PinkuBentoBox

Okay…yeah, I know, I said I’d do this earlier. Well, I think I did. If I didn’t, I certainly planned on it. Either way, it shouldn’t have taken this long. So, the second of Adult Swim’s two movie premieres was the first Inu-Yasha movie, Affections Touching Across Time. In a way, watching this movie was very much a complete opposite of my experience with Metropolis. With Metropolis, I expected greatness and was disappointed by extreme mediocrity. Here, with the first Inu-Yasha movie, I expected mediocrity—an extended filler episode at best—and came away very pleasantly surprised. Yeah, it was still basically an extra-long filler episode, but it was a damn good one. Also went a ways in dispelling my long-held belief from watching the TV series that anything involving moth demons sucks (okay, so maybe that still applies to the TV series, but whatever).

Seeing as I taped over the movie with last week’s Adult Swim Saturday (I’m going to start doing that monthly, by the way, so I can fit in more of the other stuff I’m watching), I’m pulling solely from memory here. Basically, the movie revolved around this foreign moth demon by the name of Menomaru, who happens to be the reincarnation or something of the moth demon Hyouga that Inu-Yasha’s father had slain years prior. Menomaru was resurrected by the splitting of the Shikon no Tama and having a piece of it imbed in the tree he was sealed in, but he could not fully be freed due to one of Inu-Yasha’s father’s fangs being used to seal the tree. As a result, Menomaru dispatched his two servants, Hari & Ruri I believe they were called, to retrieve “the sword of destruction forged from the Dog Demon’s fang,” or however he put it…the Tessaiga, if you haven’t guessed. After getting their asses handed to them by mistakenly pursuing Sesshoumaru, the two minions wise up and set a trap for Inu-Yasha & Co. My memory’s fuzzy, but basically there’s this big elaborate thing where the two possess Kilala (Kirara…fuck you, Viz, make up your minds on how to write that name please) and eventually Kagome, and, upon realising that no demon can touch the Tessaiga, trick Inu-Yasha into destroying his father’s fang seal for them. As you can guess, this blunder allows all hell to break loose. Menomaru gains all these new superpowers and begins stealing mortal human souls in order to transform himself into the new Hyouga, all the while Miroku & Sango engage in what’s practically a movie-long duel with Hari & Ruri (one of whom has Kilala under her power, while the other actually managed to create a duplicate of Miroku’s wind tunnel on her own hand), and Inu-Yasha is forced to fight a possessed (and suddenly wicked powerful…also eerily hawt) Kagome. Kagome ultimately recreates Kikyou’s seal on Inu-Yasha by managing to pin him to the sacred tree, the trauma of which breaks Menomaru’s hold on her, only for Kikyou to come along and act like an uncharacteristic bitch by shoving Kagome down the well (which, I should add, was being covered over by plants due to being made from the same kind of cursed tree that Menomaru was sealed to).

My memory gets fuzzy again here, but basically Kagome wakes up in her own time, gets all weepy about never seeing anybody again, somehow speaks to Inu-Yasha through the tree or whatever, finds a way back, and reconciles with Inu-Yasha while Miroku & Sango do away with Menomaru’s (now Hyouga’s, I guess) demon lackeys. Or rather, maybe it should be that one of the lackeys did herself in by stupidly trying to enlarge the wind tunnel, while the other just sucked for not being able to maintain control over Kilala. Either way, they got owned and died. So now our four reunited heroes (well, five, but damned if I recall a single thing Shippou did this entire movie outside of pal around with Inu-Yasha) just have Hyouga left to deal with, and he’s easily enough kill’d by a couple well-placed swings of the Tessaiga. Rather anticlimactic, really, given how Hyouga was supposed to be powerful enough to give Inu-Yasha’s bloody uber-deity demon father a hard time, but whatever. Meanwhile, Kikyou wandered around aimlessly, Sesshoumaru did jack shit, and Kaede ran around doing…something, I think it was damage control on the village after Kagome went all evil on it. Also, Myoga apparently did a few things of worth, but the best I can recall of him is how Inu-Yasha wised up for a change and tied Myoga down to keep him from running away. Made for some good comedy moments.

Yeah…that sounded more cold & cynical than it probably should have, given that I said I enjoyed the movie. I mean, I did, I enjoyed it a lot, but it wasn’t perfect. Also, seeing as how I can’t remember certain parts due to waiting about a month to write this blog entry up, I know I’m forgetting a few of the more quality moments, as well as much of the emotional impact of the ones I do remember. Kagome & Inu-Yasha’s whole “talking through the tree” bit was a lot more…I guess touching would be the word…than I made it out to be, trust me, and the Sango/Kilala thing was really well done. One thing that really bugged me (bugged Negs, too, if he didn’t mention it in his last entry), was how Sesshoumaru & Kikyou got a lot of screentime for doing next to nothing. The theory I have is that this movie was partly trying to draw in people who weren’t all that familiar with the show, and as a result tried to fit every major character in somehow and give them a bit of coverage, backstory, etc. (the fact that the opening like, fifteen minutes of the movie were just Kagome rambling on about exposition & character introduction go a ways in bringing me to that conclusion). Problem is, it didn’t really work out too well for the likes of Sesshoumaru & Kikyou. Aside from some bit moments that, in themselves, weren’t all that vital, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the plot. They just walked around, maybe said a few lines, and that was it. Hell, the one part Kikyou did play in the plot made her out to be a complete bitch. She just comes along, yells at Kagome, and shoves her down a hole. I guess it could be construed as the writers trying to compress her role in the main story into a quick, ten-minute scene, but it still just made her much nastier than she really is. And while the opening scene with Sesshoumaru was awesome from a Sesshou-fanboy standpoint, having him basically destroy two of the main antagonists with just two fingers while having those same enemies take Inu-Yasha & Co. practically the entire movie to overcome just makes Menomaru/Hyouga all the less impressive & formidable. Given that Inu-Yasha’s defeated Sesshoumaru before, and given that Sesshoumaru could’ve likely wiped out Menomaru in all of a minute, it makes for a really unimpressive main baddie once you stop to think about it (which…proved true, really). I guess the writers lucked out in the fact that Sesshoumaru being disinterested in such weak & unnecessary enemies is within his character, but that doesn’t really excuse the random cameos he made later on in the movie where he literally just walked around and said nothing (outside of one line to Rin when Hyouga’s little human-soul-stealing fit began).

Visually, the movie was…about like a movie based on a TV series usually is. Noticeably improved, but not exactly mind-blowingly incredible. The most noteworthy change was in the character designs, really. They looked more…I wanna say angular, with much bigger & more detailed eyes. I have to say I actually preferred this look over the TV series, and if memory serves it also looked generally closer to the character designs from the manga. The colour palette also seemed much richer. Musically it was the exact same score that they use in the TV series, complete with, ironically, the almost direct ripoff of Akira Ifukube’s Mothra theme from the Godzilla movies that’s used constantly throughout the franchise. It’s a good score otherwise, but that one track will continue to haunt me for the rest of the anime’s existence.

Despite the faults though, I really enjoyed this movie. It made for a great standalone adventure, and while the lengthy expositional dialogue & cameos didn’t really help out Sesshoumaru or Kikyou very much, they did a serviceable job of filling the viewer in on the rest of the story. The script was, for the most part, very well-conceived, the story progressed at a good pace, character development & individual character arcs were handled well enough (these things have been on my mind a lot lately, so I’ve been a bit more aware of them than usual seeing as how a certain giant robot show I’ve been following has been fucking up with them in a huge way ), and the visual & auditory aspects were up to task. All in all, I’d have to say this is one film worth seeing for all the Inu-Yasha fans out there, and possibly even people who haven’t seen the series, but are curious as to what it’s like.

Lesse…I probably should be moving on to the second movie here, shouldn’t I? Well, I will, eventually, but only once Adult Swim runs it later this year. At the moment however, I have a fansubbed copy of the third movie sitting on my harddrive, so I think I’ll go ahead and skip over to that one, seeing as it’s not only considered to be the overall best of the lot, but I’ve heard the focus is much more on my favourite character of the series by far, Sesshoumaru.