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Comments: Welcome to the Space Show

by Mappy » Sat Feb 12, 2011 7:31 am

http://anidb.net/perl-bin/animedb.pl?sh ... e&aid=7231

A childrens' film. Visually pleasing but about as deep as a dehydrated puddle. I went into this expecting kiddie stuff with absurd, cookie-cutter protagonists and even more absurd aliens and comic-book villains with dubiously incoherent motivations. I suppose I managed to get what I was expecting.

As such, I felt less insulted by this film's demonstrative and unabashed lack of ambition than I was with the previous biggish-budget kids anime film I'd seen, Summer Wars. And certainly waaaaayyyy less insulted than by the regurgitant that the stone-aged, knuckledragging, delusional luddite vomited into reality, that is more commonly referred to as Ponyo.
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Re: Comments: Welcome to the Space Show

by Hans Stockmann » Sat Feb 12, 2011 11:44 am

That's because Welcome to the Space Show isn't trying to be every genre of successful film at once like Summer Wars, nor is it an old man masturbating over cels like Ponyo.
Although I don’t know about the directions at 4:51.
It’s commonly known when you look north in Japan East is to your left. Please don’t try to correct that sentence. It lasts only for a second but I wouldn’t expect a mistake like that.
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Re: Comments: Welcome to the Space Show

by Mappy » Sun Feb 13, 2011 1:25 am

Hans Stockmann wrote:That's because Welcome to the Space Show isn't trying to be every genre of successful film at once like Summer Wars, nor is it an old man masturbating over cels like Ponyo.

This is not to say that Welcome to the Space Show doesn't try to stomp over the kind of genre ground that Summer Wars did, it just does it without the looking-over-the-shoulder kind of referencing that Hosoda did with Summer Wars. A form of straightforward simple-mindedness that says it was done more because Masunari Kouji thought it would be fun for the film's intended audience.
It also has the kind of chaotic non-storytelling style of the congenital dummkopf's recent directorial efforts, only, unlike Ponyo (and Howl's Moving Castle, it must be said), decides to actually introduce characters and give some semblance of context before rolling into the film's featured events. Ponyo was just a pile of s.hit happens and we're not really going to tell you why until you're so far into the film that the end credits are in sight.

Also the main character, Natsuki, is Tomo from Azumanga Daioh, minus a couple of years. She even occasionally looks like her.
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Re: Comments: Welcome to the Space Show

by Hans Stockmann » Sun Feb 13, 2011 12:18 pm

I recall Mamoru Oishi popping up on Ghibli's radio show and spending a good half an hour slamming Ponyo for those reasons, remarking that without anyone to keep Miyazaki focused you just get what's essentially a collection of short films with no cohesion at all. I wonder where I put that one...
Although I don’t know about the directions at 4:51.
It’s commonly known when you look north in Japan East is to your left. Please don’t try to correct that sentence. It lasts only for a second but I wouldn’t expect a mistake like that.
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