Kizumonogatari II: Nekketsu-hen

about a year from now,I wouldn't have seen myself overall enjoying this much of the monogatari series. But after each series I enjoyed more and more of it and before I knew it, I was hooked. It was a HARD journey.Episodes and episodes of dialogue, confusion , and the use of wikipedia followed but the stories got better and I expected for the next series to get no better or worse. UNTIL I SAW THIS MOVIE Kizumonogatari II is part of a trilogy of movies that takes place at the VERY VERY VERY beginning of everything in the monogatari universe; before Kanberu, before Mayoi , and evenbefore Hitagi. There was only Shinobu, Hanekawa, and Arararararagi. These three movies are pretty much a depiction of the first 86 seconds of the first episode of Bakemonogatari. Arararagi is just walking, gets a nice upskirt shots of Hanekawa and runs through a freaking wall literally to pick up some stuff.Next thing you know, he stumbles across this vampire with no limps, freaks out , and eventually gets bitten by said vampire and now is a vampire himself, and if that wasn't enough, he gets caught on fire and gets attacked by these vampire hunters who apparently stole the vampire's limbs.He now is on a quest to take back those limbs and save Kiss-shot Acerola-orion Heart-under-blade and return her back to her original form. What I really like about this concept is the way it's executed.Between each battle, Araragi is either talking with Hanekawa, or with Kisshot and Oshino but whats different about this series instead of the others in the monogatari series, its that this movie fixes major problems I had while watching Bakemonogatari, IT WASN'T BORING! At no time during the movie did I feel bored or sleepy.Even during the dialogue because at this time of the show Araragi wasn't talking with five different other people.Also at times that didn't have to do with the story, my attention was still had because of SHAFT's spectacular animation and awesome music. The animation is another thing I had a problem with in Bakemonogatari , not because it wasn't good, but only because SHAFT only showed the good bits of it on Bluray which is expensive as crap.BUT this movie was theatrically released so SHAFT couldn't do that and OHH MY GOODNESS THIS MOVIE LOOKS FREAKING AMAZING.I may sound bias, but I think that this show trumps over Your Name when it comes to animation. Don't get me wrong,Your Name looks beautiful but Kizumonogatari II is more exaggerated and insane with their animation and it fits the craziness of the movie.The over the top fights and character movements looks like so much effort has been put into it to showoff SHAFT's abilities.Also with the artsy fartsy style, unbelievable architecture, and sooo many shades of red, you can already tell what studio made this. The reason why the soundtrack is awesome is because it's different. The soundtrack is made up techno, jazz, and beautiful vocals.I honestly don't remember the last time I watched a show that used so much jazz.I can't recommend enough to listen to the soundtrack if you can. The characters in this movie are.......very different. Hanekawa, I don't why, but she does a good job at being a comic relief character, a damsel in distress,and a heroine at different times in the movie.Araragi is still funny, awkward and perverted but there are times in the movie where he loses it and becomes a badass its very nice to see.There is Oshino and Kisshot too, but they don't really do anything in the movie because they're not supposed to yet.I like how after each fight Kisshot starts turning more and more hotter. These villans are some crazy villians too just by their names alone.Dramaturgy, Episode,and GuillotineCutter. I really like their superpowers and stuff two. Like Dramaturgy is this muscled vampire with knives for hands , Episode carries this huge cross, and GuillotineCutter has.. a book. .In the end,Kizumonogatari II was funny action,packed , well animated and has a great soundtrack.What's weird about this movie was that it was some of the first events to occur but was also one of the latest to be released. But you should definately give it a go since this starts off the monogatari story chronologically.There are also two other movies. The first one was a bit boring and the third one hasn't come out yet, so hopefully it won't let me down. Years from now when I look at examples of amazing animation ,this would definately be one of the first to stand out from the rest.Once the bluray comes out I will try my hardest to pick up a copy and love it forever.I think this is absolutely a staple that stands out in SHAFT's works and really deserves praise. Overall-10 If your mad over me thinking this is better animated than Your Name, WATCH THIS MOVIE and see what i'm talking about.

(Spoilers for the first movie, obviously.) Shaft continues to adapt the best Monogatari story extremely well. I'm giving it a perfect ten out of ten, but it does have a problem: the way it was presented. Kizu should never have been split into three parts. It just doesn't work, for reasons I'll discuss below. But that's Aniplex's problem, not Kizu's. So I don't count that against this movie. The animation continues to be amazing. There's no single moment as glorious as the "Araragi on fire" scene from the first movie, but a great many scenes look very neat. Additionally, the voice acting and soundtrack continue to beon-point - which is no surprise. These VAs have proven themselves countless times over the course of this series. I shouldn't even have to tell you this. The direction is noticeably good, especially in the comedy department. The comedic timing, the visual metaphors, the sound effects, and so on enhance the humor of each scene. Additionally, the fights are very well-choreographed. It's easy to tell where each character is at any given time (unless you're not supposed to), and the developments in each fight are believable. The story here is geared heavily toward developing Araragi as a character and showing how special he and Kissshot are compared to other vampires. The "intensity as a human" theme in particular receives very heavy focus, with the story developments constantly encouraging the viewer to evaluate Araragi's "intensity as a human," in both a literal and figurative sense. Dramaturgy, Episode, and Guillotinecutter exist mainly as devices to illustrate how strong the iron-blooded, hot-blooded, and cold-blooded vampire really is - this is made clear immediately with the reasoning under which the Dramaturgy fight ends. As Araragi grows more accustomed to using his vampire powers, we learn more and more how strong Kissshot was, which leads us to think about how she got into her current predicament and what values she holds. Of course, the main focus of the character development is on Araragi and Hanekawa, and they get it in spades. I really shouldn't even have to talk about this. Additionally, Kissshot gains the body of a teenager in this movie, so Shaft is now allowed to sexualize her. We get a nude shot, we get some thigh shots, and we even get some butt shots. Strangely, though, this is actually overshadowed by the Araragi fan service. The guy's a hunk! No wonder Hanekawa got so flustered when he took off his shirt. Nekketsu gives us the action scenes that were promised in the first movie and provides nice set-up for the third movie, where the careful character development we've seen in our vampires will reach its climax. However, this begs the question: why did this have to be split into three movies? Other people have said this before, but Kizu is a very textbook three-act story. And a movie needs to have more than one act in it to be interesting - with only one act per movie, the tone is more or less the same throughout each one, until the next movie comes out and it changes. The Kizu movies are more suited to the binge-watcher than the theatergoer: it's much better to see all three in one sitting, with maybe short intermissions between each act. In short, here's what I'm saying: watch this movie, but not yet. Wait until Reiketsu is in theaters near you. Watch Tekketsu, then watch this, and then go to the theater and watch Reiketsu. It's best to have the entire story fresh in your mind as you watch each one. And if Reiketsu doesn't come to theaters near you... well, at least watch this one right after Tekketsu, since it'll probably be hard to wait for the Reiketsu BDs.

But enough about the price. Let's talk about whether Kizumonogatari actually lived up to its promise this time with its second installment. In case you've forgotten, the first part of this serial movie release had Shinobu get turned into a little girl for reasons that I can't be assed to explain the biology of, and Araragi must use his newly acquired vampire powers to defeat a group of supernatural individuals "shonen tournament"-style in order to get the body parts our Heart-Angel-Blade needs to swallow in order to go from "you masturbate to her and you'll get arrested" to "you masturbate to her and you'll gethumiliated". Thanks to his newly acquired vampire body, Araragi is basically a non-shining version of a Twilight vampire with his toned body and fighting skills, along with the usual regenerative powers, so of course the movie will exploit the shit out of it with over-the-top fight scenes, Araragi bleeding like a geyser in order to showcase how dangerous his opponents are, and making fangirls squee harder than when Sora in Kingdom Hearts II sung "Under the Sea". This is what all those years of production were for, fanboys. Pure fanservice that I seem to recall Madhouse accomplishing with a far less time-consuming schedule back when attaching their name to an anime actually meant something. Hanekawa also shows up for no reason other than fanservice. No seriously, that's it. Her cat powers don't seem to exist as of yet and she contributes nothing to the plot but overlong "comedic" banter without the humor and giving Araragi a motive to fight harder, because apparently his loli-fetish for a vampire who doesn't wear underwear is not the best choice for drawing out his true inner strength. She also has this weird habit of just teleporting to where Araragi is at the most plot-convenient moment, just in time to get her guts ripped out or to discover that the only teenage boy that seems to exist in this world is going to be young and hot forever. And because nobody seems to exist in the Monogatari universe but the main characters, it's really distracting how much this movie doesn't bother to clarify why she'd be wandering around these battle arenas in the first place, especially given how these fight scenes always take place in the middle of the night. Is her favorite grocery store in the area? Is her internal clock set in Western Hemisphere time? What? I'm having a really hard time describing the plot to this thing because it's not really up to much. There's not really more to the movie than Araragi fighting vampires (and a vampire hunter), getting closer to Hanekawa, and that cliched "you risk becoming a monster with these powers" narrative with no original ideas whatsoever. Exactly how am I supposed to write a few paragraphs about your story when that's all you're giving me? Describe the fight scenes? I guess I could say that I liked how Araragi won some of them due to tactical planning rather than Dragonball Z-logic, although the overblown emotional nature of the second and third fights was pretty silly, and the comedic nature in the beginning of the first fight was fucking dumb. And because the camera is constantly swinging, it's hard to appreciate any existing choreography that might have snuck in amidst all the power level clashes, although to be fair, I recall the camera being more calm during those scenes than the talking ones. As for the animation style, what do you want me to say? Nothing has changed from the last Kizumonogatari or any of the other ten Monogatari iterations aside from a little more blood and a little less fire. Nekketsu-hen does increase the amount of humor, so of course that means an increase in the amount of annoying sound effects and stupid reaction faces that would only be funny to twelve year olds who think it's appropriate to make fun of a woman's vagina whilst calling attention to the fact that you're making fun of it as a free pass. Every time Hanekawa banters with Araragi regarding his perverted tendencies and the amazing appeal of the panty she may or may not be wearing, I wanted to reach into the screen and beat both of them up with each other's faces for wasting about half the movie's runtime on something that in any sane universe would be considered "filler", but in the Nisio Isin universe is considered "solid gold". Please explain to me the appeal of two characters purposefully making bad jokes and calling attention to the fact that said jokes are bad for long stretches of something that's only an hour long. If I was watching Danganronpa, said jokes would be accompanied by someone getting murdered or going through a villainous breakdown in order to keep the energy going. Monogatari though seems to have that stupid mindset that characterization for its own sake is engaging, and self-aware humor where you just do something stupid and point out that said thing is stupid was funny when Mike Myers did it. And that's what's always annoyed me about this series' usage of irony: it doesn't go far enough or attach that irony to something with momentum. Every time characters converse, the plot basically grinds to a halt in order for the actors to banter with each other like a deleted scene that somehow made it into the final cut. Also, someone please tell me the appeal of sexual harassment as humor. What the fuck is the punchline of those sorts of jokes anyways? Finally, there are the new characters, who I honestly don't remember a thing about because they have no characterization other than being antagonistic and not above playing dirty to get what they want. Honestly, I can't even remember what they look like or what their names are. They don't have any good chemistry with Araragi, making them very pointless villains that makes Doc Ock's relationship with Spiderman look like something from DC comics, and they're never mentioned again after they're defeated, so Araragi might as well have been fighting moving gargoyle statues. It occurs to me that if you had cut out Hanekawa's very existence from this movie and given all that screen time to Araragi and his vampire opponents bantering it up instead, at least it would have given the action more meaning, even if risks falling into that other DBZ trademark of drawn-out anime action by doing so. But then again, Nisio Isin just doesn't seem to like the concept of male-on-male conversations. Why else would Oshino leave the story right the first series? All in all, Nekketsu-hen just gets a big meh from me. I don't care for the animation because it's the same Shaft-style it's always been except of higher technical quality, but lacking in strong visual metaphors deserving of said quality, and full of so many quick cuts, annoying reaction faces, and title cards that I'm surprised I came out of the theater without a seizure. The story actually goes somewhere in this part so it's not as torturously boring as last time, but anyone who thinks that Araragi sacrificing his humanity to protect those he loves is an engaging tale obviously does not watch monster movies. Not to mention, since this is a prequel, we know he and everyone else are going to make it out okay, so there's no real tension to anything that happens to the established cast unless you were curious regarding whether Hanekawa actually got through the whole ordeal with her virginity intact. At the end of the day, I just don't understand why this prequel needed to exist. All it does is show us stuff that we already knew happened, except being shown to us visually. And there's nothing being conveyed to us through these visuals that's new and refreshing unless you count another stupid usage of the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey new and refreshing. It's basically what's inevitably going to happen with that new Star Wars movie focused on the spies who stole the Death Star plans, and if there's anything worse than getting compared to the prequel trilogy, it's getting compared to Disney's brand of mediocre nostalgia cash-ins.

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