At last: a live-action anime adaptation that doesn’t suck! I picked up Cutie Honey purely for the lulz and on the grounds of being a Hideaki Anno completist, but wasn’t surprised at the hour and a half of over-the-top campness. What was surprising was how entertaining it all was; I haven’t seen any of the old adaptations or the original manga but thanks to those mind-boggling trailers that were going around I only had a vague idea of what to expect.
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Good job!
I find the Anno-isms to be a bit wearing in live-action format for some reason but given the old Gainax manifesto in terms of comedy, it’s a fitting choice of director in a roundabout kind of way. The packaging lists the director as he always is (i.e. as a ‘legend’ and the maker of Evangelion) but ominously Eriko Sato is introduced proudly as ‘Japan’s top swimsuit model’ and it raises no defence whatsoever against any accusations of being superficial, mindless fluff. It’s reputed to be one of MVM’s biggest sellers over here, too. No kidding.
What amazed me more than anything is that, after the hard-hitting and gritty subject matter of Love & Pop and Shiki Jitsu, it’s such outrageous fun to watch. I honestly thought that Anno had forgotten how to kick back and have a bit of fun despite his cult status effectively giving him free rein to use whatever subject or stylistic techniques he wants. Quite how he landed in the director’s chair for what is basically a trashy magical girl story I’ve no idea, but if that’s what it takes for my hero to rediscover his sense of humour then so be it.
The problem I have with Anno as a live-action director is that despite having an arsenal of clever flourishes and a sharp eye for cinematography he can’t fully let go of his animation-director roots: I still don’t think he’s woken up to his own potential in the live-action medium. Here it’s an advantage rather than a weakness though because keeping the tropes, garish colours and and other hallmarks of traditional anime actually adds to the comedic appeal.
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Gold Claw is a smooth criminal
In a way Anno is poking fun at his own back catalogue with his hand-held camera angles, snippets of cel animation or live-action imitations therof, subplots involving parental issues (including, yes, dialogue that includes a declaration of “I won’t run away!”) and the use of classical music in a pivotal showdown scene. It’s a homage to the source material I guess, but also a display of “If you can’t laugh at yourself…” To be honest, I wouldn’t mind him animating this if the quality of the opening theme sequence is anything to go by.
If you have an aversion to cheeky trash TV nostalgia, hammed-up acting in the name of laughs, or plots that always have to make sense you might not enjoy this at all. It is however a prime candidate for viewing with friends and a few drinks (if only because watching Honey in various states of undress might feel like an even guiltier pleasure when watched alone) to dilute the retina-scorching colours and knowing silliness. Somehow it’s not as expoitative as you’d expect because Honey is clothed at least in her underwear apart from in the CGI transformations, and the CGI in general is intentionally bad, which automatically makes it cool anyway.
The thing is, because it’s so knowingly ridiculous Cutie Honey somehow feels a little less gratuitous than the premise or promo material suggest. A crucial factor, which is also the reason why Anno is a genius in my eyes, is the controlled absurdity that can still make a serious point or two. Anyone can make a bad movie but only a good film maker knows when to push the stupid button and when to let the meaningful messages make themselves heard; Anno has made a film that’s a clever kind of stupid.
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More than just a pretty face…?
The biggest mistake the director, or any of the cast, could have made is taking any aspect of the movie seriously, so they didn’t. Besides, it’s yet to be proven that anime-style action works convincingly outside of anime (Casshern, take note) so the fact that the combat scenes bear no relation to Real World laws of physics or causality works in its favour. I guess the cast and crew realised they wouldn’t walk away from this with their dignity intact so they just let their hair down and threw caution to the wind.
Even so, Sato plays up the ditzy archetype well in conveying her dual persona with genuine comic timing. Aside from merely looking the part she manages to be both the kick-ass heroine and the goofy, thick-as-two-short-planks office girl; not bad for someone who was clearly not cast purely for her ability to deliver her lines. There’s even a teeny bit of character development amidst the mayhem with some profound moments that hit you even harder because profound is, understandably really, the last thing you’d expect from it.
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This is after all a story involving nano-machines, undercover journalists driving orange TVRs, cameos from both the director and the original manga-ka, a laughably cheesy rendering of Tokyo Tower getting demolished by a giant corkscrew and villains who are accompanied into battle by their own backing band. Peeling away the homages, the gleeful excesses and the riotous mashing together of live-action film and comic book action is a movie with arthouse sensibilities and an honest sense of good-natured fun. At the very least, even those of us who smugly think that they’ve seen it all will sit back and ask “what the fuck was that?”