Over at Steven’s place, people are listing their five favorite animes and speculating on what their choices say about them. Here’s mine:
1. Haibane Renmei
2. Serial Experiments Lain
3. Denno Coil
4. Cardcaptor Sakura
5. Shingu
Let’s see: I like science-fiction and fantasy, complicated stories that ultimately do make sense, well-developed and engaging characters, and background music that’s interesting in its own right. (Update: And also stuff that’s out of print or unlicensed. Of these five series, only the last is currently available in the USA.)
I’ve watched the first two episodes of Kuuchuu Buranko, or Trapeze. It’s worth seeing for the visual novelties, but the stories themselves aren’t as interesting as the art.
I may also continue watching Aoi Bungaku, of which I’ve seen the first episode, part one of “No Longer Human.” Cheery stuff, this. I am curious to see how well the crew handles “Hell Screen.”
Jonathan gave Kobatoa tentative thumbs-up, and it is CLAMP, so I’ll take a look. Otherwise, the rest of the current season doesn’t interest me.
Thanks to abundant moisture throughout the year and unseasonably cool temperatures the past few weeks, this is the best year for fall color that I can remember.
I have no intention ever of watching Queen’s Blade. I hope I never meet anyone who writes about it. ((With the possible exception of Ubu, who reported on the first episode of the first season (not for the squeamish).))
Update: Evidentally, my point isn’t clear. One of those who wrote about about Queen’s Blade titled his post “I would love a tentacle rape,” which is distasteful enough. The other gratuitously used one of the most offensive words in the English language.
I shot over 1500 frames this week during the rehearsals of the Friends University fall ballet concert, and it’s going to take me a while to go through them all. Until then, here’s a selection from Prodigal Son, choreography by Stan Rogers after Balanchine. Continue reading “Balletic debauchery”
Several otherwisesane and sensiblepeople recently have been posting their Champions Online or City of Heroes characters. I thought I’d check the games out. Fortunately for me, the former is Windows-only, but the latter does have a Mac client and a free trial period, so that’s how I spent a couple of lunch hours this past week. (Actually, I spent the first lunch twiddling my thumbs while the client downloaded nearly three gigabytes of additional content — if I had realized that it would do that, I wouldn’t have bothered.) It is fun to play with the character creator; you can make a (rather skanky-looking) schoolgirl, which isn’t possible with such sites as Hero Machine. The game itself, though, looks as dull as every other MMORPG I’ve visited, as far as I could judge from the tutorials (I tried both the heroic and villainous options). It’s nifty to design colorful avatars, but “jogging heroically” to fight random enemies is tedious. I’d rather listen to music —
— which is what I do in Second Life. My initial impressions of SL were rather negative, and if you want to find intelligent people to discuss anime with, you’ll do better hanging around Steven’s place. But there is lots of music there, some of it good, and there are other people with tastes as wide-ranging as mine. It’s possible to stream music from your computer to sites within Second Life, which I’ll be doing Saturday evenings for while. If you have a SL account, stop by Grizzy’s Café between 6 and 8 p.m. SL time (i.e., California time; between 8 and 10 p.m. in the central USA time zone). Tonight I’ll be playing very miscellaneous Japanese music, from Yoko Kanno to Hatsune Miku.
There is a tremendous range of ready-made avatars available in Second Life, such as this Super S Sailor Moon (to my eye, the most elegant of all mahou shoujo costumes). You can also design your own from scratch, if you're handy with Photoshop and virtual 3-D manipulation.
*****
I’ve sampled some random examples from the fall anime season. So far I haven’t finished a single episode. Surprisingly, the one I watched longest was Kämpfer, this season’s attempt to create the ultimate anime. Let’s see … we have
• high school students
• fighting
— with guns
— with swords
— with magic
(… but no forks)
• sailor fuku
• panties
• sexual ambiguity (question of definition: is a guy who actually changes to a girl truly a “trap”?)
• a meganekko
• henshin
• absolute territory
• .4 Rushunas — and that’s the hero. He also runs like a girl.
I hesitate to say whether there are any moeblobs or tsunderes in the show. I think one character qualifies on both counts, but that isn’t my field of expertise.
That’s in just the first fifteen minutes or so. There are also hints of a developing harem, a ridiculously powerful student government and perhaps a vast conspiracy. I expect future episodes will include copious steam. There are unlikely to be nekomimi, mecha or winged people, but I wouldn’t put it past the writers — it really is a silly show. Sad girls in snow are probably too much to hope for.
My only hope for the fall season is Kuuchuu Buranko, or Trapeze, whose crew includes Kenji Nakamura and Manabu Ishikawa of Mononoke.
I spent most of the weekend at the Walnut Valley Festival. It’s primarily devoted to acoustic string music, particularly bluegrass, but there were some items of interest to students of Japanese popular culture.
• The second-place winner in the fingerpicking championship was Akihiro Tanaka, from Kyoto, Japan. I wasn’t able to get down to Winfield on Thursday, when the contest was held, but the fingerpick winners made an appearance on the main stage Friday evening. Here’s what Tanaka played then: ((The sound is less than wonderful. Stage one is a noisy place.))
• I spent several hours listening to the jam sessions at Carp Camp. ((I don’t bring my dulcimer to Winfield unless I’m camping. This year I day-tripped, so I just listened.)) Here’s the tune that the campers call “Finish (sic) Polka.” It soundsstrangelyfamiliar.
[audio:http://tancos.net/audio/finnish polka.mp3]
(This is not my recording, but Carp Camp’s own from last year. The campers played the tune at least twice this weekend, but neither time did I have my recorder handy.)
• One of this year’s Carp Camp catchphrases (if you write it as a single word, you get six consecutive consonants. Can you think of any other English words like that?) was “Don’t hurt the old people.” The third Monday in September (usually the day after Winfield), is celebrated in the Japan as Respect for the Aged Day.
Recently I spotted something called Choujikuu Romanesque Samy: Missing 99 OVA on AnimeSuki. It was written and directed by one Seiji Okuda, who has worked in various capacities on anime ranging from Ponyo to Dream Hunter Rem, so I thought I’d check it out. Well, sometimes there is a good reason why an old show remains obscure.
Samy, after transformation and armored. Note characteristic expression.
It’s the same kind of story as Leda — The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko: an apparently ordinary girl is transported to a fantasy world, where she allegedly has great powers. Unlike Yohko, however, Samy, as herself, never learns how to use her powers and just stands around uselessly as others fight to protect her. Her little non-magical dog is a more effective combatant than she is. The conceptual framework is a melange of Buddhist mythology, the Old Testament and Big Bang physics. It perhaps make a little more sense than RahXephon ultimately does, but that’s not saying much. With a more competent protagonist, Samy might have been watchable, but as it is, it’s a waste of time. I can’t even recommend it for fanservice.
Some guys apparently like their girls wimpy.More views like this, and a few more inches in the right place, would have improved the show.
Highlights from the posts I don’t have time to write:
• Taishou Yakyuu Musume is the first new show this year to sustain my interest beyond the second episode. In the first eight episodes of the story, the writers have kept the focus primarily on high school girls learning to play baseball in 1925 Japan, and they have not let the themes of feminism and westernization versus traditionalism overburden the story. There’s also been very little teen angst. ((Some of the girls waste time being moody and depressed in early episodes; part of the story is how they find the mental toughness to keep playing despite errors and losses. However, there hasn’t been any romangst — yet. (In the eighth episode, it turns out that one of the girls has an unlikely crush on the central character. If this gets played up in the remaining episodes, it will be seriously annoying.) )) If the last four episodes are on the same level as the first six (the seventh and eight episodes are essentially filler), the series might be worth recommending.
Taking the maxim that “the pitcher and catcher should be as close as husband and wife” too literally.
• Ponyo is in its fifth week in Wichita, the longest any Miyazaki film has ever played here, and it’s at a theatre within reasonable bicycle distance. I watched it last weekend. The dub is tolerable, though “bug off” is not an adequate substitute for “baka.” It made a little more sense than the fansub I watched last year — I suspect that there was some discreet re-writing in the dub script — but the logic of the story still is, um, hard to follow. I’d rank Ponyo as second-tier Miyazaki, not a classic like Spirited Away or Totoro, but far better than Howl’s Moving Castle (skip the movie and read the book instead). It is well worth seeing on a large screen if you have the opportunity, particularly if you have kids.
• For the convenience of any balletomanes visiting here, this is the only section of choreographic interest in Hakucho no Mizumi, the 1981 animated version of Swan Lake.
Sorry — if you want 32 fouettés, you’re out of luck. Swan Lake does have one of the better stories in ballet, but this adaptation trivializes it. Skip it, and find a video of a good dance production instead. Or, better yet, attend a live performance when you have the opportunity.
Sony and the Blu-Ray consortium have created a format where the system requirements for honest users are vastly higher than for pirates. They’ve created a system in which even the honest are given an incentive to break in.
