Essential Anime Viewing

My definition of “essential” is “the best”. That is, not the series that the most people have seen, not even the ones recognised as widely influential, and certainly not the ones everyone loves because of nostalgia (I’m currently watching the Giant Robo OVA, which has brilliant production levels, but is pure nostalgic junk).

Keep in mind also that I’m a bit older than most anime fans, so have a bit less patience with the anime cliches.

To be fair (and get ahead of the critics), I’m going to mention the flaws that exist but I think fail to dent the shows’ intrinsic excellence. Except where specified, these shows have great character, story, graphic design, music, etc.

In NO particular order:

Fruits Basket – a reverse harem show that could’ve been trite, but had brilliant direction and wonderful OP/ED. Flaws: Gets a bit repetitive; ending doesn’t resolve the love triangle.
Azumanga Daioh – humour working on clever and dumb levels simultaneously; some great characters. Flaws: should’ve been longer.
Boogiepop Phantom – wonderfully grim and creepy; a horror anime that doesn’t resort to cliches (better than the book). Flaws: visually very dark; sometimes hard to tell characters apart.
Genshiken – yes, it’s set in an anime club, but this is brilliantly perceptive character-based comedy. Flaws: weak OP; waiting for the sequel.
Gunslinger Girl – from the premise, this could’ve been so bad, but the characters are detailed, convincing and touching, and you are carried along even though there’s not much of an “arc”. Flaws: ending feels inconclusive (I’m not counting the second series, which I haven’t seen).
Haibane Renmei – least pretentious of the ABe animes, because he directed himself. A great parable about life, set in a full-realised alt world. Flaws: None I can think of; maybe needed a punchier ending?
(Mobile Suit) Gundam Seed – brings together the best elements of the previous series, with fine modern graphics; a great space epic. Flaws: confusing in beginning if you don’t know the premise; padded in the middle; don’t remember how it ends.
(Super Dimensional Fortress) Macross – Still very original story. Fascinating characters. The last third, only produced due to unexpected popularity, really raises this series, showing the aftermath of war and how personalities and decisions affect destiny. Flaws: dated animation; takes a while to take off; OP/ED.
Wolf’s Rain – sustains a unique “end times” feel; good characters; plot well constructed; epic feel. Flaws: 4 recap episodes in a row due to strike?; art a bit drab; spoiler[everyone dies].
Planetes – creates a realistic future world, viewed from the bottom up. Terrific plot (takes a while to develop) that delivers at the end. Flaws: characters tend to stereotype; I didn’t think much of the OP/ED.

And I’ll sneak in a personal favourite at the end:
NieA_7 – a poignant comedy about a starving student in recession Japan, + there’s aliens. Fans of gentle nostalgic ambience will love. Flaws: OP singer; takes a while to get past the surface comedy.

There’s still a lot of anime to see, so this list is not exhaustive.

The Meaning of Music

Well, someone famously said that talking about music is like dancing about architecture, but we all talk about music, so it must be somewhat effective. Talk about music is ultimately informed by our emotional response to it. Indeed, without that emotional response there would be no need for anything like art; it would merely be pattern without function; it would be redundant.

As opposed to subtle arguments about whether music imitates, evokes, represents, communicates anything (I believe it can do all of these things), I am personally more interested in the difference between music and noise. I think John Cage raised interesting questions with his compositions, but ultimately the answer has to be that music is not random, and the parts of noise that appeal to us aesthetically do so because they produce relationships of tone and rhythm that we instinctively recognise as musical.

Now, to address something I should have addressed at the start, what do I mean by musical? I mean that tonal relationships, both horizontal (melodic) and vertical (harmonic), affect us emotionally. This seems to me to be an obvious, prima facie fact. Certain cool theoreticians say that it is a useless banality to say that a major chord seems “happy” and a minor chord seems “sad”. Well, banal it may be, but it is a banality with which all but the most autistic or perversely technocratic would agree.

If a major chord seems “happy” and a minor chord seems “sad” to the listener, we must presume that they also seem that way to the composer. All the other tonal relations that are variously poignant to us are also poignant to the composer. So what a composer does is arrange tones horizontally and vertically to produce a complex (vertical) and sustained (horizontal) emotional experience in the listener.

Beyond this function, music is complicated by (i) technical and (ii) social factors, as well as (iii) the desire for novelty:

(i) Music theory is a way of keeping music “tidy” as it increases in scale and complexity, by confining tonal relations and rhythms within certain mutually-agreed bounds (the mutual agreement is necessary so that we can recognise the matrix over which the tonal and rhythmical elements are developed). It also adds an appeal to mathematical instinct: the urge to count, and to identify patterns.*
(ii) Through precedent, music can evoke social memories, e.g. the “martial” strains of military music; see also violins evoking Gypsies, horns evoking hunts, trumpets evoking military bugle calls (I would classify imitation of natural sounds as a sub-set of this). Arguably, both (i) and (ii) are a kind of extra-musical decadence, but I think they are unavoidable.
(iii) Unless we are obsessive-compulsive, we don’t want to listen to the same music repeatedly. Thus we are interested in music containing novel elements. At the same time, there is a tension, because we naturally distrust the unfamiliar. We particularly distrust innovation arising from (i) and (ii), as these sophistications are already a step removed from “pure” tonal relationships. This is why avant guarde developments of the 20th Century remain cultish.

* I have not addressed the issue of rhythm in detail. I think the rhythmic and tonal elements of music must have developed simultaneously, but, despite Reich’s Drumming, rhythm has not developed to the extent that tonal music has, in terms of structural complexity (theoretical relationships of parts), and emotional potential.

No more old movies

It’s a sadly true truism that young people react to discovering a movie is in black and white in the same way they would react to stepping in dog shit. Read the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere, and you’ll see they really are offended that someone could recommend such a thing to them.

Well, things have probably been that way since the invention of colour film. Stupid people are hardly a recent invention, after all. More worrying is the lack of opportunity young people have to be exposed to these important and sometimes great products of Western culture. Old movies used to be a cheap-and-cheerful way for TV stations to fill their schedules. Students would stay up for the late movie, enjoying the unpredictable mix of horror, historical, hard-boiled and screw-ball’d. Occasionally they’d even catch a landmark like Citizen Kane, or cult classic like Cat People, and because they knew the cinematic language they knew these were important films without having to be told by some old grump in a bad suit.

In the 1980s, Australians with televisions were lucky enough to be able to watch Bill Collins hosting The Golden Years Of Hollywood, every Saturday. He would present a colour film at 8.30pm, followed by a black and white film. The presentation was simple and effective: after the opening sequence (famous clips from old films accompanied by an orchestral version of “That’s Entertainment”), music from the score of the night’s first film would swell, while the camera would zoom out from a framed poster or still of the film, revealing “uncle” Bill in one of his trademark brightly-coloured jackets.

Bill would give us idea of what the film was about, and then he would drop in a tidbit or two about the production, perhaps quoting from an actor’s memoirs, and finally suggest something of interest we should look out for. Halfway through the film there would be a sort of intermission, in which Bill would enthuse over what we had just seen, perhaps commenting on a significant point we may have missed.

In this colour feature part of the show, we saw classics like The Wizard of Oz, Ben Hur, Gone with the Wind, The Magnificent Seven, and North by Northwest. In the late segment, we saw films noirs, comedies, war movies and horrors. With the later timeslot and more obscure charms of these less famous items, staying up for the second feature felt like a really adult pursuit.

I’m profoundly grateful to Bill for this education in film. It’s now said that DVD commentaries are like a film school at home, but they can’t match The Golden Years of Hollywood for a thorough immersion in the filmography and language of cinema. DVDs must always be watched selectively, and it’s too easy to be the victim of one’s own ignorance or timidity, compared with the guidance of a seasoned aficionado.

Without the opportunity I and my generation had, what is the cinematic experience of the younger generation? For most of them, Star Wars is the oldest film they’ve seen. They’ve never seen a Hitchcock movie, or a Cecil B DeMille film. They’ve never seen Bonny and Clyde, or even A Fistful of Dollars. They have no idea who Cary Grant is; they only know Alec Guiness for his cameo appearance in Star Wars; they don’t know who was supposed to have said “Play it again, Sam”, let alone in what context. They’ve never heard the theme music to Gone with the Wind, or The 3rd Man. They can’t even guess at what they’ve missed, the fairyland power of these vividly recorded dreams of mythic simplicity.

Don’t be fooled by the plethora of collector’s editions and boxsets now available – these are feeding the appetites of a final generation, who know they’ll never see these films again unless they have a copy in their own home, and who have no way to pass on their knowledge short of tying up their children in front of the TV. The multitude of entertainment media have led to short attention spans in the young audience, and corresponding fragmenting of older forms into bright, loud, sound-bite chunks. Long movies without frequent bangs or crashes are passe. No one cares anymore, and profundity of feeling is nearing its extinction.

 

I was inspired to write this post by a review of Have You Seen …?, a rambling rant on movies and assorted vagaries by one David Thomson. I’d just like to take issue with a couple of opinions he reportedly holds. I agree with him that the Oscars have been routinely awarded to worthy but dull films that no-one really wants to see again, but, to go through the other issues one by one:

1. Ben Hur does have its longeurs, but also has a gripping central conflict and impressive action sequences. Monty Python were right that the pace of a film deteriorates whenever sacred connotations come to the fore.

2. The Rules of the Game (“the greatest film by the greatest director”) is a mature literary work in terms of themes of social comment; however, it doesn’t exactly jump of the screen in execution.

3. Swing Time is not as good a film as Gay Divorcee, Follow the Fleet, Shall we Dance, or maybe even Carefree (and neither is Top Hat).

4. Bringing Up Baby is not funny, and such charm as it possesses evaporates with the ascerbic presence of Hepburn.

5. Tracing the decline of Hollywood movies to the premiere of Star Wars (“the disastrous event”) is wrong-headed, given that work’s overt homage to old space opera serials (as seen in its simple good-against-evil plotting), Odyssean narrative, and relatively sedate pacing. Star Wars led directly to several estimable science fiction movies including Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Blade Runner. Its cross-media saturation (toys, T-shirts, etc.) is limited in imitation to a couple of big budget children’s films per year, and was besides hardly unprecedented (see the Universal monsters franchise, and Fanderson paraphenalia). The only direct negative impact of Star Wars was in leading to an expectation by studios that every movie must be an immediate blockbuster, or else yanked from the screens as a failure – and this is hardly the fault of George Lucas or his producers.

More culpable are the Friday the 13th films (leading to the undying teen slasher movie, which has practically nullified the horror genre), and the classic sci-fi pulps of James Cameron (Aliens, The Terminator). Cameron is a great B-film director, but the big budget gloss and spectacular sound design of these movies led to them being taken more seriously than they deserved, and their rapid-cutting, big-chinned machismo bloated and developed into a universal style of action movie.

Most culpable is the corporate culture of Hollywood, the ultimate result of the continuing demand for big budget films after the end of the studio system. The greedy, culturally irresponsible mindset of Hollywood’s large production names is the main reason almost every major film of the last ten years was a waste of celluloid.

But there were a couple of solid entries (e.g. The Bourne Identity, Fight Club) that may give us hope – perhaps Hollywood isn’t dead yet. Perhaps there is still an audience ready for intelligent well-told stories that don’t pander to pretention. That audience will need regular feeding, or else they’ll lose interest and go away, and then it really will be the end of the movies.

More bloody Modernism

… Serra’s remarkable sculpture, which, around the corner of a distant slab, suddenly revealed some fresh, surprising aspect—the presence of another slab, which had previously been blocked from view, or the triangular space formed by the angles of two further slabs coinciding in space …

… All of which suggests this critic is rather easily amused. I suppose it’s far too gauche these days to admire a sunset?

TEXHNOLYZE interview

INTERVIEW WITH YOSHITOSHI ABe & YASUYUKI UEDA

Interview with Texhnolyze creator/producer Yasuyuki Ueda & character designer Yoshitoshi ABe [length 11:48]
(I’m posting this because my DVD had the wrong subtitles for the interview.)

Q1: HOW DID THE IDEA AND PRODUCTION OF TEXHNOLYZE FIRST GET STARTED?

Ueda: The Texhnolyze project started about two years ago, about four years after I wrote Lain [Serial Experiments Lain]. I just felt like writing it, so I went ahead and that’s how it started. When the story, the content, took shape inside my head, when I knew what kind of story I wanted to do, I went to talk to ABe as usual. I told him, “I’m thinking about this story, would you be interested in designing characters?” And having decided on the main characters between us, we needed to choose which production company we would use, and who would write the screenplay. I wanted to work again with Chiaki Konaka, and the production company called Madhouse, a major studio that anyone who’s into animation knows. So I went to Mr. Maruyama of Madhouse and asked him if he’d be interested in doing an animation. That’s how it started.

ABe: That’s right. It’s been two years already. Right. I haven’t been paid even one yen for this project yet.

[both laugh]

ABe: Incredible.

Ueda: I will pay, I told you.

ABe: Incredible. As if working for free.

Ueda: It’s because you haven’t sent an invoice.

[both laugh]

Q2: WERE THERE ANY NEW CHALLENGES WITH THE PRODUCTION OF TEXHNOLYZE?

Ueda: Middle-aged men.

ABe: [laughs] Yes, for one thing, there are an exceptionally large number of middle-aged men in this story, so I wanted to take the opportunity to widen the variations among the faces – to enrich the picture. The other thing is, with Haibane [Haibane Renmei], I was very conscious about the use of colours to create that world. I thought we could go with a very beautiful world for that particular story, so I tried making things beautiful. There were things such as building ruins and dirty colours as well, but rather than adding lots of small details to the picture, I shifted toward expressing things using colours. Texhnolyze, on the other hand, was more up my alley. It was the type of picture that’s easiest for me to draw, so in that sense I didn’t feel restrained. Not needing the conscious limiter I’d imposed on myself for Haibane, I could add as many details as I wanted into the picture. I like to keep increasing the density of the picture, and the grimy feel this world has is perfect for creating a dense picture. So, in that sense, I felt that I could go back to my usual style and win the game with that.

Ueda: But then it got too scary.

ABe: That’s true.

Ueda: The characters are really scary. [Abe laughs] “Wow, that’s scary!” It was scary even to me, the one who was doing the original plans.

ABe: My characters tend to be evil-looking.

Ueda: [expressively] Evil-looking.

Q3: DID YOU GIVE ANY SPECIAL THOUGHT TO HOW TO MAKE EACH CHARACTER’S DESIGN UNIQUE?

ABe: Hmmm…

Ueda: Well, the fox mask for Ran, for instance.

ABe: Right.

Ueda: And like the coat with the strange flap.

ABe: Right. On the other hand, as far as Ichise and other characters were concerned, because cartoonish details do not go well at all with this world, I couldn’t really do any designing to speak of. The yakuza are all wearing suits. Ichise is wearing a sort of baggy jacket or parka-like outerwear.

Ueda: Like that of a homeless.

ABe: So what it came down to was that we created this particular world using density, or in other words, details, I should say. Not symbolic elements. That was the direction we took.

Q4: WHICH CHARACTERS DID YOU PUT THE MOST EFFORT INTO DESIGNING?

ABe: Naturally, the main characters whom I spent most time working on, Ran and Ichise, required a certain level of effort. And as far as the middle-aged men went, it was very difficult. First of all, I had to be very careful to differentiate them from each other. But there was a limit as well, since there were too many of them. And also…

Ueda: And you did the machines, too.

ABe: Oh, yes. Things I drew for the first time in my life, things that were not exactly robots but robot-like, were going to be delivered directly to the viewers’ living rooms, so I felt a great deal of pressure. They don’t have many people who do machines at Madhouse.

Ueda: No, they don’t.

ABe: That’s right. I guess that’s just the studio’s nature. That was not necessarily the reason, though…

Ueda: Because you, ABe, did the original planning this time…

ABe: Right, right, right…

Ueda: What you drew was what we used…

ABe: True, true, true, that’s very true, but… Well, they were OK’ed, so it’s alright. But when I was drawing them…

Ueda: You yourself were a little anxious, yes?

ABe: Right. Because I had no experience drawing robot-like things, I couldn’t tell if my designs were good or bad. Until you accumulate much experience, you can’t really decide which direction you want to go, right? So in that sense, I felt strong anxiety as to whether I was doing an OK job.

Q5: IN TEXHNOLYZE, WHAT WERE YOU TRYING TO COMMUNICATE TO THE AUDIENCE?

Ueda: [to ABe] Well, what do you think?

ABe: When creating characters, what I tried to be careful about, or what I wanted to appreciate, was that those characters were living human beings. I said just a moment ago that there was not much room for symbolic decorative elements in terms of designing, and that’s the same thing. There are comics out there, for instance, in which you see lots of bloodshed. In that sense, there are stories that are far bloodier that this one, I think. But, in those stories, the bloodshed itself has become nothing but symbolic. There’s no pain, for instance. Characters are mortally wounded but still can go on fighting like hell. In the Shonen Jump-type of world, for instance, that kind of unreality is accepted as completely normal. [Ueda laughs] Something that makes you go, “That’s impossible!” I didn’t want that. In our story, if the main character’s arm is severed, for instance, I wanted the real pain to be conveyed to the viewers. I wanted to design characters that could make it possible.

[pause]

Ueda: Maybe I was too particular about that as well. Retrospectively, I feel that I was too hung up on that point for the first half of the story. But I wanted it to be taken very seriously, that the characters were having their arms and legs severed. For the sake of story-telling, it might have been better to push it forward in a quicker tempo, with “I’ve got my limbs cut off, but I’m OK! I’ll go on!” kind of attitude, but I couldn’t compromise on that point. In the story as a whole, the texhnolyzed limbs are not a mere substitute for lost limbs. The texhnolyzed limbs take a role, as if they are sort of partners to their respective owners – they have a very important meaning. I wanted to express the pain of loss, and the things that happen after natural limbs are lost. So the first half of the story is very dark and dragging [ABe agrees], but once people watch the story to the end, maybe they’ll think, “Oh, so this is what the creators wanted to do, and that’s why they were so persistent in the first half.” I have a feeling that they will understand.

So, when it comes to what I want to communicate to the audience, it’s just like ABe’s works. I have things in my head, and the way I feel about things changes. Various creators get together, and we start shaping what I have in my head into a story, and I can never tell what kind of chemical changes it will go through inside me at that point. That’s one of the reasons it’s so interesting to me, too. I’m not sure at all if it’s interesting to the audience as well, but I always do try to make things interesting for them. But to the question as to what I want to communicate to them, I really don’t have an answer. It’s all about things that change inside myself, things that I validate inside myself, and experiments that I do inside myself. So, though it’s different from Haibane, if the viewers feel some kind of empathy – but if they feel something, if they have a fleeting thought, “Oh, maybe it means this”, or if something stands out in their memories, and if some actions are triggered in the viewers by watching the show, then I will be very happy. My work is nothing more than that. [laughs] I feel very bad for the other creators who are involved for saying so, but personally, I’m happier that way.

Q6: DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING THAT YOU WANT TO SAY TO THE AUDIENCE WATCHING THIS DVD?

ABe: Right, let’s see. About how the story ends, I can only say, “Wait and see”. But Mr. Chiaki Konaka, the screenwriter, had a great deal of difficulty with the last few episodes. It took a very long time to finalise the scripts, and I was worried, but when they were finally completed, I was very impressed. I’d done the screenplay for Haibane myself, and had some understanding as to how difficult it is to write a screenplay, and how much skill it requires to write a story at a certain quality level, and I was genuinely amazed by the quality of the last two episodes, by how great they were. I’m really excited to see how they are translated to the picture.

Ueda: And I wouldn’t have said anything, had they been finished according to schedule.

ABe: [laughs] He was about two months late. Or a month and a half, I guess.

[pause]

Ueda: I’m curious how the very-Japanese yakuza will be perceived, and the fights between men as well. I can only say that I sincerely hope the viewers will enjoy the show. [laughs] But towards the end, where the story builds up towards the climax, I think they’ll enjoy it, even if there are things that they don’t quite understand. We have sort of hidden items worked into the story, such as various enemies and tricks. There are some troublesome incidents that come up due to the conflicts between groups, and we’ve added many twists to those parts of the story, in an effort to keep the viewers enthralled, even in places that are not directly related to the main storyline. So I hope they’ll watch the episodes in order, looking forward to those twists.

[end]