I bet you guys thought I’d forgotten all about this column. I’ve just been too busy to sit down and watch a documentary for about a month. But I’m back with it and have a queue full of exciting fandom related documentaries to watch!

My most recent foray into fandom documentary was through Monster Camp, a 2007 film directed by Cullen Hoback. In the context of the film, “Monster Camp” is a multi-day LARPing (Live Action Role Playing) adventure in Seattle. Hoback followed a handful of LARPers as they prepared for different camp visits and went adventuring over a year.

I didn’t have very high expectations coming into the film. Most people consider LARPing, where you essentially run around acting like a Dungeons & Dragons character or monster, as something just for kids. I figured there was a pretty high chance that I would be cringing for the LARPers as they embarrassed themselves on film.

However, I admire the director’s approach to interviews. The first few interviews of the film involve campers gently, slowly (as if they’ve had to do this for many incredulous non-LARPers hundreds of times) explaining the intricacies of LARP. From there, interviews get more personal as each camper discusses what Monster Camp means to them. Once the confusion of the concept is out of the way, and the average person realizes it’s an escape rather than a wacky lifestyle, it’s a lot easier to relate to the interview subjects. The interviews neither glorify LARP nor belittle the LARPers- they show individuals, not a type. They are simply genuine portrayals of people sharing what they love with the audience.

Cinematography wise, there was nothing fancy going on here. No sleek graphics and stats, no thoughtful camera angles. Sometimes when the filmmakers shot the campers running around playing games in the dark, the scene almost appeared to have been shot as home video. It reminded me of playing Capture the Flag as a teenager during summer evenings. The film style is as down-to-earth and basic as the interviews, leading to an authentic, relatable, even compassionate portrayal of the campers.

In closing, Monster Camp is an example of what happens when you’re able to throw all your assumptions away and let those being documented speak for themselves.

Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)

Cinematography: ★★★

Content: ★★★★★

You can watch Monster Camp on Netflix or Netflix Streaming.

Here’s something you wouldn’t expect from a documentary with an exclamation point at the end of the title: a dull movie.

Last night I watched Otaku Unite! (Eric Bresler, 2004), a movie that works great on paper. With a well researched premise encompassing dozens of conventions, archived footage of early anime events and shows, interviews with prominent anime scholars, the director of Robotech, and voice actors for shows spanning from Akira to Speed Racer, how could it possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, this movie seems to sap away the the lively personalities and colorful characters that populate anime fandom and leave us with a lecture.

As smart as this guy was, he didn’t register as a personality. This film needed more characters.

It isn’t all bad. By making the rise of anime in America sound like a history lesson, it rejects the idea that otaku are somehow unusual and normalizes the fandom as just another cultural movement. But how could a documentary with everything it needs to succeed end up boring?

The first thing that appears in the film is a parody of a rating screen: “Rated O for otaku of all ages.” Based on this, I wrongly assumed that the documentary was designed for a niche audience of self-identified anime fans. However, much of the movie went into defining the nuances of anime is for the benefit of outsiders.

It’s interesting to see how Otaku Unite! defines “otaku.” (Remember how Manga Mad did it?)

Much of the movie is static interviews with the same experts. While they have a lot of great information about how anime in America came to be, we never get to know them or care about them at all (one sad attempt was to show how the Akira voice actor deeply.. appreciated Hooters restaurants). There is no plot to the movie, no change, no story being told. (There wasn’t even much uniting- it seemed that the title should have been: Otaku Already United!) I learned a lot about the history of otaku fandom that I didn’t know, but at the end I still felt like I wasted seventy-five minutes.

Correction by Tom S. – Katsucon 2004 made a cameo.

I’ve heard incredible things about this movie and I’m sure a lot of you are going to disagree with my review (most notably Lawrence Eng, whose name is on the credit roll!) I WISH I liked this movie more, because it was so darn well researched. If only well done equaled not boring.

Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)

Cinematography: ★★★

Content: ★★

You can watch Otaku Unite! on Netflix like I did, or watch right now at The Anime Network.

Another week, another documentary, and I am happy to say that this week’s pick was considerably better. This time I watched Second Skin (2008), directed by Juan Carlos Pineiro Escoriaza. You can watch this film on Netflix Instant Queue.

I was immediately impressed with the cinematography of this film, but truth be told, anything would look good after last week’s doc. After a while of watching the same sort of quality shots (both interview and B-roll) that I learned to aspire to in my introduction to filmmaking class, I realized that while they were expertly maneuvered, they were really just average. An example of what I’m talking about: an interview with a video game addiction rehabilitator that positions her head between icons of Jesus and Mary, B roll of the shopping cart wheels while some gamers buy soda and snacks.

What really puts the visuals of the film above and beyond is the use of handy and gorgeously done infographics that explain to the viewer- in a crisp and straight-to-the-point style- the facts and figures of the film. Instead of trying to tell viewers how many WoW gamers consider themselves addicted, we are shown a jarring visual instead.

The story is powerful, but- as several reviewers put it- incredibly bleak. Let’s face it- Second Skin is downright depressing. As we watch the gamers World of Warcraft away their lives, we cringe for them. “Go outside!” we want to tell them. This film focuses entirely on gamers stuck more in their virtual worlds than the real one. Some have a legitimate reason; the depiction of severely handicapped people who find new purpose in life through their avatars was especially touching. But my complaint remains: there are no portrayals of people who identify themselves as “moderate” gamers.

While it’s not bad to make a depressing film, I think that the misery here is unnecessarily harped upon. Sure, video game addiction is a serious illness, and some people need to get help. But not all people who play video and computer games spend a whopping 8 hours a day in front of their console, like the people shown in this film. While I understand this isn’t as interesting a subject for a movie, the director needs to represent more types of gamers.

Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)

Cinematography: ★★★1/2

Content: ★★★

NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, I had to dip into an earlier backup and lost all comments on this post. Feel free to rewrite your comment… or write something entirely new!

Welcome to a new weekly feature on my blog. In preparation for my latest documentary on fandom, I am watching (at least) one documentary on the subject every week.

This past week I watched Manga Mad, a 2008 documentary by Ray Castle that you can watch on Hulu. I hate to start this column on a negtive note, but if you’ve watched at least five minutes into the film, you can see what I mean when I say that the film was an excellent example of what not to do.

Just one of the unsettling captions in Manga Mad.

The first thing that struck me about the film was the jarring cinematography. In what must have taken ages in a video editor, the screen seems to switch from one manga cover to the next every few seconds. The camera is shaky and pans in, out and side to side in a way that made me nauseous. The same footage was reused over and over- something I learned in my basic film making class never to do.

Sound was poorly executed in this documentary. The nature of the subject involved a lot of interviews with Japanese native speakers, but the voice over translation was barely understandable. The translator was himself a native speaker and his accent was difficult for Western ears to comprehend. The interviews needed subtitles. The music was no better. With the same repetitive clips used over and over during the jarring visual montages of one second shots, I felt dizzy.

What disappointed me most about this film was the content, which was not only difficult to follow but, to me, insulting. Castle’s assertions that manga is all about sexuality (more than half of the film consisted of unnecessary and unsavory stills of cartoon porn) and its readers are social outcasts were short sighted and poorly defended. Shame on Castle, who should know very well that manga genres and readers are far more varied than that.

I have taken out a still from the film that particularly bothered me (above.) Yes, it’s true that manga fans in Japan are still considered on the fringe. The Japanese media nervously reports on violent criminals who watch anime the same way the American media reports on violent criminals who play video games. However, by the time this film was made, it was long established that the otaku stereotype does not truly reflect today’s otaku, who are usually ordinary individuals who happen to enjoy anime and manga (and yes, I consider myself one). I think that Castle is mistaking his portrayal of otaku for hikikomori, or shut-ins (Link goes to a great story on the subject from The New York Times).

For a far more in depth analysis of the otaku stereotype problem, I highly reccomend otaku scholar Lawrence Eng’s academic paper, “The current status of “otaku” and Japan’s latest youth crisis.” But as for Manga Mad, don’t expect to get any insight into fandom here.

Lauren’s Rating (out of five stars)

Cinematography: ★

Content: ★