Welcome To The Space Show

This is the second of three reviews of films I caught at the BFI’s Anime Weekend. They run the weekend every couple of years and it’s well worth paying attention to as you’ll get a chance to see films you won’t at UK anime conventions (i.e. Mind Game in 2006, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time in 2008).

Sci-fi take on a traditional children’s adventure yarn, told with humour and an imaginative line in aliens.

Welcome to the Space Show
is a project from the “Besame Mucho” team of director Koji Masunari, writer Hideyuki Kurata and producer Tomonori Ochikoshi, along with their Read or Die collaborator, character designer/animation director Masashi Ishihama.

It tells the tale of 5 children who get whisked off into an adventure in space during their annual holiday in the countryside. “Five Go Off To Space” if you like. It definitely adheres to the unsupervised nature of popular children’s adventure fiction. There’s even a dog and evil smugglers!

What weaknesses there are, seem to come from Kurata. The story is too long, caused by there being a few too many elements that needed to be set up to get to the ending. It’s not that it really lags, it’s just that it feels like there’s just a litle too much of it. It really pushes the number of “Chekhov’s gun” moments you can have in a story. On top of that, the villains are sketches rather than fully drawn personalities and lack fleshed out motivations. That’s something that you could see in the team’s Read Or Die projects too, a focus on the mechanics of the plot over clarifying the actual reasons it was all happening.

However, Kurata is also great at writing gags and likeable heroines. The comedy in the film is one of the film’s strongest points, full of genuinely amusing lines and situations. And the central conflict isn’t really the one between the heroes and the villains, but between two cousins who have fallen out over a lost rabbit. That totally human dilemma grounds the sci-fi lunacy that surrounds it, and allows the film to get away with leaving its villains with motives that are only hinted at.

The other overwhelmingly strong aspect of the film is the visual inventiveness, particularly in terms of creating the sense of a universe teeming with diverse life forms. In the Q&A after the screening, Masunari said there were about 400 different alien designs used through the film. Personally it took me back to some of the brief insane crowd scenes you’d get in Urusei Yatsura, where they’d populate a crowd with characters from earlier episodes. Except in Welcome To The Space Show, this was happening for most of the running time of the film. It avoids being a distraction, instead it works more like the little incidental gags you’d get in the What-A-Mess books. I suspect rewatching will pay dividends as extra visual gags reveal themselves.

Of the three films I saw at the BFI Anime Weekend, it was easily my favourite despite its flaws. While not a classic, it’s a good family film. More importantly it’s more talent making the leap from TV/OAVs to movies, and it’s a strong debut feature for Sony’s A-1 Pictures. Would love to see them get Kazuki Akane & Hiroshi Onogi (Noein, Birdy The Mighty Decode) to create an original film too, so hopefully this one is a big enough hit to make them continue on the feature film route (Welcome To The Space Show is yet to be released in Japan, this was the second screening in the world so far).