It’s that time of year again… is what I’d be saying if this was more than just the second occasion the event has been held, or if I’d actually been to the Glasgow weekend last year. Instead, hey, it’s the second year of Scotland Loves Anime, the event in which two cinemas in Scotland show anime movies all weekend.

Not that, on paper, this years line-up looked as good as last years. This isn’t the fault of the organisers, though – The advantage of doing one of these for the first time last year is that they could get away with pulling content from the previous couple of years, whereas they didn’t really have that luxury when following things up just a year later. Add to that the fact that last year was really an abnormally good year for anime movies coming out of Japan, with things like Redline finally hitting after years in production.

I’m not saying that this years line-up is bad (particularly given I’ve not yet seen A Letter to Momo, or next weeks enigmatic “MYSTERY FILM”), but at first glance, not quite so spectacular.

It’s an impression that wasn’t really assisted for me by the fact that they started off with a screening of Tekken: Blood Vengeance (in 3D!). I’m not really a Tekken fan, having not played an instalment of the series since Tekken 3 on the PSOne. Then there’s the fact that Tekken probably manages to beat out even DoA to the crown of the goofiest of the mainstream 3D fighters…

Saying that, the movie was written by Dai Sato, who generally strikes me as a clever guy. I mean, he wrote Ergo Proxy, which I didn’t understand a word of after the sixth episode, so he surely must simply be too intelligent for me to comprehend. He did writing for a bunch of other good shows like GitS:SAC and Cowboy Bebop and things that are actually good and coherent, as well as being the type of guy who complains about the lack of ambition in anime writing.

Which does mean that him writing Tekken immediately strikes one as being a little hypocritical, but it’s honestly a really difficult movie for me to get an accurate read on. On the surface, it plays itself entirely seriously – that’s not to say that there aren’t jokes in there, but the jokes are in the context of the situation rather than at the expensive of the universe. The problem is that it’s Tekken, so it’s not really something you can be entirely serious about, even if you try to be.

This makes the movie absolutely hilarious, and the difficulty I have reading the movie is regarding how much of that is intentional. I’d like to give Dai Sato the benefit of the doubt here, but that would make this an incredibly spiteful work – as it takes it’s journey from silly to utterly ludicrous, with a brief stop-over at rocket powered Panda, it’s almost as if the movie is actively mocking those people who dare to take fighting game fiction as seriously as it so frequently takes itself.

Which, as I say, makes it hilarious – quite probably the funniest movie I’ve seen all year, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I have to say, though, the 3D is to the films determent. It doesn’t really work with the fast-cut fight sequences (not that there’s as many of those as you might want from a Tekken movie) – with it taking time for the eyes to readjust to the change in framing. It just serves to confuse and make things difficult to follow.

Moving on to things that people might not have seen, they did have the first European screening of the new Brains Base short film Hotarubi no Mori E, from all the people who brought us Natsumes Book of Friends. Being a short movie, they padded out the screening with a couple of episodes of Bacanno – somewhat mercifully the second and third episodes (this was partially because the first episode isn’t age appropriate for Hotarubi, partially because it’s the first episode of Bacanno). The problem with this is that it’s kind of the first two episodes of Bacanno, therefore it’s better than most other things you are likely to see. Also, with it’s extravagant nature and outlandish characters, it’s pretty much as far from Hotarubi (a film lacking in conflict) as you can get in terms of tone.

The story behind Hotarubi is that, as a six year old staying at her grandfathers for the summer, Hotaru get’s lost in the woods, where she is shown to safety by Gin, a mysterious fellow in a mask who claims to be a Yokai. From that point, Hotaru visits Gin every summer, when she stays with her grandparents in the country, the movie being mostly recounted by an older Hotaru heading there on the train.

The problem is that, according to Gin, if he’ll disappear if he is ever touched by a human.

I’m kind of divided on the movie. On it’s own merits, it’s largely fine. There’s nothing particularly stellar in terms of animation, being very much OAV more than movie, presumably having been produced around their work on Natsume (this being where following Bacanno didn’t help, it being a far more technically impressive work). It’s relatively well directed with a good sense of comedy timing, even if most of the humour comes from pain being inflicted on young children (which, judging by the audience reaction, is a sure-fire recipe for success). Being only 40 minutes long, it does have brevity on it’s side as well.

The problem with the movie, though, is that it just feels so very rote. It’s a very Japanese story, very much in the Princess and the Cowherd kind of mould. It’s very, dare I say it, mono no aware, but there’s not really a single story beat that you wouldn’t be able to predict after just a few minutes of the film. It’s not exactly a waste of time, but it’s also not really something that you’ve not seen before.

I also saw the second part of Mardock Scramble – The Second Combustion, though that’s difficult to talk about with it being a second movie. It certainly starts more-or-less starts the same way as the first film ended (not really a surprise given it’s murderous cliffhanger), and runs with it, with a few peaks and troughs, for the first half of the picture. The problem discussing it is with what comes after, which those who’ve read the novel will undoubtedly remember as an extended journey in a direction that few would have expected.

To talk around it, they handle the later half of the movie about as well as they probably could. They get a little cute with the direction, throwing in a lot of time-lapse and split screen effects which mostly work, but sometimes come across as being a little on the hokey side.

The adaptation (once again written by the original novelist Tow Ubukata) does, at least, realise that brevity is the key, and streamlines the flow of events somewhat from the novel, cutting a few unnecessary midpoints on the journey, and cutting short a number of the dialogue sequences which simply dragged in the original novel.

Being a middle movie, it doesn’t really bring a whole lot new to the table in terms of themes or content, though, besides delving a little into Boileds background, making him rather less of a Terminator-style faceless threat. It may just be me having read the novel now, but it was rather less of a confusing, and rather more straightforward, a movie than the first was (or at least what I remember of the first – I found the screening of The First Compression immediately prior far more comprehensible this time, though again, it may just be familiarity, or that it was the BD edit of the movie this time).

Production wise, it’s a better looking movie than the first one, but not really a better animated one. Whereas a lot of the first movie was set in dark locales (aside from a brief shopping trip), this one moves events to far gaudier locations, with far brighter and elaborate backgrounds giving you a lot more to look at. Fabulous costume design as well, particularly in that later half. The CG still looks like plastic, but we are at least spared the extended car-chase sequence this time, and most of the CG use here is used in ways where it’s easier to accept it’s appearance.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got to say for now (Escaflowne is about to start shortly. Oh boy). Probably back tomorrow to at least try and write something about A Letter To Momo.