Posted by Roarkiller on 11.29.2008, 09:18 AM:
The Sky Crawlers
Saw Sky Crawlers. Like all off Oshii's previous movies, do NOT expect anything happy or funny from this movie, cuz you won't find it anywhere.
Summary: Kannami Yuuichi is an ace pilot who just got assigned to a new base. Like every other pilot, he is a kildren: adolescents who never grow old and never die, and whose sole purpose is to pilot ther planes in a neverending war. In his new base, he meets with Kusanagi Suito, his strongheaded female superior, with whom he feels strangely familiar with... along with everything else. His suspicions starts to grow from the moment he was unable to meet the previous pilot of his new aircraft, Jinroh, even though it was supposed to be standard procedure, and how everyone seemed to be avoiding the topic.
IMO the term "Kildren" is a subtitle error of sorts. The original japanese spelling is Kirudore, and I highly suspect it to mean "killing slave" due to their nature of being nothing more than pawns. [Kiru=cut, or English KILL; dorei = slave)
The movie has an overall feeling of uneasiness, especially in the beginning when Yuuichi continually comments on being familiar with everything, from the diner's meatpies to the brothel girl he was later introduced to. It gets especially worse for him when he starts noticing the strange behaviour of the people around him. Unfortunately, the dogfights are highly realistic to the point of being rather short and far between, so there's hardly any excitement in the movie. But then again, this isn't an action movie. In fact, it's closer to say that it's a philosophical sci-fi movie.
The artwork is as expected from Production IG, but what is surprising is their usage of real-live footage (probably to reduce production costs, but still pretty good). Character design is very close to Last Exile. There aren't any songs in the show, sadly, and while still applaudable, the theme song does not have much of an impact.
Sky Crawlers is dialogue-heavy, albeit in simple enough Japanese most of the time. What is truly interesting is the integration of other languages as well: the locals and newscaster speak in perfect British English AND accent, and on one of their missions, a separate foreign language was used as well (probably russian). But what was truly unique was how the pilots will always, without exception, speak in English when airborne; in fact, I was really taken aback at this, not because of the language itself, but because of a iron rule that, in real life itself, traffic controllers and pilots MUST use the English medium to avoid confusion across global regions. To think that they would actually emulate this fact in a Japanese movie is astounding.
Overall, it's a show I would highly recommend to fans of GITS, and some to fans of Paprika and Perfect Blue, it being a show that requires thinking, after all.
If you're not into serious movies, though, stay cleer, or it'll get boring real quick.
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