Maybe I’m stating the glaringly obvious here, but since it wasn’t obvious to me until recently I might as well set out my thoughts on it. I’m not saying that the Unlimited Blade Works is a great movie but it’s worth stopping to think about the broader context or what the movie itself is trying to accomplish. Similarly, there are a few things I could say about the Yukikaze OAV but now I’ve read the original novel I feel a bit different about it. Feelings concerning the motives behind, and effects of, adapting stories from one medium to another mostly.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Click for full size
An extreme example of the importance of context that I stumbled on is William Gibson’s Neuromancer. It’s an enjoyable enough cyberpunk novel but not as enjoyable for me as I expected: I’m finding it tedious in places but when I remind myself that it was written before any of that stuff related to the internet, VR and even the cyberpunk genre itself were commonplace, I admire it more. Not that it makes the book itself more fun, but it makes its limitations at least understandable.
Yukikaze is a pretty old novel in its genre too (the same age as Neuromancer, coincidentally). It also deals with issues concerning A.I. and the interface between humans and machines…again back in the mid 80s before such things were regular themes in either scientific research or science fiction. It too was ahead of its time, but time doesn’t stand still.
In some ways then the real world has caught up with the technology of Yukikaze, which takes the futuristic edge off things like fly-by-wire control systems, on-board computers and the general performance of the planes depicted in the novel. On the flipside, it’s a little easier to visualise how they would look and behave IRL because there are now some pretty cool pieces of hardware in service today that aren’t far from Kambayashi’s vision.
There’s also an element of the ‘knights of the sky’ ideal that’s lasted right from WWI to the present day in perpetuating the notion that fighter pilots are a breed apart. Kambayashi has married that mystique of the elite magnificent men in their flying machines and added a SF twist by giving the machine a mind of its own. To its credit, that element of the novel still holds quite a lot of its magic.
The portrayal of Yukikaze is full of tantalising contradictions: a poetic name painted on the fusalage in stylised calligraphy that was nevertheless chosen at random and borrowed from a WWII warship; a machine designed for death and destruction, yet Kambiyashi’s prose paints it as awe-inspiring and beautiful with a mind and will of its own. As a military hardware geek, I consider it to be beautiful in its own way, at any rate.
One curious thing about Yukikaze’s A.I. is that it’s hard to work out what, if anything, it’s really thinking. Similarly, the novel doesn’t even answer the question about whether the JAM are more interested in the planes than the people piloting them; introducing the idea of the aliens being more interested in our tech than us as a species is neat in itself and only adds to the cool, detached ambiguity of everything that’s going on.
The story demands a hero of few words; the fact that this character trait is pivotal to the story doesn’t make the reading or viewing experience more fun however. For what it’s worth, I don’t think Fukai’s humanity is ever in danger of being lost altogether because the devotion and care he would have otherwise lavished on the humans in his life are directed at his plane. I suppose he’s an aeronautical dori-kei, to steal the term from Eve no Jikan.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Such things as Fukai’s feelings towards his plane and the people around him come across better in print because in the cinematic or animated format everything has to be either spoken outwardly or implied with imagery as opposed to internal monologues (see what I mean by ‘glaringly obvious’?). A hero who rarely speaks would either require infodump-style exposition or text overlays, which may not sit well with the target audience of a production that sells itself on air-to-air combat with aliens.
That’s not to say that Kambayashi can’t write a good action scene; hell, the combat in Yukikaze leaves the likes of Tom Clancy standing. One of my favourite scenes is when the flight envelope protection limiter switches off and the plane does a missile launch maneuvre backwards that makes Fukai black out and takes the JAM by surprise – it’s true edge-of-your-seat stuff and the OAV captures that sort of moment very well.
I guess the crux of this post is that some of these aspects work better in print than on screen, and vice-versa. Yukikaze the OAV is a companion to the novel – if I were to rewatch it I’d probably enjoy it more than I did the first time around. It’s not however a replacement for the novel: the combat looks awesome but there’s a lot more going on at a thematic and characterisation level that the OAV either leaves out or is unable to address. Long story short, if you want to see Yukikaze dance in the skies of Faery, buy the DVDs. For everything else, read the novel. Or just read the novel because it’s an excellent and thought-provoking read.
Which leads me to Unlimited Blade Works. Like the OAV of Yukikaze it’s a shortened retelling of a story that was originally comprised mostly of words rather than moving pictures, which at least partly explains why certain things didn’t come over as well as they did in their original format. If I observed it correctly, the writers wisely opted to use CGs from the VN in the movie so if I were to recommend the UBW movie purely on the combat and the general approach to animating the characters on a feature film budget, I would. So I do.
Even so, UBW suffers the same problem as the much-maligned Tsukihime anime; that is, there’s too much quality content squeezed into too little time. Simply put, the film was too short. There, I said it. There’s no escaping the cold hard fact that the editing was choppy and the plot jumped uncertainly from scene to scene rather than progressing smoothly. The opening scenes, bringing the story up to the point where the plot diverges between the Fate and UBW route, feels like a last episode recap. Which, appropriately enough, is I think what it is.
I asked myself who would bother with this movie unless they had played the VN or at the very least watched the TV show. I haven’t had chance to check for interviews with cast and crew, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it was deliberately aimed at people who were already familiar with the franchise. Half of the viewers in its theatrical run probably knew exactly what would happen…but just wanted to see it animated.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
As far as I can tell the movie doesn’t do or say anything the VN didn’t, but if it’s merely an act of animating Takeuchi’s artwork and Nasu’s strings of text, is that actually a flaw? The jerky editing is something I think the movie should be criticised for, but failing to stray from the source material is a perfectly acceptable aim.
That said, if cinema tickets and DVDs of the two-hour cinematic adaptations of Paradox Spiral and Murder Speculation Part 2 can sell like hot cakes on a cold day, I don’t know what the excuse was to keep the running time to a mere ninety minutes here. If the Industry is having trouble finding audiences outside the ‘safe’ minority of existing fans, surely it’s disadvantageous to exclude casual viewers with such an insular narrative approach?
What I will say in this film’s defence is that it only needs to place emphasis on the aspects that work better in the animated format to avoid failing altogether. But yeah, it could’ve done more than that without betraying its source material, even when doing the tricky transition from prose to cinema. Part of me is wishing that Heaven’s Feel is left well alone after all now.
If it makes you feel any better (it certainly did for me), the sequel to Yukikaze will be out sometime next year. Yay.
Tags: deculture, feature film, Haikasoru, nasuverse, tsun-tsun, war drama