To this day, I still don’t really know why I picked up the first disc of Haibane Renmei when I saw it sitting there in the store. I don’t recall ever hearing much about it beforehand, and a quick glance at the synopsis would probably have done nothing to really pique my curiosity. Perhaps it was the moody, ethereal artwork on the cover, or that Yoshitoshi ABe’s name appeared in the credits.

Whatever the reason, though, I did pick it up and subsequently found myself enthralled by the series’ world, almost from the first moment. And to this day, Haibane Renmei remains one of the most unique, thought-provoking, and affecting anime series I’ve seen.

Haibane Renmei‘s greatest strength lies in its ambiguity. Now, much of anime loves to toy with ambiguity and engimatic elements, be it through shadowy character motivations, obscure philosophical/religious/cultural references and discussions, or half-explained technological deus ex machina. But oftentimes, these simply feel like attempts to instill more depth, substance, and style to a series than it really needs, demands, or supports. And so when all is said and done, the weaknesses only become more glaring, and the series more frustrating and underwhelming than anything else.

This is most happily not the case with Haibane Renmei.

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I never thought I’d say this, not in a million years, but here it is: with Curse Of The Golden Flower, Zhang Yimou has become the George Lucas of “wuxia” cinema, and I mean that in both the good and bad ways.

But mostly the bad ways.

There’s no question that, by year’s end, Curse… will have been the most opulent, visually astonishing film to grace movie theatres in 2007.  Compared to the elaborate set designs and costumes that fill every single scene here, Zhang’s previous period pieces—2002’s Hero and 2004’s House Of Flying Daggers—look like shabby high school productions.  Thanks to the incredibly elaborate costumes and stunning sets, each frame of Curse… is awash with every color of the rainbow, so vibrant that it’s almost blinding.

Unfortunately, like those Star Wars prequels, visual splendor is about all that Curse… has going for it.  And even the visuals ultimately fail to satisfy thanks to the shallow characters, threadbare-yet-still ponderous plot, and lumbering execution—qualities that I never thought I’d use to describe a Zhang Yimou film.

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School’s out for the summer—except, that is, for a group of schoolgirls attending a remedial math class that none of them care about.  While their teacher drones on in the morning heat, one of students—a girl named Tomoko—stares out the window, daydreaming.  She casually observes the school’s beloved brass band as they leave to help cheer on the school’s equally beloved baseball team as well as the deliveryman who arrives too late with the band’s lunches.

Seeing a chance for her and her classmates to escape their teacher’s lecturing, Tomoko volunteers to bring the lunches to the band as a show of school spirit.  Naturally, the girls are much more interested in having the day off than in actually helping out the band, and so take their time with the delivery.  By the time they finally deliver the lunches, it’s too late.  The food has become spoiled, and the band quickly succumbs to a severe case of food poisoning.

The only survivor is a reluctant young man named Yuta who is charged with putting together an interim band until the “real” band can recover.  Despite blackmailing the Tomoko and all of the other girls into helping him, Yuta still doesn’t have enough students to make a brass band proper, and so he improvises, deciding to start a swing jazz band instead.

Up until now, Swing Girls has been moving at a fairly leisurely pace, with a few little humorous asides thrown in here and there to establish the various outrageous characters.  However, as the swing band takes shape, the film slowly begins kicking things into high gear; the girls learn to love the music they’re being forced to play, work their butts off to earn enough money to buy instruments, and struggle to be taken seriously as musicians even after the real band returns from the hospital.

At it’s core, Swing Girls is essentially a stereotypical sports movie, and as such, you can basically guess every single story element and plot twist that will pop up throughout the film’s 105 minutes.  There’s the group of unruly misfits thrown together by outrageous circumstances and forced to train under a reluctant/unrelenting coach figure, who bond together during grueling circumstances, and who go on to triumph over various setbacks, learning a valuable life lesson or two in the process.

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Why are we here?  What purpose does our existence serve?  How can we tell if our lives have meaning, if they are worth living?  What is a life that is worth living?  These are questions for which art—be it literature, poetry, painting, or cinema—is uniquely poised to answer.  Other things, such as science and law may purport to hold the answers.  However, their answers will always be unsatisfactory, will always seem like half-truths and theories when compared to the mysteries, conundrums, and paradoxes that are inherent to artistic explorations of those aforementioned questions.

Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a fine example of this.  While Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics and period pieces (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran), Ikiru (lit. “To Live”) is no less a masterpiece.  What’s more, it’s one that feels vaguely biblical at that, as it takes on topics and expounds upon themes that could have easily come from that most existential of books: Ecclesiastes.

Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura, best known for his role as Seven Samurai‘s elderly samurai leader) is about as sad a sack as one can imagine.  He’s spent nearly 30 years of his life working in the city offices, but even after such tenure, he’s still little more than a faceless cog in post-WWII Japan’s bureaucratic machine.  He spends his days stamping documents, oblivious to the machinations of his underlings, who constantly wonder when the old man is going to die so they can move up the totem pole.

It’s a predictable existence, but also a safe one.  That is, until Watanabe discovers that he has stomach cancer.  The viewer learns this fact at the very beginning of the movie, when an emotionless narrator informs us of his imminent demise, which only makes us feel even more pity for the man.

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