In 2012, Ufotable adapted Junji Ito’s legendary manga into a 70 minute OVA.

As in the comic, millions of fish suddenly sprout legs and start migrating inland, causing massive destruction. It’s a silly story, but Ito found a way to make it creepy and compelling, and Ufotable doesn’t deviate far from his plot. All the basic points are touched upon briefly – often too briefly (Brevity is the soul of wit, but it’s the soul of laziness, too), and while a different take on the manga might have been ideal, I’m glad they did this. The few times they take the story in a new direction are nearly enough to ruin the entire movie.

There’s lots of fanservice here. Lots of animated bouncing breasts and heroines tripping over so we can see their panties. This is all wrong – Ito’s comics aren’t about cockteasing T&A crap. It disrupts the atmosphere, and takes things to the level of a western horror film. You start wondering when the guy in the hockey mask will show up.

They switched the genders of the main characters, presumably so they could show a nubile young girl getting molested by a giant octopus. The male character Tadashi is now a fifth wheel. He has no purpose in the story because Kaori is now Princess Peach and Mario rolled into one, simultaneously a damsel in distress and a plucky heroine. They also added some secondary female characters who provide T&A and are generally of no import to the story.

A lot of stuff seems awfully rushed, and things that were lingered on unpleasantly. The two chapters in the circus were my favourite part of Gyo, a trippy interlude that reveals things might actually be worse than anyone could ever imagine. But they come across awkwardly in the movie, and it wouldn’t have hurt if they’d been scrapped. The business with Dr Koyanagi is handled pretty shittily as well, and a dark and interesting character becomes an annoying Dr Phibes.

There’s some effective scenes. Kaori carrying an injured friend up a staircase with a giant walking shark charging up the stairs behind her, with the shark kept out of the frame so that we don’t know how far away it is…that’s a spectacularly effective shot, and my heart rate increases every time I see it. Junji Ito has lamented that you cannot easily control pacing in comics, cannot decide how fast the reader experiences the action, and Takayuki Hirao seems keen to show that he is under no such limitation. The special effects are pretty good, and seeing all those walking fish running around Okinawa was nice.

But the soul of Gyo went missing in the transfer. There’s none of the comic’s sense of the absurd made palpable and real. The movie feels campy and trite, and not very scary. The comic had a dense atmosphere. Ultimately the Gyo Anime serves as an exercise in how to adapt a comic almost flawlessly – and yet, somehow, not truly adapt any of it at all.

I watched this more times than the first Lion King movie. I think I was trying to persuade myself that it was better than the original. It isn’t, of course, but it’s still quite good – probably Disney’s best direct to video movie.

The music is not as good as the first movie, and overall things aren’t as bright and colourful and fun. Here the palette is muddy and dark, especially in the final scene, which makes Africa look rather like a Stalinist gulag. The Timon and Pumba characters are given a lot of time…probably a bit too much. I find them distracting.’

But the story’s surprisingly good, picking up where the first one left off. Not a lot of kids movies show the consequences of the hero’s actions, but this one does, with large numbers of Scar’s supporters banished from the tribe and nursing their wounds in the desert. The plot is a bit similar to other Disney movies, but The Lion King wasn’t a paragon of originality either, and the sequel has some twists and turns that probably wouldn’t have worked in the original’s Biblical/Hamlet inspired tale.

The voice talent is mostly intact, except that Rowan Atkinson no longer voices Zazu (and believe me, he’s much missed.) The new villain is just a female Scar without Scar’s sense of humour. I wonder why they didn’t have survive Lion King‘s final scene and make a comeback. When I was 10 and saw the ripped-to-shreds character Nuka, I misunderstood and thought that was exactly what they had done. As it is, Zira creates continuity problems. Where was she when the events of the first movie were happening?

Rafiki’s still in fine form, and Nala and Kovu are good characters. We don’t have the very typical scenario of the main character being the least interesting part of the movie, which is fortunate – some of Disney’s legit theater-released movies can’t say the same. The characterisation is good enough that the real stick-the-knife-in-and-twist scenes in the second half of the movie come off well, and are suitably moving.

In 1932, Walt Disney released a short called Three Little Pigs. The short proved unexpectedly popular, with audiences identifying with the pigs and reviling the wolf (who they saw as symbolic of The Great Depression). Disney banged out several more shorts, and when none of them created the original’s sensation did he is said to have remarked “you can’t follow pigs with pigs.” Maybe not, but you can certainly follow lions with lions, and this movie is proof.

Large numbers of movies get released and make no money. The traditional indie counter-manoeuvre is to spend no money making the movie in the first place.

Mad Max was such a movie, and the result is a classic. The series really finds its voice with The Road Warrior, but the first one is good, too – an edgy and stylish movie that combines a peak oil-induced apocalypse with Australian muscle car culture.

The setting is familiar, and the Mad Max franchise made it that way. Civilisation is winding down due to depleted fuel reserves, and road gangs have turned the roads into battlefields. Max Rockatansky is an officer in the collapsing house of cards that is the local police force, and he’s getting uncomfortably happy with the violence his job requires. When a fellow officer is burned alive in an ambush, he begins a transformation into a vigilante who doesn’t just throw away the rulebook, he does wheelies over it with his supercharged Pursuit Special.

After an energetic opening scene that hurls cars around and showcases the series’ love of outrageous trash talk (Ayatolla of Rock and Rolla, etc), Max hits its stride: a gritty and atmospheric movie with solid writing and acting. Considering the budget, the action scenes are impressive and occasionally spectacular – but the thing that really brings this movie together is the characters.

Gibson is particularly good. He’s calm, but it’s a calm that makes you uncomfortable. He seems like a benign cloud cell that could mutate into a hurricane. He doesn’t overact – far from it, he’s usually quieter than he needs to be. But he has a strange power over the screen, and his quietness is part of what makes the final scene so chilling.

There’s a bunch of crazy desperadoes with ridiculous names like Mudguts and Toecutter, and they’re also handled with a nuance that isn’t typical in this kind of movie. I like how Nightrider goes from insane tirades to tears, and Johnny tries to escape Max’s vengeance by claiming mental problems. The villains have a nice bit of…humanity, which reminds us that Max himself might not be too far behind.

Max isn’t perfect. As an emotional experience it has an odd plateau-like quality, and it lacks a big epic scene like the road chase of the second movie or the Thunderdome battle of the third. The music hasn’t aged too well. Mad Max has an ill-fitting jaunty score that makes me think of Adam West punching out bad guys with “WHAM!” and “POW!” appearing on the screen.

But the movie is still impressive for what it is. Few films do so much with so little money (imagine if Blair Witch had car stunts), and it’s influence etc cannot be overstated. The odd thing about Max is that you’ve witnessed its spirit even if you haven’t seen the movie, because so many of its ideas have seeped into the work of other directors.