 So ride your way. Alright, so we got another one. It seems like these days we just keep watching a lot of things from the same people, right? Because my you also is cranking out way too much content. Right. Okay. So here's the thing, right? So if you look at the top anime directors, right, you got your Miyazaki Ghibli. Yep. You got your Hosada. You had your shinkai, right? Hosada is putting out one every three years. Miyazaki and Ghibli are putting out one every century. Yep. Right. How often, you know, but the point is Masaki Uasa and Saiyansaru are cranking out not just TV shows, but also movies at a shocking rate. So this movie came out in Japan months ago, but finally made its way to the U.S. one night only in U.S. theater, some subtitles, thanks to G-Kids of course. Yep. And I said, well, I guess I have to go see that. Yep. So even though it feels like we just talked about Walk On Girl. And also we not that long ago reviewed another movie that has a very, very, very similar. Oh yeah, Lou Over the Wall, right? Lou Over the Wall, which was also Uasa. Right. And had the same producer as this, right? So there's Lou Over the Wall, Walk On Girl and this bang, bang, bang. It's like they're just, it feels like those movies are coming way too fast from, from the studio. Yep. And just to remind you before this, because I want to go through some of this ping-pong the animation 2014 adventure time, that one episode of Food Chain 2014, Space Dandy 2014. And then a gap because that's when they founded Saiyansaru. And then Night of Short Walk On Girl 2017, Lou Over the Wall also 2017, Devilman Crybirds, baby 2018. I think they only did one episode of Space Dandy. Right. Director, writer, animation supervisor and storyboard for the episode, Slow and Steady Wins the Race, baby. Right. It was sort of, it was like Adventure Time where there was one episode that was totally insane that was by them. But Uasa did like one crazy episode anyway. So this movie, just the short version is, it is absolutely worth seeing. It is a fantastic movie. It is extremely well executed. And I have very few complaints about it. Yeah. I mean, there's nothing at the same time. Well, that is all true. It's also not like, oh my God, it's the best movie ever. It's a legendary, right? Yeah. It's like, it's like great. It's, it's between good and great, right? But I guess maybe, maybe it is great, but not legendary. Great. But what I would say is that regular great for what it is, because the story it told was a relatively straightforward story. Like there are no surprises. Right. So I read the synopsis, right? And this is not spoiler, right? For the movie at all, because all this stuff happened super early in the movie. And also you can figure this out from the teaser trailer. Right. So this is the synopsis of the movie is, okay, there's some, you know, 20-somethings that live in like a beach town, right? The girl's a pro surfer. The girl's like a basically a pro surfer. The dude is a fireman. They fall in love. The dude dies. And then it becomes a situation like that, you know, movie ghost with Goldberg and those other people, right? Where the dudes a ghost with the pottery, right? I'm surprised that of all the headlining actors and actresses you might have said as ghost, you know, the movie with, I was surprised you said whoopie Goldberg. Yeah, because that's a recognizable person. The other, the main two people were just generic Hollywood hot people. I don't remember their names and I wouldn't recognize them on the street, but whoopie Goldberg is a recognizable unique individual. You don't remember who Patrick Swayze is. I know that's the name of a famous person, but if he walked into this room right now and said, what is my name? I would say have no fucking clue. If Patrick Swayze walked into this room right now, unless he looks radically different from old age or something, I would be like, wow, it's Patrick Swayze. I would say your unusually hot person. Are you a Hollywood actor of some kind? Maybe or, you know, famous person. I don't know your name. And it's Patrick Swayze. I'm like, I know that name. That is the name of a famous person. And then I'd say you were in things. What were you in ghost? Oh, I've seen that. OK. But to put it like a broader, the whole movie is just her sort of processing his death, basically. Yes. With a little bit of magical realism that does not necessarily need to be real. It could just be in her head. Though there's a fun little nod at the end to make it clear there's a little bit of magic going on. But the movie is exactly what I expected it to be, except the execution was so good that I actually want to bring in a lot of praise and point out a lot of very specific things. I think it did well. Right. So usually the other U.S. assigned Saru works, right, are usually sort of, you know, plot wise and character wise, really out there and like a short walk on, girl, I defy you to summarize the events of that movie succinctly. Right. To Tommy Galaxy, which has the same characters, basically, is also just completely like out there kind of trippy and nutty, right? Devilman crybaby. That shit is fucked up and insane. Right. This is really plot wise and character wise, much more in line with a very, you know, down to earth kind of anime. Yep. Right. More in line with a plot you would see from Hosada. But what it really interested me is that there's actually a pretty good number of characters for how sort of zoomed in some of them have almost no screen time. But the characters that get screen time are surprisingly nuanced characters. Oh, yeah. And a lot of the things I thought, Oh, I guess, I guess that's gonna happen. That person will date that person. None of those things happened. Oh, everything I thought would happen happened. Well, the one thing I predicted specifically was the sister and like her deal. Yeah, I picked that one up pretty early. And I was glad that the other firemen did not date a different character. Yeah. Because that's a direction to a more pedestrian version of this movie would have gone. Well, that's a wall. Yeah. But the problem, not the problem, but the interesting about this movie is that it's so soon after Lou over the wall and both this and Lou over the wall, another completely crazy one. But they both in many ways tell a very similar story. And they're both about using water as a metaphor for the threshold of death and transformation central plots of both movies, even though one's a children's movie and one is, you know, more adult, not completely adult, but a more adult romance movie, maybe like a teenage romance movie, maybe call it right. Is that they're both about people dying at sea? Yep. But it's like central to the, you know, Lou over the wall was more about water and the mermaids were the metaphor for on one hand, the ostensibly suicidal feelings of the main character, coupled with like the processing of death, coupled with the death of like ideas and culture and like the old way that town was and how things change as time goes on and the past dies eventually. This one is very literally the death of one person and the reverberations or dare I say the waves that person made both metaphorically and literally in the world and how that affected the people around them. And then well, also about the people riding those waves, right? The name of the movie comes. Yeah. And how it's not really subtle with its message. Yep. But it's a movie. It's not to the point where, you know, sometimes there are movies where or or any kind of storytelling medium where, you know, their message is so sort of told so ham fistedly and overtly that it's in elegant, right? Here it is overt, right? To where they literally just spell it out for you. It's one of the rare movies that can get away with saying the name of the movie, right? It doesn't sound stupid. It's like it's like, you know, you need to ride your wave to do that, right? But they do it in a way that doesn't feel, you know, sort of, you know, tacked on or, or, you know, like, uncomfortable. Right? Like, you know, it feels like natural. And it's just like, Oh, it's just not. It's, you know, it's like, OK, you didn't really do this in an attacking way. You just did it in a way to where there's no way the audience can miss it. Yep. But at the same time, what I really appreciate about this movie is how much it trusted the audience to notice things and how a lot of the subtle things that happened in the movie were not spelled out. And it assumed that you would know that anime does that a lot in general. Yeah. But in particular, this one is a one point. There is a large time skip, right? Yeah. Then there are several. You don't really know what happened in that time and it doesn't matter too much. But there are references or tiny flashbacks to things that it's not a super long time skip, but it's long enough. There are tiny flashbacks to events that happened in the time skip or characters will reference things that happened in the time skip, but they didn't show you those things. So it's like, you know, it's like, if I went to rim and said, Hey, remember the time something happened and the time something happened was not in the movie yet. Yep. Right. It happened during a time in the movie that got ignored. But it's still okay. Right? It totally works. Yep. The other interesting thing is, and it seems like this is a science Saru thing. They hyper researched like the details of the things they were portraying to the point that like, there's a lot of very detailed long running shots of firefighting techniques and firefighting equipment that is like accurate to a shocking degree. The surfing is also extremely accurate. The life saving techniques, tiny little bits, like there's two different scenes where someone like takes an unconscious person and flips them onto a surfboard or a raft. Right. That's like, that's a technique you learn in life saving that like, I think because like I was saying, this one is much more grounded in the real world compared to their other works, right? Compared to say like Lou over the wall, right? So therefore, even though I'm sure they researched things for those other works as thoroughly, right? Say for example, like there was like a bicycle episode of to Tommy Galaxy. I'm sure that they researched bicycles for that. But because this is much more grounded in the real world, the real world matching research shines through. It's like you can see that they put that work into it when you watch the movie, rather than whereas they might have done it for other things, but it's less visible and, you know, obvious. I mean, it was weird for me because like, I am a son of a fireman, and I spent a lot of time around firefighting equipment as a kid. And part of my brain was like, that part's accurate. That's a Japanese only thing. That's the that's like this class of fire. Well, you know, when we talk about anime, we talk a lot about at least on the judge anime show, which will come back eventually guns. We talk about guns. It's like, Hey, you're reading some manga, you're watching some anime and that gun is just drawn in exquisite detail, right? It's like, well, the person who made this clearly likes guns, and it's clearly about the guns, right? Or the guns could be anything, right? And it should be the cars of the guns, right? Well, in this, there are several guns in this movie, right? And I think the biggest one is coffee. Coffee is the biggest gun in this movie. They're basically constantly drawing the process of making coffee. And a fire firefighting is also a gun, but the detail in the drawing, surfing and making Omurice. Yes. The detail in the drawings, an animation of people making coffee in cafes on the beach in their homes, right? Is not only a so highly detailed and realistic, right? To sort of, you know, appeal to coffee fanboys who, you know, want to make coffee in a fancy way. Yeah, well, that's CO2 boom. They're always doing it the exact same way every time they do it as like this, you know, repeated, you know, imagery to tie, you know, various scenes together. Because it's subtle, but it ties together the like, the interest in the topic of how to make this kind of coffee, having like spread from person to person in parallel to all the other ideas that spread like waves among these people affecting each other. Yeah, because the dude who died was way into coffee. Yeah. And then everyone, after he's dead, you see more coffee making than when he was alive. Yeah, but in terms of something clearly meta meta think, right? Yeah, people, there's clearly one or more people at the studio who are way into coffee and this coffee making process in particular also from the definitely inserted it because this coffee fan people at the studio from the interview with the could have been I could have been any, you know, on the young joy of the producer. They talked a lot about how much research science are did for this movie in particular, and how like they got surfing lessons and life saving lessons. I wouldn't be surprised if they like shadowed a fire department in a beach. I wouldn't be surprised that they went to several cafes. Yep. Right. To watch them make coffee. And I guess like overall, because like you just it's an anime movie, like just watch it. I'm not going to explain the rest of the plot to you other than that. It is deeply satisfying. It's extremely well animated. It's beautiful. It'll hit you right in the fields. I cried a few times during it. I think the other thing is that, you know, like I was saying, it's not so as crazy surreal and unrealistic as the other works by you, but he still manages to put in the trade his trademark art style, right? All over it. Like you can tell immediately who made it. Yeah. Even though it's so different in many ways because of the way the characters move the way the lines on the edge, you know, the characters don't like, you know, hold hold their same like solid shape. Yeah. Yeah. They're sort of stretchy a little bit and wiggly. You know, he always does a little bit of wiggliness and the lines on the edge of the characters are. It's almost like they're thicker and thinner at the same time because they're sort of, you know, they move a little bit. Right. They're not, you know, characters all have like pretty unique or interesting walk cycles and like the way characters move is very tied to what they're about. Yeah. And then, you know, of course, the is trademark thing of sort of moving the, you know, it's not a real camera, but the virtual camera perspective and all which he's riding her bike. Right. You know, he'll go, he'll go low with wide angles or long crazy angle. Right. All over the place, the way he does in, you know, a more, a less realistic anime. Right. But he's still doing that in this, you know, story that is mostly just real normal world stuff. Right. Yep. But there's enough crazy stuff and magical stuff that like, yeah, you couldn't make this live action, even though it's like so you can make like almost all of it live action. Right. But then they just, you know, they make, they go in that extra mile. It's like, no, just kidding. You couldn't like the ending scene of this movie, like the climax of the movie to make that without animation would be on. It would be a practical effects effort on the level of like back to the future to or like a Star Wars. Yeah. It would not be, you know, doable. That is one hell of a climax too. That was a good scene. Yeah. So kind of got a little, you know, stretches your disbelief a little bit, but that's all right. I was totally down with the stretch of belief in that final scene just cause I was like, all right, I see what you're going to do here. Fine. It's like in the interview when the producer was like, I'll go, you also explained what he wanted to happen to the end. And she was like, what? Yeah. It's like, I'll let you know. And then he's like, no, no, no, no, no, when he's storyboard and she was like, oh, that was also interesting in the interview. We learned that, you know, it's like, I always feel bad, you know, when we talk about enemies or mongers, right? Cause in manga, always like a one or two people get all the credits when I know there were a ton of assistants aren't getting any credit. Yeah. And anime and movies, this on TV shows, there's a ton of fucking people working on those things. And we always just talk about like the one person, right? Yeah. But they, she said in the post credit interview that like, yeah, you also draws 100% of the storyboards themselves, which I think Satoshi Kone was also that way. Right. And it's like, oh, okay. I guess I can pretty much give you the credit for this whole fucking thing, right? As, you know, obviously you, you're not fully responsible for every aspect of it. But in terms of, you know, the, the overwhelming majority of the creative input was at your direction. And from your mind, you are the primary author of this work by far. So I will give you most of the credit for that, right? But going further, not feel too bad, but I felt this before, but now that we've done, now that the track record is basically batting a thousand, science Saru is a really important force in anime. Oh yeah. I still wonder if they're overworking their people, but more so, you know, in the bad anime industry way. But on young made a really interesting point. They have like less than 100 people. They founded the studio basically to make that adventure time episode. And then they made everything. But all the things they made, the rare in that they make both feature films and television. And she talked about how that's how they can have a development pipeline to give up incoming people in the animation industry the ability to like try directing and try like someone can like be the episode director for something and not like risk ruining a movie. Yeah. When you look at other anime studios, the vast majority of them seem to either be in the TV business or the movie business and sometimes video game cut. But by having both they're getting what the anime industry started to lose in Japan. If you look at all the greats we talk about and you look at like the works over their lives, they all started as like key animation for episode four of like Gundam. Right. But it's like, you know, I guess Madhouse made movies and TV shows. Yeah. But it's like Ghibli only makes movies. Is there a Ghibli TV show? I haven't seen one. But she specifically pointed out that they do it because it lets them have the freedom to have their own internal development pipeline. Right. It's like you're some new person or you're lower in the totem pole. We're not going to let you make a movie. Right. The movies are serious biz. But you can have a lot more creative input on the TV shows. Right. I don't think, you know, you also is hand drawing every storyboard for every TV episode. Yeah. But we'll trust someone else to draw a storyboard baby. So other people can express their ideas, you know, something like at the Tommy Galaxy or the new show that I watched one episode of that I'm going to watch more. Keep your hands off Azokin. Yeah. Keep your hands off Azokin. It's their new show. Right. And it's like there's a lot of opportunity for other creators in the studio to have a lot of creative input on those TV shows and prove that they're good enough and maybe then work on a movie later if they're, you know, they stand out. But still, they said there's less than a hundred people working there making all this stuff. I don't know. That doesn't sound like a... So they got another film coming called You Knew Oh. It's supposed to premiere in 2021. It doesn't even have a Wikipedia page yet. Okay. So maybe they're taking a little break now. Is there any movie they made after Ride Your Wave? Not according to Wikipedia. Okay. And yeah, TV shows, they're making a ton. Right. Yep. So there you go. Science Saru, like just keep an eye on them. If you see Science Saru make anything, you should pretty much go see it. I haven't seen a bad thing that they've made. I feel like if we were younger and still like boisterous, like kids going to anime cons, we'd be doing that sofas dance around a con at least once. Oh, the sofas dance replacing the Naruto walk. Yep. The Naruto run whatever. Yeah, I gotta watch that again. I saw that one time. So go see this movie. This has been Geek Nights with Brim and Scott special. Thanks to DJ Pretzel for the opening music. Cat Lee for web design and brand okay for the logos. Be sure to visit our website at front row crew dot com for show notes, discussion news, and more. Remember Geek Nights is not one but four different shows. SciTech Mondays, Gaming Tuesdays, Anime Comic Wednesdays, and Indiscriminate Thursdays. Geek Nights is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Geek Nights is recorded live with no studio and no audience, but unlike those other late shows.