Arch Angels (2006) User Reviews (2)

Colourful, wacky and the coolest dog ever

[rooprect · 7/10 · 7 February 2007]

Well, maybe he's not the coolest dog *ever*. Check out a film called HACHIKO MONOGATARI for the coolest dog ever. But Damien the cgi dog in Arch Angels was pretty darn trippy. It's the most unusual use of a creepy big black dog since The Omen.

I'm not familiar with the manga upon which this film is based, nor am I familiar with manga-based films in general. But I really enjoyed this flick. What won me over was the creativity of both plot and presentation. Here we have a bizarre story (a bunch of girls at a Japanese convent school attain super powers and do battle with evil Italian submarines while trying to uphold a façade of proper feminine charms à la French aristocracy) which is told through an equally bizarre blend of live action, cgi, illustrations, "bulleting" (that "Matrix" effect of freezing the action and swooshing the camera around different angles) and even a few comic strip special effects like the old Batman TV series. Essentially, this movie is a visual burst of fruit flavours.

I wish I were more familiar with Japanese culture & language, because I could tell that a lot of jokes & humorous situations were lost on me. For example, there's a recurring gag about ramen noodles which confused me. But it didn't take long for me to figure out that it's supposed to be really funny. And before I knew it I was laughing even though I still didn't get the joke.

There are also many subtle situational gags dealing with the prim & proper nature of polite Japanese society. This I equate to the hilarious old Monty Python sketches about British gentility--again, something you may not be familiar with, but you can enjoy the laughs nonetheless.

I've never been disappointed with a Japanese comedy. Check out SWING GIRLS (also starring the lovely & talented Juri Ueno) as well as KAMIKAZE GIRLS (which has a similar theme of Japanese-European identity crisis) and if you like kickass superhero chicks try CUTIE HONEY.

What did I just watch?

[johannesaquila · 7 November 2021]

I am reviewing the subtitled version of this film as a westerner with no particular knowledge of, or interest in, Japanese pop culture. I was so stunned by the weirdness of this film that I couldn't stop watching it to the end. I couldn't say that I enjoyed it, or that I didn't, because my sense of wonder that something so weird exists was so overwhelming that I didn't notice anything else.

The original Japanese title of this film is "Warau Mikaeru", which translates to "Laughing Michael" and is the name of a comedy manga series on which it is based. I guess this explains a lot of the weirdness: The film doesn't try to be realistic; if anything, I guess it tries to be like a manga. (As I have never read one, I can't be sure, though.)

Almost every frame of this film involves a special effect of roughly the quality of a late 1990s 3D computer game. In other words: Only a bit better than Myst. Many of the dialogs (at least the subtitles) are similarly artificial, containing such gems of natural speech as this:

"Fumio-san, are you hungry? Chef Yoshida has prepared a meal with his expert skills tonight."

Or maybe upper class Japanese people actually speak a bit like this and it only gets funny in the translation?

The story mostly takes place in St. Michael's Academy, a Catholic school for rich Japanese girls, run by European nuns on a Japanese island. The island is a bigger copy of Mont-Saint-Michel, reimagined in a 'Venice of the North' style that could be Dutch or Danish (but is in no way related to Normandy or, for that matter, to Japan), and it is connected to the mainland by railway over a bridge rather than by a road on a dam.

The heroine is a girl who grew up with her poor mother, not knowing that she had an elder brother who was living with their rich father. After both parents' death, the two were recently united and now live together in a palace on the mainland. Due to her background she doesn't really fit in -- and soon finds two friends whose backgrounds are similarly unusual for this school. The three rebel against school norms in bizarre ways such as by eating chicken ramen or eating chocolate -- practices they also teach their schoolmates, who are too upper class to have encountered them yet.

For some reason, soon after becoming rebels the trio suddenly get superpowers. This is fortunate, because a series of traceless disappearances of rich girls from all over Japan and South Korea suddenly strikes at the school as well. To save their schoolmates, the trio's superpowers aren't sufficient. They also need the help of Damian, the ubiquitous and extremely artificial looking school dog, as well as the power of prayer. But in the end they overcome the evil Italian Viking ninjas equipped with a submarine, a helicopter, and ... a paddle wheel sailboat.

There are also a number of side plots around the heroine, and flashbacks to her childhood with her mother.

In a way, this film reminds me of famous YouTube artist Cyriak, who has done some of his psychedelic work for Adult Swim. But it's possible that this is just because I know too much about European culture and too little about mangas.