The Kawaii Menace

I need to watch it again to make sure that there aren’t any paradoxes left dangling and that the writers didn’t cheat at the end, but one thing is clear: it is every bit as good as it is said to be. I doubt that I’ll see a better movie this year. The story is interesting and the central characters are three-dimensional. The production may not be as glossy as a Studio Ghibli epic, but it’s more than adequate, and the script and the acting are first-rate. I will be astonished (and appalled) if TokiKake isn’t quickly licensed, and I hope that whoever does bring it over makes an effort to market it to all audiences, not just anime fans.

Wabi Sabi comments on some of the motifs here (spoilers).

Here’s a curiosity I noticed. I wonder if it was intentional.

Now would someone please translate the book.

*****

It turns out that TokiKake is not an adaptation of the novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui but is a “continuation” of it, set twenty years later. The protagonist of the novel appears in the movie as “Aunt Witch.”

Here’s Yasutaka Tsutsui’s site. It includes a profile that I hope is misleadingly pretentious and English translations of some of his short stories.

I discovered last fall that the U.S. Postal Service can send a package into the future. Apparently, they can send objects into the past as well. Here’s the status report on my most recent amazon.com order. Just what exactly did happen on the afternoon of December 31, 1969?

Posting will eventually resume with comments on Rocket Girls, Animal Yokocho and Pythagoras Switch. Until then, here’s a truly motivational poster.

(Via the LLama Butchers.)

Bishoujo Celeb Panchanne is a live-action mahou shoujo spoof in which a former magical girl, now a happily married mother, is persuaded by a rather seedy kami-sama to wear the short skirt again. I’ve only seen the raw for the first episode, so I don’t know what the silly/stupid ratio is, but it looks quite cheesy, as Pixy observed. It’s also very low budget: the alien space ship looks curiously like the device I use to steam peas and corn. It does feature one element of realism missing from every other mahou shoujo show I’ve seen: we get to see Panchanne’s costume designed and constructed.¹ (She still undergoes the usual magical transformation when it’s time to face the monster of the week.)

1. Cardcaptor Sakura is a special case, and I don’t think we ever actually see Tomoyo sewing. [↩]