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Posts Tagged ‘evangelion’

In Which I am Tired and Talk About Cartoons

It has been a crazy week.  I’ve spent the last half-hour coming up with something else to write here, without success.  Between a trip to Tennessee, workshops and hangouts and podcast recordings and SEEKRET PROJEKTS which I can’t wait to start talking about, I’m basically spent.

Final edits to Last First Snow continue apace.  Basically everything I could say would be a spoiler, which is a shame, because if you can’t trust The Internet, who can you trust?

Hm.  On second thought, don’t answer that.

I finished The Bone Clocks, which I loved on most individual pages and have more complex feelings about as a unit; I see where James Wood’s review in The New Yorker‘s coming from, but I diverge with him on so many particulars, generally to Mitchell’s benefit, that I will offer my own analysis as soon as I have spare psychic cycles to do so, which should be, well.  Um.  Let’s say next week.

Started watching Gurren Lagann, AKA The GAINAX Mecha Anime I Haven’t Yet Seen.  Four episodes in, I’m not certain what I think.  The show’s done impressive, risky psychological work already—I’m thinking specifically of the Episode Two Reveal, if any of y’all have seen it before.  It seems aggressively resistant to the creation of a status quo, which I do appreciate, having seen too many anime series waste too much time, and it’s utterly mercenary in its storytelling, also a relief.  The fight scenes are awesome, the animation is cool and weird, and I like the music a great deal.

That said, Gurren Lagann is, so far, diving deep into a lot of the hyperactive gender politics that bore me in shounen (boy’s) anime—c.f. Kamina’s constant crowing about “proper manly behavior;” I’d accuse him of overcompensating if the plot so far hadn’t gone out of its way to reinforce his concern (“the manly art of combining!”). And then there’s Leeron, who’s, well, let’s just call him problematic and get on with our lives.  Meanwhile, female lead Yoko demonstrates my least favorite shounen trope, that of The Girl Who In Spite of an Awesome Character Design Never Gets To Do Anything But Look Pretty and Moon Over The Male Lead—she has this crazy cool sniper railgun, and is ostensibly this badass Mad Max-esque warrior, but her railgun has yet to influence the outcome of a fight.  She shoots at stuff, sure, but I don’t think her bullets have done more than dent a robot chassis.  And that’s not even to mention the series’ gaze: she’s wearing a bikini, and the camera spends an awful lot of time ogling her.

I’m only four episodes in, admittedly—but dammit, episode five of Evangelion is the episode where Shinji falls on top of Rei and the whole shounen anime “durr I just tripped and ended up groping you on accident” visual joke ends up played for total horror, shame, and discomfort rather than humor—a brilliant and chilling subversion.  And ep 4 of FLCL, as close as that series gets to a filler episode, is the one where 13-y-o boy Naota hits his father in the head with a baseball bat in a fit of sexual jealousy, only to discover that the thing he thought was his father was actually a robot that looked like his father, which leads to him rescuing his real father from the cupboard into which he’s been stuffed—some serious Iron John levels of investigation of male sexuality, desire, and manhood, carried out in maybe 5 minutes of screen time.

Now, I’d argue that Evangelion is (among other things) a damning, daring feminist analysis/critique/deconstruction/etc. of giant robot shows and “boy’s own stories” in general, which returns again and again to the viciousness and brokenness of human relationships and the warping (dis)embodying effect society has on the female mind and form, even as the women in Eva fight to build and preserve their own identities, and to seek pleasure from life.  (And it’s telling that The Dystopian Future Ushered In by Shinji’s Failure—the horror into which he wakes in the third Rebuild movie—is basically a world in which the women are doing just fine without him thank you very much.)  (Oh no, I’m going to have to write that long post about Eva and feminism, won’t I?)  FLCL, meanwhile, is a brilliant and compassionate look at the tangled mind of a confused adolescent that externalizes his central concerns through giant robots and rock & roll—and yet FLCL still manages (IMO) to represent the women Naota encounters (& to many of whom he’s attracted—this is a show about being an adolescent boy) as their own subjects, with internal lives, goals, desires, and plot impact.

 

Which is to say, Eva and FLCL are special shows, though neither of them’s perfect—while to me, so far, Gurren Lagann seems all id.  There’s nothing wrong with the id, but it’s pretty simplistic.  That said, there seems to be enough love for this series that I’ll give it more time.

Baccano! – or, Yay! There’s no Main Character!

I don’t watch TV much.  Never had cable or TV reception in my house, so I never got in the habit.

Anime was the one exception for a while – Bastard! hooked me, Cowboy Bebop reeled me in, and Kenshin landed me.  And, of course, I watched Evangelion and felt like Anno had written me a personal letter.

(That last sentence gave you the wrong impression about me, so let me explain: that sense you get, watching Eva, like you want to shake Shinji until he feels better?  That’s the right sense.  He’s deeply depressed for most of the show, and the story tells of his, and everyone else’s, struggle against not only loneliness but the fear of loneliness, the desperate fight to be your own person without cutting yourself off from the universe.  Shinji’s a boy with serious problems, surrounded by people who want to help – but have serious problems of their own.  Eva is a realistic look at the dark, scary sides of adolescence, and both endings are brilliant in their own crazy way.   So there.)

Anyway, after college I fell a bit out of love with anime, largely because I was getting tired of the Main Character.  I watched a lot of shonen stuff – boy’s stories – and man, some days it seems like you can’t throw a shoe in anime without four plucky young protagonists running up to challenge you to a shoe throwing duel, to prove that they’re THE GREATEST SHOE THROWER IN THE WHOLE WOOORLD!

It gets old.

I stumbled into Baccano! via the wonderful time-sink that is TV Tropes – Gangsters? Anime? New York City? Broken chronology?  Intersecting narratives?  Yes please.  Six episodes in, I’m a bit infatuated.

Why?  Well, all of the above – plus, there’s no Main Character.  The plot’s shifting between 6 or 7 groups of characters, each with their own (sometimes weird) moral universe.  Even the best are pretty flawed (‘cept for maybe Firo), but, thank the Maker, nobody’s running around trying to be the Best Gangster in All History!!1one.

Except for Ladd Russo, and he’s a mass-murdering lunatic.

In fact, the first six or seven episodes are a sort of commentary on Generic Anime Plotting.  The series has a frame narrative in which an information broker and his junior assistant are chatting about how to tell the story of these connected events – and they spend half of the first episode arguing about who the main character might be without reaching a conclusion.  Everyone is going about their own story, and the stories intersect, sometimes chaotically – at one point three different people try to hijack the same train! – and the consequences are fascinating, weird, and exciting to watch.

Sort of like real life, only with gangsters, immortal alchemists, demons(?), death cultists, spy-reporters, and murdering lunatics.

So, if you’re at all like me and a bit tired of the nice kid trying to be the Best Sumo Sushi Master In The World, check out Baccano!

Just be ready for the blood, because there’s a lot of it.