Ponyo (2008) - An Adorable and Charming Take on a Classic Tale

 

I guess I just am on a bit of an anime kick right now, not really surprising since I've been getting more into graphic novels lately, and that includes manga. It may also be that I really wanted something comforting to watch, and you can't really get more comforting that Studio Ghibli. One of the most recognizable animation studios in Japan, Studio Ghibli is probably what most American audiences think of when they think of "Anime Movie", and it's easy to see why, these stories are cute, charming, resonant, powerful, exciting, creative, Studio Ghibli is a unique brand of animated movie that I don't think we really have an equivalent to in the west, nor does there need to be one. I haven't talked much about Studio Ghibli, mostly because I want to really explore animated movies and find things I wouldn't normally watch on my own, but I did take a look at Whisper of the Heart as my fiftieth movie review, and I thought, it's been a while so maybe I should take a look at another Studio Ghibli movie, and why not make it the first Studio Ghibli movie I ever watched, Ponyo.

At it's core, Ponyo is a retelling of The Little Mermaid, in that it's about a girl from the sea who falls in love with a human boy and wants to become human herself. Ponyo, or Brunhilde, is one of the daughters of Fujimoto, a formerly human sea wizard, yep this is definitely a Studio Ghibli movie. Anyway, Brunhilde swims off and comes across Sōsuke, a five-year old boy who lives on a Cliff by the sea. This is where she gets the name Ponyo, and wishes to become human, and she does, she begins to turn into a human. The problem is, something about the sea world and the human world never being able to fully cross, so either Ponyo has to give up her powers to fully become human, or the world ends. The plot moves along, kind of at it's own pace, there are a lot of scenes that don't really advance the main plot in anyway, but they still work because they serve to show Ponyo learning about and interacting with the human world, and as far as Ghibli movies go, Ponyo is actually not that slow. You can still tell this is a Ghibli movie, it has the pacing and editing, but it's not to the same extent of Whisper of the Heart or My Neighbor Totoro.

It may also not feel slow-paced because Ponyo herself is a highly energetic character. She's usually always running around and laughing, and it never gets too annoying, it also helps that she is just super cute too. The rest of the characters are pretty good, Sōsuke is a good kid, kind, hopeful, I think he's just well developed for the story being told. I think the only character I have some issue with is Lisa, Sōsuke's mother, she does clearly love her son and she's not unlikable, but I do think she can be a bit of an irresponsible parent, like leaving two kids alone during a flood is not something a responsible parent would be doing. Honestly, the characters aren't too complex or deep, pardon the pun, but they work, besides, this story is about Ponyo, and she's a fun and charming character. I also watched the Japanese version available on Netflix, and not the Disney dub this time, and I will say the voice acting was quite excellent, though Fujimoto's voice actor was a bit... I mean when he says the world is gonna end, he doesn't say it with a lot of weight.

Where the movie really shines is in the animation, and yeah, this is a Studio Ghibli movie and they have high quality animation. Not only is it really bright and colourful, but the way they make the water look, with flat colours and different shades of blue is incredible, and the backgrounds are just filled with tiny details, like Ponyo's wet footprints on the concrete, all kinds of creatures moving around. None of which is wholly necessary, but it's all appreciated, it makes each scene come alive, while it also doesn't overstuff each scene with things. When a scene needs to be empty, the scene is empty, like Sōsuke and Ponyo finding Lisa's car on the road, there is only Sōsuke and Ponyo in that scene, and it works so much better because of that. Really, this is kind of a standard for Ghibli movies, what else can I really add about the animation?

And really, what is there more to say about Ponyo? It's just a good movie, solid and likeable characters, a good story, wonderful and detailed animation. Honestly, there is not much else to say about Ponyo, it's a cute, charming, enjoyable watch, and I think this is a great starting place for anyone who wants to get into Studio Ghibli's features. Like, people will always bring up stuff like My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, but if you want something that is more accessible, I think Ponyo is a good place to start. This and Castle in the Sky would be my picks for starting points if you want to get into Studio Ghibli, in fact I should consider doing a review of Castle in the Sky as well. I can't say Ponyo is their best movie, but that is a really high bar to reach considering, and regardless it is a good movie and I definitely recommend it to anyone, consider this one of those "Almost High" recommendations.

Editorial: The Amazing Digital Circus Pilot is Fantastic

 

The 2020s have so far been a pretty fantastic decade for independent animation. Thanks to animation software reducing the barrier to entry for many users, and the viewer-base for online content only really going up, a lot of people are taking a stab at creating their own animated series, this isn't new to the 2020s, people have been making online animated web-shows since the 1990s and it has become much more popular with channels like Eddsworld, Mondo Media, and the Disney of the internet, Rooster Teeth, and no that is not mean as a compliment. Honestly, it's kind of because of this that I've stepped a bit away from internet animation, save for the shows I'm already a fan of like Death Battle or Red vs Blue, it's kind of that we're spoiled for choice and short on time so we have to pick and choose what we want to give our time to, we all have our preferences to what we want to spend our time on. Yet, something drew me into The Amazing Digital Circus, and if I'm being frank, it was entirely the response the pilot has received, people are going crazy over this show, excited about the amount of views it's gotten in three weeks, already making fan theories and so much Rule 34 art already... just so much.

To be fair, I absolutely see why people have been going crazy over this, because this is such a fantastic pilot. It advertises itself as, if I may quote the video description, "A psychological dark comedy about cute cartoon characters who hate their lives and want to leave", and frankly, I don't think I can sum it up better than that. It's kind of like a cuter, and funnier version of The Gregory Horror Show, a cult anime that is also a psychological dark comedy, but it's a very different kind of show. The Gregory Horror Show is very much shrouded in metaphor and symbolism, and it is very dark. The Amazing Digital Circus, as of now, isn't as full of metaphor and although it definitely has a darker edge to it, visually speaking it is very bright and colourful. It also reminds me a little of one of my favourite video games, The Stanley Parable, which also has a bit of a psychological edge to it.

Speaking of the visuals, let's start there, because the animation is absolutely amazing. When people talk about stylized CG animation, this is the kind of stuff we're talking about. It gives off the vibes of an old uncanny computer game, the kind of games that stuff like Baldi's Basics took inspiration from, but a lot more polished. Which is amusing, the opening splash logo look like a PlayStation One title screen, and the whole pilot could have looked like that, honestly the fact that they chose not to go that route is very respectable. Anyone could have made it look like an old PC or PS1 title and claimed "Stylization", but that trick doesn't really work for animation like it does video games, and even then it doesn't work all the time for video games. I think where the visuals really shines is the character design, each character looks distinct, unique, and memorable. I've been watching MrEnter tear into High Guardian Spice, and for the life of me I can't remember which character is Parsley, Sage, Rosemary or Thyme in that show, I just remember them as "Pink", "Blue", "Elf" and "Dwarf". Not here, I can easily put a name to the design of Caine, Jax, Pomni, Ragatha, Gangle, Zooble, Kinger and Bubble, and can list of personality traits, like Kinger being a nervous and unstable wreck, and Jax being an unapologetic jerk... I think he's my favourite.

Which is a perfect segue into the comedy. I think my main issue with dark comedies is that they focus a lot more on the "Dark" than they do the "Comedy", though honestly this one kind of skews in the opposite direction, but there are two things I have to keep in mind; Firstly, this is a pilot, more episodes are potentially on their way and we may get some much darker episodes in the future, and secondly, even if we don't, the show is still funny. Jax is probably my pick for funniest character, but Kinger and Caine both had equally hilarious moments. Pomni herself is a great protagonist, I do want to follow her as she tries to escape the circus, or slowly becomes consumed by it. Ragatha is probably my favourite non-humourous character though, that is my favourite character beyond how funny I find her, you can tell she is clearly as sucked into this world as the others, but she still tries to be kind and friendly, I hope nothing but good things happen to her, they say knowing full well nothing good is going to happen to any of the characters in the future. It also helps that the voice acting is perfect, all the characters were perfectly cast. Lizzie Freeman as Pomni, Michael Kovach as Jax, Amanda Hufford as Ragatha, and Alex Rochon as Caine? Alex Rochon, former Countdown YouTuber, formerly known as The Autarch of Flame, was Caine? Well that is just point number "Okay I've lost count of how many points this bloody pilot has" to add to why this pilot is awesome. All the cast did an excellent job, absolutely disappearing into their characters.

The Amazing Digital Circus is a wonderful show with loads of potential, I really want to see where this show goes. Will it get darker? What is in store for the characters? What is Caine's deal? Very much, this is a show I will have to keep my eye on, and the fact that it's an independent internet series, allowing it to have few restrictions, means that it is bound to be a very unique show. I'm really hoping this series becomes the next big piece of indie animation, it was funny, dark, had wonderful characters, fantastic animation, there really is nothing bad I can say about it, I mean I guess I could nitpick, but you know what, I don't really want to. I want to see more of this show, I want to see a home media release in the future, and I want to have one of those Pomni plushies... I know what I'm going to pester my family for Christmas for. I'd say "Go see it", but at 78 Million views on YouTube... you already have! If you haven't, this pilot gets a High Recommendation from me. I eagerly await more, MORE!

Editorial: Disney Dreamlight Valley Updated Review

 

Eighty-three, that is the number of hours I have put into Disney Dreamlight Valley since October 25, 2022. That was when I published my initial impressions of the game as an Editorial. In that review, I outlined some of the major flaws with the game, including the bizarre character inclusions, weird bugs and and how the game forces you to progress in Friendship quests before you can freely explore the world. Well, a lot manages to change in a year, and there have been some announcements about Disney Dreamlight Valley, and since I have, for all intents and purposes, finished the main story of the game, I figured now is a good chance to update my review, and talk about the announcements.

And I think the first thing to talk about is stuff that I... didn't get wrong, but are wrong about the original review. Like saying that Belle was in the game and I haven't come across her yet, straight up, she wasn't even in the game, she was added much later and is in the game now, but as of writing, while she was advertised as being in the game, she was not. Also to bring up is the story, as it ended up becoming more... complex is too strong of a word, but it was more than just "tidy up Disney Town", it introduced a darker version of your playable character and... yeah that is about it. The way they let you progress was kind of weird, and I probably should have brought this up when I said that "a lot of the game was gated off", but straight up, when I wrote that review, they did not let you progress until the next major update, like you could access the biomes, but until they released the update you could not really fix those biomes by doing what the game wants you to do. Okay, so a big part of the game I neglected to mention was that you needed to find and restore a bunch of magical orbs and put them back into pillars to fix the world, and when I originally wrote the review, the pillars for Frosted Heights, The Forgotten lands and I think Sunlit Plateau were unavailable to do, and that irritates me to no end. I hate the idea of game companies selling incomplete games and finishing them with updates and DLC. No! Sell a complete game, add to it later, because that is how you should do it. If I worked at a sandwich shop and gave you two slices of bread and told you to come back next year for a piece of lettuce and two tomato slices, you'd boycott my place and get me shut down.

But now the game is complete... I hope, and I've put in plenty more hours, so what is my updated opinion? The game is... mediocre at best. Honestly, a lot of my complaints have not changed, but I've added plenty of new ones since. The first major complaint I have, the biomes just aren't fun to explore. Let's take another mediocre at best Disney game to compare, Disneyland Adventures, that game has you wandering around a simulated Disneyland Park, and you know, it's kind of fun to explore because you have items that you can use to interact with the world, you can find items to use your magic wand on, you can find hidden mickey's around the park to photograph with your camera, find hidden secrets in the park and on the rides. It's a really mediocre game, but it gives you a reason to go looking throughout the park, Dreamlight Valley doesn't. The main reason I keep going around the world is to pick up stuff to sell to Goofy, and that just gets tedious, picking up the same flowers, gems, herbs, it's so boring. Sometimes there's a chest you can open, but that's about it, there aren't really any secrets to explore for until you get a quest that makes you find something that only appears once you activate that quest, come on, maybe I want to catch eels for more reasons than coconut trees.

It also doesn't help that the world map is pathetically small. Small worlds aren't inherently bad, but they need to be packed with content to be worth exploring, but that isn't even the main problem with this game's world. It's packed alright, packed with crap, so much of the biome space is taken up by trees, rocks and other natural objects that you can't really place anything in them, much less another house. "Oh, but you can remove all the things", but I shouldn't have to, there either needs to be less crap in the biomes, or the biomes need to be bigger. I don't want to have to keep removing foliage to place houses.

Another big part of the game is collecting fragments of memories, which are really just screenshots of iconic Disney movie moments, and you get this randomly by doing errands. You'll get pieces of specific memories by catching fish, or digging in the ground, or feeding critters, or mining, and the problem is that they are too random to even really be worth getting. Like, you'll get a piece of memory after making one meal, but then you will get another piece of a different memory after making fifty meals, and you may not even get a memory piece, you may just a small amount of coins instead, which really makes the memories not really worth it. It also doesn't help that to get some of the pieces, you need to feed critters, which is difficult because they each have different ways to getting close to them, different foods they prefer, different favourite foods that will give you better rewards, and different critters will appear of different days at different times, sorry that I can't keep playing this game 24/7 guys, I guess that critter that appears from 6AM to 8AM just isn't worth not having a life over.

But let's get to the meat of all of this, the big announcements. The biggest announcement made in regards to Dreamlight Valley was that it was leaving Early Access, come December it will no longer be an Early Access game, which is kind of confusing to me because, A) This isn't an Indie game, I mean it's backed by a major company, so while the dev team may not be a Triple A studio, the association with Disney definitely restricts from being an Indie game. It also, B) means that this game isn't an original IP that needed Early Access sales to fund the game's development, this is a Disney game, they could easily have pumped a fraction of the money they withhold from Writers and Actors to give this game some more funds. It's also worth noting that this game is, C) not a Steam exclusive, so this game will also recieve money from sales on consoles, which means that the only reason I can see for this game being Early Access is entirely because Disney didn't want to fund it but still reap profits from it, which let's be real is a Disney thing to do. It's probably also why this game isn't going Free-to-Play when it leaves Early Access like it promised.

So with all that said, I must really hate this game right? Honestly, a mediocre at best game is not worthy of being hated, at least not by me. The big problem is, I can see a good game in pieces of this one, a fantastic game even. Interacting with different Disney characters and collecting fragments of memories that are Disney screenshots, I can see a fantastic game being made with that concept, it's just that a fantastic game wasn't made. Sometimes, I wish I could get into game development, as a writer or concept artist, because there are ideas that just seem so obvious that it makes no sense that, instead of a Kingdom Hearts style RPG where we collect memory fragments, it's a life-sim where we run errands and do busy work, and after a while it just kind of feels like a chore to play, and nobody likes chores. I can't say I hate it, but once that better game is made, I'm probably not gonna come back to it.

And really, why isn't Winnie the Pooh in this game yet?

Panda! Go, Panda! (1972 & 1973) - A Fun Collection of Two Cute Stories

 

Okay so, I'm kind of cheating for this review. Panda! Go, Panda!, is not a movie in a sense, it isn't even really a package film like The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, it's a 2017 DVD and Blu-Ray release of two short films, Panda Kopanda from 1972 and Panda Kopanda and the Rainy-Day Circus from 1973. I have a general rule about reviewing short films, in that I just don't review them. 40 minutes is the general accepted minimum length required for a movie to qualify as "Feature Length" according to the AFI and the BFI, and neither of these shorts reach 40 minutes. So the question is, Does this fall into my rules? Well, I decided to cheat a little bit, this is gonna review the shorts as though they are part of one big package film, because the DVD release allows you to watch both of them in one sitting, no selecting at the menu, just click play and watch. Does this mean short film packages from the likes of Disney and Pixar up for review? I'm going to say no, I'm making an exception here because, honestly I do need to talk about anime more on here.

Panda Kopanda follows a little girl named Mimiko who is left home alone when her Grandmother leaves to Nagasaki for a memorial service. She finds a baby panda sleeping on her back porch and befriends the little guy, meets his father, and the three of them quickly decide to become a family, with Mimiko becoming the little Panda's mother, and PapaPanda becoming Mimiko's father. The first short mainly follows the three of them getting along together, with the little Panda "Panny" following Mimiko to school, and Mimiko learning that the Panda's actually escaped from the Zoo. The whole short is actually really cute, and the three lead characters are all very perky and bubbly. It's a very comforting watch, and really has that Studio Ghibli vibe to it, which is entirely because this was Written by Hayao Miyazaki, and directed by Isao Takahata, both of whom would go on to found Studio Ghibli in 1985. Other staff include Yoichi Kotabe as animation director, Yasuo Otsuka as a character designer, and Yoshifumi Kondō as an animator.

The second short, Panda Kopanda and the Rainy-Day Circus follows Mimiko and the Pandas as they discover an escaped baby tiger in their house. Being a cutesy anime, the tiger quickly befriends the three, and Mimiko reunites the baby tiger with its mother at the circus. Of course it wouldn't be called the "Rainy-Day Circus" if their wasn't a rainy day, or a stormy day that floods most of the town they live in. With the circus animals stuck in the flood, Mimiko and the Pandas need to rescue them. This short is just as cute as the previous, but it was also a bit tenser, the music in the opening when the circus crew were looking for the tiger, it almost made it feel like a horror movie, which of course makes it all the funnier when Mimiko excitedly does a hand-stand on the table proclaiming that she's never seen a real burglar before, and the climax with the circus train was both fun and kind of exciting. This is admittedly a film for younger kids, but I can see them really getting into this one.

Both of these shorts have really simple designs, but it really fits the tone they were going for with these movies. The characters look cute and the stories they're put in are equally so. There really isn't a whole lot I can say on the animation side of things, it has a simpler style and doesn't do a lot of what I think most people come to expect from anime, but it wasn't meant to have any super detailed moments or extravagantly choreographed sequences, it was meant to be a cute and charming series of shorts about a girl and two pandas and that is what it is. I also watched this movie subbed, and the Japanese voice actors really did do a good job, I honestly almost dread watching it dubbed because I feel that American voice actors very rarely get "cute" down right, I can name some who do, but not a whole lot. I think my only real problem with these shorts is that... well whenever Mimiko is excited, she does a handstand, and that leads to a lot of shots where we see here underwear. I do feel like that is something I should tell people about before they give this a watch.

Other than that, Panda! Go, Panda! was a fun collection of two really cute shorts. You can draw a lot of connections from it and Hayao Miyazaki's future works, especially My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo. If you're a big Studio Ghibli fan, I would classify this as a must see, and if you are an anime fan, I would say this is worth checking out. It's nice comfort viewing, the stakes are never very high and the whole this is just an adorable and fun watch, it would be fantastic to show for kids, and it's a cute comfortable watch for anyone else. I may be a bit biased because the Panda is my favourite animal in the world, but even looking at this objectively, it's not aiming for more than cute and fun, and I'd say it succeeds. Yeah, this was kind of a short review, but hey, it happens. I give this collection a solid recommendation.