Archive for the Series Category


Sailor Moon Eternal on Netflix

June 6th, 2021

2021 has been an “interesting” year in every meaning of the word, In the middle of so much wonderful and awful news, Netflix announced a Global (excluding Japan) release for Sailor Moon Eternal, Parts 1 & 2. The movie had been delayed in Japan, due to the pandemic, then pushed out in between two lockdown state of emergencies this past spring. Given that this, of all the arcs, is least likely to appeal to any adults not already fans of the series and being the one most likely to need a very young audience, it’s kind of obvious that it was being set up for failure as a theatrical release. Making it two movies didn’t help, as it forced people in Japan to make time *twice* to sit with other people in a small room for an hour in a pandemic. Frankly, the whole thing was so poorly handled, its a wonder we actually got the thing at all.

But we did, in the end, get the thing. And you know what? I think it was pretty darn good! Certainly better than I expected.

Sailor Moon Eternal, Part 1 is a re-introduction of the Inner Senshi without rehashing much of the history from the first three seasons of Sailor Moon Crystal. In rapid succession we meet Usagi, her daughter from the future, Chibi-Usa, and her boyfriend and eventual eternal consort, Mamoru. If you don’t understand their super weird dynamic when you begin the story, it is going to be super weird. This sentence was written for my mother who says she’s going to try to watch it. I’m just saying, that if you walked into this part cold, it would be befuddling.

Both bad and good, we spend almost no time with the Amazon Trio. On the positive side, we don’t get endless rapey chest mirror scenes, but on the bad side, the gender queerness of Hawkseye and Fisheye ends up reinforcing negative tropes. Of all the characters in the entire series, Fisheye is my  #1 vote for why this series desperately needs a full rewrite to bring it up to date with  modern understanding of gender and sexuality. I want a Sailor Moon in which she gets a chance to tell Hawkseye and Tigerseye that she was Assigned Male at Human Transformation.

Thankfully, we also got a brief moment with each of the Senshi in a relatively pure form. Character tells us her dream, powers up, defeats baddie. I love when the spirits of their planet castle come to help them power up, so swoon on that for me. It’s basically the only part of this manga arc I really like.

Voice acting (I watched the sub, as I am wont to) was great, I want to shout out to Watanabe Naomi for absolutely doing a Zirconia that was actually creepy.

Sailor Moon Eternal, Part 2 is begins with the Outer Senshi and again, this was the strongest portion of the movie. It was outstanding to see Haruka, Michiru and Setsuna recognize their vows to be a family and raise Hotaru, their happy home life together, and this scene in particular:


If the whole thing had stopped here, that would have been fine. ^_^ Along with I’m in Love With the Villainess, Volume 3, this has definitely been the year of the Yuri family. ^_^ When I log into Patreon, the thing that is written in this space is something like, “Why are you creating today?” or “What have you worked on today?” or something like that… Well…this image right here is why I am still writing Okazu. THIS is why I am creating today, So that someone looks at this and says, “That there is my ideal world I want to create.”

I consider the Amazoness Quartet a whole wasted opportunity every time. They deserve better than just being sent back to sleep. Can someone give them a decent comic arc, please? Saturn stepping up as Chibi-Usa’s companion was nice, but the Asteroid Senshi still deserve their own story.

I very much liked seeing the Senshi in their Princess (i.e. dressed-up) forms and the final powerup scene was beautifully done.

Most importantly, I want to give props to the animators for killing the transformation sequences. I could watch just them and the attacks and be happy. And, finally Saturn has an official henshin, yay! For once, the extra time Toei got from the delays went to taking better care with the animation. Kon Chiaki’s direction was on point and the whole package is that, as a theatrical experience, Sailor Moon Eternal was not going to let us down, as earlier seasons of Crystal had.

I’ve been thinking about this specific issue a lot. There’s something to be said for making sure people assigned to the creation of a beloved series give a shit about that series. Viz was doing really well on that score, until this release, when they and Netflix allowed a man who has been credibly accused of sexual assault of an industry colleague to be involved with the production. Lynzee Loveridge has written poignant and heartfelt coverage of this and I have to say I really feel her.  Almost 30 years of upskirts and down shirts (Part 2 was especially obnoxious in this regard) and sex pests infesting every aspect of this series – for little girls – sends a clear message that we will never ever be free of the creeps as long as all those “nice” guys let them have power and influence.

Just as impactful for those of us who rely on translations and adaptations – localization companies who put any old translator or actor on a series that is, in the original language, a breakthrough of representation for a marginalized audience,  is going to come off looking like they intentionally insulted that audience. It’s not 1995 and it’s not okay to put a vocally anti-trans person in a role that is trans or trans-adjacent, for instance. It’s not acceptable to put someone who doesn’t *care* about language used by a queer writer to tell a queer story to translate that story. When you pick some guy to direct the world’s most famous series for little girls, he’d better LOVE that series to death, or get him the fuck off the project. Sailor Moon Crystal Season 1 looked like crap. There has yet to be an edition of the manga into English that I think is better than okay. It’s been more than a quarter of a century. This stuff is important.  It’s time for a power up.

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 6
Characters – YMMV on every last one of them, but we voted 9
Service – Yes, sadly – 4
Yuri – 8

Overall – 8

So, overall, the movies themselves are very well done, men who are sex pests suck and this series needs an overhaul. If I had the time, I would definitely be inclined to rewrite the whole thing. ^_^

No we sit back and wait for for news of the last season. Again.

 





The Rose of Versailles, Volume 4

June 1st, 2021

What better way is there to start off Pride Month than to begin with revolution, with a fight against the status quo and respectability? What better thing can we do in 2021 than to remember why we celebrate this month, than to tear down systemic oppression and fight for our freedoms?

Sit yourself down, make yourself some tea, maybe a crepe, and buckle in, because we’re about to get historical. The Rose of Versailles, Volume 4 will cover the last days of the French Revolution, and of Oscar François de Jarjeyes’ life in noble service to the undeserving ancien régime of France. The parallels to right now are once again uncanny and distressing.

As the book opens, Oscar and Andre’ finally confront the one thing they have never discussed in a lifetime of friendship – their feelings for one another. They consummate what little of their marriage they will ever have.

The next morning, committed to the cause of the people, Oscar leads her troops to one of the most resonant moments of the Revolution – the day the canons of the Bastille were turned, not upon the prison, but upon the town. This scene makes me tremble, to be honest. In recent years, in cities all over the US, the canons were indeed turned upon the people…and it has come very close to making a difference, but never quite close enough. Even in 18th century France, the Revolution, while it ushered in new ideals, failed to bring the kind of change the commoners were fighting for – food, justice, the right to live without harassment.

We are asked to watch as the characters we learned about face the guillotine, the mob, or are cut down in battle. It’s never an easy story, but one we need to be able to get to the end of. With Fersen’s death, which was slightly more complicated than the narration makes it seem, the story as such, is over.

We take a deep breath, because the neither the series nor the story is truly over. Instead we are plunged from the real horrors of history into a gothic horror, complete with a virgin-killing, blood-bathing protagonist, a murderous creepy doll, and Oscar’s niece Lulu. Get used to Lulu, she’ll be back. This final story gives us some predatory lesbian behavior from the Marquise de Montclair, which I find somehow refreshing, after the guillotine and the spectre of an uncaring elite staring at children dying without interest.

And so, the main narrative of The Rose of Versailles comes to an end, as the République Française begins. But wait! There’s more! More evil women, more mysterious disappearances, more predatory lesbians and more Lulu on the way in The Rose of Versailles, Volume 5! (Which is the part I worked on first, oddly, with translator Mari Morimoto.)

Ratings:

Art – 9 Honestly fantastic
Story – 9 A lot happens, good and bad
Characters – 9 We’re going to do some rethinking about people here
Service – Not visually, but there is some in Montclair’s behavior
Yuri – Same as above

Overall – 9

My hat is off to Jocelyne for the fine translation and Jeannie Lee for the great lettering. Andy Tsang’s cover design is amazing. Again, my thanks to the UDON team for making this a pleasure to work on. Gonna say…I’m still blown away that I was able to help out.

All I have to say this pride month is Vive la Révolution! There’s still so much yet to fight for. Let’s get out there and fight for every last queer kid, so in 30 years they can be clueless gobs about us on the neural network. ^_^





The Rose of Versailles, Volume 3

May 21st, 2021

As I sat down to write today’s review, it dawned on me that I had never covered Volume 3 of The Rose of Versailles. So today, we will nod towards it, as we stride past headed for the last volume to deal with the Revolution and it’s aftermath.

In Volume 3 of The Rose of Versailles, Oscar’s choices come piling down upon her head. In a complete reversal of everything she had been asked to do with her life, her father barters her hand in marriage to her rival since she was young, Captain de Girodelle. Unsurprisingly, this puts Oscar into a very uncomfortable place. Of course she does not want to be married off without her consent, and also she believed that acting as a son, her father would not just treat her as collateral. To find that she had accomplished so much, only to have it be treated as irrelevant is, obviously, enraging. To young feminists of the 1970s this would reflect the exact situation they were – and, let’s be real, still are –  facing in the workplace.

Oscar has a new uniform made for herself, and at last attends the balls of Paris, to seduce women and show herself supremely uninterested in Girodelle or marriage. Meanwhile, Andre’s eyesight is deteriorating and Oscar begins to think of him more as a man, rather than a servant. Andre tries to force himself on her, but they withdraw from one another. Pushed to her limits, Oscar dedicates her life to war, and leaves to visit the Queen one last time.

The story, then, becomes a kind of slow avalanche of horrible decisions made in the worst way for the worst reasons. The Dauphin dies and Marie holes up in the Petit Trianon, refusing to deal with the people of France at all. The commons try to meet and are locked out of the building, the army starts to split at the seams and Oscar sides with the common people. She learns the truth about her Gardes members, how family and friends are being killed or starved and she becomes enraged, demanding answers of people who don’t care. Alain and the Gardes help Andre cover his failing sight, but they all know that death is waiting, Andre ends the book wishing that Oscar and he might be lovers, even knowing that his wish cannot come true.

There are a lot of tears. We’re given more space here to sympathize with Marie Antoinette than we have before, but it’s still hard to see her as  a victim of anything except her own selfishness. Oscar will stress for many pages about her gender and sex. Had she been a man, Rosalie would have ended the conversation, but she is not and she is neither transgender nor a lesbian. She’s embraced her fate to live a man’s life as a woman, but in the end her father never respected that, even though it was his wish that she do so.

Ratings:

Art –  Sublime and Oscar in bell-bottoms.
Story –  Grim, but magnificent
Character – Everyone has a moment when it is impossible to like them.
Yuri – One almost feels bad for any woman Oscar pretends to seduces to show up Girodelle
Service – Shirtless Andre, attempted rape, Oscar in new uniform

Overall  – Hard to read, but absolutely compelling

If I were going to sum up this volume with one emotion, I’d say “anger.” It’s not a righteous anger, not yet, but the signs are all there.  In a sense it’s good that the end is on the way in the next volume. After the last few years of anger and inequality and the same kinds of violence and deadly economics as we see in this story, reading this volume feels too much like reading the news sometimes. Something has to break, and we all hope like hell that it’s not us.

Kudos to UDON for another glorious volume of this epic story. It was my very sincere pleasure to be part of that team.

Volume 4 and Volume 5 are now available for you to read and experience!





Bloom Into You Artbook, Astrolabe (アストロラーベ), Guest Review by tikkitavi

May 5th, 2021

Hello and welcome to another wonderful Guest Review Wednesday! Today we have a new Guest Reviewer today! tikkitavi is one of the friendly gang you’ll meet on the Okazu Discord, and he kindly offered to walk us through Nakatani Nio’s Yagate Kimi Ni Naru artbook. Please welcome tikkitavi and give him a warm welcome. The floor is yours, tikkitavi!

I like to say that I’ve been interested in Yuri since the days of Xena:Warrior Princess, but it took Bloom into You to spark my current regard for Yuri. I love the series on several levels, so when I discovered that Nakatani-sensei had an artbook named Astrolabe (アストロラーベ) available, naturally I had to add it to my collection.

In terms of content, this is a pretty complete snapshot of Bloom into You color and monochrome illustrations before 2020. The artbook was published in early 2020; given production lead times, it’s not surprising that it lacks images from later works such as the third Saeki Sayaka novel. I felt the lack most in that there isn’t a single image of Yuu, Touko, or Sayaka after high school in the artbook.

 

However, it includes promotional artwork, art for goods, SNS stickers, earlier Yuriten images, and the like, in addition to the expected book and video packaging art. (The SNS stickers and web art are particularly cute.) Most of the art features Touko and Yuu, plus a smattering involving Sayaka; for those interested in other characters, they appear quite rarely.

Beyond Bloom into You, it includes a couple of collaboration pieces that add characters from other series. There are also a handful of illustrations created by Nakatani-sensei for works such as a novel by Iruma-sensei (writer of the Saeki Sayaka novels) and art for the Ѐclair series.

There are only two pieces original to the artbook; the cover, and an extra end spread. A five-page chapter detailing the production of the cover art is a nice bonus, especially for artists and those interested in the steps involved in creating digital art. A photo of Nakatani-sensei’s work area augments this. Beyond this, Nakatani-sensei wrote captions for all the major works and a short afterword. I admit, I would have liked to see more new content, perhaps a short manga or the like.

 

Fans of the series, who understand the character’s relationships, will see the Yuri on almost every page; the weighted looks and intimate moments are a joy. Nakatani-sensei’s muted palette and clean imagery works well here. For those seeking anything more salacious than holding hands, they will need to look elsewhere.

Physically, the volume is typical for Japanese anime and manga artbooks. 128 pages, softcover, perfect bound, printed on a smooth heavy weight paper; a plastic slipcase pushes it slightly above average for the type. One could still wish for hardbound with a lay-flat binding, though that would be pretty uncommon (and expensive); but it would have helped with the two-page spreads quite a bit.

Ratings:

Production – 8
Content – 8
Yuri – 9
Service – 1 (a couple images of Yuu and Touko in swimsuits)

Overall – 8

Generally, I felt this was a quite nice but not exceptional artbook, a satisfactory addition to the library of anyone who appreciates
Nakatani-sensei’s work.

 

Erica here: Thank you very much! It’s good to know what the contents include! Artbooks are always a great mystery unless we get a chance to see inside. We appreciate you giving us this guided tour. ^_^ Astrolabe is available in print on Amazon JP, CD Japan, and as a e-book, on JP Kindle or Bookwalker!





Ride or Die on Netflix

April 16th, 2021

Ride or Die on NetflixIf you are a regular reader here at Okazu, you know that I have loved the darkly violent Yuri manga GUNJO from the day I received a message about it on Japanese social platform Mixi, back in 2008ish. I’ve written reviews of various chapters I read in Morning Two magazine and all three of the volumes in Japanese in my GUNJO category here on Okazu.  In 2018, I was able to meet with Nakamura-sensei (over what was possibly one of the hilariously worst lunches I can remember. This was supposed to be a BLT. It was inedible.) At the time, we worked out how we might do a translation for GUNJO into English. And she mentioned that she was in talks about a live-action adaptation.

Translator Erin Subramanian and I have completed the translation for Volume 1 of GUNJO, into English, which is purchasable by the chapter on Nakamura-sensei’s website. We’re hoping to see a collected Volume 1 on ebook sellers near you one day soon. As we completed Volume 1, the pandemic hit and the project was paused. Today’s review was, in large part, why it paused. Last night Netflix released Ride or Die, the live-action movie based on the manga by Nakamura Ching.  Ride or Die, directed by Hiroki Ryuuichi, is not GUNJO. It is, however, within spitting distance of it.

Like GUNJO, (I ended up using this spelling when Morning Two magazine chose it over Gunjō, so forgive me) Ride or Die contains graphic violence and marital abuse. Unlike the manga, the movie also contains several explicit sex scenes, both straight and lesbian. If any of this makes you feel uncomfortable, you may well want to give this movie a pass. Interestingly, for the lesbian sex scene at the end of the movie, the staff brought in an “intimacy coordinator,” which Max Gao writes about in his article on NBC, Stars of Netflix’s lesbian thriller ‘Ride or Die’ on their on- and off-screen connection. This intimacy does change the end of the story considerably, but whether you think it works better or worse will be an entirely personal decision. In my opinion the end of the manga is very hard to beat for perfection. ^_^

Another change from the manga is that the characters – who remained nameless and were referred to as “Megane-san” and “Lesbian-san” by Japanese fandom – here are named. They get to share moments of genuine joy in this movie, which was probably the most disconcerting change for me. I don’t think it was a bad change, it merely signaled that we would not get that manga ending. Overall, I think both Sato Honami as the abused Nanae and Mizuhara Kiko as Rei, the woman who loves her enough to kill for her, did an excellent job. There were moments when Sato looked so like Megane-san that it was quite extraordinary and I found myself commenting on it every time.

As you may remember in my other movie reviews, I dislike the slowdown of pacing that seems to be to be a common occurrence in Japanese live-action manga adaptations. In the case of Ride or Die, it was the sex scenes that I felt went on too long, and the movie would have benefited from them being cut slightly. But this was pretty much my only complaint. This, I think, came from the choice of director whose career began in pink films and whose body of work tends to favor graphic sex and violence. 

Some of you may wonder about the title, Ride or Die, which I’m sure many of us see as an already tired trope. Nakamura-sensei mentioned that the title change was something she approved of and I’m inclined to agree. It allows us to view the movie as something separate from the manga…but also to see this is a subversion of the trope itself. This is not a “ride or die” scenario in the most typical sense. The characters are, yes, being followed by the police, but not hot on their heels. There’s just no urgency as they wander randomly through their lives together until they and we have all the pieces.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 9
Story – 9
Characters – Portrayed beautifully, so 9 but they are sometimes deeply unlikable
Service – 10
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 9

I’ll watch it again, for sure. If you get a chance to watch it, let us know what you think in the comments!