Roujin Z

A simple movie straightforward message to the viewers, personally didn't feel anything from the movie I think a bit more could be done to show it more effective to the viewers. The artwork was awesome, Japanese old-school art is always great.

A great manga film with a somewhat unusual storyline about a young nurse and her patient, an old near-vegetative man who is chosen to test drive 'project z', a government funded initiative to care for the old; using state of the art computer controlled care beds but of course this being manga, this guys bed turns out to be more than they bargained for. The animation is a little lazy in places but this is a great little film with lots of subtle comedy, satire and enjoyable over-the-top manga moments. Comedic but with good dialogue and some serious ideas, so one to watch with subtitles and not dubbed.

An anime story about a nurse and his 70 year old patient. I liked this movie but for me it has lost some of it's freshness over the years. Still it's worth seeing to see Haruko Mishashi and Mr. Takazawa and also the bad guys Terada and Hasegawa.

An odd feature-length anime which haphazardly mashes genres and ideas that, while curious, aren't completely successful together. I'm not sure if it was meant to be a comedy or a straight sci-fi nightmare, but it tries mixing elements of both and their clash hurts the whole.

The plot is out-there and interesting, a concerned rumination on the looming near-future in which young are outnumbered by old, their careers hampered by the need to care for aging family. To address this worry, and liberate the fresher generation, a major metro hospital has developed (what else) a fully self-contained cybernetic bed, complete with built-in exercise routines, bathing capabilities and self-defense mechanisms. Katsuhiro Otomo handles the screenplay and many of the mechanical designs, and boy, does it feel a whole lot like Akira in places. Particularly the last hour, when the bed inevitably gains sentience, staggers through the city with a test subject strapped to its chest and swallows up machines in a gale of techno-organic vines and limbs.

The crazier bits are nice to look at, detailed and smooth in motion (if not quite to the intricate level of Otomo's masterwork), but the flat character designs and overly simplistic storytelling leave a lot to be desired. Also, not entirely a knock on the film itself, but my copy randomly swapped subtitles for dubs around the halfway mark and the English voice acting is downright unbearable.

Roujien Z starts out being a wonderfully vicious satire of society's treatment of the aged. We see a young nurse taking care of an almost vegetative geriatric, one of the many old and infirm that would be in a nursing home in the USA. He is then selected to be the guinea-pig for a new, completely automated caretaking robot, a sly jab at the dehumanizing sterility of geriatric care. The story maintains its high energy and grinning cynicism until the robot goes insane and decides it is the old man's wife; from here it becomes a rather confusing action movie before pulling itself together in time for a poignant ending. Still worth watching, if you can find it.