Post by Alice on Nov 29, 2008 0:31:47 GMT -8
On the late night of April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean. In the wee hours of April 15th, the ship had sunk entirely, and as a result brought death to over 1,500 people.
That cheery note aside, on April 14th, 2001, Nintendo’s Animal Forest was released in Japan, and as a result, the franchise today has brought joy (or boredom, depending on your viewpoint) to millions of people!
Animal Forest was originally released in Japan at the end of the Nintendo 64’s lifetime. Eight months later, a superior GameCube upgrade, named Animal Crossing in the English translation, was released in North America. Animal Crossing has spawned two follow-ups (the most recent title being Animal Crossing: City Folk for the Wii), and is one of Nintendo’s most popular and unique franchises.
For the uninitiated, Animal Crossing is virtual life. Unlike other famous Nintendo properties, such as Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda and Metroid, Animal Crossing is non-linear. There is no princess to rescue; there is no kingdom to save; there aren’t any alien asses to kick. The beginning of Animal Crossing does have a strict, mandatory trial, but after that anything goes with you. It is possible to play the game forever, as there is no end. You can’t “beat” the game, but you can collect everything there is to find, which takes a long time, provided that you don’t tinker with the game’s calendar in order to cheat.
The most interesting and arguably crucial aspect of Animal Crossing is that the game takes place in real time. If it’s 12:21 AM in your real life location, it is 12:21 AM in your town. Every second goes by in Animal Crossing just as in real life. There are shops to visit in the games, but they are only open during certain times of the day, akin to shops in our own cities. If you play the game at 3 o'clock in the morning, you’ll be lucky to find any neighbor out of bed and talkative, and your options of activity are severely limited.
At the start of each game, you move into your village. You purchase a house from a tanuki (raccoon, my fanny!) named Tom Nook, but you have no bells (the games’ currency) to pay the mortgage. Because of this, you are forced to work part-time for Nook until he is satisfied. After your part-time work, you have 18,400 bells left in your debt, and you are free to do whatever you want within the game’s universe. You can pay off your debt at your own pace, and after that you can expand your house… at the cost of even more debt! Paying off your debt is the closest the game has to a goal; the rest is literally how you manage your time. The more amusing activities to do in the game are to talk with your neighbors, fish, catch bugs, search for fossils (“IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!”—Indiana Jones), collect paintings, decorate your house, send letters, give and receive presents… many things, actually. A few specific events only happen rarely, if not once a year. That is why seeing everything Animal Crossing has to offer will take a long time.
Okay, I know. On paper, this sounds like a really stupid game. That’s what I feared would be the case when I played the game series for the first time back in ’02, but to be honest with you, Animal Crossing is inexplicably addicting. There have been several occasions where I’ve determinedly encouraged myself, “NO! I must reach Nook’s before 10 o’clock to sell these sea shells!” I played the hell out of the first game, and yet I still had not seen everything. Several years later, a follow-up titled Wild World was released on the Nintendo DS, but due to time constraints I mostly skipped out on that one. Recently, City Folk has been released on the Wii. Although it is the best version of Animal Crossing to date, it is still disappointingly the same game, only enhanced.
So, yeah. Animal Crossing has charm and is very popular. It is so popular, in fact, that it was actually the subject of an anime film a few years back, released only in Japan. The movie is “Animal Crossing: The Movie.”
“Animal Crossing: The Movie?” This is one thing I find particularly lazy: taking a franchise, slapping “The Movie” at the end of said franchise’s name as a title and then calling it a day. Off the top of my head, this applies to but not limited to “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” “The Rugrats Movie,” “The Simpsons Movie,” “Jetsons: The Movie,” “Tom & Jerry: The Movie,” “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie,” “The Baby-Sitters Club: The Movie”… man alive! Would it kill anyone to come up with a different title, or a subtitle relevant to the film besides “The Movie?” It’s a lazy trend, but alas a trend that will continue for years to come. Currently, the lamest title to ever contain “The Movie” is “The Rugrats in Paris: The Movie.” Seriously, that title is the pits. (Say what you will about the show, but “Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters” is perhaps the best parody of “The Movie” title in cinema history.)
“Animal Crossing: The Movie” (known as “Animal Forest: The Movie” in literal Japanese translation), as I mentioned earlier, was only released in Japan. Nintendo of America has no plans to bring the film to America, and in all honesty, the odds of this happening are nil. When I learned that an anime movie based on Animal Crossing existed, I knew I had to see it sometime, because my burning question had to be answered:
How the hell do you make a movie about Animal Crossing?
Seriously. Animal Crossing should not work as a movie. It could work as a featurette, maybe, of twenty or thirty minutes, but as an eighty-minute film? How long could you watch a movie about fishing, collecting fossils and hearing that “EEEOO-EEEOO-EEEOO” noise whenever the central character is unable to move furniture in his desired direction? I was very curious at how the Animal Crossing concept was implemented in film, and so I located the film and watched it.
I can honestly tell you right from the start that “Animal Crossing: The Movie” is not a bad movie, surprisingly. However, it is also not a very good one.
Slumberland, Slumberland! Joys without numberland! Rainbow’s end…!”
The film opens just like “Animal Crossing: The Games;” the main character, a Japanese girl named Ai (who represents the girl character the player controls), moves into Animal Village, with the assistance of Kappei (Kapp’n in the English translation of the games). Ai drops into the Town Hall, and meets Peliko the pelican (Pelly) and Mayor Kotobuki (Tortimer). The aged mayor welcomes Ai to Animal Village, and they instruct her to visit Tanukichi (Tom Nook), if she expects to move into her house. However, she finds that as soon as she introduces herself to Nook, the tanuki forces her to work for him part-time. Ai protests because she feels that she is a victim of unethical child labor, but Tom Nook assures her that not only will it pay off her debt, but she’ll also meet everyone in the Animal Village community.
“So you AREN’T eighteen?”
Look at the axes in the background. Do you think Tom Nook is somehow linked to the mysterious murders in Animal Village?!
During her part-time work, Ai meets some of the animal residents, many of whom can be found in the games: Bouquet (Rosie) the cat, Albert (Alfonso) the crocodile, Bianca (Whitney) the sexy wolf, the Able Sisters, Sally the elephant (Margie), and a boy named Yu.
I really hate Yu. Yu is the thing about this movie I hate the most. OH, GOD, DO I HATE HIM.
Still, Yu is important because he represents the boy character in Animal Crossing, just as Ai represents the girl. But did they really have to make Yu so unbearably annoying? Yu’s gimmick is that he wears disguises (ninja, pirate, white bunny [!], etc.) and goes on imaginary adventure. That’s all good and well, but he’s extremely annoying while doing it. I’ve played imaginary pirates when I was a kid, but I never physically harassed anyone while doing it. I sincerely hope Yu is mentally challenged or something, because otherwise he’s just plain moronic. Alfonso also doesn’t help matters, as he plays Yu’s best friend in this movie.
Ai and Yu formally meet each other when a spider crawls on Ai (surprise, surprise!—she shares my phobia), and Yu ‘rescues’ her by smacking his net on her face. Then before you know it, Yu allows a cockroach to crawl on Ai’s face. I mean what the hell, kid? Are you really this deviant? You make my crack addict-like nephew seem perfectly normal.
“I know they’re all essentially brainless, but you have to watch them. ‘Cause… they creep on ya. They creep up on ya.”
Deformed, disproportioned wolves have never looked so sexy!
The next day, Ai continues her part-time work by delivering a package to Apollo the eagle, who gardens beautifully blue roses. Apollo isn’t home, which is fortunate because Yu’s shenanigans cause Ai to fall and destroy a good portion of the blue rose garden. Then my all-time favorite Animal Crossing character is introduced:
Kame ni kawatte, oshioki yo! Now… SCRAM!!!
Mr. Resetti! I love this guy; he is easily my favorite recurring character from the games. He is constantly PO’d and shouts all the time, but he has a reason for it—after all, naughty little schnooks that constantly reset their progress (a method that is considered cheating) deserve to be verbally abused. In this movie, Resetti plays the role of the village’s chief law enforcer. This means that he replaces Copper and Booker, two Animal Crossing characters that are also among my favorites but are absent in this film.
Resetti quickly decides that Ai is not to blame for messing up Apollo’s roses, but she is still “unlucky.” As he leaves, he informs the human girl that she may find Apollo at The Roost, the café in Animal Village’s museum. She promptly enters the museum and meets Fūta and Fūko (Blathers and Celeste respectively), owl siblings that run the museum. Ai learns that the only dinosaur remains that have yet to be donated to the museum are that of the sesismosaur. She enters The Roost, and before long she meets Apollo. She not only delivers the package to the eagle, but she admits that it was she who ruined the blue rose garden. Apollo, without saying a word, gets up and leaves, implying that he is moodier than Ed Asner in death row.
After her experiences in the museum and The Roost, Ai leaves and soon meets an animal who would soon be her best friend, Sally the elephant (Margie). Sally and Ai become amazingly close, and as weird as it is for a man to say, their friendship constitutes the best scenes in this movie. Sally is perhaps the best character in the film, mainly because she is the only character who chases her desired dream with all speed, come hail or high water: to be a fashion designer (in the games, all she’d need to do is to drop by the Able Sisters and create a primitive design with a limited color palette!).
I am not even going to comment on this one…
Sally and Ai share a metaphor, concerning cherry pies. The two girls equally love cherries (me, too!—the food and any original characters created by Collin), and in basic terms Sally describes her goal as a cherry pie, and a pie that she will eat.
“Do you understand, Ai? That’s more to the point; do you understand? I eat your cherry pie. I eat it up! Every day! I eat the blood of lamb from Animal Village!”
One night, Ai finds the first of a series of messages in bottles on the beach: “Dear Mario: Please come to the castle. I have baked a cake for you. Sincerely, Princess Toadstool. Peach~!” Okay, okay, that wasn’t the letter’s contents. It is: “Above the pine forest, the night of the Winter Festival, a miracle will occur.” This message is followed by equally enigmatic messages from the same source, and UFO reports convince Ai that the truth is out there…
Ai and Sally befriend Rosie the cat, and the three of them become BFFs. It’s kinda funny to me how the most girly parts of the film are the best; Yu simply annoys the hell out of me. Nevertheless, Yu, Alfonso, Rosie, Sally and Ai embark on a sea-bound quest to find fossils, in a cove. They find an actual skeleton of a seismosaurus in mint condition (what are the odds?!), but because Yu is brain dead, he is responsible for the cove to cave in, and our young heroes barely escape with their skins. The museum weeps…
Yar-har fiddle dee dee! Bein’ a pirate is alright to be! Do what you want ‘cause a pirate is free! You are a pirate!
All in all, Ai, Sally and Rosie share a close friendship, and as saccharine the charm may be, the charm is nevertheless undeniable. Eventually, the night when Totakeke (K.K. Slider) performs approaches. K.K. Slider, as most of you are aware, is a nomadic animal musician, and is a caricature of Animal Crossing music supervisor and partial composer, Kazumi Totaka (some of you know him best as the voice of Yoshi, though). In the games, K.K. Slider is a laid-back hippie, who firmly believes that to be “cool” is to be one with the melody, and that music should be free. In the film, he is just as cool and mellow, but he is more of a sex symbol. I mean, the fact that they got a popular Japanese actor in his 20s to voice Slider is a piece of my argument.
PLAY “FREEBIRD!”
K.K. Slider asks for song requests, and fangirl Sally begs him to play K.K. Bossa. Slider agrees, and promptly plays a very pretty, slow-tempo melody on his guitar… and sings the song in Animalese. Totaka went through the trouble of rearranging Animal Crossing’s catchy music into pretty orchestrations (more on that later), and yet retained K.K. Slider’s warbled vocals. That is freakin’ hilarious… or is it lazy? Or is it both? Hmm…
“All right, and now for the right side! Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea…”
Every Animal Village resident has fun at the festival, but alas, the fun couldn’t stay forever. In the fall, Rosie informs Ai that Sally has moved out of the village. Ai is frustrated and depressed that Sally hadn’t even told her own friend beforehand. Ai sulks her way to The Roost and orders a drink. Her moodiness gets Bianca’s attention, and the snuggable wolf encourages Ai to be more ladylike, because a woman should be ladylike in any and every situation. Ten bucks says Bianca thought, “That’ll shut her up!”
It is blatantly obvious that Bianca and Apollo was once a couple, but they split. This is probably why Apollo is off-putting and quiet.
Ai leaves The Roost and meets Seichii the walrus (Wendell). The time has come, the walrus said, to eat! Just like in the games, he whines until he is fed. Ai takes him home and feeds him rice cakes, and Wendell says something about sadness constituting hunger, and vice versa. As he eats, Ai receives a letter from Sally. The letter details Sally’s reasoning for not telling Ai of her decision, and apologizing for it. Sally said she would have cried if she told Ai, and didn’t want to start her new dream with tears in her eyes.
[Joseph suddenly retires from Fantasmic Kingdom without telling anyone, because he doesn’t want to start his new chapter in life with teary eyes.]
Not sure if that was a smart move, Sally, but you should be thankful that Ai seems to take it well, and is once again her cheery self! Wendell is by now long gone. What a gluttonous walrus; it’s always dine and dash with him!
At the end of the year, the winter festival commences. Before a mayor can be elected, and the winner of the Christmas lights contest decided, a UFO crashes in the village. The UFO opens, and out steps a seagull (alien, your granny!) named Jonni (Gulliver). It seems that his ship is missing several pieces, and his manages to convince Animal Village’s denizens to find said parts. Alfonso, Ai, Rosie and Yu (NO YU!) approach to the same cave they went to earlier in the film, because Yu believes he saw a UFO part crash there. Okay?
We should play Slim Whitman’s cover of “Indian Love Call,” and see what happens to Gulliver’s head!
Guess who pops in for the remainder of the movie? Sally! It turns out she has winter break, and decides to visit Animal Village during the Winter Festival. D’aww.
With Sally’s elephantine strength, the kids push aside the boulder blocking the entrance, and they enter the very same cave that they were in earlier in the film. At the top of the seismosaurus fossil is the UFO part that they are searching for. Yu manages to obtain the part (but he still wasn’t able to redeem himself), and the kids return to Gulliver.
In a bizarre twist, Gulliver is not the true alien and is instead a total fake (duh!), but the UFO piece the kids found actually is an alien; the sprocket transforms into a liquid-esque alien. The true UFOs float in the sky, and after a bizarre scene with Ai and the little, morph-happy alien, the alien returns to its kind and the aliens create a constellation in the sky, based on Ai’s head. Why her and not anyone else is beyond me… she is the heroine, sure, but that’s just picking favorites!
“It’s CGI!”
It was Gulliver who wrote the letters that Ai found (he says this to himself as he hovers away), and he intended to make a big scene, but by sheer coincidence his spaceship was knocked to the ground by the alien kid. That was how the alien kid landed in the cave. Or… something. To be honest with you, I’ve kinda lost interest in the film for a while at this point.
Happy endings all around! Tom Nook upgrades Nook’s Cranny to Nook ‘n Go (which is not the final upgrade in the games), it’s heavily implied that Bianca and Apollo get back together (the eagle also bonds with Ai and lightens up), Sally becomes a hugely successful designer, Yu continues to be even more annoying than Tom Green and Dane Cook combined, the seismosaurus fossil is retrieved and donated to the museum, and Ai eats her cherry pie: she befriends Celeste and starts to learn astronomy. Tortimer is rather funny in this movie, and his final joke is no exception: he is the only animal that voted for a mayor, and he voted for himself, and therefore he is re-elected. Another cute running gag in the film is the penguin character, Darumaso (Hopper), and his attempts to catch a fish. He finally catches a fish in the end, but the fish is laughably small. It’s a cute and funny running gag in the same vein of Dinky and Boomer striving to obtain a caterpillar in “The Fox and the Hound,” and I enjoyed it.
The animation is well done, especially considering the franchise. Animal Crossing has never been known for outstanding graphics. In fact, the first Animal Crossing game released in North America was horrifically outdated with Nintendo 64 graphics, but Animal Crossing is not about visuals. The movie’s characters are deformed and goofy, but they do possess solid charm… unless, of course, you’re talking about freakin’ Yu. The backgrounds are slightly better, and in areas they reminded me of “The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.” CGI is used, but sparingly. The CGI is the most obvious (and jarring) with the aliens.
Music is the absolute best thing about this movie. Animal Crossing has always had some short but catchy tunes, and this movie has them in spades, but orchestrated! Many of the film’s score pieces are less than thirty seconds long, but they are freakishly catchy. I can guarantee that very few will deny that “Town Hall,” “The Roost” and “2 AM” are catchy. Even K.K. Slider, with his goofy and warbled voice, is accompanied by a very pretty guitar piece. Animal Crossing’s score is not meant to be compared with, say, the frightening and original music from “There Will Be Blood,” or the haunting, sweeping melodies of “The Secret of NIMH;” instead, Animal Crossing’s music pieces are short but sweet.
The truth is this movie is not bad. This might puzzle you, considering that many of my reviews are purposely geared towards awful stuff, but the fact is “Animal Crossing: The Movie” is not bad. With that said, it’s also not a very good movie. Mediocre is the term that could best describe the film. While the animation is competent, the music is great and some of the characters are endearing, the film is just infrequently boring. The movie has an inconsistent pace that simply drags in parts, and while the film isn’t flat-out bad, it’s still difficult to recommend.
At the same time, the film is also difficult to harshly criticize, since it is obviously geared to young children. Of course, the film is not geared to the same children I have the unfortunate ‘pleasure’ of seeing several times a year (my cousin’s children, they be hobgoblins!); this film is geared to children who adore funny, deformed characters. It does help to be widely familiar with Animal Crossing, absolutely, but knowledge isn’t necessary. Either way, there are plenty of cameos to be found. Not everyone’s favorite characters will be featured, but you really couldn’t ask for more.
Toys “R” Us? What the hell did they have to do with this film?
I do not regret watching “Animal Crossing: The Movie,” but I highly doubt I’ll ever watch it again. I’d much rather play the actual games instead of watching the movie, but at the same time you could do much, much worse than watch “Animal Crossing: The Movie.” I still think this would have worked better as a featurette, though. ** out of ****
