Tag Archives: anime

One Hell of a Butler: Black Butler anime

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A couple of years ago, I tried the Black Butler manga, but it didn’t move me. I’d forgotten all about it until a friend recommended the anime to me.

I was stuck at home on doctor’s orders the other day–a day I had planned to be spending in my glorious summertime garden. I was too grumpy to be in the mood for my usual cozy mysteries. Stuck inside on one of summer’s most perfect days? I wanted a little bite with my mindless entertainment. So I gave Black Butler another whirl.

At first, I was both frustrated and bored with what appeared to be a pretty traditional story.  Young scion of wealthy aristocratic family has a tragic past.  His whole family, mom and dad and even the family dog, died in a great big house fire several years ago.  This leaves young Ciel Phantomgrave to be the Phantomgrave at a terribly young age–they don’t say exactly how old, but young enough to wear short-shorts and garters and lace and carry a whip.  You know, as you do.

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He even has a bad eye covered by an eyepatch.  Can you get more stock anime?  I felt like I was watching a remake of Godchild/Count Cain, except with bizarre plucky comic relief provided by the other servants in the house (a lecherous maid, a cook, another male servant who often looks like a doll).  Ciel, the frilly lace and shorts-wearing scion, had a bit of Count Cain’s caustic wit, so I sighed and continued to watch.

During the first episode, we discover that Ciel makes some kind of terrible bargain while suspended in air and surrounded by feathers, wearing nothing but a sheet.  You know, as you do.

The bargain appears to involve his Butler, Sebastian.

That’s also quite similar to the Count Cain/Godchild plot (where Cain is paired with his butler Riff).  But, unlike Riff, Sebastian is actually shown butling.  Which was strange and kind of funny, if you don’t mind broad humor involving knives, forks, and broken dishes.  The regular household staff is both earnest and incompetent.  When Ciel has a guest for dinner, the staff manages to screw up the cleaning, cooking, and gardening to such an extent that Sebastian has to step in.

Thus the plucky comic relief when Sebastian serves their foreign guest donuri bowl (actually rare meat Sebastian rescued from the charred mess the cool make) and shows off a traditional rock garden (really gravel raked over the mess the help made of the front lawn).  I was starting to think that perhaps Black Butler was a lighter, sillier version of the Count Cain genre.

I kept thinking that right up to the point where they break the guest’s leg and baked him in the kitchen oven.

Yeah, really.  They bake the guy in the oven.  (The guest is a business associate who has been embezzling funds from the young Ciel, but jeez.)  You do see the guest crawling away, smoking and charred and still with the busted leg, so I guess there’s a shred of plausible deniability of the fatalness of baking someone in an oven, but I don’t care.  They baked the guy in a damn oven!

Naturally, I clicked the ‘Play next episode’ on Netflix.

I wasn’t too surprised when the story focused on a well-meaning but clumsy butler who worked for Ciel’s aunt.  The story had some slap-stick comic relief that was similar to the burnt dinner gag.

What I didn’t expect is that the plucky comic relief clumsy butler turns out to be a villain in a later episode.  So does the damn aunt!

Not just any villain, either.  Ciel, Earl Phantomhive, is called the Queen’s Guard Dog, and the role of the Phantomhives through history is to take care of pesky problems for the Queen.  Often employing morally dubious means to do so.

Since this is a goth Victoriana historical, the Queen’s Guard Dog is summoned to London to deal with a man who is slaughtering prostitutes in Whitechapel.  I sort of expected Jack the Ripper to show up as a villain.

I didn’t expect the storyline to include the gruesome (but true) detail about Jack removing the victims’ internal organs.  In Black Butler’s world, this is explicitly the women’s uteruses.

Not quite what I expected from a tween horror anime, I gotta admit.

Because cognitive dissonance is what Black Butler is all about, we get a very sweet series of scenes where Ciel crossdresses as a young fashionable lady to lure out the killer.  Sebastian, the eponymous Black Butler, is disguised as Ciel’s tutor.  While at a society party, the two must dance together in order to avoid Ciel’s fiance from figuring out what is going on.  It’s comedic and a little silly, there’s lots of ruffles and lace, and general foolishness.

And then of course, it’s revealed that the earl they’ve suspected of being Jack is actually running some kind of underground slave / body part auction.  As an old Weiss Kreuz fan, I totally saw that coming.  That wasn’t too dissonant, since Sebastian uses his mad butling skillz to rescue his damsel in distress.  As it were.

No, my mind went ‘wait, say again’ when the next night arrives and we discover the real identity of Jack to be Ciel’s aunt and her clumsy butler, who is armed with a magic chainsaw.

Why is Ciel’s aunt killing prostitutes in Whitechapel and stealing their uteruses?  Because she lost her unborn baby and her husband in a tragic carriage accident.  To save her, the doctors had to remove her uterus.  She also appears to have been in love with her sister’s husband.  And possibly her sister.  But anyway.  So the aunt is a Victorian-era gynecologist, and it turns out that performing abortions on prostitutes drives her the rest of the way around the bend.  She must punish the women who got the abortions (and killed the babies she so desperately wanted) by taking their uteruses.

By why, you may be asking, is she doing this with a clumsy butler wielding a MAGIC CHAINSAW.  The clumsy butler is some kind of grim Reaper, and if he saws your heart out he gets to see your life as if it was a movie.  With little film-strips and everything.  (Gave me flashbacks to elementary school–remember having to turn film-strips?  Man, those were the days.)

Things get pretty handwavy at this point, and it’s possible my brain was going ‘whirr-click Victorian magic chainsaw whirr-click mad abortionist whirr-click whirr-click’, so I’m not all that clear on the details, but near as I could tell, the reaper-butler dude just likes killing people and watching snuff films.  He’s supposedly a divine being from heaven (although why heaven is into snuff-films remains unclear.)  Apparently, Sebastian, Ciel’s butler, is a butler from, yes, you guessed it, Hell.  This makes them natural enemies.

(Although I was sort of confused about this, because wouldn’t a Hell demon be pro-mad abortionist and snuff film?  Wouldn’t a heaven dude be anti?  But I decided pondering this too much would be interrogating the text from the wrong perspective, so I settled in to enjoy the nice long butler-on-butler fight.  With additional magic chainsaws. )

Sebastian kicks butt in the end, but all the butling fun and games ends when some party-pooper from Heaven shows up with some kind of weird telescoping graphite-and-steel scythe and puts an end to the festivities.  Heaven-dude hauls off the reaper-butler before Sebastian can force him to reveal the killer of Ciel’s parents, servants, and the family dog.

By the time this episode is over, the viewer knows that Ciel and Sebastian have an infernal bargain.  Sebastian is magically bound to Ciel–Sebastian must protect him, serve him, obey him, and, stay with him until the Very End.  In exchange, Sebastian gets to eat Ciel’s soul.  Ciel seems to kind of be looking forward to having his soul eaten, by the way, as if it were sort of the ultimate engagement ring in a magical marriage.  I guess the original bargain was shown in that first scene where Ciel’s lying around in a sheet and surrounded by floating white chicken feathers.   There’s also mystical light, a hand tattoo, an eye patch, and a Significant Trickle of Blood on a hand that has a black-nail manicure.

The whole show is a deuced odd mix of extremely over-the-top melodramaz (nothing says classy like black nail polish manicures, I always say), sort of funny slapstick, and genuinely creepy horror (baking people in ovens, mad abortionists).  I really cannot recommend it on the merits of art, originality, or coherence, but I have to admit that it has a surprising amount of charm and the kind of relentless character development old soaps used to have.  You keep watching because you really can’t believe they just did that.

By the way, the manga is still going strong, and my research indicates that a live-action version is currently underway.

Aku no Hana and the Politics of Decadence

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Before going any further, let’s see what mental images a synopsis like this conjures: “Takao Kasuga is a shy, book-loving high school student who’s had a crush on classmate Saeki Nanako for as long as he can remember. One day, in a moment of lust and foolishness, he steals her gym uniform from class, only to be caught in the act by the quiet and lonely Sawa Nakamura. Knowing she has sway over him, Nakamura forces Kasuga to make a contract with her, or else risk having his secret revealed to the entire class!”

What you might expect from such a synopsis is a harem anime where a bemused, stand-in protagonist finds himself pulled into wacky situations by a cast of cute and quirky moe girls. What you get is one of the most genuinely disturbing and hard to watch anime series of the past 5 years.
 

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From the outset, the most striking feature of Aku no Hana (The Flowers of Evil) is the use of rotoscoping in all of its character animation. Rather than being originally designed and drawn, the characters of Aku no Hana are played by actors in live action and then painstakingly redrawn in a way that both captures their original movements and gives them an unnerving fluidity. This technique creates a visual juxtaposition between the beautifully drawn and lingered over backgrounds and the airy, almost two-dimensional characters, who are distant drawn without any distinguishing features, like strange, faceless simulacrum posing as flesh-and-blood humans. The effect is distinctly unnerving, and has been a predictable source of outrage in fan communities in Japan and abroad, who wanted a series that sticks to the more standard moe conventions which value cuteness and stylization over realism. While most anime try to draw equal attention to foreground and background in their composition, Aku no Hana specifically prioritizes its environments over the characters; while each scene is painstakingly drawn and lingered on throughout the series, the characters within them remain insubstantial wisps, almost featureless even when viewed up close. There is no typical cuteness to be found in this series. There will be no figurines, no body pillows of its characters. There is instead an empty, boring town, filled with empty, boring people.
 

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Kasuga Takao knows his town is a boring and hollow place. As he says himself, there’s nothing but “weeds and pachinko parlors here”. He, however, is in his own mind anything but hollow; he is a connoisseur of fine literature, a sensitive and intellectual soul who finds solace from the world in his favorite book of poetry, Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil. Those familiar with Baudelaire’s work, of course, will know that the French poet had little interest in providing solace; Baudelaire was a hedonistic, scandalous libertine whose arch-nemesis was the unceasing boredom of modern society, a bête noire as potent in 19th century Paris as it is in 2013’s Japan. Although he thinks himself a poet and intellect inhabiting an ethereal world all of his own, Kasuga quickly demonstrates he’s as fallible as anyone else, and in a moment of irrational lust, steals the gym clothing of his crush, Saeki Nanako, an act witnessed by the class outcast Sawa Nakamura.

Upon seeing Kasuga’s moment of deviance, Nakamura begins to believe that he is different from the rest of their classmates and town, albeit for reasons Kasuga denies; like her, she believes him to be a fellow “deviant”*, someone who sees the world for the sad and boring place that it is and seeks to liven it up with chaos and anarchy. She seeks out Kasuga, and under the threat of revealing his crimes to everyone, forces him to make a “contract” with her, doing whatever she commands to do while she tries to break down “all the walls you’ve built around yourself.”

In a different anime, this premise might make for cute, lighthearted hijinks, but Aku no Hana plays up the inherently disturbing nature of it as often as it can. Over the course of the series, Nakamura forces Kasuga to wear Saeki’s stolen gym clothes as he takes her out on a date, stalks him and constantly undermines his ideas of Saeki being pure and virginal, and ultimately tries to make him confess to his sins to the whole classroom on a blackboard. A peculiar bond develops between Nakamura and Kasuga; even as Kasuga denies being a deviant and clings to his poetry and erudition as a way of distinguishing himself, Nakamura belittles and mocks his false sense of superiority, telling him that beneath it all what he really wants to do is give in to his base principles, fuck Saeki and fuck the world up in turn. In principle, it’s easy to see Nakamura as a standard crazy-anime-girl archetype, without a real personality besides being cute and chaotic. But the reality is more complex; even as Nakamura seeks out chaos and some end to the boredom and insubstantiality of modern life, what she truly desires is a companion, somebody who recognizes the world for what it is and hates it as much as she does. Her desire is not to destroy things, but to escape, to find what lies on “the other side of the hill” beyond the town and the world she knows.
 

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Slowly and methodically, Nakamura breaks down the walls around Kasuga’s psyche, revealing to him the hollowness of his life and self. Midway through the series, she tries to force him to break into their classroom and write all his crimes on the blackboard, something Kasuga point-blank refuses to do. Raging at him, she accuses Kasuga of being just as boring and empty as everybody else, and ultimately tells him never to speak to her again. And for the first time since stealing Saeki’s gym clothes, it is this threat that prompts Kasuga to act autonomously and take action. He admits he’s a deviant, he writes on the board with furious tears in his eyes, and together, he and Nakamura trash the classroom in a blaze of youthful joussiance, neither feeling more alive than in destroying their shit classroom and the shit world it represents.

The anarchic impulses and desire for stable, “real” identity in Aku no Hana are reminiscent of much young adult literature and media, with their shared hatred of the mundane world they’re trapped in, the desire to escape, and the search for meaning in an empty landscape. The key difference, of course, is that while other young adult media valorize their protagonists as seekers of a purer, greater truth, Aku no Hana mercilessly savages such ideas for their naivety. In another series, a sensitive, erudite protagonist like Kasuga might be portrayed as the pure hearted hero, but here, he is mercilessly mocked for the falseness and vapidity of his character. As Nakamura continues to break him down, he also finds himself in conflict with Saeki, who genuinely cares about him even after she learns that he stole her gym clothes. When she learns that he was the one who vandalized their classroom, Kasuga and Nakamura attempt to flee to the place “on the other side of the hill,” only to be confronted once more by Saeki. Realizing he can’t make a choice between the two of them, Kasuga breaks down and admits he doesn’t even understand Baudelaire’s poetry, that he just liked the idea of himself reading it, and that he’s truly, completely empty inside. In the end, both Nakamura and Saeki draw away from him, as both realize he’s not the person they want him to be.

More than anything, Aku no Hana is about identity; it is an exploration on how human beings are supposed to grow and bloom in a world of empty concrete. As I suggested earlier, the aesthetics of Aku no Hana depict the ephemerality of their characters while emphasizing the unchanging nature of their environment; even as individual humans live, breathe, and expire, the concrete and steel they build around them long outlives their own ambitions. In a world where identity and meaning making have been subsumed to commodities and the act of living is conducted in the sterile, alienating urban condition, what choice do people have but go large or go crazy? Surely there are more constructive ways to channel one’s frustrations, but Aku no Hana isn’t interested in them.
Gleefully borrowing from the Decadent literary tradition of 19th century France, the anime savages the idea of modernist progress and the sublimation of human identity to the rigidity of codes and institutions. It wants only to incite violence and chaos, even as it suggests that there is a way to overcome the ennui of modern life through interpersonal relationships and genuine human contact. But it simultaneously is suffused with a postmodern understanding of the world, and recognizes that the antediluvian time when humans could understand one another without the artifice of code, symbol and language dividing them has long passed. All beauty, the beauty Kasuga seeks in his books and in Saeki, the beauty striven towards by the effete constructions of modernism and postmodernism, are compromised and tainted, and the human drive towards something more than emptiness is to blame for it. Beyond the facades, the feeble attempts to rationalize the boringness of quotidian life, a true and utter deviant lurks, a lunatic whose only crime is wanting to find something more, something more than the boring, boring, boring shit hole they’ve found themselves in.
 

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As the first part of the series ends, we find Nakamura and Kasuga’s roles reversed; while Nakamura attempts to leave Kasuga behind, Kasuga asks her to make a contract with him, so they can “crawl out of this shit hole together.” Gone are Kasuga’s self-fulfilling and illusive attempts to define himself as different from everyone else, as superior because of his books and his learning. As Nakamura shows him, there is no path towards self-realization that exists within the system, that isn’t always-already compromised by its subsumation to the authorities and processes that deny autonomy to anyone. To become a person, in the adolescent and neoliberal sense, means to define oneself as free of all others, and so to fulfill the teenage fantasy of becoming more “real” than others implies nothing short of destroying everything that ties you down to the world from whence you came. This is what the final sequence shows; in order to escape the town and the people that inhabit it, Nakamura and Kasuga engage in a surreal whirlwind of violence, a premonition of what they would ultimately have to do for their fantasies of escape to succeed. The liberal idea of individual self-actualization is shown to be a split-level trap; even as one wants to escape and subvert the system, the only way to do so is to give into violence and decadence, and thus fulfill a notion of the individual that places them at the heart of violence itself. It is this paradox, between being someone without any autonomy or claiming it through violence that renders the autonomy and validity of other human lives moot, that Aku no Hana positions itself to engage by the end of its first segment.

I have not read the manga, so I do not know what ultimately happens beyond the first 13 episodes. But in speculating, I can’t help but revisit the ending poem of the series, about a flower which wants to bloom, but should not even exist:

“The flower bloomed. The flower, the flower bloomed. It was terribly afraid of the wind. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it bloomed. Nobody had ever seen it before, and it seemed to bloom. [None had seen it before..and it seemed to bloom. “There’s no flower.” “There shouldn’t be a flower.” Some were convinced it was so. But they were wrong, and it was there. None had ever seen it. It should be harsh to listen to. A flower bloomed that should not have. There it is, yes, there it is. There it is.”

As the series closes, we see the one-eyed flower, depicted on the front of Kasuga’s cover of The Flowers of Evil and a recurring motif elsewhere, finally open its eyes and look towards the viewer. The flower, it seems, has bloomed. The flower has awoken, it has become autonomous, and its time has come. But it is an evil flower. It is a flower that should not exist.
 

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*The word that is used, as far as I’m aware, is hentai, which is usually translated to pervert; however, the elastic use of the term in this series, as it refers to both sexual and social deviance, may be the reason translators use the word “deviant” instead.

Is the Bamboo Curtain More Treacherous Than the Glass Ceiling?

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I read an odd entry in my Twitter feed the other morning. Not unusual for a forum dedicated to misinformed celebrity rants and the beekeepers that idolize them, but what struck me about this tweet was that it came from the account of Hayao Miyazaki, He that is Deus in the Machina at Ghibli Studios, and dare I say… a generally uplifting and motivational Twitterer. Bear in mind the Japanese language is composed of ideographs, so 140 characters can read like an American paragraph. Nonetheless, this morning I read this:

@Miyasan_bot:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we borrow from outside staff (i.e. outsource), but soon we won’t be able to do that forever.

OK, now mind you, Miyazaki’s been talking a lot about the end of anime on Twitter lately. Sort of the same way people are decrying the end of print publishing. He’s not giving up on animation but suggesting it might be best to face up to the fleeting nature of all things. Yes, his micro-wisdoms border on sermonic.

So what I found interesting in this tweet was the casual observation that a sign of decline was that only women are responding to job solicits. He wasn’t trying to say anything about women. He was saying it’s over for Japanese animation. The bit about women was just a bit, but the mumble was deafening.

So I mustered some courage and replied to him.

@ill_iterate:
Really, @miyasan_bot?

I didn’t get a response per se… A few hours later, I saw this in my feed:

A five-part transcript of the whole statement from which he’d excerpted the top line earlier in the morning. The full statement is from a lengthy interview in Eiga pia (Movie Peer) magazine

@miyasan_bot:
Part 1:
They say it’s over for animation in Japan. When we look for new hires only women respond, and I get the feeling that we’re done for. In our last hurrah we’ll borrow from outside staff, to lend a hand but we can’t do that forever.

Part 2:
These are not reasons for me to take production to China. I don’t want to deplete Japan in that way. So, what do we do?

Part 3:
(Ghibli Studios) has been resolved to rowing the boat altogether as a team and giving it our all, while everyone around us is jet-propelled with new technology and running at full-speed. We still illustrate with pen and paper. I say we continue to give this our all, together.

Part 4:
I counter the point some make that we’re in an age where you’ll find women driving buses by asking if it’s ok to have women all over cotton mills. (LOL)

Part 5:
I think it would be great to see a female animation director, but as far as Ghibli’s concerned, I can’t think of a single one for us. So what about newcomers? Well, I believe women are incredibly fast-learners and self-starters. If you look at men, even today, they develop much slower.

I’ll cut to the chase: What do I see in the full statement? More obfuscation of the glass ceiling, but a genuine interest in seeing it shattered.

The first part of his quintweet is sort of unfortunate as there’s not doubt about it. He just said: women in the employment queue bum me out. Chauvnism is colorblind, deaf, and a little obnoxious, but well, let’s see what else he’s saying.

In Part 2 of the quintweet, Miyazaki calls out the harsh realities of competing with China for animators and technology. It’s a problem in just about every industry outside of the People’s Republic. From textile manufacturing to bootlegging Apple retail, we the people of everywhere else is kung-fucked. I empathize as my bootleg Apple store doesn’t stand a chance against theirs.

In Part 3 Miyazaki explains how Ghibli’s work is a labor of love. As much a labor as the biggest animation production company in Japan whose American distributor is Disney (one of the biggest media companies in the world) can be. Though it is really beautiful that they work in analog. I mean that. No one watches Pixar to see peach-shaped marhsmallow humanoids. No, we fell with the kid from Up because he was part of a good story.

Part 4 is as baffling as it is evocative to me. Miyazaki’s recapitulating his point about evening the status by playing devil’s advocate to some truism that “women are even driving buses now.” I’ve never thought of it that way, but (thinking…) yeah I guess it’s sort of a man’s world behind that huge steering wheel in Japan. In New York City I think every third bus driver I’ve encountered has been female but it just goes to show… Strange where we engender jobs, isn’t it?

Moreover, to counter the observation on female bus drivers by suggesting labor-equality can turn be flipped and end us up with sweatshops full of women begs the question… has Miyazaki picked up a newspaper in the last decade? These cotton mills ARE populated by women. This statement is what baffled me most particularly. Cotton mills? I’m hoping it’s
lost in translation. Hoping cotton mills is Japanese for Dick Shop. And yet…
there is no mistaking “LOL” which I’m positive is the correct translation of (laughter):

My conclusion from Part 4 of the Quintweet is that for Miyazaki, status quo is an issue that starts with the basic tenet that women do work at all. Amazing to think the studio responsible for so many phenomenal heroins doesn’t think women actually earn their keep in modern professions. Actually I take that back. Nausicaa is an animist warrior; Chihiro and Ponyo are both children, as are Totoro’s neighbors. The closest thing to a working professional woman in Ghibli films is a witch who delivers packages from a bakery. [Note: I LOVE all these films and still think primary, secondary and all tertiary female characters could categorically kick every female animated Disney character in the proverbial “Pocahontas”.]

And finally, Part 5. “Show me the women!” he says. Damn straight. And this is the variable that changes my perspective on the entire argument against his seeming indifference to the glass ceiling. Women are fast learners. Men are comparatively late-bloomers. Get a leg up, women! Get out of the cotton mills, stop driving all those buses and start rowing this boat to nowhere.

Avatar the Last Airbender: a very fun American anime! (kind of)

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So a couple of weeks ago, I came down with a bad cold.  When this happens, I try to be strong, but usually I end up congested, cranky, and bored. Surrounded by books, mugs of half-drunk tea, boxes of kleenex, and my aging but fierce dog weighing down my feet lest I try to do anything shifty like get up and wander around, I laid in bed, grumbling quietly and bemoaning my fate.

Then I decided to poke halfheartedly through my streaming Netflix queue.

Lo and behold, it suggested Avatar, which several of my friends had been trying to get me to watch.  I stared at the first episode with bleary eyes, and thought to myself, You know, this isn’t half-bad.

Several hours later, I’d downed half the first season.

There’s a lot to like about this series.  It’s written for kids and aired on Nikelodean, but don’t let that fool you.  In this universe, actions have consequences.  Some characters fight, become injured, and later die.  Bad things happen. But, unlike a lot of action-packed stories, there’s depth and humor, great characterization, the chance for mistakes and then redemption.

All that said, what the heck is it about?

Katara, a teen girl, is from the Water Tribe.  She and her brother, Sokka, live at the pole and go out fishing among the icebergs.  Katara is a waterbender, which means that she has an ability to manipulate the element water if she makes certain movements, but she doesn’t know how, because her tribe has been devastated by war.  There are four people–Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, and everyone lived together peacefully until the Fire Nation got a wild hair and attacked everyone.

So, Katara’s tribe has only old folks, kids, and her and her brother left.  Katara and Sokka go out fishing, and while they’re hunting, they find the lost Avatar.

The Avatar was supposed to keep the peace, because he can use all of the elements.  But 100 years ago, the Avatar vanished, and war swept the world.

Katara and Sokka find the lost Avatar, Aang, who ended up trapped in a big iceberg.  They decide to travel with Aang to help him master the elements and restore peace to the land.

But really, that’s kind of a cool, but standard plot.  The characters are what make it great, though.   Each of the characters who personify their elements show that element.  Katara is kind and brave, and she sees the best in people .  She’s water, so she reveals wisdom.  Aang, the Avatar, has mastered Air and shows air qualities like humor but also flightiness.  The Fire Nation character, Prince Zuko, is impulsive, but also passionate.  Each of them has qualities that can be advantages of disadvantages.

The world building is thoughtful and cool. Each of the different elements is controlled by a different martial art.  Water is controlled by Tai chi, for instance, whereas Fire is controlled by Northen Shaolin kung fu.  Watching the different elements battle against each other is quite beautiful.  The different elements live in different dwellings, so you eventually find varying kinds of benders in different climates.

I won’t spoil the story, which I still haven’t finished myself, except to note that you might want to check for plot points in advance if you want to avoid sad or depressing stories (if you’re showing it to a kid, for example).

But OK.  I’m just going to be honest for a moment.

The real reason I love Avatar is that it has the coolest creatures of any show ever.

Flying bison! Bat eared flying lemurs!  Badger moles! Saber-toothed moose!  I often find myself asking, if I could only have one cool awesome animal from Avatar, which would it be?  This has entertained me for hours.  Should I get a dragon, or a ostrich-horse?  Would I enjoy a flying koi or one of those swamp alligators?

Also?  There are fox spirit librarians who scour the world for books and scrolls and knowledge and stories and take it to a hidden library deep within the earth, which is run by an owl.  How is that not awesome?

 

Overthinking Things 8/22/2011

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Anime and Manga, A Cultural “Acting Out”

This is an adaptation of an article I wrote on July 31, 2000 for a website that no longer exists. I was a site administrator at the time, and one of the conditions of my position was to write…publish or perish, in fact. I was cranking out quite a few anime and manga reviews…and no one had a clue what I was writing about at the time. Anime was for creepy guys who wore t-shirts with Lum on them (it’s always Lum….) two sizes too small. Manga was unheard of.  As a result, I received many questions about this “anime” stuff.  Mostly “what the hell are you talking about?” In the past 11 years, quite a bit has changed; manga and anime blew up in global popularity, then the market blew up because it couldn’t sustain itself and now the industry is reconfiguring for a new century.

This essay was my answer to the most common question I received in 2000 and I think it’s worth revisiting once more. It’s applicable to most comics, in fact. Enjoy.

***

Of course, as I rant and rave about all the anime and manga I consume, I’m eventually asked, “what *is* it about this stuff that you like so much?”

I love that question.  ^_^

For one thing, if there is a single quality that exists in anime/manga that nearly completely lacks in Western animation and comics, it has to be consistent character development. How many times can we see the gang in Scooby-Doo find that the bad guy wears a mask and was really the old caretaker, or have a new team, new costume, new continuity for our fave superhero, before we start to crave something more?

Over the course of a 26-episode anime series, or a 20-volume manga, the one thing I can practically count on is the emotional growth and complexity of all the characters – not just the hero/ine, but also the bad guy/girl, all the secondary characters and frequently tertiary characters as well.

But that’s not what this article is about. ^_^ This article is about all the *other* things I love so much in anime and manga – the qualities that make it so popular, and why it was inevitable that anime and manga be created specifically in a culture where there is a tremendous social pressure to conform.

1) Anime/manga heroes are usually “different.”

It is an axiom here in the west that we are all unique. Not so in Japan, where those who stand out are frequently pressured to conform by schoolmates, coworkers and family. “Pounding in the nail” is the OMG-overused-to-death phrase that is meant to express the collective desire to keep everyone at the same level. Very often the hero/ine of an anime or manga series is different – too tall, too short, bad at schoolwork, a complete brain. It doesn’t matter much – as long as the character stands out. Conversely, (and somewhat perversely) the character is occasionally average, but the circumstances of the series make them unusual – these series usually are filled with gags as the unwitting hero/ine attempts to seem “normal” as things around them fall apart. And, of course, many series portray a perfectly average hero/ine surrounded by many people of extraordinary looks and/or powers…frequently of the opposite sex.

 

 2) Taboos are not.

Many people assume that anime/manga series are all pornographic. That is not at all the case.  While Americans are obsessed with violence, but complete hypocrites when it comes to sex, the  opposite is the rule in Japan – they tend to be more sqeuamish about violence than sex. Many of  those things that we consider taboo are dealt with in a less Victorian manner in anime/manga.

Up until recent social pressures began to affect the laws of Japan, teenagers in Japan were  assumed to be (or about to be) sexually active, and thus series’ directed at them often deal with sex and love in a reasonably direct way. Mind you – this doesn’t mean it’s realistic! From what  I’ve seen,  it pretty much ends up doing what western series do, portraying it as all violins, flowers floating by and hazy lighting, OR nasty, dirty, demonic sex. There rarely seems to be a happy medium.

Anime and manga often have gender-bending characters. Cross-dressers, gays or lesbians – some of the coolest characters in anime and manga are the bent ones. This does not mean that Japan is more accepting of these qualities in real life – just that it’s less threatening in *theory.* Plus, let’s face it – women look good in ties.  ^_^ Also, strong emotional, even sexual relationships are considered relatively normal for Japanese kids – relationships that are left behind as part of their childhood when they get older and get married. It goes back to the sex thing – it just isn’t a scary concept.

3) Magic and the occult are everywhere.

Another sticking point for many Westerners – Japan is not a Christian country. Their religion is primarily a shamanic one, centered around fertility and harvest festivals. Does this mean that the average Japanese salaryman believes in magic? No. No more than the average American office worker. But they like to see it in their entertainment! And so do I.

***

To sum up, from my years watching anime and reading manga, I’ve noticed that many of the themes dealt with in these media are *not* what the average Japanese person wants to cope with. The pressures of remaining in conformity with societal norms are rather enormous. I believe that many of the things that make anime and manga so popular are those very things that make life difficult. In effect, anime and manga are a giant cultural “acting out” of things that can’t be dealt with easily in real life.

For me, these qualities are some of the most attractive things about this particular form of entertainment.

***

Note: All pictures used in this article are from Tenjo Tenge, by Oh! Great, Shueisha and Viz Media. I picked them because I thought it would be amusing to do so as it embodies all of the qualities discussed and great heaps of violence.

Overthinking Things 7/1/2011

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A Open Letter to Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi.

Dear Messrs Tapert and Raimi –

I hear that you’ve gotten the greenlight to create a live-action version of the Noir anime series for Starz. While I admit to trepidation at the idea that an American TV (premium cable, but still,) channel is interested in one of my favorite anime series, nonetheless, as the driving force behind Xena: Warrior Princess, I am willing to trust you both. (Not entirely indirectly, it was because of Xena that I now write here at HU, so I believe I owe you some thanks for the impact you’ve had on my life.)

Before I explain a little bit about Noir and what we, the fans, are and aren’t willing to tolerate, let me start with: 

Elements That Made Xena Great.

1 – “Strong Female” leads that actually were.

2 – Female team-up that acknowledged, but did not collapse because of, romantic entanglements with guys.

3 – Unresolved Sexual Tension between the leads – this is a critical point and I’ll get back to it in a moment.

4 – Xena smiling when she gutted people. Maybe it’s only me, but this was a key selling point for the show.

5 – The comedy. The jokes were always horribly corny and usually pretty stupid, but it meant that viewers never forgot the show was not to be taken seriously. This is a *very* important element when dealing with fans.

6 – Fighting – lots of it.

All of these, except the comedy should also be part of Noir. The anime Noir takes itself very seriously, so cornball humor would seem out of place for those of us who know the series but, again, I’m willing to give you some leeway here. Make it dry humor, rather than corny and I promise to behave.

Element That Did Not Make Xena Great

Joxer

I realize that he’s a relation, but if Ted Raimi shows up in Noir I will hate you, probably irrevocably. The one exception is if he shows up as one of the intended victims, is given a moving monologue, then Kirika shoots him. That is acceptable.

***

Having established some of the key concepts that should and shouldn’t be carried over, let’s talk Noir.

Noir is the first of a trilogy of “girls with guns on the run” anime series, all of which have certain elements in common. It would probably be a really terrific idea to translate at least one, hopefully several, of these elements to your new series.

Elements You Should Have in your noveau Noir

I’m going to assume you’ve got the whole older, worldly mature woman / younger, naive woman pairing thing down. You nailed it in Xena and something similar should work just fine for Noir. I won’t beat this one to death. Go with your guts.

Conspiracy

In the Noir anime, the shadow organization that pursues the leads is an occult, Medieval, secret society; in the second series Madlax. it’s a magic-driven gun-running, war-mongering organization and in the third series, El Cazador de la Bruja, it’s a scientific conspiracy to resurrect and co-opt a magical culture. As you can see, the anime director really liked to have his women running from a shadow organization. And so did the fans. I insist you must have a conspiracy. Because the original shadow organization was not only incredibly silly, but random and unevenly developed, fee free to handle it however you like…as long as there is conspiracy of some kind.

Professional Assassins

This is a no-brainer, honestly. Both Mirielle and Kirika are professional assassins. In Madlax. Rimelda was an assassin and in El Cazador de la Bruja, Nadie and Ricardo were assassin/bodyguards. So, please, don’t make them ex-soldiers, or ex-CIA gone rogue. It’s okay to just make them professional killers.

Unresolved Sexual Tension

You did this great in Xena. Just do the same exact thing in Noir. I don’t need them to get together…there just has to be the plausible possibility that they might.

UST, as we called in back in the day in the anime and manga fandom, is a common and popular element in team-up stories. I know it’s cable TV, but don’t give into the temptation of having them fake kissing, or going undercover and having to pretend to be girlfriends or anything else embarrassing and in bad taste. Start with respect that is returned, that maybe becomes something more.

Music

I’m throwing this out, knowing that you probably can’t do anything about this, but if you have actually watched Noir at all, you’ll realize that the music is practically a character in the story. The chances of you actually being able to license Salva Nos or Canta Per Me are slim to none, I realize, but if you can bring *one* thing over whole from the anime, choose the music.

 

Element from Noir Anime You Can Lose and No One Will Cry

The watch. Lose the watch, the watch’s musical theme, the watch’s 800 appearances as repeated footage. The watch isn’t the deal-breaker Ted Raimi is, but honestly, no one will miss the watch.

 

Bonus Fan Points

If you want the already-existing Noir fans to love you, (and we are poised and willing to love you!) please don’t pointlessly Americanize the names into Michelle and Karen or some such idiocy…we’re adults, we *know* there are other countries with names that are not in English!

It’s true that there are people who have never watched the anime, and have no reason to know what the character names are but, there are also people who are already fans of the series, who could specifically subscribe to Starz *just* for the pleasure of watching you not fuck up the series we love. Just sayin’.

Here’s looking forward to the new series.

Yours Truly,

Fractured Shell (No Ghost)

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For my temporary stay here at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ll be doing a series of pieces on the intersection of comics and related media with queer genders and sexualities, including how these issues have touched on my own life. I thought I’d begin with the gender politics of the Ghost in the Shell franchise.

 

 

Two panels from the Ghost in the Shell manga; Motoko Kusanagi points out to a colleague that they can’t really prove that they’re human.

 

It was as a freshly-minted teenager that I was first captured by Mamoru Oshii’s original film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell. I was at a transitional point in my life, having just been transplanted into a new family and still learning to grasp uncertainties around gender, sexuality and my own body, and Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi did something for me. She fulfilled a function, acting as an icon of strength outside of the conventional definitions of gendered behavior – and the borders of human life – with which I was familiar. I was able to construct a narrative around her which served a desperate need for some model of humanity I could relate to.

Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, in Queer Images: a History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America, write about this as a common queer spectatorial experience:

“…the desire to see queer characters onscreen was an important one. Such images could let isolated queers know that other queers existed and how they possibly looked, acted, or lived their lives. Such images could validate a queer spectator’s very existence, even if the images were (as they usually were) stereotyped, derogatory, or even monstrous. Queer audiences thus learned how to read Hollywood films in unique ways – often by looking for possible queer characters and situations while ignoring the rest. As Henry Jenkins explains in his study of media fandom, specialized audience members (such as queers) learn how to ‘fragment texts and reassemble the broken shards according to their own blueprints, salvaging bits and pieces of the found material in making sense of their own social experience.’ That process formed the basis of queer reception practice for most of the twentieth century.”

Many films became widely known for their queer readings – All About Eve and The Wizard of Oz being prominent examples. Queer filmmakers such as James Whale and Dorothy Arzner encoded queer signals in their work, and queer overtones were present with varying levels of menace and stereotype in a variety of classic films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Old Dark House, Queen Christina, Rebel Without a Cause.

Although it’s difficult to exactly describe what made Ghost in the Shell and its lead character so appealing to me, certain anchoring points of that appeal are in hindsight quite obvious. Motoko Kusanagi is at once powerful and beholden to power, at once commanding and enslaved to uncertainty. She is constantly on top of her situation, always the quickest of mind and fleetest of foot; in an elite team of cyborg special agents, her dominance is unquestioned. Yet, she comments to Batou after going diving that while her body may be able to process beers in minutes without a trace of hangover, the body which allows her such control is completely owned by the government for which she works. Were she ever to leave Section 9, she would have to leave her body at the door along with her uniforms and equipment; she retains her power only so long as it is used according to the wishes of those with greater power still. Neither can she be certain as to her own origins; “Motoko Kusanagi” is stated in at least one iteration of the franchise to be a pseudonym, and even though in at least one case she’s given childhood memories, she can never be certain they weren’t simply programmed into her head. In both the first Oshii movie and the original comic, she points out to a co-worker that she can’t prove that she’s not just an artificial personality programmed into a cyberbrain; indeed, her inorganic body leaves her open to being mistaken for a robot, and in the comic, she is – by a sexbot collector, no less. She is at once heroic and very relatable for someone as mired in identity uncertainties and as alienated from those around them as my 13-year-old self was.

A page from the original Ghost in the Shell manga: the Major discussing with a colleague the definition of “human,” and the impossibility of really knowing if either of them is human.

Then, of course, there is her gender encoding. There seems to be within geekdom, and popular culture at large, a sacred circle of acceptable gendered appearance and expression for “tough chick” characters outside of which creators (mostly cisgender [non-transgender] men, of course) very rarely step. The territory outside of this circle is in one way or another too uncomfortable for the assumed male gaze of the audience – too “mannish,” too far outside of binary conceptions of gender, too little interested in catering to what is understood to be hetero cisgender male taste. The hetero cis male majorities within fandom certainly take part in policing the sacred circle’s boundaries; I’ve seen forum threads ridiculing designs of female characters for being just a bit too masculine, too square of jaw, too muscular, not enough designed for sexual objectification. Even Xena and Buffy, famous girl-power icons, are well within this sacred circle. Oshii’s Motoko Kusanagi is not. Such characters can hold a totemic power and be quite alluring and empowering, as any Rocky Horror Picture Show fan can attest.

 

Motoko Kusanagi as Mamoru Oshii and his team constructed her: well outside of the circle of fanboy-safe “tough chick” gender expression, and well outside of Masamune Shirow’s own vision.

 

The incident in the manga in which she is mistaken for a robot by a lecherous male sexbot collector draws attention to another significant way in which the Major is unfree. Although Oshii’s construction of her gender encoding steps firmly outside of the sacred circle of acceptability and grants her periodic nudity a sort of liberated power only fully available in absence of the obvious tropes of objectification under the heterosexist, cissupremacist male gaze, this was clearly never Masamune Shirow’s intent. In fact, Ghost in the Shell is an exercise in essentialism; the idea of a ghost – an essence – existing within the body forms the very title of the franchise. This essence grants a body personhood, regardless of whether that body is organic or manufactured. Shirow goes even further in embracing the “spiritual essence” narrative, endorsing the spiritualist concepts of souls and extra-sensory perception. His essentialism allows him to elide the obviously severe implications of cyborgization, ghost dubbing and cyberbrain technology for social constructions of gender and gendered expression. By assuming the existence of essential differences between (feminine, “female-bodied,” male-attracted) women and (masculine, “male-bodied,” female-attracted) men, he is able to skirt these implications and resume policing gender in ways that please his gaze and keep the gendered underpinnings of the erotic fantasy that is Motoko Kusanagi intact.

In the original Ghost in the Shell comic, as in Appleseed and other Shirow works, the assertive and militaristic female lead is in many ways kept in her place: put in highly male-gaze sexual attire and situations while male characters are frequently designed in ways that are clearly meant to be read as at least unsexual, and at most quite ugly, paired with enormous and extremely masculine male leads (Briareos, Batou), shown breaking down in tears while those male leads remain stoic. Their environments are filled with feminine female characters, frequently in subservient roles (informational robot, nurse, assistant, sexbot, even wall decoration), and masculine men in commanding positions (bureau chief, politician, general, weapons dealer, government council member, commando, company president). In fact, there is a sort of “femdom” role-reversal narrative to Motoko in particular. She seems to provide titillation to the presumed hetero cisgender male reader by deviating from her own assumed feminine nature; this excitement could not be had if the roles, and the rationale for their existence, were not re-asserted in the first place. His essentialist logic prevents Shirow from considering, for example, the social implications for a male-assigned/male-identified person of having himself transferred to a body which consists of a box with legs and manipulators (the president of Hanka Precision Instruments) or the logic of using “he/him” pronouns on an intelligence born in cyberspace, and whose first physical body is presumably meant to be perceived as “female” (Project 2501/the Puppet Master).

This thinking is fully exposed in all its spectacularly thin logic at the end of the comic. The Major has fused with Project 2501, and Batou has transferred Kusanagi/2501 into a new body, long-haired and feminine in appearance. Kusanagi/2501 informs Batou, to his surprise, that zir new shell is that of a “guy.” Confronted with his shock, ze replies, “Yeah. This is a male body. You want proof?” The reader is led to believe that zir new body has a penis, which apparently settles the question of its “maleness.” Bodies are not only sexed but inherently gendered, the transcendence of human bodies and brains be damned. A body can throw all sorts of signals outside of those approved for “men,” but as long as it has a penis (and no significant breast tissue, one guesses), it is sexed male. Motoko/2501 goes off to find a more suitable, “female” body. The Major can even merge with a cyber-intelligence, but as long as she inhabits a body, she cannot escape the social slavery of coercive gender roles to which all human beings are subjected. Even if she were to transfer to a masculine, male-assigned body, she would only trade one set of social strictures and assumptions for another. She might find herself more or less suited to the body’s advantages and disadvantages and to the social roles it would shove her into, but she would be restricted either way.

I cannot imagine how Masamune Shirow would respond to being confronted with a transgender person of non-binary gender such as myself. As much as I admire him as an artist and storyteller, I’m not sure I want to know.

 

Shirow’s big reveal at the end of the original Ghost in the Shell manga: genitals are destiny! The divide between “male” and “female” must be maintained, even when the “woman” in question is actually the fusion of a previously female-assigned person with an autonomous intelligence born in freaking cyberspace.

 

Like other queer and transgender people, I’m used to scavenging for my queer and gender-variant stories, situations and characters amongst works made by overwhelmingly cisgender, predominantly heterosexual creators in fields dominated by men and by male gaze. This scavenging process can be incredibly gratifying, but also deeply problematic. It means embracing images of gender variance and queerness which are built to fit the perceptions and satisfy the desires of people who are not queer or trans, and may know little of real queer and trans people’s lives. These images can be as coded, as stereotyped, as condescending, as negative and as thoroughly exoticized today as they were decades ago. It can be deeply frustrating finding one’s empowerment in yet another character created as some cisgender straight guy’s wank fantasy, and cisgender straight women’s wank fantasies often aren’t much better. Just as frustrating, if not moreso, can be to see powerful and defiantly non-gender-conforming characters “put in their place” by cis straight male fans (and, again, sometimes cis straight female fans) eager to turn them into fodder for yet another tiresome role-reversal or power-stripping fantasy. This is done in the form of constant commentary within the fandom, doujinshi, slash, or simply fan art which modifies these characters’ gender coding in various ways and drags them back into the sacred circle of acceptable gender variation. However, it doesn’t seem sensible or right to allow these norm-reinforcing readings center stage. Benshoff and Griffin again:

“As critic Alexander Doty describes his own spectatorial response to popular culture in his book Making Things Perfectly Queer, ‘I’ve got news for straight culture: your readings of texts are usually ‘alternative’ ones for me, and they often seem like desperate attempts to deny the queerness that is so clearly a part of mass culture.”

This is the part where I go out on a limb.

I’m no semiotician or Theorist, but I think there’s something interesting going on here. If we refuse to accept Masamune Shirow’s essentialist assumptions about gender and instead focus on the act of gender as it is “performed” by the fictional character on the comics page, all sorts of interesting possibilities are opened up. Even laboring under the assumption that Motoko Kusanagi is bound by an underlying essence, we must admit that this binding essence is fictional – that in fact “Essential Motoko” is a construct we amalgamate out of images and ideas accumulated from consuming the Ghost in the Shell franchise in its various forms. Abandoning this idea, we are free to focus on the Major as she in fact is: a series of images and text snippets juxtaposed. Seen this way, gender can be read into just about everything: into the whole book, into whole characters to be sure, but also into scenes, pages, panel sequences, environments, color/tone palettes and individual colors/tones, outfits and items of clothing, poses, facial expressions, speed lines, patterns and symbols, inking techniques, even single lines. The changes in gendered expression from line to line, color to color, face to face, panel to panel are often tiny, but they are important because they provide an entirely different image of gender in comics. This image is not one of an immutable essence limited to characters and rarely or never changing, but as an everpresent jumble of tiny shards of signification, only semi-coherent at best and only even pushed into appearing as constant (if fluid) by the reader’s ability to imagine the gaps in information between panels – the device of “closure” described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Gender overgrows in every direction, abundant shards of it popping up wherever the particular reader’s subjectivity allows it; it is subjective, certainly, and also cumulative and temporal, agglutinating and morphing as the reader reads and re-reads, consumes new additions to the franchise, looks at new pieces of fan art, comes to greater understanding of plot points, digests criticism. Each of these experiences provides an abundance of these shards of gendering for the reader to plug into their gender-concept of the entire franchise, the individual story or character, the individual page. The reader is selective in doing this, and the shards from which they select appear different as the reader acquires different sets of eyes.

Various different Motokos from the original manga, each with her own marginally coherent assemblage of gendered signals to give off.