We Need To Blog About Kevin

We saw We Need To Talk About Kevin last night.  Having read and enjoyed the book I was surprised by the film's fragmentary retelling.  The novel tells the story of a woman whose son committed a school shooting.  It's an epistolary novel in which the Mom reflects to her now-absent husband on how she always believed her son was a damaged soul.  This reflective narration allows for plenty of chronological flexibility, but Mom unspools each memory or thread of incidents in a carefully detailed and closely argued fashion.  In one of my favorite passages, the Mom, whose blend of wit and misanthropy recalls Humbert Humbert, details her loathing of a McMansion her husband bought the family.  She goes on and on about every last repellant detail of the bloated McGormenghast, and it is hilarious.  Mom is a hoot.

She's also, in another Humbertian nod, an unreliable narrator.  Is her son really as monstrous as she describes him, or is her misanthropy the root of the boy's damage?  It's a Turn of the Screw-style riddle without a provided solution.

In the movie the Mother's voice, along with her vinegar wit, is mostly excised.  No voiceover or soliloquies here.  And since the film shows what the book tells, the filmmaker (Lynne Ramsay, whose painterly and elliptical filmmaking here is a tour de force) must make a hundred little choices about how to show the boy's defiance and seeming wickedness.  He comes across as thoroughly reptillian, which tilts things in the Mother's favor.

The film is also more fragmentary, skipping through chronology in a succession of quick cuts, as if George Roy Hill circa Slaughterhouse 5 dropped acid with Antonioni circa Zabriskie Point with an assist from Resnais circa Last Year at Marienbad.  Oh, you know what I mean, quit bellyachin'.

You know what the film really reminded me of?  Anime movies based on long-running series.  These movies tend to toss linear narrative out the window and rely on a kinetic parade of highlights from the story in the original TV series/comic.  Lots of details are alluded to but glossed over in the assumption that you've engaged the source material and know the context of details that are plopped down into the movie without explanation.  If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about, by all means check out Evangelion: Death and Rebirth, the adaptation of the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV show that makes utter hash of the narrative, on the assumption that you've seen the show and just want a fancy recap before the screamy, spastic, let's-throw-every-idea-we've-got-onscreen-because-we-may-never-get-another-chance-before-we-have-to-go-back-to-hackwork-for-hire film it precedes: End of Evangelion.

Anyway, I liked the film on its own gawgeously photographed terms, but I had a few quibbles.

• No spoilers, but there's a big tearjerking surprise in the novel's conclusion that the movie flattens out by choosing to remove the Mother's narrative.
• The film decontextualizes some of the novel's elements so vigorously that they seem like little more than accidental residue.  Mom's seeing her son's TV interview; Mom's work as a travel writer.  These things are alluded to in the film in a fashion that left my wife, who didn't read the book, confounded.  I don't think my wife was alone in this.  I know the director didn't want to elaborate things in the rational manner of the book, but I'm not sure the bewildering surrealism of the way these elements of the novel irrupt in the film seem like anything more than arty intrusions to viewers who missed the book.
• One of my favorite parts of the novel involves the pre-shooting teen psychopath boy befriending a witless hanger-on, and their attempt to frame an innocent schoolteacher of student molestation.  Author Lionel Shriver turns this into a screamingly funny passage about how it takes brains and guile to be a successful villain; brains and guile that hangers-on can't muster.  I missed this, is all I'm saying.  The film pared things down, and some fun sequences got lost.
• One last thing.  There's a sequence in the film where the boy takes a bow to an imagined audience in the gym just before his crime.  It's shot like something out of Triumph of the Will, which makes sense as a cinematic look at the connection between self-glorification and brutality, but as a matter of taste I'd have preferred a found-footage style presentation that replaced the Wagnerian lighting with a verite smeariness.  The subtle irony of the film's approach to this shot might be lost on people who don't get the Triumph of the Will reference, while a Who-does-this-daydreaming-little-foreskin-think-he-is? presentation might puncture the self-dramatizing more deflatingly.  

I think "deflatingly" is a good way to end a sentence or a blogpost.

Do Not Mistake the Pointing Finger For the Moon; or, From Mediated Life to Life.

In the late 90s I was enraptured by an anime miniseries called Please Save My Earth.  Never mind the story; the people who made the show certainly didn't.  It was adapted from a long-running comic book series (that screaming you hear is nerds yelling "It's not a comic book; it's MANGA!") that had way too much made-up-as-she-went-along plot to fit smoothly into the adaptation, added to which the story in the comic wasn't yet finished when the anime was made.  The first episode of the six-episode show had a leisurely pace, but as it went on the tempo picked up, with incident trampling over incident until, at the end, we got a montage of unaddressed plot threads that felt like a "Next time on Please Save My Earth" trailer and an effort at poetic, rather than narrative, resolution.  This failure/refusal/confounding of linear narrative resolution, no matter how clumsy, prepared me for literary modernism in a way my literature classes hadn't.  The ending burst like a seedpod, flinging unresolved plot threads and dimly glimpsed story points all over, and I found it more entrancing than any tidy conclusion could have been.

So I was really into this show.  At one point in it there's a shot of a tree with its leaves wafting in the breeze; it had no narrative significance, but it was pretty to look at while the heroine narrated at us, and perhaps it suggested a context to her affairs that a more conventional picture of her face wouldn't provide.  For some reason this animated image of a tree resonated with me, perhaps because I lived in a neighborhood full of trees.

Every night I would come home from my second-shift job and walk the dog in the dark.  One of our neighbors had placed a light under a tall tree; the light shone up the shaft of the tree, illuminating its entire length up to the canopy of leaves.  I think I would have overlooked it if I hadn't had that animated image of a tree awakening me to the way trees exist on their own beside our lives; the numinousness of trees suddenly mattered to me after a life of living around them, and that illuminated tree became a nightly touchstone for me.

So.  I've progressed from cartoon trees (that in retrospect looked more like wobbling green bubble gum blobs than foliage) to trees with dramatic lighting, to just liking trees in general.  I regard this as progress: from the mediated experience to the thing itself.

Teenager From Inner Space

Daddy Tired.

I'm in Gradjulate Skuwl so I don't have as much time/energy/focus for this blog as I did when I had an office job and posted during lulls in work.  Heck, I barely have time to make the eight espressos a day I swill down just to keep the pace brisk.  Plus we have a new cat we're trying to teach not to shred the flesh off of everyone who comes near.  

Of course when a Man/Child gets this much responsibility, he starts to remember more innocent times.  Times when he took games like Teenagers from Outer Space really seriously.

When I was in high school, this game (abbreviated TFOS) seemed to offer a way to reframe the whole experience, make it less frustrating and more fun.  A few years later I discovered anime, and yet I didn't make the connection between Rumiko Takahashi, a manga artist whose work Teenagers From Outer Space openly cannibalized, and TFOS itself, even though I was obsessed with Rumiko Takahashi's work (because it seemed to offer a way to reframe my whole post-college experience, make it less etc.)  Only now, as I take a fresh look at TFOS, do I see that I was playing in Rumiko's world before I ever fell in love with Rumiko's work.

What's more, I have two supplements to the game, one from R. Talsorian, the company that released the game, and another from a third-party startup.  

The first is called Field Trip.  It's a module (for non-dorks: a role-playing module is essentially a ready-made story for gamers to use, absolving the referee of the responsibility of creating the story, instead socking the ref with the responsibility to learn the story) that I haven't really read.  The plot hinges on a School Vice Principal organizing a booby-trapped field trip.  The idea of an utterly hostile Vice Principal doesn't square with even my most persecution-complexy school memories, and strikes me as a nonclever variation on what I wanted from TFOS: a recasting of school experience to make it more fun.  Yeah, I liked satirizing the faculty in these games, but I knew they didn't HATE us.  They just hated the cruddier things we did.  Early in the module the Vice Principal hijacks the school bus and reveals himself to be a terrorist sleeper agent, at which point I ran out of patience, not due to post-9/11 sensitivity, but out of exasperation.  These dumb jokes don't resonate with my school experience.

Then there's a more recent thing called The Landing.  It's devoted to describing a shopping mall for the TFOS characters to enjoy.  The writing is a mess.  The original TFOS writing style has a competent-standup-comic verve; the jokes may be hit or miss, but there's a sense of humor and an offer to enjoy yourself.  The Landing's style isn't reminiscent of standup; it's reminiscent of a science project report, droned aloud by a dull, serious student.  It's full of poorly thought out ideas for jazzing up your fantasy mall, but the most irksome element is the new races.

TFOS has 4 races your characters can be: human, near human, not-very-near-human and Real Weirdie.  Not so much races as categories, right?  It's a terrific way to encourage the right loosy-goosy spirit, because you can play pretty much anything under these rules.

So why do you need new races?

The new races turn out to be various categories of Furry.  One humanoid fox race, TWO humanoid cat races (one anthropomorphic cat, the other human-with-cat-ears-and-tail, an oddly popular image in Japanese cartoons) and grumpy-old-man goldfish.  Okay, the goldfish are cool.

(Sidenote: In my view there's a substantial difference between traditional funny animals (Uncle Scrooge etc.) and the whole furry thing.  Uncle Scrooge is really a human disguised as a duck for a practical cartooning reason: cartooning is in part about abstraction, and by giving Scrooge a duck bill and a ducklike stance he's abstracted far away from any human appearance.  So you can't judge him by his looks.  You have to evaluate his deeds and words.  So it is with most funny animals; they're just people whom we must judge by their behavior, since their appearances don't reveal much about them.

With furry art, though, the duck bill or the squirrel tail is the whole point.  These characteristics are fetishistic, not always in a sexual sense, but certainly in a broader meaning of the word "fetish."  And people have a right to their fetishes, even if they ick me out (and furry icks me out to an illogical extent). but I love cartoon animals while disliking anything forthrightly furverted. )

I don't mind a'tall that some people take their TFOS with a side of Furry.  To thine own self be true; I always used this kind of game to address my heart's yearnings, so why shouldn't furries?  But I'm a little irked by the way furry stuff permeates The Landing, not because I don't like furry stuff, but because I don't like the attempt to encroach on the freedom of the original game's premises.  The nature of TFOS is to allow for any kind of character, but the nature of The Landing is to mandate specific kinds of character: the kinds The Landing's creators enjoy.  In this sense TFOS is small-l liberal and/or libertarian, while The Landing is small-c conservative.  The former gives unfettered permission to Do Your Thing, while the latter wants you to Do The Author's Thing; it tries to corral you into a rigidly defined set of values and fetishes (and fetishes are usually rigorous in their rigid definition.)

Anyway, I'm going to grad school as part of my ongoing (in part successful) efforts to have good life experience directly instead of mediating life through entertainment.

Why, do you think?

I'm sure your friends aren't sending you enough Youtube links, so here.


This is pretty much the greatest thing ever. If I could do something as jaw-droppingly perfect as the first song on this clip, my life would be entirely justified. I also enjoy the way the host steals a kiss from the second act and a look of annoyance crosses her face for an instant. You know he took this gig purely out of a desire to get lucky with one of the guests. Too bad we don't get to hear the DeLorean song at the end. Truly, the 80s were a magic time. Or maybe they just seemed that way because I was a kid.

If you're wondering what Penney Peirce, the woman behind "Why Do You Think You Are Nuts?" is up to, the answer follows:



She looks happy and I'm glad, but I hope she'll put the lingerie back on and sing more outlandish punk songs for us.

Here's a video we first saw in Montreal, home of the artist:



Hope we get to see more of Socalled on our next trip to Montreal. Also hope we get to see The American Devices:



Here's a short some friends of mine made! It won awards of some kind.



And here's the closing credit sequence from Please Save My Earth becuz I love it.



And in conclusion,

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.

Rah Project

If you're feeling a strange, intangible excitement, a sense that something wonderful is immanent, rest assured that it's not just your imagination: I've started rewatching Rahxephon, and I'm going to keep you posted on an episode-by-episode basis. You're welcome.

Why am I doing this? Because I bought the whole series (I don't know why, I just did, okay?) and might as well get my money's worth. Plus it's out of print apparently, and unless people discover a way to, I don't know, download bootleg copies of video material from the Internet or something, it may be hard to find, so someone should keep some kind of anecdotal record.

Having rewatched the first two episodes: Okay, blandly attractive boy has goofy friends (whom I found tiresome the first time I watched it, but now prefer to the endless fighter-jet and giant robot routines. This is a rare instance of something from a anime becoming LESS tiresome to me over time.) KABOOM military attack, fighter jet porn, and his friend-who's-a-girl gets a slight cut. Wait a minute, her blood is red; as I recall a key plot point about seventy episodes later is that her blood is blue, indicating that she's unknowingly a Mulian (the filthy rotten alien invaders.) Is there a continuity screwup here, or do they justify it later? Something to watch for.

So protagonist-boy runs around bumping into several Mysterious Girls. Rei Ayanami of Neon Genesis Evangelion started an anime fad for Mysterious Girls, so this show has a bunch of them. One of the other big trends in anime at the time was the so-called harem anime, in which a nebbishy boy socializes with five or six hot girls. Rahxephon tries to subtly cater to the same adolescent-boy urges while maintaining plausible deniability with furrowed-brow Lost-style seriousness and plot complexity.

The only interesting things in episode one are

1. the Mulian giant robot things look like art projects: pseudo ethnographic, with broken doll heads and such. Sadly the main herobot, Rahxephon, looks much less interesting, like a big boring robot toy, plus feathers.

2. One of the mysterious girls is actually a mysterious woman, with hips and body fat, and therefore more interesting to look at than the usual willowy mysterious girls.

The only interesting things in episode two are

1. the inevitable connection between the boy and the robot is kept uncertain for a while, which in giant robot shows represents an innovation.

2. The boy's Mom is an evil scientist who, like all scientists everywhere, is doing something nefarious. Plus her minions seem to be keeping tabs on the boy hero for some reason. Some of the best episodes will revolve around Satan-Scientist-Mom. The Japanese, like the ancient Greeks, always do well with lurid family conflict.

3. The version of Tokyo where this takes place kinda sorta reminds me of Birmingham, and all the running and driving around prettily painted urban locations sweeps me back to happy days of tooling around The 'Ham. Cheap instant nostalgia is half of what anyone watches anime for.

So far there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to keep watching this thing, but as I recall other fans who had seen more assured me that the series gets more interesting once it's established its giant robot bona fides, and they turned out to be right. One of the reasons I found this show compelling was that each episode had its own identity, even if that identity was often not much of an identity. It never quite felt as if I'd watched slight variations on the same episode three times in a row, which can't be said of most anime.

P. S. this is dated September 15 because I started writing it then, but I posted it October 2nd. Thanks, Blogger. What do you want for free?

No Comment(ary track)

Someone just Googled across my blog by searching "obama reptoid cocaine white house." In celebration of this heartbreaking goofiness, I'd like to confess something.

I haven't watched any new anime releases in years, but I recently heard that they aren't buttering up anime DVDs with nonsense like dub actor commentary tracks anymore. I was actually saddened, because when I lived alone I was all too fond of the dub commentary track to Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, disk one, episode three. The show is pretty entertaining, but watching it with the dub actresses chattering all the way through it was a nice simulation of hanging out with fun people. I know, it's sad. Some people need to be married.

It's 2010 and I'm posting about Here is Greenwood

Here is Greenwood is an anime miniseries that was released on videotape sometime in the late Nineties, and I bought the first two videotapes (of three (two episodes per tape for about $30 or so. Ah, the good old days)). I barely even think about anime these days, but occasionally I think about this basically disposable product for a couple reasons:

1. The first episode's laid-back anecdotal portrayal of life at a cushy boarding school played to my hot-coal-in-my-brain yearning to return to the cushy college life I'd just been forcibly graduated out of. Episode 2 onward declined into the lame plot-driven storytelling for which anime is famous, but episode 1 was content to present a loose assemblage of mini-stories that felt a bit like hearing someone wax nostalgic about their freshman year. I watched it over and over again, but since the second tape ($30) was two filler episodes (padding out that exhausting six-episode run) I figured the ambling style of the first episode was a one-off. Years later I rented the third tape and was proven right.

2. It's been dubbed twice by two different companies, the second of which rereleased the thing on DVD. I rented this just to compare the new dub to the old one. Hey, I didn't know what to do with myself, at least I wasn't roaming the streets.

The old dub is embarrassingly, wince-inducingly amateurish, but you could tell the actors cared a lot. They were fully invested. The newer dub was done by professional actors (some of whose work I'd enjoyed in the past, and yes, I researched anime dub actors online; did I mention about not knowing what to do with myself?). With the newer dub one got the sense that it was punch-the-clock-and-let's-dub-this-turkey-before-the-lunch-break day when they recorded this. The most glaringly awful line reading in this dub is less absurd than the average line reading in the first one, but it's dull. Bored pros phoning it in are less fun than total amateurs giving it their all.

For an example of a bored pro giving his all I cannot recommend Jeremy Iron's performance in Dungeons and Dragons highly enough.

Always more people

What does it say about me that I regard Netflix's 500 movie queue limit as constraining, but regard a couple dozen Facebook Friends as just enough?

Once I was a little too fond of a movie called Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer. It was an anime movie based on a long-running comedy series about a silly alien girl who romances/torments a goofy schoolboy. The series as a whole is all about lightwieght hijinks, but this particular film was written and directed by Mamoru Ishii, who's sort of like an aphasic Antonioni. So it came off a bit somber. Anyway, in this film the gang of schoolkids who make up the bulk of the series' cast find that everyone else has disappeared, and they have the run of the city. Being alone with a small group of friends is presented as an ambiguous situation, but at the time I found it a desirable fantasy.

Nowadays I much prefer the openness of the world, in which new relationships are always possible because there are always more people to meet, but on Facebook I find myself reverting to my "just me and my handpicked buddies" mode.

Over the weekend it was too hot to go outside, so aside from doing a monologue show on Saturday (two more showings next Saturday! Lucy's coffee, showtimes 6 and 8 PM, admission 8 dollars) I stayed home and watched movies. I saw Chocolat (The Eighties one by Claire Denis about growing up in Cameroon, not the Nineties one by Lasse Halstrom about a candy shop) and Jan Svankmajer's Alice, a largely stop-motion version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Once I would have hated it because it's not the typical sugar-and-spice Alice, but now I loved it. When I did read the book I was astonished at how cruel it is; the characters suffer frustrations and indignities, and this movie focuses on that. OTOH it also highlights the transformative elements of the story in wonderful ways. Things take on and change identities in ways that go to the heart of magic; stop motion is used with astonishing creativity. The movie has the repetitive qualities of a grueling nightmare (The mad tea party of this film is a perfect representation of my personal nightmares' logic) but it's been said that we seek movies that match our dream worlds, and this one matches mine.

Chocolat is a splendid film; a young girl observes the loves and quarrels of Cameroon's people. The photography is gorgeous, the actors are iconic, and the story grows bit by bit, letting you figure out what's going on and what's at stake. I loved the way the story accumulated from lots of small stories.

Breaking SiteMeter Update

I love SiteMeter. You know why I love SiteMeter? Because thanks to it I know that the last person to look at my blog was using a Department of Veteran Affairs computer out of Washington D. C. and was googling "anime defecating." My day is made.

Shame on Animeigo

Animeigo is an Anime distribution company that's been around since the relatively early days of anime distribution in the West; it's always had a rep for being a scrappy little company, by fans, for fans. That's cool. And recently they released domestic versions of the Urusei Yatsura movies. That's cool. Urusei Yatsura is a goofy comedy series created by Rumiko Takahashi of Ranma 1/2 and Inu-Yasha fame, but the second Urusei Yatsura movie (from the future director of gloomy SF art anime like Ghost in the Shell) was moody and weird in a way I really enjoyed. The second one was the only one I could find until recently, so I was eager to see the others.

Recently Netflix delivered the first one to my mailbox, and in typical Aaron fashion I watched the behind-the-scenes feature of the English dubbing before I watched the film. It's simply footage of the English dub voice actors recording lines, and I found it reassuring; anime dubs are a crapshoot, but these actors mostly seemed like the real deal. Lovely voices and the line readings had integrity.

Then I watched the film, and found the dub disappointing. It was like a patchwork quilt in which the patches were mostly good but they'd been poorly stitched together. The level and nature of the emoting didn't match the visuals very tightly, and that's the directors' fault (there are two credited dub directors) since the director's supposed to be responsible for making sure the actors' efforts are matching up.

Plus there was a lot of "indicating" in the dub. You know how, when you're telling a story about something that happened to you, you'll demonstrate what people said with "angry voice" or "confused voice" or whatever? They're not convincingly angry or confused voices, and they're not supposed to be; they just communicate the idea of anger or confusion. Well, that's called Indicating in thesp-talk and it works in a story but not as a theatrical or cinematic performance. When an actor does it, it seems half-baked and phony. There's a lot of that in this dub.

But that's not why I'm angry at Animeigo; like I say, cruddy dubs are common in anime. I'm angry about another bonus feature on the DVD. It's a half-hour collection of dub auditions that didn't make the cut; it opens with humorous opening titles and hollerin' sound FX that communicate we're about to hear something really painful. Then we're treated to a bunch of audio auditions, some of them actually bad, some just odd. The implication is that we should spend a half-hour scorning the auditionees who weren't picked.

Well. Every working actor has auditioned and been turned down before. Your Favorite Actor has auditioned and been rejected. It's part of the deal, so holding up unchosen actors for scorn is simply wrongheaded. It's also callow and swinish; how would you like it if you applied for a job or school and later found your application on their website under the heading "Check out the essays that didn't make the cut LOL!" A company that treats applicants with such contempt is a company that doesn't deserve to stay in business. Actors should be able to audition without fearing that any uninspired performances on their part won't be trotted out for the sneering amusement of others.

One more thing: although putting this audition reel on the DVD would be rotten even if the actors on it all stank, some of them seemed about as good as the folks who DID get selected, which suggests the real reason Animeigo put this reel on the DVD at all; it's the classic insecure person's tactic of elevating oneself by pushing others down. "Look what a good job we did! After all, we didn't hire these losers!" Actually, Animeigo, you did a poor job on that dub, even with some pretty good actors on there, so screw you. I won't be buying or renting anymore Animeigo products.

My Japanese Art Collection

I've taken down my old anime wallscrolls; they're part of who I was, not who I am. Decontextualized from their narrative, they're indistinguishable from Keane kids. In fact, my Mom once saw me in a T shirt with a picture of Lain from the arty anime Serial Experiments Lain, and she said "That looks like one of your Aunt Carol's paintings." And she was right; as sophisticated as the show Lain was (or seemed to be at the time) the imagery is pretty Keane. God bless Aunt Carol. She loves those paintings. Nowadays they'd call her a Superflat patron.

As for my anime wallscrolls, some of them have sexual undertones that I thought were zingy once, but which now strike me as sad. Yes, it's all very Freudian, suggestively kinky, weirdly fetishistic. None of that's necessarily bad in my book, but I don't want that kind of lewd imagery on my walls. I want it hidden in my sock drawer, the way it's meant to be.

Rebuild!

I know most people who read this blog wouldn't know how to even begin caring about the forthcoming four-movie remake of Neon Genesis Evangelion, the anime nerd touchstone that combined giant robots with undigested nouvelle vague antics a decade or so ago, but lemmee just say this...

The people who made the original show are making the new movies. I'm interested in seeing what they come up with because it'll be an interesting measure of their growth as artists and as people. Put simply, they made the original show because they wanted to do something artistically ambitious, and they half-succeeded. Their collective reach exceeded their grasp, but it was so evident that they were reaching in directions that popular anime usually never considered reaching. Other anime series and films proceeded to reach in those directions, resulting in a burst of creativity, formal innovation, and blending of personal expression with pop entertainment (not that none of this happened in anime before, but now it seemed like more anime creators than ever before were deliberately striving to expand the possibilities of anime).

So Eva's influence is more important than its accomplishment as a thing-in-itself. Will they reach further? Will they grasp that for which they reach? We'll find out...

The Silm-Oh Really?-on

Warning: the title of this post is a laboured joke that only unreconstructable fantasy nerds will get. I'm not even a Tolkien fan... Mervyn Peake, please.

Anyhow, I just wanted to say in my defense that I didn't buy the DND Cartoon DVD box set about which I posted yesterday in the naive belief that I would enjoy these cartoons in the way I did as a child. This wasn't about reliving childhood pleasures, but trying to figure out how those childhood pleasures shaped me. I think the distinction is crucial, but Gygax don't care; the check cashes the same either way.

Another, vaguely related point: the stuff I post about on the blog isn't usually what's foremost on my mind, and I suspect that's pretty common. Vanity websites like this seem to be more like backyard playgrounds than bully pulpits for some of us. Today I'm not thinking about DND cartoons; I'm thinking about the Virginia Sister. But I'm posting about the DND Cartoon. Go figure.

A few years back our college Dungeon Master (that's a Dungeons and Dragons referee, not a dominatrix) became a father, and almost immediately he was busily constructing an exaustive website about the history of our old games. Character sheets, everything. I can dig it.

Fantasy olde and new

Okay, everybody hates the cutups, so I'll talk about the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon Dr. Brain (I'm assuming) wants to hear about.

This mid-Eighties cartoon was a highlight of my weekends once. It's a pretty good example of something one sees in community theatre all the time: people of varying degrees of talent and good will getting together and trying to create something splendid despite not having enough time, resources and in some cases ability to consistantly make it work. Which is to say, sometimes it's really good on many levels. It's never utterly bad, it's never utterly good.

I suspect this show had a subtle effect on my sense of reality. Not because it had dragons and all those fantasy tropes, but because from shot to shot the characters look different. They are identifiably the same, but they look different. From one shot to the next Sheila the thief (for example) will have a slightly different hairdo, her eyes will change shape, her costume will be more or less detailed... there's little visual consistancy. When I was a kid I went through a long, troubled Philip K. Dickish gnostic phase of questioning the reality of all my sense perceptions, and I think this cartoon slightly encouraged that. I remember being frustrated that Sheila (on whom I had a little-boy crush) didn't look as pretty from shot to shot, and it gave me a sense that reality was shifting like unstable ground beneath me. The fact that I let cartoons shape and mishape my sense of reality speaks volumes about my semi-aphasic approach to life.

Here is an article about a rather more rewarding fantasy item: The Hobbit as riffed on (rather than merely adapted) by two extremely clever contemporary cartoonists. I'm more familiar with Marc Bell than the other guy, and I have no reservations about declaring Bell to be one of the most important people in comics today. In his comics landscapes become people, people become landscapes, individuals flow into one another and into the land, and it's impossible to draw clear boundaries between them all; it's a detailed animist fantasy that does my heart good. Plus it's funny.

Avalon

Avalon, a movie by Mamoru Oshii (best known for the Ghost in the Shell movies) is a live-action CGI-packed film about a woman who makes her living playing an immersive computer game; kind of like a Matrix version of Everquest, only with a more military concept. The film's style is so consistent with Oshii's other films that he's starting to look a bit artistically constipated; the same moody, fussily composed shots, the same quiet, joyless, tough female lead. Most of the film has a digital sepia tone that I don't care for; I like real sepia but the digital stuff just looks digital, like the high-tech equivalent of putting a color filter over the lens. But the special effects were simple and convincing to my eye.

I liked a lot of things about it. The movie has some teasing ambiguities: the logic of the game becomes disturbing in ways that reflect the logical shortcomings of most complex video and role-playing games. Not to give anything away, but there's a "little girl" who plays a key role in the game, and the way the heroine interacts with this girl is disturbing but logical according to the limitations of the seemingly realistic game. Is it misanthropy or just poor coding? We never know, but by the end it's apparent that the girl represents the morally ambiguous forces behind the game, or at least that's how the heroine seems to regard it. The final shot of the girl has a wierd wrongness that was achieved with subtle digital effects and was prompted by a minor problem with the footage, a happy accident (all this is explained in the making-of featurette on the DVD.)

The movie also plays games with the virtues and limitations of teamwork vs. going it alone, and where reality and convincing simulation phase into one another. This is nothing new for post-Philip Dick SF movies but is handled with wit. Oshii lets the ambiguities resonate and never tries to slap The Answer onto it.

The fight scenes are surprisingly dull; lots of intercut shots of people shooting, then the tank blows up or someone falls down. It makes me wonder to what extent the elegantly choreographed action scenes in Ghost in the Shell, were the work of animation directors and such.

Apologies if this reads sloppy; until I get my computer fixed I'm posting on the fly. Also apologies for posting about such nerdy and obscure stuff, but it's hard to forge in the smithy of my soul or what have you while I'm forced to wear pants. It is only while pantsless that truly great blogposts can be composed.