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Posts tagged “Anime”
Mouryou no Hako, a boxful of wonderfully hard-boiled madness
I started watching this back in ’08 but for a number of reasons I didn’t get around to finishing it. The subbing was sporadic, the plot derailed into a lengthy period of three blokes sitting around a table talking, other shows caught my interest, etc., etc.. Last week though I finally sat down and practically forced myself to finish the thing; the mid section was as tedious as I remember but pushing on to the finale was worth every minute.
This is an extremely unusual series, which is why I’m not surprised that it’s already virtually forgotten. It’s straight-faced and serious as hell, challenging the viewer from the outset by starting off very weird indeed. And it gets weirder. Even so, I found it to be a piece of sheer bloody genius with a multi-layered maze of a plot that starts off with bizarre yuri overtones, moves into hard-boiled detective fiction with serial killers and femmes fatales, dabbles in esoteric Japanese folklore and rounds it all off with a closing act that reaches Nasu-esque levels of twisted insanity.
Remembering Satoshi Kon
I must admit I didn’t hear about Perfect Blue until around 2004, when the only anime I’d watched were Miyazaki’s Laputa, Anno’s Evangelion and Tsurumaki’s FLCL. It was an eye-opening experience to say the least, but that day was a pretty significant turning-point in making me the fan I am today.
I’m sure the obituaries and tributes to Satoshi Kon from his family and friends will be formed as I type and my sincere condolences go out to them. I’m afraid I know nothing about who he was as a man: I sadly never had the opportunity to meet him. His work however is something I’ve become very familiar with over the years, and it’s my love of this that I want to express, as my way of acknowledging what he achieved.
Categories: On screen
Tags: Anime, community, editorial, realistic fiction, Satoshi Kon, serious business
10 Comments
K-On!!, cats and finally forming an opinion on moe
As of this week I’m looking after my sister’s cat, which is one of the reasons why I’ve been too busy to post and reply to comments lately. Now I have three full weeks of paid leave I’m able to keep an eye on the kitteh, update here, catch up on animu and movies, visit friends, write songs, arrange my career change, etc., etc..
Classy
I’ve been following High School of the Dead and Shiki only a couple of eps behind people who’ve kept up with them properly but K-On!! is the one thing I’ve found time to watch every week. My earlier attempt at explaining my position only caused misunderstandings, although the resulting discussions made up for the disappointment I felt at the time. I just can’t bring myself around to the view of the hypothetical ‘haters’ for the simple reason that the series shouldn’t elicit a stronger negative reaction than a mere lack of interest…a view I can explain with my view on moe. And cats.
News just in: waffling idiot tries to solve the fansub debate
A recent comment thread on GRSI, plus this bit of news and my experience with this site, has led me to ask myself a question so bleeding obvious that I feel stupid asking it. I’ll stress right now that I’m not a professional computer programmer (why else would I be using a stock WP theme?) and I don’t follow the industry too closely (Omo does some very insightful and in-depth analysis on the subject though) but even so, I do wonder: I’ve noticed a potential solution that would help fans AND make money for the industry…two facts that ought to mean it should’ve been done already. Only it hasn’t.
The current attempt at a solution to the fansub/piracy problem is through the streaming with region-locking and paid subscriptions, i.e. Crunchyroll’s model. I’m not aiming to criticise what CR are doing here: they did great things in giving Eve no Jikan exposure, made last year’s Global Shinkai Day even more special and are so far the only independent site that has made a high-profile attempt to seek the middle ground.
Cat Shit One could be more than just rabbits with guns, but that’s fine for now
I’ve been hearing rumblings about this one for quite some time but since my brain makes connections in the most arcane and awkward ways I attached a bizarre preconception to it (something to do with it sounding similar to Cat Soup, which is a show I’ve considered watching for the Yuasa factor but never summoned the courage to try…go figure). It turns out to be nothing like whatever I expected, anyway. It’s all about rabbits with guns.
Cat Shit One is very, very different from pretty much everything else around right now, which is reason enough for me to recommend it on its own. The idea of anthropomorphised rabbits rescuing hostages from armed terrorist camels is indeed absurd but it was surprisingly easy for me to forget the sight of cottontails twitching prior to an all-out firefight because it was, with this quirk aside, hell of a lot of fun. So much so that I was able to accept the concept and simply enjoy the action.
Ookami-san and High School of the Dead first impressions
I try to avoid the lowest-common-denominator trashy titles what with my free time being at such a premium and with the Backlog being the way it is, but there’s no harm in giving new shows a fighting chance. Long story short, there’s a lot of stuff around that doesn’t interest me and I still haven’t found the opportunity to write some deep ‘n’ meaningful editorial for a while. I haven’t got as far as the latest NoitaminA offerings yet though, so all isn’t lost. Legservice, boobs and zombies ought to be a good place to start though, right?
I’m late to the You Can (not) Advance party and spotted familiar faces, but…
Considering the challenges in the ‘feature-length retelling of the TV show’ concept, I sometimes wonder why the studios bother. They need a keen eye for what to retain and what to leave out in order to condense the storyline effectively, it has to entertain the viewers on its own merits so we can momentarily forget the old version but at the same time it has to remain true to what made the original good enough to be worth retelling.
RahXephon for example suffered greatly from the condensed plotline issue and Eureka Seven lost a lot of the spirit of the TV show, so both were disappointing to me. The Evangelion rebuild in particular is an undertaking I personally wouldn’t enjoy being responsible for since it’ll piss off a significant proportion of the fanbase regardless of what the production team do. Over the past decade and a half it’s bred so many conflicting opinions that whatever approach is taken, it’ll hit somebody’s sore spot square-on.
Categories: On screen
Tags: Anime, Eden of the East, Evangelion, feature film, Hideaki Anno, tsun-tsun
4 Comments
Cossette revisited: Shinbo, Nasu and the Kajiura connection
Looks like I made it to the second round of the tourney thing, but I’m sadly short on topics for writing thanks to the fact that my laptop is the only working PC I have right now. It’s able to cope with DVD playback though so I can at least rewatch old favourites; I’ve had Le Portrait de Petite Cossette for instance on my shelf for a while but only came back to it last week…and I’m glad I did.
The first time I watched this I felt a bit overwhelmed by the visuals so didn’t really grasp what it was trying to say. I guess it was slightly wasted on me at the time but watching the three episodes again, across as many days, worked better for me so now I really feel I appreciate it more than I did then.
Categories: On screen
Tags: Akiyuki Shinbo, Anime, experimental, Kara no Kyoukai, Yuki Kajiura
5 Comments
Arakawa Under The Bridge is my kind of weird
I’m not an Akiyuki Shinbo completist as I am with some other directors. As dazzled as I was by Petite Cossette and Bakemonogatari I was never tempted to watch Maria+Holic or Dance in the Vampire Bund for instance but his signature style has led me to respect him enormously. Following the two seasons of ef, in which his influence crept in quite noticeably, I realised how those wonderful ‘Shinbo-isms’ are as immediately recognisable as the trademark quirks of Hideaki Anno.
Arakawa Under The Bridge is very much in Shinbo’s comfort zone: it reminds me a lot of Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei with its pun-riddled wordplay, sketch-based storyline, zany characters and of course that artistic obsession with colours, composition and geometry. The source material of the two shows doesn’t share the same writer so I wonder whether the production team are being selective with the projects they take on. The similarities go even further, and mostly in a good way too.
Careful with that axe, Yui
As difficult as it is, I have to admit that I’m enjoying K-On. Not because it’s intelligent, thought-provoking, original or a work of art. I’m enjoying it despite it not really being any of these things, mainly because something that’s so intentionally dumb is undemanding and therefore the perfect thing for unwinding with at the end of a long day.
Yes, it’s shallow, commercialised and derivative but truthfully as long as it makes you smile, who the heck cares? I’ve done at least three drafts of this post before wiping the whole lot off the screen and starting over; this is by its very nature a show that’s difficult to write about because there’s not much to it beyond the obvious observation that it’s cute, undemanding fun. That was before my word count began to mushroom…