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WTF Productions has two vids I hadn't seen before, All That Could Have Been by Kasra and Freeptop and Come Clean by Starherd and Kasra.
"Come Clean" is a Fruits Basket vid that doesn't quite work for me, although it's got some lovely moments. It's a Yuki character portrait which does a great job at evoking Yuki's loneliness and melancholy and showing how he changed over the course of the series; there's some especially good setup at the beginning showing the impact of the Zodiac curse. But the vid shows the change purely in the context of his relationship with Kyo, without a single shot of Tohru, which ... doesn't work for me. The vid was made for Yaoi-con, which I guess would explain this, but I just can't follow an argument that far from canon. The vid's slightly repetitive in slots, and I found myself thinking that it would have been better if the vidders followed the structure of "Possession," one of their Yami no Matsuei vids, and had made the story three linked character portraits instead of one: you can see the beginnings of Kyo argument already, and the applications to Tohru are also pretty obvious. I'm not sure how fair that is as a critique, since obviously it's asking for the vid to be something it's not even trying to be--but it's a frustrating vid for me to watch, because it doesn't quite work as what it is and paradoxically would work better if the vidders' goals had been more ambitious.
I'd still recommend it to fans of the series, although it's probably not going to be compelling to people who haven't seen Fruits Basket, since a lot of the impact depends on context and since the character designs for FB aren't always terribly individual.
"All That Could Have Been" is much more successful. This is a terribly sad Subaru character portrait which uses footage from Tokyo Babylon and X; obviously, it concentrates on the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto triangle of doom. (Okay, it's really the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto-Cherry Tree quadrangle of doom, but the word "quadrangle" just undercuts the implications of tragic grandeur.) Lots of rain, darkness, grasping or reaching hands. Really lovely. I need to watch this again to figure out what to say about it. But I do think this one would work even if you're unfamiliar with the source.
"Come Clean" is a Fruits Basket vid that doesn't quite work for me, although it's got some lovely moments. It's a Yuki character portrait which does a great job at evoking Yuki's loneliness and melancholy and showing how he changed over the course of the series; there's some especially good setup at the beginning showing the impact of the Zodiac curse. But the vid shows the change purely in the context of his relationship with Kyo, without a single shot of Tohru, which ... doesn't work for me. The vid was made for Yaoi-con, which I guess would explain this, but I just can't follow an argument that far from canon. The vid's slightly repetitive in slots, and I found myself thinking that it would have been better if the vidders followed the structure of "Possession," one of their Yami no Matsuei vids, and had made the story three linked character portraits instead of one: you can see the beginnings of Kyo argument already, and the applications to Tohru are also pretty obvious. I'm not sure how fair that is as a critique, since obviously it's asking for the vid to be something it's not even trying to be--but it's a frustrating vid for me to watch, because it doesn't quite work as what it is and paradoxically would work better if the vidders' goals had been more ambitious.
I'd still recommend it to fans of the series, although it's probably not going to be compelling to people who haven't seen Fruits Basket, since a lot of the impact depends on context and since the character designs for FB aren't always terribly individual.
"All That Could Have Been" is much more successful. This is a terribly sad Subaru character portrait which uses footage from Tokyo Babylon and X; obviously, it concentrates on the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto triangle of doom. (Okay, it's really the Subaru-Seishiro-Hokuto-Cherry Tree quadrangle of doom, but the word "quadrangle" just undercuts the implications of tragic grandeur.) Lots of rain, darkness, grasping or reaching hands. Really lovely. I need to watch this again to figure out what to say about it. But I do think this one would work even if you're unfamiliar with the source.
