Quarantine Control #111: Singing Bells of Resolve

It feels insane to discuss the need to continue quarantining in May 2022, but that will be necessary thanks to — of course — COVID-19 cases rising again rapidly in several places. That is, if a lot of people can quarantine given how many businesses have forced employees to return to in-person work to keep the Cogs of Capitalism rolling. But it wouldn’t be a surprise if anyone is finding this out for the first time after reading this lede considering how this appears to be page-10 news on several websites and local news programs. There’s a reason why the Quarantine Control series is still going, should anyone wonder why we still haven’t ended it two years after the pandemic began.

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Geoffrey Barnes

The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve (2017 [original Japanese release]/2021 [western release])
Source: Nintendo Switch
Episodes: 1 game (the sequel in a series)

The Great Ace Attorney: Adventures (which I discussed here) was a solid first effort for an Ace Attorney game that took place in the early 20th century, a more realistic version of the classic Japanese and especially the British settings from Professor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. It faltered in a few areas, like most of case 4 and a couple parts of case 5, and felt inconclusive through how it was clearly the first part of two-part saga. But it was still one of the better Ace Attorney games to release in the last few years, and provided something fresh instead of featuring the same old returning characters. With the sheer number of unresolved plot threads in a game full of setups for later revelations, there was high potential for The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve to be one of the best games in the series. Fortunately, it delivers.

Resolve picks up where Adventures left off, though starts with a nice twist. It would have been peculiar for protagonist Ryunosuke Naruhodo to do the introductory case again after having plenty of experience in the previous game. That task is thus left to “new” character Ryutaro Naruhodo, who the game wastes no time revealing is actually assistant Susato Mikotoba in disguise as Ryunosuke’s male cousin (women were not allowed in Japanese courtrooms at this time), desperate to defend her good friend from murder. The rest follows in the footsteps of the first game by taking place in Great Britain, with figures like Herlock Sholmes, Iris Watson, Tobias Gregson, Gina Lestrade, and prosecutor Barok van Zieks making a reappearance, in another five cases that answer all the questions raised in the previous game.

Resolve has the same number of cases as its predecessor and several other AA games, and ends up being longer than Adventures by the end of it. But it interestingly doesn’t feel that way. The development team paid more importance to the pacing and the main story, to dedicate nearly every hour to telling that tale, even when some cases didn’t feel tied to it at first glance. Prior AA titles have included “filler” cases that focus on having an ideally enjoyable-yet-intriguing murder mystery between the main story. (Though I personally hate the usage of “filler” that implies that these stories are unimportant, since many of those cases are still worth playing.) Whether that’s considered a flaw in previous AA games or not depends on the quality of the cases themselves, but it’s remarkable how every single case in Resolve deals with the story and doesn’t feel forced.

There are points, to be fair, when the game gets overly wordy, the issue with anime-inspired stories that need to explain and flashback to every little plot thread to make sure everyone can follow what’s happening. But it rarely feels like it’s going too long. There was never a time where I questioned why a certain section or entire cases needed to exist in this game. There were points where I missed the option to consult the character assisting Ryunosuke in court like in other recent AA titles, but I wouldn’t say that it detracted from the experience.

It’s a shame that Capcom didn’t give the development team much to work with, the likely result of the first game selling below expectations on 3DS when it originally released in Japan and some development members being moved to other projects. There is evidence all over this game that the company gave them pennies for a budget. Several characters, music tracks, and locations are reused from the previous game, despite prior AA titles having a number of new additions for all three of those categories. It also does away with the anime cutscenes in favor of a handful of in-engine ones. Yet, it’s a testament to the team’s abilities that the game turned out so well, better than its direct predecessor.

Resolve, well, resolves every outstanding question it could have. The story, however, leaves the fates of its characters open enough that they could absolutely make another game. This didn’t seem likely to happen considering the evidence that this particular title barely got made, but now that The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles collection has sold well enough that Capcom felt willing to share the numbers, perhaps they’ll give it another chance. It’s tough to predict what Capcom will do next these days outside the leaked list from 2020, and the recent Ace Attorney 20th anniversary concert didn’t have anything outside the orchestral showcase. But I’m not throwing in the towel on The Great Ace Attorney or Ace Attorney as a whole just yet.

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Joseph Daniels

First thing’s first, as a tribute to legendary film composer Vangelis, who passed away yesterday, here’s my favourite composition of his, from the film Antarctica.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOwuniIgYXM

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I’m going to say up front that there’s going to be spoilers in this week’s column.  I’ve still tried to be somewhat vague this week but I found that I couldn’t talk about any of what I watched without talking about major aspects of the plot, so I decided that if you don’t want to be spoiled, just scroll down, read the titles and watch everything yourself before reading the rest.  There are also spoilers for Beastars season 2, believe it or not, so if you haven’t seen it either, you’ve been warned.  I also bring up a plot point in Raya and the Last Dragon.  I don’t know if I should also say there’s a spoiler for The Lion King, but I guess it’s possible someone might not have seen it, either.

Sometimes I find myself surprised by where a tiger just suddenly turns up.  Sometimes I’m more surprised by where tigers don’t turn up.  During this past week, I’ve watched several movies which drove those two points home.  Starting with a surprising lack of tigers, we have:

Sing (2016)
Source: Currently, only available for rent/purchase
Tiger Content: None

Sing was made by Illumination Entertainment, the company that is most known for those damn Minions, so it’s likely to surprise you that it’s a pretty decent film.  Here’s the thing: when Illumination is good, they’re pretty damn good.  Sing just happens to be one of their hits.

They also made Hop, though, so if you’re not worried about the quality of the upcoming Mario film, maybe you should be.

The reason there’s no tiger content in Sing is not known to me.  In fact, most of the animals in the main cast of Sing are not animals you’d typically find in a movie like this.  Whereas even Zootopia featured animal characters that most people would commonly consider adorable in the lead roles and delegated the less adorable animals to side roles, Sing makes a pig, a porcupine and an elephant three of the main protagonists.  If anything, the cuter the animal (like a koala or a mouse), the worse they are.  Buster Moon, the koala, uses deception and lies in an effort to string everyone along until such time as he might have a hit on his paws.  Granted, he’s only doing this so that he can pay back his creditors honestly, but he definitely does not start things off on the right side of anyone.  Mike, the mouse, I’m assuming is supposed to be the “jerk with a heart of gold”, but he turns out to just be a jerk no matter how you look at it.  The first time we see him, he basically shakes down a passerby for his wallet while performing on the street, and insults him while he does so.  Unfortunately, Mike is voiced by Seth MacFarlane, whose typical style of humour involves being an asshole to everyone.  I’m sorry, but that’s not funny at all.  It’s not funny for Peter and Stewie Griffin to be assholes to everyone around them, and it’s not funny for Mike the mouse to do the same.  MacFarlane’s also the one who sang “We Saw Your Boobs” at the Academy Awards.  I quote,

“Jessica Chastain, we saw your boobs in Lawless

Jodie Foster in The Accused

Hilary Swank in Boys Don’t Cry

Penelope Cruz in Vanilla Sky.

And Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures and Jude

And Hamlet and Titanic

And Iris and Little Children

And The Reader

And whatever you’re shooting right now”

The implication there seems to be that Kate Winslet drops her robes at the drop of a hat, which sounds sexist to me, but I’m a guy so what do I know?  All I know is that I utterly despise Seth MacFarlane and didn’t like his mouse character either and was constantly hoping he would get eaten throughout the film.

I remember the previews were deliberately designed to make Sing look like it was going to revolve around a competition, with its characters competing against one another for a shot at a cash prize.  So it’s no surprise that many reviews I’ve seen compare the movie to a show like American Idol or The Voice.  I feel like those are the wrong comparisons because even though that’s how the plot begins, the actual competition is downplayed after the auditions are over, and instead the day to day lives of the main characters are the focus of the movie.  We see Rosita, the pig, struggling to take care of a very large family alongside a husband who doesn’t seem to be there for her at all.  His falling asleep as soon as he gets home suggests to me that he, too, is burning the candle at both ends in order to make ends meet, and yet his inability to meet Rosita’s emotional needs also initially led me to wonder if she’d be better off divorcing him and going it alone, since it really honestly felt like she already was on her own.  Ash, the porcupine, finds herself in a similar situation with her boyfriend, not feeling very fulfilled in both her emotional relationship with him and her professional relationship as well, since the two are in a band together.  It’s Meena the elephant who stole my heart, though.  Her crippling anxiety almost causes her to flee from the plot entirely, but the only thing that brings her back time and time again is her nearly overwhelming desire to sing.  If anything, I’d say the movie invokes a feel similar to something like Glee instead of American Idol.

Earlier, I mentioned not knowing why there aren’t any adorable animals in the main roles of the movie.  I don’t know why, but I have a theory: the makers of Sing might’ve wanted to drive home that these characters were considered losers by society and thus were never given the chance to make it big with their singing talent.  It’s why a lot of the time, when holding a talent show on television, you don’t always get beautiful people.  They’re the ones who were already given a contract years ago.  Their looks helped sell their talent.  Sometimes you do get beautiful people on these shows, but there’s a reason that some of the early clips of Britain’s Got Talent were of the judges reacting with astonishment when someone who looked like Paul Potts or Susan Boyle started singing opera.  They’re not the kind of people who look like they belong on television.  Potts won in season one of the show, and Boyle was the runner up in season three, and both have seen success in life that they wouldn’t otherwise have enjoyed, simply because their talent was finally allowed to speak for them.

In Sing, characters like Rosita and Meena are finally given a chance and the experience brings them together and improves their lives.  Ash gets out of her relationship, Rosita finally gets some much needed support from her husband, Meena gets over her stage fright, and I’ve yet to mention the gorilla named Johnny, or a second pig who joins the group named Gunter, both of whom also experience an improvement in their lives as well.

I will acknowledge that this does feel like a paint by numbers movie, but that does not mean it’s a bad one.  Sing may not feature any tigers, not that I could see anyway, but I still recommend it.

Belle (2021)
Source: Currently, only available for rent/purchase
Tiger content: Barely…

Sing had no tiger content.  Belle had approximately one second of it.

Belle is the story of a girl named Suzu who lost her mother at a young age, and also lost her will to sing as a result.  Years later, she joins the metaverse and signs up for U, a kind of mobile version of Second Life but with better graphics, and the ability to be someone else allows her to sing once more.  It’s a similar phenomenon as the one that happens when an introverted furry wears a fursuit in public for the first time and finds themselves suddenly able to be someone they can’t otherwise let themselves be.

Suzu starts to find success as Bell, a name which is basically what “Suzu” translates to in English, but fans start calling her Belle, a name which translates to “beauty” in English.  If you can see where this is going, then you’ve figured it out slightly faster than I did.

At one of her concerts, she encounters a user known as Dragon being chased by ruffians.  Instead of fearing him, Suzu wants to know more about him and starts investigating him.  In the course of her investigation, she finds several people who are speculated to be the real world player behind Dragon.  She also interviews many users who encountered him, including one who uses a tiger as his avatar.

This reminds me, the ways in which the Internet is represented in Belle reflect reality in a way that very few pieces of media bother or even attempt to show.  I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the Japanese aren’t afraid to show the Internet properly and name drop actual web sites and services instead of what TV Tropes calls a “bland-name product”.  Retsuko has an Instagram account in Aggretsuko, but no one on the American show Castle seemed to want to say the word “Facebook” in one memorable scene, even though they made a joke about Richard Castle’s mom getting the name wrong (she called it “MyFace” and his daughter stopped him from correcting her, claiming from personal experience that it would be futile to try to get her to understand).

Eventually, Suzu finds his castle, which looks damn near identical to the Beast’s castle in Disney’s animated Beauty & the Beast.  In fact, in Japanese, the title of the film is “The Dragon and the Freckled Princess”, which invokes the beauty and the beast of the story, but inverts their order in the title.  Perhaps this is intended to be on purpose, for Belle kind of inverts the whole thing by making the story less of a love story between Suzu and Dragon, and more a mystery about who Dragon might be and why, for someone who is very nearly undefeated in U, he still sports a ton of scars.  Suzu still attempts to gain Dragon’s trust, like Belle did in the Disney film, and the scene where she drops her U avatar and sings as herself is very much the emotional climax of the movie, if you don’t count Suzu rescuing Dragon from a rough home life.  I should warn you if you want to watch this movie, if you’re triggered by child abuse, you’re going to have a tough time getting through a couple of the scenes.

This is probably one of the best films of 2021, in my opinion, and I really wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did more to honour foreign films, because it deserved at least one Oscar nod at this year’s ceremony.  Disney’s animated Beauty & the Beast somehow got a nomination for Best Picture, and that was way back when there were only five nominees in the category per year.  The fact that Belle, being a Japanese animated film, had very little chance of getting even a Best Animated Feature nomination, is a failing of the Academy, in my opinion.

Sing 2 (2021)
Source: Currently, only available for rent/purchase
Tiger content: Ryan

I think the best thing Sing 2 did for the franchise was not bring Seth MacFarlane back.  Yeah, Mike probably got eaten.  Instead, the movie introduces many new characters, and I’m not sure how I feel about most of them being of species that the first movie seemed to deliberately avoid using.  For example, Porsha Crystal is a wolf and the daughter of main antagonist Jimmy Crystal.  She wants to perform with the troupe but is perhaps a bit too full of herself to realize that her talent is not in acting in a main role, but as support instead.  She is a great singer and her dancing pushes a lot of my buttons.  Clay Calloway is a lion who is considered quite a big deal in the world of rock music, but who became a recluse when his wife died, losing his will to sing much like Suzu does in Belle because of the loss of her mother.  There’s also Nooshy, a Canada lynx who helps teach Johnny the choreography he needs in order to perform his role in an elaborate science fiction rock opera opposite a tiger named Ryan.

In fact, I’d like to talk about Nooshy for a bit, and not just because lynxes are my favourite.  Nooshy is introduced while dancing to the Dillon Francis Remix of “I Like It” by Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin – and I find it interesting that the song she dances to takes samples from “I Like It Like That” by Pete Rodriguez, the song used in a very, very furry dancing commercial for a soft drink (someone tell that bear he looks unhealthy and needs to eat a few sandwiches).  Years later, the song has been sampled by Cardi B and the new song she wrote with the sample has been used in a furry singing and dancing movie.

But I digress.  Johnny finds Nooshy performing on the street and we watch as she interacts with her audience and thanks everyone who tosses money into her hat.  She sounds sincere when doing so, and she even shows kindness to a kid who has nothing to offer her except a piece of candy.  Also, yes, she accepts his candy.  It really feels like Nooshy is supposed to be the writers apologizing for including Mike in the first film, and makes me wonder how much control they had when writing him, or if Seth MacFarlane improvised a lot of his lines.  Anyway, Nooshy figures out that Johnny is being pressured to run when he barely knows how to crawl, so to speak, and is able to teach him how to dance far better than the choreographer he was assigned to.  There is a saying.  Those who can do something will do it, and those who can’t do something will teach it.  While it’s not always true, it often is, and in this case it definitely is, and a chance encounter on the street leads to Johnny learning from a true master of the field instead of someone who merely claims to be one.

While watching Sing 2, I felt as if I’d seen Nooshy before, and that’s when I realized.  Nooshy would be very much at home on Twitch.  She’s basically the kind of streamer I enjoy tossing a few bits at every time they go live.  Even though she knows she’s the best and carries herself with that kind of attitude in several scenes, she’s down to earth and incredibly appreciative of her audience.  She doesn’t seem to let it go to her head.  It feels like she’d be blown away every time I randomly send her a couple hundred bits, and would be moved to speechlessness whenever a hype train gets started.

Nooshy is one of several additions to the cast of Sing 2 which help to enhance the story and which makes it as perfect as it could possibly be.  I liked that Meena found someone she liked romantically and had to work through her anxieties in order to approach the elephant ice cream vendor she found herself crushing on.

Hey, wait a minute.  An elephant.  Who is an ice cream vendor?  Now where have I heard that before?

I liked Sing, but Sing 2 is damn near perfection, with emotional beats that blow the first film out of the water.  One of my favourite moments in the film is when Ash starts singing one of Clay Calloway’s songs and it suddenly hits me that it’s a song that always made me feel things when I listened to it back in 2000 and 2001, and still does, twenty years later.  In fact, some of the most emotional scenes all involve Clay Calloway in some form or another.  Like in the rock opera’s finale, when Clay is supposed to come on stage for the first time in decades and he almost lets his fear get the better of him, but Ash comes out on stage ahead of him and starts playing another song of his and then we see the spirit of his dead wife standing beside him, supporting him, and I think I’m three for three for crying over lion father figures in furry media, but at least this one survives to the end.  After both Mufasa’s and Ibuki’s murders, I get a little paranoid whenever I see a lion take on a fatherly role.

Also, kudos to the animators for making Rosita look absolutely sexy dressed up as the Cheshire Cat in the opening performance of the film.  Such a thing would normally be hard to top, but I guess they knew their main audience would be furries, because they didn’t stop with Rosita.  Porsha performing in three dimensions reminded me quite easily of my crush on Sisu in Raya and the Last Dragon.  I think it’s not just wings I’m into, it’s watching someone flying, wings or no.  Porsha brings the same joy to her dancing that Sisu did when she regained her ability to fly.  It makes me wish that someone would adapt Spider Robinson’s Stardance trilogy into film, or at least come up with an actual star dance like his wife had been attempting before she passed away.  It had been Jeanne Robinson’s goal to become the first zero gravity dancer, and sadly, she was unable to fulfill that dream.

At the end of Sing 2, I found myself wishing there was already a third film, and with how well the series has done so far, I’m hoping a third film is inevitable.  It’s not done as well as Minions or Despicable Me, but I’m fairly certain that it’s done well enough that they should decide to green light another.  I also kind of hope they don’t make Sing 3, because the second film wraps things up pretty nicely.

…maybe I’d enjoy watching a spin-off starring Nooshy.  Just saying.

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I was planning on talking about some anime with tigers in it this week.  Then I found some tigers in movies and spent longer than I thought I would talking about them.  I’m well over three thousand words now, and I haven’t even gotten to the anime on my schedule.  I think instead, I’ll start talking about the shows next week.  I’ve already fulfilled my weekly quota of tiger content, and then some.

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If you’re reading this, you’re likely still following COVID-related health protocols despite them largely being abandoned across countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. Still, try to be careful, despite how difficult that will be.