Quarantine Control #102: Turning Into Wild Tigers for Days
The news has been dominated by the horror of Russia’s illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that appears to be worsening by the day despite the supposedly positive-leaning negotiations. But if the current news isn’t enough to depress you, it’s worth noting that the COVID-19 pandemic is hardly over. It hasn’t been easy to see the news that a portion of China had to go into lockdown again for the biggest number of cases since 2020, and even countries that handled the pandemic well compared to others like South Korea are dealing with high case numbers. Don’t be surprised if there’s a new outbreak to discuss worldwide soon, assuming that breaks through the other terribleness in the headlines.
Geoffrey Barnes
Turning Red (2022)
Source: Disney Plus
Episodes: 1 movie
It was seemingly easy to figure out the general plotline for Turning Red, Pixar’s newest film, from the series of previews released in the lead-up to the movie’s launch on Disney Plus. Pixar has released a series of movies that reference the histories of certain nationalities and communities, combined with good and entertaining lessons that either subtly or overtly reference the ways in which certain people lived their lives. It’s the newest in a series that includes Coco, Soul, and Luca, which themselves referenced Mexican, African-American, and Italian cultures, respectively. Turning Red does this for Chinese culture, more specifically Chinese-Canadian culture from 20 years ago.
The movie takes place through the lens of Meilin “Mei” Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl beginning her teenage life in spring 2002. It’s a unique concept for a Pixar and Disney animated film that makes for a period piece full of slang and technology from the era, combined with doing its best to capture the experience of living in Toronto during the time. It’s partially director Domee Shi writing what she knows, but quite a bit more. Mei does her best to live up to her parents’, especially her mother Ming Lee’s (Sandra Oh), strict expectations through having high grades and being a diligent woman-to-be outside her main school activities. But her intended course through life is altered when she starts going through bodily changes: She discovers that she’s turned into a gigantic red panda after awaking one morning. From there, she’ll have to figure out how to live with it until it can be excised from her.
I had an idea of how the plot would progress throughout the remainder of the film following Mei’s transformation, which would have been fine. There have been several Disney and Pixar films that have followed familiar plot beats that have nonetheless been entertaining, with this one’s clichés being polished over with the unique setting and characters for an animated film. It also wasn’t as if the movie was aimed directly towards straight adult males like me. Fortunately, my predictions were wrong, with several characters’ hidden depths coming into full bloom by the film’s end, including several that weren’t prominently featured in trailers and who I figured would be largely-forgotten background characters by the end.
The movie is, to little surprise outside prejudiced sillies, perfectly watchable and relatable for anyone who didn’t grow up female, Asian-Canadian, or in Toronto. I appreciated the number of references and jokes that will only be entirely understood by adults and high school-aged girls, yet it doesn’t veer so far into them as to make normal people who aren’t the target audience uncomfortable, nor does it go too far for younger audiences. Young people can tolerate and understand more than several moral guardians like to give them credit for.
Similarly, I enjoyed how Shi’s love of anime and manga was on clear display throughout the film, perhaps as a result of watching what aired on Canadian TV as she aged. The color palette during nighttime is a blatant reference to the 1990s Sailor Moon anime, while assorted animated character reactions wouldn’t look out of place in multiple anime or manga.
It’s clear that I enjoyed the film, but I wouldn’t say it’s entirely unpredictable. I may not have been able to predict what would have happened with my first guess, which is cool, but the movie isn’t a big jump from prior films and nonetheless concludes with a very Disney ending. To the Pixar team’s credit, this is probably the furthest they could have gone while Disney was overlooking them with a careful eye. It’s a miracle they even got the cruder humor and references in.
It’s a shame this had to be the third Pixar movie in a row to skip theaters and debut right on streaming, but hopefully it does well enough for them and Shi. Disney Plus is, after all, where Disney’s last animated film, Encanto, achieved popularity. It would be nice to see the company branch out even further for future films, one of which will ideally be from Shi herself, as she’s proven herself a capable director.
Joseph Daniels
Happy green day, everyone! …I don’t really know what to say this week except that. Happy green day.
Just when you think someone’s retired from music, they return and it’s glorious. Last year, ABBA came back after a four decade hiatus, and this year, Darren Hayes is making music again, although his hiatus was for a much shorter period of time. A new single was released less than 24 hours ago, and is the second new song to come from him this year. There’s also a new tour announced, so I suspect a new album might be in the works. Nothing’s been mentioned yet, but most people don’t just write two songs and walk away again. Fingers crossed!
Orenchi no Furo Jijo (2014)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 13
Tatsumi rescues a man he found near a river, stranded and dying, but this man turns out to be a merman and the only place he can be taken care of is in the bathtub. Thus begins the comedic hijinks of the “Merman in My Tub”, as it’s called in English. The series quickly introduces new characters – and I mean very quickly, since the episodes are just 4 minutes long, so watching the entire series only takes about an hour or so – and by the end, Tatsumi has an entire harem of handsome boys who regularly hangs out with him. Oh, and his little sister, who has a complex. The episode where Kasumi practically throws herself at her older brother is a bit uncomfortable to watch and is the low point in the entire series, but there are twelve other good episodes to look at.
I used this show to distract me from things when my laptop died and I was worried that I’d lost all my work for the blog (I have since recovered my work), when I felt like I couldn’t focus on one thing for more than a moment or two. Its really short episodes meant that I could come back to it over the course of a few hours and feel just a little bit better afterwards.
Nyanko Days (2017)
Source: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 12
I never knew how short anime episodes could get until I subscribed to Crunchyroll and had my eyes opened to all the possibilities of the medium. Nyanko Days is based on a four-panel manga, and so the anime adaptation runs for two minutes per episode, with a full quarter of that run time devoted to the ending theme. With only 12 episodes produced, this series can be watched in less than a half an hour. You’d think that even if they were to make 100 episodes of a two minute show, it would still require less work than if they were to make 12 to 13 full length episodes of something. 12 episodes of a two minute show is just lazy, if you ask me. Chi’s Sweet Home, for example, is 104 episodes long, running about two to three minutes per episode and still totals less run time than a show like Darwin’s Game.
Nyanko Days is about a couple cat owners who meet and become friends, but the main focus of many of the episodes are the cats themselves. At least, the anime claims they’re cats, but unlike Chi’s Sweet Home, these cats are actually girls with cat features that act like cats and are treated like cats but communicate like humans. Honestly, what is it with ordinary animals being uplifted to mostly human status in anime? Kemono Friends features animals that became mostly human thanks to extraterrestrial influence, Uma Musume Pretty Derby features (mostly) male horses that became mostly human and female after dying and being reincarnated like an isekai anime, and here’s Nyanko Days, which feature cat-sized mostly human cats for no actual reason. The cats aren’t sexualized, so if you’re getting bad Cats flashbacks just now, fear not, this is nothing like it.
Like the above anime, this is a good show to watch while doing something else. Cooking comes to mind. I watched an episode or two while waiting for a bowl of ramen to be ready, watched an episode while waiting for the kettle to boil, and so on. There are shows you sit down and watch, maybe with a meal or something to drink, maybe with friends, and there are shows that are good filler fodder. Nyanko Days is basically filler fodder.
Meanwhile, over on Disney+, they just released a tiger documentary, and I noticed this pretty much right after I finished writing last week’s column.
Russia’s Wild Tiger (2022)
Source: Disney+
Tiger content: Main cast. I mean, it’s right there in the title
The timing for this National Geographic documentary is both good and very unfortunate. On the one paw, it is the Year of the Tiger, so what better time to release something like this? On the other paw, the setting is Russia, currently the world’s main villain thanks to Vladimir Putin’s highly opportunistic war with the independent nation of Ukraine, and especially because of all the war crimes he’s having his soldiers do to the Ukrainian people.
But that said, none of the tigers living within the human-defined borders of the country voted for Putin, so I can’t really fault them for where they happen to live. The documentary follows several tigers while having the unique narrative device of being told from a first person – first tiger? – perspective. The narrator of the documentary takes on the role of one of the tigers, but this tiger mostly takes a back seat as he narrates the lives of those around him. One of his mates, their son and daughter, even a tigress unfamiliar to him who gets a little too close to humans, all of these tigers get the spotlight instead of the documentary’s narrator. In fact, it’s the human aspect of the documentary that takes over the focus for most of the second half, which can be a little disappointing if you’re watching it for the tigers.
Another aspect of the documentary that I find a little jarring are the sudden scene breaks which indicate that this is meant for commercial television. It just suddenly cuts to black for a few seconds, sometimes where you’d expect the scene to continue for a little bit longer. Between these breaks and the sudden focus on the humans trying to locate a dog-eating tiger in the second half, the documentary’s a little disappointing but no less beautiful to watch. It’s also very rare to search for the word “tiger” on something like Disney+ or Netflix and actually find a tiger documentary. It’s amazing how many shows have Tiger in the title but which doesn’t actually feature any tigers.
But that said, there are still plenty of tigers to discover, as the coming weeks will show, including a series on Netflix which is getting a second season tomorrow…
When one country suffers from a spike in COVID cases, others will tend to follow. The newest outbreak of cases will sadly likely be within the backyards of everyone who’s reading this soon, especially given how several territories and counties have abandoned their protocols and caved to pressure from people and organizations begging for a return to pre-pandemic normalcy. This doesn’t mean that people should abandon their own health protocols, like mask-wearing and getting vaccinated, both of which have proven to be effective.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
