I picked up some terrain stuff this weekend. One of Tehnolog's Platformer modular building sets and some sandbags from Tamiya. I'll probably slap some of the sandbags onto one of my spare elongated Warhammer Fantasy Battle stands. If I can find them, anyway.
Also, I find my digital camo masking tape and put it onto my Storm Talon. Tomorrow I plan on spraying it down with a darker shade of gray. We'll see how this turns out.
This weekend I finally got around to watching that Life of Guskou Budori. Oh man. What the hell did I watch? First thing's first, the trailer made it out to be WAY more interesting than it actually is. Second, it's boring as all hell. Third, there's symbolism all over and a good chunk of the movie just plain doesn't make sense. I figure I ought to give a rundown of what the hell happens in the movie, since IMDB and Wikipedia and most other places don't seem to give much of anything for plot details. So, spoilers ahead!
THIS IS GOING TO BE A VERY BIG WALL 'O TEXT, SO MAKE SURE YOU'VE ACTUALLY GOT SOME SPARE TIME IF YOU PLAN ON READING IT.
Guskou Budori is basically this country kid living in the mountains with his father, a famous woodcutter, his mother and his sister. There's a brief sequence where he goes to school and hears a poem about one's desire to live their life to help others for the simple sake of helping them. This becomes important to the plot later, I guess. Anyway, suddenly the weather goes all wacky and the land is plunged basically into a yearlong winter. Crops all die and nothing can go, so things become desperate. Something happens to Budori's father. We don't really know what, just that he starts yelling that he's going to go for a walk in the forest and leaves, never to be seen again. Next we see Budori and his sisten tending a fire with some twigs while his mother sits with her face in her hands. She suddenly stands up and declares she's going to find their father. Both kids try to go with her, but she tells them to stay. Suddenly the fire in the fireplace grows huge and we see the silhouette of the magician that's in the trailer behind the mother. Nobody says anything about this and it's never mentioned anywhere. The mother goes out the door, Budori tries to follow and she's all of a sudden completely gone. Next scene Budori is trying to make some grass into a paste while his sister falls asleep and BAM! the wizard dude shows up, declare that the sister summoned him and that he's there to do away with the horrible weather. He then grabs her and runs off. Budori tries to follow and winds up collapsing in the road. Here at this point we come across the first instance of the weird. Budori awakens in the forest, now alive with other cats around him flying around or on ladders throwing these glowing balls of silk around a tree. A foreman tells Budori they're laying nets to capture silkworks and forces him to join in. Budori questions none of this, not the flying cats, not the glowing balls of silk, not the fact that the net makes time speed up in the tree, not even the fact that the foreman has this odd swaying motion or the fact that the guy uses magic several times as well as telekinesis. He doesn't even bat an eyelash when the guy pulls out a glowing pyramid that unfolds into a ladder. There's some sort of symbolism with this thing because it shows up numerous times. Budori goes to his house which has been turned into a factory where they are processing the captured silkworms. Due to the sped up time on the silkworms, they emerge from the cocoons they were in and fly away before all of them can be processed. Suddenly the scenery shifts back to the desolate, dead winter forest from before and Budori's house is back to normal. Budori questions none of it and I have no clue what just happened. He decides to leave the mountain and search for his sister. He immediately gets recruited by a farmer to become his helper and Budori spends the next several years working there and learning from a bunch of textbooks the farmers (possibly dead) son left behind. The weather changes again and this time it becomes super hot. Budori has to leave because the farm is pretty much worthless now, so he heads to the capitol to look for work. For some reason he seems to have forgotten entirely about his sister. On the way to the capital, we're treated to another bizarre fantasy sequence. This time he "wakes up" at a place called "Galaxy Station." All of the people around Budori are these weird, nightmare inducing caricatures of humans. For the first time, he starts asking people if they've seen his sister, but everyone ignores him. He glimpses the magician and chases after him into the city. The city seems to be in ancient China and the writing everywhere is in Chinese (up till now it was some other language, possibly Esperanto). He chases the magician to a large tower and proceeds up the stairs. Here we're treated to a bizarre and rather freaky stop motion sequence. I really REALLY wish I could find a clip from this scene because it serves no purpose, is completely out of place, and is just downright freaky. Anyway, as he goes up the tower, the tower's elevator goes by, and Budori sees not only his sister, but other cat people and I'm pretty certain there were proper humans in there as well. He reaches the top, but the elevator is empty and nobody is around. A cat person (the only one we ever see in these sequences in the rest of the movie) give him binoculars, which he uses to spot the magician running through the streets again. Budori again gives chase leading to an old timey bath house which circus advertisements on its facade. He sees four, but only two are clearly shown. One is of an elephant person, the other is his sister in ballet clothes. Next thing you know, Budori is suddenly waking up in the train arriving at the capital. What follows next is several sequences of scenery porn showing the majesty of the city with its steampunk technology. Budori goes to the university and sits in on a lecture being given by the author of one of the textbooks he'd read. He meets with the professor, handing him his notebook with notes taken during the lecture. The professor is impressed with what he sees (and we see that pyramid again drawn on the pages) and he gives Budori a recommendation for employment with the city's volcanology institute. What follows is montages and scenes of him bonding with the scientists as well as working to divert an erupting volcano's lava flow. I believe Budori spends something like 7 years with the institute and of course, never once looks for his sister, asks anybody about her, or even mentions her in narration. Nor his parents. Suddenly we get another fantasy sequence with no real transition. This time Budori is brought into a courtroom populated by humanoid monsters and the magician is presiding as judge. Budori asks what crime he's being tried for and the magician tells him its because he's trespassed into their world several times, and asks him how he did it. Budori instead asks what happened to his sister and demands her return. The magician again states that she came with him of her own free will and nothing else. Budori continues demanding her return and the magician passes sentence, stating that Budori will be punished. Next scene! Budori's back at the institute and we have more montages as time passes. The weather begins to get worse again with another great freeze while Budori is assigned to observe an off shore volcano. As the weather gets worse, Budori recommends causing the volcano to erupt to, as he puts it "induce global warming through the proliferation of carbon dioxide." I'm not sure how that would work, but I'm pretty sure it cannot work that way. Budori's plan is shot down due to not having the resources to do something like induce volcanic eruptions and instead the various scientists try different methods that all fail. Budori sits and broods while the poem from earlier is replayed. He decides that he's been helped his whole life and will do his part to help others. Out of nowhere, the magician appears and states Budori summoned him. Budori does not question this and just says he didn't summon him. The magician says he'll do what he can to achieve Budori's wish and Budori states that he wants to go to the volcano and make it erupt. The next sequence is a gradual closeup of the volcano while music that'd been playing during pretty much all of the movie's scenery porn sequences plays. As the camera gets closer to the volcano's crater, we can see lava in it and the music abruptly cuts out. The camera cuts to several shots of the city and other scenery with a bright flash being visible. Next scene is the professor in an airship above the volcano, observing it and we see there's no more lava visisble. Roll credits as the theme song plays and the narrator states that the environment returned to how it was.
No explanation for what happened or how Budori caused the eruption. No explanation for who the hell the magician was, though I suspect he's supposed to be Death. There was just way too many plotholes and things that plain didn't make sense in this movie. What happened to looking for his sister? Was she dead? There's the inference that she was, but they never say. Was Budori himself actually dead and everything some hallucination as his mind trying to find some meaning in his life while he dies freezing on the forest floor? What was the deal with the fantasy sequences? Who was the foreman and who were the other cats that were harvesting the silkworms? What was that sequence? Did that actually happen? What was the deal with the pyramid thing? We see it numerous times throughout the movie, usually in scenes associated with new life, but we also see it in Budori's notebook. Why was Budori never concerned or confused when he would see magic performed in front of him? How in the hell did a volcano eruption warm up the planet rather than cool it down?
Rrgh. This movie just bugged me. From what I understand, the previous movie (this is a remake) and the actual source material are far more literal and make more sense. I believe ( I might be wrong) that the original story was written by Kenji Miyazawa who also wrote A Night on the Galactic Railroad which had a fair bit of similar themes, including a sequence where the protagonist rides a train through the galaxy while it ferries the souls of the dead. Interesting, anime adaptation of Miyazawa's other works, including Night on the Galactic Railroad also feature anthropomorphized cats. Also interesting is the the anime movie of Night on the Galactic Railroad was directed by the same guy who did Life of Guskou Budori and like Guskou, also shows humans only during the fantasy sequence.
Also interesting, there appears to be an anime movie about Kenji Miyazawa's life that was directed by Shoji Kawamori, the guy responsible for creating Macross. And guess what, that movie also features anthropomorphic cats and looks to be just as weird and bizarre and symbolism filled. Just look at the trailer.
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