In a weird bit of synchronicity, I finished reading Neal Stephenson's "Some Remarks" on the same day I finished re-watching Serial Experiments Lain. I had initially thought of doing a separate blog post for each, but they aligned in some kind of freaky ways, so I'll go ahead and debrief here while it's still fresh.
I absolutely did not plan to consume both of these media at the same time. I'd pre-ordered the Lain Blu-Rays last year after they were announced, and had forgotten I had done so until they showed up in my mailbox a few weeks ago, after I had already cracked open Some Remarks. I was looking forward to both of them, and both ended up exceeding my expectations. Neal Stephenson has been one of my favorite authors ever since I read "Snow Crash" back in college; I'd already read a few of the pieces collected in "Some Remarks," and was honestly getting it for completeness' sake as much as anything, but ended up being blown away by a few longer essays that I'd never read before, most notably "Mother Earth, Mother Board." Somewhat similarly, Serial Experiments Lain has long been my favorite anime series, and one of my favorite works of fiction in any medium. It's been years since I last watched it, and even longer since I'd seen past the first couple of episodes (my standard gambit for introducing folks to this mindblowing series, which typically ends with them running away screaming). I'd felt slightly apprehensive that it wouldn't live up to my idealized memory of it; in practice, it actually exceeded it. The Blu-Ray upgrade makes the art even more beautiful than before, and the odd perspective it took on technology has made it seem weirdly prophetic rather than dated.
(Some spoilers for Lain follow; technically for the Stephenson too, I suppose, but can you really spoil nonfiction?)
The mantra of Lain is "everything is connected." What this actually means is very much up for debate: Lain is one of the most determinedly opaque pieces of fiction I've encountered, and I still refuse to investigate wikis or anything else that would destroy the mystery; I enjoy the sensation of my mind chewing over it too much. Still, every time I watch it I feel like I'm getting closer to some sort of understanding. Even though the conclusions are unclear, the questions are relatively easy to spot: how constant connection and communication affects us as individuals and as a species; whether the Internet represents a fundamentally new thing or an evolution of previous analog networks; exactly when one's existence begins and ends; the extent to which we can ever truly know another human being.
One question that is debated with increasing frequency in the series is, "Is the Wired [i.e., the Internet] an upper layer of the 'real world'? What exactly does that mean? And, if the answer is "No," then what is the Wired? After mulling over it some more (and, I have to admit, with Mother Earth, Mother Board fresh in my mind), I see it like this:
Thesis One: The Wired was created by humans, out of physical materials in the world. It exists on top of our society, and can only reflect ideas that already exist within that society: nothing new can emerge from within the Wired.
Thesis Two: The Wired was created by humans. It grew in complexity, and now has an equal level of reality as that of our universe. (To crib from another Stephenson novel, it holds an equivalent position on the Wick.) Events that begin in The Wired can affect the real world just as strongly as events in the real world can affect The Wired. A thing (e.g., an idea or a memory) can continue to exist in the Wired even if it no longer exists (or never existed) on Earth.
Thesis Three: The Wired is a digital manifestation of the collective unconsciousness that our species already had. Ideas can emerge and hold power from The Wired, but such ideas could also emerge in the past from analog sources (mysticism, religion, metaphysics). Such impulses in the past have guided our civilization's growth, and thus in a sense the Wired invented itself.
The series seems to end with a suggestion that Thesis Three is correct, but I'm far from confident in saying that. Throughout the show, we regularly get one character or another stating with great assurance "You must not forget that The Wired is just an upper layer of the real world" or "The Wired is not, after all, an upper layer of the real world." In any other show, we would be led to the "correct" answer, but Lain seems to delight in muddying the waters, forcing us to think for ourselves about what explanation seems most plausible (or least distressing!).
This muddying extends beyond the words to the actual actions in the anime. Another enormous mystery that runs throughout the entire show is the identity of the "other" Lain. We understand several properties of her: she looks like Lain but is more confident, aggressive, and skilled. At one point, it seems like the "real" Lain has cracked the mystery: she confronts Taro, stating that the "other" Lain is only a product of the Wired; in the real world, she has only ever been spotted within Cyberia, which is a sort of threshold spot (not unlike one of the "thin places" of religious revelation) where the Wired can easily manifest thanks to the prevalence of projecting electronic devices. Mystery solved!
And yet... only an episode before, we saw another Lain step out from her own body, greeting her classmates and cutting her off. That certainly didn't happen in Cyberia. It's pretty hard to interpret that scene as anything other than the Lain of the Wired manifesting in the real world, a doppelganger supplanting its double. And, of course, a few episodes later we'll learn the bombshell that the Lain of the Wired is the original Lain; and the "real" Lain is the copy. Presuming, of course, that we can trust the man providing this information. The truth of this conundrum seems inextricably tied to which of the three theses we can accept: is it possible for a being to emerge from The Wired, and if so, could that being then influence "reality"?
These aren't new questions, but they were pretty new at the time the show was created. Lain was originally created in the mid-to-late 90s, before The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and other movies that played around with these sorts of concepts (though, to be fair, well after Gibson and Stephenson and Ghost in the Shell). Still, I think that the show has aged really well, partly as a result of its light touch on matters of technology. Inevitably, works of cyberpunk that try to be very specific about how technology is going to evolve end up seeming laughably misguided after only a decade or so. When Lain does make predictions, they end up being correct with startling subtlety. It took a while for me to realize the oddness of a class full of students with wireless Internet-enabled devices: it is ubiquitous today, and impossible to imagine back when the show was created. Ultimately, Lain is more interested in philosophical and existential questions that underlie not just the Internet but the universe as a whole, and so it continues to feel very relevant today.
It's that same continuity that makes Stephenson's Mother Earth, Mother Board almost shocking to read. Near the end of the essay, he quotes one of his sources as saying that, when it comes to digital communications, in the last one hundred and fifty years there have been no new ideas, only improved techniques. It's a shocking thing to say, but by that point in the essay I feel compelled to agree with him. Using the same techniques that he deployed so effectively in The Baroque Cycle, Stephenson shows how a modern institution was, for all practical purposes, completely formed in a short amount of time long ago.
The primary focus of MEMB is the physical structure that underlies the Internet: more specifically, the undersea cables that connect the continents together and enable the global exchange of information. It's a long, sprawling, and completely engrossing essay, covering every conceivable aspect of this: how cables are financed, how they are insured, who runs the project, how they are installed (different for every country!), the hazards they face, the politics of their creation and utilization, how data gets transmitted over those wires, etc. It's a bit humbling to think that, when I visit the legacy web site for Serial Experiments Lain, my request is getting put onto a wire, traveling 5,400 miles across the Pacific Ocean, connecting to some computer over there, then that data is coming back to me over another 5,400 miles before forming a picture in my web browser... and that all of this technology is fundamentally identical to that which was used in 1858 when the first transatlantic cable was laid between England and America.
So, much as Lain seems to be somewhat ambiguously suggesting that The Wired isn't really anything new, Stephenson points out that today's global telecommunications regime is a matter of increasing intensity, not something truly original. The kinds of debates we hold now, about whether we are too easily distracted, whether constant communication is changing our minds and relationships, are exactly the ones that people were writing about back in the Victorian era. This isn't to say that the Internet isn't important: but, the Internet is the current state of evolution of a process of technologically binding people together which has been progressing for a long, long time.
The rest of Some Remarks is also really good, although nothing else quite reaches the level of virtuosity of MEMB. The infamous Slashdot Interview is freely available online, and is pretty essential reading for anyone who liked reading, even if you don't like Stephenson. There's also a fascinating short story called The Great Simoleon Caper that perfectly predicts the rise of BitCoin, DogeCoin and other crypto-currencies, albeit not the practical difficulties they would encounter. (Oh, and you know those annoying windows that appear on web sites and say things like 'Hi, I'm Tiffany! Ask me if you have any questions!'? It also anticipated those by a good ten years or so.) The rest of the book is a solid collection of stand-alone short fiction, essays that expand on some topics he's already treated in fiction (notably the Royal Society feud between Newton and Leibniz), and some great one-off pieces like his introduction to David Foster Wallace's book on infinity that plumbs their shared experiences growing up in Midwestern college towns.
Near the end of the book is a somewhat depressing essay about the failure of science fiction to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, which Stephenson links to a broader tendency in our modern capitalist society to avoid risks. He points out that the wide-eyed idealism of early science fiction, from Wells and Verne up through Heinlein in the 1950s, gave tangible goals for society to pursue; later science fiction, which tended to be more dystopic, was more focused on showing the perils of progress. Almost all of cyberpunk falls into this category: the future might look cool, but it also has serious and dangerous problems. Lain, which isn't exactly cyberpunk, seems to glide past this distinction. It isn't encouraging us to step forward into a bright new future, nor is it cautioning us against what tomorrow will bring. Instead, it's asking us to think, to ask questions, to wonder what it means to be human and how our embrace of technology might be changing us. I don't think that Lain will inspire any entrepreneurs to build a new artificial intelligence, nor do I think it will inspire politicians to set limits on children's use of the Internet. I do think that it could inspire a new generation of philosophers, or merely informed citizens, who could help our children understand the questions that I struggle with while watching this remarkable series.
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anime. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 01, 2014
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
Furry Curry
I finished FLCL! I have no idea what I saw!
I think anyone who has ever complained that anime is strange and doesn't make sense should watch FLCL. This show makes Neon Genesis Evangelion look like Bob The Builder.
Every weird show is weird in its own way. FLCL doesn't have any of the subtlety and sinister undertones of Serial Experiments Lain; all of FLCL's strangeness is hurled aggressively at the viewer, shouting and stomping and calling attention to itself. FLCL doesn't have the artistic meanderings of Paranoia Agent; it actually sticks to a rather small cast of characters and the show's tone is, um, consistently bizarre in each episode.
Let's get the mechanics out of the way before I dive into spoilers. There are only six episodes, so there's little excuse to not watch this. I watched the first episode subtitled, then heard that the English dub was actually good, and watched the dubbed version for the last five episodes. I slightly preferred the dub, which is pretty rare for me; Cowboy Bebop is the only other anime I can think of right off hand where that was the case.
And the genre? Oh, it's just your standard action comedy drama sports high-school romance spy anime, featuring giant flying fighting robots.
MINI SPOILERS
I'm completely inadequate to describe what goes on in this show. I mean, I can summarize the action without too much trouble. There's an attractive female alien who rides a Vespa and hits people on the head with her Rickenbacker bass guitar; the young teenage boy whose head she hits gets a bump, and that bump grows into a horn, and then giant robots burst out of the horn and start fighting the alien and/or each other. That's the first episode. Things get a bit weirder after that.
It's a very loud show, and a very kinetic show. "Lain" had almost no dialog at all, and what little there was was usually whispered or typed; the difficulty there was getting enough information to piece together what was happening. In FLCL, the characters regularly yell at each other, and one guy (with pretty impressive eyebrows) surfaces in the second half of the series, apparently with the main purpose of providing exposition. We have lots of information, but it just doesn't cohere together.
And then there's the subtext. Oh, man, the subtext. I've been peeking at the AV Club's reviews of these episodes; I'd watched the first two episodes late last year, and got caught back up so I could be more or less in sync with the TV Club's view-through of the series. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I'd missed out on a ton of the sexual innuendo and metaphor in the show. I say "embarrassed" because, after having seen the first two episodes and not thought about the symbolism, when I was watching the remaining episodes I realized that almost everything is symbolism. That isn't much of an exaggeration. Particularly in the baseball episode, seemingly every line of dialog and every image on the screen has a not-at-all-subtle reference in human anatomy.
I think part of the reason I missed all the undertones was because the overtones are so pronounced. Or, to put it another way, because so much of the show openly talks about sexual matters, it didn't really occur to me that it might NOT be openly talking about some sexual matters. The first episode includes an amazing showpiece of anime, where the boy's... father and grandfather, maybe (I'm still a bit unclear on how everyone is related) eat dinner with him and the alien. The screen shifts from anime into a manga format, and a hilarious, perverted, wildly kinetic series of panels track the discussion, which does as much as anything to explain to show's title. Fooling around... fooly cooly... FLCL... Anyways, when you've got THAT thrown right at your face, you aren't necessarily going to spend a ton of time thinking about the horn growing out of Naota's head.
The stuff about sexuality and puberty is big enough that I'm tempted to say that it's the main point of FLCL, but I won't say that it explains everything. There's a ton going on there, and the revelations of the last few episodes (N.O. Channels, the Pirate King, Medical Mechanical, etc.), seem to have their own mythologies that are orthogonal to the story of Naoto maturing (emotionally and physically).
END MINI SPOILERS
It looks like there are reams of ideas that have been written about FLCL, and I'll probably peruse some of them to see what the consensus is to answer the question, "What the heck was THAT?!" I've also really enjoyed the thoughtful reviews and discussion of the show at the AV Club; I mostly avoided the comments as I was watching the show, to avoid getting too spoiled for future episodes, but I'll likely dive back in when I have time and follow what looks to be a very spirited set of discussions.
I can't really rank anime shows, but I do have mental categories for them: "Must Watch," "Should Watch," "Can Watch," and "Don't Watch". FLCL floats somewhere between the first two buckets: it's so audacious and so amazing than it's well worth checking out, even though I suspect that many people won't care for it too much.
I think anyone who has ever complained that anime is strange and doesn't make sense should watch FLCL. This show makes Neon Genesis Evangelion look like Bob The Builder.
Every weird show is weird in its own way. FLCL doesn't have any of the subtlety and sinister undertones of Serial Experiments Lain; all of FLCL's strangeness is hurled aggressively at the viewer, shouting and stomping and calling attention to itself. FLCL doesn't have the artistic meanderings of Paranoia Agent; it actually sticks to a rather small cast of characters and the show's tone is, um, consistently bizarre in each episode.
Let's get the mechanics out of the way before I dive into spoilers. There are only six episodes, so there's little excuse to not watch this. I watched the first episode subtitled, then heard that the English dub was actually good, and watched the dubbed version for the last five episodes. I slightly preferred the dub, which is pretty rare for me; Cowboy Bebop is the only other anime I can think of right off hand where that was the case.
And the genre? Oh, it's just your standard action comedy drama sports high-school romance spy anime, featuring giant flying fighting robots.
MINI SPOILERS
I'm completely inadequate to describe what goes on in this show. I mean, I can summarize the action without too much trouble. There's an attractive female alien who rides a Vespa and hits people on the head with her Rickenbacker bass guitar; the young teenage boy whose head she hits gets a bump, and that bump grows into a horn, and then giant robots burst out of the horn and start fighting the alien and/or each other. That's the first episode. Things get a bit weirder after that.
It's a very loud show, and a very kinetic show. "Lain" had almost no dialog at all, and what little there was was usually whispered or typed; the difficulty there was getting enough information to piece together what was happening. In FLCL, the characters regularly yell at each other, and one guy (with pretty impressive eyebrows) surfaces in the second half of the series, apparently with the main purpose of providing exposition. We have lots of information, but it just doesn't cohere together.
And then there's the subtext. Oh, man, the subtext. I've been peeking at the AV Club's reviews of these episodes; I'd watched the first two episodes late last year, and got caught back up so I could be more or less in sync with the TV Club's view-through of the series. I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but I'd missed out on a ton of the sexual innuendo and metaphor in the show. I say "embarrassed" because, after having seen the first two episodes and not thought about the symbolism, when I was watching the remaining episodes I realized that almost everything is symbolism. That isn't much of an exaggeration. Particularly in the baseball episode, seemingly every line of dialog and every image on the screen has a not-at-all-subtle reference in human anatomy.
I think part of the reason I missed all the undertones was because the overtones are so pronounced. Or, to put it another way, because so much of the show openly talks about sexual matters, it didn't really occur to me that it might NOT be openly talking about some sexual matters. The first episode includes an amazing showpiece of anime, where the boy's... father and grandfather, maybe (I'm still a bit unclear on how everyone is related) eat dinner with him and the alien. The screen shifts from anime into a manga format, and a hilarious, perverted, wildly kinetic series of panels track the discussion, which does as much as anything to explain to show's title. Fooling around... fooly cooly... FLCL... Anyways, when you've got THAT thrown right at your face, you aren't necessarily going to spend a ton of time thinking about the horn growing out of Naota's head.
The stuff about sexuality and puberty is big enough that I'm tempted to say that it's the main point of FLCL, but I won't say that it explains everything. There's a ton going on there, and the revelations of the last few episodes (N.O. Channels, the Pirate King, Medical Mechanical, etc.), seem to have their own mythologies that are orthogonal to the story of Naoto maturing (emotionally and physically).
END MINI SPOILERS
It looks like there are reams of ideas that have been written about FLCL, and I'll probably peruse some of them to see what the consensus is to answer the question, "What the heck was THAT?!" I've also really enjoyed the thoughtful reviews and discussion of the show at the AV Club; I mostly avoided the comments as I was watching the show, to avoid getting too spoiled for future episodes, but I'll likely dive back in when I have time and follow what looks to be a very spirited set of discussions.
I can't really rank anime shows, but I do have mental categories for them: "Must Watch," "Should Watch," "Can Watch," and "Don't Watch". FLCL floats somewhere between the first two buckets: it's so audacious and so amazing than it's well worth checking out, even though I suspect that many people won't care for it too much.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Conspiracy
"Welcome to the NHK" may be one of the most discomforting pieces of fiction that I've seen through to completion. It isn't discomforting due to violence, or sex, or ideology, or the other standard levers of edginess. Rather, it's discomforting by shining an unwavering spotlight on the many neuroses and flaws that can make up our lives, and particularly in my own life.
I haven't watched a whole lot of anime lately. I've started a few series since Death Note, but have only made it through two. I stumbled across Welcome to the NHK while reading some online discussions about Serial Experiments Lain. NHK and Lain have almost nothing in common; I suppose that they've both set in modern times, and deal with themes of alienation, but in profoundly different ways. They also have very different sensibilities. Lain felt like a dark, sinister psychological thriller. NHK is... strange. I suppose that it's a psychological drama/comedy? It's a humorous look at a profoundly depressing situation.
Welcome to the NHK stars Satou, a hikikomori in his 20s. "Hikikomori" is a Japanese social phenomenon that has been concerning people for several decades: men (it seems to always be men) become extremely socially isolated. They will retreat to their rooms for years at a time, not emerging for social interaction, or food, or work. A related term is "NEET", based on the English for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training" - that is, someone who isn't a student, in professional school, or working.
When I first heard that description, my immediate thought was of the "slacker" phenomenon that started in America around the same time in the 90's. However, they're quite different. A slacker doesn't have a job and doesn't seem to have any interest in improving their lives, but they can still be quite social; the stereotypical slacker hangs out in coffee shops, or couch-surfs, at the bottom of society but still moving around and making connections. On the other hand, the hikikomori is completely cut off from society. Uncharitable people might think of both as leeches, but the hikikomori seems (at least to me) to be in a sorrier state, devoid of companionship or real connection.
MINI SPOILERS
The first few episodes of Welcome to the NHK are probably the funniest. Satou has been living by himself for years, and his mind is starting to become frayed. He hallucinates lightly throughout the day; he talks to his appliances, and they talk back to him; he fantasizes about the characters singing the bishoojo anime that plays loudly next door. His overactive mind also assigns blame for all that's wrong with his life at the feet of the NHK, one of Japan's largest TV networks. He decides that the NHK (which, he realizes, must ACTUALLY stand for Nippon Hikikomori Kyookai) is the leader of a vast conspiracy, all designed to trick Satou into pursuing his miserable life: watching television, eating instant ramen, smoking cigarettes.
It actually would have been interesting to see a whole (though probably shorter) series try to stay locked in that room. Satou is unbalanced, but not really psychotic, just at an elevated state of stir-crazy. And I do love hallucinations. However, the series is actually about Satou gradually working his way outward, reconnecting with old acquaintances and making a few new ones. He isn't ever "cured," which I liked; he's still sad, and angry, and antisocial; but he's far more functional at the end than in the beginning, and it feels worth every agonizing step he took.
And it is agonizing. Usually, when I like a series, I'll start devouring it, watching multiple episodes a day as I try to get through it. Here, even though I liked the show and what it was doing, I often needed to wait for days or a week between episodes, just because of how painful it felt to watch. The show had many, many scenes and themes that uncomfortably resonated with my own life. Now, I don't think I'm Satou; but I recognize a LOT of tendencies that are pretty deeply ingrained within me that constantly tug me in Satou's direction. I'm capable of going out and socializing with friends, or talking with strangers, or visiting a new place; but I also feel a profound comfort on rainy Saturdays when I realize that I can stay inside, turn on the computer, play video games or read books, and not see another person all day. I also know that if I stay in that mode for too long, I'll start to feel really crummy and crabby, which is why I make myself get up and get out; but it takes a fairly constant force of will to do so.
So, in the big perspective, NHK made me uncomfortable because I could see how easily I could fall into exactly Satou's life. Just as bad, though, were the many specific aspects of Satou's life that echoed those from my own. We both have a habit of treasuring memories of awkward events from our past; we can't let them go, and instead will fuss over them for years and years. We both obsess over decisions that we made in the past - or, even more heartbreaking, decisions we DIDN'T make, gestures we didn't make, people we never touched. The longer ago a failure occurred, the more ingrained the memory becomes, so instead of being less affected by distant events, they're the ones that define us most.
Does that sound depressing? It should be, but again, NHK is a weird show, and more often than not it comes across as a comedy. The show sympathizes with Satou, and at the same time it gets as much mileage as it can out of him: his awkwardness, indecision, ignorance, and reactions are all comedy gold to the writers. The show has almost nothing in common with The Office except for that essential link between discomfort and humor.
Also, as noted before, the show starts pushing Satou out into the world. He reconnects with two friends from his school days, which felt very realistic to me; I find that in my own life, it's easiest to restart relationships with people from my childhood. One of the funniest discoveries is that for nearly a year he's been living right next door to an old friend, but since he never left the room they never met. Yamazaki is a good foil to Satou; in any other anime Yamazaki would be the hopeless nerd at the bottom of the social order, but this is the one show where he's paired with someone even lower than himself, which lets him take the lead... and man, that's a scary sight. Yamazaki is hard-core otaku, obsessed with bishoojo anime in general and, in particular, a spectacularly inane piece of fluff called "Pururin." That said, Yamazaki, while a loser, is a loser inside society, while Satou is a loser outside society, and so Yamazaki can induce Satou to crawl a little out of his hole. Eventually, he and Satou start to collaborate on creating a galge, a simple romantic adventure game. Yamazaki is clearly more skilled and capable than Satou at, well, pretty much everything, and he makes sure to let Satou know it.
Yamazaki is the closest thing to a peer that Satou has. The heart of this show, though, unquestionably belongs to Misaki. She's an incredibly sweet, cheerful, giving girl who mysteriously decides to make Satou her project: she will do anything in her power to rescue him from his hikikomori lifestyle. It's very hard to get a bead on just who Misaki is and what she's doing, and Satou puzzles over it just as much as we do.
Misaki provides some much-needed structure to Satou's life, setting up daily "classes" that meet in the park at 9PM - presumably this is to make is as easy as possible for Satou to attend, since it's dark out and he won't need to see any other people in the deserted park. The classes themselves seem odd; she has prepared lectures, and notes, and lesson plans, but she doesn't seem to know the material all that much better than Satou does (her grasp of psychology is enthusiastic but shallow), and the subject matter varies widely from session to session (often explicitly addressing hikikimori, but just as often dealing with topics that seem almost totally unrelated). Now that the show is over, I suspect that her plan wasn't so much to teach Satou through the content of these lessons; rather, just having the lessons themselves were a crucial part of his "recovery." They gave him something to look forward to (or to dread, or to be annoyed at) each day, required him to engage with another human being, and offered a sense of continuity that unfolded outside of his apartment.
While "Welcome to the NHK" is a serial, most of the episodes after the first four, up until the finale, seem more or less interchangeable. Satou's condition gradually improves, as can be seen by the way he leaves his apartment, leaves town, goes on trips, meets with people. It's not a redemption story, and it's filled with setbacks. In one sequence, we learn that a seemingly friendly person is actually trying to financially profit from him, and we worry that this sour experience will drive him back into isolation. There's also a pretty amazing diversion into a FFXI/World of Warcraft-ish MMORPG, which is one of the funniest and most painful things I've seen in a while.
MEGA SPOILERS
And then there's the ending. Is it just me, or do more things happen in that last episode than in the entire series before it? It was interesting to see Satou finally leave his apartment and get a job; I feel like we got a strong foreshadowing of this in the episode where the class president got arrested and her brother became a bicycle delivery guy. In that earlier episode, the hikikomori seemed totally redeemed by work; in a few days, he was transformed from a sniveling, helpless blob into a cheerful, energetic young man. Satou's own transformation isn't quite as dramatic. I was kind of happy to see him out in the world, but he himself doesn't look particularly happy. Those scenes also made me think a lot about Japan's social compact and economy. One of the things people often notice about Japan is the seemingly useless jobs some people have, and the main example they give is exactly what Satou ends up doing: waving a stick to let people know about road construction. From the outside, this seems like a pure waste; why on earth pay a person (and it's actually often multiple people) to do a job that can be done just as well by a sign? Well, after 23 episodes of NHK, we know why: because people NEED work. Because having a job isn't only about money, it's about having some sort of meaning to your life. Even the worst job is better than nothing, and it's better for the society to subsidize peoples' work than to subsidize their laziness.
This does obliquely get around to addressing the main question people have about hikikomori, and slackers, and NEETs: is it actually a disease? Or is it just something that happens to lazy boys with money? If you're poor, you never have the opportunity to become a hikikomori: you'll find work or you'll starve to death. Only people who can leech off of parents, or the state, have the leisure to become socially withdrawn.
So... what are we to make of that? Should parent cut off their children, and the government implement welfare-to-work programs to achieve 100% employment? I dunno, and I don't think the show does either. We're seeing how these decisions affect Satou's life, but it's hard to say if it should be read as a policy endorsement.
The main point of that final episode, though, is obviously about Misaki and Satou. How sad. How very, very sad. Now, I was never too sure of my own feelings for those two - she's obviously quite a bit younger than him, and I couldn't tell just how young, which would help determine whether their relationship would count as odd or as creepy. That said, there is a certain sense to it; Satou's hikikomori tendencies bloomed in his 20's, but started in his adolescence, and there's a certain case to be made that they're emotionally at the same age - he has arrested development due to his neuroses, and she is dealing with her own trauma. He needs saving, she needs to save. It's asymmetric, but the pieces go together.
The ending doesn't make it totally clear exactly what happened on that day... but I think we can make a very confident educated guess, especially given the last snatches of audio we hear.
END SPOILERS
Welcome to the NHK is funny, but not exactly fun. I can't really compare it to other fiction I've encountered, anime or not. It's a character study of a profoundly alienated person, who both does and does not want to reconnect with a larger society. It's got a lot of funny stuff, built on top of a very sad backdrop. If that sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out; I doubt we'll see its like again.
Update: Heh heh... whoops! After I finished writing this, I realized that, um, there are actually 24 episodes in the first season, not 23. And, yeah, the 24th episode does change the overall feel of the series. (As a side note: a really interesting thought experiment is to imagine chopping off the last chapter of a favorite novel, or the last episode of a favorite series, or the last five minutes of a favorite play or movie. I suspect that, more often than we might think, the result would end up being more powerful than the original.)
MEGA SPOILERS AGAIN
So, Misaki does not die! That certainly makes the series WAY more cheerful. I was pretty happy with how they unwound everything in the final episode... it didn't feel like they waved a magic wand that made everyone suddenly happy, but it felt like they stayed true to their characters while showing them a way forward. It was touching to get glimpses of Yamazaki and Senpai's lives; again, this was something that resonated with me, as I often feel that mix of affection and wistfulness when I hear about old school friends building happy lives farther away from me.
Did you catch the call-back from the cliff scene to the opening of the first episode? I'm kind of surprised that I remembered it; it's been a LONG time since I started this series.
I also really like the tone on which they leave Satou's and Misaki's relationship. It isn't romantic, which would have been creepy, but it's closer than friendship. They like each other, and they need each other, and simultaneously are helping each other become more independent and diminish that neediness. It's a great note on which to end the series.
OK NO MORE SPOILERS FOR REAL THIS TIME
I haven't watched a whole lot of anime lately. I've started a few series since Death Note, but have only made it through two. I stumbled across Welcome to the NHK while reading some online discussions about Serial Experiments Lain. NHK and Lain have almost nothing in common; I suppose that they've both set in modern times, and deal with themes of alienation, but in profoundly different ways. They also have very different sensibilities. Lain felt like a dark, sinister psychological thriller. NHK is... strange. I suppose that it's a psychological drama/comedy? It's a humorous look at a profoundly depressing situation.
Welcome to the NHK stars Satou, a hikikomori in his 20s. "Hikikomori" is a Japanese social phenomenon that has been concerning people for several decades: men (it seems to always be men) become extremely socially isolated. They will retreat to their rooms for years at a time, not emerging for social interaction, or food, or work. A related term is "NEET", based on the English for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training" - that is, someone who isn't a student, in professional school, or working.
When I first heard that description, my immediate thought was of the "slacker" phenomenon that started in America around the same time in the 90's. However, they're quite different. A slacker doesn't have a job and doesn't seem to have any interest in improving their lives, but they can still be quite social; the stereotypical slacker hangs out in coffee shops, or couch-surfs, at the bottom of society but still moving around and making connections. On the other hand, the hikikomori is completely cut off from society. Uncharitable people might think of both as leeches, but the hikikomori seems (at least to me) to be in a sorrier state, devoid of companionship or real connection.
MINI SPOILERS
The first few episodes of Welcome to the NHK are probably the funniest. Satou has been living by himself for years, and his mind is starting to become frayed. He hallucinates lightly throughout the day; he talks to his appliances, and they talk back to him; he fantasizes about the characters singing the bishoojo anime that plays loudly next door. His overactive mind also assigns blame for all that's wrong with his life at the feet of the NHK, one of Japan's largest TV networks. He decides that the NHK (which, he realizes, must ACTUALLY stand for Nippon Hikikomori Kyookai) is the leader of a vast conspiracy, all designed to trick Satou into pursuing his miserable life: watching television, eating instant ramen, smoking cigarettes.
It actually would have been interesting to see a whole (though probably shorter) series try to stay locked in that room. Satou is unbalanced, but not really psychotic, just at an elevated state of stir-crazy. And I do love hallucinations. However, the series is actually about Satou gradually working his way outward, reconnecting with old acquaintances and making a few new ones. He isn't ever "cured," which I liked; he's still sad, and angry, and antisocial; but he's far more functional at the end than in the beginning, and it feels worth every agonizing step he took.
And it is agonizing. Usually, when I like a series, I'll start devouring it, watching multiple episodes a day as I try to get through it. Here, even though I liked the show and what it was doing, I often needed to wait for days or a week between episodes, just because of how painful it felt to watch. The show had many, many scenes and themes that uncomfortably resonated with my own life. Now, I don't think I'm Satou; but I recognize a LOT of tendencies that are pretty deeply ingrained within me that constantly tug me in Satou's direction. I'm capable of going out and socializing with friends, or talking with strangers, or visiting a new place; but I also feel a profound comfort on rainy Saturdays when I realize that I can stay inside, turn on the computer, play video games or read books, and not see another person all day. I also know that if I stay in that mode for too long, I'll start to feel really crummy and crabby, which is why I make myself get up and get out; but it takes a fairly constant force of will to do so.
So, in the big perspective, NHK made me uncomfortable because I could see how easily I could fall into exactly Satou's life. Just as bad, though, were the many specific aspects of Satou's life that echoed those from my own. We both have a habit of treasuring memories of awkward events from our past; we can't let them go, and instead will fuss over them for years and years. We both obsess over decisions that we made in the past - or, even more heartbreaking, decisions we DIDN'T make, gestures we didn't make, people we never touched. The longer ago a failure occurred, the more ingrained the memory becomes, so instead of being less affected by distant events, they're the ones that define us most.
Does that sound depressing? It should be, but again, NHK is a weird show, and more often than not it comes across as a comedy. The show sympathizes with Satou, and at the same time it gets as much mileage as it can out of him: his awkwardness, indecision, ignorance, and reactions are all comedy gold to the writers. The show has almost nothing in common with The Office except for that essential link between discomfort and humor.
Also, as noted before, the show starts pushing Satou out into the world. He reconnects with two friends from his school days, which felt very realistic to me; I find that in my own life, it's easiest to restart relationships with people from my childhood. One of the funniest discoveries is that for nearly a year he's been living right next door to an old friend, but since he never left the room they never met. Yamazaki is a good foil to Satou; in any other anime Yamazaki would be the hopeless nerd at the bottom of the social order, but this is the one show where he's paired with someone even lower than himself, which lets him take the lead... and man, that's a scary sight. Yamazaki is hard-core otaku, obsessed with bishoojo anime in general and, in particular, a spectacularly inane piece of fluff called "Pururin." That said, Yamazaki, while a loser, is a loser inside society, while Satou is a loser outside society, and so Yamazaki can induce Satou to crawl a little out of his hole. Eventually, he and Satou start to collaborate on creating a galge, a simple romantic adventure game. Yamazaki is clearly more skilled and capable than Satou at, well, pretty much everything, and he makes sure to let Satou know it.
Yamazaki is the closest thing to a peer that Satou has. The heart of this show, though, unquestionably belongs to Misaki. She's an incredibly sweet, cheerful, giving girl who mysteriously decides to make Satou her project: she will do anything in her power to rescue him from his hikikomori lifestyle. It's very hard to get a bead on just who Misaki is and what she's doing, and Satou puzzles over it just as much as we do.
Misaki provides some much-needed structure to Satou's life, setting up daily "classes" that meet in the park at 9PM - presumably this is to make is as easy as possible for Satou to attend, since it's dark out and he won't need to see any other people in the deserted park. The classes themselves seem odd; she has prepared lectures, and notes, and lesson plans, but she doesn't seem to know the material all that much better than Satou does (her grasp of psychology is enthusiastic but shallow), and the subject matter varies widely from session to session (often explicitly addressing hikikimori, but just as often dealing with topics that seem almost totally unrelated). Now that the show is over, I suspect that her plan wasn't so much to teach Satou through the content of these lessons; rather, just having the lessons themselves were a crucial part of his "recovery." They gave him something to look forward to (or to dread, or to be annoyed at) each day, required him to engage with another human being, and offered a sense of continuity that unfolded outside of his apartment.
While "Welcome to the NHK" is a serial, most of the episodes after the first four, up until the finale, seem more or less interchangeable. Satou's condition gradually improves, as can be seen by the way he leaves his apartment, leaves town, goes on trips, meets with people. It's not a redemption story, and it's filled with setbacks. In one sequence, we learn that a seemingly friendly person is actually trying to financially profit from him, and we worry that this sour experience will drive him back into isolation. There's also a pretty amazing diversion into a FFXI/World of Warcraft-ish MMORPG, which is one of the funniest and most painful things I've seen in a while.
MEGA SPOILERS
And then there's the ending. Is it just me, or do more things happen in that last episode than in the entire series before it? It was interesting to see Satou finally leave his apartment and get a job; I feel like we got a strong foreshadowing of this in the episode where the class president got arrested and her brother became a bicycle delivery guy. In that earlier episode, the hikikomori seemed totally redeemed by work; in a few days, he was transformed from a sniveling, helpless blob into a cheerful, energetic young man. Satou's own transformation isn't quite as dramatic. I was kind of happy to see him out in the world, but he himself doesn't look particularly happy. Those scenes also made me think a lot about Japan's social compact and economy. One of the things people often notice about Japan is the seemingly useless jobs some people have, and the main example they give is exactly what Satou ends up doing: waving a stick to let people know about road construction. From the outside, this seems like a pure waste; why on earth pay a person (and it's actually often multiple people) to do a job that can be done just as well by a sign? Well, after 23 episodes of NHK, we know why: because people NEED work. Because having a job isn't only about money, it's about having some sort of meaning to your life. Even the worst job is better than nothing, and it's better for the society to subsidize peoples' work than to subsidize their laziness.
This does obliquely get around to addressing the main question people have about hikikomori, and slackers, and NEETs: is it actually a disease? Or is it just something that happens to lazy boys with money? If you're poor, you never have the opportunity to become a hikikomori: you'll find work or you'll starve to death. Only people who can leech off of parents, or the state, have the leisure to become socially withdrawn.
So... what are we to make of that? Should parent cut off their children, and the government implement welfare-to-work programs to achieve 100% employment? I dunno, and I don't think the show does either. We're seeing how these decisions affect Satou's life, but it's hard to say if it should be read as a policy endorsement.
The main point of that final episode, though, is obviously about Misaki and Satou. How sad. How very, very sad. Now, I was never too sure of my own feelings for those two - she's obviously quite a bit younger than him, and I couldn't tell just how young, which would help determine whether their relationship would count as odd or as creepy. That said, there is a certain sense to it; Satou's hikikomori tendencies bloomed in his 20's, but started in his adolescence, and there's a certain case to be made that they're emotionally at the same age - he has arrested development due to his neuroses, and she is dealing with her own trauma. He needs saving, she needs to save. It's asymmetric, but the pieces go together.
The ending doesn't make it totally clear exactly what happened on that day... but I think we can make a very confident educated guess, especially given the last snatches of audio we hear.
END SPOILERS
Welcome to the NHK is funny, but not exactly fun. I can't really compare it to other fiction I've encountered, anime or not. It's a character study of a profoundly alienated person, who both does and does not want to reconnect with a larger society. It's got a lot of funny stuff, built on top of a very sad backdrop. If that sounds interesting to you, it's worth checking out; I doubt we'll see its like again.
Update: Heh heh... whoops! After I finished writing this, I realized that, um, there are actually 24 episodes in the first season, not 23. And, yeah, the 24th episode does change the overall feel of the series. (As a side note: a really interesting thought experiment is to imagine chopping off the last chapter of a favorite novel, or the last episode of a favorite series, or the last five minutes of a favorite play or movie. I suspect that, more often than we might think, the result would end up being more powerful than the original.)
MEGA SPOILERS AGAIN
So, Misaki does not die! That certainly makes the series WAY more cheerful. I was pretty happy with how they unwound everything in the final episode... it didn't feel like they waved a magic wand that made everyone suddenly happy, but it felt like they stayed true to their characters while showing them a way forward. It was touching to get glimpses of Yamazaki and Senpai's lives; again, this was something that resonated with me, as I often feel that mix of affection and wistfulness when I hear about old school friends building happy lives farther away from me.
Did you catch the call-back from the cliff scene to the opening of the first episode? I'm kind of surprised that I remembered it; it's been a LONG time since I started this series.
I also really like the tone on which they leave Satou's and Misaki's relationship. It isn't romantic, which would have been creepy, but it's closer than friendship. They like each other, and they need each other, and simultaneously are helping each other become more independent and diminish that neediness. It's a great note on which to end the series.
OK NO MORE SPOILERS FOR REAL THIS TIME
Friday, January 22, 2010
Come Together, Sail Away for Future!
I think that The Irresponsible Captain Tylor might have been the first anime series that I watched. I'd seen a few movies and specials before then, but not a long-run series. I encountered it in college; late at night, it appeared (subtitled) on The International Channel at some amazingly late hour, paired with Dragonball Z (which was not subtitled). DBZ was a bizarre soap opera that constantly promised imminent violence, but mainly consisted of glowing and glowering. ICT, on the other hand, was one of the funniest and most entertaining things available on television. It was as if someone had set out to create a show just for me: a science-fiction story, with space ships and battles and lasers and aliens, combined with a laissez-faire sensibility, sharp humor, and an explicit philosophy of "Do what you feel like, and don't worry, things will turn out."
There were a total of 26 episodes, and I managed to watch most of them, but not in order - studies sometimes got in the way, as did an occasional need to go to bed before 2AM. I think we started about a third of the way through the series, and caught most of what we missed when it repeated after the season ended. I've continued to think fondly of ICT since then, and recently treated myself to a re-watch - in order this time, completely from start to finish.
In the intervening ten years I've watched a LOT more anime. I've certainly seen shows that are prettier or more exciting. Still, I was impressed by how well ICT stands the test of time. It originally came out in the early 1990's, and apart from the opening credit sequence (which feels VERY 1980's, complete with a color-toned woman with big hair dancing like Paula Abdul), it doesn't feel dated. The art is (or at least looks) hand-drawn, but with high production quality and attention to detail. Characters actually move: Tylor slouches and stumbles across the bridge, the Marines stride, Harumi minces. The interior of the ship, where most of the series takes place, feels rather worn, but in a good way: you do get the impression they want to convey, that the Soyokaze is a rickety old beater that hasn't been cared for. Any time that they head off-ship, the backgrounds grow much more vibrant and pretty, whether it is the futuristic city-scapes on Earth, a verdant pastoral setting in a virtual reality simulator, or the gorgeous and ethereal sight of a nebula cloud.
So, the art is good, but what initially attracted me to this series and brought me back are the characters. The cast is even more varied and interesting than I had thought... I had remembered Tylor, Yuriko, and Yamomoto, but I had forgotten how prominently the doctor, Lt. Andressen, and the marines were. Over the course of the 26 episodes, you get to really know them well, and share some of the sense of camaraderie that blossoms on the Soyokaze.
To further develop that: Tylor is the center of the series, and the most amusing character, but this series isn't about one funny guy and 20 straight men. Tylor has a particular type of humor, but Yamomoto is hilarious in his over-the-top pursuit of honorable military virtues; the doctor gets laughs with his strange mixture of competence, drunkenness, and curiosity; the twins and the Akira-esque pilot have a great running gag of unwanted attention; Harumi and Andressen are great foils of toughness. And... had I just forgotten that there's a marine with a hockey mask named Jason?
I had remembered the strange shift in tone towards the end of the series. Or maybe it shouldn't be so strange; a good number of comedic Japanese anime seem to shift towards a more serious tone towards the conclusion. (Guu does it too, if memory serves correctly.) Still, Tylor was the first time I'd witnessed the phenomenon, and it felt a little weird when I first watched it. This time around, I was ready for it, and found that it was fine... the story isn't amusing during a couple of episodes, but it's still good, and it does set stuff up nicely for the end of the very last episode. If it was up to me (and maybe it's good that it wasn't), I'd have just made the series 25 episodes long, and combined numbers 24 and 25 into a single show. Too much moping for me. Still, saying that 4% of this show isn't enjoyable shouldn't count as criticism.
Be that as it may: ICT remains as funny, poppy, and weirdly inspiring as I remember. For a show that seems to parody ST:TNG, it's very much its own thing, and it's hard to think of what I can compare it to. If you haven't seen it yet, try to track it down and give it a watch; I hope you like it!
There were a total of 26 episodes, and I managed to watch most of them, but not in order - studies sometimes got in the way, as did an occasional need to go to bed before 2AM. I think we started about a third of the way through the series, and caught most of what we missed when it repeated after the season ended. I've continued to think fondly of ICT since then, and recently treated myself to a re-watch - in order this time, completely from start to finish.
In the intervening ten years I've watched a LOT more anime. I've certainly seen shows that are prettier or more exciting. Still, I was impressed by how well ICT stands the test of time. It originally came out in the early 1990's, and apart from the opening credit sequence (which feels VERY 1980's, complete with a color-toned woman with big hair dancing like Paula Abdul), it doesn't feel dated. The art is (or at least looks) hand-drawn, but with high production quality and attention to detail. Characters actually move: Tylor slouches and stumbles across the bridge, the Marines stride, Harumi minces. The interior of the ship, where most of the series takes place, feels rather worn, but in a good way: you do get the impression they want to convey, that the Soyokaze is a rickety old beater that hasn't been cared for. Any time that they head off-ship, the backgrounds grow much more vibrant and pretty, whether it is the futuristic city-scapes on Earth, a verdant pastoral setting in a virtual reality simulator, or the gorgeous and ethereal sight of a nebula cloud.
So, the art is good, but what initially attracted me to this series and brought me back are the characters. The cast is even more varied and interesting than I had thought... I had remembered Tylor, Yuriko, and Yamomoto, but I had forgotten how prominently the doctor, Lt. Andressen, and the marines were. Over the course of the 26 episodes, you get to really know them well, and share some of the sense of camaraderie that blossoms on the Soyokaze.
To further develop that: Tylor is the center of the series, and the most amusing character, but this series isn't about one funny guy and 20 straight men. Tylor has a particular type of humor, but Yamomoto is hilarious in his over-the-top pursuit of honorable military virtues; the doctor gets laughs with his strange mixture of competence, drunkenness, and curiosity; the twins and the Akira-esque pilot have a great running gag of unwanted attention; Harumi and Andressen are great foils of toughness. And... had I just forgotten that there's a marine with a hockey mask named Jason?
I had remembered the strange shift in tone towards the end of the series. Or maybe it shouldn't be so strange; a good number of comedic Japanese anime seem to shift towards a more serious tone towards the conclusion. (Guu does it too, if memory serves correctly.) Still, Tylor was the first time I'd witnessed the phenomenon, and it felt a little weird when I first watched it. This time around, I was ready for it, and found that it was fine... the story isn't amusing during a couple of episodes, but it's still good, and it does set stuff up nicely for the end of the very last episode. If it was up to me (and maybe it's good that it wasn't), I'd have just made the series 25 episodes long, and combined numbers 24 and 25 into a single show. Too much moping for me. Still, saying that 4% of this show isn't enjoyable shouldn't count as criticism.
Be that as it may: ICT remains as funny, poppy, and weirdly inspiring as I remember. For a show that seems to parody ST:TNG, it's very much its own thing, and it's hard to think of what I can compare it to. If you haven't seen it yet, try to track it down and give it a watch; I hope you like it!
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Spectral Corpse
"Ghost in the Shell" was one of the first anime I ever saw. Years later, in Kansas City, I read the manga and watched the sequel, Innocence. It's a cool series, and I really dig the themes, atmosphere, humor, and action. The overall thrust of the series' premise and moral challenge is embedded within the title. "Ghost" refers to whatever it is that makes us human - our spirit, if you will, the part that gives us autonomy, intuition, desire. "Shell" is our physical representation in the world - out body, but in the future of GitS, the shell is almost always augmented with mechanical devices. And not only that: almost everyone in this world has "cyberized" brains: implants that allow people to see marked-up views of the world, communicate "telepathically" with others, remotely access data, and otherwise act like a giant Internet line into your mind.
Of course, that's one of the really cool things about GitS; the original story was written after the Internet but before the Web, and is really forward-looking. Through its multiple iterations over the years, the stories from the manga have been further updated, keeping that eery sense of "oooh, that could totally happen."
I've been aware of the Stand-Alone Complex for quite a while, but just now started watching it. Somewhere along the line I'd heard that it wasn't very good, and I have a long-standing policy of not wasting time on anime that isn't great. I don't remember where I heard that criticism, though, and more recently have received positive recommendations, so I decided to go for it.
I'm glad that I did! No, this isn't "Death Note," but it is one of the better anime series that I have seen for a while. It maintains the things I liked best about the original movie, while finally reflecting the strengths of the longer-form manga. Much like contemporary American drama shows, it demands a lot from its viewers, and rewards them with a really complex story that builds on itself, establishes long plot arcs, and really fleshes out the characters and their relationships.
The movies focused on Major Motoko Kusanagi and Batou, and with good reason; they're the two most striking members of Section Nine. However, the entire squad is talented and enjoyable, and I loved seeing them fleshed out more. The best improvements in the series are the Old Man and Ishikawa. Both were in the movies, but stayed mostly in the background. The Old Man gets about as much screen time here as the Major and Batou, and we actually get a chance to dig into his mind a little bit. Ishikawa is still usually background, but a really entertaining and interesting background. He reminds me of someone particular who I worked with: extremely competent, calm, intelligent, with a dry sense of humor and an impressive beard.
MINI SPOILERS
The first GitS movie spliced together a couple of stories from the first manga. The second GitS movie was kind of interesting; it took stories from the first manga that had occurred before the original stories, but set them after it chronologically; it worked, but was definitely out of sequence.
Here, I think most of the SAC stories were new. There are still plenty of things taken from the manga. I enjoyed seeing the tachikoma, and especially the short segments at the end of each episode, which perfectly captured the spirit of the tachikoma doodles that used to be included as the very end of manga issues. There are some other artistic things borrowed from the manga, such as the director of a medical equipment company who has put himself into a bizarre-looking small box with legs and wheels. In the manga, that director becomes the major focus of a story; here, he's more of an amusing plot device in connection with another story
Anyways. This is a full series, and has a lot of nifty one-off episodes. The overall arc, though, deals with a cyber-criminal known as The Laughing Man. The thread is introduced a little way into the series, fades away, is hinted at, leads to a major incident at the half-season mark, burns away for a while longer, and then leads to the finale. It's really fascinating to see everyone process through the problem, which is almost fully incomprehensible and yet irresistible.
It also does a good job of getting back to the main point of GitS, which is the tension between man and machine, and, more specifically, trying to identify just what makes us human. If a robot can think and act on its own, does it have a soul? Should it have rights? What if it developed a sense of humor? What if it gained the capacity to disobey its owner? At the opposite extreme, if your brain is moved to another body, do "you" still exist? Are you still the same person? What if someone cloned you? What if they cloned you and copied your memories?
The Laughing Man is the ultimate hacker in a world where computers reach everywhere and everything. The coolest, creepiest moments of the show come when someone encounters The Laughing Man in real life, physically standing next to him, only to have him suddenly vanish, or an icon display over his face. The Laughing Man exploits the connectedness of everyone, rewriting the reality within others' brains. It's chilling, but at the same time, it's the cost people pay for having accepted the benefits of cybrid brain technology.
It isn't all tech, though. You gradually learn that The Laughing Man's crusade is more about the political and economic structures of Japan. He's the ultimate avatar of technology, but he draws his inspiration from J. D. Salinger. Another benefit of the longer form of this anime series is that you really get a feel for the bureaucracy that Section Nine operates within (or, more accurately, outside of) and the politics that drive policy. It's all nicely complex and intriguing, and feels thoroughly realistic. I might even go so far as to say topical - I don't follow Japanese government all that closely, but I do know that collusion between government, civil service, and business is built into the system. Some moments of SAC felt like particularly pointed satire, or the vented frustration of someone fed up with the status quo.
END SPOILERS
Oh, I almost forgot to write about the art! It's really, really pretty. The opening sequence is particularly gorgeous and lush; I suspect that it's the same studio that made Advent Children, because it has that same level of photorealism, down to amazing hair and lighting. The body of the episode doesn't have that same level of production, but still looks really good. It's all computer-generated, and has a really smooth, clean look throughout. The cars in particular show really well. There's plenty of good movement throughout; I think anime has finally broken out from the meme of "hold a single image in the frame for as long as we can get away with it." The action scenes are extremely well-done, with great kinetic energy that still lets you see everything. And the characters... I suppose we can't give too much credit for character design, since they're faithful to the precedent in the manga, but the execution is excellent.
Stand Alone Complex is a different beast from the earlier movies and manga, but it keeps the coolest aspects of the characters and themes, and provides a really interesting and complex new plot. There's a great blend of thought-provoking speculative fiction with fun action scenes and random bits of silliness. Stand Alone Complex wears its mantle very well.
Of course, that's one of the really cool things about GitS; the original story was written after the Internet but before the Web, and is really forward-looking. Through its multiple iterations over the years, the stories from the manga have been further updated, keeping that eery sense of "oooh, that could totally happen."
I've been aware of the Stand-Alone Complex for quite a while, but just now started watching it. Somewhere along the line I'd heard that it wasn't very good, and I have a long-standing policy of not wasting time on anime that isn't great. I don't remember where I heard that criticism, though, and more recently have received positive recommendations, so I decided to go for it.
I'm glad that I did! No, this isn't "Death Note," but it is one of the better anime series that I have seen for a while. It maintains the things I liked best about the original movie, while finally reflecting the strengths of the longer-form manga. Much like contemporary American drama shows, it demands a lot from its viewers, and rewards them with a really complex story that builds on itself, establishes long plot arcs, and really fleshes out the characters and their relationships.
The movies focused on Major Motoko Kusanagi and Batou, and with good reason; they're the two most striking members of Section Nine. However, the entire squad is talented and enjoyable, and I loved seeing them fleshed out more. The best improvements in the series are the Old Man and Ishikawa. Both were in the movies, but stayed mostly in the background. The Old Man gets about as much screen time here as the Major and Batou, and we actually get a chance to dig into his mind a little bit. Ishikawa is still usually background, but a really entertaining and interesting background. He reminds me of someone particular who I worked with: extremely competent, calm, intelligent, with a dry sense of humor and an impressive beard.
MINI SPOILERS
The first GitS movie spliced together a couple of stories from the first manga. The second GitS movie was kind of interesting; it took stories from the first manga that had occurred before the original stories, but set them after it chronologically; it worked, but was definitely out of sequence.
Here, I think most of the SAC stories were new. There are still plenty of things taken from the manga. I enjoyed seeing the tachikoma, and especially the short segments at the end of each episode, which perfectly captured the spirit of the tachikoma doodles that used to be included as the very end of manga issues. There are some other artistic things borrowed from the manga, such as the director of a medical equipment company who has put himself into a bizarre-looking small box with legs and wheels. In the manga, that director becomes the major focus of a story; here, he's more of an amusing plot device in connection with another story
Anyways. This is a full series, and has a lot of nifty one-off episodes. The overall arc, though, deals with a cyber-criminal known as The Laughing Man. The thread is introduced a little way into the series, fades away, is hinted at, leads to a major incident at the half-season mark, burns away for a while longer, and then leads to the finale. It's really fascinating to see everyone process through the problem, which is almost fully incomprehensible and yet irresistible.
It also does a good job of getting back to the main point of GitS, which is the tension between man and machine, and, more specifically, trying to identify just what makes us human. If a robot can think and act on its own, does it have a soul? Should it have rights? What if it developed a sense of humor? What if it gained the capacity to disobey its owner? At the opposite extreme, if your brain is moved to another body, do "you" still exist? Are you still the same person? What if someone cloned you? What if they cloned you and copied your memories?
The Laughing Man is the ultimate hacker in a world where computers reach everywhere and everything. The coolest, creepiest moments of the show come when someone encounters The Laughing Man in real life, physically standing next to him, only to have him suddenly vanish, or an icon display over his face. The Laughing Man exploits the connectedness of everyone, rewriting the reality within others' brains. It's chilling, but at the same time, it's the cost people pay for having accepted the benefits of cybrid brain technology.
It isn't all tech, though. You gradually learn that The Laughing Man's crusade is more about the political and economic structures of Japan. He's the ultimate avatar of technology, but he draws his inspiration from J. D. Salinger. Another benefit of the longer form of this anime series is that you really get a feel for the bureaucracy that Section Nine operates within (or, more accurately, outside of) and the politics that drive policy. It's all nicely complex and intriguing, and feels thoroughly realistic. I might even go so far as to say topical - I don't follow Japanese government all that closely, but I do know that collusion between government, civil service, and business is built into the system. Some moments of SAC felt like particularly pointed satire, or the vented frustration of someone fed up with the status quo.
END SPOILERS
Oh, I almost forgot to write about the art! It's really, really pretty. The opening sequence is particularly gorgeous and lush; I suspect that it's the same studio that made Advent Children, because it has that same level of photorealism, down to amazing hair and lighting. The body of the episode doesn't have that same level of production, but still looks really good. It's all computer-generated, and has a really smooth, clean look throughout. The cars in particular show really well. There's plenty of good movement throughout; I think anime has finally broken out from the meme of "hold a single image in the frame for as long as we can get away with it." The action scenes are extremely well-done, with great kinetic energy that still lets you see everything. And the characters... I suppose we can't give too much credit for character design, since they're faithful to the precedent in the manga, but the execution is excellent.
Stand Alone Complex is a different beast from the earlier movies and manga, but it keeps the coolest aspects of the characters and themes, and provides a really interesting and complex new plot. There's a great blend of thought-provoking speculative fiction with fun action scenes and random bits of silliness. Stand Alone Complex wears its mantle very well.
Friday, November 14, 2008
Paranoia Paranoia Everybody's Coming to Get Me
I enjoy Satashi Kon.
I enjoy animated series.
I enjoy weird works of fiction.
So, an extremely strange animated series by Satoshi Kon must be the best thing I've ever watched, right?
I would have thought so, but oddly enough... no. And I'm still not sure why.
On paper, Paranoia Agent seems tailor-made to appeal to Christopher King. It is deliberately fantastic and bizarre, nonlinear, nonsensical, a mesh of hallucination that finely layers over events in the real world. When I watched the first episode, I thought, "This could be amazing!"
By the second episode I thought, "This is pretty cool!"
Third episode: "Um, yeah... that's interesting..."
Fourth episode: "I think I'm seeing a pattern here."
Fifth episode: "Is anything ever going to happen?"
And on and on. It's been a while since I've had a drop-off in enjoyment this severe. The really puzzling thing is trying to figure out where it goes wrong. I think that, ultimately, there just isn't enough plot in here to fill six and a half hours. Which does sort of make sense, given the source. I mean, I love Perfect Blue, right? So what would happen if, instead of Perfect Blue being 80 minutes long, it was 390 minutes long? If we were lucky, Kon would have added some compelling sub- and side-plots, further explored certain stages of that movie's madness, and maybe brought other themes into play. If we were not lucky, he would have taken compelling parts of the movie and repeated them in different settings. ("Now we see Mima... in a rape scene. Now we see Mima... ordering an execution. Now we see Mima... in an abuse scene.") He would have filled up the time and created new images, without ever adding to the excellent stuff that was there.
Well, I kind of feel like that's what happened in Paranoia Agent. This could have been an amazing movie. Take the first episode, the ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth; cut out some characters, add some transition, and you have something that would rival Paprika. Instead, the repetition falls flat.
The thing is, I like strangeness, but I want my strangeness to be varied, y'know? If the same bizarre thing keeps happening, it's no longer bizarre. What I loved most about Kon's movies is that I never expected what would happen next. Here, it's all too common.
At least in the beginning. I almost wish I could write this series off as a failure, just because of how much it ended up annoying me, but in episode 8 there is an abrupt twist in the narrative. It is shocking, for the first time since the first episode, and it redeems the series. He ditches the characters we have been shackled to up until now and just... kind of riffs. Eventually, the most interesting characters drift back into the story, while the annoying minor ones stay lost.
From here on out, the second half of the series oscillates between fine and excellent. As with some of my favorite series, they start to play with the art as much as the story, and it is weird and refreshing to see ukiyoe come to life on screen. Kon has broken out of the formula, and can do whole episodes without once cutting to the main protagonists. Still, they aren't superfluous or anything... instead, each episode is a different perspective on the same phenomenon, showing how it is affecting all of Japanese society. There is a great cumulative effect as they join together into a weird chorus of madness.
MINI SPOILERS
My favorite character was Radar Man. What a great invention! I can imagine someone creating a whole show around this idea: a man who is both the insider and the outsider, constantly plugged into all human communication as an observer rather than a consumer, sifting through all knowledge in the hopes of gleaning a few pieces of truth.
The music was both super catchy AND super annoying. The opening theme song constantly runs through my head all day long. I would hate it, except for the amazing imagery. It seems like the standard Japanese anime "We will show you all the characters in this show" trope, but the contrast between their cheerfully laughing visages and the scenes of annihilation playing out behind them can send chills down my spine. The ending theme sort of keeps this up... it's a weird happy-creepy hybrid.
What do I think of Shonen Bat himself? I'm sort of torn, specifically what to make of the false lead when they bring in a suspect. There are some interesting metaphysical possibilities suggested in the first five or so episodes: Shonen Bat is in all of us; Shonen Bat is a primal force; Shonen Bat can move from person to person. All of those are kind of obviated once Tsukiko's secret is revealed.
MEGA SPOILERS
I hesitate to suggest what this series is "about", but here's a stab. On a meta level, it's about the power of imagination. Not in a happy Disney "making a better world" sense. It's about how one person's imagination can direct the thought of an entire nation. In a media-centric consumerist society like ours and Japan's, there are a few messages that get broadcast out and work their way into peoples' lives; from their lives into their minds; from their minds into their morality and actions. Create a Mellow Maromi, and you can infantilize a country. Create a Dexter, and you will empower that dark voice inside us.
Ultimately, I think Shonen Bat represents that dark side of creation. We can all have dark fantasies, but Tsukiko's don't stay inside her head. They make it out into the culture, where they hurt people.
It's an interesting message, and off the top of my head I can't think of another work which offers a similar warning. Which kind of makes sense, since all works of media we consume are created by artists, and it's natural for artists to loudly claim the virtuous mantle of mind-shapers while quietly ignoring the responsibility they have in shaping our discourse. It's a rare message, and one that I think may become all the more urgent as we continue to define our lives by the media we consume.
END SPOILERS
So, where does this leave us? If you enjoyed "Serial Experiments Lain" you'll likely enjoy this, but I caution you: speaking personally, I find this to be a far lesser work to Lain. If you're up for having your mind challenged and bent, give this a try, and if you find yourself hating the show after a few episodes, try sticking around until episodes 8 or 9. Or even skip ahead to those. If you like them, then you'll probably enjoy the rest of the series; if not, cut your losses while you can.
I enjoy animated series.
I enjoy weird works of fiction.
So, an extremely strange animated series by Satoshi Kon must be the best thing I've ever watched, right?
I would have thought so, but oddly enough... no. And I'm still not sure why.
On paper, Paranoia Agent seems tailor-made to appeal to Christopher King. It is deliberately fantastic and bizarre, nonlinear, nonsensical, a mesh of hallucination that finely layers over events in the real world. When I watched the first episode, I thought, "This could be amazing!"
By the second episode I thought, "This is pretty cool!"
Third episode: "Um, yeah... that's interesting..."
Fourth episode: "I think I'm seeing a pattern here."
Fifth episode: "Is anything ever going to happen?"
And on and on. It's been a while since I've had a drop-off in enjoyment this severe. The really puzzling thing is trying to figure out where it goes wrong. I think that, ultimately, there just isn't enough plot in here to fill six and a half hours. Which does sort of make sense, given the source. I mean, I love Perfect Blue, right? So what would happen if, instead of Perfect Blue being 80 minutes long, it was 390 minutes long? If we were lucky, Kon would have added some compelling sub- and side-plots, further explored certain stages of that movie's madness, and maybe brought other themes into play. If we were not lucky, he would have taken compelling parts of the movie and repeated them in different settings. ("Now we see Mima... in a rape scene. Now we see Mima... ordering an execution. Now we see Mima... in an abuse scene.") He would have filled up the time and created new images, without ever adding to the excellent stuff that was there.
Well, I kind of feel like that's what happened in Paranoia Agent. This could have been an amazing movie. Take the first episode, the ninth, twelfth, and thirteenth; cut out some characters, add some transition, and you have something that would rival Paprika. Instead, the repetition falls flat.
The thing is, I like strangeness, but I want my strangeness to be varied, y'know? If the same bizarre thing keeps happening, it's no longer bizarre. What I loved most about Kon's movies is that I never expected what would happen next. Here, it's all too common.
At least in the beginning. I almost wish I could write this series off as a failure, just because of how much it ended up annoying me, but in episode 8 there is an abrupt twist in the narrative. It is shocking, for the first time since the first episode, and it redeems the series. He ditches the characters we have been shackled to up until now and just... kind of riffs. Eventually, the most interesting characters drift back into the story, while the annoying minor ones stay lost.
From here on out, the second half of the series oscillates between fine and excellent. As with some of my favorite series, they start to play with the art as much as the story, and it is weird and refreshing to see ukiyoe come to life on screen. Kon has broken out of the formula, and can do whole episodes without once cutting to the main protagonists. Still, they aren't superfluous or anything... instead, each episode is a different perspective on the same phenomenon, showing how it is affecting all of Japanese society. There is a great cumulative effect as they join together into a weird chorus of madness.
MINI SPOILERS
My favorite character was Radar Man. What a great invention! I can imagine someone creating a whole show around this idea: a man who is both the insider and the outsider, constantly plugged into all human communication as an observer rather than a consumer, sifting through all knowledge in the hopes of gleaning a few pieces of truth.
The music was both super catchy AND super annoying. The opening theme song constantly runs through my head all day long. I would hate it, except for the amazing imagery. It seems like the standard Japanese anime "We will show you all the characters in this show" trope, but the contrast between their cheerfully laughing visages and the scenes of annihilation playing out behind them can send chills down my spine. The ending theme sort of keeps this up... it's a weird happy-creepy hybrid.
What do I think of Shonen Bat himself? I'm sort of torn, specifically what to make of the false lead when they bring in a suspect. There are some interesting metaphysical possibilities suggested in the first five or so episodes: Shonen Bat is in all of us; Shonen Bat is a primal force; Shonen Bat can move from person to person. All of those are kind of obviated once Tsukiko's secret is revealed.
MEGA SPOILERS
I hesitate to suggest what this series is "about", but here's a stab. On a meta level, it's about the power of imagination. Not in a happy Disney "making a better world" sense. It's about how one person's imagination can direct the thought of an entire nation. In a media-centric consumerist society like ours and Japan's, there are a few messages that get broadcast out and work their way into peoples' lives; from their lives into their minds; from their minds into their morality and actions. Create a Mellow Maromi, and you can infantilize a country. Create a Dexter, and you will empower that dark voice inside us.
Ultimately, I think Shonen Bat represents that dark side of creation. We can all have dark fantasies, but Tsukiko's don't stay inside her head. They make it out into the culture, where they hurt people.
It's an interesting message, and off the top of my head I can't think of another work which offers a similar warning. Which kind of makes sense, since all works of media we consume are created by artists, and it's natural for artists to loudly claim the virtuous mantle of mind-shapers while quietly ignoring the responsibility they have in shaping our discourse. It's a rare message, and one that I think may become all the more urgent as we continue to define our lives by the media we consume.
END SPOILERS
So, where does this leave us? If you enjoyed "Serial Experiments Lain" you'll likely enjoy this, but I caution you: speaking personally, I find this to be a far lesser work to Lain. If you're up for having your mind challenged and bent, give this a try, and if you find yourself hating the show after a few episodes, try sticking around until episodes 8 or 9. Or even skip ahead to those. If you like them, then you'll probably enjoy the rest of the series; if not, cut your losses while you can.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Dead Note
Mini-review time!
This last week I got to see the live-action version of Death Note at Oakridge Theater. I'm glad I got to go - it was interesting to see another take on it from the anime version - but I have to admit I walked out of the theater feeling a little disappointed. I'll try and capture the reasons why here.
Everything in this post counts as a
MEGA SPOILER
First and perhaps most importantly, I disliked almost every change they made to Yagami Light's character. The anime was amazing and subversive because it made him so very likeable. Even after you realize he's a monster, it's hard not to cheer for him. He comes across as a man of pure motives and iron will who follows a logical path that leads to evil.
By contrast, the Light of the movie just seems like a punk. The anime Light was clean-cut, hard-studying, and serious; the movie Light comes off as smarmy and a little aimless. Both of them are bright, but I get the feeling that if the anime Light had never found the book, he would have gone on to an amazing career, while if the movie Light had never found the book, he would have dithered his life away.
There is an interesting side-story that they added to the movie: Light starts the movie as a college student who is studying law. Early on there are some ham-handed attempts to use this as an explanation for his connection to the notebook: he becomes aware that many criminals escape just punishment, victims don't receive satisfaction, this one mean guy pulls a knife on him, blah blah blah... and the notebook arrives like a savior, coming in the middle of a dark night after he has lost his faith in The System, providing a seductive alternative answer.
Which is all well and good, but it feels much more safe and conventional than the anime's backstory. I mean, we've all seen the movie before where the lawman learns that he needs to go outside the law to achieve justice. Heck, there are hundreds of those movies out there. It doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Probably the most important effect of this diminishment of Light's character is that the first half of the movie feels anemic. He goes through all the steps, largely following the plot of the anime, but even though he's the main character the audience just doesn't identify with him. The theater I was in was full of Death Note fans, a good chunk of them cosplaying, and it was eerily quiet for the first hour or so.
However, once L appears, everything changes for the better. There was a loud cheer in the theater, and some people actually got out of their seats to run a victory lap. Granted, L is the favorite character for most viewers, but beyond that, the director did a far better job of translating him to the screen than he did Light. Perhaps coincidentally, the movie L is almost identical in appearence, manner, and speech to the anime L. In other words, he is a fascinating character who grips your attention.
While I'm talking about actors, almost everyone else in the movie was pretty good. I don't understand why they made Ray Japanese, but I don't mind either. Light's girlfriend has an expanded role from the anime, and does a fine job. I liked all of his family members; the father in particular is solid and capable. Even with Light, it isn't really that his acting as such is bad; my issue is much more with the script and direction.
Now, the most important part: the ending! (If you didn't believe me about Mega Spoilers before, you REALLY should stop reading now.) The scene with Light and Ray's widow is still my favorite episode from the entire anime, which I should emphasize is full of great episodes. What it did was utterly masterful: have a long, extended sequence that only shows two people chatting while they walk down a sidewalk, yet contain a subtext so dire and painful that I could feel my heart racing wildly as I watched, horrified and mesmerized by the travesty unfolding before me. They completely ditch that whole scene in the movie, instead coming up with a totally alternate plot line in which Naomi discovers Light's identity, investigates him, contacts L, and tries to draw him out.
While the plot unfolded, I was replaying my earlier complaints: basically, "This is different from the show! Waaaaah!" Now that I think back on it, even if they had wanted to recreate that episode, it would have been death on film. The episode relies on use of interior monologue and frozen frames to explain both levels of what's happening. This would have seemed like pure cheese if they had shot it the same way with live actors. Without the interior monologue, it wouldn't have the same tension and would have fallen flat.
That said, after the revised scene completely played out, I had to confess my admiration. They pulled off what seemed like an impossible task: recreated the shock and admiration I had felt when first watching the anime. Granted, the story is completely different, but if it had been the same I would not have been surprised. So, a grudging "congratulations!" to the filmakers on their accomplishment.
It comes at a price, though. This is only the first movie, and heading into the second movie, it is impossible to view Light as anything other than a venal, despicable villain. There isn't anything particularly wrong with this, other than it makes for a far less interesting movie.
Enough for content. A few brief technical thoughts before signing off:
It is pretty fun to see Ryuk in the movie. At the same time - wow. I know Japanese technology is top of the line, but they seriously are years behind us in the CGI department.
We saw the dubbed version, which is HORRIBLE. I probably would have enjoyed the movie quite a bit more if it had been subtitled. I tend to be prejudiced against foreign movie dubs anyways, but this was a particularly egregrious violation because of how many significant written elements there are in the film, NONE of which were translated. Newspaper clippings, suicide notes, secret communication during a bus hijacking... all of these things were clearly important and highlighted with musical stings, and 95% of us had no idea what any of it meant.
We stayed after the movie for a "special" on the making of the movie. It was unintentionally hilarious. The whole thing felt like it had been produced by a ten-year-old on his Mac Mini... every single section had the exact same animated logo with the exact same chuckle from Ryuk. The content was repetitive as well; did we really need to see every actor's closing?
A few things did catch my interest. First, the highlight was definitely one talking head who got the title "Actor and Director's Friend." Now THAT is a job I aspire to hold one day! Second, the director seemed to have thought very thoroughly about a lot of the decisions to make in the movie, leaving me even more confused about how he ended up with what he did.
My final conclusion: this movie is for completists only. If you love Death Note and crave more, grab this, but be sure to get a subtitled version. If you've been meaning to try it, first of all, you shouldn't have been reading this! Mega spoilers! But try the anime. And if you hated the anime, you won't like the movie any more. That said, I will be watching the sequel. If it's markedly better than the first, I'll be sure to let you know!
This last week I got to see the live-action version of Death Note at Oakridge Theater. I'm glad I got to go - it was interesting to see another take on it from the anime version - but I have to admit I walked out of the theater feeling a little disappointed. I'll try and capture the reasons why here.
Everything in this post counts as a
MEGA SPOILER
First and perhaps most importantly, I disliked almost every change they made to Yagami Light's character. The anime was amazing and subversive because it made him so very likeable. Even after you realize he's a monster, it's hard not to cheer for him. He comes across as a man of pure motives and iron will who follows a logical path that leads to evil.
By contrast, the Light of the movie just seems like a punk. The anime Light was clean-cut, hard-studying, and serious; the movie Light comes off as smarmy and a little aimless. Both of them are bright, but I get the feeling that if the anime Light had never found the book, he would have gone on to an amazing career, while if the movie Light had never found the book, he would have dithered his life away.
There is an interesting side-story that they added to the movie: Light starts the movie as a college student who is studying law. Early on there are some ham-handed attempts to use this as an explanation for his connection to the notebook: he becomes aware that many criminals escape just punishment, victims don't receive satisfaction, this one mean guy pulls a knife on him, blah blah blah... and the notebook arrives like a savior, coming in the middle of a dark night after he has lost his faith in The System, providing a seductive alternative answer.
Which is all well and good, but it feels much more safe and conventional than the anime's backstory. I mean, we've all seen the movie before where the lawman learns that he needs to go outside the law to achieve justice. Heck, there are hundreds of those movies out there. It doesn't bring anything new to the table.
Probably the most important effect of this diminishment of Light's character is that the first half of the movie feels anemic. He goes through all the steps, largely following the plot of the anime, but even though he's the main character the audience just doesn't identify with him. The theater I was in was full of Death Note fans, a good chunk of them cosplaying, and it was eerily quiet for the first hour or so.
However, once L appears, everything changes for the better. There was a loud cheer in the theater, and some people actually got out of their seats to run a victory lap. Granted, L is the favorite character for most viewers, but beyond that, the director did a far better job of translating him to the screen than he did Light. Perhaps coincidentally, the movie L is almost identical in appearence, manner, and speech to the anime L. In other words, he is a fascinating character who grips your attention.
While I'm talking about actors, almost everyone else in the movie was pretty good. I don't understand why they made Ray Japanese, but I don't mind either. Light's girlfriend has an expanded role from the anime, and does a fine job. I liked all of his family members; the father in particular is solid and capable. Even with Light, it isn't really that his acting as such is bad; my issue is much more with the script and direction.
Now, the most important part: the ending! (If you didn't believe me about Mega Spoilers before, you REALLY should stop reading now.) The scene with Light and Ray's widow is still my favorite episode from the entire anime, which I should emphasize is full of great episodes. What it did was utterly masterful: have a long, extended sequence that only shows two people chatting while they walk down a sidewalk, yet contain a subtext so dire and painful that I could feel my heart racing wildly as I watched, horrified and mesmerized by the travesty unfolding before me. They completely ditch that whole scene in the movie, instead coming up with a totally alternate plot line in which Naomi discovers Light's identity, investigates him, contacts L, and tries to draw him out.
While the plot unfolded, I was replaying my earlier complaints: basically, "This is different from the show! Waaaaah!" Now that I think back on it, even if they had wanted to recreate that episode, it would have been death on film. The episode relies on use of interior monologue and frozen frames to explain both levels of what's happening. This would have seemed like pure cheese if they had shot it the same way with live actors. Without the interior monologue, it wouldn't have the same tension and would have fallen flat.
That said, after the revised scene completely played out, I had to confess my admiration. They pulled off what seemed like an impossible task: recreated the shock and admiration I had felt when first watching the anime. Granted, the story is completely different, but if it had been the same I would not have been surprised. So, a grudging "congratulations!" to the filmakers on their accomplishment.
It comes at a price, though. This is only the first movie, and heading into the second movie, it is impossible to view Light as anything other than a venal, despicable villain. There isn't anything particularly wrong with this, other than it makes for a far less interesting movie.
Enough for content. A few brief technical thoughts before signing off:
It is pretty fun to see Ryuk in the movie. At the same time - wow. I know Japanese technology is top of the line, but they seriously are years behind us in the CGI department.
We saw the dubbed version, which is HORRIBLE. I probably would have enjoyed the movie quite a bit more if it had been subtitled. I tend to be prejudiced against foreign movie dubs anyways, but this was a particularly egregrious violation because of how many significant written elements there are in the film, NONE of which were translated. Newspaper clippings, suicide notes, secret communication during a bus hijacking... all of these things were clearly important and highlighted with musical stings, and 95% of us had no idea what any of it meant.
We stayed after the movie for a "special" on the making of the movie. It was unintentionally hilarious. The whole thing felt like it had been produced by a ten-year-old on his Mac Mini... every single section had the exact same animated logo with the exact same chuckle from Ryuk. The content was repetitive as well; did we really need to see every actor's closing?
A few things did catch my interest. First, the highlight was definitely one talking head who got the title "Actor and Director's Friend." Now THAT is a job I aspire to hold one day! Second, the director seemed to have thought very thoroughly about a lot of the decisions to make in the movie, leaving me even more confused about how he ended up with what he did.
My final conclusion: this movie is for completists only. If you love Death Note and crave more, grab this, but be sure to get a subtitled version. If you've been meaning to try it, first of all, you shouldn't have been reading this! Mega spoilers! But try the anime. And if you hated the anime, you won't like the movie any more. That said, I will be watching the sequel. If it's markedly better than the first, I'll be sure to let you know!
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Hey, Hey, Human Sucker
I enjoy anime, but usually am reluctant to say so. This isn't because of people who dislike anime - I'm very used to enjoying unusual things, and actually take a sort of perverse pride in finding something that most people don't like. No, my reluctance comes from my knowledge of how little I know about the genre, a neurotic kind of shame that when my tastes are lined up against those of the true anime connoisseur, they will be found lacking.
I guess you could call me a codependent anime fan. I have friends who are much more into anime than I am, and so I can use them as a kind of screening team... they watch all the mediocre shows for me so that I don't have to. After enough people enthusiastically recommend a particular series to me, I'll take the plunge, and I am invariably pleased with what I find. This means that I have an inflated view of the quality of anime, since I only watch the best. It also means that I have a limited view, and will never be the first person to watch something. (*)
Whenever I meet a new anime fan, and admit to being the same, one of the perks is catching up with their favorite genre shows. Justin is a fan of shoujo anime, so a lot of the shows I saw from him have very bright colors, upbeat songs, and silly, humorous plots. Kate's tastes run more towards adventure, so through her I got to learn more about the darker, more violent animes. And so on.
All that to say, I've now gotten to watch a whole new series, and wow, is it ever good. Levon has been infecting the office with a passion for Death Note, an extremely new series that ran this year. (I'm used to at least a five-year gap before watching a good anime series.) Death Note is a far cry from the first anime I watched, but it is fully enjoyable.
So what is Death Note? Before getting into spoilers, I'd describe it as a psychological horror series. There is very little gore and virtually no fighting, but there is a deep and sinister sense of violence that permeates almost every minute of the show. It contains elements of other genres, including fantasy, mystery, and even school comedies and romance, but all of these are steadily consumed into the bleak yet compelling force that drives the action.
Who will like this? Any anime fan who isn't turned off by violence will probably enjoy it. People who enjoy smart horror movies (think more "Silence of the Lambs" than slasher) will also appreciate it... the series does adhere to some standard anime tropes, but fewer than most such shows, so it should be watchable even by those who usually don't enjoy anime. (Some of the remaining tropes are done so well that I think it'll make watching other shows more difficult... for example, the "put one character in a static frame for several seconds while they prepare to take an action" tendency is here, but I never once found myself thinking, "Come ON, just do it already!")
What's so good about it? It is an incredibly intelligent series, tightly plotted and dense with story, but it does not have the Lain-esque tendency to make you feel dumb. It is also a beautifully designed show. Most of it looks hand-drawn, with a fine attention to detail and gorgeous backgrounds; the cityscape in particular is very compelling. There are a few computer-animated sequences, most notably vehicle shots, and these are very cool - there's a neat effect where a car will blur and stretch as it speeds up, sort of like the Enterprise before it enters warp speed. More than anything, though, it is a surprising show. Hopefully I am not giving much away by just saying that, but I received the same information before I started, and I was still unprepared for the twists the story took. The show inverts archetypes and storytelling conventions, making everything that happens feel fresh and new.
There is also a real moral ambiguity that runs through the show. This is far more common in Japanese fiction than American, but even for that, this show is unusually unclear about its message. You can sit back and enjoy the show, but the more you think about the action taking place and its implications, the more disturbing it can become. The effect is not unlike what I often feel watching the new Battlestar Galactica. As I've mentioned before, that show puts me in the uncomfortable position of making me feel sympathetic towards a fascist point of view in a fictional world that is opposite of the liberal perspective I take in real life.
Okay, that was all pretty spoiler-free, right? Now for the meat. The next section should be safe to read if you're a few episodes in and don't mind hearing about characters and events you haven't encountered yet, though I'll try to be vague about those. The mega spoiler section should only be read after you've finished the series. Got it? Okay, now let's start the
MINI-SPOILERS
My favorite character is Light. In any other series it would be Ryuuzaki - I love his eccentricity, piercing intelligence, vulnerability in the real world. But Light is so unusual and complex and compelling that he seizes first place. (As you know he would want to do.) Even though Light's physical posturing is always reserved and mild-mannered, while Ryuuzaki's is attention-grabbing, Light dominates any scene he is in. He comes across as a charismatic psychopath, but one that I can't help cheering for.
My favorite scene contains almost no action at all - just Light and a woman walking down a sidewalk together. And yet, the drama and tension caused by this conversation were so intense that I could feel my heart beating. The show maneuvers you into an ecstatic and probably unhealthy emotional place, so that by the conclusion of the scene, I wanted to cheer and felt ashamed at myself for it. Not coincidentally, this scene also embodies everything I find compelling about Light: his intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness are all on display, bubbling below the surface of his public facade.
The overall rhythm of the show is phenomenal, at least for the first half of the series. The game of cat and mouse has been done before, but probably never done to this level, and it's hard to think of two adversaries more capable and completely matched than these. The intricate back and forth between L and Kira is a kind of dance, a violent dance.
In an odd way, I found myself thinking of "Cryptonomicon" while watching these early episodes. In that historical novel, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park are hard at work trying to break Enigma and other German ciphers. Neal Stephenson creates a wonderful visual image of the geographical situation: information is flowing into Bletchley Park, in the form of intercepted coded messages; and yet, at the same time, information is also flowing out of the park and back to the Germans, in the form of actions taken by the English in response to decoded message. There are really two problems that need to be managed during the war. The first is a largely technical one: breaking the codes on the incoming flow. The second one, though, is far more nuanced, and more psychological and strategic: managing the flow of information out of the park, in order to keep the Germans from realizing that their cipher has been compromised. That often means making the difficult choice of allowing the Germans to win a battle - for example, not protecting a convoy after learning that it will be the target of U-boats - in the service of winning the larger war.
That same sort of tension is on constant display in this series. Both Kira and L are highly intelligent, but intelligence alone won't win the day. Kira can easily take actions to hide his tracks, yet any time he does so, he is creating more evidence. Who could know about this threat? Who had the time to take action? By asking these questions, L can draw closer to Kira with astonishing quickness. Thus, Kira often needs to deny himself the best action, and deliberately make mistakes in the hopes of throwing off L.
The music throughout the show is wonderful. My favorite song is probably the opening theme from the first half of the series. And, wow, I couldn't help but jump when they switched songs halfway through. That may be the first time I've ever heard J-metal. Fascinating stuff. Anyways, the music within the show is great as well... Kira's theme is probably my favorite (the one with the bells), but it's solid throughout, always well-matched to the action.
I don't really have a favorite minor character, but as a class, I'd say it's the policemen. Matsuda is sweet and fun, I love Mogi's turn as the manager, and Aizawa is just cool - the 'fro is awesome.
I was struck by the portrayal of America in the movie, and especially their depiction of the President. It kind of reminded me of the President in "Read or Die." In both cases the President is cowardly, weak-willed, overly confident in his military strength but craven once he realizes how little good it does him. I... I can't say that I'm offended, exactly, but it is very interesting. I'm used to generic American Presidents being portrayed in a positive or neutral light, and it's just kind of funny that that's never been the case in any anime that I've seen. To be honest, though, I can't remember any Japanese prime minister receiving positive treatment in an American movie. This might be a kind of jingoism at work, or perhaps I'm making too big a deal of it.
MEGA SPOILERS
I think you could divide the show into rough fifths. The first section deals with Light's transformation into Kira, as he learns his powers and flexes his strength. The second section is the Light/Ryuuzaki dance, starting on the first day of college. This is where everything moves into the open, and at the same time becomes more concealed. The net grows tighter and tighter with every episode, even as Kira's standing rises. The third arc is what I think of as "Good Light," when he surrenders ownership and fights for the team. The fourth, short arc is the restoration of Kira and his vengeance. The final arc is the Near/Mello competition.
Of all this, I thought the middle third was probably the weakest... not bad, but I really missed having Kira around. Every minute in that arc, though, added to the big payoff when Light retrieves the notebook. I already admired his cunning; seeing the entire elaborate plan and how it came to fruition, though, nearly took my breath away. It would have been far less impressive without that more hum-drum intermission.
Boy, the show sure has guts in killing off L. It's kind of surprising how rarely main characters die in these shows - at least, without being reincarnated or cloned or otherwise restored. Anything less than a full victory one way or the other would have been a disappointment, but I was still prepared for it. And they totally made the right decision on who should win.
I'd alluded to moral ambiguity above. Obviously, the problem is this: is what Kira is doing "right"? It's essentially a return to a more powerful, but more primal, form of justice. The rule of law is swept away, and Kira becomes the embodiment of justice, judge and executioner wrapped into one. What's hard to argue with (at least in the context of the story) are the results of this approach. Crime IS down, and people are generally happy with Kira's actions. So what's the big deal? Is it really a sin to murder the guilty?
The first warning sign is that Kira's motives are not pure. He is not carrying out this work as a servant to humanity's wishes. He wishes to become a living god. Wow, talk about primal justice! And, on further examination, we may need to reconsider how much better the world is. People are committing fewer crimes, but the change is due to a fear of punishment, not because people are getting better... one gets the sense that evil is hiding, not defeated.
To pick a more extreme analogy: I have no idea what the crime rates were like in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, but let's suppose that they fell compared to those in the Wiemar Republic and under the Czars. Nobody would say that the Gestapo and KGB were acting for good, even if the level of crime dropped.
But, to choose a counter-example, it sounds like many Iraqis were more happy living under the cruel Republican Guards than they are in the lawless chaos of today.
So, it's a complex situation. And that's what makes this show so great. The characters are compelling, and the problems make you uncomfortable.
Also, I was fascinated by the relentless, ruthless push of Light's personality and intelligence. This was most striking to me in the scenes where he is seducing Takada. I suddenly realized that he no longer had any notebooks, did not have the eyes, could not kill... and yet, he still WAS Kira. His minions worshiped and followed him even when he had passed all of his power to them. That is, Light is still Kira even when he does not have the Death Note. It was a powerful revelation.
I felt only slightly let down at the very end of the series. I was kind of expecting it - I'm usually not fully satisfied by the way animes end, and I had the feeling they wouldn't give me the ending I really wanted (Kira ushering in a new world). I found myself still hoping for another layer of reversals (ending in a Kira victory) or two (ending in a Near victory). Two fake-outs felt a bit anticlimactic, three or four would have sold me.
Ever since the first episode, I've thought I had a good read on Kira's ultimate fate. Ryuuk says something like, "Do not think that anyone who uses this note will be able to enter heaven or hell." My theory has been that those who use the Death Note will become Shinigami themselves: immortal and otherworldly, but with all humanity stripped away from them. From what we see in the final episode, I'm guessing I was wrong about that, but it's ambiguous enough that I could still pretend it happens.
END OF SPOILERS
All in all, it's been a fascinating ride. I'll need to re-watch it in order to pick up on all the foreshadowing and allusions. My shoot-from-the-hip analysis is that this will wind up as one of my top three animes. Its genre isn't one I particularly enjoy, but the incredible intelligence of the script and the unmatched technical excellence more than make up for that. The deep amorality of the show makes me hesitate to recommend it unreservedly, yet for people who enjoy quality fiction, it's hard to resist.
Update 12/29/07: I forgot to mention: there are multiple iterations of Death Note floating around. If you want to get into it, I'd strongly recommend starting with episode 1 of the anime. There is also a "Director's Cut" that is floating around. It is basically a highlights reel of the whole anime run; it's kind of interesting, but shouldn't be viewed until after you finish the anime. There are also some live-action movies out there, a concept that fascinates me. I've heard that they aren't as good as the series, but are still decent. They may be a viable option if you want a more compressed version of the story.
I guess you could call me a codependent anime fan. I have friends who are much more into anime than I am, and so I can use them as a kind of screening team... they watch all the mediocre shows for me so that I don't have to. After enough people enthusiastically recommend a particular series to me, I'll take the plunge, and I am invariably pleased with what I find. This means that I have an inflated view of the quality of anime, since I only watch the best. It also means that I have a limited view, and will never be the first person to watch something. (*)
Whenever I meet a new anime fan, and admit to being the same, one of the perks is catching up with their favorite genre shows. Justin is a fan of shoujo anime, so a lot of the shows I saw from him have very bright colors, upbeat songs, and silly, humorous plots. Kate's tastes run more towards adventure, so through her I got to learn more about the darker, more violent animes. And so on.
All that to say, I've now gotten to watch a whole new series, and wow, is it ever good. Levon has been infecting the office with a passion for Death Note, an extremely new series that ran this year. (I'm used to at least a five-year gap before watching a good anime series.) Death Note is a far cry from the first anime I watched, but it is fully enjoyable.
So what is Death Note? Before getting into spoilers, I'd describe it as a psychological horror series. There is very little gore and virtually no fighting, but there is a deep and sinister sense of violence that permeates almost every minute of the show. It contains elements of other genres, including fantasy, mystery, and even school comedies and romance, but all of these are steadily consumed into the bleak yet compelling force that drives the action.
Who will like this? Any anime fan who isn't turned off by violence will probably enjoy it. People who enjoy smart horror movies (think more "Silence of the Lambs" than slasher) will also appreciate it... the series does adhere to some standard anime tropes, but fewer than most such shows, so it should be watchable even by those who usually don't enjoy anime. (Some of the remaining tropes are done so well that I think it'll make watching other shows more difficult... for example, the "put one character in a static frame for several seconds while they prepare to take an action" tendency is here, but I never once found myself thinking, "Come ON, just do it already!")
What's so good about it? It is an incredibly intelligent series, tightly plotted and dense with story, but it does not have the Lain-esque tendency to make you feel dumb. It is also a beautifully designed show. Most of it looks hand-drawn, with a fine attention to detail and gorgeous backgrounds; the cityscape in particular is very compelling. There are a few computer-animated sequences, most notably vehicle shots, and these are very cool - there's a neat effect where a car will blur and stretch as it speeds up, sort of like the Enterprise before it enters warp speed. More than anything, though, it is a surprising show. Hopefully I am not giving much away by just saying that, but I received the same information before I started, and I was still unprepared for the twists the story took. The show inverts archetypes and storytelling conventions, making everything that happens feel fresh and new.
There is also a real moral ambiguity that runs through the show. This is far more common in Japanese fiction than American, but even for that, this show is unusually unclear about its message. You can sit back and enjoy the show, but the more you think about the action taking place and its implications, the more disturbing it can become. The effect is not unlike what I often feel watching the new Battlestar Galactica. As I've mentioned before, that show puts me in the uncomfortable position of making me feel sympathetic towards a fascist point of view in a fictional world that is opposite of the liberal perspective I take in real life.
Okay, that was all pretty spoiler-free, right? Now for the meat. The next section should be safe to read if you're a few episodes in and don't mind hearing about characters and events you haven't encountered yet, though I'll try to be vague about those. The mega spoiler section should only be read after you've finished the series. Got it? Okay, now let's start the
MINI-SPOILERS
My favorite character is Light. In any other series it would be Ryuuzaki - I love his eccentricity, piercing intelligence, vulnerability in the real world. But Light is so unusual and complex and compelling that he seizes first place. (As you know he would want to do.) Even though Light's physical posturing is always reserved and mild-mannered, while Ryuuzaki's is attention-grabbing, Light dominates any scene he is in. He comes across as a charismatic psychopath, but one that I can't help cheering for.
My favorite scene contains almost no action at all - just Light and a woman walking down a sidewalk together. And yet, the drama and tension caused by this conversation were so intense that I could feel my heart beating. The show maneuvers you into an ecstatic and probably unhealthy emotional place, so that by the conclusion of the scene, I wanted to cheer and felt ashamed at myself for it. Not coincidentally, this scene also embodies everything I find compelling about Light: his intelligence, ambition, and ruthlessness are all on display, bubbling below the surface of his public facade.
The overall rhythm of the show is phenomenal, at least for the first half of the series. The game of cat and mouse has been done before, but probably never done to this level, and it's hard to think of two adversaries more capable and completely matched than these. The intricate back and forth between L and Kira is a kind of dance, a violent dance.
In an odd way, I found myself thinking of "Cryptonomicon" while watching these early episodes. In that historical novel, the codebreakers at Bletchley Park are hard at work trying to break Enigma and other German ciphers. Neal Stephenson creates a wonderful visual image of the geographical situation: information is flowing into Bletchley Park, in the form of intercepted coded messages; and yet, at the same time, information is also flowing out of the park and back to the Germans, in the form of actions taken by the English in response to decoded message. There are really two problems that need to be managed during the war. The first is a largely technical one: breaking the codes on the incoming flow. The second one, though, is far more nuanced, and more psychological and strategic: managing the flow of information out of the park, in order to keep the Germans from realizing that their cipher has been compromised. That often means making the difficult choice of allowing the Germans to win a battle - for example, not protecting a convoy after learning that it will be the target of U-boats - in the service of winning the larger war.
That same sort of tension is on constant display in this series. Both Kira and L are highly intelligent, but intelligence alone won't win the day. Kira can easily take actions to hide his tracks, yet any time he does so, he is creating more evidence. Who could know about this threat? Who had the time to take action? By asking these questions, L can draw closer to Kira with astonishing quickness. Thus, Kira often needs to deny himself the best action, and deliberately make mistakes in the hopes of throwing off L.
The music throughout the show is wonderful. My favorite song is probably the opening theme from the first half of the series. And, wow, I couldn't help but jump when they switched songs halfway through. That may be the first time I've ever heard J-metal. Fascinating stuff. Anyways, the music within the show is great as well... Kira's theme is probably my favorite (the one with the bells), but it's solid throughout, always well-matched to the action.
I don't really have a favorite minor character, but as a class, I'd say it's the policemen. Matsuda is sweet and fun, I love Mogi's turn as the manager, and Aizawa is just cool - the 'fro is awesome.
I was struck by the portrayal of America in the movie, and especially their depiction of the President. It kind of reminded me of the President in "Read or Die." In both cases the President is cowardly, weak-willed, overly confident in his military strength but craven once he realizes how little good it does him. I... I can't say that I'm offended, exactly, but it is very interesting. I'm used to generic American Presidents being portrayed in a positive or neutral light, and it's just kind of funny that that's never been the case in any anime that I've seen. To be honest, though, I can't remember any Japanese prime minister receiving positive treatment in an American movie. This might be a kind of jingoism at work, or perhaps I'm making too big a deal of it.
MEGA SPOILERS
I think you could divide the show into rough fifths. The first section deals with Light's transformation into Kira, as he learns his powers and flexes his strength. The second section is the Light/Ryuuzaki dance, starting on the first day of college. This is where everything moves into the open, and at the same time becomes more concealed. The net grows tighter and tighter with every episode, even as Kira's standing rises. The third arc is what I think of as "Good Light," when he surrenders ownership and fights for the team. The fourth, short arc is the restoration of Kira and his vengeance. The final arc is the Near/Mello competition.
Of all this, I thought the middle third was probably the weakest... not bad, but I really missed having Kira around. Every minute in that arc, though, added to the big payoff when Light retrieves the notebook. I already admired his cunning; seeing the entire elaborate plan and how it came to fruition, though, nearly took my breath away. It would have been far less impressive without that more hum-drum intermission.
Boy, the show sure has guts in killing off L. It's kind of surprising how rarely main characters die in these shows - at least, without being reincarnated or cloned or otherwise restored. Anything less than a full victory one way or the other would have been a disappointment, but I was still prepared for it. And they totally made the right decision on who should win.
I'd alluded to moral ambiguity above. Obviously, the problem is this: is what Kira is doing "right"? It's essentially a return to a more powerful, but more primal, form of justice. The rule of law is swept away, and Kira becomes the embodiment of justice, judge and executioner wrapped into one. What's hard to argue with (at least in the context of the story) are the results of this approach. Crime IS down, and people are generally happy with Kira's actions. So what's the big deal? Is it really a sin to murder the guilty?
The first warning sign is that Kira's motives are not pure. He is not carrying out this work as a servant to humanity's wishes. He wishes to become a living god. Wow, talk about primal justice! And, on further examination, we may need to reconsider how much better the world is. People are committing fewer crimes, but the change is due to a fear of punishment, not because people are getting better... one gets the sense that evil is hiding, not defeated.
To pick a more extreme analogy: I have no idea what the crime rates were like in Nazi Germany or Communist Russia, but let's suppose that they fell compared to those in the Wiemar Republic and under the Czars. Nobody would say that the Gestapo and KGB were acting for good, even if the level of crime dropped.
But, to choose a counter-example, it sounds like many Iraqis were more happy living under the cruel Republican Guards than they are in the lawless chaos of today.
So, it's a complex situation. And that's what makes this show so great. The characters are compelling, and the problems make you uncomfortable.
Also, I was fascinated by the relentless, ruthless push of Light's personality and intelligence. This was most striking to me in the scenes where he is seducing Takada. I suddenly realized that he no longer had any notebooks, did not have the eyes, could not kill... and yet, he still WAS Kira. His minions worshiped and followed him even when he had passed all of his power to them. That is, Light is still Kira even when he does not have the Death Note. It was a powerful revelation.
I felt only slightly let down at the very end of the series. I was kind of expecting it - I'm usually not fully satisfied by the way animes end, and I had the feeling they wouldn't give me the ending I really wanted (Kira ushering in a new world). I found myself still hoping for another layer of reversals (ending in a Kira victory) or two (ending in a Near victory). Two fake-outs felt a bit anticlimactic, three or four would have sold me.
Ever since the first episode, I've thought I had a good read on Kira's ultimate fate. Ryuuk says something like, "Do not think that anyone who uses this note will be able to enter heaven or hell." My theory has been that those who use the Death Note will become Shinigami themselves: immortal and otherworldly, but with all humanity stripped away from them. From what we see in the final episode, I'm guessing I was wrong about that, but it's ambiguous enough that I could still pretend it happens.
END OF SPOILERS
All in all, it's been a fascinating ride. I'll need to re-watch it in order to pick up on all the foreshadowing and allusions. My shoot-from-the-hip analysis is that this will wind up as one of my top three animes. Its genre isn't one I particularly enjoy, but the incredible intelligence of the script and the unmatched technical excellence more than make up for that. The deep amorality of the show makes me hesitate to recommend it unreservedly, yet for people who enjoy quality fiction, it's hard to resist.
Update 12/29/07: I forgot to mention: there are multiple iterations of Death Note floating around. If you want to get into it, I'd strongly recommend starting with episode 1 of the anime. There is also a "Director's Cut" that is floating around. It is basically a highlights reel of the whole anime run; it's kind of interesting, but shouldn't be viewed until after you finish the anime. There are also some live-action movies out there, a concept that fascinates me. I've heard that they aren't as good as the series, but are still decent. They may be a viable option if you want a more compressed version of the story.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
End of the Line
Well! It's been quite a long time since I started on this trip, but I think I've finally reached the capstone: after viewing the complete televised works of Joss Whedon and Cowboy Bebop, last weekend I watched (or re-watched) their theatrical manifestations. (In the case of Whedon, that means "Serenity" not the original "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," which I had watched way back in 2004.)
Both movies were excellent and served their series well, although in different ways. In both cases there was a really comfortable feeling from seeing the cast again... it was almost like reuniting with old friends. Both maintained the themes from their shows while dramatically amping up the production values. One offered depth, the other heartbreak.
Let's dive in first with
COWBOY BEBOP MINI SPOILERS
I had known almost nothing about the movie prior to watching it, and was a little surprised that it takes place in the middle of the series. This was an interesting choice... one could argue that there really isn't any space for a movie after the series, and going the prequel route would mean losing half of the cast. That said, the move makes sense... it drops the viewer right into the middle of the action, without needing to go through the exposition of "who are these people."
I initially thought that the movie was probably much more rewarding for people who've seen the series than newbies. I'm less sure of that now, though... I'm almost tempted to say I'd use this movie to hook people into the series. Granted, new viewers might be a little bit confused about the characters, but frankly, they don't need to totally understand Faye or Ed in order to enjoy the kinetic force of the story. In all it feels like a good demonstration of what's best about the show without having a strong dependency on its backstory.
One final comment about the chronology: this has a big impact on the tension (or lack thereof) that one feels while watching it. I mean, think about it: you KNOW which characters are still going to be around for the television show, so you never really worry about any of them dying. That doesn't mean that there's no draw, of course... there's a compelling mystery, and plenty of surprisingly well-designed new characters to draw our worry. Still, it is an interesting effect.
As one would hope from a Cowboy Bebop movie, the music was EXCELLENT. The jazz themes seemed a bit less prominent than in the main show, but they made up for it with a variety of interesting pieces. As with the show, it simultaneously grabs your attention while fitting well with the action.
The animation was quite well done as well. The animation in the television show is good, but the movie adds an extra layer of polish and complexity that really benefits the show. There are some particularly compelling set-pieces, although frankly nothing that beats the amusement park setting from the show.
On the whole, this was a fully satisfying movie. It doesn't radically rework or extend Cowboy Bebop, it just serves up a particularly excellent offering. I'll gladly take what I can get.
SERENITY MEGA SPOILERS
This is the third time I've seen the movie, and the first time on DVD. It's less shocking now, but it still feels like a punch to the gut. Honestly, I would probably have watched this movie more often if it was less painful... it's incredibly good, but I always feel like a bit of a masochist when I see it again.
Many parts of the movie resonate more strongly and poignantly on subsequent viewings. Like the scene on Haven where Mal is talking with Book, and says, "One of these days, you'll have to tell me how a Shepherd gets to know so much about the Alliance," and Book says, "No, I don't." Or after they arrive on Miranda, and are standing in the middle of a dusty street, looking at the corpses that surround them, Jayne says something like, "They just died. Died for no reason," while the camera lingers on Wash.
It's bittersweet to view this movie in the context of its relationship to the 'verse. On the one hand, it's extremely unlikely that we will get to see that wonderful cast together again in... well, in anything. On the other hand, though, Joss's diverse interests and contacts can keep this extraordinarily rich setting from going entirely to waste. The first comic series was fine, but hopefully we'll have even more to look forward to. There's an MMO in the works that I personally don't have a lot of hope for, but it may well surprise me. There's a traditional pen and paper RPG that looks really cool, though I'm starting to despair of finding another good crew of RPGers. Actually, while looking for that last link, I stumbled across a page that shows an amazing collection of Firefly-related games. It's telling that so many of these are community-based, non-profit games. Telling, but not surprising. Throughout its (too bright, too brief) existence, Firefly has been marked by incredible fan devotion, as people embrace the 'verse and seek to make it their own.
The DVD itself is good. Video and audio transfer seemed great. The extras are decent - not amazing, like Lord of the Rings, but they do include interesting mini-features and such. It includes a gag reel, which I think I may start viewing at the end of the movie, to help lessen the sting.
On the topic of DVD: A few weeks ago they released a collector's edition of Serenity. It looks nice, though not revolutionary... a cast and crew commentary, the River Tam Sessions (which you can also find online), and some extra features and documentaries. They talk about "extended scenes", but I think that might be the same as what's on the disc I currently have. It's a superior disc so it's well worth picking up if you don't already own the DVD, but may not be worthwhile if you already have the old version. (If you do get the new one, let me know! I'd love to borrow it and check it out.)
It seems pretty remarkable that there's enough interest in this movie to bring out a new collector's edition, two years after the movie came out to disappointing performance at the box office. I don't know if that means Firefly fans are incredibly dedicated, or if we're just suckers. I'm sure there are plenty out there who feel, "If only I spend enough money on this, THEN the studios will bring back more Firefly and I can be happy again!"
END OF SPOILERS
See you, Space Cowboy.
Both movies were excellent and served their series well, although in different ways. In both cases there was a really comfortable feeling from seeing the cast again... it was almost like reuniting with old friends. Both maintained the themes from their shows while dramatically amping up the production values. One offered depth, the other heartbreak.
Let's dive in first with
COWBOY BEBOP MINI SPOILERS
I had known almost nothing about the movie prior to watching it, and was a little surprised that it takes place in the middle of the series. This was an interesting choice... one could argue that there really isn't any space for a movie after the series, and going the prequel route would mean losing half of the cast. That said, the move makes sense... it drops the viewer right into the middle of the action, without needing to go through the exposition of "who are these people."
I initially thought that the movie was probably much more rewarding for people who've seen the series than newbies. I'm less sure of that now, though... I'm almost tempted to say I'd use this movie to hook people into the series. Granted, new viewers might be a little bit confused about the characters, but frankly, they don't need to totally understand Faye or Ed in order to enjoy the kinetic force of the story. In all it feels like a good demonstration of what's best about the show without having a strong dependency on its backstory.
One final comment about the chronology: this has a big impact on the tension (or lack thereof) that one feels while watching it. I mean, think about it: you KNOW which characters are still going to be around for the television show, so you never really worry about any of them dying. That doesn't mean that there's no draw, of course... there's a compelling mystery, and plenty of surprisingly well-designed new characters to draw our worry. Still, it is an interesting effect.
As one would hope from a Cowboy Bebop movie, the music was EXCELLENT. The jazz themes seemed a bit less prominent than in the main show, but they made up for it with a variety of interesting pieces. As with the show, it simultaneously grabs your attention while fitting well with the action.
The animation was quite well done as well. The animation in the television show is good, but the movie adds an extra layer of polish and complexity that really benefits the show. There are some particularly compelling set-pieces, although frankly nothing that beats the amusement park setting from the show.
On the whole, this was a fully satisfying movie. It doesn't radically rework or extend Cowboy Bebop, it just serves up a particularly excellent offering. I'll gladly take what I can get.
SERENITY MEGA SPOILERS
This is the third time I've seen the movie, and the first time on DVD. It's less shocking now, but it still feels like a punch to the gut. Honestly, I would probably have watched this movie more often if it was less painful... it's incredibly good, but I always feel like a bit of a masochist when I see it again.
Many parts of the movie resonate more strongly and poignantly on subsequent viewings. Like the scene on Haven where Mal is talking with Book, and says, "One of these days, you'll have to tell me how a Shepherd gets to know so much about the Alliance," and Book says, "No, I don't." Or after they arrive on Miranda, and are standing in the middle of a dusty street, looking at the corpses that surround them, Jayne says something like, "They just died. Died for no reason," while the camera lingers on Wash.
It's bittersweet to view this movie in the context of its relationship to the 'verse. On the one hand, it's extremely unlikely that we will get to see that wonderful cast together again in... well, in anything. On the other hand, though, Joss's diverse interests and contacts can keep this extraordinarily rich setting from going entirely to waste. The first comic series was fine, but hopefully we'll have even more to look forward to. There's an MMO in the works that I personally don't have a lot of hope for, but it may well surprise me. There's a traditional pen and paper RPG that looks really cool, though I'm starting to despair of finding another good crew of RPGers. Actually, while looking for that last link, I stumbled across a page that shows an amazing collection of Firefly-related games. It's telling that so many of these are community-based, non-profit games. Telling, but not surprising. Throughout its (too bright, too brief) existence, Firefly has been marked by incredible fan devotion, as people embrace the 'verse and seek to make it their own.
The DVD itself is good. Video and audio transfer seemed great. The extras are decent - not amazing, like Lord of the Rings, but they do include interesting mini-features and such. It includes a gag reel, which I think I may start viewing at the end of the movie, to help lessen the sting.
On the topic of DVD: A few weeks ago they released a collector's edition of Serenity. It looks nice, though not revolutionary... a cast and crew commentary, the River Tam Sessions (which you can also find online), and some extra features and documentaries. They talk about "extended scenes", but I think that might be the same as what's on the disc I currently have. It's a superior disc so it's well worth picking up if you don't already own the DVD, but may not be worthwhile if you already have the old version. (If you do get the new one, let me know! I'd love to borrow it and check it out.)
It seems pretty remarkable that there's enough interest in this movie to bring out a new collector's edition, two years after the movie came out to disappointing performance at the box office. I don't know if that means Firefly fans are incredibly dedicated, or if we're just suckers. I'm sure there are plenty out there who feel, "If only I spend enough money on this, THEN the studios will bring back more Firefly and I can be happy again!"
END OF SPOILERS
See you, Space Cowboy.
Monday, July 23, 2007
The Real Folk Blues
Well! This epic marathon went relatively smoothly, I think. Probably because I had some good momentum coming in. I've watched a good chunk of Cowboy Bebop before, largely out of order, enough to realize how good it is and to recognize its spiritual ties with Firefly, but not enough to really get a feel for the whole arc.
Short summary: it's really good. I'm a bit of a cheat when it comes to anime: with a few exceptions, I don't go out by myself and hunt around for something new; instead, I rely on a few friends who are much more strongly connected with the scene, and so I just get recommendations for the really good stuff. This means that I have an inflated idea of the overall quality of anime, much like we Americans have an inflated idea of how great British comedy is. Did you know that a lot of Britons think that America makes better comedies than they do? That's not because out nations' tastes are backwards; it's because only the best shows of each country get exported. So when we think of British comedy, we think of Fawlty Towers and The Office and Are You Being Served, and not of the dozens of rotten series. Likewise, the British get to see Seinfeld and The Simpsons, but not According to Jim or That 80's Show.
All that to say, when I say that Cowboy Bebop is an excellent anime, it's a much stronger statement than saying it's an excellent show. Even compared with the high quality of most anime I watch, this one stands out.
The first thing that jumped out at me is the music. Most anime shows will have a really good theme, a J-Rock song that plays over the closing credits, and some forgettable genre-specific tunes in the middle. Bebop was incredibly creative and varied. The cornerstone of the show is jazz, and they have great jazzy pieces that both help the story and also stand well on their own. In keeping with the hybrid feel of the overall show, though, the music isn't limited to just jazz... you get some strong choral pieces, folk tunes, heavy metal, and some really excellent rock pieces towards the end. While there isn't much electronic music in there, the one episode that includes a lot of electronica has some of the best music I've ever heard in the genre.
The setting of the show is another strong point. When watching this, I had to remind myself that it was made back in 1998, long before Firefly had brought the term "space western" into widespread use. (Well, "Widespread" among a small group of nerds, at least.) It's even broader than that, though. Besides the western and futuristic elements, there's also a strong hint of 1920's-era speakeasies. The locations and dress of the characters seem to be hailing from the Prohibition era, while they listen to 1950's jazz and pursue an 1850's profession in 2070's world. It's all sort of a mishmash, but for some reason it actually works. After you're a few episodes in, it becomes natural to accept this universe's particular logic, at which point all the different sources just provide more opportunities for great devices and delightful elements.
One particular thing to call out: unlike every other anime I've watched, the English dub rocks. I was a bit skeptical when others insisted I should forego my normal subtitling habits, but they're absolutely right... the voices are right for the characters, and actually done well. For that reason alone, I think I'm more likely to recommend this series to anime neophytes. (I'm also a little curious why there have been so many more mediocre dubs since this came out - one would hope that having one example of an excellent dub would encourage distributors to make appropriate efforts to round up appropriate talent.)
The characters stand out as well. I've always assumed that Spike was the hero, and I guess technically he is, but towards the end of the series I almost felt as though Jet was the real center of the show. Each of the characters is very unique without being too stereotypical. For some reason, Edward irritated me far less on this viewing than when I've watched individual episodes before.
The overall pacing of the story was really good as well. The show sits comfortably between being purely episodic and being a serial: there is an ongoing plot that is carried out through the 26 episodes, but at the same time most of the shows stand well on their own. If I were showing this to someone else, I wouldn't necessarily start with the first episode; I don't think it really gets cranking until the 5th or so. Anyways, that sort of balance was nice. While the characters had strong desires, they also just had to live their lives, and the viewer can get a much better feeling for what the universe feels like via these looks at the bounty and their homes.
In an odd sort of way, the pacing reminds me of Lord of the Rings, or maybe The Hobbit. There's a definite story to tell, but not every minute of the show is slavishly devoted to reaching the incredible climax. By indulging in detours and side jobs, they make the universe richer and more real, thereby giving even more meaning and weight to everything that takes place. It also creates fresh territory for fans to explore and fantasize about.
Wow... I think I'm actually going to finish this review without giving any spoilers. Cool. Bebop was a great side trip of my own, and I'm glad I took the time to see it as a whole. Next stop, Firefly Redux!
Short summary: it's really good. I'm a bit of a cheat when it comes to anime: with a few exceptions, I don't go out by myself and hunt around for something new; instead, I rely on a few friends who are much more strongly connected with the scene, and so I just get recommendations for the really good stuff. This means that I have an inflated idea of the overall quality of anime, much like we Americans have an inflated idea of how great British comedy is. Did you know that a lot of Britons think that America makes better comedies than they do? That's not because out nations' tastes are backwards; it's because only the best shows of each country get exported. So when we think of British comedy, we think of Fawlty Towers and The Office and Are You Being Served, and not of the dozens of rotten series. Likewise, the British get to see Seinfeld and The Simpsons, but not According to Jim or That 80's Show.
All that to say, when I say that Cowboy Bebop is an excellent anime, it's a much stronger statement than saying it's an excellent show. Even compared with the high quality of most anime I watch, this one stands out.
The first thing that jumped out at me is the music. Most anime shows will have a really good theme, a J-Rock song that plays over the closing credits, and some forgettable genre-specific tunes in the middle. Bebop was incredibly creative and varied. The cornerstone of the show is jazz, and they have great jazzy pieces that both help the story and also stand well on their own. In keeping with the hybrid feel of the overall show, though, the music isn't limited to just jazz... you get some strong choral pieces, folk tunes, heavy metal, and some really excellent rock pieces towards the end. While there isn't much electronic music in there, the one episode that includes a lot of electronica has some of the best music I've ever heard in the genre.
The setting of the show is another strong point. When watching this, I had to remind myself that it was made back in 1998, long before Firefly had brought the term "space western" into widespread use. (Well, "Widespread" among a small group of nerds, at least.) It's even broader than that, though. Besides the western and futuristic elements, there's also a strong hint of 1920's-era speakeasies. The locations and dress of the characters seem to be hailing from the Prohibition era, while they listen to 1950's jazz and pursue an 1850's profession in 2070's world. It's all sort of a mishmash, but for some reason it actually works. After you're a few episodes in, it becomes natural to accept this universe's particular logic, at which point all the different sources just provide more opportunities for great devices and delightful elements.
One particular thing to call out: unlike every other anime I've watched, the English dub rocks. I was a bit skeptical when others insisted I should forego my normal subtitling habits, but they're absolutely right... the voices are right for the characters, and actually done well. For that reason alone, I think I'm more likely to recommend this series to anime neophytes. (I'm also a little curious why there have been so many more mediocre dubs since this came out - one would hope that having one example of an excellent dub would encourage distributors to make appropriate efforts to round up appropriate talent.)
The characters stand out as well. I've always assumed that Spike was the hero, and I guess technically he is, but towards the end of the series I almost felt as though Jet was the real center of the show. Each of the characters is very unique without being too stereotypical. For some reason, Edward irritated me far less on this viewing than when I've watched individual episodes before.
The overall pacing of the story was really good as well. The show sits comfortably between being purely episodic and being a serial: there is an ongoing plot that is carried out through the 26 episodes, but at the same time most of the shows stand well on their own. If I were showing this to someone else, I wouldn't necessarily start with the first episode; I don't think it really gets cranking until the 5th or so. Anyways, that sort of balance was nice. While the characters had strong desires, they also just had to live their lives, and the viewer can get a much better feeling for what the universe feels like via these looks at the bounty and their homes.
In an odd sort of way, the pacing reminds me of Lord of the Rings, or maybe The Hobbit. There's a definite story to tell, but not every minute of the show is slavishly devoted to reaching the incredible climax. By indulging in detours and side jobs, they make the universe richer and more real, thereby giving even more meaning and weight to everything that takes place. It also creates fresh territory for fans to explore and fantasize about.
Wow... I think I'm actually going to finish this review without giving any spoilers. Cool. Bebop was a great side trip of my own, and I'm glad I took the time to see it as a whole. Next stop, Firefly Redux!
Monday, October 17, 2005
Make Your Own Kind of Music
Anime directors, in my experience, are not very prolific, and so it probably shouldn't surprise that we haven't heard a lot from Katsuhiro Otomo. In the more than 15 years since Akira was released he has only done one film that I can find, something called "Rojin Z." Last year, though, he released a new movie called "Steamboy." It was pretty well received critically (it received the standard approval of "Not as good as Akira, but then again, what is?"), and I was looking forward to seeing it in the theaters, only to be miffed when it exited Kansas City after a single week's engagement. Fie!
Fortunately, public expenditures were my salvation: I was able to find a DVD copy at my local library, and enjoyed an evening with the film. The rest of this post is just my disjointed thoughts on it.
First off, this would be a good movie to introduce Anime virgins to the form. While I think Miyazaki England
It took me a while to get into the movie. Maybe I had been oversold it, but I was a little disappointed early on: while the design was wonderful, the actual animation didn't seem THAT spectacular; it just got the job done. And the general arc of the story felt somewhat clichéd. The further I got into it, though, the more intrigued I became, in large part because they subvert the archetypes you're relying on.
Oh, I should probably put a "spoilers" warning here. You've been warned.
Once you find out the father isn't dead, things shift into uncertain territory. My sentiments were with the grandfather, but I have a soft spot for crazy old men, and it seemed at least plausible that he was doing good within the O'Hara structure. This really engaged me, and as I got drawn into the plot, the cumulative total of the very imaginative design hit me. I've done steampunk before, but I've never seen it look as good.
What really sold me on Steamboy, though, was the way they gradually spun out the conflict between Eddie and Lloyd. Lloyd, the grandfather, strikes me as a true scientist: he is utterly dedicated to advancing the course of knowledge and is willing to accept (or inflict) a high cost for that; witness the dramatic first scene. Like a true idealistic scientist, he is also very optimistic about the potential his discoveries can bring. I find it interesting that he is a far more compassionate person in abstract than in principal; he is dedicated to doing good for "the people" without seeming to particularly care what happens to his son or others close to him.
Eddie, while arguably the villain, is incredibly sympathetic. (Tangent: this is probably the single thing I enjoy most about Japanese anime, the complex way villains are presented. They are treated with respect as people with their own drives and desires, as opposed to the caricatures that wear black hats in virtually every American movie.) He is virtually the opposite of his father: he shows kindness to David and deference to Scarlett, but shows little real concern for the deaths his work will bring. If Lloyd is a scientist, Eddie is an engineer: he is interested in the application, in turning knowledge towards some concrete end. His main drive is for manifestation, to realize his vision, to pull it from the abstract world into reality. To his perspective, the O'Hara foundation is only good, because they have devoted their resources into realizing his vision. To put it bluntly, he wants the grant money so he can truly finish his research.
The pull between Lloyd and Eddie isn't simply good versus evil. The question is whether the advancement of science is a laudable end in itself (Eddie), or whether every step taken along the way needs to benefit humanity (Lloyd). One can imagine Eddie arguing that, while the steam devices would cause death in the short term, they would hasten the availability of widespread positive applications to extend lifespans and ease people's existence. But I don't think Eddie sees his work on being contingent on some future good. To him, science is a religion, something to be advanced for its own sake independent of its affect on people.
I find this tension fascinating. On paper, of course, most of us agree with Lloyd. I would argue, though, that for those of us involved in engineering, in practice we act like Eddie every chance we get. When you're working on a project, do you really stop and think about what impact it will have on people? How it will affect their happiness, their wallet, their minds and bodies? Or do you view it in isolation, considering the work by itself as something to be completed for its own sake? I do think about how my work impacts people, but far more often I'm more concerned with just making it work, and when I'm done, I'm more likely to admire its technical elegance than its application.
Kurt Vonnegut addressed this tension himself in a graduation speech at MIT back in 1985. This is reprinted in Chapter 12 of "Fates Worse than Death," which is a book I think you would enjoy. He makes his point far more elegantly than I ever could, but his message to these graduating scientists and engineers is essentially this: You are the men and women who will develop the next atomic bomb, or the next supervirus, or the next giant space weapon. Do not deceive yourselves into thinking that you are not responsible for what happens with the forces you bring into the world. Please turn your energies towards peaceful employers who seek to benefit mankind, not military who seek to destroy it.
Vonnegut admits that the speech bombed, spectacularly. I was struck by his description of what many people had told him, that they didn't think Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative to y'all) would work, but everyone wanted to work on it. Why? Because it was well-funded, and they could solve interesting problems while toiling away at it. People were offended by the suggestion that they had a responsibility to use their minds in the service of good. "I'm an engineer! I can't/shouldn't worry about what my employer will do with the tools I make for them!"
I read this speech a few years ago, and while it certainly didn't change my mind about anything, it has strengthened my convictions. When I graduated from Wash U in the spring of '03, the only companies interviewing on campus were healthcare companies and defense contractors. Even though it meant cutting my prospective employment by 50% (including some very lucrative opportunities in the post-9/11 ramp-up to war), I knew that I wouldn't be able to stand it if the software I wrote helped kill more people.
A decade later, Steamboy has reinforced the message again. The fun-fair is more valuable than the weapon, which serves to destroy. Resist the Eddies, who compromise ethics to advance their careers, and resist the Stevensons, who advance the deadly philosophy of "if we don't do it, somebody else will." If political leaders would take the lessons of Steamboy to heart, we'd live in a kinder world; if scientists and engineers paid attention, we'd live in a far less dangerous one.
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