This weekend saw the final unveiling of the the See No Evil project in Bristol; Europe’s largest street art exhibition. It is, to say the very least, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement. Graffiti artists not just from Bristol but around the globe descended on Nelson Street, transforming the whole area from drab, urban decay into what feels like a new – almost virtual – space. It is truly something that needs to be experienced, but hopefully some of the photos I grabbed (along with the many on the official Flickr page) will give you some idea of its scale and raw beauty.

My own interest in graffiti art dates back to my first introduction to hip-hop culture in the mid 1980s, when the first images of New York subway art started to make their way over the pond. Apart from their raw visceral energy, both art-forms struck me as intensely science-fictional. Both are about the appropriation of technology to create something new – hip-hop taking samplers and turntables to generate new sounds they weren’t designed to make, and graf taking car repair paint and the very architecture of cities to create new visual spaces and canvases. They are, perhaps, the most literal expression of William Gibson’s famous cyberpunk-defining phrase ‘the street finds it own use for things’.

Even before cyberpunk, the city has long been one of the defining settings of science fiction for those that dare to look beyond the standard tropes of spaceships and alien worlds. Science fiction frequently views the city as a machine, with those of us that live within it variably as components, parasites or even unwilling prisoners. Graffiti becomes one of the most visceral, immediate statements of rebellion for us urban inmates; a bold, organic riot of colour against our drab, sterile prison.

The science fictional aspect of See No Evil becomes even more heightened when you consider the history of Nelson Street. It is yet another example, amongst the hundreds that dot the urban landscape of Britain, of 1950/60s post war planning and architecture that aimed to herald a new, futuristic, technology-driven utopia. But of course the future’s greatest strength is that it can never be predicted and tamed, let alone designed or planned. The town planners and architects failed, and as the decades passed they watched their dreams descend into decay, shunned by popular taste and left to become associated with poverty, depravation and failure. And to add the ultimate insult to their injuries, they saw their utopian designs become the defining science fiction image of a dystopian future.

“The group of architects who put (the plan) forward combined super highways with dreaming notions of pedestrian decks to create squares of Venetian splendour where Bristolians would gather in their thousands on election nights six metres above the smoothly uninterrupted flow of traffic.

“The major central area civic contribution of the sixties was the complex of pedestrian decks that survive in truncated form above the street at Lewins Mead and beyond and which virtually nobody uses. This was to be the essential link between the Centre – or even Forum’s great piazza above it – and the Broadmead shopping centre and beyond.”

The Fight for Bristol (ed. by Gordon Priest and Pamela Cobb; Redcliffe Press, 1980)

It’s this idea that was the driving force behind the story that leads my collection Paintwork; the use of graffiti to reclaim the space in which we live from corporate control. The technology that is subverted in Paintwork may be far more exotic – augmented reality, nanotechnology and QR Codes – but walking around Nelson Street made me feel that somehow I had actually managed to catch a little taste of Bristol’s zeitgeist with that story. That part of town usually feels dead and deserted, but on Saturday it was rammed with bodies – Bristol residents that had come out to be enthralled and entertained; to reclaim this urban decay for their own expression and enjoyment. And the fact that this was an officially organised event, done with the guidance and support of the same city that once made the mistake of trying to guess and plan the future is not only exciting in itself, but perhaps shows us a fleeting glimpse of a real, achievable urban utopia.

Paintwork is out now – you can get Kindle versions from Amazon US and Amazon UK, and versions for all other popular e-readers (including iPad and Nook) at Smashwords.

Print versions are now available from Createspace or Amazon US and Amazon UK.

Well, I’m back. I survived Havana – a bat-shit crazy but fantastic and beautiful city, both run-down and elgant at the same time, and where everyone that walks the street is a hustler. Sure, communism and food rationing has made it hard to find a decent meal, but who cares when the rum and cigars are so cheap. Plus the Museo de la Revolución and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes make it worth the cost of the flight alone. Just don’t try bringing back a load of that cheap rum through Madrid airport security. Long, painful story. Of course, as always, I took a bunch of photos, which you can check out on the Flickr sideshow below – and are certainly worth a look if you have any passing interest in Che Guevara, crumbling but awe inspiring architecture, mojitos and lots (I mean LOTS) of gorgeous 1950s American muscle cars.

• La Habana June 2009 – photos

So due to my adventures things have been pretty quiet on the site – and sadly I’ve come back to a pretty chaotic life here in the UK. Work is hectic, social life is busy, domestic life seems to be drowning in admin jobs and on top of all that I’ve been trying to get some new top-secret projects off the ground. As a result the next week or so might not see much activity either, but stay tuned: normal service will be resumed before you know it. Coming up: reviews of Miyazaki’s Ponyo, Mariko Koike’s novel The Cat in the Coffin and Volume 5 of Tezuka’s Black Jack. Plus I’ll finally get round to looking properly at Eden of the East and Shangri-La. Oh, and I think all the Cuban sun has given me an urge to finish checking out Michiko to Hatchin….

Don’t touch that dial….

Some of you might remember my concern back in June when I first reported on Production IG’s planned visual update to Oshii’s 1995 classic Ghost in the Shell. Well, the Blu-ray of GiTS 2.0 (not to be confused with GiTS 2: Innocence, which will also be referred to a lot in this piece) hit Japanese stores a few weeks ago, and via sources that I’m not at liberty to identify I have managed to get my hands on a preview copy – months before the (still yet to be confirmed) UK release. So it was that I found myself, on the first morning of 2009, sitting down to watch one of my favourite movies of all time again, but instead of being filled with the usual satisfying feeling of anticipation, I was gripped with something nearer to dread.

The ‘problem’ – if it is really one at all – is the issue of progress. In the nine years between GiTS and GiTS 2: Innocence technology changed. In this time the tech teams at Production IG focused on becoming the masters at seamlessly merging CGI imagery with conventional hand drawn animation, with GiTS 2 being heralded as the pinnacle of this across the industry. And with these new technological changes came aesthetic ones; Oshii switched palettes from green and blue tones to more deep, orange ones, and the computer interfaces and displays that are such an important part of the GiTS environment became more sophisticated and refined as the software used to create them got cheaper, quicker and maturer. And while these displays had been the only thing to be rendered by computer in the first movie, the sequel employed CGI in nearly every scene.

Suddenly, you could run the two movies and – arguably – something didn’t look quite right. At times they looked like different worlds. The computer displays in GiTS started to look outmoded by today’s standards, let alone compared to the future they were meant to predict. Some of the cityscapes looked uninspiring – perhaps – in comparison to the epic computer rendered vistas of GiTS 2. Production IG had hit the same problem Lucas had hit with the Star Wars prequels – when you’re making heavy SFX based science fiction, your work is always going to look dated. Luckily then, that you can now go back and change it…

Before we talk about this anymore, lets have a look at the evidence. By far the biggest section of the film to have been altered is the well known, and often mimicked, opening sequence, with Major Kusanagi leaping off a skyscraper to assassinate a foreign diplomat. I’ve grabbed some images from both versions of the film for comparison.

The first thing you notice is the palette switch, as well as how the old computer maps that open the film have been completely re-designed and rendered.

Then it hits you, every external shot in the sequence – including the Major herself – have been recreated in CGI.

And this is where I first started to have problems with GiTS 2.0. CGI Kusanagi doesn’t look quite right. Well, she looks fine on her own, but inter-cut with the other characters – who are still hand drawn from the orignial – she looks jarring. Almost, at times, like you’re watching two different films.

From here you’re into the ‘cyborg birth’ opening sequence, which has also been completely redone, with much more sophisticated CGI and the same green-to-orange palette change, the again bring it more into line with the companion sequence in GiTS 2.

Later on in the film there’s also some CGI rendered helicopters and vehicles, although luckily the climactic spider tank battle sequence has survived untouched. There’s also a few minor dialogue changes, as well as a female voice actor for the Puppet Master, which makes a bit more visual sense and the plot a little easier to follow. But otherwise the rest of the movie has remained largely untouched.

Sitting writing this after watching GiTS 2.0 for the first time only a few hours ago, I’m still a little undecided as to how I feel about it. One major issue i have is that I always loved the original’s aesthetic, far more than I did it’s sequel’s. The video game style graphics, the green-blue palette…the whole film captured the 80′s cyberpunk vibe of Shirow’s original manga (all be it with a far darker, more serious tone) as well as developing on the themes and aesthetics of works like Bladerunner and Neuromancer that came before it. Don’t get me wrong, I like GiTS 2: Innocence, and I found the new palette that Oshii had brought over from Avalon appealing, but it was a different film to the original, a different world. And I was happy with that – time had passed in the real world, and I was happy to just accept it had passed in the GiTS world too. Things change, especially technology. Characters had clearly aged, so why couldn’t everything else had moved on as well?

Also the beauty of the original film for me was that it didn’t actually rely too much on futuristic design and visual effects to create it’s haunting atmosphere. The best science fiction works because it manipulates the familiar and believable, and what truly makes GiTS a masterpiece is the noir atmosphere, Oshii’s pacing, his slow pans, and the beautifully drawn Tokyo Hong Kong street scenes.

In fact watching it after returning from Tokyo, it’s remarkable how un-futuristic the architecture is in GiTS, with the sequel’s towering CGI mega-scrapers and smoggy vistas starting to look a little Fifth Element in comparison. It’s these things that give the original it’s feeling of edgy, ‘just around the corner’ realism, and if it’s any consolation, all of that is still here in 2.0.

Personally there are still a lot of unanswered questions for me. Why was this made? Is it just another IG tech demo? How much as Oshii actually involved? Wasn’t he busy making Sky Crawlers at the time, and is this really just a marketing exercise for that movie – it having been shown at the same time at some Japanese theaters?

Not that there’s nothing at all to recommend this release. As previously mentioned, the beautiful pacing and gentle street scenes are all still intact, and this is the best they’ve ever been seen. It’s a great transfer, and has clearly been cleaned up in places in the process, and it’s the better for it. Kenji Kawai‘s legendary score has also been given an audibly noticeable remaster, and sounds stunning all over again. I was only given the main feature, but the Japanese collectors release featured not only some interesting looking extras but also a copy of the original – although it’s unsure whether that has been given the same gorgeous visual polish in the transition to Blu-ray. Only time will tell what is included on any western releases.

Only one thing is certain – if you’re a GiTS fan then you can’t kid yourself – you’re going to want to see this. Whether you end up loving it, hating it, or – like me – wondering whether it was really necessary is something still to be determined.

ありがとうございます to The Laughing Man for securing me this review copy. The net is vast and infinite…

The links below will take you through to FB albums that you can view even if you’re not a member – but if you are, why not send me friends request while you’re over there? Just mention “blog” in the message and I’ll know you’re not a sexual predator or something.

• Shinjuku – First day
• Manga shopping in Shinjuku
• Shinjuku Arcades
• Shinjuku Day 2
• Shinjuku at night
• Tokyo Imperial Palace and gardens
• Akihabara – Electric Town 1
• Akihabara – Electric Town 2
• Mandarake Akihabara – the greatest shop in the world
• Retro Nintendo stuff
• Shinjuku JR at rush hour
• Shinjuku Gyoen

I’m always surprised when people moan that no-one talks on the tube in London – I mean, exactly what the fuck are we meant to say? It’s pretty much the same on the Tokyo JR lines – no-ones chatting, too engrossed in their manga, their text messages, their DS and PSP games, the flat screens showing beauty product ads and video games trailers or studying their reflected hair in the dark windows. Pulling into stations is always announced by the usual bombardment of neon signs, followed by the sight of commuters waiting in perfect, orderly queues. Something not so familiar if you hail from London, then. Some might say it looks a bit robotic and regimented, but that’s hardly two words I’d use to describe Tokyo residents. Not fucking rude are three that spring to mind.

Where do I start?

Again, everything you’ve most probably heard is quite possibly true. It’s a living, breathing Bladerunner set, part futuristic shopping district, part tacky tourist attraction, where funky dressed hipsters and short skirted schoolgirls mix with suited Hiro Nakamura otaku clones and cosplaying flyer girls. The main strip, Chuo Dori, feels like an endless strip of arcades, manga shops, PC component markets and porno stores – probably because it is. DVD players like you’ve never seen before nestle next to retro games consoles from the early 80s. Jumble sale like shops filled with cheap Chinese Gundam knock offs and priceless Star Wars rarities are stacked on top of sushi bars and maid cafes. It’s almost too much. I shot over 200 photos there alone today, and I’m still processing what I saw. And it’s going to take me a while, trust me. In time I’ll post up my thoughts here in chunks, some after I get home, but for now here’s a very small selection of images to whet your appetite.

Just like all the stories you hear, manga is everywhere in Japan. There’s racks of it in every supermarket and convenience store you pass, and at lunch times gangs of salary-men and students gather around to silently read it.

Today we stumbled across Comic and DVD Forrest in Shinjuku, a specialist store with so much stock that, to be frank, it’s a bit of a mindfuck. Didn’t actually buy anything this time – they had a couple of Denno Coil art books, but not the exact one I’m looking for – but I did manage to grab a few shots before the super-polite staff busted me….

So we’re here. Finally.

Actually, we arrived about 48 hours ago, after what seemed like a week of travelling. Hellish. But, of course, with hindsight completely worth it. Shinjuku is everything all the cliches say it is – Akira, Bladerunner and Neuromancer all rolled into one, but somehow weirder for not actually feeling that futuristic. Or at least, it’s a kind of retro futuristic, a reminder of the that 80′s cyberpunk vision that it inspired but never quite happened anywhere else. Like all sci-fi, they got some things wrong. Example? Well, it seems damn near impossible to find any public Wi-Fi round here. But why would you need it when everyone’s had 3G capable phones for over ten years?

Anyway, there’s another cliche about pictures and word counts…

It was with some slight trepidation that I sat down to watch Appleseed Ex Machina this weekend; the completely CGI anime is a sequel to the 2004 Appleseed, with both being based on Masamune Shirow‘s classic 1985 manga. Being a fan of the original printed version (and Shirow’s work in general), I found little in the first film beyond it’s impressive visuals to get me excited, sadly.

For those of you with no prior experience, the background to the Appleseed series is kind of interesting. Set some point in the 22nd century, after a non-nuclear war has destroyed 90% of world civilisation, it tells the story of the rise of Olympus, a high-tech floating city-state. Apparently utopian at first glance, the city is populated by a mixture of baseline humans, cyborgs and ‘bioroids’; genetically engineered humans designed with altered emotions to bring peace and stability to the city. For both the reader of the manga and the viewer of these two films, our point of view into this world is through the two main protagonists and lovers; female human Deunan Knute and the once human but now fully cyborg Briareos Hecatonchires. Both veterans of the war, they find themselves trying to adjust to life in Olympus, whilst also being recruited into ESWAT, a high-tech special weapons police unit detailed with keeping the peace in the so-called Utopian city. In the original Shirow uses this environment to explore the moral, political and social issues raised by this very artificial utopia, whilst also showcasing the beautifully visualised technology, gadgets, weapons and mecha that he is famed for. Unfortunately, while the movies deal with the latter in exhilarating style, it’s with the former thematic issues where they start to disappoint.

But let’s look at the positives first. Visually the film rarely fails to impress; the city of Olympus, its inhabitants and their technology and weapons are all rendered in a colourful, bold, energetic style. Of special note are the Landmate Mechas; the distinctive powered fighting suits that the ESWAT members ride into combat, which look like they’ve stepped off the page of the manga, matching Shirow’s designs perfectly and moving in subtly realistic ways. Gone is the slightly cell-shaded style of the first film, that aimed to make the characters look more hand drawn, in favour of a pure-CGI look, which while probably appeasing the many fans that disliked the look of the first film, I can’t help wondering if it doesn’t make the film seem slightly colder. Certainly the only place where the film failed visually for me at times was when depicting human characters, and especially their expressions…faces seemed too plastic, too clean and somewhat lifeless. While motion capture was clearly used for character movement, it looks very unlikely that it was for faces – probably due to budget and time constraints – and at times it’s clear much more attention has been lavished on the intricacies of the mecha and their weapons than on bestowing life into the protagonists. While a deeper, more challenging narrative would have used the emotionless plasticity of both the human and bioroid characters to subtly infer something about the true nature of Olympus, instead AsDE’s weak plot leaves it instead feeling like you’re watching yet another video game cut-scene.

Which is exactly where I started to have problems with the film. It borrows heavily, and faithfully, from computer game aesthetics – and there are a lot of times when this approach works perfectly. The action scenes are at times breathtaking, especially the aerial combat scenes between the Landmates, and are almost enough on their own to recommend the film. In fact, if like me, you are a mecha freak then the film is definitely worth seeing for these designs and action sequences. Similarly if, god forbid, you’re some sort of Michael Bay loving explosions freak, then you’ll have fun. But sadly the borrowing from video games doesn’t end there, and it feels like the producers take too many pointers from one area where games are famously weak: plot.

I mean there is some plot here, something painfully obvious about a new consumer technology (an actually quite cool looking, but never really explained in any detail, augmented reality cell phone type system) being used to control the actions of it’s users. And there’s even a sub-plot, with the introduction of a new character cloned from Briareos’ DNA, so that he looks exactly like the cyborg before he went full-op – which of course leads to weird if predictable emotional reactions from the two central characters – even hinting at a painful love triangle – but this never goes anywhere and is almost forgotten by the third act, despite being probably the script’s most potentially interesting angle. Instead the plot feels all too much like videogame padding between levels – sorry – action sequences, culminating in an impressive final battle that looks a little too much like an end of game boss encounter (and even worse, slightly like the fall of Zion in the third, terrible Matrix film). The problem was, despite how frenetic the action was at this point, with the plot failing to grip me I found myself wondering whether I really cared any more.

Which is, sadly, why I was ultimately disappointed with Appleseed Ex Machina. Coming from being a fan of the manga, it seemed an awful waste to, again, not try and tackle the subtle but important themes that Shirow pre-occupies himself with in the original. Especially when you contrast the dense, sometimes dizzying, philosophical and political plots Shirow’s most successful adaptations; Production IG’s and Mamoru Oshii‘s famous Ghost in the Shell movies and TV series. Disappointing, like I say, but still fun in places. If you’re into mecha, high-tech video-game violence or just uber-cool CGI in general, it’s still worth checking out. Just don’t expect to be intellectually challenged, or to be able to skip the more boring cut-scenes by hitting ‘A’ on your gamepad.

I finally got to sit down and watch Michael Aris’ ‘Tekkon Kinkreet’ on Blu-Ray this weekend. Coming to the movie completely cold – not having read Taiyō Matsumoto’s original manga, and knowing little about the production’s genesis, I really enjoyed it. It wasn’t until I sat down to start writing this review and did a little bit of background research online that I discovered the fanboy shit-storm surrounding the film’s release.

Last week I posted my concerns about the forthcoming Watchmen adaptation, and particularly the worry that the original employed narrative techniques and devices that could work only in the medium of comics. So it was with some sympathy and understanding that I read fans criticising Aris’ film for exactly the same reason. The story is focused around two street orphans, simply known as Black and White, and their battle to defend their Tokyo neighbourhood and their very existence from misguided but well meaning police officers, washed up Yakuzza and sinister property developers. So far so good, typical animanga fare, you might say. But Black and White are not just two-dimensional pre-teen vigilantes; both spend the whole of the story struggling with apparent emotional and mental problems, the understandable result of a childhood on the street. These problems manifest themselves in a constant clashing of realities, over-powered imaginations, White’s bi-polar mood swings and Black’s self-destructive graphic violence. In the movie this is depicted in a stylised, surrealistic way, as the city around them visually morphs back and forwards between the boy’s candy-coloured, toy-filled playground and the stage for their dark, demon haunted nightmares. For every moment that the film is quirky, playful or touching it also disorientating, jarring and cold.

The fact that this contrast comes across at all through the film, and isn’t lost below it’s rich, ever changing visuals, must be seen as giving some credit to it’s creators. But, from what I can gather from looking around online, fans feel this has been done in a slightly ham-fisted, gimmicky way compared to the original print version. Maybe so, but I personally felt it largely worked; certainly I felt it was less confused and more emotional than the surreal and disorientating reality-clash of Satoshi Kon’s recent Paprika, which while again visually impressive, felt at times like its goal had been spectacle rather than empathy.

Plus Tekkon Kinkreet, as a movie, has a hell of a lot to offer. Visually it is near perfect, using subtle CGI techniques to contrast the cluttered, overdeveloped environments with the simple, hand drawn appearance of the characters. With much of the film being played out from Black & White’s rooftop perspective the animation employs subtle techniques, like horizons with exaggerated curvatures, to instil an effective feeling of dizzying vertigo. Freeze frame the movie at any time and you find yourself gazing at artwork of incredible beauty, detail and sophistication. It playfully makes visual reference to dozens of other films, both anime and live action, from Akira and Tokyo Godfathers to A Clockwork Orange and Bladerunner. It also has a fantastic soundtrack, courtesy of UK techno duo and legendary Warp Records artists Plaid, which I’m sure I’ll be tracking down on CD in the near future.

So, like I said at the top, I really enjoyed it. If you’re familiar with the manga then you could probably spend all day and night picking holes in it, but if you’re not you’ll probably be too impressed to care. Either way, I can’t recommend it enough. One thing’s for sure I’ll be picking up the manga for myself, and adding it to my ever-growing pile of unread books. And when I do get round to reading it, I’ll stick the movie on again and i’ll be back here to tell you if and how my opinion has changed…