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Posts Tagged ‘Hideaki Anno’

Shin Ultraman

Wednesday, September 13th, 2023

“Ultraman’s the closest thing the modern world has to a god. No wonder people cling to him.”


SHIN ULTRAMAN (2022) is #2 of 3 in Hideaki Anno’s Shin series, which are not narratively connected, but are his takes on iconic Japanese sci-fi characters. The first one was the excellent SHIN GODZILLA and the third was the recent SHIN KAMEN RIDER. I was really excited to see this in its theatrical showing but it was two nights only and it turned out night two was dubbed. But now it’s on blu-ray (ironically with kinda messed up subtitles on my copy, but apparently they’ve fixed that).

Though this one is written by Anno, it’s directed by his SHIN GODZILLA co-director Shinji Higuchi. While Anno had done live action movies before (such as CUTIE HONEY), he’s primarily known as the anime visionary behind Neon Genesis Evangelion. Higuchi is maybe a more natural choice for something like this – he did storyboards for some anime, but he came up in the world of kaiju movies, starting as an assistant modeler on THE RETURN OF GODZILLA, and then as effects director of the excellent GAMERA: GUARDIAN OF THE UNIVERSE, GAMERA 2: ATTACK OF LEGION and GAMERA 3: REVENGE OF IRIS, where he was a real pioneer in the field of combining traditional rubber suit monsters and animatronics with early digital FX. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Action, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 3 Comments »

Shin Kamen Rider

Monday, June 5th, 2023

From what I’ve read, “SHIN” can mean new, true, or God. SHIN KAMEN RIDER – which I saw at a Fathom Events screening last week, and it’s playing again tonight only, check local listings – is the third and (as far as we know) final movie in the “SHIN” series by Hideaki Anno. Best known as the visionary director of the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, Anno kicked off this live action thematic trilogy with 2016’s SHIN GODZILLA (which he wrote himself and co-directed with Shinji Higuchi). It was a strikingly reimagined Godzilla with memorably bizarre monster work (as Godzilla evolves through multiple stages of development) and the best and most detailed portrayal ever of a government bureaucracy tackling the problem of a giant monster.

Next was SHIN ULTRAMAN, directed by Higuchi and written by Anno. I haven’t seen that one yet because I skipped it when I realized the second night screenings were dubbed, and it doesn’t come out on disc until next month. But the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe” concept is just meant as a brand name for merchandising, not an MCU-style shared universe, so I knew whatever happened to the new true god Ultraman in his movie would have no bearing on SHIN KAMEN RIDER, and I made sure to read the fine print on the listings this time. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Reviews, Action, Comic strips/Super heroes, Martial Arts | 12 Comments »

Cutie Honey

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022

CUTIE HONEY, like DEVILMAN, is a 2004 live action movie based on a manga character created by Go Nagai. This one is much more comedic than DEVILMAN and comes from a more pedigreed director: Hideaki Anno, the anime auteur behind the Neon Genesis Evangelion series. I would like to try to watch those some day because I know how much people love them, but for now my impression of him comes from the excellent 2016 Godzilla reboot SHIN GODZILLA. That one has a really cool, weird Godzilla in it but is most notable for its really funny satire of bureaucracy (though at the time it came out it also worked for me as an appreciation of people actually trying to pool their knowledge and resources to solve problems). It was recently announced that Anno will be overseeing a shared universe combining his Shin (new) Godzilla with Shin Ultraman and Shin Kamen Rider. But before all that he made a live action movie based on one of the most famous manga by the guy who played the food critic in THE TOXIC AVENGER PART II.

Honey Kisaragi (Eriko Sato, DOOMSDAY: THE SINKING OF JAPAN) is a bubbly young woman who lives alone and works a temp job at an office where everybody hates her except a janitor lady. One interesting fact about Honey is that she’s actually dead but her late father built a robot body for her so her consciousness could survive. Another interesting fact is that she wears a choker with a heart shaped button on it and when she pushes it and says “Honey… FLASH!” she can change her appearance and disguise herself, or she can turn into the sword-wielding super heroine Cutie Honey to battle monsters and stuff. However, she has to eat rice balls and drink green tea to build up the energy to do this stuff, so in the opening she has to run through the streets wearing a garbage bag until she has enough energy to create her work clothes. So it’s not all glamour. It deals with the gritty real life hardships of being Cutie Honey. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Comic strips/Super heroes, Reviews, Science Fiction and Space Shit | 4 Comments »

Shin Godzilla

Monday, August 7th, 2017

SHIN GODZILLA – or NEW GODZILLA, or TRUE GODZILLA, or GOD GODZILLA – is the new Japanese Godzilla movie, a regular rubber suit one even though it’s from acclaimed anime director Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion) (co-director Shinji Higuchi has worked on anime and live action and live action anime and did effects for the GAMERA trilogy). They’d stopped making Godzilla movies in Japan, I guess, but the recent American one by Gareth Edwards got them itching to start over again. So this is yet another do-over where they discover the King of the Monsters for the first time and he doesn’t have another monster to fight. He just has Tokyo.

There is plenty of computer animation, but also alot of the old rubber suit, animatronics and miniature models, sometimes deliberately, nostalgically old school. When Godzilla first emerges he’s in a comically fucked up form with crazy googly eyes, little nubs instead of arms and a chest that expands and contracts like an accordion. He evolves through several stages throughout the movie, so by the end he’s absorbing power and firing energy beams out of his spines like a laser show. And according to my research he is the tallest Godzilla ever, and the one with the longest, weirdest and most fucked up tail. But his eyes never quite stop looking like a turkey’s. (read the rest of this shit…)

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Posted in Monster, Reviews | 25 Comments »

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