Stardate 20030915.1526

Warning: This article contains many "spoilers" for Ah! My Goddess – The Movie, and reveals major plot elements. Do not read it if you have not watched the film but think you may want to eventually.

I'm still new to anime in general, and not very familiar with some of the classic series. I have been getting some of the DVDs I've been watching at my local DVD store, and they don't necessarily carry what aficionados would think they should. The anime section isn't very big, to begin with, and they're not really catering to otaku. So they have a tendency to be willing to stock "XXX - The Movie" while not carrying any of the DVDs for the series behind it. That's why I ended up watching Cowboy Bebop - The Movie before I finally mailordered for some of the series DVDs, and that's why I bought a copy of this one. I know just a bit about the basic series, so I mostly went into it cold.

After having seen it, I went and read some reviews of the film (1 2 3 4 5 6), and a pretty universal observation was that it didn't really seem consistent with the preceding series. It was claimed that several of the major characters didn't really stay true to form, and that this was a disappointment.

My friend Bill, who's been serving as something of a guide and guru in my exploration of anime, said much the same thing. And for those who were familiar with the series, the inconsistency seriously detracted from their enjoyment of the film.

But I heard about all of that after I'd watched it the first time, a few days ago. As is my habit, the first viewing was with Japanese dialogue and subtitles and as little knowledge of what it was about as possible.

Since then, the film has been growing on me. I just went back and watched it again, enabling the English dub. On balance, I think I preferred the Japanese, but there were some ways in which the English dub was interesting.

Of course, I'm still an anime newbie, and I only had fairly general knowledge of the series and characters, so I took the movie as it was, and took the characters as they were presented. Unlike a fan of the series, I didn't have any preconceptions. And I liked the movie (and the characters), as presented.

I think it stands alone well, and can be enjoyed immensely without much knowledge of the series. It is magnificent visually; and I find I'm saying that over and over again about the things I've watched. Apparently the median level of visual spectacle for these kinds of series is a lot higher than I had thought.

It could have been improved if they'd included maybe a minute or two of situation exposition to make clear just how it was that the goddess Belldandy ended up living with college student Keichii, but it isn't massively fatal that they didn't do so. One just accepts that it's their situation, and all that's really important is that they love each other deeply, which was abundantly clear almost from the beginning. It's only later where one or two events become a bit bewildering if one doesn't have that knowledge. I was bewildered about a couple of things and ended up sending mail to Bill to ask for an explanation, in particular about the original wish that Keichii made and how that established the series.

Not knowing that makes the last bit of dialogue in the movie between Belldandy and Keichii pretty mystifying. What Belldandy and Keichii do at that point (pledge themselves to one another in affirmation of their true and unshakeable mutual love) is completely understandable (indeed inevitable) but what they say makes little sense. When Belldandy says that her prior contract with him was cancelled and that he was entitled to another wish, his response is that the choice of a wish is easy, and then they embrace. Once one knows that his first wish amounted to spending the rest of his life with Belldandy, it's obvious that he intends to make exactly the same wish again. The first time it was the result of confusion and misunderstanding, but this time it would be what he truly wants. Clearly Belldandy understands what he meant by that comment, which is why she embraces him after he says it, even though we don't actually hear him make another wish. But without knowing their history, none of that makes sense, and it detracts a bit from the ending. However, it's a relatively minor point, since that happens after the real culmination of the film.

From what I read, long time fans of the series had a difficult time immersing themselves in the story because they were constantly jarred by the way that main characters acted out of character, and by other ways in which the series didn't match their preconceptions. For me, though, without that knowledge, once I got past the first 20 minutes or so of the film I had no difficulty getting immersed in it.

Perhaps it is true that the characters in the film didn't act the way they had in the series, and maybe it wasn't consistent with the rest of the series in other ways. In particular, some of the reviews complained that Urd was very much out of character. But it was the nature of the story that any attempt to permit Urd to become a temptress/trickster would have seemed contrived. I gather that in the series she was more at the level of a creator of mischief than of a brooding malevolence, since she's half-good and a sympathetic character in the series.

To include her in Celestin's plot would also have derailed the culmination which involved the three sisters singing. If she'd initially been sympathetic to Celestin and aided him in his plot, or even worse if she'd been the primary conduit for implementing it, it would have been much more complicated in plot terms to arrange things so that she was willing to give everything she had at the last to counter it, let alone to arrange things in plot terms so that anyone else would permit her to do so (or avoid locking her up afterwards). One does not expend regular series characters that way, especially characters which have large fan followings.

So despite the fact that she has both good and evil sides, she was pretty much uniformly a force for good in this film. Given the gravity of Celestin's plot, she had to be. About the only way her dark side manifested (besides visually in her spiritual form, which was really cool looking) was in her complete lack of sympathy for Celestin and her clear ruthless readiness to toast him with fireballs or lightning bolts every time she got the chance.

Easily my favorite moment was the culmination of the film. That's not always the case; my favorite moment in The Matrix is when Tank begins giving Neo his training, and downloads Jiu Jitsu into him without telling him ahead of time what's coming. Neo's reaction to that is priceless, as is Tank's amusement.

But in this film it is the last song sung by Belldandy and her sisters which affected me most. I really like that final song. The music itself is gorgeous, and the orchestration was lavish (and beautifully recorded). The Warsaw Symphony has nothing to be ashamed of. The soloists have fantastic voices. And the visual spectacle of the animation during that music is astounding.

The images of the three sisters floating in the air, with their spiritual forms hovering behind them was wonderful. (And they're larger than at any other point in the movie, presumably indicating the degree of effort they are making. Every other time they appear, they're the same size as their physical bodies.)

The energy of love (I presume) flows in from the Earth, summoned by the song and the love felt by those singing it. It encapsulates the physical manifestation of Celestin's program (that terrible giant – perhaps a Titan?), glowing intensely brightly. Then, at JUST the right moment in the music (obviously a deliberate coordination), it bursts out as what looked to me like the Phoenix, rising into the heavens. It probably wasn't intended to be the Phoenix since it trails behind it a triple helix which becomes a new life tree, but the Phoenix would be a valid symbol for that moment since it arose reborn from its own destruction, and no more mythically inconsistent than anything else going on.

...I rewound and watched that sequence four times, just because. It gives me shivers.

Of course, that song was written in the style of a Protestant hymn, even to the extent of having the standard two-chord sub-Dominant-to-Tonic transition (i.e. "Amen") after the end of the song proper, and being accompanied by a traditional church pipe-organ in the first bar or two before the orchestra fades in. That is completely inconsistent with the entire idea of this somehow being based on Norse gods. But then, the film's mythology is more than a bit of a melange anyhow and draws from many traditions and adds much beyond that. Most of what's going on in "Heaven" with "the gods" has nothing at all to do with traditional Norse mythology, let alone Norse attitudes. For example, it's clear in this film that "being good" is desirable, and it is surely no coincidence that the spiritual forms of the more powerful goddesses resemble angels. But to the Norse, the only way to get into Valhalla was to die violently in combat. Good had nothing to do with it. And the only thing I'm aware of in Norse mythology even remotely resembling an angel were the Valkyries, which isn't very close at all. (You know them; they're the ones who fly helicopters into combat...)

Nominally, the series is based on Viking tradition. A lot of the character names are at least vaguely Norse (e.g. Skuld). There are things in the film which have names borrowed from Norse mythology without really being more than vaguely similar to their namesakes, such as the master computer system (!) Yggdrasil in "Heaven", or the energy cannon Gungnir. In Norse mythology Yggdrasil was the name of the life tree, which had three main roots. (But only one trunk.) Gungnir was Odin's spear.

And in a lot of cases they abandoned any attempt at all to remain true to that mythology. While the architecture in "Heaven" is astounding, real eye-candy, it has nothing whatever to do with anything Norse. It seems to owe a bit to Greek architecture what with all the marble columns and suchlike. But the Greeks never dreamed of structures like these, and couldn't have built them even if they had. (For that matter, neither could we.) And no one has ever used circles routinely this way.

I guess that the film designer had a real challenge, needing to come up with panoramas of "Heaven" which were beautiful, inspiring, spiritual, and simultaneously both familiar and alien. It had to look like the kind of place that Gods would live if they were Gods primarily due to the triumph of Clarke's Law. ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") It's a tough problem, and on that level I think the designer did an amazing job. But the result makes no sense whatever within the context of a Norse pantheon.

With respect to that song, there was never any musical form among the pre-Christian Norse (Viking or otherwise) remotely like this, or anywhere else until just recently. Certain aspects of that song itself (key transitions and chording patterns) use music composition "technology" which was only developed in the latter part of the 18th century. That was Romantic era music theory; the Baroque composers (Bach, Vivaldi, Handel etc.) never wrote anything like that. That song could only have been written after Beethoven. Which makes it terribly anachronistic for any kind of Norse pantheon.

At the level of technological music making, the orchestra that performed it is also Romance era. Baroque era chamber groups had a much smaller variety of instruments available, mostly strings and woodwinds, and included at least a couple of instruments which are no longer considered standard in orchestras (in particular, the harpsichord, the English horn and the recorder). It also had nothing like what we now think of as percussion, and the only brass instruments were French horns and Trumpets, neither of which had valves. The trumpets of that era were bugles and everything was done by lip. That's why, for instance, the trumpet part in the third movement of one of the Brandenburg Concerti – I believe #4 but I'm not sure – is pitched so high. It had to be that high in order to have a rich enough selection of notes available to write any kind of reasonable melody that didn't sound like a bugle call.

Even the kind of organ which was used behind that song in the first bar or two is 15th century "high tech". And it was, too; pipe organs were very high tech for their age. Controlling so many complex air flows entirely mechanically without making the keyboard stiff or making response slow is non-trivial. Fitting two or three or even four keyboards and their accompanying stops into a single console so they can comfortably be used by the organist is miniaturization at its finest.

It's easy for us in this era to look at older designs from centuries ago and to feel that they are somehow primitive, but the engineers of earlier ages were not stupid nor any less clever than we are; it's just that they didn't have as much basic knowledge or the kinds of tools and materials and techniques we have. Given their limits, some of what they did surpasses most of our accomplishments. But I digress...

Despite the occasional name, the fundamental worldview in this film really has nothing to do with Norse mythology to any great extent, any more than USS Clueless is actually about Star Trek. It doesn't really matter; ultimately it's a conceit, but doesn't detract from the film.

Different people will have different reactions to things, even at the best of times. However, in this case I wonder if a fan who knows the series might actually be handicapped a bit, and may be prevented from getting the same enjoyment from it that a newbie like me would. It's by no means flawless as a film, and there is stuff in the film which I skipped this time, and which I think probably shouldn't have been in the film at all. It started slow, and I think they would have improved the film a lot by trimming about ten minutes out of the first twenty (and eliminating two particular characters entirely, neither of which was important to the film but both of whom were intensely annoying). And I really do think that the addition of just a small amount of background exposition would have helped.

There were a couple of other things I wish had been included. For one thing, they set up a situation and didn't take advantage of it. At the very beginning of the film, Belldandy sings to a tree which is trying to become more healthy, and Skuld sighs and wishes she could do the same kind of thing. At the end of the film, Skuld does join in the great song and sings beautifully, making a vital contribution. Afterwards there should have been comments about how she really could do it after all.

I was also left feeling cheated by not knowing what became of Celestin. Was he free? Captured and again imprisoned? Did he die? The physical icon which encased his spirit dissolved releasing a trail of sparks which rose into the sky, but where did they go? That left me feeling vaguely cheated.

But those aren't really all that important. Overall the main purpose of the film was to entertain, to awe, and to cause an emotional impact on the audience by taking them places they could never go and showing them things they could never see, and making them glad they went on the journey. It did all those things to me, and that's enough.

Update: Alexander Doenau comments.