Madmind

Sorry when I start this review with a rant but when in the history of movies did someone decide that anything and everything even only slightly animated is being considered stuff for kids and families?

Just look at the reviews here, here and here: in every piece there’s a warning that Mary and Max is not for kids. Well, thank you very much for this warning. Please wake me up, if you started to watch some anime series and movies. Then we can talk. Seriously, this is embarrassing, especially when such assumptions come from reviewers. They should know better.  (Or do they know better but write this because of some narrow-minded audience? Come one, nobody is that narrow-minded…)

In one point they are all correct, though: this is a truly adult story, heartwarming, poignant and bittersweet. The claymation Mary and Max is one of the best animated movies in recent memory and to me it beats Pixar’s Up by a landslide.

You see a face of a man in close-up, hard, rough, and roughly lit. Music stemming from a Spaghetti Western plays its dramatic tunes. The atmosphere is heavy. Then, the guy begins to eat a carrot. He’s sitting on a bench, nothing happens.

Seconds later a pregnant woman runs past him, pain shows in her face, she’s screaming…and a mobster is on her trails, screaming “You’re dead, bitch”. She runs into a building, the mobster’s right behind her, getting ready to shoot her. Our unnamed guy watches the whole scene in front of him. After both are out of sight he mumbles “Fuck it all” and goes after them.

Just before the mobster can kill the damsel in distress our unnamed guy closes in. He turns the bad guy around, puts his carrot into the open mouth of the mobster and smashes it right through the neck. His last advice? “Eat your vegetables”.

This, ladies and gentlemen, are the very first two minutes of Shoot ‘Em Up.

One minute later the death toll already reaches eight.

Gage recently added a comment to my review of Akira (the one anime that made anime famous as anime in the West) and this one made me think. He mainly writes about Kaori who is the girlfriend of Tetsuo i.e. the Guy Who Goes Horribly Nuts. Gage not only correctly points out that Kaori is only on screen in two scenes in Akira but also that in each segment Kaori is in a living hell and no one seems to care. I addressed his second point in a comment of mine in the original post, so I will use this space to address the first point: the role of Kaori in Akira since her two moments seem to be not that important at all.

Before I start please note that you need to have watched Akira at least once to understand what I’m writing about. If you didn’t, you can gladly skip this blog post if you like.

Don’t let the awesomely bad excuse of a movie poster fool you (see image above – the borders are part of the poster *ugh*). The French movie industry actually did it. They produced The Concert, a movie that’s heartwarming and funny at the same time. And yeah, I am as surprised as you by that fact as I totally know the European movie industry normally cannot tell a good plot/story even if their life depends on it.

Damn it! I love it when that happens…

Again this blog is living up to its one liner I’ve chosen: “movie blogging outside the frame”. Why? Because I again don’t agree with anyone else in the world. The first time this obviously happened was Avatar. And Toy Story 3 is the second time.