What was.....


the scene with the birds about exactly? I think i missed something, i assume they transmitted Hoba's signal as a trap, but how. And how long had they been there?
Anyways, it was a fun,interesting thriller, anyone can tell me anything about the tv show i heard about?

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Theres the Manga, dont know about the TV Show. I found it a teensy bit boring.

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the scene with the birds about exactly? I think i missed something, i assume they transmitted Hoba's signal as a trap, but how. And how long had they been there?


I think it had something to do with Hobas sense of humour, to leave a "ghost" of himself around to scare people. I doubt Noa appreciated the joke, though.

Eyy, the signal came from the ID attached to that birds leg. I guess they had some kind of tracking chip inside the ID plates. I've got no idea how long the bird had been there, maybe all the time? I don't believe in that myself, but it's pretty good coincidence for it to be there at the exact moment the heroes come to destroy the arc.

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When Noa reaches the sub-control room, she sees that one of the windows had been broken; I can only guess by the birds.

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It wasn't a trap, it was part of Hoba's sick sense of humor.

The good guys were attempting to use the Ark's main computer to colapse the Ark, but Hoba knew that the computer would be infected with the Bable virus, and that it would be rendered useless soon after the storm struck.

Hoba also knew that the only other way to colapse the Ark would be to use the emergency fire control system in the control tower. But once the computer shut down, nobody would be able to reach it in time unless they were already on their way before the computer shut down.

What Hoba did was to attatch his ID tag to the bird and to somehow train it to return to the control tower (don't ask me how). Whoever was trying to colapse the Ark would see his ID tag before the computer shut down (it had a microchip transmitter inside it as you said) and they would either decide to deal with him later on/decide that it was a trap and ignore it, or they would try to rescue him.

If they ignored him (his ID tag anyway), then the computer would crash and they would not be able to reach the emergency colapse controls in time and the Laborers would rampage all over the world and kill thousends of people, however, if they sent somebody to try and rescue him before the computer crashed, then that person would get to the tower in time to use the emergence fire control system and colapse the Ark before the world's Laborers went nuts.

He gave them a way to save the world, but they had to try to rescuse him in order to do it.

Sick or what.

English Language Anime: Dub it, don't pervert it.

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marsodyssey2010,

I think that's over-speculating. Realistically, he probably just put the tag on his raven before jumping off the Ark for no real reason. (That's if we accept that he put the tag on the bird.) If it was his belief that the raven was going to find its way back in the Ark, I agree that he probably found it amusing to imagine anybody's reaction on seeing "ID: 666, E. HOBA" roaming the halls after his death.

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Actually, it's not my speculation at all. I'm simply stating the conclusion that the cast of the show reached. Seriously, they said that right near the end of the film, just before Noah uses the manual release system.

The guy describes it as being a "reward" for anybody anybody who risked their life to try to save Hoba.

English Language Anime: Dub it, don't pervert it.

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"Obviously our reward if we were going to save anyone up there" in the original English dubing and "I'm glad we value human life so highly. Noa's trip was worth it afterall" in the original Japanese voiceover. This isn't a conclusion that Hoba had planned for this to happen. Asuma said it with good humor; I'm pretty sure he wasn't thinking, "Wow, Hoba's a great tactician! He thought to grab our attention with birds at the right time so that we'd be able to complete the purge manually."

Hoba had planned for labors to run amok all over the world, not for anyone to stop him or his scheme. If you want actual proof of that, it's in the main plotline: "He must've had complete certainty that his plan was going to work, or else he would've never jumped off the Ark." - Goto, "I doubt he cared about the police. What mattered to him is that we should all see." - Goto, and Mamoru Oshii himself saying that Hoba had thought his plan irreversible and flawless. Hoba's only clues were reflections on Tokyo and the human species, not about his plan, as Matsui points out.

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If you look deeper it it seems more obvious.

Hoba's main motivation was revenge against a society that mocked him and his main tool was the irony that the Laborors which were meant to save Tokyo would be its downfall and that the Ark which people build to produce the Laborors would be the tool that set the Laborers against the people.

Hoba felt wronged so he set in motion a plan to wipe out those who wronged him, but if those people should choose to try and save him he would, in turn, save them. A final irony if you wish. Hoba did indeed think that his plan was flawless. Have you ever asked why his bird had the ID tag in the first place? Surely, if it wasn't part of his plan, he'd simply have been wearing it when he killed himself?

English Language Anime: Dub it, don't pervert it.

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I think you're overspeculating, too.

There's never any mention of his main motivation being "revenge against a society that mocked him." That's in your imagination. The only mention is that Hoba had an obsession with God, being God, and society from an objective and cold point of view.

Who did he felt wronged by? Why? What lines from the movie are you referring to? What interviews state this? The only allusion to that is when Hoba thought himself to be like God, took on the name Ehoba at MIT, and his peers telling him that Jehovah (Ehoba being the Japanese pronunciation of that name) was actually mispronounced. They didn't mock him.

As for the birds, I'm sorry, man, but that's really stupid. Trained his bird? So that humanity could have a chance to redeem itself? It's never mentioned anywhere that "being stopped" was part of Hoba's plan, indeed his plan was simply for destruction of things and people; if he had ever considered that the Ark would be found as a problem and destroyed, then he would win, anyway, because the Ark was the center of the Babylon project, a hugely funded project. (Noted in the movie as being the most ambitious in Japanese history.) To say that such a smart movie would pin a pivotal ultimatum as a part of Hoba's ingenious plan on a bird without any proof is kind of like me saying that Izumi only went on the mission because she was in love with Hoba and they were a couple before he killed himself. If you dare object, I'll just say condescending *beep* like, "If you look deeper it it seems more obvious."

So why did he put the tag on his raven? That's never mentioned. You can use your imagination based on what kind of TV shows and movies you regularly watch or with what you just feel comfortable with, as you did. But to say that that's the obvious storyline? That everyone is supposed to understand? There are numerous potential reasons, but what you mention is very farfetched and unlikely.

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At this point you may wish to take out your English/Japanese dictionary.

Hoba believed himself to be an unequaled genius and felt gratified when he thought that others were giving him a high accolade. When he learned that all was not as it seemed and that he was secretly being mocked he decided to get the last laugh. He did this by turning the construction that was meant to save the city into a weapon that could destroy it.

I think that you may also need to take a look at how silly the idea of a trained bird is. What alternative would you suggest? The his bird happened to randomly roost in the control tower, the one place where the manual override just happened to be, and for his tag to just happen to show up on the system just when somebody needed to go up to the tower to activate it because the main computer just so happened to be about to go down?

Hoba put the tag on the ravens leg and had it return to the tower so that somebody going there to save him could save themselves in the process. If it weren't for Hoba's tag leading them there they wouldn't have gone at all and they wouldn't have made it in time to save the platform.

It's all part of the Biblical theme. The world here is redemption. Hoba decided that if somebody thought that he was worth saving, then they were worth saving.

English Language Anime: Dub it, don't pervert it.

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marsodyssey,

EDIT: IMDb can't read Kanji/Hiragana: naze boku ga sonna koto shinakya ikeninda?

You haven't really listed anything from the movie nor interviews. I'm afraid all of what you said goes back to my first comment: "You can use your imagination based on what kind of TV shows and movies you regularly watch or with what you just feel comfortable with, as you did. But to say that that's the obvious storyline? That everyone is supposed to understand? There are numerous potential reasons, but what you mention is very farfetched and unlikely."

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Marsodyssey theory is right.

Hoba gives them a chance to save Tokyo by giving them a no-win choice. They even mention it right after Noa calls in about the birds. The joke/message is that they can either save lives or save the project. But they can't do both. Hoba wins whatever happens. Ultimately, he just wants people to become aware of the dangers of modernisation over traditionalism.

Maybe it's not translated well on the old Manga copies, but the birds are definately explained in the remastered versions.

---
"Now...where was I?"

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Can't speak for Hoba's motivation too much, but the trained bird theory is in fact, correct. Thru-out the film the detectives investigating the case visit all of Hoba's apartments. At each of the apartments we see an empty bird cage. We are beaten over the head with this image multiple times.

Hoba did train the birds to go to "The Ark". It's quite clear in the film.

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You can, indeed, speak for part of Hoba's motivations, as those are listed in the film. What's not listed is that Hoba devoted time to train birds to go into the sub-control room on the night of the Typhoon as a means of offering a chance of redemption to the people of Tokyo.

Oshii's other films have birds and dogs without much explanation other than artistic identification.

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Hoba's plan was said to be diabolical because of the no-win situation, yes. Between lives or a hugely funded project, yes. That they can't do both, yes. Hoba wins whatever happens, yes. Those are all things that are in the movie and said quite clearly in the original Japanese version. We are made aware that Hoba had acknowledged this situation since he sources the story of Babylon as his inspiration, where the tower of Babel (the Ark) was destroyed by God (Hoba); the story of Babylon, as said in the film, also talks of destroying its people and the city (Babel), all of them "pure evil" for having tried to reach the heavens. (Otherwise known as modernization.)

To say that Hoba's reason for doing this was to give humanity or Tokyo a chance to redeem itself versus the dangers of modernizations goes against this definition. It is also not explicitly said to be the case in the film. Though Goto, in the original dub, goes off on a tangent and speaks of Hoba being confronted with what he felt was a harsh and impersonal city, he means to say that Hoba wanted its destruction; whether directly (labors running amok) or indirectly (stopping the most ambitiously funded project from panning out).

Hoba's plan was, indeed, diabolical, as either way, it causes a huge amount of destruction. To say that his plan was to have a bird in the sub-control room on the night of the typhoon as a way to have at least someone in the otherwise inexplicably* empty room who is ready, just at the right time, to destroy the tower is over-speculatory romanticism. Hoba was fine with either result.

* You might say, "he knew it was going to be empty because it was going to be the night of the Typhoon." Well, Occam's Razor. He would assume that the Ark was being destroyed by people who would already know of the sub-control room. Though this is speculation, it seems the more likely.

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You're forgetting that Hoba is quite the chess master. He lead the detectives to particular parts of the old city to get his point across. Every little thing he did was intentional and part of a greater gambit. He even killed himself to insure things would go as planned.

The fact that he for some reason placed the tag on the bird and it ended up in that important spot by chance is too much of a convenient coincidence considering just how meticulous Hoba was.

Also crows are very intelligent and highly trainable birds.

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