One of my favourite Japanese movies is a film by former comedian, now actor/director, Kitano Takeshi, entitled Hana-bi. Hana-bi is a gritty, minimalist cop drama about a broken down detective who takes revenge on the yakuza while his wife dies from leukemia. Hana-bi is, in my opinion, the best of Kitano’s minimalist crime dramas that he made in the ’90s, and the difference in tone between them and the manzai comedy he did at the beginning of his career, when he performed with the stage name “Beat Takeshi”, is the size of a chasm. I find Kitano an absolutely fascinating and creative human being: many of the ideas in Hana-bi‘s script were inspired by a near fatal motorcycle accident Kitano was involved in, and his subsequent rehabilitation. In his career, he’s done slapstick comedy, morose yakuza thrillers, sex comedies, sword fighting historical set pieces, romance fantasies, coming-of-age stories, cop movies, etc. The range in incredible. He once said in an interview that he never wants to be pigeonholed. I daresay he’s on track. (This post contains major spoilers for the tagged titles.)

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Copyright © 2011 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 6 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Claymore, Code Geass Hangyaku no Lelouch, Hana-bi, Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni

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As a generalization, critics tend to prefer titles that do something different, when it comes to genres. That could be trying to mix two or more genres in a way that hasn’t been done before, subvert commonly used tropes or start out with an unconventional premise. Suzumiya Haruhi is one of the more prominent recent examples of a simply bizarre genre mix that (many) critics went wild for… although, this genre mix is the exact same reason why it divided audiences. But there’s value to a really well executed genre piece. An overt sense of ambition is always good, but it’s certainly not impossible to make a compelling anime series that doesn’t really do anything that’s genuinely new, let alone something that hasn’t been seen time and again before. In this post I’ll be presenting a short list of anime that play well within the boundaries of their respective genres, and probably have a list of tropes as long as my sister’s Christmas wishlist (zing), but still turned out to be (to varying extents) better than the average anime in their respective genres. Feel free to add your own titles to this list.

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Copyright © 2008 Behind The Nihon Review. All licensed material are owned by their respective parties.
By Sorrow-kun | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to StumbleUpon | Tweet! | reddit
Post tags: Claymore, Lamune, Minami-ke, Nagasarete Airantou, Natsume Yuujinchou, The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi

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