Forum - View topicGarakowa -Restore the World- (movie).
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Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
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Garakowa -Restore the World- (movie) Genres: Sci-fi Themes: Plot Summary: A floating space without gravity where an infinite number of lights shine in different colors: The "Box of Wisdom." Inside of this box, there are multiple worlds, multiple timelines, and there used to be many different people. This is where Dual and Dorothy were fighting with enemies called "Viruses." Worlds infected by viruses must be erased. That is the duty, the job of these girls. However, one day, Dual and Dorothy feel the presence of a new Virus. Arriving at the scene, they see a girl being attacked by Viruses. After saving the girl, the duo wait for her to awaken so they can ask who she is, where she came from, and where she is going. Finally, when the girl opened her eyes, she gave her name, Remo, and whispered only one sentence... "I must return to the flower patch..." ---------------------------------- I heard some interesting things about the movie before. It's set to stream on CR and about an hour long. Given the context, expecting some sci-fi elements with good artwork. The premise itself also seems kinda interesting with the idea of viruses being incorporated into the story. |
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Galap
Moderator
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I just saw this last night.
I usually have a very strong sense of how much I liked something pretty much immediately. It’s not like I can give it number values and say like “I give this an 87/100” or whatever, but I almost always will definitively say “I really liked this” or “I kind of liked this” or what have you. With Garakowa, It’s pretty unclear to me. All in all, however, I think that if when you review or talk about something, and all you do is answer the question ‘Is it good?’, it’s going to be a pretty boring review. After I finished watching the movie, the main feeling I ended up with was that I should watch it again sometime, and irrespective of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, I find myself thinking about it a lot and having a lot to say about it. Since it’s just a one-off, this post will have spoilers, and due to the conceptual nature of the story, they’re kind of inherent to the discussion and inextricably woven throughout the post. So watch it first if you don’t want to know too much about it. Visually, the storyboarding is incredible! The colors, shot composition, and time editing really make this effective at conveying mood and tone, which can be very different at different times. I really like the detailed paintings of the various famous locations like that Matterhorn and Chateaus and that kind of thing. The visuals for the ‘corruption’ type scenes were the best to me, elegant and disturbing at the same time. Very unique imagery and spatial filling of the screen, and the animation enhanced this effect as well. I particularly liked the shot of the pink ribbon against a black background, and where Dorothy’s pseudo-family turned into a black mass and then raced toward her as lancing spikes. So the most interesting thing about this to me, was seeing these artificial people, who are like humans in terms of general cognitive and emotional makeup, but lacking in experiences and knowledge of the context of humanity, diving through that very context, those very experiences; sifting through all the complex and multifaceted elements of human experience. They see things like triumph and family bond, as well as war and natural disaster. It’s clear from all of this that the Box of Wisdom is exactly what it says: a monument left after humanity’s end to preserve what we’re all about. And then we learn that those crystal flowers are a repository of all the positive aspects of that human context, seeds from which to build humanity’s superior successors. That’s really cool! But for some reason it’s also bad, because these new people won’t have ‘free will’ for some reason. If all you’re ever going to do with these kinds of master plans to improve humanity is to show them to be ineffective or undesirable, you’re kind of necessarily running yourself into a dead end. There’s a lot less you can do there. If you’re writing this thing, at some point the idea had to have stemmed from, “what if humanity runs itself into the ground, but detailed information about humanity’s past is stored in memory, and an AI sorts through this to try to take all the desirable aspects of humanity while leaving out the undesirable ones, creating an ‘idealized’ humanity, but what if it doesn’t work? What if we lose ‘free will’ to do this?” To this I ask, “Well, what if it does work?” Isn’t that a lot more interesting? To go through the implications of that is really cool. What would idealized humans be like? What would they be capable of that we’re not? How would they interact with each other and the world? It’s a common frustration I have with fiction, that it sure likes to defend the status quo a lot. This takes many forms, like the story ending with characters choosing to leave the fantastical stuff they encountered and go back to everyday life, or end with ‘this new and weird technology or society is bad and we’re doing things better now.’ I think maybe part of the reason for this is that it’s a lot more complex to go through the implications of something novel than just write it off as ineffective, and it might be ‘too weird’, or put audiences off too much to spend a lot of time with things like ‘idealized humans’, which would be characters that behave genuinely differently than we’re familiar with. But this is exactly what I want to see! I guess the main issue I had with this thing though was that I didn’t like the characters. I think my empathy works a little differently than most people’s, and that specific kind of tugging on the heartstrings this show tried to do just doesn’t work on me. I guess watching people make cakes isn’t the way to make me connect with them. I think the main problem here was that they just weren’t very intelligent, or at least, didn’t have to do anything that would require or display their intelligence. I mean, we see a little bit of their personalities: Dorothy is by-the-book, uninquisitive, and first is wary of Remo and doesn’t care about the people she deletes. Then she pretends not to care, and finally admits she does. Dual is more open to sentiment and investigating things. But with this kind of thing, you don’t really get any sense of how their minds work. They’re never put into situations where they have to make difficult decisions (and I don’t mean just difficult as in ‘high stake’: I mean it in the sense of it being really complex and take a lot of computing power to come to the decision), figure things out, or talk about their philosophies. These are the kind of things that would show their uniqueness as individuals. So, to be able to see into their heads, you wouldn’t have to directly show their thoughts, but only show them doing things that are complex/unique/interesting enough that their behavior differentiates and identifies their thought styles. A lot of this thing’s runtime was dedicated to a weird ‘slice of life’ amongst the three girls, and to me that wasn’t really compelling. Now, it may sound like I’m bashing this thing a lot, but I definitely didn’t hate this. And it certainly had a lot of merits. I think I’m voicing these criticisms here because unlike most fiction, the premise was novel and complex enough that it was capable of being idea-focused, asking the big questions, or presenting things in a truly new way. It’s not like it didn’t do any of these things, but I do feel that it wasted some of its potential. It did succeed at making me think about these things a great deal, so I give it a lot of credit for that. So ultimately in the end it’s kind of interesting because Mother is gone, humanity is gone, and Remo is gone, but the Box of Wisdom remains because Dual and Dorothy were able to prevent the forced format by deleting Remo. And the garden of glass flowers is still there, and not under siege by the ‘viruses’, since Dual and Dorothy have integrated with Sumire and the like (which seems to be the will of the human memories in the Box of Wisdom). But they don’t just resorb the flowers, so the good and bad of humanity is sifted out, but this isn’t complete. So it seems that Dual and Dorothy, the so-called ‘last vestiges of human will', are left to continue to explore and evaluate the contents of the box of wisdom. Maybe they will emerge from it and actually enact the plan of humanity’s idealized successors. But that’s not really clear or focused on. It looks like they just want to mess around and rebuild their house for now. Those who see me post here will know that From the New World is like my favorite thing ever, and the art, storyboarding, and visual direction is one of the reasons for that. That was the first anime directed by Masashi Ishihama, and Garakowa is the second. He’s done key animation and storyboarding before, as well as opening and ending credits (look at our recent article on him for more info about this.) in all his stuff he has really great composition and object placement, and I like how he uses neonic colored backgrounds behind black silhouettes. In his more fantastical cuts the shape and form of things is really striking and unusual too. I really like his aesthetics and storyboarding, and from a sample size of two as director he does seem to like to work on projects that have a high conceptual element to them, which is what I’m in the game for the most. It’s especially rare to see visual/animation focused director staff that are into making serious and introspective narratives. Usually the stuff directed the animator types is more like Space Dandy, One Punch Man, Redline, Yozakura Quartet, and Gurren Lagann. While those looked really breathtaking, and some of them can even be said to have some depth in a sense (I thought Gurren Lagann went into some nice stuff toward the end, and as a general statement I do like most of these things), they are also pretty silly and dumb in a lot of ways too; not really ‘serious’ works. The other exception to this is my favorite director, Kazuki Akane, whose storyboarding and visual direction is incredible in a completely different way, and the animation in a lot of his series is minblowing as well, and much more emotionally and intellectually impactful since the storytelling and writing behind it is serious, conceptually engaging, and well-executed. So, ultimately Ishihama is another name I’ll keep tracking into the future, even if Garakowa is a mixed bag in a lot of ways. |
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Dessa
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I think, for me, the slice-of-life part was the weakest, as well. I wanted to enjoy this, but I just kept finding myself bored.
It probably doesn't help that I just watched Expelled from Paradise a couple days ago, which has some similarities to it, but much more solid story to it. |
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