Wonderful Days. (
Wikipedia.
ImdB.) A gorgeously-animated feature-length anime with a great sci-fi concept, sadly burdened with zero characterization, an inconsequential plot, a confused theme, and generally bad writing. Scores, first:
Wonderful Days, 2003
Script/Story: 4
Characters/Performances: 5
Concept: 8
Action: 6
Eye Candy: 8
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 6
A gorgeous, visually-pleasing film. It's all CG, 3D figures and backgrounds animated on computers, but they do most of the figures in a faux-2D way, so they look hand drawn into the scenes, rather than appearing as fully 3D figures in the world, video game style. Essentially it's CG done to look like actual cell drawn artwork, and it took a huge team 3 years to produce, and cost a damn fortune. Pity they didn't spend some of that on a writer.
While watching this one I found myself thinking about the same question that always comes up when I'm viewing bad anime. Who wrote this? And why did they commit to all the drawing, artwork, computer work, etc, when the story was so lame? I've seen dumber, less interesting anime, but this one had a good plot concept and setting. It just did nothing with it.
The whole plot felt like something a couple of guys had brainstormed on the back of a napkin at a bar one night, and then never advanced any further. My quick summary:
"So it's like, 100 years in the future. At some point, the world got all polluted and there was an apocalypse of some kind. One huge technologically advanced city was built before the doom, and it's where everyone smart lives. The city is semi-sentient, and it fuels itself by consuming garbage and pollution. But what happens after like a century of this, when the earth starts to become clean again? The city has to have pollution to function. What do the people who live in it do? They're a ruling class, more advanced and privileged than the teeming masses, but their power comes from the city's energy. Could they create more pollution just to keep the city running? Would the masses try to stop them?"
That's a decent framework for a story. The problem, as I said, is that nothing more is done with it. I'd like to blame the translation; perhaps the subtitled version I saw was not very well done and it missed the nuances of the plot and characterization? But there wasn't any evidence of that, since the visuals matched the dialogue and plot as presented through it. The characters are worse than the unfinished plot, and seem even more hurriedly sketched out. Perhaps on the back of a match book, since a napkin wouldn't be required for their non-detailed selves.
"Okay, so we need a hot girl. She's like, one of the security officers for the city. And we need conflict with the insurgents. So maybe she likes the main terrorist guy who breaks into the city to break into the city to hack into the CPU? Oh, I know! He's one of the ruling class, who left the city years ago. He and the girl were childhood friends, but there was some kind of tragedy and he left the city and grew up in the slums. And now he wants revenge! Oh, and there's a love triangle. The girl is in love with another of the guards, and he was also a childhood friend. So he and the girl are all conflicted if they should kill the terrorist, since he was like, their hero when he was young."
That's it for the characterization, and trust me, it's a lot less interesting than it sounds from that sketch, since none of the main characters have any personality. They're entirely defined by what they do, by their type. The character design is done poorly too, since the girl and the terrorist are obviously about 21, but the third guy in the triangle is a commanding officer, and he has white hair, and there's never any indication of special feelings between him and the girl. I assumed he was about 50, and didn't realize that he felt anything more than a soldier's duty to the girl. It wasn't until a flashback scene showed the commander as a child with the other two, all of them about 10, that I realized he was their age, and just happened to have white hair. And it wasn't until the very end that I realized he was supposed to have some kind of romantic attraction to the girl. So no, the love triangle thing wasn't all that well delineated.
Other than those three, there are lots of faceless city guards, various criminals/freedom fighters attacking them,
Total Recall style, a cute little boy who is the sexy terrorist dude's adopted younger brother, an exiled scientist from the city who wants to destroy it, etc. None of them have any more personality than you see in their first on screen appearance, though. They're all types, doing whatever their role requires to advance the plot, without standing out or creating any viewer sympathy. Furthermore, the plot doesn’t advance beyond the initial idea. I guess the city was destroyed in the end, but when it shut down the skies cleared (it was always raining before then) which didn't make sense, since the city was described as a machine that was consuming the pollution, not creating it.
There were also plans discussed by the ruling faction to blow up a bunch of oil wells to create new pollution, but despite various scenes of soldiers moving out under orders to launch that plan, we never saw if they did so, or heard any reason why not. The only combat and action was in the city, as the insurgents invaded, so presumably the soldiers sent off to destroy the oil fields were unopposed in their mission. Which they didn't carry out, because um... they just didn't.
There was also a weirdness to the vehicles in the film. All of the city people used single passenger, enclosed motorcycles, which looked a bit like sexy golf carts. But on two wheels, just so they'd be unstable and impractical. Dune buggies, guys. The ruling city people had flying machines, but they were very small, basically aerial motorcycles, and the guards only used them within the city. So any time they had a mission out in the concrete jungle around the city, they'd ride out in a long train of motorcycles, which were slow, perilous to operate on wet roads, and very vulnerable to any sort of attack. No trucks, no helicopters, etc. (The insurgents had a truck they used to drive 20 of them into the base at once; a far more effective technique than trying to sneak in 20 motorcycles.)
When the city commanders wanted to destroy the oil fields, they sent out soldiers, presumably on a fleet of motorcycles. Why don't they just fire rockets? Or bombs? They have fantastically advanced technology, but nothing that flies? Or qualifies for the carpool lane?
I mention these examples since they're illustrative of the overall weirdly thoughtless nature of the film. Lots of good ideas and concepts, great animation, but such dumb plot and events, and boring characters who take turns giving speeches, but never really interact or effect each other with conversation. A tenth, a hundredth as much time spent on the plot and story as on the technical details, and it could have been a really good movie. Instead it was just another beautiful, 3D anime without any characters worth remembering, or a story worth telling.
Labels: anime, movie review
