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I'm not sure as I write it if I'm going to end up calling this Bugmaster, or Mushishi. As is often the case, we have one title on the sleeve, and then a totally different title on the actual disc. Now, as it happens, one of these titles is correct, and the other is a terrible babblefish sort of thing which is totally misleading and embarrassing to everyone involved. Which I end up going with is going to depend on how good the movie ends up being. Off the bat, the score's kinda tied. Ginko's eye is the wrong color, but we've just got a didgeridoo in place of the totally jarring American pseudo-folk ballad from the anime series.
So yeah. I should kinda bring you up to speed here. This is the live action movie adaptation of an anime/manga series I'm generally quite a fan of, but have never really managed to talk anyone else into watching/reading, mainly because the premise is really freaking hard to convey. I'm going to be sitting here for a while watching something I've basically already seen though, and it's pretty slow paced, so I'm going to have to give it a try. Basically, we've got these things called mushi. And what they are is pretty much like... OK, picture faeries. The sort where you need the E in there. Just weird little magical forest critters, they pretty much keep to themselves like painting dewdrops and making rainbows and sometimes maybe like, putting someone to sleep for a thousand years or stealing a baby or whatever, just magical unknowable little weirdos. You've got your head around that, right? OK, now try and picture them having an evolutionary chain like anything else does. Trace it back a ways, and you've got like, I don't know. Magic dragonflies. They aren't intelligent or anything, they just like, feed off the laughter of children and fart rainbows and are otherwise pretty much just dragonflies. Now go even farther back to that, so you're just dealing with single celled life pretty much, and branch out a little to the point where you've got like, magical amoebas and mold spores, maybe some magical ferns or something but really that's about it. So all those super simple life forms you're picturing now that have weird magical qualities but totally don't have any sort of central nervous system or whatever? Those are mushi. The setting is pretty much the real world, Japan, circa like... I don't know, 1790 or something? Totally pre-westernization, generally a bunch of fishermen in rickety shacks starving getting wiped out by landslides and floods every other day, that sort of deal. Except mushi exist. Which... eh, doesn't really change all that much generally. They're fairly benign for the most part, play their roles in the ecology, often have beneficial effects on things.
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So then we've got our main character here, Ginko. He's a mushishi. The extra Shi is for "Person who studies" in this case. Basically, he's a traveling doctor who specializes in illnesses caused by mushi. So take, for instance, these things we're dealing with off the bat in the movie. They're basically these snail looking things that eat sound. So normally they live in echo-y caves, but in the winter when everything's covered in snow and things are hibernating, it gets too quiet for them, so they find animals with ears they can crawl into to hide out and eat whatever sounds they're making. Which makes you deaf in one ear, which is annoying, but you can just make this special kinda tea and it clears'em right out. Then there's another kind of weird little magic snaily thing that has some odd symbiotic relationship with them, but is way way more rare, which eat all the silence that's left after the other ones eat all the noise. So if you've got one of them afflicting you, you end up with sounds just crazy amplified and echoing in your head constantly. And there's this rather nifty fable-y life lesson-y deal that resolves that whole thing in the source material but... the movie just kinda over-abbreviated it and turned it into Ginko just smashing some poor kid's only memento of her dead mother like a jerk. Here's hoping that isn't the trend going through here. Anyway though yeah, it's an episodic anthology sort of setup, where every episode is pretty much an original fable, where Ginko wanders into some town, deals with some weird mushi caused malady, and we learn something groovy about not taking life for granted or something.
Anyway, botched ending or not, they picked a really good one to start things off with. Moving on to the second episode we're dealing with, oh hey, it's the one that explains most of the weird stuff there is to explain about Ginko. When he was a little kid, he orphan, which, in this setting, and I suppose this point in real world history too for that matter, is pretty frelling commonplace, because I so wasn't kidding about people being killed in sudden floods and landslides constantly. So after wandering around and almost starving to death, he met this hermit of a mushishi who was dedicated to studying and warning people away from the two species of mushi that live in this one pond. One is pretty malevolent really, and just kind of engulfs you, eats away all your personal memories, and actually outright kills you if you can't manage to remember some name to call yourself, at which point you still lose your identity, and just kinda have to start a new life with whatever name you kept in mind and all your practical knowledge intact. The other kind, called ginko by the way, show up at dawn and eat the memory eating kind, which is generally a good deal, but also basically emit magical radiation which, with prolonged exposure, pretty much turns you into an albino with one green eye and one empty eye socket, and eventually also kills you. Being an annoying clingy sort of kid, he kinda hung around long enough to get hit with the nasty effects of exposure to both. So... he has no memories of his childhood, looks pretty weird, and has some kind of weird magical cancer that could kill him any minute, but he's a pretty frelling laid back dude and he doesn't let it bother him at all. He just kinda shrugs and accepts that as his lot in life and does the whole traveling doctor thing... in the anime series. In the movie here we're kinda dwelling on that and otherwise making things more unpleasant in general than I am accustomed. Yeah, I think I'm going to end up calling this Bugmaster. The other odd things about Ginko are that he's constantly smoking what is eventually revealed to be general purpose mushi repelling incense, and he totally dresses like some present day fashion conscious sort of dude, which is really freaking distracting... but not the case in the movie here. So yeah, I'm not complaining about that. The style of his clothing in the anime series is just really weird and never explained in any way.
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Moving along, next we've got the bit where there's these nasty looking writhing strings of text that generally don't seem like something you want to have crawling all over your walls and such, but you can kinda yank them off with a pen and slap them down on scrolls and... you know, I totally forgot what the general moral of this bit was because again, this movie is rather alarmingly hacking the morals off. In show form, all these little stories generally end on some positive life affirming sort of note, but in the movie we've just got weird problems for a while, and then they're wrapped up and we move on. And it's not like it's a matter of not having the time for them. This is still really really laid back and slow paced, and HOLY #@$% 2 HOURS AND 48 MINUTES? OK, I don't know if I'm actually going to be able to get through this thing. That is a crazy amount of time to pour into watching a sub-par adaptation of something that sticks close enough to the source material that all that can surprise me are the disappointments. Nobody's going to mind if I just rattle off what other storylines this randomly dumps in and botches then ending of right? I mean, morbid curiosity about that is really all there is to care about from my perspective here.
So let's see. We've got the whole inverted rainbow obsession guy bit... we've got.... Ginko's mentor lady there turning up again as like, some kind of angst-ridden crazy zombie? Uh... no? That totally isn't in the original series? I mean, it might be a thing that happens later in the manga after the series was made, but.... I really really doubt it, that's totally not a Mushishi sort of plotline, at all. And... oh. That's it actually. He finds her, she goes all crazy, she dies, he goes and brings her body back to the lake she used to live by, he wanders off, that's it.
OK so yeah. That sucked. I mean, in a vacuum I guess it's OK? The basic premise/setting is conveyed pretty well, and the look of everything is pretty good except for Ginko's terrible wig and lack of anachronistic clothes but... the point? Totally missed. Turns out this movie is by the guy who did Akira though, so, I guess it fits the pattern... or it would if not for the fact that it's not that visually impressive... while the anime is. Like, really really gorgeous backgrounds. This isn't even a good example. So go hunt down the actual series. I hope I've at least kinda gotten across what makes it neat by blathering on here.
