Well, crap. There's another "Anime Snobs" out there apparently. But let me diffuse any sense of dread and or urgency you may be feeling by airing only ONE of the author's observations about the creator of a long running series latest incarnation , Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki.
"Kajishima Maskai is certainly a mastermind."
Situation green! No problem here. Continue as normal.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
PARANOIA AGENT
To waste as little of your time as possible, lets start at the top shall we? Satoshi Kon’s “Paranoia Agent” is the best anime that I have ever seen. It now stands at the top of my ‘short list’ with other notables like Revolutionary Girl Utena, Cowboy Bebop, Last Exile, Berzerk and Escaflowne. There are many reasons why PA is a sort of Magna Carta for a new brand of storytelling in animation, but what is most important about it is that it’s primary focus is people. People like you and me, with jobs, frustrations, dreams and faults are drawn into a series of events that clearly draws the line between humanity and it’s collective consciousness. Let it suffice to say that they aren’t going to get along very well.
At the start it’s easy for a fan of my stripe to fall in love with PA. Anime’s annoying conventions are totally missing. No magical girls, buxom assassins, space invaders, robots, harems or wacky hi-jinks. Graphically as well the tried and boring anime conventions are missing. PA maintains a highly realistic style even when depicting seriously fantastic situations. Everything is rendered with an attention to detail that brings you to Japan and leaves you to be stunned by the events unfolding there. And with all those fine points what is actually important about this realistic treatment is that it serves the viewer in bringing the emotional consequences of the character’s choices to life. At many points we can point at the screen and realize that we have been in those places ourselves. Leaving anime conventions behind and creating some real persons to live out these events, Satoshi Kon makes PA personally relevant. It reminds me a little of Big O in that regard, but succeeds by orders of magnitude more.
PA is told in a series of short stories woven together by the notorious Shonen Bat and his ardent pursuers, a pair of police detectives who are in way over their heads. Their antagonism takes a break in disc three but comes back in full force in the ending eps with the victor clearly decided, another great surprise for anime viewers sick of every cerebral anime ending in some kind of irrational non-sequitur. Of course none of the principal characters survives the show in a recognizable form, all persons involved changing in drastic ways one way or another. Every person involved in the plot either profits or withers according to their actions.
I’m not going to talk a lot about the technical aspects of the shows I write about, but in this instance I want to highlight the voice work for PA. The English dub is a sterling effort and English speakers should really hear this one first. The fact is that I am sure that the stable of voice actors involved were pushed to perform in many ways by the AMAZING Japanese voice work on the show. Especially in the instance of Detective Ikari the quality of the talent and the voice direction is a serious achievement. Of course both sets of actors are aided by the fact that PA usually lacks the twitching/blinking face-holes that many animators consider mouths, but it is still a joy to hear either way.
There are a few niggling problems, though. Sometimes the changes from ep to ep are quite drastic, entire rafts of characters abandoned for another. The main chars always return, but it can be disorienting. Also some of the content can be disturbing to the casual anime fan. Kon’s characters express a wide range of faults and compulsions and sometimes the ugliness is shockingly blunt. I can count this among my favorite aspects of the show, but I can see how others may shy away from it.
Studying the show after the fact gives us the impression that we’ve seen the first hard science fiction story in anime since shows like Lain and Key. It’s a story about normal people confronting forces they have no way to understand let alone combat until they are enlightened in some fashion, until Shonen Bat is somehow brought to heel. The trip is dark, emotional, violent and wholly satisfying. It reminds me of a Scorcese film, the kind of experience you survive rather than idley view from a distance. You’re there, and when it’s over you stay there. The story was rattling around in my head for days after I finished it. You end up rooting with all your might for totally un-fantastic persons against an evil that we all possess in some way. People go crazy, realities are warped, and dreams are reduced to rubble, but fakers can become saviors and everyone kinda gets the idea that they weren’t as powerless as they thought they were. It’s a great message if you ask me.
My suggestion: Buy it, love it and tell your friends. I’ll tell you this, the industry is preparing another 26 ep jaunt where gender roles are set on their ear at the hot springs and the festival grounds and no one knows where the madcap hilarity will end!!! Do you really want to be responsible for that, even in part? Buy Paranoia Agent and do something good for us all. Really.
-maguro
At the start it’s easy for a fan of my stripe to fall in love with PA. Anime’s annoying conventions are totally missing. No magical girls, buxom assassins, space invaders, robots, harems or wacky hi-jinks. Graphically as well the tried and boring anime conventions are missing. PA maintains a highly realistic style even when depicting seriously fantastic situations. Everything is rendered with an attention to detail that brings you to Japan and leaves you to be stunned by the events unfolding there. And with all those fine points what is actually important about this realistic treatment is that it serves the viewer in bringing the emotional consequences of the character’s choices to life. At many points we can point at the screen and realize that we have been in those places ourselves. Leaving anime conventions behind and creating some real persons to live out these events, Satoshi Kon makes PA personally relevant. It reminds me a little of Big O in that regard, but succeeds by orders of magnitude more.
PA is told in a series of short stories woven together by the notorious Shonen Bat and his ardent pursuers, a pair of police detectives who are in way over their heads. Their antagonism takes a break in disc three but comes back in full force in the ending eps with the victor clearly decided, another great surprise for anime viewers sick of every cerebral anime ending in some kind of irrational non-sequitur. Of course none of the principal characters survives the show in a recognizable form, all persons involved changing in drastic ways one way or another. Every person involved in the plot either profits or withers according to their actions.
I’m not going to talk a lot about the technical aspects of the shows I write about, but in this instance I want to highlight the voice work for PA. The English dub is a sterling effort and English speakers should really hear this one first. The fact is that I am sure that the stable of voice actors involved were pushed to perform in many ways by the AMAZING Japanese voice work on the show. Especially in the instance of Detective Ikari the quality of the talent and the voice direction is a serious achievement. Of course both sets of actors are aided by the fact that PA usually lacks the twitching/blinking face-holes that many animators consider mouths, but it is still a joy to hear either way.
There are a few niggling problems, though. Sometimes the changes from ep to ep are quite drastic, entire rafts of characters abandoned for another. The main chars always return, but it can be disorienting. Also some of the content can be disturbing to the casual anime fan. Kon’s characters express a wide range of faults and compulsions and sometimes the ugliness is shockingly blunt. I can count this among my favorite aspects of the show, but I can see how others may shy away from it.
Studying the show after the fact gives us the impression that we’ve seen the first hard science fiction story in anime since shows like Lain and Key. It’s a story about normal people confronting forces they have no way to understand let alone combat until they are enlightened in some fashion, until Shonen Bat is somehow brought to heel. The trip is dark, emotional, violent and wholly satisfying. It reminds me of a Scorcese film, the kind of experience you survive rather than idley view from a distance. You’re there, and when it’s over you stay there. The story was rattling around in my head for days after I finished it. You end up rooting with all your might for totally un-fantastic persons against an evil that we all possess in some way. People go crazy, realities are warped, and dreams are reduced to rubble, but fakers can become saviors and everyone kinda gets the idea that they weren’t as powerless as they thought they were. It’s a great message if you ask me.
My suggestion: Buy it, love it and tell your friends. I’ll tell you this, the industry is preparing another 26 ep jaunt where gender roles are set on their ear at the hot springs and the festival grounds and no one knows where the madcap hilarity will end!!! Do you really want to be responsible for that, even in part? Buy Paranoia Agent and do something good for us all. Really.
-maguro
Saturday, July 30, 2005
What we're going to do for YOU, because we're so great
Anime Snobs is a place where my partner and I are going to tell you about the shows were watching at the moment, what we like and what we don't like. That's all. I'm not going to tell you anything about us except that we are a husband and wife team, and we know more about anime than you. Failure to heed our sage advice may lead to you riffing on some crap like Strawberry Eggs in front of a person who prevously thought you were cool. BE WARNED. But first some ground rules...
1. Prepare to be offended. It will most likely happen. Most likey before I'm done with the ground rules.
2. Shonen titles are viewed with a high grade of skepticism here. There are some exceptions, according to report, but in general it's not worth considering them because watching them hurts our eyes. PS: There have been some Naruto AMVs I have seen that did not suck. Some that is, not all.
3.We don't torrent our anime, we pay for it you rebel scum. So don't post some yang like, "OH YOUZ GUYS GOTTA CHECK THE JND FS OF KYO DOH GUUMEN HOTORI MUZOH!!! HER IS THE TORR LINK! LOL ROFLMAO -LRDSHINJIROX!!!!!!-" Expect a formal drubbing on this subject soon in the tone of Pat Reynolds.
4. Anime Snobs does not suffer any 'fannish' nonsense. If we can remain generally acceptable persons while watching cartoons from Japan, than we expect others can follow the usual social conventions of the world as well. Stuff like; showering, wearing clean clothes, holding down a job, not living in your mom's basement past the age of 30, avoiding panic attacks at the idea of missing the "Inu-Yasha Plushies" panel, and most especially not bragging about your extensive collection of creepy anime girly figurines that you can look up the skirts of. Don't do these things, we would appreceate it.
5. Though the name of the blog is "Anime Snobs", we reserve the right to snob up anything we want. In addition to the obvious, we will probably talk about manga, videogames, techology, music and culture and you will like it.
6. We will probably write way more about the things we like and a lot less about the crap. Expect some posts in this format...
"Thoughts on the anime classic, "You're Under Arrest!"- Utterly boring tripe. I got it for free and I want my money back."
7. Lastly we want to tell everyone that this is not a review site, it is a place where we tell you what's good and what isn't. After reading us for awhile, you might get the impression that the popular review sites/publications of the day don't have your best intentions at heart. We don't either, but we aren't getting ad reveue from publishing houses in return for our efforts at least.
-maguro
1. Prepare to be offended. It will most likely happen. Most likey before I'm done with the ground rules.
2. Shonen titles are viewed with a high grade of skepticism here. There are some exceptions, according to report, but in general it's not worth considering them because watching them hurts our eyes. PS: There have been some Naruto AMVs I have seen that did not suck. Some that is, not all.
3.We don't torrent our anime, we pay for it you rebel scum. So don't post some yang like, "OH YOUZ GUYS GOTTA CHECK THE JND FS OF KYO DOH GUUMEN HOTORI MUZOH!!! HER IS THE TORR LINK! LOL ROFLMAO -LRDSHINJIROX!!!!!!-" Expect a formal drubbing on this subject soon in the tone of Pat Reynolds.
4. Anime Snobs does not suffer any 'fannish' nonsense. If we can remain generally acceptable persons while watching cartoons from Japan, than we expect others can follow the usual social conventions of the world as well. Stuff like; showering, wearing clean clothes, holding down a job, not living in your mom's basement past the age of 30, avoiding panic attacks at the idea of missing the "Inu-Yasha Plushies" panel, and most especially not bragging about your extensive collection of creepy anime girly figurines that you can look up the skirts of. Don't do these things, we would appreceate it.
5. Though the name of the blog is "Anime Snobs", we reserve the right to snob up anything we want. In addition to the obvious, we will probably talk about manga, videogames, techology, music and culture and you will like it.
6. We will probably write way more about the things we like and a lot less about the crap. Expect some posts in this format...
"Thoughts on the anime classic, "You're Under Arrest!"- Utterly boring tripe. I got it for free and I want my money back."
7. Lastly we want to tell everyone that this is not a review site, it is a place where we tell you what's good and what isn't. After reading us for awhile, you might get the impression that the popular review sites/publications of the day don't have your best intentions at heart. We don't either, but we aren't getting ad reveue from publishing houses in return for our efforts at least.
-maguro
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