'Cutie Honey' is one of the sillier cutesy, unfocused, exuberant, action/fantasy anime for grade school girls. Usually this is TV show material but here it is a love-conquers-all themed feature length film...and yeah, there's the minor detail that it is a live action movie. But don't think that this is comparable to the Wachowskis' 'Speed Racer' which adapted anime to live action with an overall western understanding of aesthetics and with certain anime-touches only giving it an anime-like FEEL...believe this statement to be true or not now, if you see 'Cutie Honey' you will immediately realize through juxtaposition that it is true. 'Cutie Honey' in contrast is conceived EXACTLY like an anime in all its unapologetic hyperkinetic, fetishistic, shallow silliness, adding nothing to it and subtracting nothing from it. There is no adapting going on whatsoever, it obviously was storyboarded as if it was to become an anime (the behind-the-scenes feature proves this assumption to be true) and then they had to figure out how to realize it in front of a camera.
Composition, mis-en-scene, framing, pacing, acting, music, you name it, there's nothing that distinguishes it from an anime, except of course that by default this has more details than the drawings of an anime. Seeing such an anime played out for real automatically multiplies the inherent silliness making it difficult to bear for probably any adult without the proper fetishes, this especially applies to the acting considering that those characters all have terrible mood swings. All things considered it's all achieved with the aid of relatively little CGI (and animation) which in a way makes it seem like it's ignoring the artificiality of its visuals while 'Speed Racer' is celebrating and actively using it.
It would have been a dreadful experience if only...yes, if only I wouldn't have been so fascinated by the uniqueness of having the visual language of anime and all those well-worn anime conventions transferred into a different medium (basically). The sheer wrongness of the whole endeavor is enough of a reason to be amazed by it and to be fascinated by the experiment that it is. It's interesting to see in practice that what works for anime doesn't work for live action movies, what's stylish in one often comes across as cheap in the other. And so it isn't a particularity successful or enjoyable movie but at least for me it was a fascinating one, akin to the experiment of a certain shot-for-shot remake of 'Psycho'.
Composition, mis-en-scene, framing, pacing, acting, music, you name it, there's nothing that distinguishes it from an anime, except of course that by default this has more details than the drawings of an anime. Seeing such an anime played out for real automatically multiplies the inherent silliness making it difficult to bear for probably any adult without the proper fetishes, this especially applies to the acting considering that those characters all have terrible mood swings. All things considered it's all achieved with the aid of relatively little CGI (and animation) which in a way makes it seem like it's ignoring the artificiality of its visuals while 'Speed Racer' is celebrating and actively using it.
It would have been a dreadful experience if only...yes, if only I wouldn't have been so fascinated by the uniqueness of having the visual language of anime and all those well-worn anime conventions transferred into a different medium (basically). The sheer wrongness of the whole endeavor is enough of a reason to be amazed by it and to be fascinated by the experiment that it is. It's interesting to see in practice that what works for anime doesn't work for live action movies, what's stylish in one often comes across as cheap in the other. And so it isn't a particularity successful or enjoyable movie but at least for me it was a fascinating one, akin to the experiment of a certain shot-for-shot remake of 'Psycho'.