Public Service Announcement

Princess Robot Bubblegum is one of the funniest anime satires that never actually got made.  If this had actual merchandise, I’d own a shirt.  Check out this sublime piece of caustic hatred against anime for yourself, courtesy of the fake TV programs in The Ballad of Gay Tony:

Yay For Anime

A belated birthday present arrived in the mail today. Appleseed: Ex Machina which is, in the immortal words of Ron Moore, a “re-imagining” of the original Appleseed manga that was created by Masamune Shirow in the 80′s. It’s got a shiny, CG sheen to it, which is really the only way the action of the series could be portrayed without killing animators. Not as thematically complex as what Shirow originally did, but the John Woo production values are abundant, and the plot itself feels about on par with the average videogame.

More Belated Loot

Here are a few other things that trickled in Post-Christmas:

The Wife is a big fan of stupid movies that don’t attempt to bash you over the head with how smart the director is, or how dumb you are. This fits the bill nicely. I have to admit that while I enjoyed it immensely, it once again drove home the “I’m an old man” point of how different comedy is in the 21st century from what I grew up with.

To me the pinnacle of comedy genius is still Monty Python, their movies and other comedies such as This Is Spinal Tap. Superbad is definitely funny, and it made me laugh, but I can’t ever see myself reverently quoting it in the years to come the way I might intone lines from The Quest for the Holy Grail or The Life of Brian. And to be honest, it’s really hard for me to imagine anyone topping the sheer audacity of the Stonehenge performance in This Is Spinal Tap. I’m starting to wonder, especially after watching this, if comedies in the Monty Python vein are still being made and I’m just no aware of them, or whether it’s simply a fact that the time for that kind of comedy has passed, and it’ll be a few generations before we see it arise again.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is one of the better games to come out exclusively for the PS3. Actually, if we’re talking strictly games that are only available on the PS3, then this is probably the best one so far. I joking referred to it as “Dude Raider” when I first saw it, and that’s really not that far off the mark. It’s a combination of Tomb Raider-y exploration, jumping and treasure hunting, combined with the duck/cover/shoot system popularized by Gears of War on the Xbox 360 where enemies can actually aim, and the only way to survive firefights to seek cover and strategically take your shots when opportunity arises. Running and gunning is pretty much guaranteed suicide. I like the game. I enjoy Tomb Raider more play-wise, but as a PS3 exclusive title, this is the one I’ve enjoyed most so far. Well written, gorgeous graphics, tried-but-true game mechanics and some excellent pacing all contribute to make this one a promising start for a new franchise. I remarked over and over while playing that it felt eerily like you were actually IN an Indiana Jones movie, with the orchestra and the manly fisticuffs that took place if you were crazy enough to actually get within hitting distance of an opponent. All in all, it’s an easy recommend to anyone with a PS3 looking to get a good game, and is actually sucking up time previously allotted to Rock Band, though that game is still played almost religiously on a daily basis.

REALLY looking forward to eventually watching this.

Satoshi Kon, the writer and director has quickly established himself as one of the oddest balls in Japanese anime, which is already pretty oddball to begin with. His take on the homeless in Tokyo Godfathers and his commentary on Japanese society in the Paranoia Agent TV series set him apart as a thoughtful, playful director with one of the most bent and random imaginations in the anime industry.

The best way to describe his works are “dream-like” because they have the same flowing, organic and seemingly random surplus of imagery that one normally associates with a dreaming state. This is even more apparent in Paprika which is about a woman with the ability to travel into other people’s mental worlds, a la Jennifer Lopez in The Cell but without the constant nagging suspicion that you’re just watching an extended version of R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion music video.

No Bladerunner or Battlestar Galactica: Razor just yet, but those are just a matter of time.

Middle Of The Week Pleasantness

It’s not like anything particularly good happened today, it just played as most days have since we arrived in Toronto; quiet, relaxed and generally enjoyable. Living in Toronto–especially now, with the tree lined streets actually being lined with green, leafy trees–feels almost like a permanent vacation in some respects. The culture also has something to do with that, I suspect, since walking out into the Annex on any given day shows people sitting at benches in parks, reading books, neighbors sitting on the porch talking to each other, and cafes lined with students and other non-rich people, animatedly having conversations and laughing and smiling a lot. It’s quite a contrast from Singapore were neighbors do not interact, parks are hothouses thanks to the equatorial heat, and cafes are where people go to preen and laugh amongst each other in a cruel, arrogant manner as they wonder what the poor people are doing, and hate or pity anyone that doesn’t have at least a six figure income.

Or it could simply be that the Wife and I spend far too much time at home writing and drawing, or wandering the Annex, which is a haven for student/scholarly life anyway.

I am also, at some point going to owe a huge debt of thanks to Suspect Video for finally allowing me to do the one thing I couldn’t do in Singapore; reasonably keep up with the anime scene. When I first discovered anime, it was the same way most kids did who were born in the 70′s and grew up in the 80′s. I saw a few Japanese animated shows which had been redubbed for English consumption. It started in fits and starts with things like Battle of the Planets and then finally really took off with Robotech, and by then I was hooked, but I wanted REAL anime, not the watered down stuff we were getting as dubbed episodes. In that pre-internet era, that really meant only one thing; watching VHS bootlegs of Japanese anime that were horrible in image quality because they were usually 8th or 9th generation copies with no subtitling.

It was in this way that I first got a taste of “pure anime” in the form of titles like Gunbuster, Fight! Iczer One!, Megazone 23 and, of course, giants like Akira. Eventually, these titles would start being released on VHS, and it was just as I left Canada that I was starting to see North America begin to embrace in the mainstream what I had been forced to hunt down and watch–usually without understanding the plot at all–back in the 80′s.

Now, I’m back home, and what a change has been wrought in the geek landscape. Manga on sale in bookstores, anime freely available in every comic store, video store and available for rent even in places like Blockbuster.

All of which is to say that when I make my weekly pilgrimage down to Bloor & Bathurst to bathe in the geek sunshine that is Suspect Video and The Beguiling next door to each other, I’m a happy, happy little boy. Suspect may look like an obsessive/compulsive’s bedroom, with DVDs stored in the front and their box-art stuck in filecases that you must rifle through–comic book hunting style, yo…–but this merely reinforces the idea that you are in a place where they understand what a sick, deprived schmuck you are and reinforce these unhealthy tendencies.

Which brings me to the point of this post. Now that I have regular access to anime, I am now raving with unabashed love, about these two shows:

Excel Saga

Pure, unadulterated, nonlinear, random, utterly hilarious insanity. ESPECIALLY if you’re familiar with the tropes and conventions of anime, manga and Japanese culture.

The simplest, shortest way to describe this 26 episode television series is, “This is what would have happened if the Monty Python crew had grown up in Japan and been given an animation studio.”

The plot–such as it is–centers on a super-secret conspiracy group named ACROSS, run by a stereotypical tall, dark, mysterious, deep voiced, effeminate anime pretty boy by the name of Ilpalazzo. He spends most of his time in a subterranean lair giving orders and playing girlfriend/dating video games. ACROSS is bent on world domination, but is deciding to start with the one city the underground HQ occupies first. The principle executor of Ilpalazzo’s orders is the girl Excel Saga. Cheerful to psychotic levels and dumb as a sack of hammers, her adoration for Ilpalazzo sends her off on missions which are half designed to bring the world to its knees and half designed to kill her since her chief actually finds her supremely annoying. Her subordinate is a beautiful, anemic girl by the name of Hyatt who has a tendency to fall over dead as a result of the tuberculosis that makes her so pale, ethereal and delicate. They are frequently aided in their hopeless endeavors by the Great Will of the Macrocosm, which presents itself as a collection of spinning galaxies in the Great Void, and has women’s arms attached to this. The Great Will frequently resets the universe to more convenient points, such as just before Excel blows herself up, gets hit by a truck, or brings an entire building tumbling down on herself an Hyatt.

There are so many moments of random insanity in the series that you’re bound to keel over laughing at something. What’s really great about the series is how each episode seeks to subvert certain conventions or cliches, such as the 80′s Jungle Action picture, or the Japanese Dating Simulation genre of games. Not since the lunacy of Project A-Ko in 1986 has an anime production made my stomach hurt so badly from the laughter.

And on a completely different tack, I bring you:

Paranoia Agent

I knew I was in for a weird trip as soon as I heard the name Satoshi Kon, and his involvement with this series. The man is probably one of the single most interesting, exciting and “critically” accessible storytellers in the animation industry of Japan, and not in that warm, friendly Hayao Miyazaki way either. If Miyazaki is the Walt Disney of Japan, Kon is its Frederico Fellini. His films are beautiful to look at, wonderfully composed, full of characterization and frequently swerves into layers of dream and surreality without so much as a wink at the audience. His first feature, Perfect Blue, was an exercise in almost Hitchcock style psychological torture of its main character, but with a dose of Dali thrown in at the most unexpected moments. His next feature, Millennium Actress was a bittersweet reminiscence of love, growing older, and the march of both culture and film. After that came Tokyo Godfathers about a trio of Japanese homeless who find a baby and attempt to raise it. In each case, Satoshi has shown an enormous amount of care in building his characters, a fairly scathing amount of social commentary on the ills of Japanese society, and that dreamlike quality of playing with time, space, reality and imagination.

It was only because of Suspect Video that I finally realized he’d done a 13 episode series, I HAD to watch it.

And so far, I am not disappointed. Kon opens this series with a story about seemingly random attacks on diverse people in Tokyo, sweeping through streets with his inline skates and his bent aluminum baseball bat. But what starts as a case of trying to track down a violent delinquent quickly becomes far more mysterious as the show looks at the social ills of urban life; everything from jealousy at the office to a precocious (and unhealthy) drive to succeed and be popular in elementary school, seemingly cured through an good, swift, whack with a baseball bat to the head.

This is one of the few times where I’ve watched something, regardless of it being a live action or animated work, and simply did not know what was going to happen next. It’s a show that’s almost impossible to predict, and I’m enjoying the ride to no end. This is making me even more excited about the fact that Kon’s next film, Paprika, is actually going to be screening here next month.

It is good to have anime back in my life on a regular basis. Especially since the subtitling is of high caliber and is grammatically correct, as opposed to the bizarrely random choices made by Singapore translation houses, who would regularly substitute what should have been an obvious “God DAMN you!” moment with… “THIS FELLOW!”

Yeah, I know. I don’t get that either…

Oh, and more Guitar Hero news, new info has been released about Guitar Hero III, which will be going on sale in “Fall of 2007″ for all the usual systems. One of the things that raised my eyebrow is that the new developers, Neversoft, will be including Boss Battles. I have no idea how this will work in practice, and my gut tells me that this may simply be a way of making change just to say “We’re in charge, so screw you, Harmonix, we own this franchise now and we’ll piss on it somehow to mark it as our territory.” However, to their credit, the newly released playlist is definitely more mainstream friendly than the increasingly more technical selections of GHII and the upcoming Rocks The 80′s, so I can see a lot of happy Guitar Heroes getting a big smile on their face from these more “radio” selections:

• Paint It Black (by The Rolling Stones)
• Cherub Rock (by Smashing Pumpkins)
• Sabotage (by Beastie Boys)
• The Metal (by Tenacious D)
• My Name is Jonas (by Weezer)
• Knights of Cydonia (by Muse)
• Rock And Roll All Nite (as made famous by Kiss)
• School’s Out (as made famous by Alice Cooper)
• Slow Ride (as made famous by Fog Hat)
• Cult of Personality (by Living Colour)
• Barracuda (as made famous by Heart)

I gotta’ admit… Tenacious D? LIVING COLOR?! FREAKIN’ PAINT IT BLACK?!? YOWZA!

Paralyzed By Choice

In what is quickly turning into our weekly ritual, we once descended on Bloor Street to pay a visit to our favorite shops and interact with the people that run the stores. This is becoming immensely satisfying as we’re starting to get recognized as “that nice artsy couple” and are being treated like well-liked regulars. There’s just something innately charming about getting to the cheese shop and realizing forlornly that we’ve missed their operating hours, only to have the nice old Slavic guy that runs the place come out, waving at us and saying “For you… I cannot stay closed. Come, come!”

Today was the also the day that I finally did the deed and went on down to Suspect Video to get my membership, where I was immediately overwhelmed with how many things there were I really, really wanted to see. In the end, my indecision ran waaaaay over time and so I settled on these, a couple of first volume DVDs to get my feet wet:

Samurai Champloo is one of those series that most anime fans keep saying, “Dude, you HAVE to watch this!” and so, finally and at long last, I am. If only to tell these people to shut the hell up. If I like it, I’ll add it onto the list of “things I like which I shall collect when/if money permits.” The other thing, and far less “mainstream” is Gilgamesh, which is supposed to be dark, grim, obscure and frequently baffling. Most of the “pedestrian” anime fans that stick to the action titles will probably be completely alienated by the title. But since I was able to watch the Evangelion series and actually LIKE the ending (Not mention actually enjoying the Tangential-Fest that was Serial Experiments Lain) there’s a chance I may actually be able to appreciate this series, so we shall see.

There was another odd moment during the visit to Suspect Video. I was using my passport as one of my forms of ID, and the girl at the counter (henceforth known as the Weekend Girl, since that seems to be her shift) asked me if what I had was a Singapore passport.

I said, “Uh… noooo… It’s Canadian.” But, already suspecting where this was going, I asked her, “Are you Singaporean?”

And of course, she was. And like most Singaporeans I know who travel a lot, she had completely annihilated her Singapore accent in favor of whatever country she happened to be in. This, to me, is a completely amazing skill. Ten years in Singapore and my Canadian accent was as potent on the day I left as it was when I arrived. And I failed utterly to grasp the bizarre rhythm and cadence of the Singapore speech pattern. Singaporeans, on the other hand, can take an accent spoken over an entire lifetime, and bury it in a matter of weeks.

I introduced the Wife and said, “Well, she’s Singaporean…”

To which the Weekend Girl smiled and said, her local accent slipping up ever-so-slightly “Wow, what a coincidence!”

And then they smiled at each other and there seemed to be an eye-contact moment where they non-verbally agreed “We shall not speak of that hell hole from which we came.”

It turns out that Weekend Girl is a literature student. I suspect she gets a huge kick from working at a store where she’s surrounded by movies that her home country would find either politically, violently or erotically objectionable. Not mention all the tentacle-ridden hentai in the joint. However, being a student, that means that she has no legal way to stay in the country, though that is something she’d very much like to do.

“Your parents are going to freak when they find you don’t want to go home,” I said to her.

She sighed and nodded. “Tell me about it…”

I hope it goes well for her. And if I don’t see her in a few months, I’ll know exactly where she is; 90 miles away from the equator, sweating, surrounded by people who’s only joy in life is driving a Mercedes and trying to figure out how to get back to a Real Country where people may be colder, but also know there’s more to life than buying a new cellular phone or saying that you shopped in the newest mall.

Back Off The Wire

Things continue to slowly achieve a sense of normalcy. Even though my PC is still steaming its way here across the Pacific (I’m assuming either a train or truck will take it and the rest of our stuff on the final leg across Canada) at least this laptop has finally been weaned off them old fashioned cables and has returned to a wireless state thanks to the new wireless network that’s been established in the house. There is also a new game to be played in the form of Rogue Galaxy, an anime/game version of Treasure Planet, developed by Level-5, the same folks that brought me last year’s surprisingly good and incredibly charming Dragon Quest VIII so I have high expectations for this one. I picked it up at a Best Buy (the first time I’d ever set foot in one since they hadn’t established a toe-hold in Edmonton when I left 10 years ago) and the store, like many game stores I’ve seen come across, had the obligatory Playstation 2 set up, with Guitar Hero 2 running. This is how I’ve been maintaining my addiction for the past few weeks; drooling in excitement as I hear the painful “plinks” of someone screwing up a song, and patiently waiting in line to try out a few songs. One thing I’ve noticed in the last couple weeks; there are very few people that can actually play on Expert level. That caught me by complete surprise as I assumed the game was a massive hit and there would be GH Freaks running willy nilly across the Greater Toronto Area, but the sad fact is, 95% of the people that play Guitar Hero 2 in public aren’t that familiar with the game. I watched in amazement as people crashed out of songs on Medium, and even though I’m sorely lacking–having been denied my daily practice–just the fact that I could play Sweet Child O’ Mine on Expert has–at least on one occasion–garnered enough notice that the staff actually pumped up the volume on the speakers once they realized they had “Real Guitar Hero Player” on the premesis. It’s a weird thing when a bunch of white people stand around and say “Dude, you’re awesome,” when that’s just about the furthest thing from the truth.

Also, they automatically assume I can play the guitar for real. Bleah.

Not much has actually been going on the last few days. A filing cabinet of sorts (a much wider one, used to store really big pieces of paper) was assembled, in addition to an office chair and some other odds and ends for the Wife’s workspace. We’ve also been hanging out some with the Old Friend which is always a pleasure and I’m looking forward to tomorrow when another old friend, Francis, henceforth known as the Math Genius, will actually drive up from his home in Waterloo to hang out with me since I haven’t seen him since 1998, and he’s never met the Wife.

However, that hasn’t stopped the geek train from chugging along. Thanks to the Old Friend, I was tipped off to a double whammy of geek goodness right in our district (that being the Annex) and my God was I ever happy to find ‘em. I was already pretty pleased with the revelation that was the Silver Snail on Queen Street West, a toy n’ comic store that charged American prices on all DC and Marvel titles, so that’s probably going to be my new designated pick up zone when it comes to getting my trade paperbacks.

However, right here in the Annex are two utterly amazing shops, right next door to each other in perfect complement. The first is called Suspect Video, and it has all those rare, foreign or B-Grade movies you hear about, but are never able to find in big retail chains like HMV. To my amazement, they even had a pretty comprehensive hentai section available for rental. It doesn’t look like they actually sell movies, but heck, the mere fact that they actually had Tromeo & Juliet available for viewing was enough to make me looking up in gratitude at the sky.

The other store, right beside it, is a comic joint called Beguiling.

My God, I’m happy.

The first floor has nothing but Independent works in it. Whether its smaller publishers like Oni, Slave Labor Graphics or Ninja Frog, it’s in there. And the guy at the counter, in true Comic Book Guy fashion, knows his shit. But then you go up to the second floor and that’s where you find monthly issues, manga, and–and here I nearly fainted–the most comprehensive collection of anime I’ve ever seen. FOR SALE. And none of this cheap, Singapore, badly sub-titled Odex crap riddled with grammar errors and people swearing by screaming, “THIS FELLOW!” this is the good stuff from Manga Video and ADV. For the last four years, the Wife has been clamouring for the region 1 version of a bizarre, surreal, existentialist, science-fiction series called Serial Experiments Lain. She’s also been hankering to watch Captain Harlock and another potentially interesting series called Gilgamesh. I’m still quietly collecting a series myself called Elfen Lied, and then there’s the very promising new series known as Ergo Proxy, that’s only availabe in Singapore as an illegal download, or, if you’re lucky, a poorly packaged, horribly mastered Video Compact Disc collection. They were all staring me in the face, with real packaging and a translating staff who claimed to be fluent in English and actually proved it by having error free subtitles.

Standing there, in that building, knowing that a few feet north was a collection of Alternative Videos, and directly below was a collection of fabulous Indie comic work, and all around me was anime up the wazoo, I suddenly found myself thinking about how Singapore constantly refers to itself as World Class and insists that if you can’t find it there, it doesn’t exist, since it’s one of the busiest ports in the world, and I nearly doubled over laughing.

It is good to be home.

Drills, Del Toro & Dinner

The Wife is currently harboring the opinion that Singapore, now realizing we are about to escape its grasp, is now doing everything in its power to make our final days as annoying as possible.

Case in point, waking up at 10 am on Saturday morning to the sound of drills and hammers tearing out chunks of wall of the apartment below you.

The odd thing about this is the Wife actually heard the noise from this sudden renovation yesterday and, duly alarmed about it, went down and asked the superviser of the fun whether this would continue over the weekend and was told, absolutely, positively in no uncertain terms, NO, there would be no construction over the weekened. But then you have to remember that in Singapore there is a tendency to simply tell people whatever they want to hear, rather than get into a conflict about it, so everyone agrees with everyone else verbally, but then continues to actually screw each other over in action and fact. This resulted in a hasty coffee and then retreat into town for the afternoon. As you may have already guessed, the afternoon was spent catching an evening sneak preview of Pan’s Labyrinth. Of course, for people in North America, this is hardly a sneak preview since the movie’s been out since December, but I’m still currently living on an island where V For Vendetta was heavily censored to keep it from giving anyone the wrong idea about government, remember that.

Still, after watching it, I liked it a lot. I didn’t love it, though I can completely see why it has garnered so much critical praise. There’s a little something in the film for everyone, and the script is very tight, the story is well told, the parallel narratives nicely balanced, and the performances are universally excellent all around. The imagery (particularly the fantasy elements) were gorgeously composed, lit and shot, and there were some very significant themes, both politically and socially. It’s an extremelly well put together movie, and I cannot for the life of me understand why I don’t unabashedly love it, despite the fact that I have nothing but good things to say about it. I see many parallels here between what Del Toro did in The Devil’s Backbone, his other movie that takes place in the Spanish Civil War era that also centers around children, paranormal events and military instability running concurrent with the occult plot. This film however, was a much more elegant and mature attempt and what he had done in the other movie, and I generally prefer it more, though I like both.

In a weird sort of way, I’m beginning to think that the way Del Toro manages to weave the supernatural, macabre and humanistic story elements all into one movie might actually make him a good contender to do a worthy Death and/or Morpheus/Sandman movie. His visual sensibility is very poetic and I could see Dave McKeans visuals sliding quite nicely into Del Toro’s methodology.

And finally, there was a nearby eatery which had recently opened, and the Wife and I have been dutifully ignoring it until tonight. It’s a “steamboat” restaurant, which, if you’re not Chinese, means that every table has a small gas stove sitting on it. When you sit down to eat, they give you a big pot of chicken stock and turn on the stove so that the chicken stock can simmer. You order assorted meats and vegetables and then toss them in when the stock approaches boiling and thus, just keep adding to the soup and heaping more into your bowl as you see fit. Simple, filling and decent tasting. Also likely the first and last time we will ever eat this place.

And now, after all this pedestrian blogging, I’m going to be even more boring and scamper off to watch My Neighbor Totoro again. It’s been years…

Having Finally Watched Appleseed In English

I can now truthfully say that it was pretty okay. The visuals were impressive (But then I got that the first time ’round) though the story itself was nothing on the scale of complexity of the original Shirow manga. Still, the kind of convoluted tech and existential questions Shirow likes to play with seem better suited to more “acclaimed” efforts like Ghost In The Shell rather than balls-to-wall mecha action as Appleseed was most definitely aiming for.

Also, it’s nice to hear the Boom Boom Satellites are still around.

My New Find

I popped this into the DVD player last night and was completely, utterly blown away. I feel incredibly bad now, because I know there’s a ton of great anime floating around out there that I haven’t watched, but THIS… my God, this is definitely one of the harsher and weirder ones out there, I’m sure.

It’s called Elfen Lied, though that last word is pronounced “leed”.

The series has been around for a while now, but of course, I’m hopelessly out of the loop on these things, because I’m not plugged into that anime livewire like I used to be in university, and anime has gotten a lot bigger and more complex than the days of yore that I remember when we would all quiver over a bad VHS recording of an episode of Zeta Gundam that had been recorded straight off Japanese TV, no subtitles, and made into a million buzillion copies, of which we got episodes 12 and 26, as 45th generation dub. These days you can you just peruse a copy of Newtype USA and walk into a DVD store and the choices, as well as the pseudo-wannabe-new-American Otaku culture that has sprung up in its wake, are a little overwhelming.

Anyway, all that aside the series itself concerns a psychic mutant by the name of Lucy. Or at least it starts out that way. The opening sets the tone for the rest of the series, that is dark and brutal at times and sweet and adorable, randomly and unpredictably taking turns from one into the other. Lucy can rend human beings to shreds simply by thinking about it, and is in confinement at some high tech research facility, and the first episode is about her break out. The level of violence is staggering and ends with Lucy making her way outside only take narrowly avoid death when a sniper bullet grazes her and instead of killing her, gives her amnesia to the point where she is now effectively a tabula rasa, a sweet, wide-eyed girl who can only say “Nyu” and doesn’t even know how to eat, use the bathroom or put on clothes. She is eventually discovered by some college students who take her in, and the government begins its intensive search. Because all she can say is “Nyu” that is the name given to the sweet, innocent, tabula rasa version of Lucy unaware of its powerful homocidal psychic abilities. Giving away the rest would be a disservice, but I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything, let alone a cartoon, balance such a seemingly psychotic combination of domestic, soap operatic emotions with an unimaginable level of brutality. I actually flinched at certain sequences in the anime not simply because there was blood or severed limbs but because of the deliberate, sadistic intent behind the suffering.

But it’s that weird balance Elfen Lied has struck that has me most impressed. The show perfectly manages to mimic the psychotic break of Lucy/Nyu’s personality in terms of tone and mood. It seems like the mundane, every day concerns of the two college students, Khota and his female cousin (who has a thing for him) Yuka are in stark contrast to the epic psychic warfare and sadistic, nihilistic underpinnings of Lucy and her pursuers. These two narrative elements shouldn’t be in the same story, working together like this, and yet they do. I’m blown away by that, and keep thinking there’s something I can learn here for my own writing if I just sit down and absorb it enough.

Suffice to say if you’ve got a strong stomach for both melodrama and ultra-violence, then this series has got a lot to offer. It’s been a long time since an anime story really punched me in the face like this and left an impression, and it’s because of the emotion that they’ve successfully worked into the tale, rather than an excess of character or mecha design that sells it.

Good Old Fashioned New(ish) Anime

I’m watching this again. In short spurts, a few episodes at a time, in between when I should be writing or playing other things, but for some reason, I just felt compelled to sit down and give this another watch.

I’m talking about Mobile Suit Gundam Seed.

It all gets a bit confusing unless you were following the intricacies of anime from its relatively simpler beginnings in the late 70′s before it took off into the much bigger cult status of the 80′s and the more mainstream acceptance it enjoys today, but it all started with the original Mobile Suit Gundam back in 1979. That was the grand daddy of all giant robot anime, or at least, the grand daddy of giant robot anime in which said giant robots were actually just vehicles of war, like tanks, or planes, as opposed to giant, sentient, mechanized samurai that fought for honor. It was a landmark in Japanese anime in that it attempted to do a “realistic” story about space and giant robots, trying to come up with rationales to explain everything. For example, the giant robot itself was justified by the invention of something called a Minovski Particle. In the context of the series, this was a special kind of particle that scrambled electromagnetic waves like radar, and thus rendered long distance, guided “smart weapons” like nuclear missiles useless. Suddenly combat went back to the WWII days where everything was either line of sight, or done by calculation. As a result, the Mobile Suit, which started its life originally as a general, all purpose construction/loader vehicle for space colonies, was weaponized.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed is sort of a remake of the original 1979 series in that many of the same themes are touched upon. There is a rebellion fomenting amongst the space colonies that have long been abused by Earth. There is an evolutionary leap as a new type of human has been slowly appearing, cause panic and outrage in the old type or “Naturals”. And of course, there is angst, self doubt, sacrifice, angst and more angst.

And, lest I forget, there are huge freakin’ robots attacking each other with laser swords while shooting around at mach 12.

Now if that ain’t cool, I dunno what it is…