Quote:
Cutie Honey comes riding a wave of nostalgia. Dozens of titles by legendary manga creators have had new anime adaptations made over the last few years, as the original manga are reprinted in disposable magazine format and sold in convenience stores, where middle aged men and women relive the stories they remember fondly from their childhoods.

Until now, Go Nagai has not been a part of it, aside from the exceedingly awful Shin Getta Robo OAV series six years ago. But he is one of the seminal creative minds in manga and anime. He has been creating hit properties since the 1960s, in all kinds of genres. He is best known in the West for Devilman, a dark, bloody series filled with demon battles and apocalypse that pretty much invented the genre. He is best known in Japan for Mazinger Z and a series of heroic robot shows in the 70s. But Cutie Honey is a third aspect to the sideburns-loving manga artist; a bubbly magical girl series originally aimed at young girls.

Go Nagai currently seems to be leading the pack of people collectively realizing that we now have the technology to make live action films from these properties without looking completely stupid. Cutie Honey is, to my knowledge, the first live action anime that actually preserves the feel and look of the original series successfully. It sets the bar pretty high.

They wisely chose a former anime director the handle the project (Evangelion’s Hideaki Anno, who also wrote the script with Shomuni’s Rumi Takahashi), and he makes full use of time honored animation techniques to get around the inevitably low budget; when Gold Claw unleashes an absurd amount of missiles at Cutie Honey, for example, we get computer animated missiles streaking towards a leaping, twirling Cutie Honey (Sato) who is not actually moving at all; instead, a series of posed still photos flicker past quickly creating the illusion of actual movement.

This Gold Claw is one of four absurd looking lackeys for the immortal unemotional tree demon Sister Jill. Cobalt Claw has lots of hands and is rather stretchy; Scarlet Claw (played by popular squeaky-voiced anime veteran Mayumi Shintani) who shoots giant death beams out of her mouth, and Black Claw (Oikawa), who is fond of karaoke and spins up giant tornados. They are attempting to steal Honey’s “Love System” which her father invented to bring his daughter back from the dead and bestow immortal life and immense superpowers upon her. They have killed her father and kidnapped her uncle. This all conspires to make her perpetually late for work.

Cutie Honey is essentially a very campy, harebrained comedy. Eriko Sato, who plays Cutie Honey like a 5-year-old pretending to be a grownup, is hardly an actress. She seems to be famous mostly as a pin-up girl. She attacks every scene with an energy that is both obnoxious and infectious. She is backed up by an ultra-professional policewoman (Ichikawa) who has the strangest bedroom since Branded to Kill) and a jaunty, suspiciously well-informed reporter (Murakami). They bond over booze and karaoke.

While fun, all of this is relentlessly shallow. The movie would be entertaining and completely forgettable except for a few moments when Hideaki Anno instills an unexpected depth. This is his third live action movie, and his first two films Love & Pop and Ritual (Shiki-jitsu) were essentially character studies filled with nuanced performances that played only to tiny audiences. His anime work as well is famous for bringing a realism and depth of character into tried and true genre shows. It probably accounts for no more than five minutes of Cutie Honey in all, but there are these beautiful moments where the shells of their crafted personae crack and we see the human beings beneath. Sato in particular manages to make you feel the deep loneliness at the core of her character. For all her speechmaking about the importance of love, she’s a girl with no parents and no friends.

And of course, no Anno movie is complete without a dose of his trademark incomprehensible symbolism. He makes it fairly accessible here, providing a nice emotional climax in the middle of flashy special effects battles. In the end, Cutie Honey is a far better film than it has any right to be.

Then again, I think you should understand that I genuinely enjoyed both Charlie’s Angels movies.

Kyuti.Hani.AKA.Cutie.Honey.Live.Action.2004.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 33 min
Size: 	1.78 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1018x576 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	2 292 kb/s
BPP: 	0.163
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/4644F9A2C22CF6C/Kyuti.Hani.AKA.Cutie.Honey.Live.Action.2004.576p.BluRay.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Hideaki Anno – Kyûtî Hanî AKA Cutie Honey: Live Action (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Ichiko is a care-giver and a nurse. She provide home-care to the Oishos’ elderly woman and is almost considered part of the family as she visits and performs her tasks routinely. What is more, Ichiko is helping Oisho Motoko to also become a care-giver and potentially replace her one day. The two have become close, which is useful when Motoko’s sister Saki disappears. She is returned safely one week later, but the kidnapper is too close to home

A.Girl.Missing.2019.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-theonlyh.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 51 min
Size: 	4.98 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1196x720 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	5 750 kb/s
BPP: 	0.279
Audio
#1:  	Japanese 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/B3F38201CEBBBC5/A.Girl.Missing.2019.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-theonlyh.mkv

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English, Cantonese and Chinese internal

The post Kôji Fukada – Yokogao AKA A Girl Missing (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quiet and introspective Kayako routinely has lunch on a rooftop with three of her friends that attend an all girls high school with her in a seaside town. One day she invites Masami Endo to join the group. As her friendship with Masami grows, she loses contact more and more with the others. She is impressed with Endo’s greater knowledge of music and art, and although Endo proclaims that she is insignificant with no aim in life, Kayako says that she wishes that she could be like her new friend. Their feelings deepen beyond friendship and she proclaims her love for Endo on a lonely beach. The two become physically intimate but when summer comes Masami disappears and Kayako learns that she has gone to Tokyo to meet a married man with whom she had an affair the year before. An abortion had led to her being suspended from school. Feeling betrayed when Masami returns and lies about where she has been, Kayako keeps to herself and starts painting a still life, emulating Cezanne paintings in one of Masami’s books. Although they reconcile and Kayako speaks of them going way to study together, her love of painting leads to her leaving for Tokyo alone to study art, while Masami remains behind. Masami sends a videotape showing a shot of the beach, and then the blue sea, proclaiming that unlike Kayako, this is all that she can do in an artistic sense.
(imdb)

1.37GB | 1h 56m | 720×400 | avi

https://nitro.download/view/DA6AB1439BE3560/blue.avi
https://nitro.download/view/B71558518D2D0B5/blue.srt
or
https://tezfiles.com/file/fc4f97070e6fc/blue.avi
https://tezfiles.com/file/b843cc785629a/blue.srt

Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English

The post Hiroshi Ando – Blue (2001) first appeared on Cinema of the World.