Tag: Hiroyuki Yoshino

SPY x FAMILY CODE: White (劇場版 SPY×FAMILY CODE: White, Takashi Katagiri, 2023)

May 1, 2024by Hayley Scanlon

The irony at the centre of the Folger family is that they cannot communicate effectively because they’re each afraid of blowing their cover. Adapted from the manga by Tatsuya Endo, Spy x Family was the smash hit anime of 2022 and now makes its way to the big screen with an epic adventure which threatens the foundations of a “fake” family which has become increasingly real to the extent that it may have come to eclipse the reason it was created.

Newcomers to the franchise need not fear as the film is broadly standalone and gives a brief explanation of its setup in not dissimilar fashion to the voiceover intro of the TV anime. Codenamed “Twilight”, spy Loid Folger (Takuya Eguchi) has adopted a little girl, Anya (Atsumi Tanezaki), and married a local woman, Yor (Saori Hayami), in order to infiltrate an elite boarding school with the aim of targeting a reclusive politician through forging a connection with his younger son, Damian. What Loid doesn’t realise is that he’s completely in the dark about his new family. Anya is the only one who knows the whole truth as she is a telepath, while Yor is a secret assassin who agreed to fake marriage as cover to avoid detection by the authorities. Even the family dog, Bond, is a canine clairvoyant who was the product of an experimental program to breed super intelligent dogs.

The mission is compromised by the fact that Anya is less than academically gifted and unlikely to gain all eight stars needed to join the elite group of students that would get her close to Damian and Loid close to his father. Having made so little progress, Loid’s handler reveals Operation Strix may be taken away from him and given to a political crony which would necessarily mean he’d have to give up the new family life to which he’s gradually become accustomed. But the family is also threatened by Yor’s insecurity and conflicted feelings for Loid, well aware their arrangement is “fake” but still anxious that Loid is having an affair and worried he’ll divorce her for not being good enough at the domestic life she too has come to value. Anya, meanwhile, obviously wants to keep to her new family together while helping her parents with various missions but can’t say anything for fear of exposing herself as a telepath and Bond as a clairvoyant.

Echoing the extended cruise arc from the anime, the film follows the Forgers on a mini break to nearby Frigis in search of a regional dessert they hope will help Anya win another star only to end up swept into local politics. The long-form format of the feature surpasses that of the TV series in shedding its bitty, episodic structure for something more substantial though that may of course detract from its charms for those taken by the isolated vignettes of the show. Even so, the film doesn’t stint on quickly humour gaining the ability to deepen its ongoing gags culminating in a fantasy sequence animated like a kids drawing in which Anya meets the God of Poop and is rewarded for excellent service.

Though what’s really about is once again the Forger family who must finally turn the wheel together in order to avoid certain death. Though fighting parallel battles, unable to simply explain what they’re doing and ask for help, the gang eventually end up in the same place united in their missions and also as a family having faced off various threats and reaffirmed their bonds which have by this point become very much real. Loid continues to struggle with the mechanics of his mission, frequently unable to read Yor’s insecurity and unwittingly fuelling it, and exclaiming that he doesn’t understand children nor have much clue how to manage Anya’s often madcap behaviour. The irony is that if he succeeds, the family will have to disband and he’ll lose this new sense of domesticity that’s becoming used to, but if he fails his nation may go to war and thousands of people will die. But until then his biggest problem is figuring out how Anya can win a baking contest and survive yet another impromptu family holiday without becoming embroiled in an international conspiracy.

SPY x FAMILY CODE: White is in UK cinemas now courtesy of All the Anime.

UK trailer (English subtitles)

Promare (プロメア, Hiroyuki Imaishi, 2019)

December 4, 2019December 4, 2019by Hayley Scanlon

It’s one of life’s ironies, sometimes the best way to stop a fire is to scorch the earth. The heroes of Studio Trigger’s first theatrical feature co-produced with XFLAG, Promare (プロメア, Puromea), are embodiments of fire and ice – a “mutant” who can shoot flames from his fingertips, and a fireman with a “burning soul”. Yet what they discover is that there is a peculiar power in their innate contradictions, actively harnessing the energy of their opposition to combat a man who thinks nothing of burning the world to save his own skin.

Our hero, Galo (Kenichi Matsuyama), is a firefighter with the Burning Rescue squad who has a talent for cheesy one liners and an overinflated sense of confidence in his own abilities. 30 years previously, the world was plagued by a series of strange incidents of spontaneous combustion later attributed to the “Burnish” phenomenon in which some members of humanity developed a mutation that allowed them to manipulate fire. The danger eventually died down, but the “Burnish” as they came to be known continued to exist in society as a kind of oppressed underclass, viewed with fear and suspicion and largely unable to live “normal” lives even if they wanted to. On a supposedly “routine” job, Galo unexpectedly encounters the leader of the Mad Burnish “terrorist” organisation and determines to bring him in, eventually awarded a medal for his pains.

As might be assumed, however, all is not as it seems. The Burning Rescue squad work for Galo’s mentor, Kray Foresight (Masato Sakai), now the governor and an enormously wealthy, influential man thanks to his advances in scientific firefighting technology. Kray reveals that the Earth is sitting on a volatile layer of magma somehow connected to the existence of the Burnish which threatens to destroy the planet if it cannot be properly controlled. This is a kind of justification for Kray’s ultra hardline stance against the Burnish who are hunted down and captured by the Freeze Force (see what they did there?) simply for living their lives even if they have committed no crimes.

Despite the nature of their work, the Burning Rescue squad are a more progressive bunch. They don’t approve of the social prejudice against the Burnish many of whom are just minding their own business and pose no threat to anyone, nor do they approve of the role the Freeze Force seems to play in their society. Mostly what they care about is stopping fires and making sure people endangered by them are eventually saved. They know that the Freeze Force’s persecution of the Burnish is at best counterproductive and fuelling the kind of resentment that makes them want to burn things. Wandering into the Mad Burnish hideout, Galo sees a different side to their struggle and learns a few home truths about his own side from the dashing rebel leader Lio Fotia (Taichi Saotome).

Burning Rescue and the Mad Burnish ought to be opposing poles but display a curious symmetry in their fierce loyalty to their own and emphasis on team work. Others, meanwhile, think only of themselves, coming up with nefarious plans to let the planet burn and move to a new intergalactic home with a starter stock of the most “valuable” 10,000 humans while everyone else succumbs to the flames. The Burnish become merely fuel, sacrificed for a “greater good” for a “chosen few”.

Galo and Lio think they’re “chosen ones” too, in a sense, but are flatly told that their role in events is really just fortuitous coincidence. Nevertheless, the fate of the world depends on their ability to bridge their differences, harnessing the unique capabilities of fire meeting ice against the forces of cold self-interest. Sometimes the only way to stop a fire is to let it burn out bright, which is what the guys discover in trying to find a way to quell that troublesome magma. Recreating the anarchic spirit of Kill la Kill, Studio Trigger’s first theatrical feature is a colourful riot of post-modern absurdity, but has its heart firmly in the right place with a strong progressive pro-diversity message in which we save the world only by saving each other.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (夜は短し歩けよ乙女, Masaaki Yuasa, 2017)

October 4, 2017October 4, 2017by Hayley Scanlon7 Comments

Have you ever had one of those incredibly long nights that seemed to pass in an instant? Masaaki Yuasa returns to the absurd world of Tomihiko Morimi with the charming one night odyssey, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl (夜は短し歩けよ乙女, Yoru wa Mijikashi Aruke yo Otome), which takes place in the same world as Yuasa’s TV anime adaptation of the author’s Tatami Galaxy. The Girl with Black Hair dreams her way through Kyoto, relentless as a steam train in her pursuit of new experiences, but perhaps the speed at which she travels leaves her horizons perpetually unclear.

Beginning where many stories end, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl, opens with a wedding. “Sempai” (Gen Hoshino) longs for the “Girl With Black Hair” (Kana Hanazawa). He doesn’t know her name or really very much about her at all other than she’s in the year below him and they belong to the same club, but this is a love for the ages fated to come true. To this end, Sempai has been engineering “coincidental” meetings with the Girl so that she knows he exists, in a “there’s that guy again!” sort of way, hoping to travel into her heart by means of osmosis. Until then he’ll just stare at her lovingly from three tables away at social events involving mutual friends…

The Girl, however, has her own plans. She’s determined to make her way into the world of adulthood this very night, travelling by the power of alcohol (for which she seems to have a seriously impressive tolerance). For the Girl, the night is filled with possibilities. She’s open to everything and everyone, ready to say yes to whatever strange adventure the gods have in store for her. Which is lucky, because this is going to be a very strange night indeed.

The Night is Short pivots around the idea of connection as its two poles – Sempai and The Girl, are perpetually kept apart, orbiting each other in an endless search for a home. The Girl drinks and claims she feels the interconnectedness of all things, at one with the world and everybody in it. The miserly, miserable local god she’s in the middle of a drinking contest with understands her reasoning but has lived too long to agree with it. After all, at some point you have to stop drinking and the world is cold and lonely. The old man tastes only life’s nothingness, for him life is fruitless and nearing its end but for the girl all the world is flowers and warmth, filled with promise and possibility.

If the old man is right and alcohol provides only a fleeting, essentially fake feeling of contentedness, then perhaps there are other routes to true connection – such as the universal circulation of books. Books carry ideas between people and take feelings with them yet there are those who try to staunch the flow – namely book collectors who try to stem the system by hoarding copies to push up the price. Sempai and the Girl each find themselves caught up in this act of anti-human profiteering as allies or enemies of the strange little creature who presides over the great book fair of life.

Even those, like the old man, who feel themselves to be excluded from human society prove themselves connected by one very special unifying factor – the passage of disease. The Girl is committed to spreading happiness wherever she goes, healing the sick and ministering to the lonely, but even those who feel they have nothing to give have still given away a part of themselves in the form of the common cold as it rips like wild fire through old Kyoto with the desperate force of a lifetime’s painful rejection. It’s kind of beautiful, in a way, as the old man’s life suddenly brightens in not feeling so alone anymore after casting himself as patient zero.

Yuasa’s drunken night in Kyoto is strange and surreal. Time runs inconsistently, revealing the uncomfortable truth that it speeds up as you grow older and night approaches dawn to the still young Girl, too full of life and possibility to think of looking at a clock. Sempai remains a cypher, his only clear personality trait being his certain love for the strange girl who’s always too busy chasing dreams to see him. His friends are also facing their own strange nights from the one who’s decided not to change his undies until he’s reunited with his one true love with whom he shared but one fateful encounter, and the other whose taste for female attire receives a slightly muddled reception, but they each find themselves caught up with three level pagoda trains, guerrilla theatre practitioners (or “school festival terrorists”) whose protest turns out to be romantic rather than political, not to mention the persistent threat of underwear thieves. Is this fate, or mere “coincidence”? In the end perhaps it doesn’t matter, but the night is short. Walk on Girl, just slow down a little, you have all the time you need.

The Night is Short, Walk on Girl is released in selected UK cinemas on Oct. 4 courtesy of Anime Ltd. Check the official website to see where it’s screening near you.

Original trailer (English subtitles)