There’s so much to love about this movie. So I thought I’d really count the ways, because I want to share, and enumerating them via Twitter just doesn’t work as well as a bulleted list.

• Uses old fantasy tropes like farm-boy-goes-on-quest in new, interesting ways. This farm boy is not a hidden prince, but a father and husband who’s well-established in his life, and knows where he comes from.
• Said father is a nurturing figure in the movie–he takes care of the baby competently the whole way through. Nice change from the big manly heroes who always save the day through brawn—though of course we get that in Madmartigan.
• “Ignore the bird. Follow the river!”
• The brownies are a great use of perspective, blue screen, and editing to make it seem like they’re actually tiny people (well, for 1988 technology). And who can’t love lines like “I stole da babyyyy!”
• Madmartigan. Everything about him. His mysterious past, his roguish nature. His complete inability to possess tact.
• “Temptiiiing… but, NO!”
• “Gentlemen? Meet Lug!”
• The diversity of characters in both the daichini (daikini?) and nelwyn people is refreshing in a genre that sometimes (not always, but too often) forgets that not all elves or dwarves are exactly the same.
• Drunk brownies falling in love with kitties
• Mouse hats
• Chase scenes galore! Including one that plays on the old cartoon trope of rolling down a snow-covered hill (after a great sled chase scene!) and turning into a giant snowball.
• The fact that until today when I looked it up on IMDB—i.e., for 22 years—I’ve thought that Madmartigan’s name was Mad Martigan, because everyone thought he was mad.
• Blackroot. “Puts hair on your chest!”—just what a baby girl wants!
• Okay, so the final fight scene with the two-headed monster is a bit odd. But Fin Raizel definitely makes up for it!
• “Willll-loow! YOU IDIOT!”–Fin Raizel, as a goat
• Fin Raizel as a sugar glider, or just about any animal, for that matter
• A love potion gone wrong that helps a strong female character realize she’s fighting for the wrong team
• Sorsha kicking Madmartigan in the face
• The sets! Oh, the beautiful sets!
• The costumes! Oh the beautiful costumes!
• Except: What is UP with General Kael’s skull mask?
• “It went away? ‘I dwell in darkness without you’ and it went away??”
• I also just realized (how many times have I watched this movie? at least twice a year for many, many years) that the people at Tiras Lee were turned to stone or encased in crystal or something. It’s so quick and not terribly clear—all these years I thought they were just stones Madmartigan was waving at.
• Madmartigan thinking he’s so scary when everyone runs at Tir Aislean, when it’s really a two-headed fire-breathing used-to-be-a-troll creature.
• Why does the music (final fight scene) keep make me expect Sloth the come swinging in on a rope, yelling, “HEY YOU GUUUYS!”?
• Oh yeah, this isn’t the final fight scene. We still have to face off with Bavmorda.
• “You’re not warriors! You’re pigs! You’re allll pigs!“
• Oh, I’m sure I’ll remember more as the movie plays on.

What about you? Is Willow a favorite? What do you love about it? What other fantasy movies are your oft-returned-to favorites?

SPOILER WARNING: I’m linking to the Wikipedia articles about these anime and the manga or light novels they’re based on. Sometimes there can be spoilers on these pages with no warnings, so proceed with caution. There are no huge spoilers in my descriptions—everything I mention is mentioned in the descriptions of the anime on the Netflix or Hulu page—but those of you with low spoiler thresholds have been warned.

DN Angel (more, including content/age range info & no spoilers, at Anime News Network)—I’m just starting this one through Netflix and it’s been making me giggle. Daisuke Niwa is a pretty normal 14-year-old kid who turns into a notorious thief when he sees the girl he loves, and he can only turn back when he’s won her love in his thief form. His mom and grandpa as accomplices are hilarious.

Darker than Black (more at ANN)—also just started this one (have only watched the 1st disc so far) and it’s okay. Definitely at least PG-13 for gore in some places–don’t recommend it for kids. The stars have gone out and are replaced by the “stars” of what they call “contractors,” people who have a superpower that is constrained by a habit they hate. So, someone who can manipulate water, for example, might be required to smoke, that kind of thing. I’m still trying to figure out the thread of the plot on this one.

Tactics (more info at Anime News Network)—LOVE this one so far. Also only past the first disc, but it’s really great so far. I would LOVE to see a YA novel focusing on this kind of folklore—Shonen Onmiyouji (ANN), another anime, also features the same kind of concept, a boy/man who can see spirits and banishes them using traditional Japanese methods (which I believe, but I’m not sure, are based on real Shinto practices—someone correct me if I’m wrong). (Nevermind, I will correct myself—if Wikipedia can be believed, Onmyodo was a spiritual practice in and of itself, but influenced by Shintoism as well as other religions.)

Point being: We’ve had plenty of YA books in which teens can see spirits or demons or fairies. But I’d love to see one set in Japan or using these kinds of Japanese folkloric influences. I think it makes a familiar story into something completely different, something fresh and new to a U.S. audience. (As always when I hope for stories like this, do your research and know the culture!)

Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok—halfway through this one. Pretty great so far. Anime News Network’s plot summary: “Loki, the Norse god of mischief, has been exiled to the human world for what was apparently was a bad joke. Along with being exiled, he’s forced to take the form of a child. He’s told the only way he can get back to the world of the gods is if he can collect auras of evil that take over human hearts, and so to do this he runs a detective agency. Loki is soon joined by a human girl named Mayura who is a maniac for mysteries, and she soon helps out in her own way. However, soon other Norse gods begin to appear, and most have the intent to assassinate Loki for reasons unclear.”

Kyo Kara Mao! (ANN’s take on it here)—yet another one I’m not far into but love so far. Another giggle-worthy one. Main character Yuri Shibuya is flushed down a toilet into a parallel world where he is proclaimed the Demon King and accidentally proposes marriage to another guy by slapping him on the face for insulting his mother. Hilarious to watch him try to navigate a culture so different from his own (which is what parallel-world fantasy is all about, though it’s not always supposed to be funny). The more serious plot arcs are great, too—Yuri has no idea what he’s doing as a king, and he tries to avoid war between demon and human kingdoms, which baffles a lot of people.

R.O.D. the TV (ANN link)—Actually, I covered this one in my original post.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (ANN link)—somehow this one got left off my last list. Watch this one! It’s hilarious. Only 12 episodes, I think, so a relatively quick watch.

M0onPhase (ANN link)—A hilariously different take on a vampire story. I love the relationship between Kouhei and Hazuki. And the opening sequence is hilarious. I’m only about halfway through this one on Hulu—I discovered it over the holiday break and haven’t had time to go back to it. (Reading subs makes it harder to do other things while watching. I love listening to the Japanese inflections, but listening to dubs (even bad ones) makes it easier for me to accomplish other things at the same time.)

I also re-watched Fruits Basket recently (it’s on Hulu!) and again recommend it to anyone. It’s a classic YA fantasy story.

I really wish there were a second season of Ghost Hunt available (this one’s on Hulu, as well). From what I can tell, it was written by the same woman who wrote Twelve Kingdoms, which might be why I like it so much.

We’ve watched a lot of great stuff in the last year or so–the stuff coming out in the last few years is just plain brilliant:

• Vampire Knight (if you liked Twilight, you’ll LOVE VK–6 or 7 volumes of the manga is out here in the States, and the anime just got licensed)
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Saiunkoku (OH so good–I would really love to be the one to bring over the light novels through Tu Publishing, but if someone got there first, I’d be all over getting them; I wish I could find the full second season on DVD)
• Gundam 00
• Ouran High School Host Club (very fun, and a great look at gender roles)
• Fruits Basket
• Code Geass
• Witch Hunter Robin (this stands out among a bunch of standouts–so good)
• Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex
• Emma: A Victorian Romance
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumya
• Kuroshitsuji (we have to finish this one sometime) (also: this one is very hard to pronounce!)
• Wolf’s Rain (good, but very sad ending)
• Twelve Kingdoms (80s cheese, including a very whiny main character at first, but if you stick with it, it’s pretty fun)
• Cele-something (dang, forgot the name; helpful, aren’t I?)
• Moribito: Guardian of the Sacred Spirit (wow, what a show. And there’s a great book it’s based on, edited by Cheryl Klein)

… and many others that I’m forgetting. I should make a complete list to help me remember & help lead me to ones I like.

This has led me to many a good anime on my own (including older ones that I never saw when they were new), often because the friend who hosted anime night–who sadly just moved away–is so in touch with it and makes great recommendations:

• Tsubasa
• Samurai 7
• xxxHolic
• Last Exile
• The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye (so good I want to add this one to my collection)
• Ghost Hunt
• Trigun
• .hack//SIGN (and just as I got into it somehow all the discs became unavailable)
• Death Note
• Scrapped Princess
• Noein
• R.O.D the TV
• Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play (90s cheese, but fun)
• Read or Die

…and so on.

Anyway, I make this list right now because I want to eventually break it down and review some of them, and also because I’d like to hear if any of you have suggestions–given that I’ve liked pretty much all of this list, and given that if you’re a reader of this blog you probably know the kind of fantasy and science fiction I’m into (there are some great YA-oriented school stories on there, too, that aren’t speculative at all, but absolutely entertaining, like Ouran), perhaps you’ll be able to recommend some I haven’t heard of. What am I missing? You can probably tell that my tastes tend to run shojo–I love the bishis, when it’s not too overdone!–but I’m also open to brilliant stories that aren’t terribly violent.

What would you guys recommend? What new anime coming out is a must-see?

**Oh, and a few I want to see but haven’t gotten to yet:

• Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok
• Shonen Onmyoji
• Darker than Black

My first example isn’t exactly the best one, but I use it for a reason. In Ocean’s Eleven (*spoilers*), the guys use an EMP to knock out Las Vegas’s electric grid for a time. With a complete acknowledgement that they’re probably playing fast and loose with the science of it, if an EMP knocks out delicate instruments, how in the world was Las Vegas able to come back up so quickly? Did they knock out all the computers on that grid, too? How many millions or billions of dollars of damage would such a pulse have done to the electronics of the part of Las Vegas that the EMP affected?

Then there’s Dark Angel–which we only see 20 years after the pulse, so there’s admittedly little dealt with in the series itself about the immediate effects of the EMP, but we do see a lot of interesting social extrapolation, where only the rich have the newest technologies and the U.S. is plunged into a new kind of depression that they might not recover from for years. (After all, when the banks’ systems crash, all those little ones and zeroes turn into just plain zeros, according to Dark Angel’s voiceover narrative in one of the earlier episodes.)

How does it happen? Well, we’ve got a service-based society, I can see how it might happen in the big cities at least. Small towns, though, tend to be a lot more self-sufficient. What Midwestern farm town doesn’t have at least two or three farmers with their own machine shops (not electromechanical–actual machine shops with tools probably inherited from their grandpa), wood shops, or even a guy or two who’s into hunting and trapping that might have a smoke shed for preserving meat? It wouldn’t serve the needs of the entire area, but that town would have resources beyond its electronics, and the food would be right out there in the fields (barring a subsequent natural disaster–it might be only corn and beans and whatever animals they might raise, plus every country garden, but they’d have food and people who knew how to cultivate it).

Limitations on even a small town, of course, would be distribution of fossil fuels and electricity. No power tools, etc. But from my experience, small towns are populated by resourceful people. As in Dark Angel, it’s the cities that would suffer most, because they generally don’t grow their own food and rely more upon electricity and fossil fuels for basic necessities like heat in the winter.

And that brings me to Jericho. The reason I stopped watching the show? All the frozen meat was thawing when the local grocery store’s backup generator died. What did they do? THEY HAD A PARTY and ATE ALL THE MEAT. No, they didn’t find the guy with the smoke shed who might be able to teach them how to preserve the meat for the winter, even though they knew they’d probably run out of food before the electricity was fixed (if it was ever going to be). No, they didn’t find the local crazy environmentalist survivalist (my town had at least one, didn’t yours?) who would be able to help them know how to cut wood in the spring and summer so that it would be dry enough to use in fireplaces and wood-burning stoves by the winter. And forget coal, which most midwestern small towns I’m familiar with would still have someone hanging on to.

Or perhaps that’s just me. My dad didn’t get an electric furnace for our house, which is 3 miles out from our small Illinois town of 2,700, until the coal hopper for our wood-burning furnace (as in, the only furnace our house had, central heat from the basement powered by wood)  finally quit, which was about 3 or 4 years ago I believe. He still cuts wood, but not as much anymore because he doesn’t have four kids at home to help him cut, haul, and stack every weekend.

We froze our meat (which we raised–pig, cow, rabbit, chicken), but my dad had plenty of friends who knew how to preserve meat, and several friends who had harness-trained horses (we raised horses for pleasure/trail riding; our family vacations were spent camping on the Jubilee College State Park horse trails near Peoria, IL) and if necessary we knew several people who could haul out their old horse or oxen-drawn plows because nobody who grew up in the Depression ever seems to have thrown anything out. (When my grandpa died in 2000, we–mostly meaning my dad and several aunts and uncles–cleaned out his barns on his farm and my grandma’s house. It took months. We found enough antiques to sell to the local antique man that we were able to establish a house maintenance fund for my grandma. We also found peaches that had been canned by my great-grandmother before she died in 1972. Sploosh!)

Okay, point being that most small towns I know have resourceful people, and the people of Jericho? They didn’t seem smart or resourceful enough to have actually populated a small town at any time in the history of the last fifty years. It was as if they’d all just moved in from L.A. last year. Oh! They did!

This is why Life As We Knew It fascinated me so much, actually. It’s not an EMP story, but it does take into account all the various ways that people can be resourceful in a doomsday scenario. And it makes me wonder how the main character of LaWKI would cope with a mere EMP blast (as opposed to the moon taking out half the earth’s ability to grow food and catastrophic climate change). I think she’d do pretty well, actually.

Ridley Scott’s director’s cut of his sci-fi noir thriller adds scenes and a new ending, drops the voice-over [which I remember being pretty corny--there was so much corny voiceover in the 70s and 80s], and deletes some of the gorier moments. The story follows a 21st-century detective (Harrison Ford) charged with terminating deadly androids.

Now, “terminating deadly androids” aside–it’s a whole lot more nuanced than that–I find it interesting that the director’s cut chooses to delete the gorier scenes, and I think I’ll end up liking the movie a lot more because of it. I saw Blade Runner for the first time back in the early 90s, in college, I believe, if not in high school. I loved the story, but the thing that always turned me off was the gore. I don’t remember there being a lot, but I have the benefit of over a decade to fuzz
out my memory on that.
But usually a director’s cut will add scenes and not refine stuff like that, because usually the scenes added would increase the likelihood of an R rating (arbitrary though that is) rather than decrease the likelihood of it. And with such a great story as Blade Runner is, it has always disappointed me that it got an R, which would deter many people I know from seeing it.
Now, looking at the TV ratings on the DVR, this still says that it’s rated R (though I believe that G4 is one of the stations that edits for language, so that may be moot). But I am interested in seeing the changes and how it affects the story.

I also got a cover of Red Dragon Codex drawn by a reader. It’s awesome, and I’d show a picture if I had a working camera.

The snow is really coming down here. Glad I don’t have to drive anywhere! I am planning on going up to Salt Lake tonight to go with some friends to a Living Nativity, so here’s hoping the roads clear by then–I’m looking forward to spending time with the friends.

Despite not having to leave the house to go to work, it feels like a snow day, so I have declared a holiday. I am watching Northanger Abbey bundled up in a cozy blanket, sitting next to my cat who is fascinated by all the snow coming down. And of course the song "Snow" from White Christmas is going through my head: "Snow… snow…
snow… snow… snow! It won’t be long before we’re there with snoooo-ooooow! I wanna wash my face, my hands, my hair in snow. What is Christmas with nooooo snooooow?" etc. There’s no replacing it, I’m afraid.

Looks like the snow is lightening up a little, at least.

Oh! And something I forgot to mention when it went up on the website, which announces something I’ve been holding off on announcing that I’m going to have to announce now–I’ll post it in a new dedicated post.