Anime and Japan – Page 14

Notes, musical and otherwise

There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.

Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”

Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.

***

No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.

***

Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.

From the chariot boudoir

If you can’t find the video you want on YouTube, look elsewhere. (This is the complete recording of the song, not just the excerpt included in the eighth episode of Girls und Panzer (and censored on Crunchyroll). The missing section of the anime begins around 1:50.) ((Though the censored section is back on Youtube for now.))

So we’ve had girls with guns, girls as guns (or is that guns as girls?), girls with mecha, girls as combat aircraft, and now with girls with tanks. ((It’s actually not that new. See Those Who Hunt Elves — on second thought, don’t. It’s lousy; not even Kotono Mitsuishi could redeem it.)) It’s probably all just pandering to otaku, but perhaps there is something more sinister going on. If anime reflects reality, Japanese young men generally are either hapless dweebs or sparkly bishies and crossdressers. If you want to form an army, they’d be useless. You’d be better off drafting young women, who in Japan have talent for using the tools of war, and often magic, too. Girls und Panzer may be just the latest in a series of entertainments designed to accustom the Japanese to the idea of women as warriors.

At least one Chinese writer sees “evil intent militarism” in Girls und Panzer, though it’s difficult to follow the argument as interpreted by Giggle Translate. ((Giggle Translate insisted that the original language of the linked page was Irish.))

Chicken emergency

Miscellaneous notes:

• I’m mostly taking pictures these days in my available time. Wichita, perhaps the least interesting place visually in North America — it’s not even ugly — is as photogenic as it ever gets right now. Although it’s already summer (spring lasted most of one morning last week), temperatures haven’t yet hit 100°, and I can ride around town without risking heatstroke.

• My route home from work yesterday was more circuitous than usual, with one intersection closed off by the police. I missed the excitement, but that may be just as well.

• I watched several more episodes of some current series but ended up dropping them all. I probably will eventually watch the rest of Suisei no Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet. The first three episodes showed more thought than any of the other shows I sampled, and the art looked good, too. The Brickmuppet and Steven both praise what they’ve seen so far. Valvrave the Liberator features not just mecha, but vampires, too (and in recent episodes, I gather, boys and girls trading bodies). It might be of interest to Wonderduck when he’s recovered from the horrors of Vividred, but I’ve had enough.

Instead, I’ve been rewatching some older favorites, Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita, Mouretsu Pirates (for the third time) and Shingu (I’ve lost count).

• You can download the materials to make a paper model of a tank at the Girls und Panzer website here. Also, Brave Combo has worked its magic, or whatever it is, on “Katyusha.”

• It’s been a while since I mentioned ponies. Here’s a list of several with their Civil War general counterparts. (Via Dusty Sage.)

• The title of this post is from Looking for Bobowicz, which I listened to earlier this evening. You can download it here.

Hmmm

Discovered while browsing in Wikipedia:

[Graham] Greene’s film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the [Night and Day] magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene’s review stated that Temple displayed “a dubious coquetry” which appealed to “middle-aged men and clergymen”.[16] It is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

It may be just as well that he didn’t live to see moe-licious anime.

Minor anniversary

Ten years ago today, my first weblog went live. ¹ It was called “Mixolydian Mode.” My gimmick was that I would post a MIDI arrangement of a public-domain tune every day, such as the “Celtic Society Quickstep.”

CelticSocietyQuickstep

Continue reading “Minor anniversary”

First look, last look

I took a look at some of the new shows on Crunchyroll.

… and that’s when I stopped watching Arata the Legend.

Blasé boy meets annoying girl in Muromi-san. The gimmick is that the girl is a mermaid. I made it all the way through the first episode. Some of it is is funny, but the humor is rather low-brow. I doubt that I’ll watch more.

Devil Survivor 2 is based on an RPG. Usually that’s a bad sign but, surprisingly, I survived the entire first episode. A trio of adolescents download demons on their smartphones to fight monsters while the earth faces some sort of apocalypse. I expect that next week is the big infodump, and after that the show will go to hell, but it could surprise me.

For a moment I thought we were in Texas during bluebonnet season, but no such luck. Majestic Prince features annoying kids piloting mecha, and I lost interest within five minutes.

Boy meets girl again in The Severing Crime Edge. This time, the boy is obsessed with cutting girls’ hair, and the girl has very long hair that cannot be cut. Perhaps there’s a story there, but it felt creepy in the wrong way. It was another I dropped in five minutes.

Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet is the least unpromising of the bunch, even if the protagonist is a mecha pilot. This might be connected to the fact that the staff includes a certain Gen Urobuchi, who not long ago wrote a story about a girl named Madoka.

*****

If the spring anime season isn’t dreary enough for you, there’s summer. When the only series that catches my eye is a remake of Sailor Moon, something is wrong.

~Tomodachi wa Mahou~

The ponies got a shiny, bouncy new opening for their Japanese debut.

I can’t say that I’m enthusiastic about it, but it is more palatable than the original.

To clear the treacle out of your ear, here’s “My Little Baccano.” ((Here’s the original Baccano opening, in case anyone still hasn’t seen it.))

A typical high school

The third Girls und Panzer OVA gave us a panoramic view of the school ship. (To see the full-size image, right-click to open the link in a new window.) In terms of Kansas cities, it looks larger than Haysville but smaller than Emporia.

Update: The more I look at this picture, the spookier it becomes. Where is everybody?

*****

You all had a narrow escape, by the way. I had a few posts in mind for tomorrow which I planned to type up this afternoon. However, my neighbors decided at 1 a.m. this morning that I didn’t need to sleep. (Curiously, when I called on them later they did not come to the door, even though the door was wide open and the teevee was on.) Instead of writing, I spent the afternoon dozing in bed.

Ending well

Jonathan says that Shin Sekai Yori is “… the best science fiction TV show that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but it definitely is in a class with Serial Experiments Lain and Dennou Coil. It’s the best show of any kind I’ve seen since at least Madoka Magica. The ending did not disappoint — not that I was worried; it was obvious early on that the creators knew exactly what they were doing.

It’s absolutely not for children, and even for adults I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation. It’s partly a horror story, with monsters and worse than monsters, all the more chilling for what isn’t shown. But if you have the stomach for it and are willing to think about aggression, social control and human nature, Shin Sekai Yori is worth your time.

*****

I can give Girls und Panzer an unreserved recommendation for all ages. The premise is silly — teams of high-school girls compete in tank battles — but the staff played it straight and made it work, and did so without panty shots. The last episode was exhilarating and satisfying. If you watch it with friends, you’ll likely cheer aloud as Miho and her comrades fight their desperate battle.

Make a contract with Fluttershy

So the Japanese are going to get their own dub of My Little Pony ~Tomodachi wa Mahou~. Good for them; the first season, at least, (which is all I’ve seen) is often clever, rarely cloying, and probably better than nearly all other contemporary shows on western teevee.

Most of the actresses announced so far are new to me, but there are a few familiar voices. The Queen of Tears, Kikuko Inoue, is Princess Celestia. Fortunately, Celestia isn’t a weepy sort, and Inoue is a good actress when she isn’t bawling her eyes out. Rozen Maiden‘s Shinku is Twilight Sparkle, and Cardcaptor Sakura‘s Li Shaoran is Spike.

The surprise is the voice of the sweet, bashful Fluttershy: Emiri Kato. Kato earlier was the cute, cuddly and evil Kyubey. I have difficulty imagining Fluttershy with that voice. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

*****

Dusty Sage found a “State of the Herd” survey of Bronies. One of the findings is astonishing if it’s accurate: more than a quarter of all MLP:FIM fans are INTJs like me. I knew that thoughtful introverts are far more common on the internet than offline, but this is bizarre.

From the observatory

Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day might look familiar to fans of Mouretsu Pirates.

The youngest licensed hang glider pilot in Canada

Jonathan Clements remembers Toren Smith, who passed away Tuesday:

Toren’s enthusiasm for Japanese comics had brought him to the attention of the early staff of Viz Communications, but his relationship with many of them was confrontational and often irascible. Told by one manager to “go and do it himself” if he thought he knew the market better than them, Toren took it not as an oriental brush-off, but as a career move. He stayed in Japan for nine months, selling all his possessions and throwing himself into what he regarded as a real industry with potential growth: translating manga. Crippled financially by the fall in the value of the dollar, he lived a precarious existence nickel-and-diming, working as a janitor in exchange for no questions about his tardy rent in the apartment building, and freezing through a Japanese winter. He was reduced to stealing noodles from a convenience store, but he was also making the right deals, and on the way, acquiring wife number two, the lovely Tomoko Saito. He arrived back in America with a set of Japanese comics entirely packaged, photographed, flipped, retouched, and translated, the rights already agreed.

…

When it turned out that there was no comic tie-in to the Dirty Pair franchise, creator Haruka Takachicho let Toren buy the right to do his own, with artist Adam Warren. When the rights for Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind were sold to Viz, Hayao Miyazaki insisted that Toren Smith be involved with the translation. When Eclipse Comics went under in America, Toren was sure to pay off the debts owed to the Japanese using his own money. He was always prepared to put his money where his mouth was, promising, for example, to indemnify Dark Horse against losses if an unknown title called Oh! My Goddess failed to make a profit.

At one point, Smith lived in the GAINAX house with about a dozen animators. According to Yasuhiro Takeda in Wikipedia:

Make no mistake, GAINAX House was a den of rabid bachelors. Nobody cleaned or even straightened up—ever. When we received a visit from Hiroe Suga (who for a time was staying at a boarding house in Tokyo and working as an author), she was literally sickened by the smell. The color drained from her face and she beat a very hasty retreat. Ultimately, we elected to move out of GAINAX House. When the landlord came by to give the place a once-over and release us from our contract, he was stricken speechless. Almost immediately after we vacated, the house was demolished.

Miscellany

If you’re a creative sort, you have an opportunity to collaborate with Neil Gaiman. Unfortunately, the deadline is next Monday. I wish I’d heard about this earlier.

*****

Coming attractions: Pixy might be able to see Comets Lemmon and PanSTARRS now. The latter should be visible to those of us in the northern hemisphere soon.

There are more comet pictures here.

*****

Vertical, Inc., is considering whether to translate Yusuke Kishi’s Shin Sekai Yori. If an English-language copy of the novel would be worth $25 to you, go to Vertical’s Tumblr page and “like” it. They need 4500 people to express an interest before they’ll undertake the project, and I was only #699.

Kishi does have one book available in English translation. I’ll probably include The Crimson Labyrinth in my next Amazon.com order.

If you’re not watching the anime Shin Sekai Yori, you’re missing one of the finest — and most nightmarish — science fiction stories ever broadcast.

*****

Bambi Meets Godzilla, rebuilt:

You can watch it in 1080 if your computer can handle it.

*****

Professor Mondo‘s novel is now available as pixels at Amazon.com. I just got a new pair of glasses, so I’ll probably wait for the print edition and read it the way books were meant to be read, on dead trees. You can read one of his short stories here.

*****

A note on current events in the Catholic Church: everything you read in the secular press is complete and absolute BS. Don’t believe anything you read. I suggest checking in occasionally with Elizabeth Scalia if you want an informed perspective.

Meanwhile, here’s the Vatican version of March Madness, and Christopher Buckley’s introduction to simony.

*****

Which famous British poet is this? The answer is here.

(Via Eve Tushnet.)

Quote of the day, anime edition

Arhyalon, in a discussion of “aristocracy”:

So, is it impossible to show noble characters well on film?

Not at all. In fact, it is done very well over and over again today. By the Japanese in Anime.

One also sees it occasionally in British films. The Japanese and the English, both peoples with a long history of a noble class, seem to grok nobility in a way that the Americans and New Zealanders just do not.