Serenity

I loved Firefly, it was one of the most interesting shows to come out for years, a cool mixture of the old west, morality plays and space ships.

Serenity, as I’m sure most people are aware, is the movie version of the TV show. I’m reluctant to call it a follow-up or continuation, as it’s more of a remix of some of the themes that came before. So knowledge of the TV show doesn’t really help when watching the film, in fact it might even be a hindrance.

The movie runs along at a nice pace, though it lacks any of the sense of serenity or calm that the Firefly had, which was its most endearing quality. So no quite moments around the dinner table or a sense of the bonding between the crew in this iteration of the saga, instead we get a gung-ho crew facing impossible odds.

So, to recap, the crew of the spaceship Serenity is led by Mal, a war veteran from the losing side. His crew includes a female teenager version of Neo, River, whose psychic abilities are interesting and whose Matrix inspired combat skills are as tedious as they are in every other knock-off action movie in recent years. Also aboard is the utterly under used married couple of Zoe and Wash (which is even more unpleasant given a throwaway tragedy for no real reason at the climax of the film), the ever funny grunt-thug Jayne, River’s brother Simon, and the charming engineer Kaylee (who gets the funniest line in the film). Oh, and there's Inara, who gets a bit of plot at the start and vanishes and Shepard Book, who gets shot so we feel bad.

They are harbouring River from the Alliance who send an ‘operative’ to recover her before she can reveal their darkest secrets.

The ethics behind the tale are straight out of a western, with the faceless forces of ‘civilization’ attempting to crush the last hold-outs of individuality, and on top of that there is the ever present threat of the savages on the border. To be honest it doesn’t quite work, sure the bad guys are nasty and the good guys believe in something more honourable but the gulf between them doesn’t seem big enough.

Perhaps the laconic performance of the secret agent sent against the heroes is a bit to laid back, perhaps his ideals are too well drawn, even sympathetically, to really hate him. Perhaps the harsh side of the captain is too raw and tough, perhaps it’s too easy to imagine that he really would have children in the past. Whatever the reason the film fails at what it seems to want to be, there just isn’t any opera in this space.

Though this is probably deliberate, Joss Whedon is a writer of some talent, his best moments in Buffy had a real emotional punch, and he may be doing his best to tell the tale he wants against a background of financing that wanted a new Star Wars.

Nowhere is this more obvious in the finale of the film where we only see glimpses of the moments that George Lucas would have wanked over for hours. From Buffy-lite confrontations between River and the Reavers, to the battle space and the crunching fight between the two adversaries, all is on screen for moments but never in a prolonged scene.

It all gives the sense of a conflict, a feeling of peril, without the needless bogging down of the story into simple action fare, or the huge expense of long winded SFX shots. Perhaps it was a financial decision, perhaps it wasn’t. I’d like to believe Whedon had the intelligence to structure the scenes deliberately, creating a sense of the future that seems surprisingly layered and real in the scenes of conflict.

Overall it’s a great film, that constantly suggests it could have been something better, something superb if there hadn’t the need to try and be something stupider and simpler than it deserves.

Samurai Champloo

There’s a few things that I find difficult about anime, things that it takes a great series to overcome. For starters, despite being popular amongst adults, way too many series seem to concentrate on young teenagers saving the world – even when the heroes are adults they often seem to behave in childish ways, with wildly varying emotions.

Animation styles can also be a problem, giant eyes and strange facial expressions seem to pull me out of the moment and remind me this is still essentially a children’s format. I don’t think it’s a surprise that some of the best regarded anime is often that which maintains a more realistic presentation (from the grim tragedy of Jin-Ron to the characters from Spirited Away) throughout, rather than dropping into giant hands, or smiles that cover whole faces.

There is also a sense of the worst kind of episodic television in a lot of anime, with piles upon piles of stand-alone episodes that seem to exist just to reach the required numbers of shows in a season – often without jarring tones and inconsistencies.

This is by way of an introduction of where I was coming from when I watched Samurai Champloo, because this great series suffers from just about all these problems, especially in the consistency of the shows, but rises above them to create a really great piece of work.

Samurai Champloo is the next anime from the mind behind Cowboy Bebop – Shinichiro Wanatabe. It’s a tale set a few hundred years ago in Japan mixed with hip-hop…

God knows why, I certainly don’t, but there’s always been a weird link between hip-hop and samurai in my mind. Maybe I listened to too much Wu-Tang and not enough bitch-slapping, pimp-praisin’ bullshit; maybe I thought Forrest Whittaker was cooler than anyone else in a movie for years when Ghost Dog came out; whatever the reason Samurai Champloo was like a dream come true.

The hip-hoppity style shows itself in the music, the style of the clothes, the speech patterns and a thousand other ways. From gangster stances when one villain carries a gun, to a whole show about graffiti and self expression, and even the strange rap in the open credits, this show mixes up your traditional expectations (indeed the word ‘champloo’ means a mix-up or combining of style).

The story is traditional and simple (not that that’s a bad thing), following the journey of cut teenager Fuu, vagabond warrior Mugen and ronin Jin. It utterly lacks the strange morality of some of the greatest samurai (especially the awe inspiring manga of Lone Wolf and Cub) only in one episode (that focuses on the sacrifice of Japanese wife to prostitution to clear her husbands debts) addressing the foulness of the feudal system. It’s the way the tale is told that makes the real difference here.

The animation and artistry on display in the series is incredible, with a great fluidity of movement that makes every fight scene a joy to behold. The most obvious example of this is the character of Mugen, whose fighting style seems to be a delightful mixture of break dancing, self injury, stupidity and genius. However it isn’t just this most obvious example where this fluidity appears. Despite Jin’s traditional appearance as the zen-like samurai, when he’s fighting there is none of the stoicism seen in the early works of Kurosawa or the fatalism of Kitano. Blades fly through the air and bodies spin with the camera in a montage of blood and flashing blades.

This style is always maintained at a perfect pitch, and even in the weakly plotted episodes there is always the level of quality in the animation and presentation, it’s always a delight to watch.

Samurai Champloo is ultimately an unimportant story dressed in the finest of clothes. It’s the clothes that matter here, not the emperor. You can pretty much guess how the series will end after just a couple of episodes, especially if you’ve seen a lot of other material from the Land of the Rising Sun, but despite the failings I’d normally hate in anime the show is a great delight, a piece of dynamic art that is the Lichtenstein of the anime world, to the more convoluted (but equally impressive) works such as Ghost in the Shell.