Scotland Loves Anime - Day 1

Okay, some bad news for you regular followers of this 'blog (and myself in terms of the backlog I'm about to create for myself) - for the next three days I'm going to be in Edinburgh covering Scotland Loves Anime, which is (as the name somewhat suggests) an anime film festival based in Scotland, offering up a whole slew of anime movies.  How could I resist?

Anyhow, I'm writing this from my hotel room, but obviously with only 3G access to speak of I doubt I'll be able to get to 'blogging the latest episodes of new shows until late Monday and into Tuesday (although I do have the latest episode of Amagami SS on my laptop here if I get the time), so you'll have to actually be patient for once - shock, horror!

In lieu of my normal ramblings on the latest TV anime, I thought I'd just keep you all appraised of what I've been watching in its wake at least so you know I'm not slacking off completely.  It's gone half 11 at night now here, so day one of the event is now over, and here's what I got to enjoy today:

Redline - Now, everyone has been raving about this movie for months now, and cynic as I am I figured it couldn't possibly live up to those lofty expectations.  Well, I was wrong.  Although this isn't a perfect movie or anything like that, it is a fantastic visual and visceral experience that is the nightmare of bloggers and reviewers in that it's simply impossible to describe, you can only really understand how and why it works by seeing it for yourself.  I read a few reviews prior to watching the film, and none of them really managed to capture just how watching Redline works as an experience - I'm sure I can't capture that flavour either, so I'm not even going to try here.

The weird thing about Redline is that it feels so fresh and new, yet at the same time it feels like so many things you've seen plenty of times before, either directly or in parody of old shows and cartoons you might remember.  It's enough to make me wonder whether you have to be a fan of a certain age or with certain previous viewing experiences to really "get it" as more than just a blur of noise and motion, so it would be interesting to hear the take of some younger, fresher fans on it, but for me it just worked for what it was - it didn't take itself (or its plot) too seriously, instead concentrating on having fun with what it had; to be honest, I think I enjoyed the whole thing all the more for that.

One Piece: Strong World - Here's the thing - I know nothing about One Piece.  At all.  If you want to know how this compares to the previous nine movies and four billion episodes of the anime, don't ask me.  What I can tell you is that Strong World was quite a lot of fun to watch - its humour was goofy throughout, but it worked given the premise and the fact that the entire series seems to be pretty goofy from what I can tell.  Even the film's repeated gags were balanced just about right to get a laugh without descending into tedium, and the only really negative of the movie was the final twenty minutes or so seemed to drag a little - it's never a good sign when everyone in the cinema starts looking at their watches, although scheduling a film like this so that it runs until past 11pm probably wasn't the smartest idea in the world either.  Still, a pretty solid bit of entertainment for me.

I wasn't planning to write anything like this much in this post (which started out as just "sorry - no posts for you" notice), but there you go - Tomorrow brings me another three movies to enjoy; Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, Summer Wars (seen it before, but why not a second time on the big screen?) and Trigun: Badlands Rumble.