Tag: Hitchcock

Analyzing Anime: Suspension of Disbelief

Why do we like anime so much? Why do we need it over western media? We can find a drama  about a dying daughter both in anime as well as in Hollywood, we have Superman  where they have Goku. Genre wise except for maybe the fan service we don’t differ that much, yet if I had to choose never Western movies or shows or Never anime again I’d bow out the first one. Why can’t I consume local  stuff? I try to find my answer. To find that answer I must first understand what separates anime from Western Media for me in the first place. Where are they different?

Today I will address something I noticed when I was watching a Spider-man Cartoon passing on tv. Anime and Cartoons to me have a different line on how far they can push me before they break the suspension of disbelief. For some reason I can take a lot more weird stuff from anime than I could in cartoons?! I am not sure if I am the only one but this to me is a thing.
Let’s take a look at Spider-man for example. Spider-man is written very differently compared to most anime characters. While either side is heroic in a weird way at least to me western heroes and villains are described by their flaws. Spider-man  might not be the greatest examples.. but we know him as Peter Parker the somewhat geeky school kid that loves Mary Jane Watson (or Gwen Stacy). Batman..well that is Bruce Wayne.. he has no actual super powers he is just really smart. Superman is Clark Kent, he can fly and shoot lasers out of their eyes and fly but they are also weak to kryptonite.  He loves Lois Lane and when we root for Superman to be alright and be well we hope he finds his romance with his partner.

Now let’s compare our superhero shows with anime. Put them up against Luffy, Naruto and Goku.  What do all of these have in common?! They have no Alter Ego. Luffy doesn’t suddenly become Hank Mugiwara .. a dusty old liberian bloke, nor does he become “Rubberman” No the human and the super part are interconnected. Why does this matter? Well because we are less confronted with their limitations, we do not see them as human’s persé but more as the heroes. Which means I can take a lot more from those weirdo’s as those humans.  Good Example, the choice Spider-man has to make in the Sam Rami movie when facing the Goblin.. save the cable car or save Mary Jane. He saves both. That feels cheap, the villian would know how fast he is .. he faced him before. Make Spidey at least a bit flawed he is not a god.Yet would it be Naruto of Luffy or Goku to save all of them by some shenanigans I’d be fine with it. First of all there is not as much a dilemma for them because they are less human that whole appeal of torn between two worlds is not a thing, secondly breaking limits is much more a part of that media, rather then where Western Heroes are more focused of achieving within your limits. So anime would make me frown less in confusion.

Of course this does not only take place in Shonen shows this takes place in just about every genre. Let’s make a bold move and compare romantic super natural shows,  such as The Vampire Diaries, True Blood, Medium and even less supernatural stuff like Grey’s Anatomy with the more outrageous Japanese romance genre of Harem shows.. just to make a point. When Elena Gilbert has to doubt between picking Stefan or Damon you could add Katherine in the mix to complicated things and Caroline to basically give Stefan his Harem but because it is western media your limitations are within being human.If you dehumanise them and make them want to partner up for very vampirish reasons or own fictional ones, the romance doesn’t work. What the hell are they doing we would ask.  Buffy’s romance are Angel Riley and Spike with Xander trying to fit in. While two are vampires, one a super soldier and one a loveable goofball in the end you can not make them to different. Everyone has to  have the same goals of planning to settle down, treat Buffy right, give her some peace. No one will join that romantic pursuit because they just think the other is cute, or heck for a misunderstanding.  If Sookie Stackhouse suddenly would be in a prearranged marriage with a demon would all think the writers have gone insane. Still.. vampire shoes are kinda like our variants of Harem aren’t they?!

Now.. let’s turn Buffy into an anime. Let’s place Angel, Riley Spike and Xander all in the same timeline. Riley instead of a plain super soldier is this ridiculous pretty boy who believes Buffy is the perfect woman and that their genetic offspring would be the most beautiful thing of all, thinking it’s his duty to create this beauty he pursues miss Summers. Spike doesn’t just fall hopelessly in love with her no instead he initially  does fall in love with her like in the orginal but this time when he asks for a soul he accidentally gets that of Buffies former boyfriend who died during the vampire attack in LA. Angel just wants to use her to lose a ancient gypsy that turns him into a woman during daytime, which he can break during a moment of pure happiness, so he just wants to bed her, but he actually begins to fall in love with her. Xander still stands no chance.. some things never change. Now as an anime I’d immediately see this working.. yet as a cartoon or life action show it would not.. why? Because they are anime characters.. they are on some other sort of level with other laws.. we can accept so much more from them.

Never felt I like this .. broke my suspense of disbelief.. somehow

Now let’s delve into the territory of drama and turn Breaking Bad in both a cartoon and into an anime. Both have a much higher suspense of disbelief and just can push the reality out of the window.. for this experiment I would like to see where the suspense breaks for me when slowly adapting this to other forms of media. For this example I will use the Fly in the Lab episode , as it is pretty self contained. Both in Cartoons and anime you can turn the fly into something more menacing. In both cases it could lead to an experiment blowing in Walter’s face chatring it black or resulting in some comical effect. In both cases we can turn the fly into something more menacing.. like a spy droid for Gus.. he controls to mess with Walter to get his batch to fail to make sure he will die or something. However where cartoons can not change Walt and Jesse while anime can.  We can see Jesse put on a jetpack in a cartoon and chase the fly away.. him spying the fly with a magic eye  seems weird.  Walt can invent a device to swat it.. yet he should not be able to change too much himself . Him creating a type of meth that gives him super powers seem out of cartoons range.

In anime though you can push a lot further. Jesse saying ‘Yeah Byakugan Bitch’ before his eye turn all white and veiny I can actually imagine. Anime Walt throwing a  disc shaped object or attack with pinpoint accuracy at the fly could remind you off the Pizza power he displayed earlier so he just kept that in the back for his enemies. Holding back is a pacing thing that is much more common in anime as in western media. Testing out your opponent rarely happens in Western comics. In manga and anime it is a constant. Western Narrative is a lot more straightforward, what you see is what you get. Superman and Batman rarely train, nor does Spiderman.. on very rare occasions they get new tech but over all western media characters deal with what they have. In basically any anime you can add on old lady that kills a fly by throwing a chopstick. Even in the more serious ones or dramatic ones, Bloom Into You for example. If Yu was bothered by a fly while pondering what she should do I could totally see her kill it with some super human action. Like tossing a chopstick or a pocky with sniper accuracy. I’d not notice anything to off.. in a way anime caters more to how they are different.. we can relate to THEM rather than that they should relate to us.  They don’t have to be relatable we will find something relatable about them.

This section title asks a very good question?! Why would I think a show is better if it is less relatable.. or further away from us?  The answer is, it doesn’t feel wrong as often. For a Western show to be good, it has to colour strictly within the lines. We know that it is right because we can it is coloured in between the lines.. or in reality we can sense it. We can sense if Tony Stark or Bilbo Baggins are being stretched too thin. Give Bilbo a Power to turn green instead of invisible and I would ask.. what were they thinking. Let Kazuma from  Konosuba wake up green and I would go like… who cursed him now?! The difference.. with Konosuba I am still thinking within the show I am not taken out of the plot yet with LOTR I am thinking of writing. Another good example is that very first episode of Star Trek the Next Generation. Encounter at Farpoint , an interdimensional being plagues the ship. With trials, time travel shenanigans and weird space jellyfish.  I felt very conflicted about this setting.. how do they balance this out? Yet would it have been an anime i would have consumed it without a single question. Exact same scenario. Where I watched the Star Trek episode as an observer through a screen, I would have watched the anime in world.

I would not go as far to call anime the more immersive experience, but once anime has you sucked in.. it can stumble a lot more before it spits you back out. The medium has less limits and as such we believe the worlds despite some really odd choices.  It can hide mistakes. Not everything we see in anime happens as we see it. Take a magical girl transformation.. I do not know how it would like seeing it as a spectator but I know the world does not fade away. When Menacing appears in front of Jojo characters I know they are not really there but I know what they mean. Now imagine Dr Octopus talking to spider-man but to indicate he is lying we see red flags appearing all around him or danger sounds.. it would feel jarring.


Anime has more options at its disposal to convey a message be it through exaggeration, parallel imagery or even side jokes. It all keeps us in that world while with Batman we ask.. would he really be able to lift that.. in Comic 73 page 12 panel 5 he was unable to lift an item that would weigh about as much. In anime.. not so much.. we can nitpick sure.. but all in all we can accept a whole lot more which makes it much more pleasant to watch, nothing seems fake because trough 90% of the medium, anything can happen.

Apologies for the bad quality.. but this. gif served my point way to well not to use!.

Pinkie’s Guilty Pleasures: Birdemic Shock and Terror

Hello Island Guests,  what originally began as a spotlight for movies which do not get not enough love has since turned in me discussing the weirdest shows, campiest movies and discussing some notoriously bad movies! The content-cocktail of today features the latter. Join me on a wonderful trip as we discuss. Birdemic Shock and Terror.

This post has lots of YouTube Clips so it is best viewed on the site instead of WordPress-Reader.

In 1963 Alfred Hitchcock made the movies “The Birds” a claustrophobic horror movie about killer birds. We haven’t seen a lot of that since.. of course there was a sequel but the scenario of evil avians has otherwise gone relatively unexplored. However in 2010 James Nguyen thought, what Alfred can do so can I! That old movie did not feature aggressive enough birds! What about if we give them acid spit! Let them explode on impact and give them airplane sound effects?! What if this is a movie about ecological changes, with heavy themes on how we mess up nature.. and big forests fires,beach scenes and of course this only should happen in the second half of the movie! The first half.. we’ll just do some random dating and social life stuff for our characters.

This movie is absolutely bonkers and I love it! This movie is SO bad.. that it’s on YouTube in its entirety. Several Times! It has been so for years as well. The oldest version I found stems from 2013. So for the very first time ever you can watch the entire movie on Pinkie’s Paradise if you wish.. at the end of this post! While I will also show you some amazing scenes from the movie! So if you want to be surprised and want to spend 90 minutes in shock and terror, although for the wrong reasons! Go below first and then come back to me! Now that the spoiler warning has been given it is time cringe!

This movie was clearly inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s great film and it happily pays tribute to it. Alan Bagh plays Rod (he has no last name) the main character of this movie. A guy that walks so stiff he might be a terminator. Rod  though  is also the name of the male lead actor Rod Taylor who played Mitch Brenner in The Birds.  The best friend character in Hitchcock flick is played by a woman named Suzanne and in this movie the female friend character is named Susan. The music on the title crawl seems like something from Hitchcock’s time rather than a 2010 movie and of course Tippi Hedren is in both movies. She plays the lead in the 1963 movie and in this movie, archive footage of her is used on a tv while female character Nat is getting naked.  That same Nat is being portrayed by  Whitney Moore, who will voice Navi in something called “The Zelda Project: The Final Battle”. She also played Jeanette Voerman.. the sexiest female voice I ever heard say the word duckling! And she is in this .. piece of trash!

The voice who plays Jeanette and Tippi Hedren on the screen! Miss Tippi Hedren people!

Now this movie basically IS The Birds.. but a modern retelling of it, done by a mad man, who may be a genius! It mimics the classic, pays tribute and even uses some names involved in the original, yet it never escapes the level of college student film and that is at it’s best moments. It is as if you read Moby Dick and we now hear it trough the bird. Instead of Call Me Ishmael we get “WARK!”  Ishmael! Yes wark! All parrots are classic Chocobo. The beauty of this movie though is that we get that sensation as well “Hitchcock through the eyes of a madman”. I wouldn’t call James insane.. but this is hitchcock fan fiction turned into a movie.

The movie starts with some Oboe or Clarinet music. We see a car drive on a road while the credits scroll by. Aside from the actors James Nguyen did just about everything else. Which is always a good sign when you are looking for a bad movie. After just about forever we see the first character shot. Rod is walking on the streets like he just duked his dungarees before he enters a diner. A blond girl says Hi to him.. and at this time (4:40 in) we know that this movie is nothing like we have seen before. The audio quality of this opening scene is WORSE than who Killed Captain Alex. The girl has been dubbed over in post without adding room tone or background noice and she spikes the mic as well as it had to be turned up because we hear an enormous amount of static. Rod talks back to her in the original audio roll though so suddenly the background noise drops.  In a barely audible accents she hands him the menu and tells him she will be right with him.. yet everything seems off in this scene.Everything! Do not believe me?! Well here’s the scene!

Rod sees Natalie in the diner and apparently he knows her from being in highschool together with her and he falls in love seeing how pretty she has become. After some extremely weird dialogue where they don’t exchange names and don’t really seem to remember each other anyway.. they tell each other where they are from..which makes little sense since they were in school together? They talk about what they do now..and apparently Nathalie is a model.. and to be fair she is pretty. She has a job though so they exchange business cards as they leave.  Rod does the poo walk again watching some tv where clearly the sound is coming from another location as it talks about dead birds and sea ice melting killing the polar bears. Eight minutes in the first foreshadowing of birds happen and only 36 minutes left to the first action scene.



This first half really meanders on with Rod and Nathalie going about their daily lives. Rod plays basketball where at random intervals there is street noise and sometimes there is not. Nathalie models which in the same scene sometimes is a montage and sometimes it is not.  They go eat in a restaurant with a scene that is so painfully overlit from one angle and so studio lit on the other that it feels as if it’s a green screen and directions make no sense. Even though at times we see it shot at location.. it feels very fake.. which is quite amazing.  Rod has great character traits such as liking football and working out. Nathalie is deep.. liking movies and going to the club with her friends. Oh and both are great at their jobs! Not long after they stroll the street together and we get to see how the birds in this movie will look like.

I think they are parots.. the green things!

These are the BEST looking birds you will encounter in the movie  the others look worse. Also sorry for the bad screenshot this was my best take out of 8 . There is something very uncapturable about it.  After this though there is 25 more minutes of dating left before this movie gets anywhere. They go see an Inconvenient Truth in the theather and  all decide to go eco friendly. Now so much seems wrong with this. First the movie is set in 2008 or 2009 I think .. so the movie would not run in theaters and why would you take your date to that movie! A friend of Nathalie who runs a company whose logo is just Inner Peace.. printed on a sheet of A4 paper and her shirt gets turned on by the movie and wants to uncage another form of bird. All again with the horrible audio of background noise fading in and out of dialogue.  When Rod talks you might here the road in the background. When Nathalie talks there is nothing, sound spiking all the time.. and then when we finally reach the 45 minute mark after some very tame scenes and weird audio it all gets a lot worse.

After the sex scene between Rod and Nathalie suddenly we get a completely different movie.  With the sound of fighting planes birds begin to kamikaze attack humans. Some are big enough to explodify an entire neighborhood, others are tiny birds who just set the metal of a fuel pump on fire. No gas explodes.. just a part of the metal while that catches fire. The pair fresh from their lovely night together and sleeping in a motel for no real reason it seems, decide to barricade themselves in because suddenly the birds can no longer explode and they just make a sound that sounds like a seagull swallowed a chew-toy. They have gained the power to aimlessly flutter like a helicopter now.. as they menacingly screech on. Magically Rod and Nathalie get dressed while their bed is still shielding explosive birds ..that won’t explode from entering to their front door. Obviously they would not bother with the other windows etc.

The pair wonders why the birds attacked and why they stopped attacking, a metaphor for this elusive and deep plot! Why does it happen?!  Why does it stop? There are no answers in live so there are no answers in this movie. The pair flees from their confines to randomly knock on only one door.. the one door that holds other people! Rod lost his car keys.. for no reason! Did the birds take it? No they weren’t there when all the sex began.. did he just lose them?! He had an expensive looking car.. maybe it got stolen? No he says he just lost the keys?! Oh well!  They meet Becky and Ramsey a couple that also spend the night there.. they have a minivan the group has to reach but the birds can be back any minute.. so they need to take some weapons along.  Some flimsey coathangers will have to do.. and while they race to the minivan and get attacked we get to see the BEST scene of this movie.

Horrible Cinematography, overly lit, poorly mixed audio, bad dialogue, weird sound effects, atrocious cgi.. it is all here in its full glory! This is Birdemic. This is so poorly done it must have been done intentionally so.  Even I can genuinely do  a better job than this and my filmmaking knowledge is very limited. Yet somehow there’s something so sincere in this seen. It’s not the acting .. but it’s as if the actors are trying to sell this stuff.  There are no.. “oh Arceus why did I sign up for this” faces they do give it their all… sure they are more bland than Jeremy Irons Cereal but they do their job without complaint as a result this scene is just mesmerizing. An eternal enigma.. how could this come to be.

It only gets weirder as apparently once inside the van Ramsey and Becky have a pistol and an assault rifle laying in there. With near infinite ammo to boot! Rod is fine with that and takes a gun without complaining. I know they are being attacked by eagles and all but one would wonder why would leave somebody leave a fully loaded assault rifle under their front seat and are they good people?! Well like anything in this movie it seems unlikely. Of course they find some children surviving .. crying for their mommy for about 12 seconds before playing on a PSP and complaining they are hungry. These children are the WORST child actors I have ever seen so that results into something amazing.

I am not sure these even are childeren.. they might be aliens!

What follows is a slew of hilariously bad moments as now this movie is catching steam. Becky dies while taking a poop, a bird flies into her and within two seconds she is dead. Ramsey saves a bunch of people on a English tourbus before he gets covered in some kind of acid these birds can throw up. The camera shows his dead body in three separate positions while already dead and unmoved. There is even a show where we focus on a woman’s corpse.. which is paused footage by the way because obviously they could not hold their breath with their mouth opens and eyes opened for 3 seconds.. which shows the camera man’s feet in the shot. Epic!

They then decide to Picnic at the beach because the  children are hungry…. before talking to a science guy who frowns upon human ecological behavior. The whole world is empty or supposed to be.. hiding in fear of the birds but we can see people walking their dog of flying a kite in the background. This also happens several times when they are on the road.. we see cars pass by regularly as they fight for their lives and birds allegedly killed everything! Top Tier Immersion!

Stores are open hmmm I could go for a dog with let’s risk our lives for one!

The political messages in this movie are also hilarious. Apparently Ramsey was just a good guy.. he was a veteran in Iraq who just wanted peace more so he quite.. that’s why he has the rifle… They get robbed by a Texan man in a gas guzzling pick up truck, who gets his comeuppance a mere minute after his crime and we see a hippie living safely in a forest until it catches fire for no reason at all. This basically feels like an elementary-schooler’s take on nature and pollution. It is so in your face and vexing that it would be a hilarious drinking game. Each time they can descent you or are all super mega eco-friendly.. take a shot.. you’ll be vomiting acid before this movie is over. Each time you see a continuity error take a sip.. you might be hospitalized because there honestly are more shots which have something wrong with them than not. 

Somehow even the hippie looks fake

The best part is the ending… there is non… well they get their happily ever after until part two but for no reason at all the birds just leave. There is no big trigger there is no resolve. They just go to another beach, which is the exact same beach of course, and they see the birds fly away. The movie ends because it wants to end. There is no end of the journey, no lesson learned and no strong new bonds formed. Nathalie and Rod now just stand on a beach after hearing a lot of eco babble with their freshly adopted kids. Who make Rod’s poo walk seem like a cool trait. The Danger Will Robinson robot or Betty White would have been able to play more believable children than these two soulless abominations.

Even Rod’s neck looks fake..and those kids like maniacs

There is not a single good thing in this movie.. but it is tremendously fun to make your own stories. Ramsey and Becky are actually serial killers. The boy was found in a trunk so he was actually a kidnapping victim. The girl is possessed by a satanic force that’s why she sounds so weird. No matter what you imagine it will make this movie better! And that makes this such a hilarious mess to watch! Now if you haven’t had enough or skipped ahead to avoid spoilers I shall present you with the entire movie! You can thank me in the comments! If this post gets enough likes I might review the sequel as well. As for me I will go take a walk in the woods! But with animals becoming more bold while we hid away I better take a coathanger!

Final Score