It's a magical world

I went to see this with a bunch of people the weekend it came out in wide release, and the general consensus among our group was that it was beautiful but unsatisfying. In the weeks since I have spent a lot of time arguing with people about it. My conversation with rushthatspeaks in this review of the movie, however, is making me reconsider my perspective and my opinions, and think that I should see it again.

One exceedingly minor quibble: since I went to the trouble of learning classical Japanese, I can tell you that "-nu" is a perfective ending in modern Japanese, and therefore a more accurate translation would be 'The Wind Has Arisen.' /pedantry

Pacific Rim. Dir. Guillermo del Toro. 2013.

I really liked this movie! I was expecting to find it enjoyable, but I was surprised at how much I genuinely liked it! I in fact am planning to go see it again! It's not perfect by any means, but I really liked it. If this is an example of the animeticization of Hollywood, then I say, bring it on. If you like anime, or action movies, or Neon Genesis Evangelion, you should see this movie.

( Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, and a bunch of white guys are cancelling the apocalypse )

Anyway. It was great! Go see it.

Well, I'm back. California is beautiful, for the record, and despite some baggage folderol secondary to SEA being one of the most inefficient airports I have ever encountered (and that's saying something), my travel was pretty good. I even saved the $50 baggage fee Alaska was supposed to charge me, which I suppose is a virtue of experience. And learned paranoia.

So Parallels 2011! I wrote Turning and Turning, a Toki wo Kakeru Shoujo fic for person. 2800 words, Makoto/Chiaki/Kousuke.

And on that note…

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Toki wo Kakeru Shôjo | The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. Dir. Hosoda Mamoru, 2006.

In a strange, tangential way, this movie reminds me a lot of Utena--no, not for the plot, but for certain plot elements and the way that damn piano music accentuates absolutely everything, because if I learned one thing from Utena--well, I learned a lot of things from Utena, but one of them was that genteel piano music is totally appropriate for totally creepy things, and this movie is, for most of the way through, a horror story.

To back up, this is Hosoda Mamoru's first movie, adopted from a 1967 novel by Tsutsui Yasutaka. Hosoda's Summer Wars remains one of the best anime movies I've seen in the past few years, and Toki wo Kakeru Shôjo is also quite good. I'm not sure which is the stronger movie; I like Summer Wars better in all honesty, but that's entirely subjective.

( Mild spoilers )

It says a lot that, living in Japan, I look at that damn bag of peaches Makoto carries around and think, "Damn, that's like ¥3000 or ¥4000 worth of fruit!"

I think my contention that the movie has horror elements is borne out by the AMVs that have been made from it. In particular, Maniaki's award-winning Paranoia Drift is very subtly creepy (and also excellent). DL and streaming at the link.

Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.

Hagane no renkinjutsushi: Mirosu no seinaru hoshi | Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos. Dir. Murata Kasuya, 2011.

I was, to be quite frank, not expecting very much of of this movie. The last FMA movie, Conqueror of Shangri-La, was a solid B effort with an absolutely infuriating denouement. This movie, however, is set in the midst of the manga storyline (the booklet we were handed when we entered the theater is volume 11.5 of the series) and was pretty kick-ass from beginning to end. It doesn't quite measure up to Arakawa's own storylines, of course, but I was satisfied with the movie all the same. Also, there are werewolves.

( Yet another train trip )
All this being said, I still prefer the voice cast of the first anime, particularly for Roy. *ducks rocks and cabbages* I also found it a little odd that he's the one who wound up dispensing the movie's moral lesson, though I suppose he got that role at the end of the first anime too, I can live with it.

Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo | Children Who Follow Lost Voices from Deep Below. Dir. Shinkai Makoto, 2011.

This is an awesome, beautiful, sad and moving anime. You will want to see it when you can, and I really enjoyed it a lot. On one level, it's its own strong story, and on the other it's an obvious remake of Castle in the Sky by way of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

To give what I can of the plot without spoilers: in a rural Japan that could as well be 1960 as 1990 or any time in between, the middle-schooler Asuna lives mostly alone, her father having died and her mother working long and late to support the two of them at a hospital on the other side of town. Asuna spends her time high up in the mountains that shelter her town's valley, tuning in a mysterious music on her home-made radio. When she meets a mysterious boy and strange monsters start popping up around her town, however, she finds herself undertaking a journey in the company of the new teacher at her school, who has secrets of his own.

( To see the stars )

So, yes. Rereading my posts on Castle in the Sky and a failed remake of it, Steamboy, I think that another area where Hoshi wo Ou Kodomo (literally "Children Who Follow the Stars", because the underworld sky has no stars) succeeds and goes one better than its source is Asuna again; she takes the initiative and she's always the protagonist in this story, whose bravery and courage impress the people around her and who is ultimately endangered as much by her compassion as by anything else and whose grief is always present with her even as she learns to bear up under it. There's no question of her being interpretable as passive, as Sheeta was, and she's anything but dispassionate, like Scarlett O'Hara was in Steamboy. I ♥ Asuna, seriously.

LaMarre, Thomas. The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

I'm going to pound this out while I wait for my dad to get home so we can go to the shore. Landmark book of animanga scholarship in half an hour or less: go!

Disclaimer: I am personally acquainted with Tom Lamarre; he wrote one of my reccomendation letters for my graduate school applications.

Tom Lamarre's overarching concern in The Anime Machine is polemical; as I've discussed at greater length before, he has a bone to pick with the vast majority of (English-language) anime and manga scholarship heretofore, namely that people tend to focus on the minutiae of narratives over technical means and that in these narratives, moreover, people go looking for and thus find some sort of amodern, tautological Other "(traditional) Japanese culture" or whatever. In defiance of this tendency, Lamarre insists on reading anime as what it is, a carefully calculated global entertainment phenomenon, and on looking not at what anime talks about but how it talks, how it thinks, what it does.

( How anime thinks technology )

First, via corneredangel, Mia Lewis on the use of ateji (kanji/okurigana divergence) in manga by CLAMP. Fascinating paper looks fascinating.

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Tenkuu no shiro Laputa | Castle in the Sky. Dir. Miyazaki Hayao. Studio Ghibli, 1986.

I've forgotten how epic and awesome this movie is. It's really beautiful too, in a way that's somewhat ineffable.

( Tou-san ga nokoshita atsui omoi )

Hoshi no koe | Voices of a Distant Star. Dir. Shinkai Makoto, 2002.

It's fitting that the first line of the first anime done in the sekai-kei style questions in its very first words what world (sekai) actually means.

I love Makoto Shinkai's skyscapes; they outshine even his landscapes, which are breathtakingly beautiful. I read a paper about Shinkai's anime, I think it was in Mechademia vol. 1, that argued that Shinkai's anime, and the anime of the sekai-kei school, consistently present worlds (plural very much intended) in which characters are separate but connected--they transcend distance, first by technology and then simply by affect, which persists across distance and time even after the characters themselves have lost all actual connection. It's like that line in the Ashberry poem: "We are together at last,/but far apart." 

I think Hoshi no koe encapsulates a lot of Shinkai's themes handily; in some ways the chronological gap Mikako and Noboru endure is just a literalization of the process of growing apart as part of growing up that characters in his other anime like Kumo no mukou, yakusoku no basho and 5cm per second experience (and in space travel time literally becomes distance; they are the same). And despite the fact that Shinkai's anime are completely digital I really do think that his anime, and the sekai-kei school in general, really are the apotheosis of Tom Lamarre's anime-as-layers theory: the entire anime is a process of moving through and across layers: in the first sequence Mikako and Noboru, on his bike (girl on the back of the boy's bike! hello Ghibli films!) look up through the sky to space beyond it, through all of which layers Mikako begins to move, while the train in the foreground separates Noboru from his terrestrial destination (much the same way as rain, snow, cherry blossom petals separate the characters from the viewer). It's no accident that Lamarre in The Anime Machine focuses almost exclusively on Castle in the Sky, and that the same movie is Shinkai's favorite anime.

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Tonari no Yamada-kun | My Neighbors the Yamadas. Dir. Takahata Isao: Studio Ghibli, 1999.

So it turns out that there was one other minor Ghibli film I hadn't seen, because I didn't even realize it existed. Tonari no Yamada-kun is a meandering, slice-of-life drama about a typical Japanese family's quotidian trials and tribulations. The most notable thing about it is the animation style, which is extremely flattened and cartoon-like. I find it notable that Miyazaki Hayao talks about making "manga movies" but that this is the Ghibli film that comes closest to looking like a comic strip (I liked the permanently unimpressed dog particularly). The movie is charming, and also really funny; I was laughing out loud at multiple points, which is something that rarely happens to me with anime. Definitely worth a watch, particularly for people interested in conversational Japanese.

I think I just need to accept that I won't be able to read everything I want to read for Wiscon before Wiscon. But hope springs eternal.

House of Five Leaves 1 - 3
Even if I hadn't looked at the website I could have told you that this is based on an Ikki manga, based simply on a) the slow pace and b) the extraterrestrial character design. Based solely on the scene in the second episode where Akitsu follows Yaichi to the shitamachi and then walks into a pole thinking about him, I predict many Yaichi/Akitsu doujinshi at Comiket this summer (also because Yaichi is hot, and says he finds Akitsu interesting. I will take his word for it). I like the characters, though. And they're making quite a lot of money on these kidnappings, even if this is middle Edo when the currency's metal content started dropping. Not surprisingly, I think Yaichi is my favorite. Also, the subtitling is pretty good. Also, look at Edo with its canals and moats and bridges! I never realized how thoroughly such things have been eradicated from contemporary Japanese cities until I went to one (Yanagawa) that has retained them. Also, looks like Seinoshin is making some wrong assumptions. We'll see.

Darker Than BLACK: Ryuusei no Gemini 12
The end! I liked it, though as usual I value the ending just as much for what it suggests about what happens after as for what it actually shows happening. I was glad about what happened to Hei, and Misaki's boss turned unexpectedly awesome at the end (WTF happened to him? holy crap!), as did Madam Oreille and her flying car, FTW. I was less pleased about Suou and July, though I don't want to privilege the copy over the original; Hei doesn't, and I think we ought to follow his lead. The Americans occupying Tokyo injected an interesting (and pointed) political note, too. I'll have to rewatch with subs at some point.