It's a magical world

In preparation for Star Trek: Lower Decks (I'm just going to call it LDS, because the one with the whales is a perfect movie, and you can't stop me), I rewatched all of The Animated Series. It's wild to realize that the first and last time I watched it was ten years ago; you can find my reaction posts in the star trek tag. 

Rewatching, it was interesting to me how some things bothered me less and others bothered me more--I've always hated Harvey Mudd, and as far as I'm concerned Lorca should have shot his ass in that Klingon prison and saved us all the suffering--but I hated him even more this time around, with the fire of a thousand firey suns. Even as it was pretty hilarious to me how there was a very obvious "no homo!" moment in that episode which…is not convincing in the slightest. But I appreciated again how the character designs make all the women look angry, and how the fact that a good chunk of the episodes are follow-ups to TOS episodes means that they can be slightly denser than their 22 minute allotment would suggest. I also don't think the animation is actually that bad, aside from the parts where the QC obviously failed. It's not that much worse than any other 1970s cartoon, at any rate, particularly in comparison to contemporary animation. And the characters outside the Kirk/Spock/McCoy trio really get a chance to shine, which is a nice change from TOS.

Anyway. TAS is canon now, again--suck it, Roddenberry! And for that reason, if you like TOS, I think it's worth watching. There are only 22 episodes, you can binge the whole thing in a day or two. But if you want a guide to the truly worthwhile episodes, well, here's my thoughts as a dedicated TAS fan. ( Six episodes out of 22 )

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women (2017), dir. Angela Robinson
I loved this film so much and I'd bet that almost everyone reading this will love it too. Based on the real-life story of the creator of Wonder Woman and his wife and their partner, the movie has been winning deserved praise for its respectful portrayal of a poly love story, as well as its exploration of exploring kink and BDSM in a relationship. The story of Bill Marston, Elizabeth Marston and Olive Byrne is fascinating, and Robinson leaps off the agreed-upon documentary record to make it a full-on romantic trio, with Elizabeth and Olive's sexual relationship being just as important and real as either woman's relationship with Marston. Despite all that, however, the film is mostly inexplicit; Robinson is far more focused on the depiction of relationships through the way people look at each other than through body parts. It is, in other words, extremely female gaze, and very sexy. I would happily have watched another hour of the movie, particularly as the latter half gets into the challenges of queer parenting in a homophobic society in a way I wasn't expecting, but the movie's conventional structure means that there's only so much time. Still, it was wonderful, and all the actors were great. Go see it.

The Princess & the Frog (2009)
Disney's last traditionally animated feature film, its first featuring a black princess, and probably the only Disney princess movie I hadn't seen. I liked the story of Tiana and her feckless prince, and from my admittedly inexpert position it seemed like the non-white characters were largely depicted in a positive manner. The story is sweet, but it owes so much to Shrek, it's kind of painful, and the thing that really struck me is that even as Disney put a lot of effort into moving beyond racist stereotypes in its depiction of the non-white characters, they were unwilling or incapable of to get beyond lazy stereotypes and fatphobic tropes in their depictions of villains and fat people. (I was also interested to see that the dupe villain gets a British accent, since the movie being set in New Orleans means that Disney was unable to rely on its main vocal stereotyping strategy of having the villains speak in Southern accents.) All of which is to say, there's ultimately no comparison between this movie and some of Disney's more recent successes.

I stopped writing up all the movies I'd seen for a while, with the result that I cannot remember all the movies I've seen this year. I have ticket stubs for Creed (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Love and Friendship (2016), and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) on my desk. Two of those movies are perfect and amazing; the other two are not. Oh, and I also saw X-Men: Apocalypse (2016).

Zootopia, dir. Byron Howard, Rich Moore, and Jared Bush
Disney has been making better Pixar movies than Pixar for about the past five years, and while this one isn't quite as amazing as Wreck-It Ralph or Big Hero 6, it more than gets the job done. It's also a Disney movie that addresses race in a not incredibly lead-footed way, although the usual problem with animation and comic specieism is not something the movie gets around: namely, once you think deeply about any aspect of the allegory, it all falls apart in spectacular fashion. (For just one example, white people here are represented as prey species…who are also the victims of the predator species, i.e. black people. Neat trick! Nor is the answer to police prejudice and violence that black people, I mean, predators, join the police force.) But the story is solid, and the chemistry between the two leads is off the charts, and the fact that the protagonist has to confront prejudice not just in other characters but also in herself is a great touch. Great animation, and great integration of Shakira and her music into the movie as well, rather than just a gratuitous add-on.

Finding Dory, dir. Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane
It's been a while since Pixar has made a movie as solid as this one; it's at least as good as Brave (2012), and I suspect will come to be evaluated in similar terms. The studio continues to ignore the truth about fish biology, which is probably good; also note that the movie taking place only a year after Finding Nemo means they can ignore the issue of coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. In many ways, Pixar here is playing to its strengths--the action arises organically from the characters themselves, and there is at least one zany breakout character (in this case, Hank the octopus; last time it was Dory herself) who steals the show, ably supported by a memorable secondary cast, notably Idris Elba and his pinniped companion. I could have done with more of the sea turtles, ngl, but the ongoing Sigourney Weaver joke was pretty great, as was the evocation of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Dory herself--only the second female protagonist of a Pixar movie after Merida--is great, as is the movie's gentle insistence that her being neuroatypical is not a problem, just the reason that she makes her way through the world by slightly different means. The animation isn't as good as it could be--the animation in the short "Piper," which is Pixar's best in years, is off the charts in terms of photorealism--and I hope that was to match Finding Nemo, which after all is 12 years old at this point. Still, I'm looking forward to what they do next.

I went to see this with my friend B yesterday and we were, on the whole, underwhelmed. Inside Out isn't actively bad--I was entertained while I was watching it, and I never felt bored--but it's also, despite many clever concepts and a really earnest attempt at dramatizing cognition, pretty thin as a story. There are other problems, but that's one of them.

The central plot of the movie involves the anthropomorphized emotions of 11 year old Reilly, whose parents (who sure as fuck don't look like millionaires--which they must be to afford that house--but then, who in the Bay Area does) move the family from Minnesota to San Francisco, setting off the first truly extended emotional turmoil in Reilly's hitherto happy existence (dare I say, she led the life of Reilly. Har har. Har). Inside Reilly's head, Joy and Sadness get shunted out of the command center due to Joy trying to make Reilly be happy all the time, and they spend the rest of the movie trying to make it back and save the core aspects of Reilly's personality while Fear, Anger, and Disgust do a mixed bag of holding down the fort in their absence.

It certainly felt like Pixar forgot some of their own rules for compelling storytelling here; the central realization--being sad is a necessary part of life--doesn't really arise organically from the interactions between Sadness and Joy in the same brilliant way that earlier Pixar films accomplished so neatly. There's also the question of character: namely, who is a character in the movie, and who's the protagonist? Joy and Sadness are a bit too 2D to be characters, but because we see the emotions literally controlling Reilly's reactions, she doesn't really feel like a character either, and in fact the whole setup was a bit mechanistic for my taste. (Side note: Where's rationality in this model?) So the film's dramatic focus oddly lacks a center. I also don't think this is sexist; we get peeks into the mechanistic setup of other people's minds at various points, and everyone is in the same boat; the question is merely which emotion is in charge. (And maybe it is sexist that for Reilly's mom it's Sadness and for Reilly's dad it's Anger; certainly Reilly's dad doesn't actually seem like an angry guy from the movie. That was a weird choice.) 

Another problem is the question of who the movie is aimed at. There's a brilliant animation interlude when Joy, Sadness, and Reilly's forgotten imaginary friend BingBong try to take a shortcut from long-term memory to imagination via abstract thought and are reduced first to Cubist caricatures, then to 2D drawings, and finally to lines, but how many kids are going to get that visual humor? The film's final line is a joke about puberty that no child is going to get and only adults will find funny. The Japanese release was accompanied by a weird video of the director talking about how he made it because he wanted to know what was going on inside his 11 year old daughter's head, and the final lines of the credits include a plea from the animators to their kids that they "Never grow up. Ever," which may have been meant ironically (Pixar are in the Bay Area, after all) but which seemed to contradict the entire implicit point of the film about how one's emotions become more complex as one ages. We were then subjected to a schmaltzy music video in Japanese before the short started, which I did find sexist--dear Pixar, please make a short with a female protagonist, it will do wonders for you, I promise.

All that being said, I did enjoy the Bay Area humor, though as B and I agreed after the film, the end credits should have shown that the bus driver's happy place was also the Brazilian helicopter pilot, since that would have been way more San Francisco even than the running bit about putting vegetables on pizza. B and I are both transplanted East Coasters and we have our own running bit about pizza in the Bay Area (which can be very good, but isn't pizza the way pizza is pizza back East), so that was pretty hilariously apropos for us. But all in all, in terms of the animated movies I've seen that depict the Bay Area while living in Japan for the past year, Big Hero 6 is a much better movie in every way.

This movie was also on the TAAF program, and since I missed it in Japan and the States the first time around, I wound up going. (If nothing else, I have to keep up my record with Ghibli films; I'm still only short Ocean Waves and Takahata's Only Yesterday.) The art is gorgeous, and as an animated film, it's a brilliant showcase of things that traditional animation can do that computer animation simply can't. But--you knew there was a but--in the end I didn't really enjoy it very much. I'll go further; I don't think it was a better movie than Big Hero 6 or Song of the Sea, both of which it was in competition with for Best Animated Feature at this year's Oscars. (Song of the Sea was robbed, though Big Hero 6 is great.)

My problems mostly resulted from the changes that Takahata made in the folk tale, a version of which I've actually read in the original classical Japanese. In the folktale, despite the fact that he keeps finding gold in the bamboo trees, the bamboo-cutter and his wife and Kaguya-hime stay in their house in the woods rather than moving to the capital (lolwhat) and the suitors and the emperor all come to them. Although Kaguya-hime is definitely assertive in the movie, to me she seemed to be more of a badass in the original version (not helped by her crying about how she's a fake all the time). It's probably superfluous to say that Takahata has no conception of Heian marriage practices, but because he doesn't, the story is definitely shoved into a more patriarchal frame, and the bamboo-cutter being obsessed with getting Kaguya-hime married doesn't help matters. Moreover, the Emperor's actions are both totally out of character, and in a society in which seeing a glimpse of a noblewoman's face was synecdochic for having had sexual relations with her, basically constitute sexual assault, which I really didn't appreciate. Finally, while there's plenty of ambiguity in the original story whether the moon people are aliens or just basically Buddhas, I'm really attached to my interpretation of the emotionless moon people as alien elf types, and I was disappointed to see Takahata take the other tack.

So, yeah. I'm glad I saw it, and it wasn't a bad movie on any technical level; just really not my cup of tea.

Omoide no Maanii | When Marni Was There (2014), dir. Yonebayashi Hiromasa

When I realized, a few hours before I was supposed to meet my friend to see this movie in Shibuya, that the newest Ghibli movie was directed by the same guy who directed Arrietty, which I thought was basically a flaming pile of poo, I was very worried. But I actually enjoyed the movie quite a lot! It's not a major work, but I liked it a lot, and in a lot of ways it actually reminded me of Maleficent in that the most important relationship is between two female characters, and that it is chock-a-block with lesbian overtones.

The movie shares Arrietty's general concept of "Western children's literature transposed to Japan" (it's adapted from a British novel by Joan G. Robinson) and follows friendless adoptee Anna, who is put on a train to Hokkaidou to spend the summer vacation with her adopted mother's family. She's a loner whose only real pleasure is in her sketchbook, and so it's not surprising that she becomes obsessed with an abandoned Western-style mansion on the far shore of the tidal bay. Despite being told that it's uninhabited, one night she meets a girl named Marni there, and they soon become fast friends. Of course, that's when things get interesting, and to say more would be spoilery (although to be fair, the audience never entirely shares Anna's obsessive disregard for facts, so we're always waiting for the other shoe to drop for some reason).

The movie is fairly direct about Anna's loneliness and the joy she finds in her friendship with Marni; partly because Anna is a little older than most Ghibli heroine, her emotions are often quite affecting, and the supporting characters, particularly Sayaka and Hisako, are well-drawn. Quite a few people teared up at the end, which although somewhat melancholy was also very satisfying. I definitely recommend seeing it if you can, although of course I can't vouch for what horrors may or may not be inflicted on the movie in the dubbing process.

I promised unjapanologist last summer that I would finish watching Avatar: The Legend of Korra without her. I fulfilled that promise only eleven months later when I was lying on the couch after getting my wisdom teeth out. I'd stopped about halfway through, and I knew enough from other people not to expect too much.

Overall, I liked this show, but the comparisons between this first season of Korra and the first season of ATLA are instructive. The first season of ATLA didn't quite gel very well, but it did set up a good overarching plot and it introduced some great characters. Korra, on the other hand, shortchanges character development in favor of a rushed, slapdash, and deus ex machine finale. (Where is it going to go from here?)

( Spoilers, though I'm probably the last person to watch this show ) But jebus, Bryan and Mike, way to fall down.

Brave. Dir. Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, and Steve Purcell, 2012.

I finally saw Brave with a colleague, and…I liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it and I thought it was a good movie overall and also Hollywood is pretty bad at interpreting what audiences want, they have to be trained in Pavolovian fashion via the application of cash, so yes, I did want to actually pay money to see this.

( If you could change your fate, would you? )

I really like Pixar movies in general, and I've seen all of them except Cars and Wall-E (I know. I even own Wall-E). This one, compared with the transcendent heights of Up, or even the not quite as sublime but still excellent and moving Toy Story 3, just doesn't quite measure up - there's a spark lacking, somehow. But I'm glad it exists, and glad I went to see it, and glad it's out there for girls to see.

1. What's the best but least-known (to Westerners, to Japanese people in other parts of the country, whichever) thing about Kyoto you've discovered?
Hmm, this is tough! Kyoto never ceases to throw new things into my path, but on the other hand, I've grown to know the city fairly well (partly, yes, because I had a lot of time and money and few responsibilities the last time I was here).

So, let's see. One of the things you can find in Kyoto that I love, and that even people from Kansai don't often know about, is hiyashi ame, cold ginger juice. It is SO GOOD. I've found it two places in Kyoto (actually near Kyoto technically, but close enough): at Mii-dera, across the mountains in Shiga, and at Mimuroto-ji in Uji, during the hydrangea season. I also found it at the Tenjin matsuri in Osaka last month, which was awesome.

As for places…I love just about all of the major Kyoto sites, which is good because I inevitably wind up making a circuit of them when I show people around, but some of my really favorite places are slightly more out of the way. Mimuroto-ji in Uji above, Ishiyama-dera a bit further east, Kajû-ji in Yamashina, Myôshin-ji up in the northwest (it's so cool to wander around there, just so cool; it's like a little town made up entirely of temples). I also really love the Garden of Fine Arts up on Kitayama, which bills itself as the world's first outdoor art garden and is a cheerfully bizarre little place, with architecture by Andô Tadao, who is one of my all-time favorites and luckily for me a Kansai native, so there's lots of his buildings around to explore. The Garden of Fine Arts is quirky and awesome.

It's really hard to choose, actually. I just love Kyoto, period.

2. What's your favorite thing about A:TLA (a character, a trope, an episode, etc.)?
Well, I think my favorite trope is actually the willingness of the show's creators to remix so many things from actual history and Asian cultures with such wild, though respectful, abandon. The most obvious example is the fauna (turtleducks! they are awesome!), but you see it everywhere (how awesome is the lion turtle? How awesome?).

Also, I really just unreservedly love Toph. TOPH I LOVE YOU.

And also, 3x17, "The Ember Island Players," is just golden, golden, golden.

3. Are there other quintessentially Jersey musicians you dig as much as Bruce Springsteen (like, dare I ask your feelings about Bon Jovi)?
Hmm, there aren't that many musicians that I think of as being quintessentially New Jersey! Really the only ones I can think of are The Gaslight Anthem, Titus Andronicus, and My Chemical Romance. The Gaslight Anthem really only have a few songs that I like, but I do like "High Lonesome" a lot. As for MCR, I really love their newest album Danger Days, which is ironically the least obviously Jersey-ish of their albums because it's (not) a concept album, but their older, more Jersey-ish music is less of a surefire win for me. But I really like Titus Andronicus a lot (their album The Monitor is really quite good, if you like alternative/indie rock-ish music exploring what the hell is with the States now via the Civil War), though I've been told that they don't perform live well. There's just something about their music--it's not even completely my experience of New Jersey, because just from their music I can tell that they are so, so North Jersey, and honestly the album that probably best reflects my experience of growing up in (the northern portion of) South Jersey is Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, which tells you a lot right there, but even so, Titus Andronicus have managed to tap into the core of New Jersey somehow, not just place but people. And, yeah. It doesn't have to be my experience of home to remind me of home.

I actually enjoy Bon Jovi, but only on a song-by-song basis, and usually only at parties or when driving around in a car singing along with the blasting stereo.

4. What do you want to be doing this time next year?
Well, I'm hoping to either spend the summer in China doing language study, or to get a summer fellowship at the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco. Hopefully either or both of those will actually be possible…the real question is whether I should be trying to be in the Beijing or the Shanghai area. Opinions on that question welcome!

5. What's your favorite outfit for daily wear & for fancy occasions?
Hmm. It depends on where/when I am! Here in Kyoto I have basically fallen back into what I think of as the gaijin uniform, namely Bermuda shorts, a shirt, and sandals or sneakers, though my bucket hat and umbrella-repurposed-as-parasol, and geta (wooden sandals) when I wear them, are adaptations of Japanese fashion that I couldn't live without. On the days when I actually wear a skirt or a sundress I feel much more in step with the people around me, though I just don't have the wardrobe to layer in the summer months, unlike people here.

In California my sartorial skills have also backslid; I tend to wear jeans, a shirt, and sneakers or sandals, with a scarf and a blazer or hoodie as appropriate. Given that I'll be teaching starting this year, though, I'm going to be making the effort to dress a little more professionally, again. This is basically in direct conflict with a) the campus ethos and b) the fact that I really love T-shirts, but clothes are a quick route to being taken more seriously, so there it is. When I make the effort to wear a skirt or a blazer I usually wear heels, though I also sometimes wear heels with jeans, just because I can.

For fancy occasions…I have several dresses that I wear frequently, depending on the weather, and several pairs of higher-heeled shoes that I enjoy wearing for short stretches of time, but one thing about grad school so far is that there's a dearth of fancy occasions in general, and half the time I just throw on my suit for the academic ones. Mind you, I love that suit (three-piece), and it looks good, so that's okay, but I will need another one eventually. I'd like something slightly less classic; we'll see.

I also need to get a good hat, like a straw trilby, before I come back to Japan again.

# One of the little things I love is all the fauna and how they're remixed rather than copied straight from our world. Turtle-seals FTW!

# Star Trek actors doing voices so far: George Takei, Rene Auberjonois (twice!). Did I miss anyone?

( Minor spoilers for 1x19-20 )

# On the other hand, apparently whoever directed the voice actors was incapable of teaching them the proper way to pronounce characters' names. Case in point: everyone's favorite villain, Zhao. Even his own voice actor can't say his name correctly! Yes, this is me in my corner being pedantic, I am getting hung up on a tree, but it niggles.

# However, I am not missing the forest of awesome that is this show for that tree. This show is the best! ♥ ♥ ♥