FunBlog

WALL-E, a gentle children’s sci-fi movie from Disney and Pixar, starts out on a future Earth that has been abandoned by humans because it has been covered with garbage. The hero, a robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, spends his days picking up the trash, crushing it into cubes with his built-in trash compactor, and stacking the cubes into gigantic pyramids.

He has been at this for 700 years. His fellow robots have all broken down. His only companion is a pet cockroach which he feeds with 700-year-old Twinkies (still good as new.)

One day a spaceship lands and disgorges a beautiful, shiny flying robot named EVE. WALL-E is instantly infatuated. EVE turns out to be sort of a robot tsundere, but he eventually wins her over. (Awww…Robot love!)
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Rumiko Takahashi is best known for sprawling epics that go on and on seemingly forever, but this series suggests that her greatest talent is writing short stories. Each of the 13 episodes is an independent short story. The stories are clever and whimsical, though sometimes with dark elements. All are set in modern Japan. The only connection between them is that sometimes you can catch glimpses of characters from other stories.

Many manga artists and anime writers prefer to work with fantastic characters or exotic foreign locations. Here however the characters are fairly realistic, even though some of the stories have fantasy elements. The milieu seems very Japanese; an American could probably learn a lot about Japanese society just from watching this series.
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OK, let’s agree up front that I’m not in the target demographic for this movie. I watched a few episodes of the TV series and found the story of four rich, witty and somewhat shallow young women trying to make it in New York City mildly amusing, but not amusing enough to watch regularly.

The movie is pretty much like the TV show, but with a bit more nudity. (Or if you’ve been watching on basic cable, a lot more nudity.) Probably most readers are already familiar with the TV show and thus already know whether they would like the movie.
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Well, it seems to be official. Rumiko Takahashi will finally bring the InuYasha manga to an end with the next issue. That’s 558 chapters in 56 volumes over a period of almost 12 years. Will the ending be worth it? Come on. There’s no story in the world that justifies 56 volumes. I suspect most fans feel more exhausted than thrilled at this point.

But what about the anime series that ended 4 years ago, having caught up to the manga and run out of material? Will some animation studio pick up the series and finish it, now that it has an ending? Or will fans who slogged through the first 167 episodes be left without ever knowing whether Naraku got his just deserts, and whether Inuyasha and Kagome ever got off the dime and admitted their feelings for each other?
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Dreamworks brings us a new animated film which is both funny and a worthy addition to the canon of great Kung Fu movies.

The story is set in ancient China, where Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), a large tortoise who invented Kung Fu, has a vision that tells him that Tai Lung (Ian McShane), an evil snow leopard, will soon escape from prison and lay waste to the valley. He decides to find a worthy student to whom to give the Dragon Scroll, which will grant invincibility.

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is sure that the honor will go to one of his five top students: Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper or Crane (played respectively by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, and David Cross.)
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This recent anime hasn’t received much attention and I think it deserves more. It’s short and amusing; rather dark but witty and cute.

This is a set of traveler’s tales, where the characters arrive at a new town in each episode and get involved in some local story. It’s tempting to compare it to Kino’s Journey–except that if Kino’s Journey were a shoujo series and the protagonist were a cute but bratty little sorceress, and the stories were more spooky than satirical, it wouldn’t be Kino’s Journey at all.
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Rumiko Takahashi is surely the most successful living manga artist, and the most influential since Osamu Tezuka. Just about every anime fan is familiar with at least some of her work, including popular series like Inuyasha and Ranma 1/2. This one is less well-known. It is much shorter than most of her other works, and also much darker. (Inuyasha has some dark moments, but it alternates them with much lighter material.)

Takahashi’s success is largely due to the fact that she is a good storyteller (though she tends to have trouble bringing a long series to a conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.) This is evident here: the stories are unsettling but compelling.
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