Cultural adventures, neh?

[kaffy_r]

Anime - Surreal High Theater of Two Dimensions in Three,
or Art Form from Planet Sideways?
Discuss.

     Because there are times I just sit and ask nanda hell, you know?
    Believe me, I adore a lot of anime. Just ask folks around me. I have for years. I love a lot of Japanese cinema, both high and low, and Japanese art,  too, but there's a special place in my heart for painted moving pictures from the mysterious and often-weird-to-my-stolidly-British-Canadian-cum-American-Midwestern eyes.
     I was delighted a couple of years ago when I talked one of my editors into letting me do a package of stories on anime (and manga, yes, I know manga started first, and I know its historical provenance, and I like reading Bleach almost as much as I like watching Ichigo and Inoue and Chad and Ishida kick massive butt in episodes 1 through 189 - uh, where was I?)
    Right. Anime. Quite simply, I love it.
    I love the diversity of artistic styles, I love the colors. I love the music (BB got all the Bleach opening and closing songs yesterday! W00t! Happy People!)
     I love all the iterations of the many near-archetypical and insanely stylized story lines, the equally archetypical and insanely stylized characters. I love mecha. I love Teenage Heroes. I love feudal Japan. I love impossible physics that allow gorgeously choreographed fights and the sublime beauty of strange imagery, whether it's wind, or birds, oceans, mountains, cherry blossoms, and moonlight.
     I love the trainwreck mashups of intense and surprisingly adult emotional stories, blood-drenched violence, bathroom humor, fanservice, and -- oh, everything. Flying battleships and heroes dying on crosses wound about with roses ... Buster Keaton as Lear on crystal meth, with Bluebottle, Jesus Christ, Faust and the Katzenjammer kids trying to find Sophia and Justice and freedom from the bomb in all the places the universe offers as stages.
    (And don't think there aren't women on stage. Don't mess with anime women: not the Babes, not the Madonnas, not the Assassins, not the Mothers, nor the Sisters, nor the Lovers, nor the Scientists, nor the Cyborg Cops, nor the Queens. Or the Insurance Adjusters. Don't ever mess with the Insurance Adjuster Women.)
    But sometimes ... sometimes, when I'm watching warring high schools with legions of toxically lethal 14-year-old warriors, with no adults in sight, with freshmen who turn into dragons when their glasses break, and casual talk of reincarnated war chiefs eating dogs in the basement ....
   Sometimes you just have to say WTF, y'all. You know?

*And, no, Miyazaki's stuff is not anime, not as such. It's brilliant, but it's not what's croggling me here. Just so you know.

Comments

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

I don't watch a ton of anime (not for lack of my mom and dad trying -- they adore the stuff; I always say I'm the only person I know whose parents keep telling her to watch *more* anime), but when it gets really weird to the point of incomprehensibility, I usually figure I'm just missing some key cultural background for understanding it. I mean, look at South Park when they do a particularly detailed skewering of a particular movie or issue -- if you don't know what they're making fun of, their stuff is pretty incomprehensible, too.

OTOH, the "cultural differences" card doesn't always work. It reminds me of a story my boss told about her days in grad school. Her department got a Chinese grad student, and he *seemed* to be a total weirdo, but none of the other grad students had ever really worked closely with someone from China, so they thought they might just be misunderstanding him because of cultural differences, to the point of feeling a little guilty about thinking he was so strange.

Then they got in another couple of Chinese grad students, and they seemed *much* more normal. Eventually, my boss worked up the courage to ask *them* what they thought of the weirdo guy, and whether or not his behavior had anything to do with his background culture.

"Oh, no," was the reply. "He's just insane."

At least everyone could feel a little better about their cultural sensitivity ratings after that . . . XD And it's entirely possible that some anime is just weird, too.

[kaffy_r]

Wow, I've always wondered what it would be like to have parents who liked stuff that I do. I love my mom, and my brother, but they always used to call my SF books "that junk." I don't know what they'd think of my love of anime. I love your story about the insane Chinese student. Your point is well taken. Within any paradigm, some folks are bound to be whack jobs.

[belsum.livejournal.com]

I'm painfully underversed (is that a word?) in anime. I love what I've seen but I haven't seen enough. I've been through all of Evangelion and started on Cowboy Beebop. I used to watch Samurai Champloo and The Big O on Cartoon Network before they banished their anime to the wee hours. But other than standalone movies, that's it for series exposure.

[kaffy_r]

Well, you can't go wrong with Bleach; the art is almost always strong, often varied, and never less than fun to watch. The story is typically Japanese; the creators throw Japanese folktales, 12-year-old boys' virility fantasies, and weirdly-timed intrusions of vaudeville humor into a blender, and you get what, at base, is a long-running teen coming of age story. And kickass battles - they're cool, too.

Cowboy Beebop is as close to a perfect anime as you can get, in my small opinion: after about 10 years (which is an eternity in anime terms) the art is still fresh, the graphic design is amazingly sophisticated, and the story is - well, after you finish it, I'll tell you what I think of it. Another one that runs close to it is Trigun, although the art is quite, quite different. Personal favorites of mine, for different reasons: Last Exile and Eureka Seven.

For a quick look at the history and context of anime, look up "Anime Explosion" by Patrick Drazen. He was a Chicago-based author who I interviewed a year or so back - he knows his stuff, and you'll get a good grounding. It's a little dated, unless he's done a new edition, but it's still good. Anime Academy is an anime site with really good reviews of, and information about, anime. It used to have forums, but I never visited them, and I don't know whether they're still operating.

There, that's more information than you wanted, right? (Oh, by the way; I loved the Big O, and I loved Samurai Champloo.)

My Tropes, Let Me Show You Them

[mmbutler.livejournal.com]

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenkiGirl

You know the TVTropes.org site, yes? It is a black hole. Made of fun.

Re: My Tropes, Let Me Show You Them

[kaffy_r]

Oh, you bastard! I'll never escape!

Re: My Tropes, Let Me Show You Them

[mmbutler.livejournal.com]

You ain't seen nothin' yet, schweetie...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SearchWiki?text=Doctor+Who&pagename=Main/SearchWiki

Cue EC-style laugh:

Eh. Eheheh. EhehehehEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHNHHHH...

Re: My Tropes, Let Me Show You Them

[mmbutler.livejournal.com]

And of course.... it's a... WIKI.

EheheheheHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHHHHHHH!!!!

Re: My Tropes, Let Me Show You Them

[kaffy_r]

AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!!!!!

Also, now this:

[(Anonymous)]

http://nonadventures.com/2008/09/20/once-nippon-a-time/

Wonderella is a sort of American non-anime doujin of Wonder Woman. The art on this page is of course a deliberate melange of the Wonderella artist's usual style and the wacky consequences of Wonderella's attempt to monetize her brand in Nihon.

--MMB