It’s amazing the things one can pull out of a pair of shorts.

I had the thought that when you had a tv show or a movie with a small budget, you make sure that you don’t try to overreach and make the movie look shitty. I guess I was wrong, as all of Japan hasn’t heard this message. It’s not like this is everywhere in film/tv, but there are some examples where special effects were used and it just doesn’t seem to fit. And again, this isn’t exactly uncommon in other places of the world as well (Polar Express sticks out as being slightly unnerving). There are two prime examples of this that have occurred recently in Japan, three movies, Gegege no Kitaro, and Death Note 1 and 2, and one tv show, Deer Man.

Now the Death Note movies did have high production values and the special effects were ok, but they never really seem to fit at any time during the movies. It’s quite hard to tell this in stills, but there is a youtube movie that shows some parts with the shinigami (死神 lit: death god), muting your computer is slightly recommended.

This could have been a conscious choice to make the shinigami feel like they never fit in the world, but I have a suspicion that this is just not the case here. I’m really not sure why they didn’t do what is done in a lot of other movies with characters that occur often, but look… odd. Ron Perlman has made a career by wearing tons of make-up and heavy costumes; can it be true that there is no one like this in Japan? Anyway, intentional or not, the shinigami stick out as aberrations on the cellulose.

This is how you do creatures.

Deer Man is a tv show here about a teacher who, somehow, can talk with some deer in Nara. The show is pretty normal most of the time, but at some points he is talking directly to deer. This is a tv show with a moderate budget, so what way do you think they handled the problem of this teacher talking with deer? You probably have some good ideas of how to do this: do the old Mr. Ed trick, make the speech be telepathic, put the camera behind the deer, etc. What did the director/producer decide on? A shitty animatronic deer that can’t move (go to 3:00 to see what I mean). “Then what do they do if the deer has to move?”, you might say (and the deer does move). They use a variety of methods that often look shitty.

Their special effects go further than just the deer. There’s some kind of monster below ground that is making earthquakes. Instead of not showing it and making it more mysterious, they make a bad cgi version of it. Why did they do any of this? There was no reason whatsoever that made them have to use special effects (or a shitty mechanical deer). They could’ve saved all the money they spent on that one deer and could’ve bought many more hookers than they did.

Unnecessary.

There is a link between all of these, they were originally in print form with the majority being manga. Manga and anime are a less restricted in what they can pull off, because of the medium in which they are made. The shinigami in the manga/anime fit much better than their film brethren, same with Gegege no kitaro. When you have something like these which are hard to do because of the content, you have to take liberties with the story and also realize that sometimes less is more.

Then again, sometimes you can use a low budget to your advantage. An upcoming movie, Machine Girl, doesn’t have a big budget, but it still manages to look awesome. Likewise, a pilot on BBC3 called Phoo Action has a small budget but does great things with the little money that it had.

The villain’s head is a basketball? I’m there.

This can all be boiled down into a couple important phrases, one of which was said best by one of our recent Secretaries of War, “You have to [make a movie] with the [budget] that you have, not the [budget] you want.” It’s all about attitude, you can’t have small budget effects and still carry the same attitude as blockbusters, it just doesn’t work.