review: angel's feather (OVA)

[piranha]

sturgeon's law says that 90% of everything is crap, and really, i think it's more like 98% when it comes to porn of any sort. :)

but this year's golden turkey honours so far go to angel's feather. i know, the year is still young, but it would take an effort of monumentally bad proportions to oust this front runner. it is to weep -- i downloaded it without reading prior reviews just because one of my favorite seiyuus (inoue kazuhiko) is in it [1], and i could listen to him read the phonebook and be happy. but even he couldn't save this disaster for me, and it's not like he has much screen time. well, if he had had more screen time, i could have just closed my eyes more often to listen to his voice, and forget the crap on the screen, so maybe... no. just... no.

here's why angel's feather sucks: it features your totally generic fantasy kingdom taken over by bad people, ridiculous monsters (a naked bishie-spider? gag me.), loads of dull fan service (never have i seen so many naked chests without feeling the slightest dokidoki), cardboard cutout characters (plucky kendo boy, girlie shota bullied boy, evil creepy headmaster), badly integrated 3D CGI, black and white wings (guess who the good guys are!)(guess who's special, and a member of the ousted royal family!), completely random plot adventures (let's go ghost hunting! were there ghosts? who knew.), music that's way too loud, monster encounters straight from one of any 50 feel-alike RPG's we've already played. i could actually go on, but why?

i guess the two OVAs are meant to promote a video game; nothing else even remotely makes sense. but really, what a total waste of electrons -- the story sucks, and there's no yaoi here at all [2], there's not even real BL (boys' love) despite a kiss between BFFs and a licky, teasy bit by the bishi-spider (*eww*), because there is absolutely no sexual or romantic tension.

inoue kazuhiko, i weep. why have you forsaken me!

[1] yes, i have now watched enough anime to recognize some seiyuus (voice actors) without reading the credits, and i have definite favourites: inoue kazuhiko, okiayu ryoutarou, seki tomokazu. mmmh.

[2] i've mostly been watching smut the last few days. i am finding that RL porn doesn't do anything for me at all anymore. not that it ever did much, but now it's completely without effect. while drawn boy-on-boy can actually be moderately hot. i have no idea why, but my inner gay guy rejoices that we actually do have a wee bit of a sex drive for a change.

Comments

[ruth-lawrence.livejournal.com]

RL visual porn has pretty much always left me cold. Turned off, even. The bodies, the vacuous looks, the unlikely behaviour...!!!

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I have no idea why, but reading so much anime jargon from you made me check to see which livejournal I was reading like 4 times. I started to wonder if you'd been derf'd even. It read like a brilliant parody. And I have no idea why. Possibly because I'm so used to most people I know not being into anime, and even fewer into anime pr0n, that it caught me off guard.

appreciation for anime

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

*cackle*. funny. yeah, when i discover something new i tend to pick up the jargon fairly quickly because jargon is so inherently cultural and fun for me.

actually i am coming really late to anime considering how many people i know are into it. it just never "took" before -- i did like miyazaki's films, but other much-touted anime left me completely cold. now i am cautiously going back to some of that to see whether my new appreciation has changed my perceptions (whether maybe i am just now used to a lot of the visual conventions that were incomprehensible to me then), or whether i still simply don't like a fair chunk of anime out there. my tastes are in general eccentric, and i am not only from a different cultural background, but i am also way older than the target audience for much of it.

i know that my perception has definitely changed when it comes to comics -- not just manga, but western comics as well. i didn't use to "get it" at all, that visual medium. sandman changed all that for me, which got me to reading scott mccloud and eisner (i always do research :). and now that i've also read a fair bit of manga i am familiar enough so i can go back and actually enjoy some of the things i put aside before.

still don't like superheroes, *heh*. it's useful to learn what is about subject matter versus visual presentation.

Re: appreciation for anime

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I've watched quite a bit of anime and I gotta say the stuff worth watching is just as rare as the stuff worth watching on US TV. Miyazakis stuff was so impressive to me just from the quality of animation perspective that it hardly mattered to me what the story was.

Re: appreciation for anime

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

yes, i can ignore some pretty tepid story telling if the art is good, while if the art sucks (or just doesn't work for me), i don't care how good the story is. fortunately, miyazaki's stories don't suck either. :) i should go back and watch all of them again; i own most.

what other than miyazaki do you like, and why?

Re: appreciation for anime

[huashan.livejournal.com]

I really liked "Ninja Scroll", "The Dagger of Kamui", and especially "Ghost in the Shell" as far as movies go. All fantastic visually, with good stories. I dig good cyberpunk (which is a very very very tiny portion of cyberpunk) and the ideas in "Ghost in th Shell" were fantastic.

As far as series go...mostly I've liked those for humor value. "Crayon Shin Chan" and Dragonball are great for humor and I like the way Dragonball treats some martial arts ideas/prototypes/etc. Dragonball is really nothing like Dragonball Z, especially at the beginning of Dragonball.

I liked "Orange Road" when I watched it, but looking back on it it seems like way too much of a soap opera. I enjoy watching "Urusei Yatsura" and find it really funny, but I don't know that I'd recommend it to people.

I like "Inuyasha" and "Samurai Champloo" and some of the other stuff they show on the Cartoon Network, but it's formulaic or simplistic in a lot of ways. I like "Avatar: The Last Airbender" quite a bit, although it's not Japanese. It is really cool because it portrays martial arts very well. Better than a lot of martial arts movies, actually.

One of the things that really annoys me though is I had dubbed anime. But I so seldom have the time to actually sit and look at a TV long enough to watch anime. And as far as my japanese skills go...they weren't good enough 10 years ago when I was studying japanese and they've disappeared almost entirely by now.

Re: appreciation for anime

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

"urusei yatsura" was one of the ones i watched and didn't care for.

"ghost in the shell" (movie) i own, and think the art is amazing, but i can't say i actually understood the bloody story. that is one i want to get back to. i think our interests probably intersect mostly on cyberpunk (which i really like). i don't care much for fighting of any kind, though martial arts beat other kinds by rather a large margin.

i don't know what it is with north america and its anemic voice acting; i shun dubs in general, unless they actually get good bigname actors. maybe it's because the US exports so many movies versus importing them -- frex german voice acting is so much better that i would buy the german version instead. luckily i can handle subtitles in anime better than in live action because the action moves more slowly.

oh, have you ever seen "samurai jack"? it's not japanese either, but it rocks.

Re: appreciation for anime

[huashan.livejournal.com]

The fighting in anime is almost always about the violence. The exact opposite of what martial arts should be about.

I have seen Samurai Jack, due to weird things, I didn't get into it until it was already gone. Very cool visually, and I'm sure it would have been a lot better in order.

Re: appreciation for anime

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

if you ever come visit, you can watch samurai jack here. :) i fell in love with it and bought it.

[huashan.livejournal.com]

It's just occured to me to ask...You're not watching that bizarre penis tentacle pr0n stuff like "Chojin densetsu Urotsukidoji" are you? Cause that stuff is just bizarre.

Kinda like all the slashfic about Davey Jones since Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. As a young female friend of mine put it "UGH! Gross slimey cold tentacles. Yuck."

tentacle pr0n

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

nah, not watching tentacle pr0n (though i have seen urotsukidoji, so i know at least what i am, uh, "missing"). i find that so terribly amusing -- i gather that tentacle porn got started because the japanese obscenity laws at the time made it impossible to show a penis, so mangaka came up with all sorts of creative ways to strongly imply a penis without actually drawing one. and so we get either pixelation (which i hate), or glowing cones, glass rods, and outlined-by-semen shapes, and woohoo! tentacles. it's pretty ingenious, really. but yeah, cold and slimy doesn't do a thing for me. of course nobody says they _have_ to be cold (slimy seems to be a given), *chortle*.

none of the smut i am watching is hentai -- i really don't care for any that i've seen. the yaoi (boy-on-boy) stuff is about 1000 times hotter for me.

Re: tentacle pr0n

[huashan.livejournal.com]

The japanese obscenity laws are just baffling. It is pretty clever how they've gotten around them, it's true. And I agree completely about the pixelation. Gah.

Strangely...can't really get into the yaoi stuff. heh

[lenabugay.livejournal.com]

хихи