a celebration of science fiction, anime, and geek culture
Anime on My Mind looks at the future of anime four years from now and finds:
June 25, 2010
Ghibli Announces Next Project: “Fresh off Ghibli’s highly successful yet highly controversial Ender’s Game anime movie adaptation last year, Ghibli reveals that their next major project is Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.”
oh, please! oh please please please!
Going to watch Princess Mononoke today. Will update this post with immediate post-viewing reactions later this afternoon… if anyone has any non-spoiler suggestions for things to watch for, drop me a comment below!
I am probably not going to rent Grave of the Fireflies again, but two comments to my recent post about depressing anime have definitely given some much-needed context to the film. Keep in mind that it’s been about five years since I watched it so I really don’t remember much of the details described below. Continue reading “Fireflies, revisited”
I just finished watching Howl’s Moving Castle. The movie is based on the book by Diana Wynne Jones which I have not read but which I’ve seen enough praise for that I might have to go and order, especially since the movie left me feeling like a potentially great storytelling opportunity was squandered. Or, as Don says, “propaganda is the enemy of art.”
As Shamus already noted, it hits all of the Miyazaki themes, but as Don notes it is probably more due to Miyazaki taking liberties with the source material than any synchrony between Miyazaki and Wynne Jones. Miyazaki admits to this in a rare interview with Newsweek Magazine:
GORDON – Were you surprised “Spirited” won an Oscar?
MIYAZAKI – Actually, your country had just started the war against Iraq, and I had a great deal of rage about that. So I felt some hesitation about the award. In fact, I had just started to make “Howl’s Moving Castle,” so the film is profoundly affected by the war in Iraq.
As the interview makes clear, Miyazaki is (surprisingly, given his deep insight and reverence for children) a pessimist at heart about human society. I have my own issues with the Iraq war but the portrayal of the military in this film is simply a cartoon, which is I think rather ironic given that it’s anime.
Still, rather than just gripe about it at the meta level, I will make an attempt at discussion of the film. Read on… Continue reading “Howl”
Eaisly the most depressing annime I ever watched was Grave of the Fireflies. It was recommended by someone whose taste I knew ran ddarker than mine, but I figured, hey it would be artsy, whynot? It certainly gets high marks from reviewers, but in my opinion from reading them there’s a Seinfeld/English Patient dynamic at work there. I mean, did they watch the same movie I did? I am particularly bitter given that that single title pretty much sabotaged the enjoyment of the entire genre of anime for my wife, who points to it (and the perpetual presence of anime orphans in general) as proof that anime is for emotional masochists.
Now – while certainly not in Fireflies’ league – several otaku comment that Binchou-tan is a fairly morose series. Given that it is kid-oriented, it certainly wasn’t going to end on a down-note, as Don observed with relief. Still, I just don’t consider loneliness and angst to have entertainment value. Whether or not the series is worth it for us would be how well it meets my Guidelines for Child-Friendly Anime or not. It’s kind of a moot point given that there is no dubbed Region 1 for Binchou-tan anyway, only fansubs.
One might argue that Haibane Renmei was a depressing series – after all, once you gget past disc 6 it seems like Rakka has a tearful breakdown every five minutes. And the introspective look of Reki is pretty well captured by my blog header – just wait until I post the lyrics to some of the songs from the Hanenone CD. But HR was joyous for all its angst. There’s an elation you feel at the end that makes it all fit together just right.
Still, there must be a market for all that angst. I bet Marvin would love it. What do you think, Marvin-tan?
UPDATE: Some folks at the Old Home Forum take exception to our attitude towards Fireflies, Miyazaki, and even Azumanga Daioh. I have often been accused of “not getting it” when I failed to express the proper reverence for certain pieces of art by those with more knowledge than I about what constitutes “good” art. I suspect that this is much the same. Ultimately whether art makes a connection to someone or not is an intensely personal affair, and I don’t think that refusal to treat art critically is the less sophisticated approach.
Kayle, who is a member of the fansub group that was subbing Kamichu before it was released to the US market, sent along these links to Kamichu resources on YouTube:
* Fan video showing real-life locations corresponding to the anime
* Guide to episode 1
* Guide to episode 2
* Guide to episode 3
Kayle notes that the text is readable, but not wonderfully so. Also, Pixy Misa also has some Kamichu content in his video archives:
* Kamichu OP (part 1)
* Kamichu OP (part 2)
* Kamichu end credits
The basic requirements for kid-friendly anime are pretty commonsensical:
1. No fan service.
This doesn’t mean that the characters have to be in burkas all the time, but it does require a sense of innocence. For example, in Sugar: Snow Fairy we do routinely see characters in the bath, and in Haibane Renmei we see the girls in various states of undress, but the context of these scenes is so totally inoocent that you’d have to be a real kimura to find any “service” in them. From Steven’s description, it seems that the fan service in World of Narue would not be too objectionable, but I’d have to review some examples of the more egregious examples to get a sense for whether it would be suitable or not.
2. Young characters.
But not too young; ideally the main character should be a few years older minimum than the child who will be watching, and if possible the same gender. The reason is simple – kids emulate older kids, and boss around younger ones. A child won’t relate to characters that are too young, and won’t identify a character that is too old as a peer.
For my daughter, who just turned four, characters in the age range of 5-11 are pretty much ideal. It is worth noting that when she first saw S:SF, she was three and a half, and found the character of Cannon pretty uninteresting. However she absolutely idolized Yume from Someday’s Dreamers.
For little girls especially, the entire genre of mahou shoujo (magical girl) is pretty much a guaranteed hit (as long as it is in compliance with the other guidelines, of course).
and finally, most importantly,
3a. A moral lesson or example of personal growth,
and/or
3b. A sense of wonder.
The first option is self-explanatory – essentially the same driving force (other than merchandising) underlying all children’s programming. Ultimately any time spent in front of television is time that is not spent outdoors, on the internet, at school, or with family. Therefore, that TV time has to maintain a minimum level of educational value. In anime, however, even in the simplest children-oriented anime that I have seen thus far, the characters have a depth that is totally absent in regular child’s fare like PBS Kids or Disney Playhouse – there’s a maturity that isn’t neccessarily adult. The potential to educate a child by example, and role model, is vast – and after parental example it is unfortunately what kids see on television that shapes their values. Even the best of parents need to rely on the TV to help out once in a while; the TV can never replace a parent but it can relieve a parent from time to time.
The second option however is more vague. By sense of wonder, I mean an inspiration for creativity, a culturing of the innate curiosity that children have and which adults often must struggle to rediscover. The classic example in my mind of this is My Neighbor Totoro, which is perhaps the most Ghibli of the Ghibli films. There really isn’t a lot of plot, and the story also seems to end abrupt;y, but the plot isn’t really the point. It’s about the intersection of the real world and the fantasy world, and how children are uniquely positioned at that nexus. Seeing the universe through a child’s eyes is a liberating experience – your own perceptions melt away and you see things again, as if new. And you see new things as well. As far as anime is a form of art, this is the ideal to which it must strive, especially if the target audience is a child.
Recommendations and lists below the fold… Continue reading “guidelines for kid-friendly anime”
Kayle commented that Honey and Clover was the best anime title of 2005. The reviews at Anime Source are quite glowing. Has anyone else seen this title or heard of it? Is it worthy of adding to the kid-friendly list?
Don just received the first volume of Kamichu and mentions that the subtitling done by Geneon is poor compared to the fansubs. Also it seems that the fansubs come with a lot of “liner notes” about Shinto that help explain the series, which the official disc lacks.
My main interest is really the dub, since my daughter can’t read yet. Don hasn’t yet evaluated the dub quality, and I look forward to his comments. I’ve pretty much decided that this series will be worth buying, seeing how it meets my kid-friendly requirements. Still, I want to see what Don says before I take the final plunge.
Don recently had a list of kid-friendly anime titles, to which I added Someday’s Dreamers because of the appeal that the “magical girl” genre has for my four-year old. Along those same lines comes this recommendation from AnimeAICN: Kamichu, Little Deity.
Kamichu is basically a story about a schoolgirl who wakes up one day to find she’s been given godlike power overnight. God is typically referred to as Kami-san (with the -san suffix indicating great reverence), but here -chu (or -chan) is a endearment suffix, so the implication is of a cute little god. The plot is apparently heavily drawn from Shinto and animism philosophy, with modernistic twists:
The anime offers some interesting and amusing views of Animism. Except for Yurie and a young shrine maiden, the other characters can’t see the active spirit world around them in which a blink or change in perspective reveals a busy ecosystem of rock spirits, water spirits and the like. The complexity of this world is even stranger when Yurie steps into the full spirit world and sees sights like the gods of obsolete disc media formats sitting around kvetching.
There’s something about the idea of gods for disc formats that appeals to my inner geek. The review at AnimeAICN makes it clear that Kamichu is a heavily culturally-specific work, and was not initially designed with kids in mind, but rather for disillusioned adults to help them rediscover joy and optimism. However the end result looks to be eminently kid-friendly, so I think it will be worth the try. The release date is June and will be available on Amazon. Volume 2 will be out in August.