Anno Hideaki's Shin movies

[decade368990]

Has anybody here already watched either Shin Godzilla and Shin Ultraman??

I watched Shin Ultraman in October and left the cinema in a mixed feelings. It did have production value, but the narrative is really a hit and missed. It felt like reinventing the iconic moments in a generic way with not enough human chemistry for the protagonist. I talked to some of the toy shop owners, they all said they didn't enjoy the CGI Ultraman at all, preferring the regular suit design. Anno did not direct this movie, but he wrote the screenplay, he did the editing, and he supplied motion capture.

What do you all think of Anno Hideaki's Shin project? Are you looking forward to Shin Kamen Rider next year????

[Mxylv]

I liked a lot of Shin Godzilla, although I didn’t think it quite lived up to its hype. There are one or two points where the kaiju itself jumps the shark for me (its reaction to being bombed from above felt like a bit much even for the franchise’s standards), and I recall feeling somewhat disappointed in the finale, which seemed oddly anticlimactic for me. I did like a lot of the satire elements and commentary, though some of its messages can be interpreted with a nationalist slant and can be hit-or-miss depending on what the director actually meant (to clarify, though, I took issue with the politics in Shin, disagreed with the philosophy in the anime trilogy, and on first watch had no idea what the science in Singular Point was, but I’m glad they’re at least trying those topics out).

Might just be me, but Shin Goji also felt like it was out there to prove a point, possibly to a fault. Coming around two years after Legendary’s Godzilla, it swapped to full CGI, took itself with a massive (albeit not humorless) gravitas, and made Shin the tallest Godzilla to date. To me, this made the film feel like it was trying to outdo Legendary, or justify the franchise’s existence, when it didn’t really need to do either one. A lot of the time, I just want to watch *a* Godzilla film, not “the” Godzilla film.

If Shin Godzilla was trying to reestablish the brand and Toho as a Hollywood-tier major force, Shin Ultraman feels like it’s embracing the fact that it’s a modest-budget indie film that can do pretty much whatever it wants. This doesn’t mean isn’t wasn’t interested in being dark, political, or occasionally cynical(!), but it does mean its arthouse camerawork, questionable contrasts in music style, and sometimes-bizarre editing choices lent to the film feeling more like a passion project than anything trying to prove itself. Now, I have no idea why so many shots and edits are done the way they are, but I’m pretty sure there was a reason behind it, and when I do “get” such a decision, I think it’s extremely well done. Certainly looking forward to what he does with Kamen Rider; I like what I’ve seen of that an awful lot.