vi clearly grow longer hair, suggesting it to be weeks or even months. Which in turn makes everything in the episodes fall apart completely.
  • How exactly was Ekko clued in to the happenings? He just shows up at the start of episode 9, and at the end seems to know to head for Victor, despite no one having told him what's happened. It's not like he visited the post-apocalyptic future like Jayce.
I dunno man, this season's just really messy and disappointing.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Finished Arcane S2 again. It really kind of falls apart at the end. The timescale of things doesn't make sense, nor does the plan of defense against the Noxians, or how Mel and the subplot involving the Black Rose is kept nebulous at best right up to the end. The questions just keep piling up:
  • What was Jayce's plan supposed to be exactly? If shutting down the hexgates was supposedly so important, why didn't they just do that immediately? Why is Jayce seemingly the only one doing it?
  • Why was the cocoon holding Victor at the final battle seemingly just a distraction, seeing as the army of automatons show up anyway, right at the front line, and seem to be pretty much unstoppable?
  • If Jayce showing Victor the (alternate?) future was what prevented the nuking of Piltover, why did he hold out until the very end? Couldn't he just have waltzed up to Victor first thing and been like "hey, you pretty much told me to come to you and show how you fuck up everything"?
  • What the hell is the timescale of things supposed to be in episodes 8 and 9? From how things escalate you'd think it to be a couple of days at most, but in that time both Jinx and Vi clearly grow longer hair, suggesting it to be weeks or even months. Which in turn makes everything in the episodes fall apart completely.
  • How exactly was Ekko clued in to the happenings? He just shows up at the start of episode 9, and at the end seems to know to head for Victor, despite no one having told him what's happened. It's not like he visited the post-apocalyptic future like Jayce.
I dunno man, this season's just really messy and disappointing.
Might be controversial, but it would probably have been better if Mel actually died at the start of Season 2. I really liked her in Season 1, but they really did fuck all with her in S2. And all that time wasted on her character going nowhere could've been spent on other more important plot points. And her death could've worked to fuel Ambessa's villainy, which as it is now feels a bit too forced just so that there's a big bad at the end.
 

Bartholen

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Might be controversial, but it would probably have been better if Mel actually died at the start of Season 2. I really liked her in Season 1, but they really did fuck all with her in S2. And all that time wasted on her character going nowhere could've been spent on other more important plot points. And her death could've worked to fuel Ambessa's villainy, which as it is now feels a bit too forced just so that there's a big bad at the end.
Maybe. IMO if they'd dropped that pointless filler with the Black Rose (like seriously, they don't affect the story at all), and instead had Mel dealing with the political element this season it could have been a lot more focused. The tensions between Zaun and Piltover just get dropped like a brick after the first three episodes, much like Jinx being a high priority criminal. It could have been much more interesting to have Mel deal with the logistics and natural issues of the occupation while maybe trying to figure out what happened to Jayce, Heimer and Ekko. Her losing her lover in such a situation could have made for some great drama, her trying to keep Ambessa at arm's length while kind of having to lean on her for support. But instead they almost literally threw her in a fridge for half the season just to give her some cool magic powers.

Also, a lot of the season feels like it's trying to forcibly create big "woah" moments for the audience, regardless of whether it benefits the story. Whether it's Jayce showing back up as seemingly kill-crazy, the Beast being revealed to be Vander, or Mel getting kidnapped by the Black Rose, a lot of it just feels like it's there to seemingly add drama or heighten the stakes without the season having the runtime to properly play them out. There's probably no better example of this than the mystery of what happened to Mel's brother: it's built up from like episode 1 with all this intrigue, but then it's wrapped up in literally like 2 sentences amidst an exposition dump in episode 8.
 

Ezekiel

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Have three Invader Zim episodes left. Honestly, overrated. Has its moments, but mostly not that funny, often relying on the strange and macabre as if they're enough as is. Preferred GIR, the robot, when he wasn't so in your face with his wackiness.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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I'm watching original Dragon Ball in Japanese for the first time.

I had seen some of it in the past on TV, but in english and not necessarily in order, so I decided to try watching it as a silly little thing to relax with before bed.

Yo Dragon Ball is fucking nuts.

First of all, Dragon Ball GOES. It's fast paced. The first season is 32 episodes long. I expected it to take all 32 episodes to find the titular dragon balls. They're found and the dragon is called by episode 10. There's a training arc for Goku where Master Roshi trains him. The entire 6 month training arc is 2 episodes long. There's a tournament arc and the entire tournament is 6 episodes, with multiple fights starting and finishing per episode. This is NOT dragon ball z. People are not standing around powering up for 5 episodes at a time. There are 5 seasons, each one about 30 episodes long, and the pacing is making me realize that I don't think I know anything past like season 2.

Second, Goku's dick is out all the time. Like every 3 episodes he'll pull his pants down and they draw the little child penis. It was the 80s, but still highly unexpected. What's not unexpected is the constant and extreme sexual harassment of women...but the women (or at least Bulma) do sexually harass back. Having lived in the forest away from people his entire life Goku is unable to visually tell the difference between men and women without groping their genitals...which he does...a lot...in an innocent way. Seemingly every character except Goku is obsessed with women's panties.

Speaking of sexually harassing women, one of the plot points of season 1 is Yamcha being afraid of women, and wanting the dragon balls so that he won't act like such an awkward goober around girls. At a certain point a 12 year old girl startles him and he beats the shit out of her and knocks her out. When another character remarks "wow Yamcha, you weren't scared of that girl at all, your fear of women must be getting better" to which Yamcha replies "I'm just not a lolicon." Based.
 
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Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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I'm watching original Dragon Ball in Japanese for the first time.

I had seen some of it in the past on TV, but in english and not necessarily in order, so I decided to try watching it as a silly little thing to relax with before bed.

Yo Dragon Ball is fucking nuts.

First of all, Dragon Ball GOES. It's fast paced. The first season is 32 episodes long. I expected it to take all 32 episodes to find the titular dragon balls. They're found and the dragon is called by episode 10. There's a training arc for Goku where Master Roshi trains him. The entire 6 month training arc is 2 episodes long. There's a tournament arc and the entire tournament is 6 episodes, with multiple fights starting and finishing per episode. This is NOT dragon ball z. People are not standing around powering up for 5 episodes at a time. There are 5 seasons, each one about 30 episodes long, and the pacing is making me realize that I don't think I know anything past like season 2.

Second, Goku's dick is out all the time. Like every 3 episodes he'll pull his pants down and they draw the little child penis. It was the 80s, but still highly unexpected. What's not unexpected is the constant and extreme sexual harassment of women...but the women (or at least Bulma) do sexually harass back. Having lived in the forest away from people his entire life Goku is unable to visually tell the difference between men and women without groping their genitals...which he does...a lot...in an innocent way. Seemingly every character except Goku is obsessed with women's panties.

Speaking of sexually harassing women, one of the plot points of season 1 is Yamcha being afraid of women, and wanting the dragon balls so that he won't act like such an awkward goober around girls. At a certain point a 12 year old girl startles him and he beats the shit out of her and knocks her out. When another character remarks "wow Yamcha, you weren't scared of that girl at all, your fear of women must be getting better" to which Yamcha replies "I'm just not a lolicon." Based.
I think we're all familiar with that image of little Goku slapping an unconcious Bulma on the cooch, and I've never even OG Dragon Ball.
 

Casual Shinji

Should've gone before we left.
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Okay so without me having to scrub through a video about a show I don’t care about, what was the yikes about the actress who’s work I do like?
There's apparently some zionism going on there, pictures she took with IDF soldiers back in 2019. I don't know what the deal is currently, but that's really not a good look.
 

PsychedelicDiamond

Wild at Heart and weird on top
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The Lord of the Rings: War of the Rohirim

Animated Lord of the Rings spin-off movie, directed by Kenji Kamiyama who worked on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and not very much else.

War of the Rohirim follows a war... of the Rohirim, as Wulf, Lord of the Dunlending swears revenge against king Helm Hammerhand and his daughter Hera for respectively killing his father in a duel and rejecting his proposal for marriage.

You know, Lord of the Rings doesn't quite get as much criticism for this as the Star Wars series, mainly because it's not as egregious about it (yet), but it sure is piling up material that seems to be made out of a sense of obligation alone. This can be added to the same pile as the Hobbit movies and Rings of Power, a piece of underwhelming fanfiction that brings nothing new or interesting to the table and has practically nothing going for it aside from some token attempts at fanservice.

I dunno, I'm not opposed to the idea of an animated movie set in Middle Earth but this just doesn't do anything worthwhile. In a series where the stakes are as high and scope is as epic as Lord of the Rings, making this about about a petty tribal squabble instigated by a guy who couldn't get over a woman rejecting him just feels silly. Maybe the writers thought this premise was shakesperean and tragic but it really just comes off as a bloated melodrama where the primary motivation for just about everyone seems to be hurt pride. If you go for that sort of thing, which I maintain this universe, in particular, isn't the right place for, you really need to make sure the characters are strong enough to carry it and I really didn't think they were.

We are meant to think of Helm Hammerhand as this badass warrior king but he really just comes off as a meatheaded idiot who acts rashly and puts his people into harms way. We are meant to think of Hera as an archetypal heroine who has to prove her mettle in a world where everyone is underestimating her and rise up to be a leader to her people but really, she spends just about three quarters of the movie accomplishing fuck all and even by the end feels mostly like a side character in her own movie. And then we get to Wulf who, between his comically petty motivation and almost farcical edgelord mannerisms almost feels like a parody of an anime villain. I just found none of this any interesting or engaging, it fails at being good drama, even good melodrama, because it's too contrived to take seriously and no one's relatable enough to root for.

So, are the visuals or the action any good? I didn't really think so. It has some pretty backgrounds but the animation's kinda choppy, the CGI looks jarring, even by the standards of anime and the climax is effectively just a worse retread of the battle of Helm's Deep. None of it stuck out to me as being particularly well framed or choreographed. And speaking of CGI there was an object factoring into the climax of the movie that looked so jarring compared to the background that it made me wonder if it was supposed to be a homage to the artstyle of the Ralph Bakshi movie. You'll recognize it when you see it.

I'm gonna be honest, Lord of the Rings is slowly but surely raking up a pile of pretty questionable spin-off media and it's hard not to feel cynical about it. Trying to expand on material without involvement of the original author is almost always a fools errand and... well, straight up, I don't think this would make old J.R.R. very proud. Nor would anything else based on his world that was made in the last 15 years. The universe of Lord of the Rings is a very rich one but it can't sustain this sort of tangential, iterative apocrypha that neither manages to capture its original appeal nor bring anything unique and idiosyncratic to the table. I don't want to stress the Star Wars comparison too much, but it's starting to fall into the same trap of "Not earnest enough to be a sincere tribute, not bold enough to qualify as a reinvention" so all it ever aspires to is the lukewarm comfort of familiarity, which it still somehow falls short of.

Straight up, I feel this is pretty bad and not even in an especially interesting way. It's a movie that exists for the hell of it and some will defend it more than it deserves and some will hate it more than it deserves but in most people, I imagine, it won't inspire any particular passion one way or the other. And honestly, how could it? It's a pointless story brought to life with mediocre animation to add some low density fluff to a property that's over and done with. Tolkien isn't gonna rise from the grave and write more material and the Silmarillion doesn't lend itself well to being adapted unless they really got creative with it, which seems to be the exact opposite of what anyone wants to do with this series.

This wasn't any good and if I may be so bold, I'm gonna go out and predict that that Gollum movie and whatever else they have in development won't be either. I gave this a fair chance and was left very unimpressed. Everything suggests that we'll never see the end of this series and I'm already tired of it. It's not something I'm looking forward to.
 
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Bob_McMillan

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Well that's disappointing to hear that the animation isn't anything special. I was never particularly interested in the story but if it had at least some good sakuga...