It's a magical world

Kiki's Delivery Service | Majo no takkyubin. Dir. Miyazaki Hayao: Studio Ghibli, 1989.

This is the last of the major Studio Ghibli films that I hadn't seen--the only Ghibli films I haven't, in point of fact, are the minor Umi ga kikoeru and Omohide poroporo, (For the record, we don't talk about Gedo senki around here.)

In some ways this movie is the most flight-obsessed of all the Ghibli movies, though of course this is arguable; flight is a central motif in Ghibli, maybe the central motif. I really do enjoy the way Ghibli presents flying, too, and girls' relation to it; in this movie in particular the gender divide is stark, as Tombo notes when he wishes that he had been born into a witch family so that he could fly naturally, rather than only with the aid of ungainly technology. Indeed, Kiki's ontological ease with flying, and the fact that it's her talent and her livelihood, makes the disappearance of her powers of magic and flight all the more wrenching, and the climax all the better; she has found herself again, and won a place in her town's heart doing it. ("Look, up in the sky! That's not a bird, it's a girl! No, it's Kiki!")

In some ways too this movie also seems to be the most female-centric of the Ghibli corpus: Kiki derives her powers from her mother, it's the female baker Osono who gives Kiki her room, Kiki's customers are almost all women, and it's the painter Ursula who helps Kiki deal with her depression when she does lose her power. Even Jiji, a male cat, is voiced by a woman in the Japanese version (as is standard in Japanese animation)--and in the Japanese version Kiki does not regain the ability to talk to him, significantly. Despite Miyazaki putting Kiki on the back of Tombo's bike in that one scene, I really did enjoy the movie's presentation of one girl's struggle to find her independence, and her eventual success at it.

All of these are connected in some fashion to halfamoon.

arefadedaway has made a wonderful vid combining two of my favorite things: Princess Tutu and Revolutionary Girl Utena. The vid spoils both anime, so don't watch it if you're concerned about such things, but if you don't care or if you've seen both shows (you totally should watch both shows, they are both amazing), the vid is marvelous. Great song choice, and a great story: women choosing their own stories' ending.

zahrawithaz has a roundup of vids focusing on Amazing Ladies. There's some great stuff here. (I am in love with that Kamikaze Girls/Shimotsuma monogatari vid,I have to say.)

thedeadparrot has made a great video focusing on one amazing lady in particular, Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Bonus points for using a song by an artist of color (in this case, M.I.A. I think it's the remix for Slumdog Millionaire, but I'd have to check to be sure.), to say nothing of awesome editing.

And in halfamoon itself, harriet_spy has a feminist vid sampler. Oo, fannish history!

A very Happy Birthday to tammypierce!

I can't think of a single author whose works have had more influence on me as a reader, as a writer, and probably as a person too--here's hoping you have a birthday as awesome as your heroines.

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In other news, rachelmanija has an interesting essay on Ponyo at the Internet Review of Science Fiction. I think she's particularly good on discussing the parental figures in the movie, which apparently some people found problematic (I will admit immediately that I didn't notice any problems, but this is because I am not a parent), as well as on the movie versus the Anderson story.

And now to work.

DTB: Ryuusei no Gemini 07
Dear Hei, I love you so much. Not even at all because you totally looked like a good friend of mine for part of this episode. Nope, not at all. Also: it shouldn't have taken me this long to realize that Suou totally has Yuna's hair.

( All the way to Sendai.  )

Tune in next week for a showdown with the FSB on a traaaaaiiiin. And possibly the return of Hei's appetite.

DTB: Ryuusei no Gemini 04
So as I had bet with myself, Suou didn't actually manage to get off any killing shots at the train station. Seeing that this is part of a years-long pattern, I really hope she doesn't fall into that category of "anime women/girls who can kick ass but never do." On the other hand, she's not bad at hand-to-hand combat, as depicted in this episode. Clearly, though, she still needs more training. With Hei.

( I'd rather be in Tokyo )

Darker Than BLACK - Ryuusei no Gemini 02
Flying squirrel to the face FTW! And, omg, I love Hei so much. I love Suou, too, though in a completely different and slightly less admiring way. For that matter, I love Misaki too (and I want her mountain bike). The Magician and the other contractors are pretty kick-ass, I must say--I can't decide which of them is the most badass, though it might be the golemist.

I find the use of language in this show pretty interesting, actually. When the golemist contractor (can't be arsed to look up his name) runs into Suou, he runs through Mandarin and then German before she starts talking in Japanese, and he explicitly says, "Oh, you speak Japanese!" Now, this is interesting because it's Vladivostok and all the signs are in Russian...but even the Russians speak Japanese. So it's kind of schizoid on the show's part, but it also shows a not-inconsequential gesturing towards some kind of authenticity.


( Spoilers & speculation )

What would you do if you were given ¥10 billion and told to save your country? And if, as a condition of the money, which you couldn't refuse, you were told that if your solution wasn't satisfactory, one of the other 11 people given the same money and mandate would come to kill you? What would--or wouldn't--you do? 

Eden of the East has to be one of the best anime I've seen in the past few years, hands down. Our heroes are Morimi Saki, a senior in college trying to take her place in society, her circle of college friends, and one Takizawa Akira, a guy she meets in front of the White House when he's naked, holding a gun and a cell phone, having lost his memories completely. On their way back to Japan, they see that the country has come under missile attack in another "Careless Monday." Almost as soon as they land, it becomes clear that Akira had something to do with the disappearance of some 20,000 NEETs [Not in Education, Employment, or Training] several months ago, and maybe with the missile attacks themselves--but in what capacity? As the 9th Seleçaõ, Akira has almost unimaginable resources at his disposal, and he could have been on either side of the incident, as Saki's would-be boyfriend Ohsugi points out. Saki has problems of her own, as do her friends, who like many young people in Japan today have plenty of skills and brains but no outlet to put them to use.

There's an unmistakeable whiff of Christianity about the whole Seleçaõ business--a set of twelve potential saviors, set up by a guy named "Mr. Outside", with a built-in traitor in their midst? Yeah, that sounds familiar (and indeed, the fact that the traitor among the Seleçaõ is called the "Supporter" seems to gesture to the old heresy that Judas Iscariot was part of the plan), but I wouldn't want to overdo it--perhaps equally salient is the fact that, as Saki notes in the first episode, both she and Akira were born in the last week of the Showa era, just before the start of Heisei. They've grown up with the era, but the ghosts of Showa still linger to oppress their generation--and indeed, is not the Bubble economy the greatest Showa ghost of all? For that matter, I'd have to say that this is the rare anime which isn't completely obsessed with the war; in Eden of the East it's the economy, stupid. At the end, though, several characters do plot to take Japan back to "a new postwar" in which the slate can be erased and the country can start afresh. Given that the entire postwar regime was set up with the goal and raison d'etre of economic prosperity, and that the system has been failing worse and worse for 20 years, one hopes that Showa fixers like Mr. Outside are suffering an acute crisis of conscience that Japan's meteoric rise led only to its current dead end.

Aside from great character design, impeccable animation (particularly in backgrounds and locations--the Kyoto and Tokyo settings are dead-on, I can say from experience) and great writing--Akira is one of those charming characters who actually charms the audience as easily as he does the people in the show--Eden of the East isn't afraid to go toe-to-toe with the abyss into which Japan is currently gazing. One of the characters (who himself illustrates how thin the line between NEET and hikikomori can be) argues that NEETs are committing individual acts of terrorism against the government of their elders, which seems a radical but not an incorrect formation, and the anime is not subtle in making the point that Something Ought To Be Done which would allow all these potentially productive people to contribute to society in a way that was valuable, and for which they felt valued.

In the Silver Age of Russian literature, perhaps the last 20 years before the Revolution, a novel entitled What Is to Be Done? became a best-seller, and the question bedeviled the intelligentsia after that. Japan has the same problem. It's hard to say which notion on the part of Eden of the East is more radical or more fantastic--that one person can save an entire country, or that an anime could help to do the same.

So, obviously, I can't wait for the movies.

ETA: Actually, thinking about it, I would be remiss if I didn't comment further on the motif of terrorism that runs through the warp of the anime. In the very first sequence, we see Saki and Micchon in front of the Freedom Tower (not yet built in real life) in New York City, and even before the Kyoto NEET Itazu calls himself and his fellow NEETs terrorists, Akira takes a picture with Saki in which he literally equates his home in Toyosu with Ground Zero in New York. Further, at the airport in D.C. Saki ruminates on how she feels that the events of 9/11 should not be forgotten (which is taken up in a contrary way when Itazu refers to 9/11 as "the double terrorist conspiracy", not an uncommon view on the Japanese left in my experience). Moreover, for part of the anime Saki and company wonder if the Seleçaõ and Akira are terrorists. I think what's being got at here is a modernized form of the old saw about girlhood in a patriarchal society being criminal--being a NEET in Japan is criminal, and when the NEETs get together in Toyosu to save Japan from a terrorist attack, they are in that one sense committing a terrorist act themselves--hence Ground Zero.

P.S. I forgot to mention that I don't think that Akira having picked the alias "Takizawa Akira" out of his stack of passports is really a coincidence--let's not forget that Akira is the name of the movie in which the eponymous character "saves" a future Japan through destruction. Moreover, I can't really believe that Number 10, Yuuki, being a dead ringer for Kannami of The Sky Crawlers is a coincidence either.

So I just mainlined the entirety of the anime "Mouryou no Hako" in about two days. It only has 13 episodes (the last of which sadly has not been subbed, but I found the raw and understood the gist of it), but it's pretty complex. And awesome.

The plot is rather complicated, but it involves the disappearance of one schoolgirl and the murder of several others in and around Tokyo in 1952 (when the Occupation ended). The murders are investigated by a loose group of (male) friends and war buddies who are now private investigators, reporters, novelists, detectives, and onmyouji.

The character designs are by CLAMP (just one pretty aspect of a pretty anime) and frankly I was expecting, well, something like Tokyo Babylon I guess: monster of the week with some m/m innuendo. That is not what this anime is (though the first episode is one of the more enthusiastic depictions of yuri that I've seen in a while). Instead--of course--it's about the war, and about war crimes and the chickens of war that do come home to roost. The metaphor is crap, but I should hope the point suffices--Sekiguchi, the novelist, suffers from depression and possibly PTSD, both of which are almost certainly a result of his experiences in the war, when he was the lieutenant of now-Detective Kiba, who still has dreams about all the people who died. The onmyouji, Kyogokudou, spent his war service researching forced conversion alongside scientists trying to create immortal soldiers. The better to conquer and assimilate you with, my dear!

So, obviously, there's quite a number of parallels with Fullmetal Alchemist here (Unit 731 even gets a shout-out by name), though of course that's because the mouryou of the war remains unexorcised, unlike most of the mouryou (specters? demons?) in the anime itself. I did, however, detect a possible reference to Studio Ghibli--the research facility at which a good deal of the action takes place is in Mitaka, and there's a kid who looks exactly like the brother in Grave of the Fireflies (which let's not forget in Japanese is Hotaru no Hako) in a couple of the early episodes. It's no secret that Miyazaki's love of flight was inspired by his father's factory, which made Zero warplanes. Anime and manga are at least latently complicit in, since they arose out of, the Japanese imperial/national project, and I think this anime recognizes that fact.

The anime is actually based on the book of the same name by Kyogoku Natsuhiko. The first book, Summer of the Ubume, has just been released by Vertical, and you can bet I'll be checking it out.

So this weekend I went down to Baltimore and for the first time in four years attended Otakon, the convention of the otaku generation. It was, all in all, an excellent time, and I have to give my friend Alex Leavitt, blogger and aspiring anime academic, thanks and acknowledgment for organizing the hotel room in which I and three of his friends crashed, and especially for getting me on the "Anime and Manga in Academia" panel.

( Otaku unite! )

All in all, Otakon continues to be a paragon of a well-run con, and it's managed to retain, if not amp up, its fannish vibe, which makes it appealingly different from AX. The things I really disagreed with were statements made by attendees themselves, such as the bizarrely sexist statement that fujoshi are otaku (particularly out of the mouth of an older white man) and recurrent ableist language of the "that's so lame" variety (and let me just give a shout out to coffeeandink for raising my consciousness on that one). Fujoshi are fans, but as a group they insist strenuously that they are different from and are not otaku, and for many reasons I think there's no reason not to accept their self-definition at face value. Certainly comparative studies of otaku and fujoshi would yield rich results, since they are both highly gendered paradigms of highly involved fandoms, but saying that fujoshi are otaku and they're in denial is just more of "those silly wimmen don't know what they're doin" crap. Some guy also tried to take pictures up Rachel's skirt (she was cosplaying some schoolgirl character or other), which proves that there's always a couple of bad apples, even if the crowds were remarkably well-behaved and polite on the whole.

At the start of her panel Trish Ledoux described how she initially got into anime, in the dark ages of the 80s when "Japanimation" had one room at any given science fiction convention and you watched a hodgepodge of whatever you had, since it was copied from copies of copies of whatever servicemen could tape off the TVs in Japan. In 1991 the first exclusively anime convention was held, the sff people having gotten nervous about "that stuff" not really being scif, and I can't help but think that this Great Divorce may have been a forward echo of the death knell of sff as it was and as we know it. It's no accident that most sff con crowds are majority graying, white, and male; their natural successors have largely gone into anime and media fandoms, since that's where they feel comfortable, for obvious reasons (side note: demographics are also why the Hugo shortlists are mediocre). WorldCon has been around since 1931, but after only 16 years Otakon's annual attendance is larger by a factor of three (and that's with a dropoff this year due to the Great Recession), even though I'm sure there are far more sff fans in the world than anime fans. The San Diego Comic Con, which doesn't actively discriminate against manga and anime afaik, regularly draws more than 100K people. What about these facts does not constitute the writing on the wall, and why are the organizers of sff cons persistently illiterate?

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No thanks to the Greyhound bus company, I made it back to Philly in time to meet my sister to head to the TLA to see one of our favorite bands, VNV Nation. The concert was amazing--Spike and I wound up roughly one person back from the barricade in front of the stage, and we shook both Ronan and Mark's hands at the end of the concert! We as a crowd also were video'd for possible inclusion in the video for their new single, which is ironic considering that we weren't even sure if they were touring in support of a new album until we walked in past the merch booth and saw it for sale. They played three or four tracks off the new album, "Of Faith, Power, And Glory", and it seems to promise a possible synthesis between the slightly mellower sound of their previous two albums and their older, somewhat harder-edged approach--certainly the concert itself delivered that, beginning with the first song of the set, "Joy," which was so loud that my arm hairs vibrated, and the lyrics of which Ronan delivered in a more melodic style than is heard on the actual album cut. I'd like to get their new CD/DVD set, it has a live CD with some of their best songs on it, and probably records the new approach. Bands at smaller shows regularly cite Philly crowds as some of the best they play for, and sure enough we brought Ronan to tears at least twice, and even managed to help the band recover from a girl fainting onto the stage during "Darkangel." As they've been doing since the "Matter + Form" tour, which was the first time I saw them (this was my second; I don't know why I didn't see them on the "Judgment" tour, but my sister did), they ended with "Perpetual," and it was amazing.

I liked the first opening band, Ayria, a Canadian industrial group with a female vocalist--definitely more on the mellow/melodic end of the industrial spectrum, but I've been looking to expand my horizons in the genre, and female vocalist! The second band, War Tapes, sounded like a cross between J-rock and The Editors--it seemed fitting that their guitarists were an Asian dude and a white woman even before they said they were from L.A., which explained everything. They should tour Japan, they'd make a mint. Side note to the dude selling the VNV merch: I am not unsympathetic to student loan debt, as it is the only way to get an education these days and I certainly have my own financial cross to bear, but if you have $110K in student loan debt for a degree that prepared you to work the merch booth at an industrial concert, I question your decisions.

First, rodo is having a poll on language and fandom participation that is crying out for some participation. Go vote!

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As some of you have heard, I started a new job today, as a CS rep at a mumble mumble major company whose local offices are really close to my house. Close enough that I probably will bike to work once I get a better handle on the whole "return to employment" thing. Currently I'm working 6hrs/day, 30hrs/week, but as summer is the busy season, I will be full time starting next month. The money is good for a temp job, the people seem nice, it's not difficult work, yadda yadda yadda... And my first impression is that I want to run screaming for the hills. I am desperately awaiting my financial aid letter from IUC, and probably am going to try to throw together a MEXT scholarship application, and will be applying to graduate school this fall (unless I get said MEXT scholarship for an April 2010 start date). Hey, at least now I can afford the transcripts!

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I've been paging through a lot of my old, old posts, and you know, I used to talk about anime a lot. But then, when I started this journal I watched anime a lot. And you'd never know I've received grants to research manga for all that I talk about it on here. So, in the spirit of recharging the manga/anime elements of this journal, I note here my thoughts on the new Fullmetal Alchemist anime, "Brotherhood."

• I sort of enjoyed, and sort of didn't like, how the first episode is a completely AU way of transparently setting up/foreshadowing the ending. I mean, there's probably people out there who are watching the anime but haven't read the manga (okay: I know some of them), but is the bloody obvious signposting really necessary?
• Relatedly, while I suppose that ship has sailed in terms of folowing the manga and getting the big reveal of Ed and Al's true condition in Lior, I had mixed feelings about how blithely they gave away the automail/full armor suit in the first episode, and about how they just shoehorned the entire past arcs into the second episode. Well, not the entire past--their training with Izumi was glossed over completely, and I hope they do the flashbacks to that in future. I guess I just think that following Arakawa's own pacing is best, because she's a genius.
• Voice actors! When Ed first showed up on screen, for the first ten seconds all I could think was "Why is Hitsugaya talking out of Ed's mouth?" but then my mind was able to dissociate them, which was probably good for my sanity. Also, after Ohkawa Tohru, Roy's new voice actor sounded way too high-pitched, but I also got used to that by the end of the episode. He's Urahara's voice actor, I think we're in good hands. My jury is still out on Hawkeye's voice actor though. I still think she sounds a little too...I don't want to say "feminine." I don't know. She's Rukia's voice actress, she's perfectly capable of sounding kick-ass. Maybe I just haven't watched enough. It's a Bleach reunion party!
• I still can't stand Rose. But I can certainly sympathize with her dilemma more than ever. Relatedly, go Arakawa for foreshadowing chimeras and the army that doesn't fear death so early on. Although, the army does do both of them better.
• Cutest ending credits ever! I like the opening song too. But the man saying "Fullmetal Alchemist" in the middle is unnerving. Also, embedded sponsor credits: good from the perspective of more time in the show, bad for occluding the view.
• I'm going to spend a lot of brainpower considering whether FMA could be called steampunk, and what that says about both FMA and steampunk if the answer is yes. If anyone has any suggestions for a good place to starting finding out what steampunk is all about (in a really obvious, newbie sort of way, since I've been dealing with it at a higher level without ever investigating the foundations), I'd welcome them.

I need a fandom tag. I've been marking everything "otw," which is sort of metonymic, and kind of fitting for that reason.