Supernatural Beast City (Wicked City)
Daniel:
Supernatural Beast City is set in Tokyo, the night before a peace treaty between the 'human world' and the 'dark world' is due to be renewed. It all takes place over one night, from dusk 'til dawn, and it tells the story of two black guards- Taki the human man and Maki the Dark World woman, who are assigned to protect an Italian man who is more than 200 years old who is essential for the signing of the treaty, named Dr. Giussepe Mayart.
Anyway, the story is all about sex, and, of course, the real plan turns out to be that Dr. Mayart was really playing Cupid and that the whole mission was a farce in order to bring Taki and Maki together and get them to have sex. Stupid plot.
On the positive column, the animation is consistently of a reasonably high quality, and the Tokyo street scenes are realistic, including real skylines of real neighbourhoods. What's not realistic is that there never seems to be any traffic on the streets, and that they seem to be able to drive for ages in Tokyo downtown without any traffic or traffic lights. Also, the roads are constantly turning clockwise. But I get obsessed with such things, and that wouldn't bother most people. It's also better dubbed than most Manga video releases. Also, there are a number of interesting characters, and the character designs are good. the transformations from human to dark world form of the dark world bad-guys is also interesting.
The animation style is very 1970's, which is nice, I guess. But the bottom line for me is that the plot is cheesier than cheese, and this kind of mucky soft-porn horror is just not my kind of thing at all. If I want porno, I prefer the orthoscopic shots and the tentacle rapes of Urotsukidooji to all this poop.
Some people might definitely like Supernatural Beast City, and it was a relatively popular anime when it was released, but it's so not my cup of tea. For those who fancy such things.
Alon:
Wicked City was the secong anime movie that I've seen (the first was Ghost in the shell). Needless to say that after Ghost in the shell, it was kind of a disappointment. Well, it's not fair comparing it to ghost in the shell, but even now, after I've seen many anime movies, I still don't think Wicked City is so good. Personally I don't like the "sex and tentacles" genre (although Wicked City is not Hentai), and wicked city has a bit of sex and, well... tentacles. The plot is absurd, and the characters not apealing. And to think I spent 100 nis on that... well, learn from your mistakes. I don't recommend this movie, unless you really like the genre.
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