Recommended
As much as I’d genuinely like to put in a good word for CG and the advancements which it can surely bring to the medium of animation when done well, the crushingly few amount of times in which it’s actually been implemented with any sense of craft whatsoever has really restrained me from doing so. Too often have I seen such immense talent put behind so many promising projects which came to shocking fruition against all odds, only to have their monumental achievements undercut and outright trivialized by the mediocrity and downright incompetency of all other CG producers in the landscape. For every complete technicalmastery of fully 3DCG anime the likes of Land of the Lustrous, there’ll be a couple dozen absolute failures the likes of Berserk (2016). For every expert blend of CG prop integration with hand-drawn animation the likes of that in Psycho-Pass, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, or B: The Beginning, there’ll be another deluge of visual atrocities the likes of Overlord III. For every ravishingly immersive, artfully detailed, and stylistically perfect 3DCG background environments the likes of those in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress or Attack on Titan, there’ll be more frame-rate fever dreams the likes of the hellish Gantz or Inuyashiki anime adaptations. The only brand of CG I feel has truly found its place in anime is purely experimental CG, which simply is not trying to quote-unquote “look good.” SSSS.Gridman or Gatchaman Crowds are two perfect examples of shows with creative, talented, and ambitious staff behind them, but which simply lack the technical resources and mastery to produce anything better than what they did. However, even in this context, there are still exceptions like Tiger & Bunny, a smart show made by accomplished creators at a powerhouse studio, but who’s atrocious CG doesn’t fit the aesthetic like that in Gatchman Crowds nor does it get hand-drawn when necessary like that in SSSS.Gridman. At this point in time, the only way I see to guarantee quality assurance is to properly fund and staff a studio dedicated to the advancement of CG, and while Polygon Pictures has been trying and failing to be exactly that for the last decade, Studio Orange has showed us quite recently just how irrelevant years of cultivation really is when it comes to doing CG right, and it looks like Production IG is trying to prove the same with Sola Digital Arts.
You can’t imagine how high my expectations were for this show. Keeping up with the career of Kenji Kamiyama following his time as the creative director heading Production IG’s in-house TV animation staff has been honestly depressing, and I truly believed this would be his big comeback. After he barely stumbled over the finish line with the theatrical finale of Eden of the East, let’s be honest, I think he and everyone around him really lost faith. Production IG is and always has been the best of the best, the gold standard of Japanese animation, and back in the 2000s and in the 90s, the common consumer was actually smart enough to know this, so acknowledging how high a bar they’d set for themselves by their own painstaking efforts, I honestly see why they replaced Kamiyama, not after he made something which wasn’t absolutely perfect (following his team’s two prior projects which were), but after he simply lost his creative drive on a project before finishing it. It’s no surprise Ishikawa put Naoyoshi Shiotani in the director’s chair given his and Urobuchi’s fresh, daring, and thoughtful passion project to come in the epic figure of Psycho-Pass, and after Tow Ubukata spent the last five years proving Shiotani’s brilliant cinematography can’t make something good without competent writing underneath, it’s also no surprise Ishikawa switched Shiotani out for Kazuto Nakazawa, since he’s even more of a studio veteran than Shiotani is and has cultivated his creative senses in the shadows with cult classic after cult classic after cult classic for decades. Simply put, Kamiyama was beginning to stagnate, and while you’d be a fool to say he’d already done so, it was certainly a fate on the horizon, and the fact the graduates of his team lead by his co-director Masayuki Yoshihara, his co-writer Shōtarō Suga, and their art director Takeda Yūsuke could work without him and make a masterpiece the likes of The Eccentric Family—at a studio other than IG, no less—really said a lot about the industry’s need for his presence. And speaking personally, the manner in which Kamiyama sought to keep himself busy outside the limelight didn’t inspire much confidence either…because it was CG. 009 Re:Cyborg was a good movie, and what made it good was his inspired visual direction and uncharacteristically smart theming for the genre, but the SANZIGEN CG animation simply could not do said direction justice and clashed awfully with the beautiful hand-drawn background art from Production IG. And while Hirune Hime suggested a more fundamental issue with Kamiyama’s screenwriting, it was a step in the right direction visually, boasting the talent of Production IG’s animation legends, but more importantly, it proved his creative vision was still alive and kicking, dying to prove his expertise once again.
Ultraman (2019) is, if nothing else, inspired. Aside from the usual suspects like a mildly choppy frame-rate and unnaturally rigid facial features, the show doesn’t look atrocious for what it is. The digital effects are as clean and crisp as those of a ufotable show; the 3DCG environments were as expansive as those in the Kizumonogtari films, if not as polished; from the sound of concrete slowly cracking under the pounding footsteps and sparkling metal armor of the heavyweight iron men duking it out in the middle of the city to the differing sounds a coffee cup makes depending on the surface it’s placed on, the highly detailed sound design brought both the spectacular and the smallest, most tedious audio to life with its incredible attention to detail; the soundtrack is a truly phenomenal mix of Hans Zimmer’s orchestral tracks in “Man of Steel” and Daft Punk’s atmospheric electronic BGM in “Tron: Legacy,” and it made so much of the action hit harder and so much of the emotions run higher, which was certainly something I did not expect at all from such an innocuous looking superhero show; the lighting effects and shading gradients weren’t quite on the level of a Studio Orange production, for example, but they still fixed the Polygon Pictures face and made the characters able to emote like few CG casts have been able to before without falling into the uncanny valley; and the Motion Capture Animation for the character acting upped the ante to such a degree, I can call the production as a whole a genuine and unique step forward in the medium of CG anime. But with the technicalities aside, the standout quality of the show is in that clear inspiration. While dialogue scenes can be standard at times, the actions scenes and really any scene paying homage to the illustrious Ultraman title is bursting at the seems with cinematic love for the franchise, respect for the creators who’ve helmed it before them, and of course, their own personal flair branding the show with their own creative identity whilst still staying true to its roots. Ultraman has always been any other classic superhero story, and I went into this new adaptation with the expectation this fact would hold it back a ton, or at least water down its intellectual content, if any, not because I think the genre is inherently limiting, but because I’m an American who’s seen it done more times than they can even count. I come to anime because the Japanese are fifty billion times more creative than we are, and anime as a medium allows infinitely higher levels of unfiltered imagination to shine, so the idea Ultraman was the likes of any other dime-a-dozen Western Superman really left me listless on concept.
Luckily, the characters serving as the heart and soul of the narrative were more than worthy to. Our main character Shinjiro is the newest name I get to add to my list of shounen leads who actually deserve the title of “hero” and does more than simply piss me off. Most shounen leads are indecisive, melodramatic, whinny, and generally immature, but not in a way which is constructive to character development. Whenever I get a Kamille Bidan or an Eren Yeager, I get to see a hundred thousand Izuku Midoriyas or Kaneki Kens, and thankfully, Shinjiro belongs with the former. He's awkward and unsure of himself like anyone his age, but he's a great kid, and the supporting cast feels so much more well realized than many who share they're archetypes, especially Rena, the main heroine. If you’re an American like me, and you can empathize with my exhaustion towards commonplace superhero stories, then you can probably also agree with the assertion the genre as a whole is plagued with the issue of one-dimensional female leads. The girl is only there to be a pretty face and a worthless damsel in distress just so the hero can come and save her, and forgetting about how grossly misogynistic that trope is, it’s just straight-up boring from a narrative perspective, so if you’re going to do it, it may as well be with a human character who you actually care for and who the creators actually put effort into building, and like Shinjiro, Rena delivers. She has character, personality, actual narrative relevancy, and honestly puts more thematic meaning on the table than any male character in any suit of armor in the entire show. But speaking of the show’s themes, Ultraman (2019)’s marvelous inspiration is really all it has going for it. The story is just the standard superhero vs alien invaders flick, and while the human elements and cinematic elements are overflowing with creative passion and the production is outstanding among its CG contemporaries, the storyline itself is as bare-bones as it gets and the message behind it is so trite as to be entirely insignificant. What I will say, though, is what I say about Haikyuu. This show is all tropes, but it knows which tropes are actually good, it knows why they’re good and why screenwriters have used them since the dawn of time, and most importantly, it actually has the tact to take that knowledge and deliver it to screen in the exact manner which it was meant to be. If I had to describe Ultraman (2019) in one word, I would say loved. Kamiyama’s direction is utterly nonexistent from a cinematic perspective, and Shinji Aramaki seems to have been the actual director, which isn’t really a good thing given the show’s overlong action scenes and technical flexing, but he obviously grew up loving Ultraman, because every single frame just screams dedication. Of Kamiyama's many masterpieces, Ultraman (2019) is a joke, but I don't think he even wanted it to make it his own. Just as he held back his intellectual experimentation in the anime original episodes of Guardian of the Sacred Spirit out of reverence for author Nahoko Uehashi’s meticulously characterized world, I think Kamiyama actively treaded no new ground with Ultraman (2019) out of respect for the series and its genre legacy, and for that, I cannot possibly fault him.
Thank you for reading.
