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Jûichi-nin iru!

Jûichi-nin iru! (1986) Movie Poster
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Japan  •    •  91m  •    •  Directed by: Satoshi Dezaki, Tsuneo Tominaga.  •  Starring: Akira Kamiya, Michiko Kawai, Hideyuki Tanaka, Toshio Furukawa, Tesshô Genda, Hirotaka Suzuoki, Norio Wakamoto, Michihiro Ikemizu, Kôzô Shioya, Tarako, Tsutomu Kashiwakura, Steve Blum, Dorothy Elias-Fahn.  •  Music by: Dan Oikawa.
     A group of students from the Cosmo Academy are about to take their final exam: surviving for over fifty days in a derelict ship. But when they arrive, they discover that instead of ten students, there are eleven. One of them doesn't belong there.

Trailers:

   Length:  Languages:  Subtitles:
 3:28
 
 

Review:

Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Image from: Jûichi-nin iru! (1986)
Juuichinin Iru gained some fame along the years for being one of a kind movie, at least when it comes to anime. It has an amazing setting and premise consisting of ten people from different galaxies, planets, and races taking a final exam on a spaceship in order to graduate from a space academy and the situation goes out of control when they realize that there are actually eleven people so they will have to find out who is the infiltrator.

The biggest issue with this movie is its short duration, is only one hour and a half long so there's no time to explore its vast setting and so many characters properly. Some of them have a bit of their backgrounds and motivations revealed but the viewer will only get the names out of the majority of them. Only a few get some development and since the movie is too short, it feels more like they were rewritten instead of having a natural and progressive change. Their personalities and interactions, though, are strong; everyone is completely different in behavior and they need to work together and use their different knowledge and skills in order to surpass difficult situations such as having to deactivate bombs planted on the spaceship or fix said spaceship's computers and it never feels like someone is useless, they are all capable people about to graduate after all.

The production values are good for the time the movie came out, the character designs are very simple and, few aside, they all have a generic look from a shoujo manga (this movie is an adaptation of one after all). The motions are weird, it can be excused in the beginning since they were in space but for the rest of the movie, it just feels like the characters' movements are really slow, to the most part at least. There are noticeable quality drops and the special effects are poor as well. When it comes to body language though, the film does a good job, especially in its comical situations, but the best part of this department are definitely the backgrounds, the space academy, the space station, the spaceship, its different levels, the computers, etc.; as expected from a 80's anime movie, everything that has to do with mechanical designs looks great.

As for the sound department, it is ok, nothing really special when it comes to voice acting or music, and the sound effects are rather weak.

On the second half is when the film starts to feel rushed; all of a sudden the characters' motivations change for something completely different with extreme ease and the mystery is resolved in the laziest way possible, with asspulls and no foreshadowing of who was the eleventh at all, even the presentation of the outcomes of the characters is lazy, still images with short descriptions under them, as if it was a videogame from that time. Hell, it even has a completely pointless and out of place food war in the middle.

It's not a bad movie, it's actually watchable and enjoyable and definitely better than that failure of a closed door mystery that was Rokka no Yuusha, but it is not even a shadow of what could have been if it was a series and could explore its characters and setting properly.


Review by nanoalba from the Internet Movie Database.

 

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Jan 5 2017, 03:23