While I’ve been spending weeks crying about anime shows in the Summer and Fall cours, and praying that the Summer Curse™ doesn’t hit me again, I’d been making plans to go to this little event in Edinburgh, Scotland. I could use the fresh Scottish air.
The Scotland Loves Anime event is something that has been going for 10 years now. Organized by UK anime distributor Anime Limited, it’s a little different from all the other fan conventions that take place here in the UK, in that it premieres a few anime movies, as well as bring in industry guests. No maid cafes, karaoke events, or cosplay masquerade contests here. Some movies in past years have even received European premieres here. I was unfortunately only able to make the weekend in Edinburgh, not Glasgow, but of course that didn’t stop me from having a great time here.
The first thing I noticed when I arrived here on the Thursday was how beautiful the city of Edinburgh really is. My family had already told me how nice Edinburgh Castle and the National Museum were, and now I understand them. In the spare time I had, I was able to play the role of the naive tourist.
Reviews of 5 movies are in this article, but a lot more movies aired at Scotland Loves Anime that I was sadly unable to make, like The Relative Worlds, Birthday Wonderland, and the European premiere of Eureka Seven Hi-Evolution: Anemone. I’m not a big fan of the Eureka Seven franchise to begin with, so I suppose that wasn’t a big loss, but I sort of underestimated how busy some of these screenings ended up becoming.
Ride Your Wave
Hinako is a devoted surfer who attends college, but doesn’t really have a direction in life. When her new apartment catches fire, trainee firefighter Minato saves her, and the two eventually begin a relationship. However when tragedy strikes, Hinako is left distraught and emotionally unstable, until she begins to see a bizarre reflection of Minato in water whenever she sings a memorable song.
Ride Your Wave was marketed as a ‘simple romantic comedy’, and it is in every degree, but I noticed that a lot of other critics called the movie ‘too normal’ for Yuasa, which I thought was a little unfair. Comparing this to his other, more surreal works (Mind Game, Devilman Crybaby) and just assuming everything he makes will have a touch of surrealism to it is a little wrong. There is a lot to laugh at here, and these are all wonderful characters we want to know more about, but this is definitely a movie about tragedy in life, and how important it is to move on and not dwell in the past.
Mind Game
I also had time to watch a Yuasa classic, Mind Game, which made little to no sense; you can blame the experimental and varied animation styles used here.
If you’re curious about the plot, it concerns Nishi, who’s a bit of a loser, who runs into his old high-school sweetheart Myon one day. After the Yakuza find the yakitori restaurant her father owns, the two of them (along with her sister) go on a run, and end up in the belly of a whale…yes, you heard me right. There’s so much more than just that, and if you’re prepared to have your mind blown, then it’s definitely worth checking out this pre-Science Saru movie. I understand that it has gained a bit of a cult audience, and it’s very easy to understand why. Curious though that Mind Game was not officially a part of the Scotland Loves Anime programme, and instead was shown by the cinema itself.
Time to move back onto the event itself, and on to a movie that…is different.
Human Lost
The movie focuses mostly on Youzo Oba, an orphaned artist, who decides to associate himself with a motorcycle gang and a mysterious man named Masao Horiki, who claims to hold the key to ‘resetting’ humanity. Youzo’s life is later saved by the equally mysterious Yoshiko Hiiragi, who calls herself an Applicant, someone who has mysterious abilities related to abnormally long life, and when Youzo later learns he has mysterious powers of his own, his life takes a turn for the worse…or is he also another key to ‘saving’ humanity?
I like a good amount of material that comes from Polygon Pictures, but as I watched this, I began to question what direction they planned to go. The animation is certainly something to be impressed at, but there was just so much in the plot of Human Lost that it was very easy to get confused. As well as this, the initial plot was a little too ridiculous. I can believe that humanity can strive to live longer than normal, but this ‘Lost’ phenomenon just did not sit right with me somehow.
Weathering With You
A lot of people were expecting a lot from Weathering With You, Makoto Shinkai’s next project, which is already being compared to your name. It certainly gained the popularity of the crowd here; I, on the other hand, wasn’t entirely won over by it.
The reason it is being heavily compared to your name isn’t just because of the director – the main characters share a lot of similarities with Taki and Mitsuha in your name, the same animation studio (Comix Wave Films) is used, and the same band (Radwimps) is responsible for original music. Heck, Taki and Mitsuha even make a cameo in this movie; it’s more of a ‘blink-and-you-miss-them‘ moment. Here in Weathering With You, we see the story of high school runaway Hodaka heading off to Tokyo to try and make something of himself, only to discover that the city is in the grip of an unusually long downpour. After finding a job as an assistant at an urban legends magazine, he learns about the legend of the weather maiden who has the power to part the clouds and bring sunshine back to the city, albeit temporarily.
This ‘weather maiden’ turns out to be orphaned girl Hina, who is finding jobs herself to take care of her younger brother Nagi. When they decide to make a business out of her mysterious power (while Tokyo is still in the grip of a downpour), Hina discovers some changes happening to her body.
Weathering With You has a solid story, and plenty of melodrama for any viewer, anime fan or not. The one issue this movie has, though, is that it is in the shadow of your name‘s success, and it seems like it’s impossible for it to break free. Because both Taki and Mitsuha make cameos in this movie, we can’t really tell if this is meant to be a spiritual sequel to your name, or whether this is just Makoto Shinkai trying to be some kind of auteur filmmaker. Which leads us to think if Shinkai is only capable of making one kind of anime movie or not. Maybe this is a spiritual sequel, or maybe it’s just Shinkai trying to be an auteur, or even a mixture of the two – either way, this movie didn’t entirely win me over, although I don’t doubt that it will win over a lot of other people.
Now onto what can only be described as the main event of the festival: a special screening of Trigger’s first feature film, Promare, with director Hiroyuki Imaishi, creative producer Hiromi Wakabayashi, and character/mecha designer Shigeto Koyama in attendance.
Promare
In case you’re unfamiliar with the plot, it revolves around a mutation that some people end up developing, which causes spontaneous human combustion. These people are later labelled Burnish, and are outcast by the rest of society. 30 years after half of the world’s population is wiped out by this phenomenon, the young leader of terrorist group Mad Burnish, Lio Fotia, stages an attack, only to be foiled by the brash recruit of firefighting group Burning Rescue, Galo Thymos. After being awarded for his bravery, Galo later learns why Mad Burnish do what they do, and what the government behind Burning Rescue have in store for the world’s population in the future.
This movie is everything you expect Trigger to be: sharp animation, vibrant colors, laugh-out-loud comedy, frequent references to the mecha and kaiju genres. Curiously, we found out via the three that Promare was set to be a feature-length movie right from the very beginning, despite Trigger’s history of making TV shows or short-length pieces, largely because of the animation style used for the movie, which was something they felt they couldn’t really replicate in a TV show. Interesting, as Promare has the kind of plot that could well have ended up becoming a TV show. Sure enough, they were initially very nervous on making something of this length, but the project ended up becoming more of a fluid process, which is something I think all of the staff at Trigger are more comfortable with. Not quite calling it “making-it-up-as-you-go-along”, but as I watched, it really did feel like the main staff simply threw all of the things they loved about making shows into one basket, with the final result becoming something that is actually quite remarkable.
Out of all the movies I watched here at Scotland Loves Anime, my rating for favorite movie is a close tie between Promare and Ride Your Wave. I know that Promare has been given a theatrical release date here in the UK for November, and we also learned here that it is to be on the conditional shortlist for next year’s Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature, which is quite impressive as well. Weathering With You seems to have become the festival favorite, but I wasn’t convinced by it. Ride Your Wave deserves much more credit than it is being given, and I can’t speak for the other movies aired here that I couldn’t make (Birthday Wonderland, Children of the Sea, Eureka Seven Hi-Evolution: Anemone, etc.), although the grapevine told me that Children of the Sea was extremely weird. I went home with heavily discounted copies of The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl and Belladonna of Sadness, which is a bonus.
I’d like to thank everyone at Anime Limited for hosting this event here in Edinburgh and over in Glasgow; this was my first time attending this, as well as my first time in Scotland, so I had been extremely nervous the whole weekend, and they were all very wonderful people. I’d also like to give a big shout-out to Hiroyuki Imaishi, Hiromi Wakabayashi and Shigeto Koyama from Studio Trigger, who took the time to make it to Scotland for this little event. They told us they didn’t expect Scotland to be so cold, which made us all laugh.
Promare received a North American release (with English dub) in September, and is scheduled for release in UK/Ireland cinemas on November 26. Human Lost was released in North America on October 22. Weathering With You and Ride Your Wave are all set for theatrical releases in North America and Europe in early 2020.