Watched a few anime movies from 2010 recently:
The Disappearance of Haruhi SuzumiyaIt's good,
really good. One of the best works of anime I've seen in...ages. Well-written, well-animated, well-acted, and the characters are the best they've ever been. This is coming from someone who enjoyed the first season of the TV show, I didn't think it was amazing and I'm certainly not obsessed with it, but I did enjoy it. The movie is far and away better. In every way.
Trigun: Badlands RumbleOn the one hand, I'm overjoyed that there's an actual new Trigun animation out there. On the other, I can't help but a feel a bit disappointed by the results. There's a reason for this and the biggest reason is that it feels like a fanservice movie [as in made specifically for fans of Trigun], but somehow misses out on a lot of the things that it could have added.
spoiler (click to show/hide)
Vash never uses or mentions his arm-gun [or his super-laser arm-gun], there's none of the classic music except for one instance at the climax, nothing is said of Vash's ability to survive numerous injuries, his ability to communicate with the Plants totally absent, and there's no mention of Knives or Legator or Vash's backstory.
But, at the same time, the story is clearly designed for Trigun fans because it brings back Wolfwood and retreads ideas from the series [such as Vash's love-and-peace philosophy and some of the problems it creates]. It feels like they took episode 6 of the series and stretched it out to feature length. The movie doesn't develop any of the old characters further than the series did and the new characters are predictable in their roles. Having said that, the movie is still pretty good and really fun to watch. It's a Trigun
movie, for God's sake! Looking past the mild disappointment at some aspects, there's really no reason not to watch this.
Loups=GarousBasically this is Ghost in the Shell Kids [advanced technology, intrigue, political corruption, hacking, action, but with kids], which kind of makes since as it was directed by one of the screenwriters on GITS: SAC. It's a bit animu, but tells an interesting story in an intelligent way for the most part. Animation is decent, but not really exceptional barring a couple of scattered action scenes. The biggest downside is that the villain of the whole thing is so easily spotted from within the first ten minutes. Pretty good, not great.