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Just watched two anime movies, lood: The Last Vampire and the original Appleseed.

Blood is pretty cool, with great artwork and slick animation, very stylish and dark, but feels like an experiment or tech demo rather than a movie, showcasing Production I.G.'s skill at animation and action rather than narrative, which in itself is pretty simple. It's worth a watch but it's not as good as I hoped.

Appleseed is pure 80s cyberpunk anime, and it's a lot of fun. From Masamune Shirow too, so you can expect a bit too much talking at times, but fortunately not as bad as some of the movies based on his works (Ghost in the Shell 2 for instance). It has that retro charm that's fun, colourful, and full of cheese. Also I really have no idea what Bully is, robot bunny man? I dunno, watch it and you'll know what I mean.

Last night I watched another anime movie, this time is was a mid 90s one called Land Lock, and I have to admit that I bought it because I liked the cover art by Masamune Shirow, who also seemed to be the character designer.

Now the animation and art are mostly fine, always consistent but it really doesn't seem like movie quality, plus there are some really poor decisions in special effects, at a few points flickering red and blue light fills the majority of the screen, so anyone with epilepsy should avoid, and it gave my brother a headache and me eye strain. Other than that there are a few times where things just seem to cut to other scenes without really getting to that scene.

The story is confusing and weird, and not the good sort of confusing or weird, the bad sort, The Spirit sort. Too much explaining, not enough making any sense of what they're explaining either. Also almost all of the characters seem to be complete idiots, with no really interesting things to say. Except the badguy, who for half of the movie seems to really get that everyone's an idiot, and is just toying with that. It turns out that the confusing plot is too much for him and he joins the idiocy. There's one particular character, I can't remember any of the names, who just seems to join the adventure for no reason, he's the scientist with swirly glasses and bad teeth, just looks really out of place, though has a moment of awesome where he points out the absurdity of the story.

The voice acting is really bad too, none of the lines are delivered with any real emotion, and it was a lot of fun to parody during the movie. The scientist is probably the worst of all the characters, mainly because his voice and the acting itself just don't gel with the character design at all, it's like having a sedate Toby McGuire voicing Dr Robotnik.

The music was forgettable. I seriously don't remember any of it.

Yeah, crap fest with some pretty pictures.