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canmom · 3 years ago

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Animation Night 85: Mocap

Hello friends! If you are of the inclination to celebrate some sort of “WINTER HOLIDAY” i do hope you are having a pleasant time. And conversely you are currently stuck visiting a family you’d rather not see I hope you get to leave soon.

Tonight is a night ending in 5, which by recent tradition means I should gather some films unified by technique. In fact, this instance is something of a coming together of the last two, rotoscopy and early 3DCG... so, grab your tasty plasmas and let’s look in to the subject of performance capture!

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(Pedants will insist on a difference between ‘motion capture’ (captures only broad body movements) and ‘performance capture’ (also captures facial expressions) but honestly who cares. i’m going to be using the terms interchangeably.)

Nowadays, the line between a 3DCG animated film and a high budget ‘live action’ film is more of a continuum. On one end you have a movie like Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, (not-Toku tuesday 21) which features live actors in mostly real sets with some additional CGI work to fill in missing parts of the sets in some shots. In the middle you might have something like Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, featuring mostly real actors in practical sets but with extensive matte painting composites and full-CG shots, and certain characters instead presented through mocap. At the more extreme end, you would have something like the Wachowskis’ Speed Racer or the Star Wars prequels which composite their actors into 3D renders in almost every shot.

And then, we have movies presented entirely through motion/performance capture, which seems to be the line where it becomes considered ‘animated film’.

So let’s talk about mocap! And heck, check out this gif, I don’t know the context but it’s funny how the computer insists on aligning the feet with the floor:

So let’s briefly describe the technique. 3D computer animation almost always uses a ‘rig’ to control the animated character: a hierarchical structure of ‘bones’ which are, internally, each a transformation matrix in 3D space. So for example the finger bone will have some translation, rotation and scale, and it may depend on the hand bone, which depends on the forearm bone, which depends on the upper arm bone, which depends on the shoulder bone, which depends on the upper spine bone, which depends on the ‘root’ bone of the rig.

To determine the full transformation of the finger bone, you compose all of these transformations: root, spine, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, hand and finger in order. This gives you a position and orientation in 3D space.

When we animate a 3D character, we move and rotate the bones in 3D space. Rigs can be very complex, with switching between forward and ‘inverse kinematics’ systems (you can place a hand and the other arm bones will be placed in the appropriate positions), facial expression blendshapes, and all sorts of derived components such as simulated muscles which stretch appropriately.

This gif I pulled out of the gif searcher demonstrates the principles. The upper torso bone is rotated, and all the arm bones rotate with it.

The model is ‘skinned’ by assigning each vertex a certain weight for every bone, and then using these weights we can displace a vertex from its original position to a new one that averages the transformations of various bones. Creating ‘good deformation’ is its own complicated subject: you want the model’s volume to stay consistent, and you don’t want noticeable stretching, or weird bumps and self-intersections created by bad topology. (The above gif shows a number of deformation problems which cause the model to fail to match the rig.) For more subtle rigs, tools exist to simulate muscles, support softbody simulation for fat deposits, and simulate cloth draping over the model.

The kind of animation you can do with a 3D model is heavily limited by the quality of the rig. Nowadays, there are many very sophisticated tools to automate the process of rigging, and well-designed rigs available for download, but this body of knowledge is something we’ve gradually built over the last few decades.

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So when did mocap begin? We might be inclined to imagine it would be around the start of the 2000s, as CG character animation started to become a presence in movies; it would be easy to speculate (and was my initial supposition) that artists started to recognise that they could use video of real actors to drive these rigs instead of keyframe animation. But motion capture is actually considerably older than this...

The earliest instance seems to lie with Lee Harrison III of the Computer Image Corporation in Denver. He’s best known for the Scanimate system used for analogue video motion graphics in the 60s and 70s (see documentary here). But around the same time, Harrison created a system called ANIMAC, which created computer animations using a physical rig.

There is unfortunately very limited information available on the internet that I’ve been able to find, but there is an article on it here. Rather than the video tracking approach used today, ANIMAC used a special harness of potentiometers which measured the angles of various joints; these angles could be used to drive a model - at first, just a stick figure. The animation system used a similar bone rig to what we discussed above, but more often with rigid models than soft, interpolated deformation.

And using it was incredibly #aesthetic:

The motion capture component of ANIMAC/Scanimate was only rarely used; the novelty was not enough to get over the lack of immediately appealing designs. One example that used it was the comedy variety show Turn-On (1969) discussed in this VICE article which was infamously cancelled almost immediately. Before too long the ANIMAC was destroyed to make space, and Scanimate was used largely for motion graphics.

It would take until 2000 for a full mocap movie in the form of Sinbad: Beyond the Veil of Mists, with the mocap footage shot in Los Angeles (ft. some surprisingly high profile actors) then processed into animation at the Indian studio Pentamedia Graphics. You can watch Sinbad in full on Youtube, in a rather bizarre upload where the left channel is in English and the right channel is in Hindi, or a full Hindi version below. It had some surprisingly big names on the English cast, but made almost nothing, perhaps because the visual style is... offputting. Have a click through...

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It looks like a videogame cutscene... and what of games, anyway? Apparently the first game to make extensive use of true motion capture (as opposed to video sprites as in the 2D Prince of Persia games) was Virtua Fighter 2 (1994), a 3D fighting game, although the studio previously tested the technology for the pit crew in Virtua Racer. You can see the evolution of their techniques in this video (click through to the description for details):

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It seems to have spread first in the Japanese industry, and Square first picked up the tech for Final Fantasy VIII (1999), using it to drive pre-rendered CGI cutscenes. We’ll come back to them very shortly.

And now... we hit the Remington Scott Productions era.

The early 2000s were apparently deemed the time for mocap to debut. The year before, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace had demonstrated to the world that it was possible to put a minstrel character in a modern movie if you made him a mocap alien. This character, Jar-Jar Binks, was very poorly received, but the studios did not give up; the next major attempt was Andy Serkis’s performance as a tortured, dissociative Gollum in Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), which gathered extensive praise. The latter worked with a guy called Remington Scott, who had made his name on a certain Square project...

Over in Hawaii, Square had founded an animation studio called Square Pictures with the hope of creating photorealistic, mocap-driven CG animation. Their first project was a massively expensive animated film called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Although directed by series creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, the film had very little to do with the plot of any Final Fantasy game, or any of the recurring elements of the series; filmed in English, it took more of its cues from a general sci-fi milieu which we might see reflected in films like Sky Blue/Wonderful Days (Animation Night 20). The project, begun in 2008, demanded lot of time from animators to clean up the mocap footage and a hefty custom render farm; Producer Chris Lee argued the expense as justified because this was a grand, pioneering passion project similar to Disney’s Snow White (Animation Night 84).

The mocap data acquisition was led by that guy we just mentioned Remington Scott, who still proudly reports on the quality of mocap data he was able to acquire. Scott appears to have gotten his start in the late 80s, inserting FMV characters into boxing games. then further in games in the 90s at Acclaim Entertainment’s dedicated motion capture studio. By the time of Spirits Within, he was running the whole project.

Unfortunately, Spirits Within did not land to nearly such success as Snow White. The promise of being “the first to simulate human emotions and movements through computer graphics” was generally speaking considered a failure; reception focused on the idea of the ‘uncanny valley’, and critics judged the plot to be dry and cliched. With such a high-profile failure on their hands, Square Pictures did not have long left to live; they did, however, last long enough to create a segment on the Animatrix (Animation Night 6), titled Final Flight of the Osiris, notably using the tech to blend the performances of three different actresses in one 3D character to take advantage of their respective strengths (acting, gymnastics, etc.). Scott left to work on Lord of the Rings and became a recurring figure in the VFX industry.

Despite this reception of their magnum opus, the animators and technologists were not deterred, and kept taking more money as they attempted to cross this so-called ‘uncanny valley’. More computing power was directed at ever more detailed models of human biology and the interaction of skin with light scattering, and by this point it is pretty much expected that a sufficiently high-budget scifi movie will feature mocap characters. Meanwhile, as computer games started to converge on a realtime version of the Hollywood realist paradigm, people started to get more comfortable looking at hyperreal CGI faces, and the ‘valley’ became shallower.

If you read more recent copy on Scott’s site, it starts to sound like something from a dystopian novel. For example, describing his work for Chinese film L.O.R.D.: Legend of Ravaging Dynasties (2016) (which admittedly looks fascinating, and I hope I can find a source at some point), Scott declares:

GEMINI TECHNOLOGY, developed for production in high resolution IMAX 3D feature films, re-creates the exact likeness of the actor. Skin is de-aged and beautified, essentially turning back the clock to a more youthful age, yet retaining the essential details.

He also reports on animating the dead, e.g. recreating David Bowie on stage. Or maybe you want the closest thing yet to a nationalist VR snuff film, with ‘Seal Team Six Virtual Reality’? No doubt his next act will be the Torment Nexus VR (with blockchain technology!)

Not all motion capture goes for all out hyperrealism, though. Robert Zemeckis, known for Back to the Future and in animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Animation Night 40), got the mocap bug hard in the 2000s, starting with The Polar Express (2004). In this case the mocap was motivated by affordably recreating the visual style of the children’s book he was adapting, but the experience motivated him to make a whole string of other mocap movies: Monster House (2006), Beowulf (2007), A Christmas Carol (2009), and Welcome to Marwen (2018).

By this point we’re a few years on from LotR and Final Fantasy, and the tech is a little more developed. It was nevertheless still an experiment. At one point Zemeckis wanted lead actor Tom Hanks to play every character in the film, but this was too exhausting for Hanks, and others were brought on. Most of the animation seems to have been done at Zemeckis’s studio ImageMovers, involving Doug Chiang who later became head of LucasFilm as a ‘production designer’.

The film is framed around a theme adult nostalgia for being a child who could easily and uncritically accept narratives like ‘Santa Claus’ (c.f. America Observations 3 where I found myself compelled to note the origins of christmas symbols). It mixes the ‘Santa Claus’ story with a notion of the supposed infrastructure behind it; a child accepts an invitation to board a special train to Santa’s workshop in the north pole, goes through a variety of symbolic experiences with the train’s conductor, and then arrives in the elf workshop where the children are placed in competition to receive the ‘first gift’. The best thing about it is apparently, if you ask someone like Ebert who seems to just love this kind of mocap movie (all of the articles mention his high praise for them), is the somewhat creepy atmosphere.

The film landed to mixed reception, once again drawing comments of stiff acting and ‘uncanny valley’ creepiness - not to mention complaint that Zemeckis would serve such a ‘schmaltzy’ christmas movie. However, this did not prove as fatal to ImageMovers as Spirits Within did to Square Pictures. Their subsequent films take on a variety of tones - the only one I’ve seen is their adaptation of the famous Old English epic poem Beowulf, which is... strained lol and features the bizarre decision to make Grendel’s mother super fuckable (by normie standards). At some point I want to be there with @baeddel watching it lmao

Our final one in this hopefully representative triangulation will come from the end of the first decade of the 2000s, when some of the blockbuster directors got interested in using this now somewhat more mature tech. James Cameron finally had the opportunity to create his hardish sci-fi white saviour passion project Avatar, and it was for a brief period the highest grossing film ever, yet managed to leave next to no impact on popular culture. At some point I guess I will get around to watching it but I’m not especially in a hurry. The animation for this film was performed at Weta Digital, same as LotR.

And not long after, Steven Spielberg decided to get in on the action with an unusual adaptation of Hergé’s famous adventure-story bande dessinée (c.f. AN 71: Moebius), The Adventures of Tintin, about a reporter who alongside his friend Captain Haddock finds himself having Adventures in various countries; in this case, it’s a loose adaptation of the Tintin story The Secret of the Unicorn in which the pair seek the treasure of a pirate who fought Haddock’s ancestor.

A full account of the history of the Tintin comics, gradually evolving from extremely racist origins like Tintin in the Congo (bc the French and Belgians have almost unparalleled nostalgia for their African colonies, Belgium particularly infamous for the brutality of King Leopold’s rule of the Congo) to become a - for their time!! - fairly well-researched series of travel comics, will have to wait for another occasion. Hergé used an iconic style in a tradition known as ligne claire, with flat shading and carefully minimal linework on characters amidst detailed backgrounds, and up to that point, the various animated adaptations of Tintin have used similar hand-drawn character designs.

Spielberg had other ideas. He decided on a tack of almost-realism; the costume design and overall proportions tend to reflect the comic, but the characters’ skin would have realistic shading and tone variations, and faces would move in realistic ways driven by mocap, with various action sequences following the dominant conventions of Hollywood stunt filming (e.g. highly mobile camera, use of slow motion, improbable physics coincidences).

At this point, the VFX industry had become so split into Taylorist production houses that it’s hard to work out who actually did any particular thing. So while we can read about where principal photography was performed, and even watch Weta’s upload of VFX breakdowns for the film, it really starts to feel like it lacks any personal touch in terms of animation. Everything, the camera especially, is in constant, almost overwhelming motion, without any stillness for contrast. Like Disney’s ‘full animation’, this ideal functions - whatever the intentions of its creators - as a display of expensive excess.

I’m not necessarily against this. It worked great in for example Speed Racer, a natural fit to the themes and tone of that film. But as a dominant paradigm it’s exhausting! And the popular discussion seems to prefer to obscure the ‘how’, so that the images seem to magically manifest from the power of the mighty new computers and genius of the tech industry, instead of letting us be familiar with the exact painstaking way that the various images and elements are composed together which is actually very interesting.

Tintin at least presents its spectacles with a kind of clarity; motion blur is still heavily present, but the scenes are brightly lit and at least somewhat colourful, and the camera does not try to obscure it subjects. It will be interesting to see the full film, but I recall most peoples’ reaction at the time being a kind of ‘huh.’ and ‘why do that?’ and I kind of expect I’ll feel the same...

So, we’re starting horrendously late, but the plan is three movies from across the first decade of the mocap era: Spirits Within to open it, Polar Express as another early foray, and then Tintin to show where it went after. Full-mocap movies never really seem to have caught on over live action compositing, but filmmakers keep probing at the technology, so who knows if all big budget movies will end up working like this at some point.

Anyway we’re going to start almost immediately now (1am UK time, 5pm US time); apologies to UK viewers, I definitely want to get Animation Night back to the original time before too long. As much as it brings shame on me, I am showing a christmas movie next to christmas, so please feel free to mock and deride as far as you feel appropriate. See you soon at https://twitch.tv/canmom!

#animation night

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detroitbydark · 4 years ago

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Chapter 11

Characters: Fox/Mouse (reader), appearances from Hound, Thire, Rule, Mace Windu, Yoda, and Padmé Amidala.

Warning: angst (y’all want me to hirt you right?)

A/N: so get ready to read nearly 6000 words of Fox’s self loathing, the CG being supportive vod, Jedi being Jedi, and Mouse being hurt yet again.

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The choices had been fresh ink or gut-rot barracks hooch. Fox chose the ink.

He’s down in the levels, he can’t remember which one exactly, far enough from prying eyes and questioning vod, that was all that had really mattered. The artist, a pantoran with a nice portfolio, was busy laying out the design. He can feel the cool transfer as it’s pressed over his heart and he drags in a ragged breath. This was penance. This was the closure he needed. He’d messed up. For two weeks he’d messed up and now any chance he had was gone along with her.

“You wanna talk about it, man?” The tattoo artist asks as he peels away the flimsy leaving the outline on his skin.

“No”

Two weeks earlier

Fox hates the sterile smell of the hospital, the beige walls, the gleaming metal all around. It reminds him of Kamino and a medbay he’d spent more than enough time in. He was never quite as strong or quite as fast as the other CCs in his batch, men that would go on to bear monikers like Gree and Bly and Wolffe. He made up for it in other ways. His mind was sharp, quick to come to a plan of action, he could think on his feet.

He remembers Sargent Kal coming into the CC classroom one day for a talk on urban combat- something that had piqued CC-1010’s interest from the word go- and how by the end of the lesson he’d ended up the star of the day. His observations as they’d talked through scenarios had left Kal remarking that he was “Sly as a Fox” and that the Triple Zero would be a good place for the likes of him. He was only the second in his batch to earn a name and he wore it around like a badge of honor.

Now he didn’t feel so honorable or so sly. He felt a lot of other things though. The psych droid, a loathsome device of he'd ever seen one, had talked him through what had happened in the Supreme Chancellor’s suite. It had questioned him over and over, maybe expecting the answers to change, about what his part in the assassination of Sheev Palpatine had been. He was tired. He wanted to wrap himself around his cyar’ika and pretend the whole day had been a nightmare.

That was impossible, she was somewhere else in the hospital being treated, shoved into a bacta tank. It had only been Rex’s firm voice that had convinced Fox to let the medic’s anywhere near her. When he’d let them take her limp body away from him-

Fierfek.

The handprint- a bloody partial across the left side of his breastplate, was still there.

“Commander Fox” a familiar voice cuts through the silent world of the room“ Much to think about you have“

He recognizes the Jedi Master, Yoda, immediately. There was no one else the ancient green Jedi could be mistaken for.

“I prefer to not“ being around a force wielder was not high on Fox’s current list of things to do.

“Such Is life”

“With all due respect sir,” he can hear the petulance in his own voice but he has neither the energy nor will to rein it in “I didn’t ask for this life.”

“But given to you it was, nonetheless. Choices you must make with what to do with it.“

Fox is quiet and the small Jedi Master matches it until the door opens again and General Windu joins the pair. Fox meets his gaze and the Jedi nods solemnly.

“Much discussion Master Windu and I have had these last few hours-“

“So it’s back to Kamino then? Reconditioning or Termination?” Fox can’t hide the bitterness in his voice. He doesn’t want to. He wants the world -or at least the two Jedi in the room- to see his pain. To feel it like he was.

Yoda sighs and moves to him, walking stick clicking in time with his steps. He hops up on the cold metal table next to Fox in a way that makes Fox think that the walking stick was not really necessary. He fights the urge to move away.

“A great disservice has been done to you, Commander. No, Kamino is not where you belong, deserve punishment you do not.”

The words burn. Fox is trapped between relief and a slow simmering rage, one that demands he be punished for his inability to protect those most vulnerable. First Fives. Now Mouse. He failed because he was weak-

“Stop” General Windu’s voice is firm. The look on Fox’s face must read pure terror because the Jedi huffs softly, “I don’t need to see inside your head to know what you're thinking. It’s all over your face. Do you know the kind of power Sidious possessed? To fight off that kind of insinuation would have been nearly impossible and that was before the chip-“

“The chip?” Fox attempts to rise to his feet but three green fingers press down on his arm. He looks down at the tired, ancient face of the Jedi Master and sits back down. “What of the chip? What has it got to do in all of this?”

The answer is simple. Everything.

Fox sits in cold shock as the Jedi describe to him what they’d learned of Palpatine’s- no, Sidious’ plans for the clone army. He stops them once to go to the bathroom and vomit. It wasn’t just Tup and Fives and him. It was all his vode. The entire clone army programmed to turn on their leaders, their friends with the utterance of a single phrase. He thinks of the hints Bly had made about his Jedi when they’d last spoken.

For a moment it’s more than he can fathom, and he holds a hand up for quiet. The Jedi allow it. He gives himself a minute, just one, before he pulls himself together, before he sits up straight and pushes the anguish, hurt, and the dirty feelings deep down.

“What now?” The implications of what has happened are finally becoming clear “The Republic can’t know the truth. There’ll be chaos in the streets. They’ll turn against the clones entirely” Fox worries more for his brothers than ever before. If the citizens knew…

“Correct you are, Commander” Yoda agrees..

“It needs to stay under wraps. The only people that will ever know it was anything other than an sudden death by natural causes will be us and the others that were in that room. Skywalker, Captain Rex, and-“

“Don’t say her name” it comes out as a growl, “leave her out of this.”

“There she was, Commander. Secrets she must learn to keep.”

Fox’s nails bite into the palms of his hands, “you won’t-“ he can’t bring himself to say the words.

“We will not force thoughts into her head.” Mace clarifies. “From what I’ve heard of her I think she’ll understand our reasoning for secrecy. Her injuries will be said to come from a mugging. You’ll fill out the report. Wrong place wrong time”

Wasn’t that the truth.

Fox nods slowly, “and what of my brothers?”

“Come out the chips must.” Fox flinches when a green finger taps at his temple, “but uncomplicated and quick it is.”

“We will let it be known that the chips are faulty and to continue to use them puts the clones in danger of having unforeseen medical problems.” Mace’s eyes narrow as Fox scoffs. He raises a brow challengingly, “do you think they’d rather know that they were all ticking timebombs? That at any moment they’d be triggered into mindless killers? Pawns?”

A tense moment passes with the two men glaring at one another. Of course Fox doesn’t think that would be any better.

“We’ll begin rotating troops through the nearest medical units capable of removal immediately.” Mace explains. “We can have the entire Coruscant Guard done by the end of the week and it appears with minimal down time. A day, tops.” He explains.

A quick nod is all the acknowledgement Fox can muster. He doesn’t like the idea of keeping the Guard in the dark and he hates having them undergo any medical procedure even more. He wasn’t the only clone who had lingering emotions when it came to the medbay, not by a long shot.

“I’ll go first.”

The Jedi at his side makes an agreeable hum. General Windu nods.

“As I would expect a good leader to do.”

Fox isn’t sure how much he buys into their approval.

13 days earlier

The official story was that Supreme Chancellor Sheev Palpatine had succumbed to a sudden illness. The holonews was ablaze with stories: from the official release to the tabloid fodder. Fellow politicians waxed poetic on him as a man and a leader, someone who stepped forward when the Republic was in its darkest hour to take control of the chaos.

It was said his last words were, “and sorry I couldn’t give more for my people and the galaxy.”

If Fox’s eyes rolled any harder he was sure they’d fly from his head and ping around in his bucket. Sidious was dead. He didn’t deserve the adoration of billions or the high honors of his burial. He was a hu’tuun. The skanah was better suited as feed for the carrion birds than the marble burial chamber he’s laid to rest in with military honors provided by clones he’d have used as weapons against the very Republic they swore to protect.

10 days earlier

Four days without Mouse and Fox feels twitchy. It’s been over a year since he’s gone more than two days without laying eyes on her. Knowing that she was recently released from the bacta tank doesn’t make it any easier. He’d not wanted to see her floating in the tank for a plethora of reasons, the least of which was his own guilt. That didn’t stop him from setting up a guard rotation at her door as soon as he was cleared to return to duty. It also didn’t stop him from demanding regular updates on her care from the kits he was setting up at her room.

Ryk had been present when she’d been taken out of the tank and said she’d seemed in good spirits as she’d slowly come too.

Wren had gently indicated that she’d love some company while she was on bed rest.

Rule had given him a look that screamed, ‘don’t be a scum sucking piece of nerf fodder.’ As he’d explained that Mous’ika had been asking for him.

She’d been asking for him. Even after everything she wanted to see him.

And he couldn’t do it.

He’d made his way twice to the nurses station before turning and making an excuse to leave.

He couldn’t look at her. Sidious’ words still swirled in his head. even though General Yoda had reassured him that he was no longer under the sway of the Sith, the thoughts still lingered.

You were supposed to use her to fuck your baser urges out.

She’s using you to obtain a foothold in the guard.

She’s fooled you all.

The underlying message was unmistakable.

Why would anyone choose to care for a clone?

Fox almost wishes the headaches would return so he could focus on the pain in his head vs. that dull empty ache in his chest, a black hole behind his rib cage, but he hasn’t had one since both the Sith Lord and the chip were removed from his life.

9 days earlier

Bail Organa is voted into the Chancellorship by an overwhelming number of his peers.

It’s the best choice, as far as Fox is concerned. With Senator Amidala announcing a leave of absence to give birth to the best guarded secret since the clone army, it’s the only choice Fox finds acceptable.

Not like anyone would ask his opinion.

Organa is a good man, even if he is a politician. He’s only ever looked out for the Republic, never given in to self indulgent whims, never taken more than he deserved.

Fox touches the fresh scar on the right side of his head gently as Holonet News continues to replay the new Chancellor's inauguration from earlier. Barely more than a week and everything has changed.

General Windu was correct, medical had been able to get through the entire guard in rapid fire. All of his men were sporting matching scars, many were more than a little curious as to the actual reason their chips had been removed. He’s both insanely proud and horribly frustrated at the theories being bandied about. Some far too close for comfort.

They can never know. Nobody can ever know.

But somehow Bail Organa knows.

He’s only had one meeting, early this morning before the inauguration, in private with the new Chancellor but he’d alluded to things that left Fox speechless. He’d known Bail to have friends in high places, but he hadn’t realized how high.

“Think he’ll do better than the last one?”

Thire hovers in the doorway, unmoving until Fox inclines his head toward the open seat across his desktop.

“Can’t be any worse.” There’s no humor in his tone but Thire huffs out a quiet laugh.

There’s a lag in the conversation, not like one has truly begun, and Fox takes a breath before setting down his datapad and flicking the holo off. “How long have we known one another?” He asks looking up at his lieutenant.

“Long enough.”

“So, you and I both know that you're here for something else and It's not just to make quips about the new Alor.”

“I suppose that’s true” Thire’s face gives nothing away. Fox liked that about the shock trooper. He was reserved, yes, but also pragmatic. A problem solver, not ruled by his emotions. Which was all well and good but something about the way he’s staring makes Fox feel like he’s the problem needing solving.

“Spit it out.”

“Go see her.”

Fox raises a brow in his vod’s direction. “Is that an order”

“Respectfully sir” the corner of Thire’s mouth quirks almost imperceptibly before it falls away.

The little shit.

In reality, Fox had known this one going to come from one of his men. He’d expected Rule or Hound, the more brash and aggressive boys, to be the ones but Thire is not a complete shock. He’d never seemed particularly close to Mouse but the lieutenant did play things close to the chest.

“She had a nightmare last night while I was on watch. Woke up crying your name.”

Inside Fox crumbles. No amount of talking to a psych droid was going to fix that feeling. No amount of time would make him feel ok about what he’d allowed to happen to the woman he loved. Thire continues.

“A clone's lot is not much. They decant us. They train us. They ship us out to fight in their war. We live, maybe. We die, more likely. Nothing is given to us.” Thire runs a hand over his head, fingers scratching at the crown. “Sometimes though, a di’kut like you gets a break. That woman in that bed cried in my arms. Talked to me like I was you for over an hour and I let her. You know why?”

Fox has to unclench his jaw, work past the jealous ache rising up in his chest to respond, “why?”

“Because it’s the closest I’ll ever have to feeling that kind of emotion. I’m not ashamed to say I pulled your girl into my lap, held her close and said soft things I didn’t even know I knew into her pretty hair until she calmed down. I was happy to pretend to be your atin’shebs but you know what the real kicker is, Vod?”

Fox’s hands are like vice grips on the edge of his seat, knuckles pale white as a shinies armor. The thought of Mouse hurting is one thing, but to have someone else be the one to comfort her? It tears at him. “What?” He asks through gritted teeth.

“When she calms down she says, “I know you're not him. Thank you for letting me pretend for a minute”.

7 days earlier

He pretends like he doesn’t know where he’s going. Like talking to the kriffing psych droid really had him so out of sorts he didn’t realize he was getting on a turbo lift and heading up three flights after his appointment.

He tries to act like he doesn’t know his feet are carrying him to the room with the familiar red and white sentinel outside the door.

Rule quirks his helmet before snapping to attention.

“Commander Fox, sir?”

“At ease Sargent.” It's late, well past visiting hours but the few sentient nurses and the droids assisting them make no move to rush him along. Perks of the armor.

Rule relaxes and glances through the small transparisteel window on the door behind him before turning back.

“She just had some medicine.” He explains, “pain was getting pretty bad again.”

Fox’s bucket hides his cringe, allowing him to outwardly remain impassive and aloof, his voice even as he asks simple questions about visitors and any possible issues arising.

“No problems here sir. I think I heard her Doc say something about discharge tomorrow. She’s doing ok” what isn’t said hangs in the air.

She’d be doing better if you were with her

“That’s good. That’s good” Fox agrees, readily avoiding the things left unspoken. “Have you been relieved for dinner?”

“I have a ration bar in my pack sir.”

“Do I need to say it?”

The sunny tone of Rule’s voice tells him everything he needs to know. He can imagine the shit eating grin that accompanies it. “I’m not entirely sure what you mean, sir?”

A quick glance up and down the hall shows nothing but gleaming white tile. No staff. No visitors. No one but Rule to bear witness to his moment of weakness.

“Take the night off Sargent. I’ll cover the watch.”

He stares at the emotionless visor for a beat waiting for his kit to argue, for him to make a smart comment.

It doesn’t happen.

Rule rolls his shoulders, stretching slightly as he makes his move past Fox. At the last second, Rule's hand shoots out, resting over Fox’s vambrace. The moment lingers without either speaking until Rule gently pulls the Commander in and knocks his bucket against Fox’s, pressing his forehead to his Commander’s.

Fox, claps a hand behind the sargents head and they sit there frozen for a moment in time, Rule offering more comfort in that one gesture than he’s felt in days. A Keldabe kiss to ease his fragile psyche.

“Alverde.” Rule offers quietly when the pair finally part.

“Sargent” Fox gives a minuscule nod. “Enjoy your night.” He watches the youngster head down the hall until he turns a corner and is gone from sight.

Fox manages to avoid looking in the room for five minutes exactly. He’s able to fight off the pull to enter it for another twenty. The draw of her is too much in the end and he finds himself slipping into her room before the first thirty minutes are even past.

The lights are low and the monitors and electronics surrounding her hum and buzz steadily. Everything is white and stark. His cyar’ika is nearly the same color as the sheet she lays under.

She looks small, and so achingly fragile Fox is afraid the weight of his look alone will break her. She shivers lightly and he lurches into motion, dragging the itchy comforter over her legs and tucking it around her shoulders. Her body stirs as his gloved hand grazes along her cheek.

He freezes as her eyes flutter open. Her pupils aren’t quite right. It seems to take her a moment to piece together what’s going on but when she does the realization that washes over her is visible.

“Fox” his name sounds like a long lost friend rolling from her lips. She struggles to sit up. A look of pain flashes across her face as she twists under the blankets.

“Stop that” he demands impotently, his gloves moving to press gently against her chest. “you’re going to hurt yourself.”

She blinks owlishly up at him in the way only a person on good pain meds can, like she doesn’t quite understand what’s been said and she’s not sure whether she should comply or question it. It’s somewhere between bemused and scared.

He cups her cheek in his hand, “easy precious girl.” He soothes. Mouse relaxes into his touch as his gloved thumb rubs softly. Her eyes flutter shut and he can feel the soft sound she makes against his palm.

This was already far past what he intended. He just wanted to see her, to prove to himself she was really alive and in one piece despite him.

Now, he finds himself already slipping into old habits.

More focused, her eyes open. Her hand slips up and grips his vambrace. Slowly she pulls his hand away from her face. She lets her fingers slip down into and through his. Her voice is thick with sleep when she speaks and Fox has to lean in to hear her.

“I knew you’d come”

Of course she had. Fox wonders if she knew him better than he knew himself. This was always going to happen no matter how many times he’d lied to himself. He pulls his hand away. Mouse’s hangs empty in the air for a moment before she sets it down over her chest.

The quiet burr and hum of the monitors around her are the only sound between them until he reaches up to his bucket and lets the seal pop with a soft hiss.

Her eyes scan his face as he sets the helm off to the side. There’s a question there he can’t decipher. “What can I do?”

A harsh laugh escapes Fox’s lips and Mouse frowns at him.

“I think you’ve done enough, cyar’ika.”

“Fox-“ it’s a scolding tone that holds no weight when she looks like a battered doll in a too big hospital bed. She closes her eyes when he doesn’t give in and offer her more.

The bed dips under his weight as he sits at the edge of it. “I just wanted to make sure you were, ok. Alright?” He holds back from touching her again. It takes an enormous amount of will.

“I’m ok, Fox. Because of you.”

It’s a lie. All of it. It can’t be anything else. “You're in a hospital bed,” he growls, pushing up to his feet and stalking toward the window. He can’t look at her. “You spent days floating in bacta. You-“

“I’m alive.”

“That’s not because of me.”

He hears the ruffle of sheets as he looks out over Coruscant. The lights of the buildings and speeders in the sky lanes, like stars in the polluted evening light.

“Fox-“ her hand touches his arm and he spins to steady her. Anger swells up in him.

“Kriff- Mouse, get back in bed” he orders lowly, “you’re going to get hurt.”

She sways gently on her feet in the too big hospital gown but her jaw is set, “will you listen to me?”

“Will you get back in bed?” Fox pinches the bridge of his nose and takes a deep breath before looking at her again. “Get back in bed and I’ll listen. Please.”

Mouse stands, arms crossed, glaring pointedly. Fox has had enough. Quick and smooth like a tactical insertion he scoops her up. Mouse makes a small noise as his arms slide behind her knees and his other arm cradles behind her shoulders. She breathes heavily as she looks up at him.

“You’re going back to bed.” He covers the small room in just a few steps. When he goes to set her down she slips her arms around his neck and holds on for dear life.

“I’m not getting back in that bed unless you come with me.”

“You’re not in the position to make demands.” But that’s a lie because, with him, she was always in the position to make demands. She just never had to.

“Please, Fox. I just want one good night. You can leave as soon as I'm asleep.”

It’s hard to say if it’s the tired tone of her voice, the smell of her skin so temptingly close, or just his own beaten down need to be close to her, regardless Fox gives in.

“The armor stays on.” He says as he settles into the bed, he tries to keep his boots off the bed the best he can. Mouse curls tighter against him. It can’t be comfortable against the plastoid but to look at her he’d never know. One hand rests along his jaw while the other wraps around his back keeping him from easily disentangling himself.

Fox can’t help himself as he slips one glove off and cards his fingers through her hair, stopping every so often to work out a tangle. Mouse sighs against him.

“Precious girl,” he hums lowly as her fingers trace along the stubble at his jaw, “go to sleep.”

“You're going to leave once I do.”

“Yes, that was the deal.”

“You’re not going to come back.”

Again, he’s struck with how well she knows him. “No, cyar’ika. I’m not.”

6 days earlier

His knuckles are wailing in pain and it feels so kriffing good. His hands, wrapped in protective tape are held tight and safe as he tenderizes the heavy bag in front of him. A low, guttural growl works its way up from his chest with each landed blow.

It’s the first time he’s felt in control in days. Even if it only lasted for his duration in the sparring rooms he didn’t care. When he closes his eyes he doesn’t see Mouse at the end of his blaster, the way her body recoiled and convulsed at the first shot. He doesn’t hear the scream that rips through her when the second bolt burns through her side. He doesn’t dwell on the voice in his head demanding the kill while Fox did everything to drag his near perfect aim away from center mass.

He pictures Sidious’ face on the bag and the pile of sloppy mash his fists were making it into. There’s catharsis in the exertion that a psych droid couldn’t give him.

“Commander, sir?”

Fox turns to see Hound stripped down to just his black under armor pants. He was a burly boy as far as clones went, thicker and more muscular through the torso, next to Hound, Fox looks almost lithe.

Fox pants lightly as he dips to grab a bottle of water and straighten back up. “What can I do for you?”

“I- do you need to-“

Fox watches as the man chooses his words carefully, finally gesturing first toward the mat.

“You wanna go a few, rounds? Looks like you could use it?”

A roll of tape is flipped through the air in answer. Hound catches it smoothly, giving Fox a happy grin as he begins wrapping his hands.

5 days earlier

There’s a neat hole in his wall, fist sized and fresh, less than a week old. Fox pretends like he doesn’t see Chancellor Organa eyeballing it with some amount of apprehension. What he can’t pretend is that a visit from the newly minted Chancellor to his office isn’t a surprise.

“Commander, you can drop the title with me.” The Chancellor says for the second time since his arrival.

“Sir, it’s frowned upon-“

“-not by me”

Fox huffs and closes his eyes to hide the roll of them. “Ok, fine. Can I get you something to drink? Some caf?”

Bail waves off the offer, “I won’t be long and it looks like you're woefully underserved.” He tips his head back toward the door and the empty desk.

A bristle of irritation tingles down Fox’s neck. “She was in the hospital. She was…” the words trail off. Part of protecting his little Mouse was keeping her involvement in the Sidious event quiet.

“I know, Commander.” Bail says quietly, “we share a friend on the council who’s made me aware of many interesting things.”

It feels like he’s being baited. He likes to think Organa wouldn't try to try to weasel information from him but his trust is a very delicate thing at the moment and he’s not willing to give an inch. His loyalty is to his men and the republic, after that only one other person had earned any devotion from him and that was not Bail Organa. At least not yet.

“If there’s anything I can do for her, anything she needs we can make that happen.”

Fox glances at the picture on his desk. It had come by courier earlier in the day. It’s been neatly matted and framed to be hung, a children’s drawing of a small green twi’lek child and him holding hands. He’d stared at it on his desk in silence for far too long before he felt something ugly bubble up. Now he had a hole in the wall. He hoped the picture would cover it.

Fox continues to look at the picture. He needs a second to pretend like he knows what Mouse needs. He doesn’t listen to the nagging voice inside of him saying it to him. He hates that voice, would smother it if he could.

“She needs time to heal.”

“I can make that happen.”

“Thank you.”

Earlier this day

“Senator Amidala” Fox greets the senator at the door, “this is a surprise. If I keep receiving politicians in my office I’m going to have to have it made more suitable.”

The senator gives him a bright smile, “it’s good to see you Fox.”

He lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding, “it’s good to see you too Padmé.”

They were friends, of a sort. They’d seen enough together that Fox would gladly file her under battle buddies in his short list of friends. She looks lovely, as always, absolutely glowing. Her hand rests softly over the growing baby bump she was now proudly displaying.

“You look wonderful. Congratulations on the coming Ik’aad.” He offers gesturing toward her belly. His eyes linger and he remembers laying Mouse across his bed, placing kisses in a ring around her naval and imaging what it would be like someday when he-

Fox gives his head a quick shake and refocuses on the senator.

“Thank you.” He watches her eyes travel to the child’s drawing on the wall behind his desk before returning to him. “And how are you doing?”

“As well as can be expected. Chancellor Organa keeps a busy schedule and he’s insistent that I go with him. He’s got a lot of ideas and he asks my opinion. It’s different… but it’s nice.”

Padmé slips into the chair across from him.

“That’s wonderful” but she doesn’t sound like it’s wonderful. She sounds like she was here on a mission that he hasn’t been briefed on. He raises a brow at her. They’ve known each other long enough that she should know to just come out with it.

“We’re leaving for Naboo today. I want to have the baby in the lake country. It’s beautiful and peaceful.” She lets out a tired laugh, “and far away from the prying eyes of the holonet news.”

“They’ve been very… interested in you as of late” he offers diplomatically.

Another small laugh, “to say the least” Padmé sobers. “I just wanted to make sure you were ok with her going?”

Confusion must show on his face. Her?

Padmé frowns gently, the look of pity is out of place on her serene features, “you weren’t told, were you?”

“I’m afraid you’ll need to speak clearly.” Fox tries to bite back the tension but it slips into his voice.

She says Mouse’s name. Her real name.

“The Chancellor asked if we would take her with us. That she needed a place to finish recovering.” Padmé is watching his face. She’s trying to gauge his reaction.

He tries to give her nothing.

“She’s an amazing woman. She said if she went then she had to be useful. She’s going to be my assistant while I’m on leave-“

Fox holds up a hand. “She’s excellent at what she does. You’ll never be in better hands.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not her keeper. Mouse deserves to be safe and happy.” He shoots her a forced smile. “That’s not with me.”

Current

He had the rancor etched into his arm after Thorn had been killed in action on a mission Fox was supposed to have led. It was an inside joke they’d heard as shinies. Something about a Jedi and a rancor walking into a cantina. He can’t remember the punchline. It wasn’t funny anyways.

The Pantoran works the needle over his freshly shaven chest. Back and forth, outlining and filling. Pressing the ink into his skin to permanently mark him with another mark of regret, penance. Everytime he looks in the mirror, stripped down from his armor and his blacks he’ll see the reminder of what never was supposed to be, the thing that he went after when he knew it wasn’t allowed. The love that nearly destroyed the person he cared for beyond all others.

“So, this picture is pretty wicked” the Pantoran says conversationally. He glances back and forth from the reference picture Fox gave him, a partial hand print pressed against his armor, the fourth and fifth finger only partially visible and the heel of the hand smeared red. “Was it done in ink?”

“No. Blood.”

The Pantoran makes a sound of understanding. The buzz of the tattoo gun fills the quiet.

Seconds, minutes, hours it’s all the same as Fox sits still as stone in the chair, the press of the needle intimately familiar.

He thinks of Mouse on a shuttle to Naboo.

This was what he’d needed. Mouse far away, somewhere safe. Somewhere no one could hurt her. Where he couldn’t hurt her. No matter what he’s told he still doesn’t believe there isn’t something in him that can be persuaded, to be flipped on, that won’t harm her.

He needed to focus on his job, his men, the Galactic Republic. There was no world in which he and Mouse would work and it was better that she wasn’t there to know that.

“Alright, mate.” The Artist sets the gun down and claps his hands once before rubbing them together. “You’re all set. Why don’t you take a looksy in the mirror while I grab the bacta gel and a dressing?”

Fox nods and pushes himself up. His back is stiff from laying still and he takes a moment to stretch and twist before stepping in front of the mirror. His eyes trace the ink. It’s a perfect replica of the picture, deep vibrant red fingers pressing into his armor, only now pressing into his heart. A reminder of what happens when he becomes selfish. When he wants more than the greater design allows for.

“It’s perfect.”

#fox and mouse #commander fox/reader #cc 1010 #commander fox #fox fanciers #tcw

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rawsanma · 3 years ago

Text

In Memoriam of "Shin Evangelion: Curse"

*The following article contains a full spoiler for "Evangelion 3.0+1.0".*

I sat together with a person who was not in birth when EOE was released, and after watching the film we talked a bit and thought about the people who passed away without ever seeing this. I understand that fans from the old series and those who came from the new series may have very different perceptions of Shin-Eva. So I'd like to first correct a few things I said in my first impressions.

It may be somewhere between an honorable movie and a mediocre movie in general, but as Evangelion, it's garbage.

After about halfway through the two hours and thirty-five minutes, I started to look at my watch again and again. The double ending, which is both a personal novel and a product, was a fleeting fantasy, and the two songs "One Last Kiss" and "beautiful world (da capo ver.)" were not used effectively in relation to the story, only being played in the staff roll.

When I saw the first 10 minutes of the movie that was released last year, I thought that perhaps Paris was chosen as the setting for the story of "humanity fighting together in the face of destruction" or "the expansion of the Eva world (not G Gundam, but G Eva!)", but that was not the case at all. He just wanted to depict the battle using the Eiffel Tower as a FATALITY,　I realized that he hadn't made a single millimeter of progress since when he asked Hayao Miyazaki if I could film only this action scene of Her Highness Kushana in the re-animation of Nausicaa, he was scolded, "That's why you're no good!"

At the beginning of the film, they try to carefully describe the things behind the scenes that were not told in Eva Q. The third Ayanami like the TV version is the main character, and they go on and on about living in the countryside, copying "My Neighbor Totoro". The large family of our parent's home that we go back to during the summer vacation is presented as an image of happiness in life and a decent human being. It is also connected to Gendou's narrative during the Human Instrumentality Project but isn't it too Showa-era and too simple a solution? I am interested in how the young fans who are children of nuclear families who left their large families in the countryside and moved to the city saw the too sudden depiction of "life in the countryside". It was almost a gag to see Ayanami walking around in a plug suit which is a sexual orientation that has manifested itself after Space Battleship Yamato, in the images of pre and post-war farming villages depicted by recent NHK morning dramas. The director, influenced by his wife, must have been immersed in the LOHAS and vegan lifestyle as a fashion statement, which is only possible because he is an urbanite with too much stuff and too much money. As for this theme, it has already been presented in the watermelon field scene in the second film, and it is merely a re-presentation of the same theme in a diluted form.

I've pointed out before that Eva Q is "a crack in reality because of the loss of reality to rely on. "It's rude not to eat what you're served!", Shinji was scolded by Touji's father, who looked like a subversion of Hayao Miyazaki's work (Gedo Senki!). I have a simple question, how can the interior of a house become so old and wretched after only 14 years? How can a community of people of all ages be formed in just 14 years?　There was a line that implied that Touji had killed someone for the village, and it is possible that the director had extremely beautified the "Showa era" as a sanctuary where people who are hurt and regret their committing murder during the war as a soldier live nearby, and when he opened the last drawer after using up all the materials, he found the image of the original landscape of his childhood.

Misato and Kaji's child, which is only described for a few minutes, is also abrupt, and I don't feel that it is more than a plot device for the purpose of staging the reconciliation with Shinji later on. Some people seem to be moved by the fact that "behind Misato's cold attitude towards Shinji in Q, there was such a conflict in her mind," but it's the opposite. All the answers are just excuses after wasting nine years of work. Even if the wounds healed and treated with a gentle "I'm sorry," after being beaten severely by a raging DV husband, the fact of the beating would not disappear, and the wife would feel nothing but fear at the sudden change in her husband. To a situation that he had set to minus 100, he spent 2 hours and 35 minutes gradually pouring water drawn from other places and past works to bring it back to zero...I've never seen such a horrible match pump. Well, now that I'm writing this, I'm thinking that I've seen this before.

The relationship between Eva Q and Shin Eva is very similar to the relationship between "The Last Jedi" and "The rise of Skywalker" in Star Wars. In a self-absorbed rampage of conjecture that did not listen to the opinions of others, the historical stage of the series that had been built up was turned into a mess, and then the destroyed story was carefully built up again from the ground using unnecessary length, and only the shape of the story was created to end it without being disgraceful, and every scene that tries to make things more exciting is a copy of past work. As for Star Wars, since 8 and 9 were directed by different directors, I was able to settle my feelings of resentment towards Ryan and gratitude towards Abrams, respectively, but as for Evangelion, the director looks like a child who has been proud to clean up his own mess and have his female cronies praise and pat him on the head. Moreover, what kind of sympathy do you expect when you are told to "I'll make amends" for the mere act of wiping your ass after defecating, in a cool, Showa-era chivalrous tone?

In this film, as a recovery from Q and a summary of new Eva, there are elements throughout the story that critics can easily relate to the old Eva. “Oh, I can talk about this in connection with that!” This is what gives them a good impression and it has nothing to do with how the old fans perceive it. The director seems to have a dedicated person in charge of communicating and negotiating with the outside, but now he wants the critics to communicate with the fans about Shin-Eva. As long as he doesn't speak for himself, he can correct their interpretations later based on the "misunderstandings" of the people in between himself and his fans. This is a very Japanese-style system of surmising feelings, a system of authority that is formed when only a limited number of cronies are informed of the true intentions of the president. If I talk about it in too much detail, right-winged Yakuza will show up very soon, so to make it short, it is an indigenous control structure unique to Japan that originated from the "Mikado behind the bamboo blind". This time the director was very conscious of that, and I was able to see that Eva, who was a challenger, has become an authority that does not tolerate any criticism.

And what fan from the past could enjoy watching the endless battle scenes after Shinji returns to Wunder in the middle of the film? One after another, the sister ships of Wunder appear--there's almost no difference in appearance, but Ritsuko is able to guess their names the moment they appear. Right after the line "I'm pretty sure there's a fourth ship," the fourth ship comes crashing upon them from underneath, with no intention other than to make us laugh, right? As well as the repeated tenseless bombardment fight with no description of damage no matter how many artillery shells are hit, and it's quite painful being poured Asuka and Mari's Me-Strong Battles which are already enough by the time of Q, continuously down my throat like a goose with a funnel in its mouth. There's no way to synchronize my feelings with the screen, and it just creates an atmosphere as if the story is going on with the unattractive super-robot action that I pointed out in Q. It's no use pointing out, but the repair and supply problems of Wille side in a world where the industry has been destroyed were shown in the farming village part, though it was inadequate. But those of NERV side, an organization of only a man and an old man, was completely thrown away.

The last part of the story about the Human Instrumentality Project is like a fanzine where Gendou, Asuka, Kaworu, and Rei are lined up in a row and complemented in turn and then dismissed, whereas EOE was a total complement through Shinji. The director has tried to upgrade his framework by borrowing them from EOE and has failed miserably. Someone who has created works by putting his emotion and flair into a copy has dabbled in copying his own work. As a result, he had to confront his own sensibilities from when he was young and had to compare the old and the new by his old audience. Frankly speaking, only the techniques have been traced, the sound and the screen have become gorgeous, but the emotion and the sense have deteriorated. The face of the giant Ayanami that was replaced with a live-action one -- probably based on the face acting of Shinji's voice actor, and the "untested ordeal" of her tweet means this -- appears in the background like a gold folding screen in the high sand at a Japanese wedding reception. You're getting tired of all this, and you're not making it seriously, are you? The battle between Eva Unit01 and Eva Unit13 in Tokyo-III, which I expressed my anxiety about before the film's release, is a scene where the company's CG team can't produce what the director expects and he is so frustrated that he has the same mindset as in the final two episodes of the TV version, "I'd rather get a minus than a red", and after that, it became like a gag scene, including Eva fights in Misato's apartment and Shinji's school classroom, as if he was staged them in desperation. The side-shooting screenshot of the little Wunder charging at the head of the giant Ayanami is a picture of ”Cho Aniki (Japanese STG)” itself, and it's also meant to be funny, right? It's a series of loose, sloppy, and tenseless scenes that can't be compared to EOE.

What the hell have the CG team been doing for the past nine years, getting paid with no progress and making Eva look like an outdated piece of crap? Didn't anyone have the chivalrous spirit of the Showa era like "Don't embarrass our boss!"? Don't be so relieved when you get the green light! The director has just given up on you! There were a few scenes where the person at the top of the editing and collage, who has been making the coolest pictures, was not given as much good material as he used to be and seemed to make desperate staging in a way that he would never have given the green light in the past. It's been more than 10 years since Xapa was established, but I guess they don't have enough talent to meet the director's vision. Perhaps because of this, the conclusion of the film is exactly the same as the old one, that the director has no choice but to use his personal feelings to finish Eva, but the film ends up being a self-imitation of "Sincerely Yours". It is sad to see a person who "surpasses the original by putting his heart and soul into the copy" start to copy his own past works on the big screen of the theater, because he has become a big name in the animation world after reaching the age of 60, and there are no others left to be copied. However, right after "Komm, süsser Tod" started playing in the old movie, the scene where the titles of each episode and the reverse side of Cels were played in succession was projected on the wall of the studio using a projector -- the title of the new movie was added. It made me mad and thought, "Don't touch my EOE with the dirty hands of the merchant. I'll kill you."

The last things that the man who "transfers his own life onto films" presented in his costly self-published private novel were a naked confession of his own mental history up to the point where he met his wife, which he temporarily entrusted to Gendou, and the words "I think I loved you" and "I loved you" exchanged between himself and the former lover who could not be together and themselves who had separate spouses, just a reckoning of the muddled love affair that existed behind the scenes of EOE. I half-jokingly said that the distance between the director and Asuka's voice actor was important for the end of Eva, but it turned out to be true in a different way. During the recording session, Asuka's voice actor was told by the director, "I'm glad Miyamura is Asuka," which sent chills down my spine as it conveyed the horror of a creator who doesn't hide everything about his life and relationships and uses them to create his works.

In the scene where Shinji says "I liked you too" to the adult Asuka, who is wearing a tight latex suit and drawn in a more realistic character design (making us aware of the cosplay by Asuka's voice actor), while she is lying on the EOE beach, I thought "You guys should do this in a coffee shop or something between recording sessions! Don't make us watch middle-aged man and woman having unpleasant conversations on the big screen of the theater!", I almost screamed out. I think that's the scary part, the director's one-sided love for Asuka's voice actor is falsified by having the character say that she liked him, as if it was a mutual love. The director's statement at the beginning of the pamphlet says that he started working on the sequel right after Evangelion 2.0 without hesitation, using the worldview of "Q". I'm not trying to quote the line "You can change the reality you don't like by getting on Eva.", but it's not as if he's trying to cover up the fact, but he really believes that using his strong imagery, and it made me feel a bit chilly that there was no one around to correct his misconceptions.

At the end of Human Instrumentality Project, I wondered if the fact that a senior member of the movie industry had praised the shooting of EOE by flipping Cels over as a "tremendous deconstruction" was still fresh in his mind. This time, too, it was postponed after postponement, and even though the makings have been done in time, he showed the other side of the production with line drawings and roughs. The reason it was so innovative was that it was the first time anyone had tried it then, and now, 25 years later, it's just a rut. It's disgusting that everyone is praising the master's strange drawing habit and saying, "Oh yeah, that's it, that's it." As I've said before, it's like "defecating in a sixty-nine," which was successful because the first partner happened to be a scatologist. The expression of EOE was sharp and ”Rock’n’‐roll”, but Shin-Eva's "fun of anime images" has gone into the realm of traditional art, like slow "Gagaku".

The director hadn't decided who Mari Makinami was for a long time -- he was so indifferent to her that he threw the actor's acting plan to a sub-director -- but with Shin-Eva, he's changed her into an equal to Moyoco Anno, his wife. In other words, the flashy battle in the middle of the film, which is unimportant to many viewers, is revealed to have been a very pleasant pretend play for the director, in which he has his former love and his current wife fight on his favorite robots. Once again, we are shown the director's so-what-attitude, which has not progressed even a millimeter since "I'm an asshole," and which he can complete his work only by masturbation. So it's no wonder that they couldn't depict the extremely simple catharsis of Shinji's great success with Eva Unit01, which is what most of the old fans want. Because a robot with a pathetic old man on board can't get an erection due to impotence, let alone masturbation!　Oops, excuse me, sir.

And as I said before, it's time to realize that the English language has become so popular in Japan that it's become lame. You use Infinity, Another, Additional, Advanced, Commodity, and Imaginary, just because it sounds cool to you, right?　Everyone criticized the naming "Final Impact", but I never thought I'd see the time when I'd faint from the lack of taste and coolness in Evangelion, such as Another Impact, Additional Impact.

And the ending, with the wedding report in a live-action aerial shot of the director's hometown, newbie fans are screaming that it is like, "They're doing a very positive version of the old "Return to Reality!". But I felt it was too empty and cynical because it was intended to be read that way by the director. It depicts only the elation of marriage, and the pain of getting along with a partner and his or her family with different values is cut off (well, maybe Q was expressing the hardship of married life......). But isn't the emotional weight of a marriage report much higher when you meet your partner's parents?　The fact that he ended the movie by showing his own hometown instead of his wife's hometown leaves me with the impression that he's definitively an egotistical geek through and through. "You may have graduated from a good university and are making good money in the city, but if you're not married and don't have children, aren't you somehow humanly flawed?" After 25 years, Evangelion, which was such a forward-thinking Sci-Fi, is now completely in sync with the earthly ethics of Showa-era's farmers and farm horses. "I got married and it saved my life. I don't know about you, but why don't you try?" You can think what you want, but if you want to convey it as a message of salvation, you have to express it in the content of your work, not in your own talk.

I've been married for 20 years, I have two children, both of whom are about to reach the age of adulthood, I've paid off the mortgage on my home, and I'm finally at the end of raising my children, but all of that is just an outer shell of a social skin that has nothing to do with my true nature or where my soul is! There's no connection between what kind of life an individual lives in the real world and the Sci-Fi sense of wonder, in fact, there shouldn't be any connection! If you're a science fiction fan, take a page from the great Arthur C. Clarke! I was a nerd with a negative value of 100, but when I got married, I gradually poured the "common-sense values" of the Showa era into myself, and now I'm a true man with no negative value? Don't write such pathetic fiction proudly! Listen, what you presented to the audience at the end was the same thing that someone would say to you, "You seedless stallion!" It's the same kind of unethical and vulgar message that you shouldn't be giving! The old Eva became a classic of Japanimation, and no one was able to properly scold you, or you keep away those who tried, and the result of this is directly reflected in the ending of Shin Eva!　You've reached your 60th birthday and you only have such poor social common sense, damn it!

I'm sorry, I was so excited that I lost my control a little bit, just a little bit. I think the director is relying a little too much on his wife, who is ultimately a stranger on, to be his laison d'etre (lol). If they were to break up in the future, it would certainly be the soil for the next Eva, the content and development of which is completely predictable, but that is no longer my concern. I wonder if his wife doesn't like the fact that he's mentally dependent on her like this, and that it's being shown on screens all over the country. If it were me, I'd be furious, but since she's a creator, I guess she understands how he feels. Ignoring the other person's feelings and continuing to force what he believes to be love on her, thinking that it will make her happy, seems to me that there has been no progress at all since the way he treated his girlfriend 25 years ago. The person I want to hear from the most right now is not the self-proclaimed Eva fans who are looking at each other from the side and giving positive feedback in celebration of the final episode, but his wife. If the director had a child, he would not have been able to distinguish between his own ego and that of the child, and would have doted on his child, making a documentary film about his or her growth, but would most likely have turned into a controlling and poisonous parent in his or her adolescence. And he animated his feelings for his child who was rebelling against him, without the child's permission, considering it as a one-sided redemption for the child, and the child who was exposed to the whole country about their home life would have distanced from his father more and more.

In the end, Evangelion did not become a product like Gundam, but rather a robot animation that was the director's weird personal novel. The repeated use of the word "job" in the film has stuck in my mind, but in order for the studio to survive, it had to make Evangelion a product in this new series, and I'm sure that was the initial motivation behind the production of these new films. Your real "job" was to make Evangelion the same as Gundam, to protect the people who came to you because they loved Evangelion. Years from now, I can see a future where Xapa will be like Ghibli, behead the staff and continue as a copyright management company. The director, who didn't want to be embarrassed as a creator by a new challenge adopted the safe way -- I can't believe that I have to use the word "safe" for Evangelion -- to end the new series that relied on EOE only for himself, not for the future of the people who came to admire him. That's what Shin Evangelion is all about.

The good part? The fact that he didn't bring Shin Ultraman trailer at the end of the film makes me think he has grown up a bit. If you're declaring "Farewell, All Evangelions" with the intention of hurting, disappointing, and disinterested old fans like me, then your malice is unfathomable, and that's quite a feat. Brilliantly, your intentions have permanently killed a part of me that used to be an Eva fan.

As horrifying as it is to imagine, it must have crossed the director's mind to reschedule the film and set a new release date for March 11. The only reason he didn't do so is not that he has grown up to be a sensible adult, but rather because the idea of linking Evangelion 3.0 with the Great East Japan Earthquake was a fact that is too painful for him to make it public.

Ten years ago today, many lives were lost and Evangelion was destroyed.

This fact will never disappear, no matter how much the director denies and covers up with the "true" history. If there is any mission left for me as a fan, it is to continue to pass on this fact to future generations as a storyteller. It is a huge loss for Japanese fiction that the end of the great Evangelion has become a self-recovery work of the great failure of the reboot affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake, and that the potential of the great Evangelion has been consumed by the self-defense of someone who cannot admit his own mistakes, and I sincerely regret it. Shin Evangelion will be forever cursed by the dead, who yearn to see the sequel of Evangelion 2.0, and the living, who yearn to see the sequel of Evangelion 2.0.

This curse will be completed when it spreads, arrives, and is burned by the powers that be as a false history. I pray that my thoughts will reach him!

#evangelion 3.0+1.0

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recentanimenews · 4 years ago

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REVIEW: US Release of Lupin the 3rd: THE FIRST Is a Vintage Treasure

Just over a year ago, Lupin the 3rd: THE FIRST stole its way into Japanese cinemas. The film marks the first 3DCG animated outing for the gentleman thief, who debuted in 1967 in a manga penned by the late Kazuhiko Katō (better known to us as Monkey Punch). We brought you a fresh review right when the film first came out; but now that it's making its way to home video courtesy of GKIDS, we're taking another look — this time not only at THE FIRST itself, but also at its North American release.

All images via GKIDS

You'll be able to unlock the secrets of the Bresson Diary for yourself this month, but join us now for a look at the state-side release of the hotly-anticipated movie!

The Story

Lupin the 3rd tends to move with the times, updating the anime antihero to our modern life. But THE FIRST does the exact opposite. Set contemporary to the premiere of the manga, it reminds us of the whole point of the title: This is the grandson of literary thief Arsène Lupin we're following. And The First looms large throughout this film, not only in the title, but through the story itself.

Lupin is looking to get his hands on the one thing his renowned grandfather failed to steal: the Bresson Diary (a throwback to a character in Maurice Leblanc's Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmes). Locked in a puzzle box, the diary promises a great treasure to anyone who can open it. Also chasing after the treasure is Laetitia, a passionate archaeologist turned rookie thief. Oh, and the Third Reich is there, too: in typical post-War fashion, a few stragglers of the especially occult kind believe the Diary will lead them to a magical superweapon. And since this is Lupin the 3rd, they're probably not wrong.

The truth of the Bresson Diary and the original Lupin's involvement is a bit more convoluted than first laid out. But as we move into the final act, it's full Indiana Jones energy: deadly science-magic traps, betrayals, Rule of Cool action, and the literal fate of the world hanging in the balance. Even Zenigata is willing to call a truce and take up his honorary role as fifth Lupin Gang member once again.

A Classic Lupin Gang Heist

When it comes to Lupin the 3rd, rocking the boat has risks and rewards. Series like Lupin the 3rd Part 5 and The Woman Called Fujiko Mine tested the decades-long franchise's tropes, and did so in a way that was both successful and fan-pleasing. Other films and specials haven't hit the mark quite as well. The safest course of action is to toe the line, and that's what THE FIRST does. If you're expecting director Takashi Yamazaki to reinvent the wheel with the screen time he's given, you'll be disappointed. But that's largely because that was never the aim.

More than anything, this film strives to be as classic Lupin as possible. Every music cue short of "Fire Treasure" (which post-dates the setting, anyway) is present somewhere, courtesy of series mainstays Yuji Ohno and You & Explosion Band. We get a car chase with the reliable little Fiat 500. We get Lupin ziplining down a laser corridor while his theme music plays. Goemon slices no fewer than two very large passenger-carrying vehicles, Jigen is at his sharp-shootiest, and Fujiko breaks hearts and necks in quick succession. It may not be game-changing, but it's so right — possibly the rightest the series has been in a while — that trying to get fancy would feel wrong.

Of special note are each character's nuanced expression and movement. We've watched the core five for decades, albeit in 2D animation, and by now we know them like old friends. As we've seen in Stand by Me Doraemon, Yamazaki goes for broke making his CG stars as emotive as possible. These depictions hit the nail on the head in terms of body language, to the point that a keen eye might even catch when a background character is actually Lupin in disguise.

Coming to America

In recent years, the Lupin the 3rd TV series and films have been getting increasingly better treatment in North America. This is in large part due to the dream team of Tony Oliver (Lupin) and Richard Epcar (Jigen) — industry voice acting veterans — leading a stellar ensemble cast. Lex Lang (Goemon), Michelle Ruff (Fujiko), and Doug Erholtz (Zenigata) are all as on point as ever, and that's no surprise.

The dub's guest cast is equally strong. Laurie Hymes shines as Laetitia, with excellent villainy from J. David Brimmer as the megalomaniacal Lambert and Paul Guyet as Third Reich straggler Gerard.

THE FIRST presents an uncommon challenge in the Lupin the 3rd series: rather than the typical anime lip flap, the writers and voice actors have to match (or at least approximate) much more specific enunciation. Well ... it's less that they have to and more that they went for it. It was a good call, and the localization is all the better and flows all the more naturally for it.

The Score

Since its premiere, Lupin the 3rd: THE FIRST has been for American fans much like the Bresson Diary was for Lupin himself: shiny, enticing, and always just out of reach. Having it in hand, it lives up to expectations. And if this all sounds like a love letter to the movie, that's not inappropriate — since the movie is a love letter to Lupin.

THE FIRST is a deliberate throwback in every sense. Rooted firmly in both its own history and that of the books that inspired it, it's a reminder of where this long-lived anime classic began. It's a standard story, exactly the sort we've come to expect, but that doesn't stop it from being a fantastic experience.

Get Lupin the 3rd: THE FIRST on digital, Blu-ray, and steelbook

By: Kara Dennison

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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gascon-en-exil · 4 years ago

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This past weekend I picked up another Steam dating sim, Full Service. I don’t think I could do a complete write-up like I’ve done for some others, but it’s worth mentioning some highlights and lowlights.

The Good

A lot of content for an indie erotica game, with seven primary love interests, over 200 CGs, and over twenty endings running the gamut from tenderly romantic to wildly kinky to dubcon/noncon scenarios. There’s more actual gameplay here than any of the dating sims I’ve previously talked about, with some light scheduling and resource management and a gifting/heart level system comparable to Fire Emblem support ranks or even more so heart levels in those old Harvest Moon games (are those still a thing?). The second playthrough adds more story content to better explore certain character motivations, and there are even after stories - epilogues, essentially - unlocked after perfect endings that catch up with the characters some time later and feature brief animated sex scenes. In the tradition of most gay dating sim protagonists that I’ve come across, Tomoki is fully vers, and his love interests are evenly divided by favored position: three tops, three bottoms, and one fellow vers with a little additional flexibility for certain scenes/combinations. Speaking from extensive personal experience I consider this much more reflective of how the gay/bi male population as a whole approaches anal than something like To Trust an Incubus contorting itself to ensure that every single guy is vers.

The premise is that all the love interests work at a spa/massage parlor that specializes in happy endings. All of them could be considered sex workers, and some of them have alternative sources of income in a similar vein, ex. modeling. This is not the easiest subject matter to write well without being either overly glorifying or overly preachy, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that for the most part Full Service walks the fine line between the two. It doesn’t shy away from the potential dangers and hardships of sex work (especially in some of the bad endings) or from the issues it can create with forming romantic connections, but it also remains generally sex positive and never condemns its characters for what they choose to do with their lives or suggest that they’d all be happier doing something else. The most judgmental the game ever gets seems to be a projection of Tomoki’s own prudishness...which comes off as deliberately hypocritical considering all the raunchy things he can get up to over the course of the game.

Speaking of sex positivity, it’s actually impossible to go through a full playthrough and only have sex with one person, and the fact that around half of the love interests’ development occurs outside plot events means that it’s quite likely that Tomoki will sleep his way through half or more of the spa’s masseurs before all is said and done. Furthermore, despite what I said in my Chess of Blades review about a poly relationship being beyond the scope of a typical dating sim this one pulls it off with one pair of love interests that Tomoki can potentially end up with at the same time.

While she’s not a love interest, there’s a trans woman in the supporting cast. Her full story isn’t revealed until your second playthrough owing to her major role in the plot, but I appreciated the depiction of someone who discovered her gender identity/presentation through her sexual relationships with men. Thara may not be the sort of trans character who would appeal to typical fans of either yaoi or bara, but having explored feminization kink in the context of sex work myself I thought she was a nice addition.

The Bad

So...voice acting. Most of the game goes for vocal work in the style of Fire Emblem Awakening and Fates, short clips that only somewhat match up with the text on screen and are meant to be more suggestive of what the character is saying. Those are fine enough if not always exactly on point, but then there are the perfect endings which are fully voiced. There’s a fair bit of variance in this game’s vocal talent and even audio recording equipment in one or two cases - sadly one of my favorite love interests has a noticeably lower recording quality to his audio, and it’s no more evident than in his perfect ending where suddenly he’s voicing full lines of dialogue - and then there’s the recurring problem these games have with fully voiced sex scenes and how generally silly those come off. I really have to ask: does anyone genuinely feel that full or even partial voice acting adds anything to the eroticism of such scenes? Props to the voice actors for doing their best with the material, but the sounds of sex are just not easy to vocalize unless you’re actually doing it - at least not without sounding ridiculous.

Harping on lack of realism in gay sex scenes has become rather passé, and I can overlook things like everyone being muscled and well-endowed, no one wearing a condom, or there rarely being any mention of artificial lube. However, there is one glaring issue that over and over shattered my suspension of disbelief, because it comes up in like 80% of the game’s sex scenes: these men have no refractory periods, at all. Almost every scene has all characters involved cumming twice, with only one or two lines of text between CGs as a break. Even worse than the inherent absurdity of a man cumming and then being hard again five seconds later is that it leads to the scenes coming off as quite predictable. With only a handful of exceptions sex scenes in Full Service consist of two NSFW CGs: a foreplay CG - oral, rimming, or some light kink like bondage or nipple or armpit play - and then an anal CG. There’s a lot of variety in positions and (tame) kink elements on display, but it’s undercut when almost every encounter follows this exact script.

On some subjects Full Service flirts with a particular kind of kink but can’t find it in itself to commit. Tomoki’s romance with his boss Rald is almost an instance of this, although they do end up having one of those (allegedly) scandalous workplace romances with its kink potential left intact. Less fortunate however are the twins Oki and Okan, who Tomoki can romance either individually or together in the aforementioned poly ending. The twincest is indeed hot, but it’s explained in supplementary material (if not necessarily the game itself) that two really aren’t twins or even related which annoys me as the same sort of cop-out as Coming Out on Top’s teacher/student romance. Here it’s a bit more forgivable as the reason Oki and Okan are more or less RPing as twins is tied into the plot.

The...Eh

Full Service’s setting is difficult to pin down. It’s clearly somewhat inspired by Japan and takes place somewhere in the real world as various other ethnicities get referenced throughout, but it’s all rather vague. I honestly can’t even tell if the developer is Japanese or Western, as there’s signs pointing to either.

There’s an annoying mascot character who runs a gacha for gift items - in-game currency only, thankfully - but the script knows how silly he and uses him sparingly in the plot and heart events.

One of the love interests is (so I’ve read) the protagonist of a completely different indie game, recognizable because he looks like a JRPG protagonist and has plot-convenient amnesia. He’s not a bad character by any means, just a big bundle of genre clichés.

With both Chess of Blades and Coming Out on Top I pointed out that best friend romances were a tricky business and tend to end up lighter on conflict. Full Service really yanks the rug out on that one, but it’s impossible to say any more without heavy spoilers. Suffice it to say Tomoki does have a best friend romance, but it’s hidden and hard to obtain and figures into the main plot in a thoroughly unexpected way.

What I said pertaining to second playthrough reveals also brings up another serious issue the game attempts to tackle, this one with more mixed results. It’s sex trafficking, which indeed ties into the larger sex work premise but in my opinion doesn’t land nearly as well as the rest in large part due to it being treated as a mystery and the centerpiece of many a lategame reveal. There are worse ideas for a source of conflict independent of who Tomoki ends up dating, but I’m still not sure about the overall execution.

So in summary? It’s not entirely my genre and there’s a lack of polish in parts, but a lot of gameplay for a dating sim and so, so much porn. Kind of middle of the pack for me.

#Full Service #Gay dating sims

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mrjoelgarcia9 · 4 years ago

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Let’s Talk #StarWars: The Original Trilogy

When it comes to Star Wars, the original film trilogy ranges from perfect to good.

The films are entertaining, tell a cohesive story, full of memorable characters, and the most standalone of the franchise’s film trilogies.

For my thoughts on A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi, feel free to keep reading. There will be spoilers.

The original film trilogy centers around a Rebel Alliance led by Princess Leia taking on the Galactic Empire led by Darth Vader. Characters such as Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Chewbacca join the Rebels while confronting additional threats such as two Death Stars, Boba Fett, and Ewoks.

For a majority of fans, their first exposure to Star Wars was primarily through these films. They could have first seen them when they came out, in a re-release, on TV, or VHS (and/or Laserdisc).

The films are overall fun and exciting to watch, full of action, drama, just the right amount of comedy, and great actors. Each film has its own flaws, albeit not to the same level as the prequels.

As for the “Special Editions”, more on that later.

A New Hope is a great introduction to the franchise. It presents an open-ended story of Good Vs Evil, wrapping up the main crisis within the film itself but leaving open the possibility for more adventures. The film can be enjoyed either by itself or as part of the trilogy. The only major flaw is the final confrontation between Obi Wan and Darth Vader. Regardless of what order you see the films, it is one of the weaker lightsaber fights, coming off as a fencing match compared to later duels and fights. Prequel fans might find it disappointing considering how their last confrontation was on a lava planet.

The Empire Strikes Back is an excellent follow-up. It raises the stakes by having the characters endure various trials and tribulations, from Luke training with Yoda to Han being frozen in carbonite. It also had a bit more comedy via C-3PO, which lightens up the film as this is the darkest of the three. Several characters were introduced in this film: Lando Calrissian, the Emperor, and Boba Fett. The climax is also one of the franchise’s best, with an emotional confrontation between Luke and Vader culminating in one of cinema’s biggest plot twists. The ending is a mixture of failure and potential, with the rebels suffering several losses but with the hope they can make a comeback.

Return of the Jedi, like any third part of a trilogy, is a mixed bag. It does bring the trilogy to a triumphant conclusion, has yet another great lightsaber duel between Luke and Vader, and an action-packed climax involving Lando and the second Death Star. Some of the weaker parts include the first act dragging on for a bit too long and the Ewoks feeling shoehorned in just to sell more toys (and produce a forgettable Saturday morning cartoon). It still is a good and exciting film but not as great as the first two. Also, Hayden Christensen looks very out of place in the ending.

Overall, the original trilogy is fun and exciting to watch. However, they are also critiqued due to something else: The Special Editions.

It is unbelievable how many times Lucas revised the films, all the way up to right before selling them to Disney by adding a single infamous line to an already controversial moment.

Without getting into any specific alterations, the Special Editions do not ruin the films. They still have the same plots, characters, and actions only with some minor CG additions to help the films avoid continuity issues and look outdated. For example, Christensen’s aforementioned cameo in Return of the Jedi connects with the Prequel Trilogy by showing Anakin before he became Vader. Ironically, by comparison, the CG in The Phantom Menace has badly aged.

However, the Special Edition being the only legal way to see these films is wrong. Those who grew up watching the original theatrical cuts are right to be furious they cannot see them alongside the Special Editions. Disney, for example, has included multiple versions of a single film in some of their releases, such as the three cuts of Beauty and the Beast.

It would be perfectly fine if the Special Editions are the ones airing on TV and streaming on Disney+. Disney should at least sell the original theatrical versions either on digital or as part of an expensive limited edition 4K box set, giving fans a legal way to watch them in the highest quality possible.

Regardless of which edition you prefer, the original trilogy is a prime example of a good trilogy. It starts off on a high note, goes even further with the sequel, and has a bumpy but successful conclusion. If you only wanted to see a single Star Wars film, A New Hope best summarizes the franchise. The Empire Strikes Back is a great example of the heroes losing but refusing to admit defeat. Despite the Ewoks, Return of the Jedi is a good conclusion to the trilogy.

The Original Trilogy is available to own on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital. They can also be streamed exclusively on Disney+.

Until next time, thank you for reading!

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illfoandillfie · 4 years ago

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hello lovely! may i please get a love reading? their initials are MM and mine are CG. and i really like them. ahhhh i dunno what else to say, also i’m a big fan of your queen cards!!

ahhh thank you love! There are so many incredible artists in this fandom and I’m just thrilled and thankful that so many of them have wanted to be part of my little project! Lord knows the deck wouldn’t be looking half as good if it was just me on my lonesome doing it lmao

Anyway, here’s you’re reading, apologies for the late response!

tarot cards: 2 of cups, 8 of pentacles, queen of pentacles, ace of cups, 4 of wands, 10 of pentacles, strength, knight of swords

Okay so the first two cards are a great opening set. The 2 of cups represents partnership and unity and it’s being clarified by the 4 of wands which is celebration and home but is also sometimes called the marriage card. Both very positive signs for relationships, even if you’re not thinking marriage yet lmao.

The 8 of pentacles represents passion, ambition and high standards. The 10 of pentacles under it is about prosperity and sharing your wealth (not necessarily monetary wealth either) with those you consider family. The 8 of pentacles is also about apprenticeship so it’s like the beginning steps of the relationship, when everything is new and shiny. Conversely, the 10 of pentacles is much later in the story, with a family of people gathered together, being happy. That indicates that this relationship has the potential to last a long time, to make both of you happy for years to come.

Next we have the queen of pentacles (did you meet this person through work? or is one of you an earth sign? so many pentacles lmao). I’m assuming this card represents you, though it could be MM instead. She’s a symbol of practicality, generosity and security. With the strength card under her, the person represented here is obviously strong as well. It may be physical strength or a strength of character. With the generosity of the queen it may be indicating someone who is compassionate and kindhearted. Strength can also indicate someone with a bit of a wild side.

The other person is appearing as the knight of swords - a little younger than the queen maybe? - racing to action, possibly a little impulsively. They’re brave though and skilful. Above them is the ace of cups which represents new feelings and attraction. This knight is definitely attracted to the queen.

I like that the ace of cups is touching both the queen and the knight, as is strength. There’s reciprocated feelings between you both. And Strength can be a sign that the relationship is stable but also gives space for both parties involved to grow.

Your romance angel oracles are:

Playfulness - to recapture romance, allow your inner youthful spirit of fun to shine / Calling in your soulmate - your prayers, affirmations, and visualisations help bring you together / It is safe for you to love - Open your heart to give and receive the highest energy of all.

Playful indicates not only a romantic connection but also a relationship that would be fun! Someone you can have a laugh with! Whether or not you believe in soul mates, the second card here indicates a strong bond, something with the potential to last a while or at least leave an impact. And the third card really just says that this is a good thing, you can let yourself enjoy it.

Your love oracle is Ricky Martin. These cards have 3 bits of advice. The first is for one night stands, the second for relationships and breakups and the third for platonic relationships, bit I’ll give you all three in case any of them resonate.

Ricky says: Sex is like exercise: practice and discipline are essential / The crowd can go wild, but love is something only your secret heart can know / Keep your friends like your bathing suits: tight.

You also got 2 of the heart shaped oracles. Romance - Cupid’s arrow strikes! and Look deep within my heart and you will feel my love. My love for you is as deep as the ocean.

Definitely positive signs! There’s romance here and a deep connection with the feelings to match!

And finally, three secret garden cards:

Breathe - Slow down and contemplate the tea, violets and ivy tangled around the eaves / Present - Journey into the garden to escape the two eternities: the past and the future / Joy - Make time for the little things today.

Breathe to me feels like it’s aimed at the knight of swords. They don’t need to rush as much, they can take their time and enjoy things. Present could be as well, though it feels a little more general. Don’t worry about things that happened in the past and don’t worry about what might be, just exist in the now and take a chance. Big Fool energy tbh. And joy of course indicates a joyful relationship, someone you can be happy with. All three of these cards have very calm energies though which is nice.

#card readings #last one for tonight #got 2 more to do tomorrow and then i'm done #i will be out most of the day though so i hope you don't mind waiting a little longer #please don't send any more in though!

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tripentertainment · 4 years ago

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New Movies To Watch This Week: ‘Malcolm & Marie,’ ‘Falling’ And A New Studio Ghibli

February is shaping up to be something special. In response to a pandemic-extended awards season, the sort of films that used to crowd the release calendar just before New Year’s in an effort to Oscar-qualify while also still maintaining some measure of last-minute/latest-thing freshness are now arranging to come out over the coming weeks.

Think of that as a teaser of such upcoming films as “Minari” and “Nomadland” more than a reflection of this week’s lineup, although a couple of this week’s releases feature elements the marketing departments would be happy to hear described as “Oscar worthy.”

The first is Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut, in which he plays a gay man dealing with his father’s dementia (featuring a raging performance by Lance Henriksen). The second is Sam Levinson’s resourceful two-hander “Malcolm & Marie,” made during the pandemic and featuring two terrific, on-fire performances from John David Washington and Zendaya. (Variety critic Joe Leydon also floated the suggestion that Brian Dennehy’s performances as a spiteful Klansman in the Spike Lee-produced “Son of the South” is deserving of posthumous attention.)

Here’s a rundown of those films opening this week that Variety has reviewed, along with information on where you can watch them. Find more movies and TV shows to stream here.

New Releases on Demand and in Select Theaters

Falling (Viggo Mortensen)Distributor: Quiver DistributionWhere to Find It: In theaters, on digital and on demandDrawing on his own upbringing while touching on universal themes of family and loss, Mortensen reimagines the relationship with his parents — doting mother, difficult father — through the protective filter of fiction. In the process, the actor reminds that his best work comes from a place of emotional vulnerability. Dad was clearly a piece of work, portrayed here as a scorpion-tempered patriarch who dominated his family for decades, growing even more difficult with the onset of dementia (as seen in the present, where Lance Henriksen brings the hellfire). — Peter DebrugeRead the full review

A Glitch in the Matrix (Rodney Ascher)Distributor: Magnolia PicturesWhere to Find It: In theaters and on demandThere are words, and many metaphors, one could use to describe simulation theory: the belief, popularized two decades ago by “The Matrix,” that the life we’re living — the people we know, the experiences we have, what we see, touch, think, and feel — is literally an illusion, an artificial façade orchestrated by minds far more developed than our own. … “A Glitch in the Matrix” gives each of those metaphors a workout. The movie takes the pulse of how science fiction has merged with our imaginations. — Owen GleibermanRead the full review

Little Fish (Chad Hartigan)Distributor: IFC FilmsWhere to Find It: In theaters and on demandWith COVID-19 still raging around the world, a melancholy love story about a 2021 viral pandemic that ravages people’s relationships, romances and sense of self is perhaps not the easiest sell at the moment. Such timeliness proves both a blessing and a curse for “Little Fish,” writer-director Chad Hartigan’s heartfelt tale about a couple struggling with a global epidemic of memory loss. A portrait of life’s impermanence, it’s a bittersweet small-scale saga whose occasional sluggishness is offset by its sensitivity. — Nick SchagerRead the full review

Rams (Jeremy Sims)Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn FilmsWhere to Find It: In theaters and on demandNearly six years ago, “Rams,” a touching humanist drama from Iceland directed and written by Grímur Hákonarson, won hearts — and prizes — at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, in trots an Australian remake. Adapted with winning cultural specificity by former newsman Jules Duncan, it’s longer and more broadly comic than the Icelandic version and boasts a tacked on, feel-good ending. Beloved Antipodean stars Sam Neill and Michael Caton play the two estranged brothers who must pull together to save what is dearest to them: their sheep. — Alissa SimonRead the full review

The Reckoning (Neil Marshall)Distributor: RLJE Films and ShudderWhere to Find It: In theaters, on digital and on demandMarshall returns to his traditional horror roots with “The Reckoning,” an uneven melodrama about an innocent young widow accused of witchcraft during the Great Plague of London, 1665. Striving to be a rousing tale of female empowerment in the face of brutal patriarchy and religious extremism, “The Reckoning” has some powerful moments but relies too heavily on fantasy sequences to deliver scares, and its credibility is significantly compromised by the heroine consistently emerging from extreme torture sessions with barely a hair out of place or a smudge on her makeup. — Richard KuipersRead the full review

Son of the South (Barry Alexander Brown)Distributor: Vertical EntertainmentWhere to Find It: Available on demandAlthough he occasionally uses a broad brush dipped in primary colors while fashioning his admiring portrait of Bob Zellner, the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman who improbably evolved into a civil rights activist during the early 1960s, Brown shrewdly and intelligently avoids most of the “white savior” clichés common to such scenarios. His well-crafted and period-persuasive biopic strikes a dramatically sound and emotionally satisfying balance between the moral awakening of its white protagonist and his relationships with sometimes encouraging, sometimes skeptical Black leaders and foot soldiers. — Joe LeydonRead the full review

Two of Us (Filippo Meneghetti)Distributor: Magnolia PicturesWhere to Find It: Available in theaters and on demandNeither a hot-blooded tale of sexual discovery like “Blue Is the Warmest Color” nor a coolly alluring bauble like “Carol,” Meneghetti’s debut feature “Two of Us” is an entirely unique and uniquely vital lesbian love story. The tale of two older women whose decades-long secret relationship is threatened after tragedy strikes covers emotional and thematic ground that transcends the sexual preferences of the two main characters. This often-moving film is an affirmation of our universal desire for emotional intimacy and how the right connection can overcome all social and physical limitations. — Mark KeizerRead the full review

Bliss Courtesy of Amazon Studios

Exclusive to Amazon Prime

Bliss (Mike Cahill)Where to Find It: Amazon PrimeThe biggest challenge of discussing “Bliss” lies in describing its premise without making it sound considerably wilder and more interesting than it actually is. In short, the film stars Owen Wilson as a sad-sack office drone who, after accidentally killing his boss, is rescued by an intense, shamanistic homeless woman played by Salma Hayek, who not only informs him that they are soulmates, but also that they are among the few flesh-and-blood humans inhabiting a complex computer simulation. See? Sounds intriguing enough, doesn’t it? — Andrew BarkerRead the full review

Earwig and the Witch Courtesy of GKIDS

Available in Theaters and on HBO Max

Earwig and the Witch (Goro Miyazaki)Distributor: GKIDSWhere to Find It: In select theaters and HBO MaxErica Wigg, the main character of Goro Miyazaki’s made-for-TV feature “Earwig and the Witch,” is both a brat and an orphan. Those two traits seldom go together in children’s stories, and the combination provides a modest starting point for this intermittently amusing CG entry from Studio Ghibli — back in business but a shadow of its former glory. While the story doesn’t feel terribly original, Erica’s attitude manages to set her apart from such relatively well-behaved orphans as Harry Potter and Roald Dahl’s Matilda. — Peter DebrugeRead the full review

Malcolm & Marie Dominic Miller/Netflix

Exclusive to Netflix

Malcolm & Marie (Sam Levinson) CRITIC’S PICKWhere to Find It: NetflixWhile not nearly as ambitious as “Eyes Wide Shut” in theme or technique, Levinson’s feature feels every bit as raw and honest in exploring the fissures in a relationship with a bit of wear on its tires. Not too shabby for a film dashed off and shot during the pandemic. It’s “the biggest night of my life,” Malcolm believes, and we observe as they alternately appreciate and abuse one another, making love and war as they test and tentatively reestablish where they stand. The result is like Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” minus the booze and the cruel mirror a second couple provides. — Peter DebrugeRead the full review

Strip Down, Rise Up (Michèle Ohayon)Where to Find It: NetflixThe class at the heart of “Strip Down, Rise Up,” upends expectations. So does Ohayon’s cinema verité movie. Debuting on Netflix (where the subject might attract the wrong kind of audience, or precisely those who’d connect with it most), the doc is poignant, surprising and deftly reawakens questions about “patriarchy” — not by being a pole-dancing polemic but by foregrounding its characters’ experiences. The film isn’t concerned with strip clubs and their habitués [but rather what the class instructor] calls a “feminine lifestyle practice.” — Lisa KennedyRead the full review

Life in a Day 2020 Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival

Exclusive to YouTube

Life in a Day 2020 (Kevin Macdonald)Where to Find It: On YouTube Feb. 6It’s been precisely a decade since the first edition of “Life in a Day” debuted at Sundance, though in internet years, that amounts to several eons. So, what can “Life in a Day 2020” now bring to the table? Nothing groundbreaking, certainly. Macdonald’s followup collage neatly matches its predecessor in form and function, serving another enjoyable but unavoidably surface-level survey of how the other half lives. Videos flood in from Mongolian livestock farmers, Eastern European high-rise dwellers and American suburbanites alike, connected by little more than their access to a smartphone Cell Phone Belt Holder .

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kingdomofbretonxrpg · 4 years ago

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Congratulations, Krissi! We are delighted to welcome Seo-jun Hamon to take care of the submissives of the Kingdom of Breton. Please complete our after acceptance checklist. We are looking forward to seeing you develop him! Please send in his blog within 48 hours.

Out of Character

Alias: Krissi

Preferred Pronouns: She/Her

Age: Twenty Nine

Timezone: EST

Anything else? None

Character

Name: Seo-jun Hamon

Birthdate and Age: January 12th ; Twenty - seven

Preferred Pronouns: He/Him

Faceclaim: Min Yoongi

House Affiliation: Maine

Profession: Professional Dominant at the Castlebrac Hotel

Claim: Unclaimed

Children: No

Designation: Dominant

Sexuality: Bisexual

What is their symbol?: Sword pendant and for official events – a shield lapel pin.

Kinks: Canning, Pain, Edging, etc. (A lot, whatever is not included in anti-kinks)

Anti-kinks: Age regression, CG/l, Diapers, Daddy, Sounding, Brats, Scat/Watersports/Bathroom restriction, Boot worship, Latex, Extreme humiliation, Beatings. (etc.)

Biography:

Seojun’s mother – Ye-Won, was a cunning and sharp woman. Forward and strong willed she – one of the many submissive daughters in her family, came to Breton looking to make a strategic and smart claim for herself. Coming from a Noble and revered House in Korea she had been looking to strengthen the connections of her family by making a favorable match.

The house of Maine appeared to lack only in one thing – women. After a few inquiries about whom would present as a good match with her Seo’s mother was introduced to Louie Hamon. Louie, like herself, was a smart and business oriented man who fell deeply infatuated with Ye-won – she was smart as a whip, beautiful and unlike his previous relationships, Ye-won had no patience for saccharine romance. The two of them were match made in Heavan. They claimed not six months later.

And while neither believed in nonsense like luck and fate – the couple never had any female children. Seojun was the first of three. Their firstborn could not have been any different from his levelheaded parents. Seojun was passionate, loud and demanding, his teenage years passed under constant turmoil – he acted out, misbehaved and while his parents tried to help, it didn’t seem like it was the right kind of help.

Things seemed to settle down only once he started attending the necessary classes once he selected his designation. Seojun was never one for school – lack of attention span and general disdain for anything that required conforming, his grades stood in the average middle most of the time. But when it came down to Dominance he never minded doing the work, the reading, the practice.

He got a lot more level headed his relationship with his parents and his siblings improved – it seemed that having a proper outlet for his Dominance had softened him in profound ways. His mother kept encouraging him to further his education but Seojun had other ideas. Once Asmata opened the Castlebrac he was one of the first to seek her out and inquire about working for her. She’d agreed and that’s been his focus for some time now.

When the King passed, he mourned with the rest the country, curious to see who would take the spot after him.

#bretonaccepted #Min Yoongi #Yoongi #smut rp #D/s rp

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arcaneranger · 4 years ago

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Final Thoughts - Ghost In The Shell SAC_2045

Not quite a worthy successor, but better than a cheap imitation.

If, at this point, we have to accept that Netflix is primarily interested in CG anime and will throw lots of money at it, can more of that money go to the people responsible for this rather than Polygon Pictures? This looks significantly better than nearly any 3D television production we’ve seen before, even if it’s still a bit janky. I’m addressing this first because it’s the elephant in the room, but although SAC_2045′s art style looks a little plastic in still frames, it totally works during action sequences, and although much has been made of the transition from being a spectacular 2-D animation to a totally workable 3-D one, it’s not that much of a step down.

Where 2045 really shines is when it’s basically just acting as a third season of Stand Alone Complex. When Section 9 is all together, the cast’s dynamic is still excellent thriller material. The original dub cast are all still here and all still great matches for their characters, particularly Mary Elizabeth McGlynn as Major Kusanagi. Nothing has been lost here when the elements that worked so well before are all present and accounted for, and the story is still packed with the future-is-now social commentary and badass action sequences we’ve all come to expect from this franchise.

The thing that really holds me back though is...well, Purin.

This first half to the new season introduces us to two new teammates, one that works with the team in the first arc while they’re in South America and one for the second arc in Japan after Section 9 is formally reinstated. The first is a young black man named Standard, who accompanies them on two missions while the team - sans Togusa - fight off a band of outlaws and retrieve a millionaire in L.A., at which point he exits stage right. He’s mostly harmless and fits in relatively well with the squad while Togusa is away, and he’s not what I’m here to complain about.

The second character is brought in as an outsider looking in when the team is back together in Japan. Her name is Purin, and she is a huge problem, because her only character traits are “overeager” and “has a persistant, vocal crush on Batou”. She basically never shuts up about him, and that isn’t the fault of either of her voice actresses, but it is a big distraction from the serious events that the team are trying to investigate. We already had our element of silly levity in the childlike Tachikoma robots, who are definitely still here, and having even more comic relief tends to spoil basically any scene she appears in.

That, unfortunately, brings the show down to a 7/10 - it’s still good, I still recommend it, but Purin is basically a stray cluster of raisins in a chocolate chip cookie. Not worth throwing the whole thing out, but you’re gonna want to eat around it.

#final thoughts #netflix originals 2020 #netflix 2020 #arcaneanime #ghost in the shell

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that-shamrock-vibe · 5 years ago

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Movie Review: The Lion King (Spoilers)

Spoiler Warning: So I am slightly later to the party than originally intended but I will be talking about this movie in detail and am posting this review a day or so after it is released in U.K. cinemas, so if you haven’t yet seen the movie, either go and watch the original or wait until you have seen it before reading on.

General Reaction:

I have several problems with Disney’s “live-action” remake of The Lion King, not only with the choices the actual movie makes, but unfortunately also some of my ranting will be down to the live-action remake fatigue that has struck almost every Disney fan with the recent onslaught of remakes coming out. For me, The Lion King is where I have reached my peak because up until now the live-action remakes at least brought something different from the originals for me.

Here however, if for some strange reason you haven’t seen the original animated version of this movie...as I know at least one person who hasn’t...then this may be a brand new enjoyable movie for you. However, for the rest of the world that has, this was pretty much the exact same movie scene for scene with dialogue that seems very tired and characters that lack the basic sense of emotion.

I just want to clarify something, anyone who knows me knows I do not talk follow trends when writing these reviews, so the fact that I am going to spend a lot of this review pretty much complaining about the movie is not because it seems to be the “it thing” to hate it, but instead I have actual reasons as to my disdain.

I do blame Jon Favreau for some of the problems with the movie, especially because he hit it out of the park with The Jungle Book remake back in 2016. I can remember walking out of the cinema after seeing that movie with such a sense of enjoyment from my cinema experience which was decorated in Jungle Book paraphernalia, to the actual movie which was obviously based on the original animated version but also took inspiration from the novel the original was based on.

Here though there was no decor save for one lion totem hidden away, and from the very start of the movie I was seriously underwhelmed by it all.

I don’t know if something got lost between the 2D animation and the CG animation but the movie just felt rather slow compared to the 1994 animated version. There was something so iconic and special about the original version that maybe it was simply the case that nothing could match up to it, but if that is the case then the talent behind the scenes should have at least tried to do something different with the story like Aladdin and Dumbo tried to do.

I genuinely believe that Jonny Fav blinked when tackling this compared to The Jungle Book because while The Jungle Book is a classic it isn’t as iconic or beloved as The Lion King and therefore maybe he didn’t want the backlash if he changed it and it wasn’t received well.

Also, this “live-action” version of the animated movie has 30 minutes more content in it than the original 1994 animated version, this is both a good and a bad thing. The two worst crimes of this movie, aside from it lacking originality and emotive facial expressions, as well as one particular song which I will get into, are two minor scenes that stretch-out pointless plot-points.

The first just after the “Circle of Life” opening where the movie follows the travels of the mouse that Scar eventually tries to eat. But this mouse is followed from the bottom of the cliff-face into the cave that Scar is in.

The second is after Simba begins to question everything he has been told about life and slumps down on that ledge. In the original 1994 version there are leaves and particles that originally spell out “Sex” that are now replaced by a piece of Simba’s mane flying away and going on a journey for five long minutes.

This hair lands in a lake, floats across a Savannah, is eaten and subsequently pooped out by a giraffe, rolled away in a poop ball by a dung beetle before being separated from the pile and being carried up to Rafiki’s tree by worker ants. In the original, a breeze carries leaves across Rafiki’s path which he catches and it is over in about 2 minutes.

Both scenes are dragged out, almost completely irrelevant to the plot and just took me out of the movie questioning why I’m following a mouse and a piece of hair.

Then I have to quickly talk about the stampede scene which leads to Mufasa’s death. 2-D Animation vs. photo-realistic technology is becoming a massive battle in cinema recently particularly at Disney, but there are many things that hand-drawn animation can get away with that live-action cannot. Not only did I get zero facial expressions from Simba or Mufasa in this scene but also that stampede scene in the original animated movie is so grand and has such an emotive response from audience members no matter how many times you see it whereas here, it didn’t seem as epic. It still felt grand because it’s a stampede but not on the level of the animated version.

To end this section on a positive, I do appreciate the photo-realistic CG because it does comprise the entire movie, even the scenery, because it all does make it seem like watching realistic animals for the most part.

Cast:

Alright so there are some good and bad thing about the cast and characters. For a start, the characters in “live-action” are emotionless, lack any real form of empathy and require your love of their 2D animated counterparts to gain any affection from the audience.

The best characters in this version are Timon, Pumbaa and the Hyenas, even Zazu is high-up for me...this presents another problem with the movie, the comic relief of the movie is the best part about it. But it is true, while Billy Eichner as Timon and Seth Rogen as Pumbaa may not be as strong a double act as Nathan Lane and Ernie Sabella, they are still rather funny together and actually are given more of a meta humour than in the original movie. Not only with their version of “Hakuna Matata” but also the new Hyena distraction scene which in the original is the Hula scene but now starts off as the beginning of Beauty and the Beast’s “Be Our Guest”.

The hyenas meanwhile are made more formidable and fearsome in this movie, not only is Florence Kasumba as Shenzi more of a leader of her clan even opposing Scar at times, but both Keegan Michael-Kay and Eric André prove to be almost as good a double act as Kay & Peele. For this reason they’re high up on my list.

Donald Glover is an okay adult Simba. He has got that innocent youthful tone that adult Simba should have given the experiences of his life, but he does just feel like he’s reading a script rather than actually acting..

Beyoncé is, well Beyoncé in lioness form but the thing that lets her down is the lack of emotion on Nala’s face. Also I don’t understand why the back of her ears and tail were blackened aside from the fact that Favreau wanted Nala to stand out from the other lionesses.

Scar is as fierce as ever and Chiwetel Ejiofor proves once again why he is a great villain actor.

I was also pleasantly surprised by Simba’s mother Sarabi in this movie as not only did she have more to do but her backstory with Mufasa and Scar, which doesn’t necessarily make me want a prequel but adds to the Hamlet story that this story is based on, and has Scar state that she chose Mufasa over him...so does that mean she was somehow romantically involved with her now brother-in-law? Also Alfre Woodard is great in the role.

James Earl Jones is back and...it’s simply for nostalgic purposes because there is nothing really elevated in his performance. If anything his performance falls slightly flat in parts but otherwise he’s fine.

The biggest letdown for me is the character of Rafiki, who in the original 1994 version is my favourite character. I love the fact he’s a shaman, I loved his first meeting with Simba I could easily watch it over and over again. I do not understand why they effectively cut that scene and the message of morality that comes with it.

Then he only had his stick when preparing for that climactic fight. It seemed as if they were saying that point was him coming out of pacifism but it isn’t fully shown, but I wanted to see Rafiki walk around with his stick like he did in the original, they copied pretty much everything else but got rid of that?!

Also the one bit of facial emotion that any of these characters show is in the beginning “Circle of Life” sequence when Rafiki carries baby Simba to the edge of Pride Rock and Simba looks genuinely sad to be pulled away from his mother.

Speaking of young Simba, both JD McCrary and Shahadi Wright Joseph do a good job as the young versions of Simba and Nala respectively. I think McCrary tries very hard to recapture the emotion that can bring grown men to tears when Simba finds his father dead, it doesn’t quite stick but he tries.

Songs:

I don’t know if it is because the original score and soundtrack is so iconic and ingrained in popular culture, or just that reworks of the same songs don’t really work...Aladdin for all its plusses still fell into that category...but the songs from the original movie in this version do nothing good for me.

“Circle of Life” is supposed to be the energised introduction to the movie, but if you were to watch the opening to this movie and the original side-by-side, it is practically a shot for shot copy but this version is slower and therefore misses a lot of the cues. Even the shot where you first see Zazu flying over to Pride Rock is underwhelming and they screwed that up twice, first at the start and then again at the end of the movie.

“I Just Can’t Wait To Be King” was also slightly lackluster because of the fact this movie seemed to take away the fantastical elements of the performances in favour of apparently making it more grounded, but it was still a fun performance. I think the two young actors playing the two young cubs did a great job vocally and the performance of them hiding from Zazu amongst the animals was an okay alternative.

“Be Prepared” is the one time I have been actually offended in one of these Disney live-action remakes, this song is one of the greatest villain songs in history. They take a performance which fully executes the Elephant Graveyard but also turns the hyenas into the New Reich! This is Scar monologuing for a couple of minutes and the “song” lasts about maybe 30 seconds. This was my favourite song in the original and it fizzles out completely.

“Hakuna Matata” is a fun song as it was in the original, like “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” the fantastical elements are taken out of it so Pumbaa swinging on the vine swing and the use of the bugs and the diving into water are all taken out. Even so, Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen do a good job singing as does JD McCrary...Donald Glover on the other hand is not a singer.

“The Lion Sleeps Tonight” is probably my favourite song in the movie, and it’s a song not original to The Lion King which is more of a problem for the revision of the soundtrack to the original 1994 version but the fact Timon and Pumbaa got essentially their own doo-wop group going of the animals that also inhabit their home, it’s just such a good rendition.

“Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”...if it wasn’t for Beyoncé would be an absolute bomb because Donald Glover, again, cannot sing. Also the song happens way too quickly. The movie is effectively a shot-for-shot remake but some scenes are cut short and Simba and Nala’s reunion is made very short before this song kicks in.

Recommendation:

I can’t say this is a perfect movie, if you love the original and want to see that again you will like this just fine, if you were wanting something different like how Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast altered themselves slightly then you won’t really get that here.

I still recommend it as a movie to see just one because it is an important movie to see just to see how stretched out these live-action remakes are becoming. However, I will agree with those that say it is one of the worst remakes.

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