Blablathon episodes 9 & 10

Hey Aaron, why are you writing these tedious, impenetrable descriptions of a cartoon you don't seem to like much?


Good question. I think it's because we recently finished Lost, which like Rahxephon is an overcomplicated scattershot techno-mystical soap opera. OTOH I preferred the way Rahxephon grew as it accumulated.

Ep. 9. There's a Magic Temple on an island, with a door that opens or closes at narrative convenience. Heroboy and Quon the Mysterious Red-Braid Girl go inside because the other Mysterious Girl, Mishima the Deus Ex Machina Ghost in the Rahxephon, appears in it. Heroboy thinks Mishima is dead for some reason, so he goes ghost-chasing with Quon in tow. They stumble around inside the shrine while Herogirl hangs around outside, worrying about Heroboy.

Subplot: Ponytail Science Guy yearns to pilot Rahxephon himself, and Evil Albino Guy razzes him about it. Ponytail tries to get inside Rahxephon, but ghostly Mishima appears and rebuffs him.

Back in the Magic Temple, Heroboy has visions of Home in Tokyo Pooptrumpet, thereby meeting his fixating-on-the-past quota for this episode, while the two Mysterious Girls meet by a big black egg that they seem to think is a terribly important big black egg. And they talk about how music is the true shape of what the world can be, or something.

Herogirl, who's all worried about the duo in the now-closed temple, rescues them by playing some cheezy old pop song that she likes. Inside the Temple Heroboy and Quon hear the song and magically escape the Temple, so I guess the true shape of the world is cheezy pop music.

Also: lots of gratuitious fanservice.

Ep. 10. First act=lousy. Lot of vamping and boxstepping, but all that really happens is that Quon hangs out at the home of one of the middle-aged commander guys while playing fiddle music, to the consternation of various guys who have the hots for Quon and fear she's an item with Commader Guy. Weak humor about this; the show seems to be channeling Tenchi, a dire humor anime from around the same time. And I'm the guy who renamed Tokyo Jupiter "Tokyo Pooptrumpet," so when I say the humor is weak, you know it's weak. Also there's about a million shots of the commander's bluebird in its birdcage, cuz SYMBOLISM. Commander fixates on a videotape of an unseen little girl playing the violin and asking Commander to come to her recital. Say, Quon also plays violin; the same tune, even! And the tune has magic miracle-gro qualities, making flowers bloom real good.

Act Two is mostly timewasting and padding and exposition. Beyond that, Commander was once underling to a soldier who ordered him to bomb Tokyo, turning it into Tokyo Pooptrumpet (which, remember, is my conceived-at-2-A.M. joke name for Tokyo Jupiter, which is Tokyo with a Jupiter-lookin' shell over it) and that soldier is now squirreled away in TokPoop, working for Heroboy's Evil Mom. Commander meets his estranged daughter, who wants closure before she leaves Japan, so she gives him the Missing Last Page Of Sheetmusic For That Magic Tune. Turns out daughter isn't the little girl in the videotape, but that little girl wrote this magic tune despite being ten. The little girl herself is dead, and Quon is exhausted by playing the tune because it's so spiritually, rather than technically, taxing. Then Commander visits the dead girl's grave and tells her she won't be lonely for long. My bet is the girl in the grave'll turn out to be Mishima, the ghostly Deus Ex Machina Girl.

Blablathon Episode 8

Christmas episode. Has about as much heft as the phrase "Christmas episode" suggests. Lots of monochromatic snow imagery, lots of Christmas kitsch imagery, all of which I'm an easy mark for. Dropped hints about who has a crush on whom; empty-calorie human interest subplottery. Herogirl's kid sister drops some hints about how Herogirl once bought a Christmas gift for a boy she loved but she never gave it to him. Later, it's cold and Heroboy doesn't have any mittens, so Herogirl gives Heroboy some mittens. HMMMM.

Also Ponytail Scientist Guy finds a big pretty crystal stuck in the wings of the Rahxe-Robot and doesn't stop to consider that it might be dangerous. Nope, he just puts it on a necklace and gives it to Blonde Scientist Lady. No one notices when it begins growing, as a spooky phantom Mu Pilot (all the Mu monsters have human pilots operating them be remote control) appears in the window behind her, watching, waiting...

In the second act all the pretty snow turns into freezing imagery as a wintry Mu grows from the crystal necklace and absorbs Blond Scientist Lady in its ice, with funky visual stylings. Heroboy in his Rahxephon tries to save her; he can't hit the Mu because BSL is a human shield. Mu freezes Rahxephon with wintry ice magic as BSL gives a manic monologue about how unloved she is and how cold (geddit?) Heroboy is. And she weeps blood.

Then Yellow-Ribbon Mysterious Girl manifests inside the Rahxephon and gives Heroboy a little cuddle, which warms him up and thaws the ice. Hot sphere of sun shimmers behind Rahxephon as it whips up a force sword somehow and carves BSL out of her Mu. Day saved. By cuddles. My kind of Deus Ex.

Coda: Christmas party. Herogirl's kid sister notices Heroboy's gloves and mentions that they're the gift Herogirl bought for her long lost love. HMMMMM.

Blahblahthon Episode 7

Once my Brother and I were sitting around watching Akira when my Dad strolled through the room, just in time for the bit where Tetsuo, the out-of-control mutant boy, starts growing at an explosive rate, like a time-lapse tumor, and accidentally squashes the girl he loves, in gruesome explicit colorful animation. Dad said "What kind of mind thinks up this stuff?" I guess the answer is: a mind that had two atomic bombs dropped on its cities. And now Japan gets even more apocalyptic death, disease and dread.

All of which is worth bearing in mind as I finally get around to Episode 7 of Rahxephon.

This episode starts with Heroboy entering his big goofy giant robot through some kind of magic portal in the mission control room. The portal is a little pyramid with a picture of an Angel (I guess; it's a human with wings, anyway) and Heroboy just walks through the wall. His head passes through the angel's Barbie-doll crotch, because animators are bored. Then there's lots of vulvaesque additional portal for him to travel through, because animators are lonely.

Pony-tailed scientist guy and blond scientist woman run some kind of benign experiments on the boy in the 'bot while flirty-flirting. Uh-oh, here comes the evil albino guy, who knows Ponytail Guy somehow! Let's hope no love triangles develop, else Blondie might start driving too fast and squealing her tires (spoiler).

Also that Reporter suspects the Government just might be hiding a Giant Robot. And there's a colors-of-Bennington team of fighter jet pilots joining the Let's-Fight-Mu-Monsters gang.

In Act Two our hero in his Bot and the fighter jet team have to fight a robot on stilts. For a while all we see are stilts rising into the clouds, which is pretty neat imagery, then the good guys rise above the clouds and the robot hits them with fire and ice and lightning and lasers and bananas and I lost track. Squad resents running backup for a boy, goes in for the kill despite orders to hang back and cover Heroboy. Mu almost kills them.

Heroboy saves the day via the power of remembering the folks back home and getting all determined to protect them, just like in WWII movies.

Afterwards the Fighter jet team leader (a buxom Cowgirl, cuz animators are in show biz) gets dressed down by Haruka, the woman who brought Heroboy from Tokyo Pooptrumpet (I know, it never gets old!) and just might have the spoiler warning hots for him. Haruka softens the blow by saying oh yeah thanks for fighting and all.

Reporter dude sniffs that Heroboy just might be piloting a secret giant robot, and asks Heroboy why he fights. Heroboy responds that it makes him feel connected to something bigger than himself. I used to think that was just the kind of thing screenwriters like to put into characters' mouths for some reason; today I understand, which is why I write blogposts about last decades' anime. Makes me part of something grander and more important than myself: old cartoons.

Quon, the red-braid Mystery Girl, wakes up after the Mu fight, magically knows about the fight, and announces to the air that Heroboy shouldn't fight. Instead he should Tune Himself To The Song. People say things like that in Anime.

Blahblahthon Episode 6

This is happening. I am going to rewatch and subsequently remark upon Rahxephon, a giant robot anime that I haven’t watched in years, even if it kills me (with boredom (or alcohol poisoning)). Sadly I can’t find the first disk of this series, so I’m starting with episode six, making things even more confusing than they would be anyway.

The basic plot is more or less identical to every giant robot show I’ve seen; a teen boy has to pilot a big robot (here called The Rahxephon) and use it to fight mysterious alien robots (here called the Mu) on behalf of a paramilitary organization. In this episode he tells his supervisors that he won’t fight anymore. Why? Maybe I’d know if I’d reviewed the previous episodes; he doesn’t articulate his reasons here. I suspect the real reason is that the show creators wanted him to be a less annoying version of Shinji, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the popular and influential giant robot show on which Rahxephon is nakedly modeled. Shinji spent a lot of time refusing to fight, and many fans found him annoying (how do I know this? Because I spent way too much time on anime message boards when I should have been going outside, dating, etc). I suspect the disconnect between fans and Shinji stemmed from fans’ desire to have a vicarious heroic experience; a hero who overdoes the “refusing the call” routine doesn’t contribute to the triumphalist vibe. So anyway, Heroboy in Rahxephon emulates Shinji, but replaces realistic adolescent stridency with bland unexplained insistence. Which makes him more suitable for conventional self-insertion and less suitable for fine-grained examination of maturational struggle.

There’s also a bunch of fooferall about military maneuvers that I couldn’t be bothered to follow since it was all delivered in exposition (there’s a reporter covering the paramilitary org who exists entirely to provide such exposition, and will turn out to be an undercover general for some reason oops spoiler warning).

Also in this episode (only) there’s a team member named Kim who keeps privately dwelling on the trauma of having her parents killed by Mu when they first inexplicably attacked earth; she wants revenge on them. She has a pensive conversation with Heroboy about it; he also has reason to be bitter about the Mu because:

Heroboy’s backstory! Years ago the Mu surrounded his city, Tokyo, with a pocket dimension forcefield mammerjammer that makes time run differently (like Lost Island oops spoiler warning) and keeps Tokyoians unknowingly separated from the world outside; an enforced urban provincialism. In the early episodes the exterior war-with-the-Mu irrupts into his seemingly ordinary existence, and he gets expelled from that comfortable quiet life into A Time Of War. With Giant Robots. Also the force field around Tokyo looks like Jupiter, so people refer to Tokyo plus force field as Tokyo Jupiter. As I recorded notes on each episode I started referring to Tokyo Jupiter as Tokyo Pooptrumpet, because at 2 in the morning that is hilarious.

Are you following all this? Tough. Anyway, Heroboy tells Kim that despite all the evil the Mu have done, he doesn’t want revenge. This adjusts her attitude so she stops wanting revenge. She thanks Heroboy. And pretty much disappears from the show. One nice grace note: their pensive conversation takes place on a big concrete rooftop with the sun going down, and whoever colored it got the tone of sunset reflecting off concrete just right; reminds me of college days somehow.

The basic outline of every episode is: Act One, lots of talky stuff; Act Two, Mu Attack. The Rahxephon (Heroboy’s robot, remember) looks like the dorkiest toy robot from 70s Japan ever, which I used to think was an aesthetic lapse. Now, though, I see the point; Japanese viewers see it and intuitively know this is the herobot, since it looks like every herobot in every robot show ever. The Mu look like postmodern sculpture; beautiful but enigmatic.

In this episode The Mu has two strategies: smash into your robot like a wrecking ball, and make you sink into some magical drowning dimension. Happily, if you’re Heroboy, your robot comes equipped with a Mysterious Girl (Mysterious Girls were all the rage in robot anime at the time) with a big yellow scarf who appears out of nowhere and sings, thereby breaking the spell. Then when the Mu smashes into you again it will smash into a bazillion pieces and you’ll be fine. Thanx, Deus Ex Machina girl (named Mishima, like the suicidal novelist)!

That’s Episode Six. Pray for me.

some stuff prior to stuffing.

Today we had a jolly Thanksgiving lunch at work, and tomorrow I'm going to try to compress a full work day, some initial Christmas shopping, and a trip to Nashville to see the family all into one day. I'd better hit the sack. Before I go, though, a few thoughts about the arts'n'entertainment on which I've been stewing.

I'm reading Richard Ford's short story collection "A Multitude of Sins." In many ways it's a kindred spirit with the work of two other authors I love, Carol Shields and Alice Munro. Yet I can't say I enjoy his work as much. I can't quite put my finger on it; maybe his prose is a little plainer. Maybe his characters are a little further from the type I enjoy reading about. There's a different kind of character evaluation going on in his work. It's got a brusqueness to it; I left the volume at work or I'd cite examples. But I think it's worth my while to finish the book. To paraphrase a recent Norman Mailer speech, great writing isn't just there to meet your immediate entertainment needs; it's there to live with you. Ford may not brighten my day the way Munro and Shields do, but he resonates with me on the same level they do, and that's the greater accomplishment. He knows how to explain and express some of the deeper elements of life and human relations, and I really feel like I learn a little with every story. I never finish a book out of a sense of bookworm obligation, but I'll finish it out of a sense of spiritual need.

I finished J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World last night; it's a sixties novel in which an environmental disaster causes global flooding and high temperatures. When Ballard writes about peoples' slow descent into what he terms a new psychology (a sort of sun worship that ties into an embryonic biochemical drive) I'm entranced. When he describes the choreography of the action as people navigate around a sunken London, I'm bewildered. He shifts tenses in ways that throw me right out of the story, leaving me wondering if he was a little weak on tenses or if he was really sophisticated and I'm the one who's weak. I don't have these problems with his later writings, so either he got better or he just clicked into a style I could follow. The novel is also chock full of primal negro savagery, although I imagine Mr. Ballard, who's unquestionably my intellectual superior, has become more enlightened since the sixties.

I watched the last episode of Rahxephon last night; Rahxephon is one of those Giant Robot animes. You know Neon Genesis Evangelion? A crash course for those who don't (And BTW there's a billion web sites where you can read about these shows, but presumably if you're reading this blog at all it's because you're interested in my take on things more than the subjects themselves...) Neon Genesis Evangelion was a Giant Robot cartoon series that was masterminded by Hideaki Anno, an animator who didn't want to make giant robot cartoons. He wanted to do a drama about the angst of life, but toy manufacturers don't sponsor shows like that. So he used the Giant Robot (or Mecha) genre as a Trojan horse (Trojan robot?) to get on the air at all. It was a hugely popular show (around the mid-nineties) that had two effects on popular anime, the first minor, the second major. It upgraded the Jungian aspect of the mecha anime (the giant robots the cute but troubled teen pilots use are basically symbols of puberty writ large) and it downloaded the concerns and techniques of nouvelle vague filmmaking into pop anime. Granted, it did the latter in an often clumsy and clunky way, but it created a demand for more challeging anime that has influenced anime for the better. A movie sequel (End of Evangelion) tidied up the fumbled, bungled or abandoned narrative threads and thematic elements of the show, but in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink fashion. It was like they were afraid if they left an idea out of the film they'd never get another chance, so they threw a lot of stuff into it, resulting in a semi-brilliant semi-dopey mishmash. Still, with all its faults, Eva suggested, if not exemplified, some fresh approaches for anime.

Rahxephon is the show for people who think Eva was a great mecha show that screwed up by trying to be arty. It's largely a buff and wax on Eva; sometimes it seems like the makers had no intention of copying Eva; it's just that Eva was the only show they'd ever seen and they didn't have any other model for what a show could be. Other times it seem like if Eva had talking dogs, Rahxephon has whispering kittens. If Eva had clogging, Rah has techno-squaredancing. If Eva had Free Candy Day, Rah has Complementary Ice Cream Weekend.

But Rah's not a ripoff, somehow; despite a hundred overly-familiar elements it manages to create a bit of an individual identity. Its like the Monkees of Mecha. Unlike Eva, which eventually lets its improvised plot threads get snarled, only to treat that snarl like a Gordian Knot, Rahxephon has a carefully worked-out double acrostic plot scheme that pretty much works (although I'm the worst person for spotting plot holes, so don't trust me on that.) The final episode is like a reconsideration of Eva's final episode, which was basically Last EST Session at Marienbad with some Ranma spliced in. (Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, another series from the makers of Eva, also has an improved Eva-style ending.)

But I prefer Eva. Even in its filler episodes there's the sensation that the folks behind the show are striving to give you your money's worth. Sometimes they fail you, but they never short you. Even when they fall on their faces it's because they were trying for something impressive. Rahxephon's a little too carefully worked out; in some episodes you can imagine the creators thinking "We're only scheduled to hit two plot points this episode, so we gotta do a lot of vamping this week." Really, there's a ton of padding. The best episodes can stand with the best Eva episodes, but a bad Eva episode still has some gonzo elements that make it interesting; the weaker episodes of Rahxephon are just... weak. Rahxephon is tidier than Eva, but Eva was the breakthrough.

Enough of that; you want to know about the Gormenghast Opera soundtrack, right? Well, I'm pretty ignorant about opera in general, so I really don't have much business evaluating this, but I really like it. I've been interested in musicals most of my life, and many of the songs on this album could work just fine with a more musical-comedy vocal approach. Still there's a power to operatic vocals that is unique. When I studied singing under the dear departed Andy Gainey I tried my hand at some arias. As I believe he told me, I'd never, ever get to the point where I could do these well, but I'd learn by doing. He was right. The melodies may sound pretty darn simple, but singing them with that full-bodied opera voice, with correct enuciation, is such a vocal workout... As for Gormenghast, the lyrics are in english, and are brilliant distillations of the novel's implications, without ever directly quoting Peake's prose. I intend to buy a few of librettist Duncan Fallowell's books. A sample lyric: "I swoon at the thought/of thighs swimming in port/or a quivering portion/of pallid abortion/because veal to be right/must be unborn and white/with veg round the edge/to assist the excreta/of this humble meat eater." I'll save any further notes for a later post (I also hope to comment on BBC's radio adaptation of Gormenghast soon) but I'll add that nothing's sexier than dueling coloraturas.