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Nov 18, 2025
For all the (unjustified) denigration it has received over the years, Stardust Memory is much more closely aligned to Char’s Counterattack than it is typically given credit for. As in that film, the characters are gripped by a psychological weakness, whereby the process of rational thought operates in a secondary manner to that of impulse or desire, an aspect of human design articulated by Thomas Hobbes:
“Thoughts are to the desires, as scouts and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired: all steadiness of the mind’s motion, and all quickness of the same, proceeding from thence: for as to have no
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desire, is to be dead […] and to have stronger and more vehement passions for anything, than is ordinarily seen in others, is that which men call MADNESS.”
If there is one word to describe Stardust Memory’s tone, it would be operatic (and “80s” would be my second choice). An unrestrained emotionality is its strongest element, creating characters that are all of about average intelligence but consider themselves much greater, and, in the circumstances of urgent improvisation that war calls for, allow their neuroses to spill over without much thought of long-term consequences. Its characters are afforded an emotional depth through realism, and the combination of both depth and realism find ways to complement and enhance each other. The characters of Stardust Memory are akin to the grunts of Vietnam, who are all too familiar with the credibility gap, between the sanitised idea of “saving democracy” sold to them by the government, and the reality of having to institute that order with industrial-scale quantities of explosives and lead. It avoids an overarching theme of failed communication that is meant to carry implications for all of humanity, offering a much more contained story, but its smaller scale gives it greater room to emphasise the more affective aspects that control the tempo of a war.
One way in which this is powerfully encapsulated is through the ideology of Zeon. In prior Gundam works, there is no real attempt to actually explicate if there is anything Zeon believes in, and despite the attempt to craft complex, politically conscious storylines, it’s never really addressed. Stardust Memory does not answer the question through a speech or a debate, but rather focuses on the inherent psychology that compels one to believe in something ‘fake’, like a cult. Delaz speaks of “ideals”, and returning to the righteous path, but there is no actual logical framework behind these claims, just a vague, egoistic conception of not being mercantile like the Federation, but without any real substantiation beyond impressive-sounding polemic. In a moment when he is cornered and may have to accept being either captured or killed, against the ‘rational’ response to stay quiet and improve his odds at survival, his only response is “Sieg Zeon”, which encapsulates the comprehensive whole – the war is instigated and fought not for tangible gain, but for Zeon ideology, which starts and ends with the words Sieg Zeon.
Freud said that war reveals an emotional life that is otherwise repressed by the state, and in the case of Stardust Memory, the war itself is explainable through psychological terms, a latent emotional anger that is self-inflicted, from an officer class with a long-term emotional investment in an idea of Zeon that can never be realised, because it never existed. A more compelling angle than “Zabi/Haman/Haman again did it for money and power.”
The Freudian influence becomes apparent through the manner in which the series intertwines the desire to assert the self with the psychosexual. Cima is the most apparent example, commanding her own fleet from an opulent zebra fur chair, in a theatrical display of the image she wishes to project. While her deliberately constructed speech and body language are there to evoke an authoritative presence, internally she is a victim of conflicting ideals, between morality (the rational), pure survival, and the desire to see her autonomy realised. The same struggles are equally applicable to the other characters, including Kou, who develops from an FNG to a competent pilot, but is a much slower learner in the field of sexual competition. This frailty is what makes the characters compelling, it is in conflict that gives them intrigue and depth, and it is also in that weakness of indecision that makes them feel realistic and relatable.
The visual direction, with its sharply evocative artsyle and lighting, is characterised by granular, tactile sensation. The presentation of detail, in life on base and onboard a ship, and in the various working parts in the mobile suits, radar systems, bridge communications, makes every aspect of design compelling to look at, providing a convincing application of a futuristic military framework and all the engines that let it run smoothly, rather than just a suggestion that gets relegated to the background. The characters and writing are given an interior psychology that tells the viewer how they feel, placing greater importance on this aspect of design as to the dispassionate outcome of historical events, and the art direction then intersperses, giving the viewer an involved insight, placing the level of sensory input that compels them to act this way to the forefront of its visual design. Moreover, by providing its ships and structures with such a degree of colour, detail, and differentiating shapes and angles that appear in every part, it has a remarkable strength in conveying the fear inherent in the emptiness of space: its confusing vastness, and the feeling of vulnerability from not being able to see the enemy.
Stardust Memory is unconventional for a Gundam series, with its prioritisation of the individual self over the body politic, principally on account of its length, which removes the possibility to create story events with strategic-level reverberations and implications. By creating a finely realised atmosphere, and characters that manage to convincingly share both the capacity for autonomy and aspirations, and the psychological weakness to see those qualities limited, it remains consistently engaging, and has the rare quality of being a series that leaves the viewer wanting more.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Oct 31, 2025
While the eclectic visual style of Bakemonogatari may consume the majority of attention surrounding discussion of the series, of equal directorial importance is its episode structure. The episodes forego the typical A and B-plot structure, the effect of which is compounded by a consciously limited use of location, with some episodes essentially functioning as one continuous scene. This distinctly limited scope in its setting recalls 12 Angry Men and Glengarry Glen Ross (which could surely be retitled to Four Angry Men), where this limitation contributes to a feeling of isolation and confinement for its characters. Despite using a broadly comparable directorial technique, Bakemonogatari’s use of
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limitations in this regard does not produce the same effect, and it is precisely through this difference that helps to highlight the aspects of design that the series is predicated on.
What separates the ‘angry men duology’ from Bakemonogatari is that in the former, anger is an irreconcilable symptom of an omnipresent societal injustice. In Bakemonogatari, justice is not instituted from above by a malignantly faceless entity, i.e. the law, but rather, it is a series that is concerned with a purely introspective and individualised sense of justice.
An immediate effect of this differentiation is that anger, as emphasised through Mayoi, is something that can be worked through, understood and resolved, against the instant emotional instinct to rebuke or reciprocate it. As such, Bakemonogatari’s narrative approach could be summarised as an extended and at times obfuscatory depiction of cognitive behavioural therapy, but administered from someone who sees the answer to repressed autonomy in Dogen or Nishida Kitaro, rather than in Freud.
Directly matching its distinctively dynamic visual direction, the dialogue demands full attention from the viewer, operating on multiple simultaneous levels of wordplay, jumping between the apparent object of discussion, character flashbacks, references to both contemporary otaku convention and classical mythology, with a treatment that suggests all the above form one coalescent entity, and it accomplishes all of this while still remaining not only comprehensible, but engaging. Recalling the fact the scenes are so unconventionally long, the reason such a technique is able to work is precisely because of the rhythmic fluidity of its dialogue. While a series with a far less stylised approach would rely on a more developed sense of plot and world-building to keep viewer attention, Bakemonogatari recognises that the dialogue is its schwerpunkt, and each of its remaining constituent elements are balanced accordingly.
The editing of Bakemonogatari is reminiscent of Tetsuya Nakashima, with its mixed-media cross-cutting that, as with the dialogue, suggests a distorted and subjectivised perspectivalism. While the use of abrupt cuts and unusual points of focus for extended still shots may contribute to the overall effect, its other aspects of visual design provide a more comprehensive application of these ideas, predominantly via the use of colour and the depiction of its setting. Sharp, overpowering colours provide filters for many of its scenes, particularly red and orange, which evoke a sense of estrangement, especially when placed alongside its architectural design which is reliant on industrial, uniform patterns. Kafkaesque housing complexes, fences and power lines envelop the screen in a suffocating infinitude, and which all appear to be in place to support a burgeoning urban populace that is never seen.
Hanekawa makes a catchphrase out of “I don’t know everything, I just know what I know”, and just as her knowledge is limited despite assumptions to the contrary, the same is true of vision, as it pertains not just to Hanekawa, but to everyone. The perspectivalism denies the camera’s assumed position of an objective, comprehensive view, aligning itself closer to a hyperspecific version of reality that reflects the perceiver’s current state of experience (a viewpoint vaguely in line with the aforementioned Nishida). From this limited perspective, the editing, visual design, and the dialogue all interconnect with each other, acknowledging that moving beyond what is afforded by one’s own vision may be confusing or contradictory, but Bakemonogatari shows that despite the inherent difficulty, the process is always insightful and worth being witness to.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Oct 3, 2025
Key The Metal Idol is a series that is at its most interesting when it is working with small details. The writing is engrossing when it deals with the finer aspects of psychology that influence its wider thematic concerns of displaced agency and repressed desire, but when it comes to building a narrative, it retreats to an emotionally distant form of exposition, valuing the disconnected act of informing the viewer of events, rather than consistently making those events meaningful.
According to a famous quotation, it is impossible to make an anti-war film, as the medium naturally and inevitably translates war’s terror into excitement. From this basis,
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I would extend the sentiment to sci-fi as a whole, where the highlighting of social malaise is easily obscured by the typical format of the genre, in which the heroic protagonist inevitably rises above it, thereby undermining its impact. This is especially prescient for the mecha genre, wherein the protagonist manages to use their killing machines to exert positive values and instigate change. Compared to some war films like Casualties of War or Born on the Fourth of July, which offer an unambiguous “we never should have come here”, mecha and sci-fi are more inclined to present a much more optimistic interpretation of their subject matter. It is precisely for this reason that Key is remarkable, because there is one trait shared amongst all of its characters, which is an intractable sense of disempowerment. This is exemplified through the mecha connection, as the robots in the series not only cause immense mental strain for their remote pilots who struggle to keep them in operation for more than a few minutes, but in that short time they are ineffectual, sometimes displaying an inability to simply walk in a straight line.
This complete lack of functionality is a point that extends to all of its characters and their interactions – the president of Miho’s company is told in plain terms that his title is meaningless, and that he has no control over Miho. While he might not seem important, having this information actually gives him an unmatched judgement and intellectual grasp on his situation that everyone surrounding him lacks, causing them great anguish. The others are convinced they have power when they do not, and become victims of a self-inflicted cycle of confusion and frustration when things do not go the way they try and will them to. Characters like Ajo and Tsurugi may appear powerful by having the authority to order others, and the physical strength to command through fear, but they are in actuality no better off than the aforementioned president, as their efforts consistently lead to disappointment and failure, and the more they try and exert their sense of self, the greater their resentment at their own inability grows.
Powerlessness and displacement is further represented through the visual design, which shares its anti-Cartesianism form with Blade Runner. Frames are overloaded with clutter: pedestrians, advertising signs and skyscrapers interlock and overlap, taking over the space like parasitic insects, creating a claustrophobic sensibility, decentralising and further de-emphasising any sense of importance for any of its characters.
Blade Runner’s similarity extends beyond its visual design, as, of a more enduring importance than one character sharing Deckard’s taste in duster jackets, a Frankenstein subtext is common to both. But this is the area in which Key’s writing becomes far less engaging, as viewed in the context of a pre-existing work that addressed the same thematic concerns much more richly, its treatment feels marked by gaping holes of ideas. Ajo has an army of robots who address him as Father, which seems to be a detail added for the sake of it, because they hardly speak to begin with, and Ajo lacks the nuance as a character to fit into the dichotomous relationship that defines Frankenstein. His office is adorned with enough dolls to produce an exaggerated enough scene that he may as well be living in a Dr. Wily skull fortress, his temperament is one of pure megalomania, and the lack of nuance or self-awareness is probably exemplified by his last moments having him declare himself to be the new Prometheus, and then his head explodes.
The direction of the series as a whole is the area in which its writing falters, rather than any from one particular line or character that lacks intrigue. This is a point that is especially exemplified within its closing two episodes, both 90 minutes each. Episode 14 is one that does not need any sort of clever or sardonic hyperbole to convey the extent of its horror, because the reality of the situation is an indictment all on its own. This is one significant divergence from Frankenstein, as while The Creature is aware of and repulsed by his own wretchedness, the writers of this series appear oblivious.
The episode is a feature-length exposition dump that cuts between two scenes: one has two people sitting on a park bench and explaining every single plot detail that they neglected to mention prior. In the other, a separate character who barely made an appearance prior (and is so irrelevant that he doesn’t even appear in MAL’s list of characters for the series), soliloquises to himself in an empty room.
Brian De Palma once articulated the issue with bad exposition, which is that it completely eliminates any sense of discovery for the viewer, and his concept can be applied here. Notwithstanding the fact that it would be far more engaging for the viewer to actually, as the title viewer implies, view the events the series describes, instead of being told about them, the context and setting that surrounds the entire ordeal is completely devoid of any real excitement or emotional resonance. The writer's goal is not to recount great events, but to create small ones that seem large, which is done through connecting them to the depths of emotional intensity.
The episode that follows is not substantially better, as just as Episode 14 largely seems to be the product of obligation, an explanation in the quickest form available, then the closing episode is one that, along the same trajectory, resolves everything by accelerating to a rushed conclusion. Neither of these episodes are well-directed, because they are so typified by a pursuit of indiscriminate material, which is an issue that is also present in all the episodes that precede its closing arc. The way the regular, 25-minute episodes navigate through their runtime is one that assigns secondary importance to the characters or anything that affects them directly. Dealing with plot rather than character is the principal currency of Key, it is a series that seems to forget that the reason one has any investment in the plot in the first place is precisely due to the emotional investment that it affords. An obfuscatory overloading of detail is a technique that may recall the Bogart classic The Big Sleep, not because the writing style is comparable to that noir (where it is effectively deployed), but because The Big Sleep is simply a description of the viewing experience.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Aug 31, 2025
Releasing prior to 1974 and Space Battleship Yamato, Lupin III commits fully to its episodic format. Apart from the introduction of two side characters, it has essentially zero enduring changes that occur within its overarching story, allowing it to focus on refining its episode scripts with no secondary concerns. It takes these circumstances of production to a conclusion of pure chaos, but only for roughly its opening 9 episodes, after which point its main director was fired and replaced by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, whose approach does not substantially reconfigure the character of the series, but it does eliminate the anarchic energy that it
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held previously for something more plain.
The disconnect between the two halves of Lupin is best encapsulated through its opening. The first opening utilises freeze frames and timing its action in tune to the music to economically convey a feeling of momentum, and its stylisation is further recognisable through the use of a split-diopter shot and rapid-cutting psychedelic imagery. The psychedelic influence also bleeds into the overall soundtrack, with music clearly influenced by the emergent, experimental developments in rock from the 60s, but without the production value to really follow through. Although simplistic and sometimes repetitive soundtracks for older anime are quite standard, the lack of production value in Lupin's case is evidenced by the fact that all the songs (including the OPs) have the unifying quality of not having any ideas for lyrics beyond just repeating the show's title.
For any series, not just one constrained to the budgets of the 1970s, Lupin’s animation is significant for carrying an unprecedented level of monumentality via its commitment to a pure level of mayhem, which is really its principal goal as a series. Compared for a moment to most heavy hitters within the shonen genre, which concern themselves with questions of psychology and morality, Lupin is a refreshingly simple construction. It does not ask questions of morality, it makes an unwavering, declarative judgement: Guns are cool, cars are cool, and its singular intention is to make full use of the fluidity and dynamism of animation to demonstrate these principal truths.
The Western genre was upended by Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in 1969, which, as with Lupin, did not invent any new ideas, it only found the force to push those relentless aspects of the genre’s most chaotic institutions to new heights. Similarly, Lupin did not find new ways to direct a car chase or a firefight, but it does have a unique strength in highlighting the intensity of these items, through a great emphasis on movement, rather than landscapes and orientating establishing shots. Accentuating the humour with this approach, whereby characters will have guns seemingly materialise in their back pockets at a moment’s notice, it commits to the intensity and emotional investment of its action sequences in a manner that might not be edited in an unusual manner, but through framing its action in a way that prioritises its intensity over any conception of ‘sense’, it has more commonality with its psychedelic and experimental musical inspirations than one may otherwise expect.
It is in full view of this stylised direction that the series’ latter half seems comparatively dry. The two openings implicitly reveal this change, as they both share a shot of Lupin running while under fire, allowing for a direct comparison. In the first opening, this is taken at a close-up, giving a view of Lupin’s facial expression and better emphasising the speed of the action, while the bullet holes are punctuated both with sound and visually. In the second, it’s taken at a medium distance, which gives the animators far less opportunity to highlight any aspect of his character, and instead of the more involved perspective of a low, Dutch angle seen in the first opening, it is completely flat, lacking in detail. The episodes themselves follow through on this de-intensified approach, treating its subject matter with a procedural distance. This is not to suggest that the later episodes approach anything close to being boring, mostly on account of the fact they are still working from the same original story, and retain the same episodic format that allows for an appropriate focus on action.
As a comprehensive entity, Lupin is always sharp in its direction, and its willingness to commit to a discontinuous, anarchic brand of action, closer related to Spy Vs Spy than something like Yamato, is precisely what allows it to remain consistently gripping across all of its episodes. But the change in tone that comes at the halfway point is one that lessens its most powerful qualities, aligning it closer to any standard TV production, rather than fully embracing its own unique strengths. The directorial style of Miyazaki and Takahata may work better for finding an emotional centre in a feature-length film, but within a singular, contained episode, the premise of Lupin works at its best when it operates under a currency of loosely defined moments of pure, distilled action and chaos. From their direction, Lupin establishes itself as a series with consistently adequate direction, animation and writing, which happens to have a few audaciously poignant outliers within its first half.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Jul 14, 2025
Great art’s defining quality is its ability to coalesce into more than the sum of its parts. This was articulated by the Romanticists and their respondents in the theory of the sublime, which says that the power of art lies in creating a feeling of comprehensive totality, which the viewer recognises and acknowledges as something greater than themselves. Haibane Renmei does not qualify for any definition of the sublime, having some well-crafted elements that fail to interconnect in a meaningful way, producing a feeling of a somewhat shallow and deliberately generic iconography that it fails to expand upon.
The atmosphere of Haibane Renmei is the one
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area that it manages to convey most vividly. The enclosed city of its setting is one that creates an immersive and nostalgic portrait, evocative of a classic small town from an age past. This nostalgic feeling is complemented by the soundtrack, using natural and acoustic tones particularly characterised by strings, which subtly impart the emotional tone of a given scene, never trying to oversell a moment’s intensity. In some regards, the hand-drawn 2000s art style, with rougher edges and a more drab colour palette than one would see on a contemporary production, may seem to further this nostalgic image. To an extent, this naturalistic feeling from the colour and art direction is betrayed on a technical level, in which the limited animation of the frame carries far less movement than the frame itself which moves along with an unequal fluidity, looking like the product of a poorly done 60FPS upscale or interpolation, and creating a disconcerting and distracting effect.
If the music of the series employs a finessed subtlety, then the opposite may be said of its approach to iconography and thematics. Religious iconography is a core part of Haibane Renmei, from the high-pitched heavenly strings of its OP, its angel characters (or at least, angelic enough), and its deliberate invocation of a religious order that governs the small town of its setting. A mediator of this religion at one point speaks to Rakka, the main character, and tells her about the paradox that “To recognise that one is sinful is to be free of sin”. This might seem to evoke the same sort of dialetheia found in numerous sources through the history of Zen Buddhism and Daoism (the series itself utilises a visual iconography mostly borrowed from Zen and Christianity), but a critical difference lies that in these historical religious examples, the purpose of the dialetheia is to demonstrate the limitations of a standard mode of thinking, encouraging one to think more, not less. But the more one looks into Haibane Renmei’s presentation of this idea of dialetheia or sin and morality, it creates a feeling of disappointment. It does not become enlightening or rewarding to explore the ideas it has created, but instead holds the same hollow vagueness of a shyster lawyer or a sophist (such as Jordan Peterson), not a sage.
In the religious and historical framework that is initiated by Haibane Renmei, it would not be entirely accurate to accuse it of generating more questions than answers. Rather, it doesn’t seem very interested in either. It produces a world with various idiosyncrasies in its opening episodes, and although a comprehensive encyclopedic recollection would be out of the question, it does not seem interested in addressing any of the aspects of its own world. It does far too little to even begin to introspect, it does not give the viewer an opening to begin to consider or wonder – there is no point to wonder what more there is beyond the surface-level image, when there is no suggestion (much less a directly revealing demonstration) that the series wishes to do so. It recalls Emil Cioran’s comment that “Mystery is a word used to deceive others – to convince them that we are “deeper” than we really are”.
Even taken as an unconventional slice of life (on account of its fantastical setting), Haibane Renmei is actually painfully conventional for most of its duration. There is the aforementioned religious aspect, and the wall that separates its characters from the rest of the world may recall either Plato’s allegory of the cave or the limitations of representational thought in Kant’s transcendental idealism. With this underlying basis in mind, the series never really moves beyond the standard slice of life repertoire, where the unskilled but enthusiastic Rakka learns to stumble through a life of working, eating and talking. After establishing an interesting premise, it becomes reductive and disarming that, like any other series, it falls back into a generic endorsement of a life praxis of ‘eat nice food, be nice to your friends, work or we’ll exile you from our lovely community, and value your life’. The working and exile comment may be softly delivered, but it is present early on, just like any other post-bubble series that wishes to affirm state ideology in the same manner of any philosophaster that would prefer to produce a positive image in this manner, rather than engage with more challenging ideas. In this regard, I may invoke Daoism once more, where Zhuangzi writes:
“You have only to rest in non-deliberate doing and things will transform themselves. Let go of your body, spit out your intelligence, and forget you are beholden to others. Join the great harmony of the deep and boundless, dispel the mind, and let go of the spirit, then you will be still and soulless.”
This is not to advocate for a specifically Zhuangzian interpretation of ideal human behaviour and cooperation, or to presume that for a series to align with state ideology may automatically be diagnosed as a symptom of poor writing. But in the case of Haibane Renmei, we find that the religious and philosophical premises that it invokes are hollow, they do not generate interest or encourage greater thought, they are myths to the characters, and myths to the viewer – both are essentially told to accept that they are there, without further contextualisation or accompanying thought given any sort of legitimacy. Daoist students would sometimes be given a dialetheia, and sit for days in wonder, trying to understand their meaning. Haibane Renmei isn’t introspective enough for that, and neither are its characters – it does not wish to think at length, because it is far too preoccupied with a systemic and calculated indulgence in a slice of life, one that offers more legitimacy to lunchtime than it does to its own thematic ideas or principles. It is to this end that Nishitani Keiji encapsulated the shortcoming of its narrative approach:
“When even religion, metaphysics and morality are perceived as null, life becomes fundamentally void and boring.”
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Jun 21, 2025
The Heike Monogatari, a work equally concerned with the mechanisms of power and their destruction, opens with the following line: “In the sound of the bell of the Gion Temple echoes the impermanence of all things. The pale hue of the flowers of the teak-tree shows the truth that they who prosper must fall.”
Revolutionary Girl Utena, for all of its stylised, post-Showa sensibility, manages to find a connection through the ringing of bells, where they are used to indicate the opening and ending of battle, in a ritual that functions as a way to actualise impermanence and change every time they are heard. But for
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a series that suggests and emphasises impermanence at a thematic level, it is remarkably static in its pacing and episodic format, and would have benefitted from a more modern direction.
The opening arc of Utena represents the series at its most captivating. By the end of the first episode, the viewer has already been introduced to the powerfully evocative iconography of its Rococo-inspired architecture and uniforms, and Utena’s walk up a tower to a floating castle, with a sort of Rimbaudian grandiosity that feels befitting of a final boss arena. Further, in these early episodes, its stylistic detail is found through the elaborate frames and spinning flowers which overlay the images and evoke the shoujo manga traditions that it came from. But somewhere after this opening arc, around episode 6, there is a drastic reduction in the frequency in which this unique style of framing is utilised, which mirrors the move towards a formulaic direction in which events rarely hold any direct consequence. Compared to Space Battleship Yamato, an older series with this sort of episodic format, there is one similarity with Utena, in that most of its episodes do not have plot developments that carry direct implications towards the survival of their characters, but the critical difference lies in that it is a series about a journey that is clearly being made – in Yamato, the protagonists have a clear goal, and they are pursuing it. It is stated in Utena that she would like to find her prince, but she does nothing to actualise that desire.
With its invocation of duels as a central plot mechanism, Utena also lacks critically when it comes to developing an appropriate context for both Utena herself and the person she is duelling. In consideration of its historical counterpart, in which to declare a duel was to publicly reclaim one’s honour, it is often the case that Utena hardly even knows the person she is duelling, and as such there is a frenzied attempt to have them explain themselves even basically as the fight is happening, failing to produce a meaningful development between either duelist. The choreography is equally lacking, there are a few episodes in which the movements are impressive and varied, but usually, it is just Utena being pushed back against the wall, and then Utena makes one charge, which is enough to guarantee a victory. One never really gets the impression that her aggression is part of a meaningful strategy or that she ever improves as a fighter.
This all compounds into an issue of a repetitive, wasted potential, as articulated (though in a separate context) by Christopher Bolton: “The same trivial script replayed endlessly without any room for self-awareness or choice. Even as the extended time frame allows for more involved plots, the formulaic quality that often characterizes television can quickly undermine any sense of critical perspective […] where the protagonist undergoes the same transformation or apotheosis each week in order to come from behind and beat the bad guys- whether the transformation is magical, technological, athletic, or occult. In extreme cases these climactic transformations occur at the same minute of the episode and present themselves with the same recycled stock footage each time.”
The symbolism invites a Freudian reading; the name Utena means sepal, the outer part of a flower that protects it, correlating directly to the Rose Bride. With every male character’s romantic behaviour only describable as controlling and abusive, Utena is positioned as the antithesis to male aggression, whose desire for the Rose Bride is non-penetrative and devoid of harm. Utena is depicted as a saviour, but this is a position that is not significantly corroborated by the actual events of the series. It is remarkable for someone who has made her tomboyish personality such a core part of her identity, that when Anthy tells her that she actually enjoys having to clean up Utena’s dorm and doesn’t want the trouble of having other friends, Utena takes this entirely at face value and doesn’t consider whether this is really true or if she has confused her own happiness for what the men who control her life have dictated it is supposed to be, which she has internalised out of fear. With such a one-sided relationship, in which Anthy embodies the bridal duty of a woman who is seen and not heard, there is a noticeable absence of a psychological background that would produce an interesting relationship. The ending does more to end the argument, removing the potential ambiguity in a manner that, to invoke Bolton’s earlier comment, undermines any possibility of a critical perspective, and does more to explain to the viewer in plain terms that Anthy actually likes Utena, rather than providing meaningful interactions that would convey that and avoid necessitating this information. The final result of all of these issues is that Utena spends every episode fighting people she doesn’t know, who challenge her for reasons she doesn’t understand, to secure her relationship with a bride who shows less explicit romantic interest in her than one of the side characters.
Utena is a series that largely lies in contradiction with itself. Its plot suggests that impermanence is one of its driving motivations, but Utena’s actions have little lasting consequence on the power dynamics that the school has in place. After her great act of gekokujo, none of them even seem affected, being resigned to shrugging and saying “nothing we can do”. For that matter, the only way one is capable of expressing serious emotion is if they want to duel that episode. The series wishes to suggest an ideological conflict between Akio’s pessimism and Utena’s belief in miracles and the power to revolutionise the world, but it only advances its own deeper form of pessimism in which all the great events of history culminate into nothingness - this aspect would make it comparable to Julius Bahnsen, but even his own pessimism gave more legitimacy to actual ideological concerns than the series affords. The student council members are marked by their self-absorbed arrogance that makes them unable to consider anything beyond themselves, and on a meta level, the series is guilty of this exact behaviour. Its visual design is impressive, but the direction of the series is so enamoured with its own setting that it repeats the same scenes, ideas and plot devices every episode, so that it undermines any possibility of a coalescent narrative that would give meaning to any of these events.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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May 4, 2025
Performance is the main thematic concern of Hibike Euphonium 3. It is a series that understands the emotional investment that comes from the act of performing as a musician, the varying levels of performance that come from social convention and engaging with others, and it recognises the obscurity of the boundaries that separate these two fields of performance. In consideration of this aspect of design, the formatting of the series reveals itself to be weaker than its predecessors in laying a comprehensive groundwork to make use of these levels of performativity, and its actual, main performance is strangely sidelined in its narrative, making what should
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be a moment of grand culmination feel as though its treatment was given an improper level of surrounding tension and context.
The animation and visual direction of Hibike interconnect with each other to create a naturalistic setting. Taking place in the spring, its palette emphasises soft and warm tones, particularly in the shots that include reflections and openings from the sunlight as it peers into a building. There is a meticulous level of detail on display, with interior designs that use wide shots to reveal rows of chairs arranged in uniform to the edge of the room, coupled with empty cups and disorganised stacks of paper months in the making that give its world a real lived-in feel. Much as these wide shots give a comprehensive view of locale, this naturalistic presence is frequently suggested in its closer compositions, creating a distinctly recognisable aspect of design. In a manner evocative of the more restrictive camera setups of an older director like John Ford, the camera further emphasises this naturalistic feeling by embedding its camera into the environment itself, including background details of its architecture or of extras stood inside the frame, which appear with a level of closeness highly unprecedented for an anime production. This naturalistic positioning of the camera is exemplified in the shots where it is blocked by the environment, as in the cases where cars will drive past and block the view of the characters, or the way that falling sakura petals will fall through and obscure the whole frame, sometimes coinciding with a full screen wipe as the scene changes. Through the addition of these extra details, it creates a level of crowding on the frame, which compounds the level of atmosphere, and it is through such a focused and naturalistic use of detailing that the series manages to capture that specific feeling of going to the convenience store or taking the train late in the evening and noticing how the artificial neon light and the absence of other people create a level of palpable emptiness.
Although the visual direction is routinely excellent, Hibike Euphonium 3’s approach to location appears to have a much narrower scope when viewed alongside its predecessors. For a slice of life series, the amount of scenes inside of Kumiko’s home are rather limited, only used in selective, calculated instances where another family member will speak to her to illustrate a point in service of the narrative. This makes for an approach to location that lacks that Yasujiro Ozu quality common to many KyoAni works, an aspect of design that would give its characters much more room to breathe and advance the emotional underpinnings of the narrative in a more pronounced way. It’s not just the home, but scenes exploring the parks, bridges, cafes, and other miscellaneous places in the city (as in previous entries) adds a lot of depth to the setting, but this is an aspect which is utilised sparingly and, much like with the cases with Kumiko’s home, only by plot necessity.
The approach to location is one that devalues the naturalism created by the art direction, and this issue is exasperated in the handling of new characters. Recalling side characters from previous seasons such as Kanade or Yuuko, they are effective as supporting characters that are complementary to the overall class balance. By having an established presence, they then develop an interesting situation when the plot trajectory puts them into the forefront, giving them a level of recognisability and substance. By comparison, the new characters introduced in Hibike Euphonium 3 exist not to add life to the class dynamic, but more out of pure necessity – the most memorable of the new kohai is the one who likes to talk about the Yayoi period, and as to why exactly someone who likes history so much is in the band and not the history club is a mystery that goes unaddressed, but it isn’t very important.
Mayu, a third-year transfer, is uniquely important, but is distinct from all the other side characters as her presence in the story is as a plot device first, and as an actual character second. Her arc, as a mirror to Kumiko’s earlier, less confident self, is established early on, which manifests itself in Mayu constantly asking Kumiko in the lead up to the Kansai competition if it’d be better if she resigned. This really doesn’t enhance the viewer’s understanding of Mayu as a character, it doesn’t recontextualise Kumiko’s understanding of herself, it is, in the plainest of terms, Mayu asking the same question every episode, and Kumiko responding in the same way, and this leads to Mayu feeling rather hollow as a character. They establish various behaviours that indicate her lack of confidence, but it’s never really used for any significant narrative function. Apart from being tedious, this results in the season feeling like it suffers from a misuse of resources, so much of it is centred on the Kansai competition that by the time they actually have to practice for the Nationals, there’s barely any time dedicated to it, and the narrative threads that would normally be in place to provide extra depth or weight to this moment were all used for Kansai instead. They seem to have gotten it backwards, giving large surrounding circumstances to the small event, while the actual large event feels small, almost an obligatory presence. Of its 13 episodes, only 2 are dedicated to the Nationals, while close to 10 of them are dedicated to Mayu’s hesitancy. At its best, Hibike raises a whole class of interesting characters to produce interweaving and interconnecting dramas throughout the series, but this is not Hibike at its best. It only produces one real source of conflict, and it is one that is so static as neither side chooses to concede that it reveals nothing, it is more obnoxious than it is dramatic.
Kant said that “The sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.” This is what an orchestra should invoke, and this is why so much of the series is dedicated to the idea of finding a way to interconnect the feelings conveyed through music with those that one feels, but struggles to adequately convey to others. The issue with the central conflict of the series is that it avoids any real development in allowing either side to produce an emotional idea, dedicating more time to this narrative thread in lieu of allowing Mayu and Kumiko to develop a relationship in which they would both be able to explore their respective feelings and find ways to learn more about each other, and by extension the music they perform.
Although there is a lot of emotional investment generated by Hibike Euphonium 3, a lot of it is misapplied through such a focus on its singular Mayu-Kumiko issue, which manages to detract from the comprehensive experience – certainly, for something that is so naturalistic on the visual plane, it comes across as distinctly unnatural that Mayu wouldn’t just stop bringing it up after a while. In a world of Alien 3, Godfather 3, Rambo 3, or =3 by Ray William Johnson, historical precedent does normally dictate that the third one ranges from mediocre to abysmal. So, in a global historical context, Hibike Euphonium 3 is actually impressive for its level of achievement, but in the context of its own series, it does leave a lingering feeling that while each individual episode’s direction and design is excellent, the overarching narrative is below its own standard.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Apr 14, 2025
Arthur Schopenhauer once argued "A work is objectively tedious [...] when its author has no perfectly clear thought or knowledge to communicate." To call ZZ Gundam tedious would be a serious exaggeration, it is not a legitimately bad series by any means, but Schopenhauer’s comments come from someone who may not have had much experience with serialised TV anime, but plenty in the form of novels, music and theatre. I’ve had plenty of experience with all of the above, to which the show’s approach to character and writing carries a unique level of bizarre inconsistency in which they frequently make narrative choices that feel outright
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thoughtless.
Much like any of the many incarnations of Space Battleship Yamato, or its own predecessors, ZZ Gundam has the episodic space opera format drilled and regimented, even if its opening 10 episode arc serves as a lethargic entry to that point. If there is one thing the series is remembered for, it is its tonal shift compared to Zeta, which is perhaps best exemplified by one scene in both series, in which the main character meets with a high-ranking AEUG associate named Wong, who in both instances talks down to and physically attacks the two pilots. While this serves as a bitterly poignant moment for Kamille in Zeta, who has to take the abuse and spontaneously realises that being angry all the time and solving all his problems with violence is not going to serve him well in the long term, when Judau fights back against Wong he suffers no consequence, because, broadly, director Yoshiyuki Tomino didn’t like the tone of Zeta and wanted something more positive. Comparing these two scenes, it becomes apparent that Kamille is given an important moment of character development, while Judau does not, and having character development and a positive tone are not mutually exclusive entities. Moreover, due to complaints from viewers, Tomino chose to rescind his original vision, and tonally it is rather similar to the preceding entries in the series after a certain point, even if some spectres remain, like Chara Soon, a woman whose design is an obscene display of all the worst fashion choices to come from the 1980s, combined with a Hitchcockian psychosexuality that is so ostentatious that even I have a problem with it.
Returning to Schopenhauer’s comment for a moment, for something to be tedious means for it to be too long (or at least to feel as such), but many of ZZ Gundam’s worst moments seem to present the opposite problem. It is a series with an episode length appropriately long to get comfortable with establishing character, and thereby to present meaningful events and relations between them, but it inserts and drops people with a sense of timing that sometimes makes it feel more like a poorly rushed compilation movie. One of the worst examples comes in the closing 5 episodes, wherein instead of mounting the tension and impact of the war that has been pivotal to the whole series, they decide to not only turn it into a Leiji Matsumoto voyage to a new planet that has no implications on the overarching plot, but also make sure to dedicate two episodes to their pointless filler. The number of character moments that seem to have no thought behind them would be too numerous to list comprehensively, but perhaps the most pressing example comes via Emaly, who is treated as an incompetent comic relief obsessed with Bright, and then dies in what is treated as a deeply impactful tragic moment (it had been around for a lot longer than her, so I was more attached to the ship she was on than Emaly herself), and this moment is presented as so monumental that her shipmates make sure to extract a floppy disk of her last recorded voice log in which she cries out Bright’s name, and nobody ever mentions this to Bright, so for all we know, he doesn’t know. In his last appearance which comes in the finale, Bright speaks to Judau. An overarching framework of the whole Gundam franchise comes in the form of trying to navigate as a young adult in a world in which all authority has shown itself to be malignantly corrupt, this is something that Amuro and Kamille went through at numerous junctures, even Kai got his own episode on this theme. The only time Judau really goes through this is with Bright in this final episode, but it plainly doesn’t work. Amuro and Kamille lose their humanity from fighting in subtle and implicit ways, they have to learn how to reconcile their belief that humanity is worth fighting for with the painful reality they’ve been presented with, but when it comes to Judau, this is happening 5 minutes before the whole show ends, so what’s even the point? Moreover, in the episode prior, they mention how “Char’s presence hasn’t been felt in this war at all”, which does convey the extent of it quite well – nothing that happened in this whole series mattered at all.
These sort of poorly thought out moments do definitely contribute to an overall feeling of carelessness with the material, not even a lack of interest in the psychological or political elements of the setting compared to previous entries, because these elements are still here, only in a form that is less intelligently put together. Even still, the episodic format is still on par, the worldbuilding and mecha combat is as good as it has always been, but I realise my own general view on the Gundam series is itself controversial, as rather than seeing either of the prior two releases as exemplary, I consider their greatest strength lies in being generally good, but nothing more, and their greatest strength lies in the absolute consistency through which they can execute their ideas, and it is for this reason that ZZ Gundam can only be viewed as a downgrade. The same sort of lack of a clear direction that Schopenhauer spoke of constitutes an infectious presence over the series, it might have some good mecha fights, one standout example being one on Earth between Judau and a Zeon commander named Desert Rommel, but the lingering feeling from ZZ Gundam is not of it as a good action series. Even if it is disproportionate to the overall experience, the most memorable aspect it put forth is its writing which belies any semblance of coherence in its construction.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Mar 23, 2025
In an early scene in Gundam GquuuuuX Beginnings, Char makes a comment to the effect of “Mobile suits can only influence conditions on a tactical level. It’s the generals and politicians who really decide how a war is won or lost.” Being conscious of this claim, the film’s scope becomes especially significant, because it then shows a war that is largely won without the help of generals or politicians, seemingly suggesting the opposite of Char’s statement to be true. By way of contradistinction, the original Mobile Suit Gundam incorporated a balance between mobile suit combat, political considerations on the construction of Zeon and the Federation
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as societies, and both high and low levels of strategic command. Rather than comprehensively showing all the coalescent elements that inform each other and maintaining a steady trajectory, GquuuuuX demonstrates an interest in only one aspect of warfare, which is the pure chaos inherent in combat, and it uses every aspect of production to reinforce this idea, and to create a relentless sense of pacing that brings the viewer and the character much closer together than a more standard mode of editing would allow for.
The most remarkable aspect of GquuuuuX’s design is the sheer fluidity in its camera movement which completely disregards the concept of a fixed or level viewing position. Across any individual scene, the camera may pan spherically, forwards or backwards, and with a level of commitment that is fully unprecedented in its ambition. The movement is constant and multiplanar, it’s not a strategically planned battle with a front line, but an unrelenting primal charge in all directions at almost every moment. This approach to depicting mobile suit combat with such speed and aggression makes for a continuous assault on the senses, which is a point that even reflects back towards how the camera operates and depicts that level of chaos. The way debris falls and responds to impact, the fluttering of an ammo belt as it spits out cartridges and jolts in the low-gravity environment, or the recoil of a shot causing shockwaves and vibrations that affect the camera itself, all these aspects that inform the specific movements and mechanisms of weapon systems can essentially be defined as details, and with the hard-hitting drums in the soundtrack pushing forward the tempo in corresponding sequence with the visual action, these details, of the camera movement, the inner feeling of terror in trying to grasp it from the characters, and of the environment itself, all coexist simultaneously, creating a pure sensory overload that perfectly exasperates the insanity of combat, with so much happening at one time, one feels as though they can only jolt their eyes for a second to scan for a second, everything moves so quickly that they cannot fully comprehend everything that is happening at any time.
Through the audio-visual onslaught, the way the individual pilots react to the distortive effect of mobile suit combat is a constant presence that provides a sufficient level of context and meaning to its combat sequences, which are so invested in creating these sweeping cinematographic moves and indulging in their pure anarchic chaos, that the psychological element becomes a necessary presence through which to intelligibly identify and interpret the volume of images that the viewer is presented with. With this in mind, the film’s notability extends beyond its combat sequences, for it is able to carry over its sense of pacing and tone outside of that area, largely through the usage of similar directorial techniques which are recontextualised to show the dystopic reality of life within the space colonies. In a manner similar to the works of Edgar Wright, it is able to create highly choreographed action sequences, while also finding a way to visually invoke and parallel that same action energy within its lighter character moments, something which is especially poignant as GquuuuuX, in Gundam tradition, creates a main character whose main identifiable traits are their impulsivity and combative attitude which certainly helps in linking together the two parts of the film’s construction. Significantly, although this relentless pace is present for most of the runtime, by virtue of the depiction of the Newtype inner self, a sort of reprieve into an alternate world, it is able to concomitantly produce rare moments devoted fully to character introspection in which the viewer is absorbed fully into the protagonist’s own view of the world they have been put into, with none of the distortion or sensory overload of industrial warfare, or plain industry. Being conscious of Taki Koji’s comment that the act of photography is an “attempt to overcome vision itself”, GquuuuuX seems to find a way of moving past the limitation of vision as it is typically understood. Through such a heavy emphasis on multiplanar movement, it creates a pervasive sense of tension and terror in its action set pieces, which then inform its aspects of life outside the mobile suit.
Machu says at one point that she desires freedom from the artificiality of her constructed environment, and another character tells Machu that “Spacenoids will never be free.” Liberty as a political condition may differ from a personal feeling of freedom, but GquuuuuX manages to present that individual feeling of freedom through its floating world, only viewed and understood by Newtypes. It may not quite “overcome vision”, but in this floating world, when the camera and music move into stillness in response to their new transcendent environment, it creates a feeling of freedom that is able to be so deftly emphasised due to the persistent mode of editing and pacing orchestrated by the rest of the film.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jan 29, 2025
Kino’s Journey is fundamentally and structurally elusive in its design and intention. It is a series centred around a cool-headed, nomadic, revolver-slinging outlaw, a subgenre whose principal currency is best exemplified by Clint Eastwood’s eternally poignant “dying ain’t much of a living”. Rather than dealing in death as the defining element of story progression, Kino's Journey is more concerned with the mechanisms of society, their function, and how they tie in so directly to the understanding of death as an omnipresent part of life and society, rather than something that is centralised through a singular hero or villain.
A pervasive presence throughout Kino’s Journey is
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its unique interpretation of human nature, which is too multifaceted to be easily summarised. It is a series that avoids the reductive simplification of human nature as generally good or bad, but rather elucidates the ways in which human nature carries some inherent traits, at least as exhibited by certain individuals, but they are mostly only created by circumstance, and the series looks at how those circumstances are themselves first created. Unlike most works that try to offer commentary on human nature, doing so with a certain level of polemic and persuasion from a clearly identifiable author’s viewpoint, Kino’s Journey is more interested in viewing the matter through a scientific approach. It takes certain principles of human nature, and puts them through various experiments, changes, and differentiation, simply but implicitly presenting their results and omitting the choice (which would surely increase its broad appeal) to have a narrator or audience surrogate, someone whose purpose as a character lies with their affirmation of moral sensibility to reorient the story’s events onto the ‘correct’ path. Specifically, the series seems to corroborate Thomas Hobbes’ comments on human nature, that identifying and exploiting weakness in others is what humans will always do (in the absence of laws or authority that would dissuade them), which is something that is inarguably a defining presence of the series. Though banditry, enslavement, and all forms of coercion do make themselves known on a regular basis, the series does not follow through on Hobbes’ conclusion that this makes human nature inherently hostile. As a furtherance of this position, one significant deviation is that while Hobbes might have suggested that those who live outside of society cannot be compelled by ideas of morality or virtue, this is contradicted by the series, whereby individuals, whether travellers like Kino or eccentric outcasts and hermits, are intuitively aware of moral behaviour, whereas the impersonal machinations of the state are what allow those who exercise authority to do so maliciously. As an exemplification of the series’ complex position, Kino is variously attacked by those who both represent law and authority, and vicious mobs who represent enemies of that exact authority, so while Kino’s Journey may have much to say about society and its conception of historical grand narratives, in its construction of society it is easy to identify the flaws that it presents, but conversely it does not proscribe to equate human nature as entirely equal to society’s social engineering. Kino may encounter hostility on a frequent basis, but they are also variously given hospitality by others who neither know them nor expect anything in return. In a sense, human nature is to want to care for the other, but it is society that manipulates that aspect of psychology and instigates conflict. This is not to suggest anything close to an argument for anarchism, Kino’s Journey isn’t simplistic enough in its conveyance to view the issue as anything that can be overcome with one regime change or the magical power of friendship, but the inherent contradiction it presents, society’s damages and the healing power of a social community, are what drive the series and unify its disparate ideas and events.
In a comparable manner to its articulation of human psychology, the visual design of the series carries a hyperspecificity that makes each frame of its design unique and engaging. Its characters are defined by their sharp edges, with elements of social realism and Cubism, a point reflected in its depiction of countries that are suspended in time, with a slight steampunk flair, but mostly committing to an early to mid-20th century architectural and technological design, with intermittent elements of futurism to further the ambiguity. More critically, by avoiding a standard mode of representational realism through its simplistic character design (which are generally noted by a drab, Soviet-like colour palette and complemented by an acoustic soundtrack, comparably sparse with its number of instruments), it facilitates a greater focus on the psychology behind these characters – one notable instance comes from an episode in which Kino speaks to some robotic dolls, who through a drawn-out close-up of their faces, implicitly reveal the pure emptiness in their affect and thoughts as they wait for Kino to respond to them with no prior thoughts or judgements of their own, and the effect of this scene would have been lesser, had they been accentuated with extra features only for detail’s sake, distracting from the emotional core that makes it important and memorable.
As a series about travelling, it is, nonetheless marked by an appropriate level of splendour in its natural landscapes, which do share commonality with the aforementioned social realism more than the overproduced, contrast-heavy images that one finds on postcards and pamphlets made by tourism agencies. Pertaining to tourism, Hiroki Azuma has spoken about its philosophical implications, but Kino’s Journey is not about tourism, she does not see any fictional equivalent to the Grand Canyon or Times Square, a place that is manufactured and sold as an ‘important experience’ that one should see. Antithetical to what Azuma covers, and as an item with plenty of meta-narratological implications, Kino travels to unknown countries who, by virtue of being unknown, are not participants in the global grand narrative of contemporary globalisation. The lush forests she sees may have some beautifully foregrounded cinematography and an inviting sense of scale, but to extrapolate from this is entirely within the purview of any particular viewer. Much as in its depiction of human psychology, there is no pre-existing simplistic term or conclusion to characterise it by, all that Kino’s Journey encompasses is a journey for Kino as much as it is for the viewer – one to engage in their own self-discovery, one in which, if they decide to look, the vast expanse may present an open frontier of endless possibility, just like the one commanded by Eastwood.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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