Tag Archives: sci-fi

Paprika and Appleseed

Hmm, while I still have a few games to post about, there were two Japanese anime films I watched today (not in ideal situations, but there we go). Might as well report on them 🙂

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The first, Paprika, was a very fun film to watch. A wonderful look at dreams, and how they reflect or act on reality. A little muddled in the story department because you’re never quite sure if the entire thing is a dream at one moment or the next (that’s no spoiler, this happens in the first few minutes of it starting), so highly entertaining – the characters themselves, and their dreams, are equally both amazing and sometimes more then a little confusing 🙂

I’d recommend seeing this, since it is both polished and an amazing experience to take on board – much deeper then most films to be honest in many ways. This is the intro which hosts one damn catchy song which I have no idea what it is saying showing off the titular character, I’ll say no more. It gives you a good general idea about the films theme without going into some of the spoiler scenes I saw when I watched the trailer.

[youtube width=”320″ height=”264″]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=xqg3Sw3s9Wg[/youtube]

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The second was Appleseed, a sci-fi action film. Yeah, that’s about it to be honest. You are best to usually ignore the bits which don’t make sense (unexplained things abound, and serious troubles getting me excited about a climax due to a keyboard fault) and go along for the ride. One unique thing is that rather then traditional flat animation, it’s 3d cell shaded animation. It’s a bit unnerving (no uncanny valley, but everything is quite shiny).

The action throughout is good, if a little random and pretty atypical of many action tropes. This, with a story where you’ll likely see the ending a mile off. I’d say give it a shot only if you like sci-fi action and have some time to spare.

Possibly I’m giving Appleseed a bad rap, but I’ve seen good conversions of books and comics to films, and this suffers (possibly a lot was left out, certainly a lot of the explaining if anything!). It does have a sequel, and is defiantly more of a “series” film, so if it does interest you I guess the sequel would be interesting too.

I watched both with subtitles, since that’s what I had available, and I suspect for Paprika it fits a lot better too, to be honest (Appleseed I doubt it matters as long as the dub is reasonable).