Jin-Roh Live Action Movie (Korean) - July 2018

[no3Ljm]

 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2018 by no3Ljm

[505thAirborne]

Looks good to me!! I'll for sure watch it. 

[peter]

Well, why not.

[dizman]

Looks like it's going to be just a remake so I'm not all that interested, if it was a new story in the same setting of the original movies I'd be in though.

[kajnrig]

Didn't they already do one or two of the Wolf Brigade movies in live-action in Japan? Is this a strict adaptation of Jin-Roh the animated movie, or is it an adaptation of one of the other movies in the trilogy? (I've only seen the animated one.)

EDIT:

Watched the trailer just now, answered my own question. Reaction: They don't get the weight of the armor right. Trying to one-for-one recreate some of the shots in the anime is a bit of a fool's errand, as every anime adaptation ever will tell you.

Edited June 20, 2018 by kajnrig

[electric indigo]

Looks like a more current setting vs. the vintage style of the animation.

Personally, I'm much more forgiving when it comes to dialogue and character interaction in animated films. A one-for-one adaption could be quite awkward in this case.

[Valkyrie Griffon]

There are two previous live action films Stray Dog and Akai Megane (The Red Spectacles). Mamoru Oshii is hands down my favorite film director and I spent years looking for the Japanese LDs for the two films plus Talking Head...to severe disappointment. The problem is that almost nothing happens in them, due to the shoe string budgets the characters basically just sit around lamenting how things went wrong, this is the end of the Panzer Cops, etc all while chain smoking their way through the films. When you see the first flashback or two you start to think something is going to happen...but it doesn't. When from out of nowhere Bandai dropped the three films in a dvd set I still grabbed a copy right away. And promptly never watched them, lol.

 

The only one of the three worth watching is MAYBE Talking Head just because it is a murder mystery set inside an anime studio that is so bat-crap crazy that it is kind of interesting. But again, lots of talking...lots and lots and lots of talking. And I hate to say all this as he is hands down my favorite filmmaker. 

I would trade Blue Uru, Ninja Scroll 2, and the Vampire Hunter D TV series all for him to do GITS3, Patlabor 3, or his Lupin movie. I just think aside from Avalon his live-action work pales to the amazing animations he creates.

 

Anyways this remake seems...pointless? A Korean remake of a somewhat obscure anime? Why? Who is asking for this? And the attempt to match the anime so closely is just going to backfire. Honestly I'd rather watch something like 2009 Lost Memories than this remake.

 

On a side note I recently rewatched Jin-Roh and I really didn't enjoy it anymore. Aside from the armor/combat and dream scenes the film just falls flat. If Kazuki even loved Kei even a bit the film wouldn't have ended that way, especially with him being the bada** he was. He'd have killed everyone to rescue her. He'd have found a way through the conspiracy, just like Captain Goto always does, through probably far more violently.

 

Also the character animation is just terrible. I'm not even going to entertain some "oh it's cause the juxtaposition of the true Kazuki is armored form and the human form is just a shell"...yeah no, the character animation just sucks. They are completely flat and lifeless. Look at a Studio Ghibli film, same simple looking characters without much detail in the character's face yet still completely alive as a character.

 

Also the plot is just meh, a minor conspiracy to try to embarass/shut down the Panzer Cops right before the get shutdown anyways. Ok, yawn...

 

The music however is still topnotch and on constant rotation in my car. I really wish Mizoguchi had a larger body of work than he does.

Edited June 28, 2018 by Valkyrie Griffon

[kajnrig]

26 minutes ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

There are two previous live action films Stray Dog and Akai Megane (The Red Spectacles). Mamoru Oshii is hands down my favorite film director and I spent years looking for the Japanese LDs for the two films plus Talking Head...to severe disappointment. The problem is that almost nothing happens in them, due to the shoe string budgets the characters basically just sit around lamenting how things went wrong, this is the end of the Panzer Cops, etc all while chain smoking their way through the films. When you see the first flashback or two you start to think something is going to happen...but it doesn't.

Is Talking Head related to the Jin-Roh universe at all? Or is it a standalone story? Seems like from what you're saying it was included just because it was one of the three live-action films Oshii directed, and the other two just happened to actually be connected to each other and to Jin-Roh.

26 minutes ago, Valkyrie Griffon said:

 

  Hide contents

On a side note I recently rewatched Jin-Roh and I really didn't enjoy it anymore. Aside from the armor/combat and dream scenes the film just falls flat. If Kazuki even loved Kei even a bit the film wouldn't have ended that way, especially with him being the bada** he was. He'd have killed everyone to rescue her.

...

Also the character animation is just terrible. ... They are completely flat and lifeless. Look at a Studio Ghibli film, same simple looking characters without much detail in the character's face yet still completely alive as a character.

I watched it again a few months ago and had the complete opposite reaction: I still found it enjoyable. I don't know the context in which the film (and novel? it started out as a novel or series of novels, right?) exists, so I've always just enjoyed it as a classic political thriller set in an alternate-universe Japan. Maybe you're just no longer able to stand the slower pacing, the washed out color palette? I know that watching Oshii's GitS 2 (and even GitS 1, and also revisiting it again a few months later) was a plodding exercise for me. Especially GitS 2. The amount of overt philosophizing that all the characters get up to was frustrating at times in GitS 1, and downright sleep-inducing in GitS 2. (SAC was straight-up awesome, by the by. I know I'm super late to that party, but still.)

As for the animation... well, I think it's fine. Not everything needs to be Ghibli, and certainly it's from an era when diversity of style was far more common than it is now. I still think it's great animation work.

 

[Valkyrie Griffon]

Talking Head is completely unrelated. Bandai just bundled it with the others for whatever reason.

Funny that we have such opposite reactions. There is some very nice animation in the brief combat scenes and the dreams/nightmares. But the people just look awful to me now. Backgrounds are nicely detailed also, it's just the character faces especially that now bother me. My disappointment is that the character animation is usually soooo good in Oshii films. True he did not personally direct Jin-Roh but he wrote the script and gave one of his longtime subordinate animators permission to do the film as long as the script was stuck to without changes. I never noticed years ago when the film was first out but it jumped out at me now. 

 

I agree that the anime industry is now at a point that their creativity is related to such generic character designs so as to generate yet another worthless nendoroid figure for sale. I actually prefer when anime doesn't look like an anime; works like Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust, Honneamise, Perfect Blue, Dezaki's Black Jack OVAs, and oshii's spectacular Patlabor 2, Angel Egg, GITS, & Innocence. I also really appreciate the character designs in stuff like the original Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Space Adventure Cobra tv series. In fact I will not watch the remake of LOGH because all character and aesthetic design is replaced by yet another set of generic anime pretty-boys.

 

If you found Innocence, or any of Oshii's films, too slow then stay away from Akai Megane and Stray Dog, lol. You literally won't make through. Jin-Roh definitely follows Oshii's style of slower paced action epics...it just isn't all that epic in my opinion when compared to the patlabor films, GITS films, Angel egg, or Avalon. I'm actually hopeful that the on-again-off-again Kerberos CG film would make it out one day but who knows. Jin-Roh's is actually a pretty solid film overall; I just personally have some quibbles with it that render it way down my list of things to rewatch.

[obakesan]

Just makes me yearn for a Votoms live action movie