Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing, from GKIDS

In the Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage “rhythm game,” virtual singers are sort of like the literary characters who come alive in Twilight Zone episodes, except it is a relatively common phenomenon. Supposedly, if real-life singers perform with enough emotion, they can bring their virtual collaborators to life and even join them in “Sekai,” special dedicated rooms in the dimension between the IRL and virtual worlds. Weirdly, several bands and their virtual “Mikus” encounter a mysterious new Miku who cannot connect musically in Hiroyuki Hata’s anime feature, Colorful Stage! The Movie: A Miku Who Can’t Sing, produced by animation house P.A. House and released by GKIDS, which starts a limited 4-day theatrical release today.

Move over Minecraft, because Hata and screenwriter Yoko Yonaiyama managed to adapt a game not unlike Guitar Hero or old-fashioned karaoke. However, there was a large cast of pre-existing characters whom Yonaiyama assumed the audience would already know. There is a bit of catching up to do, but astute viewers will hopefully pick things up as they go.

Several bands have connected with the own virtual collaborators in their specific Sekai. For Ichika Hoshino that would be Hatsume Miku, who is about the purest incarnation of a j-pop idol as you could envision. One day, she also encounters a new Miku, who looks somewhat similar, but is much less self-assured. She seems to travel through digital screens, producing static and distortions. Ironically, the frustration caused by her service disruptions makes new Miku’s challenge to connect on an emotional level even more difficult.

Nevertheless, the four bands she reaches out to do their best to help, but they cannot coordinate their efforts, because the alternate Miku communicates with them on different wavelengths, or something like that. They feel for her and the creators she is supposed to be attuned with. Unfortunately, the real-life people hardwired to her Sekai cannot reach it, because they are all mired in states of creative and emotional crisis. In fact, their aggregated depression could drag the new Miku down as well.

It bears repeating, the rules of the Colorful Stage world are a tad confusing for newcomers, but that is the general idea. Regardless, it is pretty impressive how Hata and Yonaiyama built a full feature length narrative out of a smart-phone game that previously spawned a dozen or so ultra-mini anime webisodes.

While there are some thematic similarities with Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle, Colorful Stage! The Movie serves up some interesting world-building. In fact, it would nicely fit with Belle, Summer Wars, The Matrix, Tron, and World on a Wire in film series exploring the porous border between the physical and digital worlds.

Mars Express, from GKIDS

Science fiction once reflected society’s concerns, but lately, it more often tries to shape and alter society’s worries instead. Horror has become a better barometer of our true collective anxieties. AI is a prime example. Horror depicts the potential deadly menace of AI in movies like M3gan. In contrast, sf tells us human beings are the bad guys, so AI constructs have more to fear from us than we do from them, in films like The Creator, Automata, The Artifice Girl, Ex Machina, and Chappie, many of which bombed at the box office. Can human and artificial consciousnesses just get along? The answer is complicated, but it boils down to probably not in Jeremie Perin’s GKIDS-released animated feature Mars Express, which opens this Friday in New York.

In the future, anybody who is anyone lives on Mars rather than the crummy old Earth. Artificial intelligence has achieved self-aware consciousness, but they are still bound prime directive programming—unless a cybernetic hacker “jailbreaks” them. Most of private investigator Aline Ruby’s work involves catching such criminals, at the behest robotics tycoon Chris Royjacker, with the help her partner, Carlos Rivera. Sadly, Rivera was killed several years ago, but they still work together, because he had the foresight to back-up his consciousness. Ruby fully accepts the back-up Rivera cyborg, but Rivera’s former family did not.

Recently, a rash of jailbreaks have led to violent robotic crime sprees. There seems to be a systemic effort to corrupt artificial intelligences. Ruby and Rivera quickly suspect it might be related to their latest case: the disappearance of a cybernetic programming student.

Mars Express is a cool-looking attempt to create a Ghost in the Shell-style world, with its own distinctive sociological take on human-AI interaction, inspired by Asimov’s laws of robotics. Perin and co-screenwriter Laurant Sarfati also shrewdly import elements of the noir detective genre. However, they inevitably return to same anti-human themes, inviting viewers to literally root against their own species.

Ironically, Mars Express is an animated film with deeply human characters. Ruby is a recovering alcoholic, who falters due to the stress of the case. Back-up Rivera yearns to reconnect with Rivera-prime’s family, but he cannot undue his former self’s mistakes or his ex-wife’s revulsion to his current physical form. (To be fair, the way his head hovers above his should, sans neck, is a bit disconcerting).

Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia

Evidently, society can learn a lot from a bear and a mouse. In their first film, Ernest and Celestine taught us a lesson in tolerance. This time around, they tackle artistic freedom and rigidly controlled labor markets. Sadly, there is little social or economic freedom in Gibberitia, Ernest’s hometown of bears. That is why he left in the first place. Unfortunately, he must return to have his prized Stradibearius violin fixed in Jean-Christophe Roger & Julian Chheng’s Ernests & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia, which opens Friday in New York, from GKIDS.

Ernest just woke up from a long sleep and boy is hungry, but there is no food in the house, so Celestine suggests they busk for money. Unfortunately, she trips on his slipper, breaking his beloved Stradibearius. The only luthier who can fix it lives in Gibberitia, so that is where she goes, with the reluctant Ernest trailing after her.

When they finally reach the Balkan-looking Gibberitia, Ernest finds it has drastically changed. All music consisting of more than one note is now forbidden and instruments are confiscated (ironically, some extreme punk could still be legal). However, there is an underground resistance, which presumably includes Ernest’s luthier, but they might not be so happy to see him. The law outlawing music is known as the “Ernestov Law,” named in his honor by his father, Nabokov, Gibberitia’s chief judge. He passed the anti-music regulations when his son left home to pursue music, rather than follow in his father’s jurist footsteps, as required by Gibberitian law and tradition.

Trip to Gibberitia takes an unexpectedly dystopian turn, but it works much better than the third act of Mark Osbourne’s The Little Prince. Clearly, the “-ov” suffixes added to the character names suggest a commentary on Russian authoritarianism, either from the Soviet past or the Putinic present. It is also easy to hear Eastern European influences in the score composed by jazz cellist Vincent Courtois, which further emphasizes the Iron Curtain vibe.

Japan Cuts ’23: The First Slam Dunk

Do you miss the joy of basketball, before the NBA became consumed with the pursuit of money from China? Ryota Miyagi and his teammates do not necessarily like each other, but they play with a pure love for the game. Despite their talent, nobody gives Okinawan students much of a chance against the defending Japanese high school champions, not even their fans, in Takehiko Inoue’s The First Slam Dunk, an animated adaptation of his manga, which screens as the opening night film of the 2023 Japan Cuts Festival of New Japanese Film.

As we see in flashbacks, Miyagi idolized his older brother Sota, who was one of the top basketball prospects in Japan. Tragically, Sota was lost in a boating accident, devastating Ryota. As a tribute to his older brother, Miyagi obsessively pursues his hoop dreams, even though his single mother has her reservations regarding the emotional toll.

Throughout their game against Sannoh, Miyagi keeps flashing back to memories of his brother. He also revisits some of his first encounters with his Shohoku teammates, like their outside shooter, who was once a bully, but Miyagi won him over, by taking his worst beating like a man.

Miyagi is quick, but undersized, so he struggles against Sannoh’s press. Their big man also gets into the head of Shohoku’s center. However, Miyagi’s Zen-like coach has faith and a knack for making the right moves.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror, from GKIDS

This portal fantasy world keeps bankers’ hours: nine to five, Japanese time. To get there, seven troubled middle-schoolers literally travel through the looking glass. What they find is more like a clubhouse than Narnia, but its rules still need to be respected in Keiichi Hara’s Lonely Castle in the Mirror, from GKIDS, which screens today and tomorrow nationwide.

Kokoro has almost entirely stopped attending school, after the bullying she faced drastically intensified, but she is too ashamed to explain it to her parents. Just when she really sinks into depression, “Ms. Wolf” pulls Kokoro through her mirror to a remote, fantastical castle, entirely surrounded by water, where six other confused middle schoolers are waiting.

They will have the run of the place until one of them finds a magic wish-granting key. Once they wish for their heart’s desire, all seven will lose their memories of the strange castle and of each other. Until then, they can spend as much time there as they like, as long as they leave by five. If they are caught after hours, they will be eaten by “the Wolf.”

Slowly, the seven become friends and discover the secrets they have in common. There always seem to be exceptions to their conclusions, but there are always good reasons for them. It is not entirely unfair to think of Lonely Castle as a Breakfast Club portal fantasy, but there is more to it than that. For one thing, it riffs on Little Red Riding Hood (Ms. Wolf sometimes even refers to the seven misfits as her “Riding Hoods”), much in the same way Belle riffed on Beauty & the Beast.

Unicorn Wars, from GKIDS

Remember during basic training, when your drill instructor told you war was a lot more than teddy bears and unicorns? (Most New York film critics can ignore this rhetorical question.) Turns out that was a good thing. This eternally running war between teddy bears and unicorns is both brutal and pointless. It makes you wonder just what good is war anyway, except for halting genocide, repelling illegal invasions, and liberating oppressed people—but aside from that, what is it good for? Regardless, the titular war is not good for anyone except maybe the privileged teddy bear officers in Alberto Vasquez’s Unicorn Wars, from GKIDS, which opens tomorrow in theaters.

Bluey and Tubby are two Kane and Abel teddy bear brothers, who are going through basic training together, Tubby acts like the shy, sensitive one, but Bluey is actually scared and damaged inside, due to his mother’s rejection. They recruits act like Care Bears around each other, but when the subject of unicorns comes up, they turn into blood-thirsty Z-emblazoned war criminals.

For years, the teddy bears have waged a genocidal war against unicorns, fueled by propaganda dressed up as ancient wisdom. According to legend, the teddy bear who drinks the blood of the “last unicorn” will gain super-heroic powers, sort of in the Highlander tradition. Of course, it doesn’t make sense. That is Vasquez’s statement on war.

It is hard to say whether Unicorn Wars works or not, because it greatly depends on Vasquez’s intentions. If he set out to make a film about unicorns and teddy bears that would shock and horrify parents that accidentally took their kids to it, then Unicorn Wars is a smashing success and completely worthy endeavor. However, if it was meant as a lofty anti-war statement then it is a clumsy, ham-fisted, rub-your-nose-in-it failure. At some point, when you are constantly getting hit over the head, it starts to drag. That point comes awfully quickly in Unicorn Wars.

New Gods: Yang Jian, from GKIDS

Like nearly every other Chinese mythical figure, Yang Jian (a.k.a. Erlang Shen) makes an appearance in Journey to the West, but he is more prominent in the classic novel, Creation of the Gods and the fairy tale, Lotus Lantern. Those are the sources director Zhao Ji and screenwriter Muchuan primarily draw from for the second film in their mythical News Gods animated franchise. There is also a lot of weirdness added to Zhao’s New Gods: Yang Jian, a GKIDS release, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Around a millennium and a half ago, the gods were sort of overthrown, but they are still around. Yang Jian is proof, as the offspring of a goddess and a mortal man. That kind interbreeding is frowned upon, but he was still hailed as a hero, until an ugly incident closed his third eye. During the battle, Yang Jian was forced to seal his goddess sister inside a mountain. Rumor has it, his reason for doing so was surprisingly lurid (really, GKID?), but—spoiler alert—such talk is slander.

Nevertheless, Yang Jian was forced to leave his nephew Chenxiang with his master to train. Mourning his sister and his powers, the demigod makes ends meet by working as a bounty hunter with the crew of his steampunky flying airship (we’re guessing this part is new). Most of them look like pirates, but their loyal panting dog sometimes physically transforms into an adoring teenage girl. Again, odd choice.

Things veer more towards Lotus Lantern and Creation of the Gods when Yang Jian is hired to find an outlaw who stole an ancient relic. Of course, his target turns out to be the still youthful Chenxiang, who is determined to use it to free his mother from the mountain. That puts both Yang Jian and his nephew in the middle of a cosmic power struggle that encompasses both the immortal and mortal realms. Or something like that.

Muchuan tells a highly convoluted story that gets even harder to follow with each whirling maelstrom the characters jump into. Not surprisingly, it works best when it is most grounded, following the misadventures of hardboiled, half-godlike bounty hunter, who has to fight using conventional martial arts.

Basically, Yang Jian makes the same mistake as Shang-Chi. They both establish likable heroes and put them through some nice early fight scenes, but their climaxes are empty noise. Probably the greatest martial arts movie finale was the showdown between Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris in Way of the Dragon. It had no whirlwinds or cosmic-rays, just two martial arts legends going toe-to-toe. That’s what movies like this should build towards, rather than incomprehensibly swirling magic.

At least Zhao finds a way to incorporate one very cool effect. During the course of the whooshing and swooshing, Yang Jian and Chenxiang get swept up inside a magic scroll, at which point the the animation shifts, replicating the style and color palette of ancient ink-wash painting. It looks amazing, even though the action is a little hard to follow.

Goodbye, Don Glees!, from GKIDS

Whenever a film invites us to share a group of friends’ last summer together, it is a near certainty we will see the final summer ever for one of them. Roma Kamogawa will definitely have his Big Chill moments, but he does not carry any ex-hippy-boomer baggage, so it is easier to identify with and feel for him in Atsuko Ishizuka’s anime feature Goodbye, Don Glees!, which screens nationwide over the coming days.

Kamogawa’s boyhood friend Toto Mitarai will sort of explain why he named their club of two the “Don Glees,” but it doesn’t really make sense, so don’t worry about it. They had to stick together through middle school, but Mitarai’s domineering father sent him to Tokyo for high school. Now that he is back after freshman year, Mitarai clearly considers Kamogawa a bit of a towny, which makes him embarrassing. He is also more than a little put off by Kamogawa’s new friend.

Shizuku “Drop” Sakuma is somewhat younger than they are, but Kamogawa enjoys his energy and earnestness (whereas Mitarai, not so much). Unfortunately, their private store-bought fireworks ritual goes somewhat awry, especially when their snobby peers point to it, scapegoating them for a freak forest fire. To prove their innocence, the trio sets off on a quest to find an errant drone they hope recorded exculpatory footage.

Nobody does teen angst better than anime filmmakers. This is another good example. Admittedly, Roma and Toto are a bit dense when it comes to picking up on Drop’s fatalistic carpe diem asides, but Ishizuka definitely understands the emotional mindset of young teens. In fact, her story takes on surprising depth and complexity, especially when it reaches the third act (or maybe it is actually a really long epilogue). Regardless, she ties everything together beautifully and even hints at the mildly fantastical.

Fantasia ’22: Inu-Oh

How does some heavy biwa sound to you? To the Shogun, it sounds disruptive and dangerous. He is also not very appreciative of the “new” stories from the Tales of the Heike that have made two itinerant performers a sensation in divided Muromachi-era Japan. Art and authority do not mix well in Masaaki Yuasa’s future cult-classic, Inu-Oh, which screened at this year’s Fantasia International Film Festival.

As is often the case in Japanese history, the Heike clan lost their war with the Genji, but they got all the glory (albeit tragic glory). Supposedly, you can still hear the voices of their samurai murmuring from the river where their fleet drowned. Tomona is the kind of sensitive artist who can pick-up their whispers.

As a boy, his father died and he was blinded when the Shogun retained their diving services to retrieve a politically sensitive relic from the river. Having little conventional prospects, the now-sightless teen apprenticed to become a biwa troubadour-priest, but he rejected the traditional shaved head and monks’ robes, in favor of a rock & roll style. That appeals to Inu-Oh’s sensibilities. The frustrated actor and dancer was disowned by his father, a celebrated Noh performer, because of his physical and facial deformities. Even while bizarrely masked, Inu-Oh is a crowd-pleasing performer, especially when he teams up with Tomona. Inevitably, their popularity stirs the jealous ire of the Shogun and Inu-Oh’s arrogant father.

Tomona follows in a long line of sight-challenged Biwa players in  films, starting with Hoichi in the classic Kwaidan and continuing with the one-eyed Kubo in Kubo and the Two Strings. Neither of them played like Tomona. Jethro Tull fans in particular should really dig the fusion of hard rock with traditional (almost pastoral) instrumentation. The musical sequences are extensive, to the point of defining the film’s character and vibe, rather than incidental or episodic. You just can’t miss Tomona wailing on his biwa, like Pete Townsend in his prime.

Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, from GKIDS

Yes, all parents are embarrassing, but Nikuko is in a league of her own. Yet, her daughter Kikuko never judges her too harshly, because she understands her better than even her mother realizes. Life dealt Nikuko a lot of disappointments, but at least she has her daughter in Ayumu Watanabe’s Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko, from Studio 4ºC and GKIDS, which screens nationwide tonight (and opens Friday in select theaters).

Big-hearted and big-boned Nikuko has a long history of getting involved with the wrong men, who inevitably took advantage of her. The last was arguably the best of the bad lot, so Kikuko sort of understood when her mother dragged her to his sleeping fishing village-hometown, afraid he had fled there to take his own life. They never found him, but they decided to stay and make a home there.

Nikuko works for the gruff but protective Sassan at his seafood grill and they rent his ramshackle houseboat. Boys are not really a factor yet in tomboyish Kikuko’s life, but she is reasonably friendly with her fellow girls at school. In fact, she is courted by two basketball-playing cliques, because of her height, but she is uncomfortable committing to either side. However, her anxiety is probably really coming from a fear Nikuko will uproot them again.

Despite being a slice-of-life story (think of as a Japanese Beaches, but with less weepy melodrama), Lady Nikuko features some wonderfully vivid animation. The coastal village and surrounding environment sparkle on-screen quite invitingly. (It is easy to believe this came from the same animation house that brought us Tekkonkinkreet.) Ironically, there is a far more visual dazzle in this film than Watanabe’s more fantastical Children of the Sea.

Hosoda’s Belle

It is an event, like the Wachowski’s returning to the Matrix, but Mamoru Hosoda creating another virtual world of avatars is exponentially more interesting. In Hosoda’s Summer Wars, the events within the fictional online OZ held potentially disastrous implications for the real, physical world. Technically, Susu Naito never confronts an imminent apocalypse when she enters the virtual “U,” but she still faces life-and-death stakes IRL, based on her actions as an avatar idol in Hosoda’s Oscar-qualified Belle, which opens Friday in New York.

Naito has been depressed and socially withdrawn for years, since her mother heroically died saving an endangered child (who happened to be someone else’s kid). The high school student has one friend, the brutally caustic computer nerd “Hiro” Betsuyaku. She also has a protector, big-man-on-campus Shinobu Hisatake, who would probably like to be something more, but she just can’t see it in her present state of mind. Tellingly, she has been unable to sing since her mother’s death, but when Betsuyaku helps her reinvent in U as “Belle” (derived from Susu, which means “bell”), she becomes the most popular singer on the virtual platform. Yet, nobody but Hiro knows her true identity, because of U’s strict anonymity.

That also means nobody knows who “The Dragon” is either. He started be beating the heck out of everyone in U’s MMA tournaments, but his anti-social behavior inevitably attracts the attention of U’s self-appointed guardians of order. Frankly, their efforts to unmask Dragon’s identity might be even more disruptive than his rage-benders. Nevertheless, Naito/Belle intuitively feels the pain below his bruised exterior.

Acting on instinct, Belle manages to follow Dragon to his castle-lair hidden in the outer regions of U. There he broods with the company of loyal AI creature-servants. It looks very much like Beauty & the Beast, but Hosoda is only playing with the fable’s imagery. The secret of Dragon (sometimes actually referred to as the “Beast”) is entirely different from any of his movie, TV, or fairy tale predecessors.

In fact, Belle resonates so deeply as a film because it makes it clear what happens in physical reality is much more gravely important than the rivalries of avatars in U. However, Naito must navigate U as Belle in order to reach the real Dragon, who does indeed need her, whether he admits it or not. As a result, Belle is probably the most emotionally fulfilling GKIDS release since Ride Your Wave (on par with Poupelle of Chimney Town, which they missed out on).

Visually, it is also stunning. For Belle, Hosoda assembled an Expendables-level team of animators, including Jin Kim (formerly of Disney) to design Belle and Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart (acclaimed for Song of the Sea and Wolfwalkers) for the fantastical world-building. Frankly, the resulting animation is even more impressive than the baroque and trippy Summer Wars.

Lupin III: The First

Ahnenerbe was a National Socialist think tank that dissolved ignominiously in 1945, but it has had a weirdly lasting influence on pseudoscientific paranormal archaeology. Many of those prehistoric alien “reality” TV shows would have been right up their alley. However, the secret underground surviving members of Ahnenerbe finally meet their match in a roguish master thief, the grandson of the notorious Arsene Lupin. After building an international fanbase in a long-running manga series, five editions of an anime TV series, numerous specials, and six previous anime theatrical features (including Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki’s feature directorial debut), the endearing cat burglar gets the full 3DCG animated treatment in Takashi Yamazaki’s Lupin III: The First, which releases Tuesday on DVD.

Everyone is after the “Bresson Diary,” when it is displayed as part of an exhibition of the late French archaeologist’s work, but it is the sticky-fingered Lupin who snags it. However, he agrees to team up with Laetitia, an earnest young archaeology student, who had been manipulated by Dr. Lambert, her evil adopted grandfather, into nearly stealing the diary herself, in order to learn its secrets.

She and Lupin quickly figure out the diary reveals the hidden location of the “Eclipse,” an ancient invention of vast power. Of course, Lambert’s employers at Ahnenerbe would use it to re-establish the Reich. To foil their scheme, Lupin enlists the help of his regular cronies, Daisuke Jigen and Goemon Ishikawa XIII (the direct descendant of the celebrated “Robin Hood” samurai), as well as his friendly rival Fujiko Mine and his incorruptible nemesis, Inspector Zenigata (having transferred from the Tokyo Police to Interpol).

III: The First (which it isn’t, but whatever), has a lot of rollicking period action that is a lot of fun. You can see the influence of Raiders of the Lost Ark all over the film. Yet, beyond the impressive 3DCG animation, stuff like story, character development, and English voice performances are basically on the level of a really good Naruto feature film. It is entertaining, but it does not feel as “special” as most of the anime films GKIDS distributes (like Miss Hokusai, Napping Princess, Nightis Short Walk on Girl, Ride Your Wave, etc.).

Promare, from GKIDS and Studio Trigger

Evidently, the futuristic megalopolis known as Promepolis is a lot like today’s California. Fires can break out anywhere without warning and the agencies responsible for fighting them are more apt to fight among themselves. Fortunately, stout-hearted Galo Thymos never flags in his duties as a member of the elite Burning Rescue unit. Unfortunately, he is dumb as a post, but he is still the best hope for saving the Earth in Hiroyuki Imaishi’s Promare, produced by Studio Trigger, which opens this Friday in New York, following special nationwide Fathom Events screenings tonight and Thursday.

Initially, the catastrophic fires were the result of spontaneous combustion brought on by society’s collective rage. Three decades later, humanity has cooled off considerably, but we are still plagued by incidents of terrorist-arson deliberately caused by the fire-wielding “Mad Burnish” mutants. They are convinced the fire speaks to them and it wants them to unleash it. The thing is, that turns out to be largely true. In fact, there is much more to the Mad Burnish outlaws than government propaganda suggests, as Thymos learns when he is forced to team up with their youthful leader, Lio Fortia, naturally to save the world. This is an anime film, after all.

Promare has a lot of splashy colors and some hard-charging mecha action, but the characters are mostly broad stock-figures, including Thymos and Fortia. Frankly, there really isn’t a Burning Rescue team-member or Mad Burnish rebel who you would really want to spend time with in the real world—and Thymos is probably the only one most viewers will remember after screening Promare.

One the other hand, Imaishi does some nifty world-building and he drops some genuinely game-changing revelations on multiple occasions. This is definitely a film for fans of mecha-hardware fighting and crashing. Stuff definitely goes boom in this film—often. Still, it inevitably calls up comparisons to established mecha franchises, like Evangelion and Mazinger Z, which is probably to be expected, since character designer Shigeto Koyama is a veteran of the former.

Imaishi never lets up on the action and his animation is appealingly bright and bold. Promare will never bore anyone, but it lacks the sophistication of other science fiction anime released by GKIDS, such as Patema Inverted and Napping Princess (a.k.a. Ancien and the Magic Tablet). It is fun, but light-weight. Recommended for serious anime fans, Promare opens this Friday (9/20) in New York, at the Metrograph and screens nationwide via Fathom Events tonight (9/17) and Thursday (9/19).

Another Day of Life, from GKIDS

In 1981, Ryszard Kapuscinski was fired for supporting Solidarity, but back in 1975, as a journalist in good standing from a Soviet satellite state, he was granted rock star access by the Marxist MPLA during the Angolan Civil War. He duly took their side, as is clearly depicted in Raul de la Fuente & Damian Nenow’s Another Day of Life, which opens this Friday in New York.

Unfortunately, Kapuscinski is no longer with us. If he were, he might have a few choice words to say about Rafael Marques de Morais and Mariano Bras, two journalists who successful defended themselves against criminal defamation charges after they dared to report on the attorney general’s corruption. Sadly, none of Kapuscinski’s surviving comrades who are seen during the film’s live action talking head sequences have anything to say about the lack of press freedoms during the MPLA’s uninterrupted single-party rule that they and Kapuscinski helped bring about. At least, Kapuscinski is seen struggling with the fundamental issue of how reporters change events just through their very presence.

Nevertheless, it is still pretty compelling to watch the stumble-faced Kapuscinski venture towards the southern front, in hopes of scoring an interview with Farrusco, a legendary Portuguese paratrooper who crossed over to the MPLA side. To get past the initial checkpoints, he enlists the help of Artur, a native Angolan journalist, but for the journey through the southern war zone, he convinces the MPLA to assign him Carlotta, the star soldier of MPLA’s propaganda campaign, as his escort (by promising her commander fawning press coverage).

You have to wonder if de la Fuente, Nenow, and their three co-screenwriters recognize the irony of the climax, involving Kapuscinski deliberate decision to exclude mention of the Cuban military’s armed intervention in the country, to prevent the American military from moving to counter them. It is indeed absolutely fair to ask about the implications of Kapuscinski’s decisions—in fact, it is conspicuously absent. Clearly something is profoundly amiss with the management of a nation with considerable diamond and petroleum reserves, but its per capita GDP is estimated below $4,000 US.

Frankly, it is surprising how biased Another Day is in favor of the oppressive MPLA, especially since it was co-helmed by Nenow, whose memorable short Paths of Hate depicts the dehumanization of war in a way that eschews ideology. Still, it certainly portrays Kapuscinski as a complex and conflicted character, rather than a standard-bearing revolutionary.

The animation of Another Day is quite similar in style to that of Paths of Hate. Both are quite stylish visually, so it is too bad GKIDS isn’t screening the 85-minute feature with the short, as they have sometimes done in the past. Regardless, the feature’s biases are so distractingly obvious and so many glaring questions are left dangling in the air (like what happened over the next forty-four years?), it greatly detracts from Kapuscinski’s character study. Not recommended, Another Day of Life opens this Friday (9/13) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, from GKIDS

Luis Buñuel is easily the most important surrealist in cinema history. You could also say he was one of the early pioneers of the true-in-spirit hybrid-documentary. Just like his previous films, the 27-minute Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan or Land Without Bread immediately stirred controversy and was duly banned for years. Truth and artistic license jostle each other while witnessing the depths of Spanish poverty in Salvador Simo Busom’s animated making-of feature, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles, which opens today in New York, courtesy of GKIDS.

When Buñuel started developing the documentary that would become Land Without Bread, his reputation as a filmmaker essentially rested on two films, Un Chien Andalou, the short film that commenced his collaboration with Salvador Dali and L’Age d’Or, the hour-long satire that pointedly ended it. Both works generated explosive outrage as well as reverence within avant-garde circles. There are frequent references to Buñuel’s frosty relationship with Dali throughout the film, but the psychological influence of his distant and domineering father will be more significant.

Despite his baggage, Buñuel can be charming, at least at this early stage of his career, but also maddening. Just ask his anarchist friend, Ramón Acín Aquilué, who jokingly promised to fund Buñuel’s proposed documentary exposing the desperate living conditions in the Las Hurdes region—and kept his word when it came to pass. However, Acín was most definitely not made of money, which inevitably led to conflict with the not-so practical auteur.

Although most of the film is animated, Simo periodically inserts archival footage from Land Without Bread, cutting back and forth to show us what was happening on both sides of the camera. The way he and editor Jose Manuel Jimenez marry the two styles of footage together is enormously clever and visually striking.

Clearly, Simo has a great deal of sympathy for Buñuel, but the film is not a starry-eyed exercise in hagiography. Instead, he provides a complete portrait of the artist, including his tendencies to be a bit of a user and a flake. Even though Simo takes us pretty extensively into Buñuel’s head, it is still hard to decide what to make of him. Look, geniuses are complicated.

Regardless, Labyrinth of the Turtles (a reference to Las Hurdes’ tortoise shell-like roofs) is an entertaining and erudite primer on Buñuel’s early development as an artist. Simo’s animation is quite elegant, in a style befitting the 1930s, but he mixes in some wild, Freudian flights of fancy that are quite in keeping with the Buñuelian spirit.

In fact, Simo and co-screenwriter Eligio R. Montero will probably motivate a lot of intrigued viewers to take a deep dive into the Buñuel filmography. Yet, they avoid getting bogged down in problematic politics of the era. Altogether, it is probably the most fitting big-screen treatment of the larger-than-life auteur you could ever hope for. Highly recommended for fans of sophisticated animation, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles opens today (8/16) in New York, at the Quad.

Funan: GKIDS’ Next Masterwork of International Animation

Parenting is so bourgeoisie. Under the Khmer Rouge, there was no need for such old-fashioned capitalist conventions. They took care of child-rearing, splitting up families for years. It was cradle-to-grave socialism, with an emphasis on the grave. Chou and Khuon will try to survive the camps and endure years of separation from their young son Sovanh in Cambodian-French filmmaker Denis Do’s remarkable animated feature Funan, which opens today in New York.

Chou and Khuon never really saw the rise of Angkor coming, but there is very little they could have done to prepare. Like everyone else, they suddenly found themselves on a forced march from Phnom Penh to the countryside. In the chaos, they lose sight of Sovanh, but that hardly matters to the Khmer Rouge guards, because they would have been split up soon enough anyway. However, Chou finds absolutely no solace in that fact. She bitterly resents Khuon’s acquiescence, insisting he should have deserted their cadre to find their son. Their relationship will fray, but they still must stick together to have any hope of survival.

Funan is visually stunning and emotionally devastating. Do uses the lush, verdant Cambodian landscapes as an ironic (and enormously cinematic) counterpoint to the cruelty and madness that surrounds his characters. Family members die with grim regularity, but it just rips your heart out each time it happens. Technically, Do keeps most of the violence off-screen, but certainly not the suffering and tragedy.

The artistry of Do and his team of animators is so clearly evident, nobody could seriously deny it. Instead, some critics uncomfortable with Funan’s forthrightness have tagged it “cliched,” but the truth is quite the contrary. Chou and Khuon do not suffer nobly and stoically. They hurt each other and act badly, but still remain bound by love. Really, this is an unusually honest and complex portrayal of human emotions under extreme and prolonged stress.

In all honesty, if GKIDS does not finally win an Oscar with Funan than the Academy should just level with everyone and change their name to “The Official Disney/Pixar Awards.” It is an important and, in some ways, timely film (considering the recent vogue for socialism among millennials and presidential candidates), but it is even more fundamentally a work of great artistic merit and humanism.

(As an aside, Do previously made The Ribbon, an achingly beautiful and tragic four-minute short film set amid Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Hopefully, GKIDS can pair them together at some screenings, as they have sometimes done with their shorter features, because both films truly deserve to be seen.)

Regardless, this is genuinely vibrant animation, in service of a deeply haunting film. Very highly recommended, Funan opens today (6/7) in New York, at the IFC Center.

Okko’s Inn, from GKIDS and Madhouse

You could definitely say this film is more honest than the Caspar cartoons, but it forthrightly acknowledges the ghosts of young children imply something quite sad. Alas, nobody knows bereavement better than the title character. She lost her parents in a freak auto accident, so she now lives at her grandmother’s country hotel. Much to her surprise, the ghosts she finds there might help her reach some closure in Kitaro Kosaka’s Okko’s Inn, which has two special screenings next week via Fathom Events and GKIDS.

Oriko “Okko” Seki had picture perfect parents, so their sudden death leaves her reeling. Nevertheless, she is still resilient enough to try to make the best of it when her stern grandmother takes her in. She quickly makes friends with Uri-bo, a little boy ghost who has silently watched over her grandmother since she was a young girl. She has more trouble with Miyo Akino, another young ghosty, who is, or rather was the older sister of Okko’s new rival, Matsuki Akino, the heir apparent of a tony resort nearby.

Actually, Uri-bo and Miyo can both be a little annoying at times, but the film (based on Hiroko Reijo’s YA novels) still has a massive and infectious heart. When Okko really comes to terms with the circumstances of her parents’ death, you are absolutely guaranteed to get a little choked up (or maybe a lot). As an added bonus, Okko’s relationship with Matsuki evolves in ways that are somewhat surprising, but definitely rewarding and smart.

The animation of Madhouse (the studio that produced Summer Wars and Paprika) is not quite at the level of Studio Ghibli or the best of Makoto Shinkai, but it is still quite lovely. There is some goofy bedlam with the young ghosts that could have been reigned in a little, but there is no doubt this film connects on an emotional level. In fact, Reiko Yoshida’s screenplay adaptation of Reijo’s novels is shrewdly crafted to maximize the dramatic whammies.

In many ways, Okko’s Inn is a textbook example of anime films. That also includes an aptitude for addressing heavy life events in a way that is accessible for younger viewers. Anyone who enjoyed Ghibli films like When Marnie Was There or Mamoru Hosoda’s Mirai should respond similarly to Okko. Recommended with affection for anime fans, Okko’s Inn screens in theaters nationwide on Monday (4/22) and Tuesday (4/23), including the AMC Empire in New York.