(no subject)
Last night Brian and I finished watching the Rayearth OAVs. Huh.
Okay, I admit--in certain contexts, I actually enjoy watching movie or OAV remakes that take an existing character set and completely shake them up. There are worse movie adaptations--Utena, I'm looking at you--but Clamp crack is already cracked, so yeah. They are a studio that exists to shake up and reorganize their characters, and to create pastiches to their own works. It's something you just accept when going into the Clamp universe. So I sat down and prepared to enjoy the ride.
There were some pretty cool things in there: awesome animation, awesome Clef, awesome--well, mainly just those two ^.^; But there were a couple of things that left me completely scratching my head, and I had to tell myself to not think too hard about anything and just enjoy the pretty.
I'll start with one minor point that irked me. Ferio. Okay, they redid him as a villain--fine. Okay, Ferio fights Fuu. Makes sense. Said villainous Ferio has an epiphany later on and switches sides, and later on he and Fuu have a conversation where they come to understand one another and seem to form a bond. Okay, fine, that stuff happens all the time in anime.
BUT. 1) The conversation they have doesn't seem to be the kind of revealing conversation that ought to lead to any sort of bond. It was all very vague and brief, so the resulting 'bond' felt kind of unconvincing, thrown in there because Ferio and Fuu are "supposed" to be together. 2) During their battle, Ferio admits to Fuu that he enjoys torturing people weaker than himself, AS A HOBBY. Even if he switches to the good side, Fuu, he is an admitted and unabashed SADIST. What. The. Heck.
But this pales in comparison to the most major piece of irksomeness: the writing. Whenever there is an info dump, it is so vague and couched in non-specific terms and full of strange logical leaps that by the end, I had no idea why anything was happening.
Okay, they want to write Emeraude as being trapped in a dream-world where her love Zagato is still alive, even though Cephiro is crumbling around her? Okay. But then, why do the people of Cephiro invade Earth, claiming that it's to fulfill Emeraude's wish? What wish? She only has one wish, and she thinks it's already been fulfilled, and it has NOTHING to do with invading the Earth or destroying anything. But the people make this strange logical leap that Emeraude wants them to come to Earth and destroy it, and/or take some 'divine test' that is never fully explained.
The closest we get to a true explanation is that Eagle, who is now her brother and immortal, is tired of living and wants to destroy everything. But even this is couched in vague terms and he still says it's for his sister's sake. Again, what part of "I want to be with my love Zagato" translates to "I want you to leave our failing world, invade another world and destroy it"?
So yeah. I'm sitting here scratching my head, and Eagle is all ready to summon his huge mecha when Emeraude wakes up from her dream world and realizes what's going on. She then orders Eagle to stop fighting, and instead to "build a future we believe in." Apparently she has learned this valuable (but vague) lesson from watching the Magic Knights--though how she derives this lesson from watching schoolgirls battle across Tokyo in giant mechs for all of thirty seconds in her magic viewing pool is beyond me.
It gets better. When a distraught Eagle asks Emeraude how he's supposed to do what she asks, her response is, I am not kidding, "We must believe in our hopes."
. . .
Let that sink in for a minute. Is it just me, or does it seem like the dialogue was written with the aid of a graduation-themed magnetic poetry kit?
Maybe this is the fault of bad translation, but considering that this is Clamp we're talking about, I'm not so sure. After all, about 80% of the dialogue of MKR's first season seemed to be permutations of "power," "heart," "magic," and "the love I have for my friends," and how they're all interchangeable concepts.
Anyway, I'm ranting but really I have a big smile on my face. I enjoyed watching pretty animation, bad@$$ Clef, and stuff blowing up real good. And I enjoy things that are so ridiculously, unabashedly over-the-top that they don't NEED to care about a plot that makes sense. Because they're Clamp.
Okay, I admit--in certain contexts, I actually enjoy watching movie or OAV remakes that take an existing character set and completely shake them up. There are worse movie adaptations--Utena, I'm looking at you--but Clamp crack is already cracked, so yeah. They are a studio that exists to shake up and reorganize their characters, and to create pastiches to their own works. It's something you just accept when going into the Clamp universe. So I sat down and prepared to enjoy the ride.
There were some pretty cool things in there: awesome animation, awesome Clef, awesome--well, mainly just those two ^.^; But there were a couple of things that left me completely scratching my head, and I had to tell myself to not think too hard about anything and just enjoy the pretty.
I'll start with one minor point that irked me. Ferio. Okay, they redid him as a villain--fine. Okay, Ferio fights Fuu. Makes sense. Said villainous Ferio has an epiphany later on and switches sides, and later on he and Fuu have a conversation where they come to understand one another and seem to form a bond. Okay, fine, that stuff happens all the time in anime.
BUT. 1) The conversation they have doesn't seem to be the kind of revealing conversation that ought to lead to any sort of bond. It was all very vague and brief, so the resulting 'bond' felt kind of unconvincing, thrown in there because Ferio and Fuu are "supposed" to be together. 2) During their battle, Ferio admits to Fuu that he enjoys torturing people weaker than himself, AS A HOBBY. Even if he switches to the good side, Fuu, he is an admitted and unabashed SADIST. What. The. Heck.
But this pales in comparison to the most major piece of irksomeness: the writing. Whenever there is an info dump, it is so vague and couched in non-specific terms and full of strange logical leaps that by the end, I had no idea why anything was happening.
Okay, they want to write Emeraude as being trapped in a dream-world where her love Zagato is still alive, even though Cephiro is crumbling around her? Okay. But then, why do the people of Cephiro invade Earth, claiming that it's to fulfill Emeraude's wish? What wish? She only has one wish, and she thinks it's already been fulfilled, and it has NOTHING to do with invading the Earth or destroying anything. But the people make this strange logical leap that Emeraude wants them to come to Earth and destroy it, and/or take some 'divine test' that is never fully explained.
The closest we get to a true explanation is that Eagle, who is now her brother and immortal, is tired of living and wants to destroy everything. But even this is couched in vague terms and he still says it's for his sister's sake. Again, what part of "I want to be with my love Zagato" translates to "I want you to leave our failing world, invade another world and destroy it"?
So yeah. I'm sitting here scratching my head, and Eagle is all ready to summon his huge mecha when Emeraude wakes up from her dream world and realizes what's going on. She then orders Eagle to stop fighting, and instead to "build a future we believe in." Apparently she has learned this valuable (but vague) lesson from watching the Magic Knights--though how she derives this lesson from watching schoolgirls battle across Tokyo in giant mechs for all of thirty seconds in her magic viewing pool is beyond me.
It gets better. When a distraught Eagle asks Emeraude how he's supposed to do what she asks, her response is, I am not kidding, "We must believe in our hopes."
. . .
Let that sink in for a minute. Is it just me, or does it seem like the dialogue was written with the aid of a graduation-themed magnetic poetry kit?
Maybe this is the fault of bad translation, but considering that this is Clamp we're talking about, I'm not so sure. After all, about 80% of the dialogue of MKR's first season seemed to be permutations of "power," "heart," "magic," and "the love I have for my friends," and how they're all interchangeable concepts.
Anyway, I'm ranting but really I have a big smile on my face. I enjoyed watching pretty animation, bad@$$ Clef, and stuff blowing up real good. And I enjoy things that are so ridiculously, unabashedly over-the-top that they don't NEED to care about a plot that makes sense. Because they're Clamp.