Web Work Review: Kung Fu Cooking Girls

So I was trolling around deviantART one day and I read about this animated short called "BatMan in Shanghai", made for the DC Nation Shorts. It's title pretty much describes what it is: an alternate-universe Batman tale set in 1930s Shanghai, in which versions of Catwoman, Bane, and Batman fight over some scroll. And it was good. But then I heard the same team who made it, who call themselves Wolf Smoke Studios, did this other animated short called "Kung Fu Cooking Girls", which is also a more or less a case of Exactly What It Says On The Tin. And it was good. But it got me thinking a lot more than the other one, so please indulge me this opportunity to vomit the contents of my over-active mind.

Having a running time of about six minutes, not including credits, the plot of this video is simple enough. A traveller walks into a village, discovers himself to be hungry, and is called upon by two rival food vendors. One is a Chinese girl selling dim sum (shrimp-filled dumplings), and one is an Occidental (presumably American) girl selling sub sandwiches. They compete to get his attention, only to forget about the man and fight each other directly. Eventually they forget all about the man, who crawls over to yet another restaurant, and finally gets something to eat as the catfight rages on until the credits roll. This sort of love-triangle story archetype is a dime a dozen, something you might find in rom-com anime like Ranma 1/2 or Tenchi Muyo!. Essentially, this tale teaches the moral that if you keep trying to one-up other people, you'll lose sight if what's really important, in this case, doing business with a customer. But by presenting a conflict of East versus West, it permits me to inject my own crazy interpretations, so let's have at it.

The Chinese girl, heretofore referred as Girl Number One in a vague Lonely Island reference, certainly lives up to the expectations set up by the title of this film. She uses kung fu in her cooking: first she throws the shrimp fillings in the air and, with lightning-fast reflexes, catches them in their buns, and to top it off, she cooks them by levitating the basket in a sphere of chi. Simply awesome. I do love a girl with huge... talents. (And I meant that both literally and as a Sailor Moon in-joke.) The Western girl (Girl Number Two) is certainly overshadowed in this department (although her speed at assembling that sandwich is nothing to sneeze at), but she makes up for it in sex appeal, all but flirting with her potential customer (why not call him Steve, just to wrap up the "Just 2 Guyz" reference) in a getup lifted from Gurren Lagann's Yoko. Not that Girl Number One is lacking in this aspect either; I'm guessing she doesn't have a bra under that apron-top-thingie. Regardless, Girl Number One calls Girl Number Two out on this, and on the lack of technical skill in preparing her food. Meanwhile, what sort of smack can Girl Number Two talk about Girl Number One's food? That it's not worth feeding to the pigs. Well, that's just your problem, lady. The way I see it, responding to objective criticism with a subjective insult is just petty. And at the end of it all, the two girls expend all that energy and waste all that food (as complained by "Steve" himself), only for "Steve" to find another place to eat altogether. It's tempting as a viewer to emotionally latch on to either of the two girls, but in the end "Steve" is the protagonist, so it's nice to see his conflict (read: hunger) resolved.

So based on what I just described, the inferrence to draw would be that the Chinese take greater care in not just the preparation of food, but everything they do, whereas their Western counterparts just don't understand the tradition and diligence that goes into making great works, right? Well, it's not that simple, and in fact it falls apart if we were to apply it to real-world macroeconomics. As I have been led to believe, America and allies have been doing most of the industrial innovation in the past few years, as opposed to China being ripe with cheap production labour. Granted, that role has the potential to change -- the quite likely potential, at that -- so we can't apply that to the movie. Besides, it's not as if Girl Number Two is completely out of Girl Number One's league; when they fight each other directly, they're pretty much evenly matched, and their fight ends without conclusion.

But what if the behaviour of the girls could be a representation of Chinese and American mindsets about each other? As mentioned before, Girl Number One can get rather hot-tempered in her attempts to prove herself to "Steve" and Girl Number Two who, in turn, goes for sex appeal over technical skill in doing the same. This may, more plausibly, be seen as a commentary on the mentalities of China and America, both as nationalities and as people. Communist nationalism aside, it is imaginable that the Chinese, and for that matter many other peoples of the East, take offence at the heretofore unrestricted dominance the West has had over politics and culture over the past century or two. Meanwhile, the way in which Girl Number Two attempts to connect with "Steve" suggest that both the works America produces, along with the tastes of American consumers, are geared towards the lowest common denominator. Man, when I put it like that, I really come across as siding with Girl Number One, if not the Chinese as a whole. But who's to say Girl Number One really is better? It's never revealed, but is there possibly any talent she lacks but Girl Number Two possess? (Besides the obvious "talents".) See, this is why you should never draw these kinds of inferences without knowing the whole story.

Why am I telling you all this, especially if it may never even have been intended by its creators at all? Think about it: with China's economic power growing as it has been over the past few decades, the country stands to play a far bigger part in more than just the economic sector. What I mean is that we may soon encounter pieces of media that are not only produced, but conceived in China. Like this film, having been produced by a Shanghai-based studio. So as potential viewers of this media, we need to brace ourselves for what sorts of ideas will be presented therein. If you're worried about the next generation of the Red Scare, I wouldn't. Ever since the end of the Cold War, and the death of Mao Zedong before that, it feels like the Chinse government has become less concerned with spreading the Communist revolution than with just the usual amassment of riches. So we can expect more depictions of rivalries between China and the West, if not on an ideological level, then on economical or cultural terms.

But enough about the message that "Kung Fu Cooking Girls" may or may not be trying to promote; is it any good? Well, the plot is action-packed and concise, with no more main characters or minutes of running time than it needs to get its point across. Enough visual stylings are borrowed from Japanese anime for it to feel familiar, but are used just loosely enough to create a completely new aesthetic identity. The animation is a little sketchy, with roughly drawn outlines barely containing their colours, but for a short film produced by five people (not including music and voice acting), would you really expect a whole lot more? After all, they've got the frenetic pace of the fight scenes down pat, although considering the great Chinese tradition of martial-arts films, I can't say I'm surprised. But most importantly, I had fun and it made me think a little, which I for one value above all other qualities. The future of Chinese media is yet to be set in stone, but for now? Godspeed, Wolf Smoke Studios. Take the time to perfect your craft, and you may one day become animation's equivalent of Girl Number One.

The Call: 5 dim-sum out of 5 (A)

Manga Review: Spy Goddess vol. 2

Spy Goddess #2: The Quest for the Lance

• Publisher: Harper Collins / Tokyopop
• Writer: Michael P. Spradlin / Johanna Stokes
• Artist: Yifang Ling
• Release: 2009

One of the first reviews I ever posted on this site, and the first I'm actually satisfied with, was for the first volume of the Spy Goddess manga.  And it sucked.  Among its main problems were unlikeable main characters, choppy action flow, and plot holes you could drive the Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann through.  (And for the record, that's not just the (Japanese only!) title of that show, but also the ultimate final form of the heroic mecha.)  Even crazier, it was a continuation of a novel series - which only lasted two books.  Welp, when I snarked at the end of that review that the villain only escaped so they could make a sequel, I was right: I hold in my hands (in between unexpected bouts of typing) the sequel, The Quest for the Lance.  One thing I should point out before diving in is that the co-writer, Rachel Manjia Brown, was swapped out for a miss Johanna Stokes, who has a considerably thicker resume of comics and TV works including SyFy's Eureka, so we might get a decent plot out of this mother for once.  ...Why do I delude myself so.

I'll assume you're familiar with our cast of heroes (protagonist Rachel Buchanan, esper Pilar Jordan, tsundere Alex Scott, gadget guy Brent Christian, and boss Johnathan Kim), so if you're not, I'll wait a moment for you to read my review of the first book.  Moment over.  So the book starts off with Rachel cornering her arch-nemesis, Simon Blankenship, who believes himself to be the incarnation of Mithras, an evil Roman bull god.  Fittingly, Rachel is in turn imbued with the powers of the rival goddess Etherea, no matter how much she tries to deny it.  Rachel holds her own in what turns out to be a training session, except for the part about it being a stealth mission.

Mr. Kim calls the gang for a briefing session, where he reminds everyone of the plot... as in Simon's evil plot.  Apparently he needs seven artifacts for a resurrection ritual or something.  Pilar tells everyone that she has been doing some off-page research which points to one of the objects being hidden somewhere in Brazil.  Now, despite Brazil being the largest nation in South America, the team decides to start searching on Rio de Janeiro, because we all know that's the only city in Brazil!  False, it's not even the capital city, nor even the biggest.  And don't get me started on Buenos Aires...  Rachel's on board with the idea too, but as a vacation, not a mission.  Alex is shocked at her treating their momentous quest so lightly, so she snaps back at him and everyone else, justifying with the fact that she's risked life and limb directly fighting the Mithras faction multiple times before.  This could make a thought-provoking arguement; after all, in pretty much any other story you can think of, how much should the hero work before he or she loses it, physically or mentally?  But the arguement falls apart in this case, because she's only been in three incidents so far, and if the manga's poor action scenes are anything to go by, she's had a rather easy time of it.  Sorry, babe, wake me when you've had one of your limbs hacked off or your nether region of choice beaten for torture.  Besides, I don't know about you, readers, but Rachel comes across as more of a spoiled brat.

Rachel does her best to patch things up with her allies on the plane to Brazil and at their hotel, but rather than R&R at the beaches or markets, the team heads straight for a library to research leads on the Mithras artifacts.  Tensions flare up again as Rachel grows immaturely bored, and Pilar begrudgingly lets her leave.  She gets lost in the Carnaval looking for someone who speaks English, because as we all know, Carnaval goes on all the time in Rio!  False, it only lasts a week or two before Lent in February/March.  Then again, they do have a tendency to party it up every day of the year.  Also, I am thankful that the writers chose not to touch on the fact that Brazil doesn't speak Spanish, because it's been done.  Besides, what we did get instead (Rachel can't even speak English good well) was just as funny.  So, back on track, Rachel runs into this piece of eye candy named Renard (I call plot significance!).  They share a date at a burger restaurant, but get interrupted by Alex, who for once is not so much annoyed at Rachel dating (Alex is already going out with Pilar), but Rachel dating when she could be working.

Under the stress, Rachel breaks up her date with Renard, but not before he informs her of a ceremony taking place at a mountain called "Grito do Touro", Portugese for "Cry of the Bull".  The scene cuts to Pilar and the others struggling at the library, almost quitting over their lack of progress, until Rachel barges in and says she knows where the artifact do jour is located.  Umm... okay?  Since she doesn't tell her team where she's talking about on-panel, I have to say this knocked me for a loop.  Let's rewind: Mithras, both the god and the organisation, have a bull motif (ridiculously so, if you remember the fight scene at the end of the last book).  So, apparently she makes a connection with the first thing she hears with the word "bull" in it.  I mean, couldn't there possibly be more mountains in Brazil named after bulls, to say nothing of other types of landmarks?


So the squad goes on a little hiking trip to Grito do Touro, and sure enough they find a cave.  Cliches abound, including being faced with a branching path and Rachel falling down a hole.  But it's worth it; she encounters an ancient lance behind a barrier of light.  As she goes to take it, she suffers a brief flashback wherein the lance was first laid to rest by the Romans (I didn't know King Leonidas was Roman!) and the goddess Etherea set up the magical ward which, being her reincarnation, Rachel is more or less immune to.  As she walks out with the lance, Simon Blankenship rears his un-ugly head, shows that he has the rest of her team taken hostage and - surprise, surprise, I said in sarcasm mode - he used Renard to bait the trap.


After a bit of negotiations, Simon convinces Rachel to give him the lance in exchange for not putting a knife through Pilar's throat, but he just has his men shoot the gang with arrows anyway.  Just then, Rachel blocks the arrows with a wall of energy as she transforms into Etherea.  Now her destiny, eternally fighting with her immortal enemy Mithras will be fulfilled... with one energy blast.  Simon is down for the count, and for no reason Rachel has de-morphed and fainted.  With the villain brought into custody, the team departs Brazil and Rachel patches things up with her friends once and for all.  You are now free to close your book.

This second volume of the Spy Goddess manga is, I must admit, a marked improvement over its predecessor.  The plot holes are far less frequent, and I like their attempts at character development, even if I still didn't walk away necessarily rooting for our heroine.  The art direction is still a sore spot for this series; fight and action scenes lack decent flow, leading us to wonder if we had skipped a panel here and there.  (Let me answer that for you: you didn't.)  Even in non-action scenes, the artist relies too much on blank or pattern backgrounds, cheating us out of detail whenever possible.  Further props to the writers for not focusing on the more touristy aspects of Brazil, but I'd much rather take a vacation of my own to fill in the blanks.


Artwork: 1 lance out of 5
Plot: 2 lances out of 5
Characters: 1 lance out of 5
The Call: 50% (D)

Next Episode: It's almost the end of the year, so I thought it would be a good time to break out one of my most shocking reviews ever!

Manga Review: Spy Goddess vol. 1

Spy Goddess #1: The Chase for the Chalice

• Publisher: Harper Collins / Tokyopop
• Writer: Michael P. Spradlin / Rachel Manjia Brown
• Artist: Yifang Ling
• Release: 2008

Totally Spies! is one of my guilty pleasures.  It's stupid, and can't stand up to real spy fiction plot-wise, but those girls are hot! ^v^  You can expect a review of that show later, but for now, we get... Spy Goddess.  It's got some of the idiocy of TS!, none of the fanservice, and a host of its own problems.

Spy Goddess started out as a series of two novels written by Michael P. Spradlin, the first one released in January 2006.  This is the third book, and they already decided to switch to an OEL manga format.  Kinda jumping the gun there, are you?  The Artemis Fowl and Maximum Ride series had to wait at least twice as long before doing similar, to say nothing of actual street cred.  But Spradlin may not have been involved with this manga.  The script was written by Rachel Manija Brown, who wrote for several small boys' love manga titles, and the art is by Beijing-born Yifang Ling, AKA Rainbow Buddy.  She's gonna need a new alias once I'm through with this.

Our designated heroine is Rachel Buchanan.  In her backstory, she apparently got caught joyriding, and was given a choice of either going to juvenile hall or spy school Blackthorn Academy.  If you're expecting any sort of plot, not only will you be disappointed, but you could guess which one she took.  Oh, and she's a fashion-obsessed girl who sucks at martial arts - well, off and on anyway.  You call that a hero?

The equally unimpressive supporting cast includes:

• Pilar Jordan.  Is psychic, but not an awesome Psychic like in Sapphire.  What this means is she's prone to certain sixth-sense feelings.  It's an easy talent for the reader to forget about it - but don't, or else her scenes won't make sense.
• Alex Scott.  A frequently irate black-belt in tae kwon do, but he doesn't do much.
• Brent Christian.  The gadget guy, usually mute.  Also doesn't do much.
• Johnathan Kim.  Their boss.  A ninth-degree black-belt, not that he really does anyfighting for himself.  He actually has a good character design, a thirty-something with a thin beard, but said beard inexplicably shrinks throughout the book.  I never thought I'd see growing the beard in reverse. ^_^

The majority of this book takes place in Tokyo, Japan.  The problem with setting a story in a foreign location is the tendency to feel like a travel documentary with a plot attached.  I admit I fell into this trap, to some degree, while writing Sapphire, particularly Episode II which also takes place in Japan.  This can be done well, though, and make the setting that much more immersive.  But if the plot gets ignored, it tends gets overshadowed completely.  Our so-called heroes spend time shopping in Akihabara and Harajuku, eating at an Okonomiyaki restaurant (Okonomiyaki originated in Osaka, but it exists in all the big cities, so never mind), and soaking in a public bath before any of the real action starts.

In Tokyo, our five-man-band is joined by two Japanese investigators, Mrs. Kazumi Sato and Mr. Yoshi Tanaka, who are both blond... despite being of Asian descent.  Now I know about the whole Sailor Moon thing, but this here isn't that fantastical.  Yoshi arrives later, at the Okonomiyaki restaurant.  During the lunch, Rachel and Pilar have a private chat in the bathroom, where Pilar informs that she sensed an evil feeling during the shopping trip with Rachel and Kazumi.  They then proceed to steal Brent and Yoshi's PDAs to check for any incriminating messages.  Presumably on the latter, using the former to do the hacking.  It's never explained why they need the two, but with Brent on their team, I had to make that connection myself.

Now that we got all that out of the way, the plot supposedly involves a chalice stolen from a Tokyo museum of Roman artifacts.  The obvious choice of culprit is Simon Blankenship, the villain from the two novels who is convinced that he is a reincarnation of the evil Roman god Mithras.  And yes, he left a calling card in the form of a gold trinket.  I never got the idea of these calling card things.  The theft of the chalice was caught on security video, perpetrated by his anonymous horned-helmeted goons.  Look carefully and you'll see it's not even a chalice - literally, cup - that was stolen, but the thing is instead a vase.  But worst of all is that the thing is never mentioned again, and only shown in two more panels.  AND THIS THING'S PART OF THE FREAKING TITLE!!!

After leaving the museum, ruining her new outfit by falling in a koi pond, and being treated to a public bath, Rachel gets captured.  Some heroine.  Pilar investigates the room, discovers a couple of clues, and fingers the suspect...  Yoshi Tanaka!  What!?  It's not Kazumi?  Pilar had her sixth sense go off with her nearby, and in the baths, she even tipped off Rachel about the phony hair treatment where she would get abducted!  Okay, so that feeling was about another unnamed enemy spy, and Kazumi probably didn't know about the trap.  Again, I'm making that last part up myself.  But Yoshi is indeed a Mithrian, and manages to run away into the crowd.  But Alex tracks him down, having placed a tracking dot on him.  ...Or not.  The aforementioned Mithrian spy snuck a tracking dot onto Rachel's new trenchcoat, and during lunch we saw it again, still on the trenchcoat, but that's it.  There's nothing in this book even implicitly showing that Alex took the dot off and planted it on Yoshi, or even used a new one on him!!  ...I hope my anger's showing through in my writing, because this plot hole deserves it.

With that hangup out of the way, Rachel is introduced to Simon Blankenship, here a black-haired bishônen decked out in a caped Romanesque costume, complete with bull horns on his helmet... and even the toes of his boots.  Hope you like Rachel calling him out on this fashion faux-pas, because she milks the joke for all it's worth.  He explains his evil plot - sacrificing the goddess Etherea to allow Mithras to return - but we're led to ignore it in favor of Rachel and Yoshi arguing.  Oh, I forgot to mention - Rachel has been imbued with the power of Etherea, a little deus ex machina that comes in handy with her duel with Simon/Mithras.  And by the way, the two fight scenes in this manga are rather poor as well.  The poses chosen focus more on the reaction than the action, and fail to flow well together as a result.  You'll often wonder how one move led to another, or if it did so at all.

Meanwhile, the other five heroes reach the base to rescue Rachel.  At one point, they are faced with an entrance which Brent indicates, through the power of his magic PDA, is booby trapped.  A seriously funny little scene ensues in which he imagines what would happen if one of the invisible lasers were to be tripped, completely overkilling Alex as a demonstration.  Alex is not amused.  Pilar dives through a gap in the lasers, attempts to disable them using a voice command which she just happened to make up on the spot, and as luck and her psychic feelings have it, it works.  ...That's kind of a bit to buy, book, and I'm already broke.  But it turns out there's one more trapped door left, which Alex senselessly triggers in order to reach Rachel.  The trap here is... some kind of blade...  The only indication we get is a panel of some slicing wind, and another of drops of blood on a white background.  I can understand if they were trying to hide some of the violence, but like I said, I'm broke.

The team follows to find Simon/Mithras knocked into the wall by Rachel/Etherea... the duel over after just one blow.  So once again the day is saved, or something.  Kazumi proceeds to arrest Yoshi, and oh, look! Alex's arm was cut up after all!  On the flight home, one final text message comes in: "Simon Blankenship has escaped."  Oh, right, because they want to make a sequel.  ...*sigh*...  This is the *worst* manga I have ever read.  Almost all of its problems, be they the lack of explanation, poor character and plot development, or choppy fight scenes, can be traced to the fact that this book feels short.  The target size for a tankôbon manga volume is 180-200 pages, but this clocks in at 163.  Oh, and it's a one-shot; a full-length story crammed into these six tiny chapters.  With something this bad, you wouldn't think I'd be asking for more, but expanding on this would make it at least readable.  Everything else, such as Rachel being a poor excuse for a heroine, is of course a problem of the source material itself, so there's no helping that.

Artwork: 2 vases out of 5
Plot: 1 vase out of 5
Characters: 1 vase out of 5
The Call: 25% (F)

And now for a segment that I and TVTropes like to call "Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking", where after listing all these serious criticisms, I go after something trivial.  At one point early on, Kazumi joins our heroes by some vending machines.  Vending machines are everywhere in Japan; I can attest to that first-hand.  But one of the machines here sells iPods, which leads Brent to deem Japan the greatest country in the world.  Never mind that the iPod, unlike many electronic devices, is an American invention, or that it's capitalized incorrectly (Ipod) in the book.  I'm just not comfortable with this level of product placement, even if it is unsponsored.  I'm not sure that we're at the point where iPod is a generic name for this kind of thing, like what things like Xerox, Photoshop, and Google have become.  Besides, keeping things that expensive in a vending machine is just stupid.  In stores, they have to keep these things behind the counter!  Oh, and speaking of product placement, this book name-drops various anime titles - Naruto, Fruits Basket, and Full Metal Panic, plus a cameo of some Doraemon and Sailor Moon toys - but they have to make up a video game series, Neon Apocalypse Engine.  I assume they were riffing of of Evangelion, but this kind of dichotomy is just weird.