-
Latest
Latest Comments
Categories
Main siteMe@Twitter
- http://bit.ly/a06YPe how old do you reckon The Girl Who Leapt Through Time franchise is? I was surprised. 4 hrs ago
- ...Billy Corgan beat Mogwai to it by five years but apparently Hendrix used that chord before either! I'm in such a geeky mood right now. 9 hrs ago
- Mogwai Fear Satan and the Smashing Pumpkins' Cherub Rock are eerily similar. It's that delicious E major octave on the 11th fret... <3 9 hrs ago
- Registered with Ayacon 2011! Just need to wait for the payment to clear and it'll be official. 9 hrs ago
- Sigur Ros falls in with Explosions In The Sky under my personal classification of 'iyashikei music'. My CD purchases of both are overdue! 10 hrs ago
- More updates...
Powered by Twitter Tools
Meta
Posts tagged “realistic fiction”
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
Tokyo Sonata
Tokyo Sonata is a domestic drama from Kiyoshi Kurosawa, a director who has made his name in the horror genre with the likes of Kairo and Bright Future. This film then is a marked departure for him but it is also unlike most titles in Japanese cinema that I’ve seen on international home video release. Its quietly powerful realism and topical themes make it, for me, one of the most important Japanese films of recent years.
If there’s one thing I find fascinating about contemporary Japan it’s the presence of contrasts that are baffling to an outside first-time visitor. This has been heightened in the past decade or two by fundamental changes that are inexorably altering the society’s status quo, so the ramifications for its defining features of harmony, tradition and smooth routine are quite striking.
It really can be a wonderful world
“By changing your viewpoint just a bit, you can see familiar things in a whole new light. It happens a lot. And really works.”
I’ve no idea what’s up with the current fad for live-action adaptations of anime and manga these days, although I’m pretty excited about the feature-length effort of Solanin. The thing is, it’s so easy for me to imagine how well Inio Asano’s graphic novels can make the jump from paper to big screen since he has such a keen eye for scene composition and, to coin a hackneyed phrase, a finger on the pulse on what makes ordinary ‘real life’ people tick. He captures snapshots of everyday life events with the flair of a skilled photographer; What a Wonderful World! pre-dates it by several years but the intentions, and end results, are similar.
On Narcissu, on reflection
I don’t know if my readers take this for granted but I don’t set out to write *reviews*; not the objective, completely logical or helpful variety, anyway. I’m doing this article for instance purely on my feelings concerning the visual novel Narcissu that are very subjective and not necessarily helpful at all. Fundamentally your appreciation of it hinges on whether it moves you; it moved me a lot so I got the inevitable compulsion to write about it.
This won’t be the best Narcissu article around so I do at least apologise for that. Its subject matter, approach and underlying messages are quite unusual so I suspect a definitive judgement on my part wouldn’t be particularly valuable anyway. So, yeah…bear that in mind when I recommend it (it’s free and completely legal to download, after all) and you later read it for yourself and think, “hey, I thought you said it was good…” Needless to say there are spoilers after the jump.
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
I’ve been interested in twentieth-century history for as long as I can remember – before my fascination with Japanese popular culture even began I was drawn to the issues surrounding the atomic bombings of 1945. Fumiyo Kouno is one of many writers and artists who have taken on the subject but her approach is one that conveys the human cost of the events in an unusual way. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is a short, surprisingly sweet but nevertheless powerful work.
Her graphic novel is not an historical document. The whimsical slice-of-life angle doesn’t prevent it being meaningful though: fundamentally, history is about people and the relevance today of the events that occured then. This story is therefore very relevant even though the individual stories of this event are fictional; it also manages to convey hard-hitting subject matter with subtlety and restraint.
On wartime anime and re-watchability
Being the dutiful fan I am I prefer retail copies of DVDs over downloading as long as they’re available in English but when I’m paying for something I want to be confident it’ll be worthwhile. Keeping the receipt is the easy answer but when shelf space and money are at a premium I want series and movies to be ‘rewatchable’. I’m kinda elaborating on this comment, at any rate.
I can watch some stuff, such as The Place Promised…, Laputa and Paprika over and over; I’ve watched others once but they’ve sat gathering dust ever since. There are one or two purchases that I actually regretted, despite the titles themselves being very good. Actually, they were…too good for their own good.
Categories: On screen
Tags: Anime, editorial, nasuverse, realistic fiction, Studio Ghibli, war drama
9 Comments
Chain Mail: Addicted To You
The idea of taking on an online persona to escape the pressures of Real Life is hardly a new one. I found the effects of teen angst in the Internet Age in All About Lily Chou-Chou to be both effective and deeply moving, despite cultural barriers between me and foreigners a decade younger than I am. Taking this angle and running with it, Hiroshi Ishizaki’s light novel Chain Mail examines how the isolation and pressure of adolescence draws four total strangers together with fascinating results.
If you’re reading this blog at all you ought to be able to understand where Chain Mail is coming from with this. After finding it tucked away virtually unseen in the manga section of my local Waterstone’s and buying on impulse, I suspect the only people I know who’d appreciate its innovative ‘multiple viewpoint’ storytelling as I did are those I converse with online. The ‘net and the artificial realities it provides attract us all for very personal reasons but the overall promises of diversion and communication are the same.
Hataraki Man: slice of the work-life balance
A while ago I asked my readers for some recommendations and you wonderful people obliged. One of the titles that cropped up more than once was Hataraki Man and since it had been on my to-watch list since forever I tracked down the full series. And marathoned it. Cheers folks.
I can see why it’s one of those sleeper hits because of its realistic setting, live-action feel and they way it appeals to the josei or seinen demographics, without limiting itself to either piegeonhole. As I said in my previous post a healthy slab of realism is a good thing, and Noitamin A has a history of being a good place to find it. This title also goes even further than the pleasant surprises of Clannad ~after story~ and Solanin in breaking through the glass ceiling of portraying life after high school. Win.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 and Murakami’s after the quake
I was intrigued by Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 because of the Noitamin A timeslot (which has so far also yielded Higashi no Eden, Hataraki Man and Moyashimon) but also because of the promise to portray the events of an earthquake in as realistic a manner as possible. I’m guessing that animation, rather than live-ation, was the most efficient medium to go about this project for budgetry constraints; in terms of character designs and fluidity of animation I wouldn’t say it goes out of its way to dazzle the viewer though. It’s in Bones’ typical MO however: not necessarily groundbreaking but reassuringly solid and consistent.
The visuals do at least show how the events would look without overdramatising things, which is a particular benefit for those of us who have never actually witnessed a major earthquake for ourselves. I have to say there are some nailbiting moments here, mainly because the order of the day is preventing the drama being at the expense of being true-to-life. In the posts I’ve read so far it’s surprising how so many bloggers have found more to say on the drama side of things rather than the documentary aspect…and I can see why.
White Album first impressions: the little things that go unsaid
White Album was pretty much the first of the new season’s shows to be subbed which is part of the reason why I think it caused such a ruckus: the first over the parapet drawing most of the fire and all that. Admittedly it’s an unusual series that has a style you’ll either love or hate, so I’m not overly surprised that reviews have been mixed. I waited a while before sampling the first three or so episodes for myself though because while one post is an honest opinion, a whole slew of them on a bloated feedreader makes for an offputting wave of negativity. Of course, when something divides opinion at all it has to be doing something right, y’know?
Star-crossed lovers in more ways than one
I’m not going quite as far as 21stDigitalBoy’s wonderful gasp of nonstop Directorgasm but the guy has a point. So too does Michael over at Low on Hit Points in praising its restraint and subtlety. The old argument of “what’s so special about normal people doing normal things?” rears its head again because it’s another slice of life effort; anime bloggers can never seem to agree to disagree on that issue so for this show I’m hoping we’ll be able to fail to understand one another in peace this time. Granted, White Album does take a little while to slip into its groove and there are one or two unfortunate elements resulting from its visual novel origins (cue epic sigh of exasperation at that old chestnut too) but the fact that it has that subtlety, restraint and maturity is why I’m so (cautiously) optimistic for it.