AjinWeek22: Day 3, Yellow/(Satou squad)

Brobm drew a gift for Gen <3

IBM Week Day 4

For this event I decided to make a series of drawings à la volume covers.

Takahashi and BroBM!

"... man is not truly one, but two." ~ Robert Louis Stevenson https://www.instagram.com/p/BroBM-UHpd0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=13dgx0b08lul

Ajin Live Action Movie --FULL SPOILERS-- (may also include spoilers for the Ajin manga and anime)

Table of Contents:

1. Overall verdict

2. Plot summary

3. Detailed plot (coming later)

4. Other thoughts

5. Thoughts about each character (long)

6. Final status of each character (summarized)

--under a cut because of spoilers and length--

1. Overall verdict: Good. My friends liked it a lot too!!! (Two of them had seen the entire anime, and the other one had only seen the first two episodes.)

SPOILERS BELOW, LAST WARNING

2. Plot summary:

-(I was late and missed the first few minutes of the movie, but I’m guessing Kei gets hit by the truck and gets taken to the lab.)

-Satou comes to rescue Kei, Kei escapes, Satou makes his announcement.

-The nice lady in the countryside looks out for Kei. 

-Izumi comes to question Eriko but Tanaka attacks. 

-Kei goes to the hospital and gets Eriko to come with him to the old lady’s house.

-Satou flies a plane into a building and gathers his team of ajin.

-Angry mob of villagers comes to the old lady’s house, and Kei and Eriko run away, wandering around the city. (No one appears to notice them.) Kei decides he and Tosaki need to join forces.

-manga version of the Forge arc

-Final battle between Kei and Satou on the helipad. 

-Satou and Kei are both blasted with dry ice, frozen, and smashed into tiny ice bits, but Kei regenerates from a leftover hand, and it’s implied in a trailer scene that Satou has also regenerated. 

3. VERY DETAILED plot summary:

Coming soon, it’s taking me forever. :|  May be in a separate post. 4. Other thoughts –WOOD. CHIPPER. SCENE. – The entire Forge arc is very close to the manga version!! –There were a few Kei lines and Satou lines that were delivered in pretty much the same voice (tone of voice) as in the anime, though, that was pretty cool. –It was neat that Miyano Mamoru voiced Kei's IBM, too, since that's the same as the anime. – Apparently Polygon Studios did the animation for the IBMs!! I thought they looked pretty good.  They were vaguely color-coded so Izumi's and Kei's were slightly bluer, and Tanaka and Satou's were slightly red. (We didn't see BroBM or Okuyama's at all, not much of a surprise there) –YouTube dude: In the attempts to imitate the original story and include the media as a significant factor, a random YouTuber popped up a few times to serve as a public reaction to the news. This is significant to me because I just get this feeling that Shinya is hiding out somewhere and using YouTube to make a living...  but you can ignore me. They did briefly use the last name Nakamura for a separate news anchor. –There were a few spots that were even more pointedly violent than the manga, which surprised me. When Satou took on the SAT, [also omg I heard a really good pun in there, it was 'satto owaru', as in 1. Satou 2. SAT and 3. satto (I'll finish them off -quickly-)], at one point he grabbed a guy for shelter, regenerated, held a knife to the guy's throat, pulled out a grenade, stuck it under the guy's riot helmet, and then shoved him into his teammates where it exploded. They also had Kei cut off his hand for the decoy in the lab like the manga, vs. the anime leaving his shoes or something. And they had Satou fly the plane into the building... that's still hard to watch coming from the U.S. after 9/11.  They didn't show Satou on the plane at all, only after it had crashed. –I was rewatching some episodes of the anime with the friend who hadn’t seen it, and the action scenes when Satou comes to rescue Kei from the facility last for longer screen time in the live action than the anime. The action was definitely a focus.  There was also a cool background song that played at three(?) points in the movie (major action scenes), which started with the spoken words “Three, two, one, start! [enter action scene].” 5. Thoughts about each character: Kei: Kei felt a little lame to me. I think they did subdue Kei’s character a little bit. My friend that didn't like him for being a jerk in the anime did like him a little better in the movie.  As a fan of the K boys in the series, it did make me kinda sad, but overall I think the movie captured got the essence of the series without the details, so I'm pretty happy with it.  I felt a little bad for Takeru Satoh because I don’t think it was his best role. (I really enjoyed Ruroni Kenshin and Bakuman but Kei wasn’t a very expressive character, and not even that interesting when you tone him down a bit.) Eriko: She had freckles!  She was really cute!  And not quite as antagonistic towards Kei as in the manga/anime. Still somewhat antagonistic, but not as much. Her hair braids were thinner than I was expecting. Izumi: Izumi was perfect so that's all that really matters. Nothing more to say here, she was just badass and cute and didn’t get wrapped up in any unnecessary romantic relationships. If anything I really liked her interactions with Eriko. Tosaki: He get his 30 seconds of mints and saying "It's Tosaki, not Tozaki" – in general they kept in some small things like that that are particularly recognizable traits of the characters in Ajin, so that was nice.  They didn’t give Tosaki any sympathy.  Tosaki looked at Izumi laying on the floor with a knife in her stomach and said "I thought you were the one who was supposed to protect me" after he had to step in to help her fight Tanaka, so yeah, he still felt like a complete asshole.  I don’t think Tosaki was the one who sent Kei to the lab, but Kei comes and offers to work with them after neither of them have any more options (and the discussion is carried out in a much less tense situation than in the manga/anime). Kei still threatens to use his IBM to kill his fiancée if anything goes wrong. At some point Izumi comments that it’s unusual to see Tosaki working with anyone, and (I believe) he says that they have no other choice. Hirasawa: He wasn’t bald?  This was the only thing that bothered me ^^;  The other three gulf squad members were there and they looked vaguely like Manabe, Kuroki, and Suzumura, but not enough to tell who was who. Satou: I normally root for Kei, so it made me feel like I was watching it through the eyes of a Satou fan– Satou and his squad were super cool (I mean, I'll concede that they are in all forms of the story, but Satou was definitely the focus of this movie.) Satou being played by a younger actor was not a problem at all. He TOTALLY had the Satou atmosphere down. I had no objections whatsoever to that. About how old he is and whether he's American, they really didn't get into that at all. I think the movie did a good job at covering the basics, but they did have to leave out a lot to fit it within the time frame.  I was glancing through the movie pamphlet and I think in the director's interview it said they got Satou's actor to talk a little faster to help cut down the time XD Oh, but one of the small changes that felt huge to me was, so you know how they said Tanaka was only in the facility for 2 years? They said that Satou was in for 20, all the way from when he was an infant to when he was a young man. (Aka, sympathy points for Satou that he absolutely does not require.) Tanaka: Tanaka is way more competent, he can fly a drone and shoot VERY accurately. He’s made out not to be sympathetic. He doesn’t hesitate to shoot humans. We never get a scene where he and Izumi exchange memories. Takahashi/Gen: Takahashi and Gen were perfect and hilarious. They were being silly in the van before Forge, but I didn't see any drugs. (Maybe I didn't notice them, or them didn't have the time to make it a point...) Gen mostly served as the gunman to reset Takahashi and Tanaka. Okuyama: Okuyama still has his limp, and it even seems more severe because they have him using a wheelchair, although he can still move around with a cane.   6. Final status of each character: (MAY ALSO CONTAIN MANGA AND ANIME SPOILERS) Kei: Revived and likely still on the run Eriko: Safely back in the hospital? (I forget...) Izumi and Tosaki: still alive and still on the Ajin Management Committee Hirasawa and gulf squad: dead Satou: implied revived Tanaka: probably in custody of the Ajin Management Committee; unclear Takahashi, Okuyama: see Tanaka Gen: see Tanaka, and was never definitively killed and revived (could be human) Kai, Kou, Kotobuki, Ogura, Naomi Li, Almeida/Myers, Akiyama(firefighter), Sokabe, Shinya/Yuusuke: never in the movie When you look at the status of the characters, there’s no conclusive ending, but somehow or other the movie felt like it had resolved things by the end. That’s it!  I’m happy to take questions to fill out anything I missed, so just send me an ask~  I hope the movie becomes available internationally soon!