Day Two Hundred and Ten - Kimjongilia, "A strange mishmash of testimonials and NK Prop films."

I'm a big fan of VICE's efforts to peak behind the veil of North Korea's secrecy and tyranny, so when ANY documentary pops up on Netflix concerning the country, I generally put it into my queue until I feel the need for something non-fiction.

In this particular case, I probably could've done without.

Not to minimize the plight and suffering that the subjects of Kimjongilia went through in escaping the horror of the totalitarian state they were born to, it's less an analytical/descriptive piece and more an appeal to emotion.

Occasionally, the film puts up timelines describing the rise of the Kim family, turning everything above the 38th parallel into a dictatorial communist regime under the cult of personality for the Kim line, but... for the most part... it's just a series of testimonials of survivors who have escaped to China, Mongolia, and the South describing the suffering that they went through.

These testimonials are intercut with odd modern dance routines where the sole character is one of the infamous North Korean female traffic wardens who recreates moments of pain, despair, abuse, and suicide through interpretive dance.

Also providing contrast are dozens and dozens of NK propaganda performances and films which send up Dear Leader and promise that everything is just fine and dandy, despite the fact that the country is in a deplorable state, being crushed by the iron rule of the elite few.

Perhaps the format is necessary due to the extremely limited footage available from inside the dictatorship, but... as emotive the testimonials are, I'm not getting much out of this doc. Of course I sympathize, empathize with this people and the countless others still trapped under the yoke of the Kim Dynasty, but this film is all about pulling heart strings with barely anything in the way of facts and analysis.


I find it more than a little ironic that it plays so while airing propaganda that claims it's the West that is dying and decadent, trying to convince through emotion the opposite is true.

Yes, "Up is Down" to them, but just counterclaiming that "Up is Up" doesn't make for an all that interesting documentary.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day One Hundred and Forty-three - Rin: Daughters of Mnemosyne, Episode 1, "Okay, hold on... did that woman just attach a chain to-OHMYGAWD!!"

I felt it was time to try another Netflix anime of a series that I'd never watched before. Initial impressions were somewhat promising, as the title card was suitably fan-service friendly, but it was yet another one without dual audio.

Well, they can't all have terrible dubs, so I gave it a try.

Really, the dub wasn't the problem, as it was actually somewhat decent... and neither was the plot or the art style all that troubling (well, I do have one or two needling issues there). It was the brutality gimmick that really bothered me.

See, Rin:DoM centers on a buxom private detective type who has the uncanny ability of resurrection. In the cold opener of the episode, we are treated to her very violent and certainly unhappy death as she's tagged several times by a shotgun and plummets quite a few stories from the rooftops to street level.

Granted, in the very next scene we're shown that she's perfectly fine the following morning, but still... it was hard to watch.

After the cold opener, the majority of the episode revolves around a man who feels his memory, his very life, isn't his own. Rin takes it upon herself to investigate and stumbles onto professional hitmen, secret cloning and organ harvesting operations, and a very disturbing sadist doctor-lady... oh, and zombies.

Weak storytelling and the horror gimmicks randomly popping up aside, what is truly disturbing are the lengths of brutal domination and torture that the author forces Rin to endure for the sake of... well, what? Gratuity is all I can come up with.

Literally the sadist doctor pierces every fleshy bit of Rin's body, going so far as to attach a long length of chain to what is implied to be her genitals... a chain that the evil doctor yanks just for the heck of it.

Ick.

Also, ugh.

It's those moments that are just completely unnecessary and over the top. Not that I'm a fan of censorship, I just can't call the anime quality when it resorts to this level of on-screen torture to fill some time.

Then, there's the zombie horde that just comes out of nowhere.

I mean, I could swallow the evil sadist doc-lady cloning people to harvest their organs... I could also live with the hand-wavey way she macguffined a "chemical memory transfer" so that the clones retain the original's personality... but random zombies?

What the hell?

The little trouble I had with the art is that a lot of the featured style swings way too liberally back and forth between flat and boring and overly extravagant. Like everything is dull and solid colored until you get to that one frame where Rin is putting on nylons and THEN there's deep texture.

Meh.

I'll probably stick around an episode or two more, despite the red flags, just to give the series a chance to redeem itself... but, anime really doesn't work that way. It's stories are generally already written and approved long before anything gets animated. I don't hold much hope for improvement, but we'll see.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~