Claiming Ground

Soul Eaters’ style exerts a strange fascination over me. Not the setting, which is currently somewhat ambiguous - lacking any sense of geography or organisation, but the cast. If I look at my desktop I find Maka leering out at me with a perverse menace, her coattails spiralling away absurdly. I find this image mildly hypnotic. I appear to have been sucked in.

Maka is a triumph of basic design, achieving coolness unlimited, without absurd forced attempts at originality. Bandy legs and pigtails, mini-skirt and long coat, big gloves, colossal scythe - a combination that spells out victory. But it isn’t just the looks, the real source of her stylistic appeal is the writing, though I don’t mean the character writing.

I don’t know if Maka would feel the same if it weren’t for the impact of the opening minutes of Soul Eater. That Tim Burton style has never been quite so massively appealing to me as it clearly is to some people. But there’s no better way to win somebody over than with a pure display of verve.

A few words delivered, then pure spiralling motion - a lavishly realised super-fight. A masterpiece of shonen exuberence, in a genre where instant classics are the only real kind. Suddenly Maka becomes the new definition of awesome, her image tied to that moment, the show imbuing the design with extra style. And lo and behold Soul Eater has at its disposal someone cool to throw into later episodes, to make the next action kick even better.

I’d be inclined to say that character in general is completely reliant on plotting. A great character isn’t just a believable combination of characteristics, those elements are only compelling in so far as they are effectively deployed. There are characters I can relate to more easily than others, but I’ll only do so if they work within the context of their world. The storytelling gives the character templates meaning - any great character is a sign of good writing.

So far Soul Eater has good writing without any great characters - just take Maka. The show has done more to emphasise her style than her personality, which is just beginning to be established - in keeping with a genre with light development. She’s the workmanlike soul, she offers us father hate, Soul buoying her up when she’s down, and the Resonance of the Souls (Oouuuahhhhhh!!!). We’ve seen her a few times now, and her character is just beginning to be built up, but she’s a fully developed example of liquid cool.

I guess my point is that the second I see a piece of design appear in the show, my reaction to it is already being conditioned by the writer. Like with Stein, another simple but decent piece of artwork, made excellent by his role in the plot (slapstick, but also monstrous). He’s not been made sympathetic, or realistic. He isn’t a great character, but the beginnings of his character fill this neat template with meaning - rounding out his style.

Lest I forget, 5 episodes in, basically nothing has happened. Three episodes of meet the family, then a double-ep introducing Stein, bringing Death the Kid to Shibusen, and explaining Soul Eaters’s power mechanics. Soul Eater is still explaining itself, the plot proper hasn’t got going - few things have weight or significance, everything is fun and stylish.

To contrast it with Kurenai, each episode there is structured around showing the characters to the full. Action shows can’t do that, telling character moments can’t be so common, but well-plotted action sequences reinforce the aesthetics. It’s immediate fun, and it’s also creating an ever-growing array of stylish things, expanding its arsenal week by week. Soul Eater takes your death gods, and makes them cool again. Nobody exactly needed to do that. But it’s been done, and so another shiny pleasure is granted to the world.

It feels rather more natural to analyse the finished article than it does to interrupt a story in progress. As it is, I’m interjecting mid-way through Kurenai partly just to get some thoughts off my chest and partly because I’m curious as to how my take on it will have changed once I know the conclusion.

Any story will have to decide on its meaning/s eventually, and in a show which already oozes thoughtfulness week to week I’ve got to assume that the pieces are being used to compile some sort of truth. Which raises the great problem for considered writing within episodic structures - how the show manages to keep the audience on board for the moment whilst using the breadth of the series to advance ideas more thoroughly.

Kurenai has to be clever week to week, has to be fun(ny), and along the way it can develop the cast and explore series themes. If I have any doubt regarding Kurenai it’s over its capacity to provide the big kicks in the course of a single episode - so far it is very good (the direction, the art, the writing) but it hasn’t yet blown me away. Not that I require a show to do so within a few episodes, but (because I’m picky) I’d like this one to wind up as a transcendent experience. If Kurenai is going to fulfil its potential then those series-wide ideas we can see unfolding are the reason, those are the things that truly leave their mark.

Coming to the show on the understanding that it was a) getting some serious praise, and b) the loli du jour, I was prepared for the very best and the very worst. And lo and behold, slick poppy OP (advertising an overwhelmingly female cast) followed by alienating and not very fun po-faced action. That credits vs content contrast is something I still haven’t quite got a hold of, made even more apparent when the jolly ED is followed by a pointedly minimalist preview, replete with evocative strings and storyteller narration. Kurenai seems to revel in being as satisfying in the moment as it is dramatically serious.

That musical contrast seems to play up a blunt dichotomy between the hollow (electro-pop) present and the past as the zone of meaning and importance. With Murasaki being essentially an echo of the old Japanese aristocracy meeting the modern(and, of course, a child), Kurenai is showing us an outsiders’ look at the world. Thankfully the writing is nuanced, and provides an interesting view on modern life.

Shinkurou is orphaned and already employed, has a small flat and a nice girlfriend - a very contemporary young man. He never gets laid and tries to play it by the book, and he gets to be secretly hard as nails too. He’s a cold faced eliminator in his line of work, emotionless enforcer (contractor?). Is this the disconnected modern man as both spineless wimp and driven workman - useless personally but ruthless for the sake of his boss?

For all that Murasaki gets the laughs and, in her naivete, gets the obvious messages from each episode, it’s Shinny-boy who surely holds they key to the wider plot. The emotional progress of the child is predictable, defined by the story we can see shaping her week by week. How the older protagonist will change given his stronger preconceptions, and what choices he’ll have to make, provides the tension in the series plot.

Of course Shinkurou is also the product of his environment - as his work shows. Benika is slick, suited, professional - and has defined the sort of serious person our hero wants to be. She’s the antagonist to the robed mr Kuhoin in the adult drama - his opposite in her modernity, and his counterpart in her responsibility and seriousness. Critically for the influence he’ll surely have on her, Murasaki lives with Shinkurou, whilst Shinkurou was seemingly separated from his idol - farmed out to learn killing with the Houzuki’s, in order to live up to the ideal of strength in his head.

It’s nice how the viewer gets to meet Ginko before Yuuno, and certainly get to see more of her character (via her outburst). Neatly, Yuuno has been made to seem first simple and superficial, then suspicious (knowing the Kuhoins), before being shown as a sparring partner who’s rather closer to Shinston than lovely snarky Ginko is (what next from Yuuno? a betrayer? an extra-terrestrial? blood-related?). It’s simple but well executed character development like this that lends momentum to the drama.

Anyway, back to the noodlings. I’m fascinated by the idea of the Houzukis as killers, and as a different sort of killer. Shinkurou has literally learned lethality (of a rather gruesomely self-mutilating style) from feudal assassins. And the disenfranchised old sensei is cozy, inactive, relaxed. Their mantle is passed on to this young chap who is personally clumsy and pleasant, but also a driven and oddly hollow professional.

As much as it is a story of Murasaki meeting the world, it’s also a story of Shinkurou deciding what to do with the world he thinks he knows (which now comes with added little girls). He’s still young, and he’s too duplicitous to be an innocent, even if he’s rather clean. Now he’s in a position to shape a life, to decide the plot - he’s the one who has to grow up and settle his business.

In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the control centre really matters. I mainly mean to say that it has thematic significance, but I guess I’ll trot through its obvious functions in the drama first. It’s the location from which we see the reactions to the action. That means that it sets the parameters for the show during those monster battle segments, tells the audience stuff - “It’s a Sinker!” and so forth. The base is where we go to analyse stuff and raise our eyebrows (from behind the geeky spectacles of science) at the staggering power levels.

This high-tech setting lends a tone of shiny shiny scientificness. It robots-up the not very robotic mecha action, makes it feels more like sci-fi and less like some random colourful giants having fights. At the same time as providing this sci-fi sheen it also humanises the action. Eva uses this trick several times when the action turns really nasty, with the reactions to the rampages and brain-rapes bringing home the brutality.

Anyway, the watchers aren’t just there for our convenience, they’re actors in the drama. And their role as the ones who watch the action involves some pretty serious power-plays. On the one had it raises the hero above the others by having him act while they just talk. On the other hand it creates an array of interpersonal relations based in surveillance, which contain our hero.

Our pal Shinji isn’t making many decisions. He’s a drone in a high tech hive. Sure, we, who see him up close, know that as a human being he’s a neurotic mess - far from a fighting machine. But after school he goes to the fleshbot, everyone sits and scans him, and he tries to perform anyway - his actions defined by others.

So many heroes seem to acquire power on account of protecting something, which is a neat way of making killing people into acceptable social action. Violence can thus be disconnected from personal morality. There’s a difference of agency between one who acts violently after consulting their inner beliefs, and one who acts by consulting others for the ideal position. In that standard where the hero gains strength from protecting comrades it matters that they watch - their presence is a source of power because it suggests that the inner certainties of the hero are in sync with their own social world.

In Eva being the one elected to smash stuff up isn’t so great. Sure Shinji is saving everybody - but he’s being coerced into it, living in an environment designed for an emotionless doll like Rei. Where positively designed heroes step up and take on the mantle of representative of the people Shinji lacks that sort of moral certainty, and has to be constantly kept on course by those who watch him - by whatever means necessary.

It’s always clear that Shinji is a pawn. He has power, but his morality is confused, and the seemingly protective goals he is guided towards by authority figures are merely part of a greater scheme. Eva gives us the hero as dupe, communications means surveilance, a trap run by Machiavellians.

Thing is, Eva is about the human singularity. Cut past the giant dancing robots, the conspiracies and the charming Biblical wallpapaer and that’s it. And in that place Shinji would be completely linked with everyone. It’s pure communication, displayed as sexual. It is, in fact, the ultimate contrast to the regimented watching array with which Shinji communicates with the military scientists.

In Kino’s journey a nation where all citizens (telepathically) communicate everything becomes a nightmare - everybody hides away from each other, afraid of personal truths. Eva offers something like that, except that our personalities merge too - eliminating the downside of communication. And that’s a heaven, an enlightened state, if an inhuman one.

In Eva being human means having personal issues. When it asks whether we’d be happier as thinking goo it’s setting up an opposition between a society of individuals communicating and a collection of minds in unity. Whilst individuality may be the explicit issue it has to be remembered that the way in which individual relationships function is affected by social structures. When one person is the actor and the other the watcher there’s all the ingredients for a dysfunctional dynamic.

The command centre in Eva represents the future society presented in Eva. Shinji is significantly defined by how he is being watched. The scientific approach, the militarism, the rigorous analysis. The fact that it’s Misato (and, in the shadows, his dad) who approach him via that apparatus. He looks to them for his certainties, and they monitor his pulse. It’s a kind of nightmare. Not so creepy as the singularity of course, because it’s a set of social restrictions that parallel reality.

Because this blog really needed another Cowboy Bebop post. And because new episodes get microanalysed all the time, and I liked seeing lelangir go over some of his best-loved scenes. And because I tend to write about series as a whole, when a stand alone episode can merit analysis. So then, episode 22, ‘Cowboy Funk’.

We’ve got our terrorist, Teddy Bomber, with his political mission. And we’ve got Andy, Space Cowboy, hogging the limelight. It’s an episode which starts with an elegant futurecrafted sci-fi tower, wanders through an affluent bar, a dusky local market, and finishes in bombed-out ruins and a dusty highway.

Oh Architecture! Home to meticulously planned modernity, intellectual constructions whose intentions baffle the public - peculiar shapes and titanic gherkins. Shaping our lives, representing our societies. Our pathetic villain cares deeply for it, for the symbolism of bringing those skyscrapers crashing down. And our heroes? For them, it’s a playground, or a place to make a living.

Our terrorist only wants to be heard, to live out his thoughts. In the first moments of the show his face is hidden, he laughs to himself, he has knowledge, power. Soon he’s sweating, people are ignoring him willy-nilly, the TV hosts don’t even bother to make time to read out his manifesto. He’s on his way to a kind of passive acceptance of his own weakness, the futility of his attempts at making a style which can change the world.

In contrast to this desperate attention-seeker we have two men who surrender to image, who achieve a sort of purity. Teddy Bomber tells people to listen to him, Andy rides a horse through a window. Which is rather more effective attention-seeking. While the bomber worries about his image, sticking to teddy bears, creating simple patterns in his trail of destruction, Spike and Andy are surrendered to their style, living it out.

Or, at least, that’s how Spike used to be defined. Turns out, he isn’t truly the ultimate ’space cowboy’. Season two of Bebop sees a Spike who is rather less bulletproof, who takes the odd beating. In ep. 22 he’s seen talking himself up - the surest sign of impotence in a universe where actions speak loud. He claims to have a higher “level.. no.. rank”, and shows the viewer that, for all his cool, there’s a faker inside him too - that he’s just a bit less fake than Teddy Bomber, more able to detach himself from real life and be his image.

Meanwhile, Andy claims not to remember a man he chased yesterday, he lives in the present, he doesn’t have a mask to drop. Staring into Faye’s eyes (at his own reflection), he lives within his own image - and can, if necessary, swap between images. Andy is a kind of postmodern Übermensch, his identity is entirely false, and thus flawless, impenetrable. Of course he’s also a rich kid, a spoiled child on a joyride, but he transcends this real identity, the soundtrack of the world announces his entrances - the writers allow him to be inhumanly pure.

The episode is where the central characters in the show meet fiction - Spike finds a doppelgänger who is as outrageous to him as he himself would be to us in real life. A ludicrously exaggerated archetype who reveals a truth. The same applies to Faye, who goes home with this ultra-Spike, in her killer dress, and acts out a mockery of her relationship with the original comic self-obsessed Space Cowboy. Andy couldn’t exist in real life, he’s set up as the opposite to the realistically hopeless Teddy Bomber - as pure style. He makes our cast feel a bit more human, and, because he’s got pure style, he steals the show.

Words were said, words were wrong. Father! I will do it! I will admit my wrongness!

I complained that The Tower of Druaga was turning into a straight up quest prefaced by a bizarrely inappropriate parody, a cheap attempt to subvert the genre without adding anything to it. I thought that the opening was going to undermine the dynamic of the series, that it would be a mere tacked on peculiarity in the course of my pleasingly competent fun adventure story.

I have just seen Druaga ep.5. I do not need this show to rescue the fantasy genre in anime. It has a higher calling. It is hilarious. It’s that same undermining of expectations all over again, only even funnier. Melt does not show mercy toward men, I shall not show mercy toward myself. I took shit too seriously, I was wrong to do so, I stand corrected.

Oh speculative fiction, how you are mistreated. Or at least, mistreated by me. I’ve read very very little, all of which was out of date. This despite the fact that my head tells me that the page is the natural arena for the stuff, the best place to really explore those ideas. Instead, most of the visions of the future I come across are novelty “science” stories in the papers and vaguely speculative films (also, all too often, outdated).

The TV series seems like a reasonable way around some of the problems raised by speculation on film. They have less of a time constraint, more of an ability to build an impression of normal life. They also deliver that same audio-visual element which can’t quite be found on the page.

The future should never be pictured as life with flashy add-ons. There’s a need for a holistic view, for us to ask how people can and will change. When people say “actually this sci-fi is about the present day” I get suspicious. It’s like the stuff can’t be worthwhile unless it’s a metaphor. They should mean, “this tells us about the human condition and our fate”, not “this presents a clear parallel with the events of 9/11″. Evidently this is a challenge for writers, and most “literary” writers ignore it, contributing to the poor reputation of the genre, and the fact that I don’t read much of it. Frankly, we need to capture the flavour of imagined futures, to really feel their textures.

Ghost in the Shell is all texture. When I saw it I was rather disappointed. Expecting an examination of the future, what I got was a gorgeous treat for the eyes, with strangely little substance. It gave the future a flavour, but never convinced me that this was the future. It was elegant and fantastic, but unreal. It was a bit like Blade Runner, except for the fact that I adore Blade Runner to the point where I can’t even communicate how amazing I think it is.

I’ve just started GITS: Stand Alone Complex. As I was lead to believe, this one’s a bit different. It’s thorough, convincing. Its future is less tied to android aesthetics than to the political, it’s life as data labyrinth - the slow invasion of the computerised, not the flashy intrusion of cyborgs. As speculation the series suits me better than the film, but it did raise another question. There’s apparently a live action film coming. The series already feels close to live action.

In my last post I suggested that animation needs to stake its claim at the cinemas, demonstrate its virtues on the biggest screens. When anime isn’t showy, when a massive element of the aesthetic it works with is a feeling of the real, I kind of wonder what the point is. Is Stand Alone Complex just a way round live-action TV budgets? That’s not a criticism of the show really, because it doesn’t lose anything from being animated, art and design is impeccably arranged.

It does, however, make me wonder about the projection of alternative societies that we get from sci-fi. How much is that feel, that flavour, governed by the medium? The engagement is with (if you’ll excuse the pretension) art. It’s not just an idea of the shape of the future, it’s an attempt to create it as human experience. Which is something art does for the present too, in all its permutations.

So when I watch Ghost in the Shell it’s not just saying what the future feels like, it’s hitting a particular area of the future. It’s the future for a cop, for justice enforcement. And in presenting the image of life for the Major and co. it’s establishing a critical criteria, deciding which bit of the future really matters, where the story is in this different human society, which bit gives me the real flavour of the place. Which is a bloody overextended way of saying: the show has my full attention. With any luck I’ll eventually crank out a detailed post about what it says, for now I’m just glad that I’m watching some good speculative fiction, for once.

I go to the cinema pretty regularly, and since I do so to be entertained I mostly ignore the blockbusters. It’s difficult not to be sceptical towards Hollywood fare, it’s mired in the pursuit of the latest fad, and the industry has largely sequestered its auteurs away from the biggest budgets, where they can do less harm with their eccentricities. Thing is, I like a good blockbuster, it’s just that in practise most of them turn out a bit rubbish.

Why is this relevant subject matter on an anime blog? Because of the release in cinema’s of Howl’s Moving Castle a few years ago; a flawed piece of filmmaking which doubles as a superb cinematic experience. As one of those chaps who got into anime via Miyazaki I feel a fair bit of nostalgia for my first viewing of Howl. Since its release I’ve rewatched it on the small screen, and despite liking it, just knew it wasn’t the same, wasn’t big enough.

Howl is not entirely satisfying, even on the big screen. The story concludes rather messily, and I found myself wondering whether something had been lost in the adaptation to the screen. Still, I think it’s one of the great widescreen experiences of the decade. All those massive Lord of the Rings battles can take a hike if I can keep that moment when Howl flies out of his front door into the flaming battlefield, or the instant when the camera flies into the guts of an airship above the garden sanctum. The film is stuffed full of the visually sublime.

Even in the cinema I knew for most of the duration that Miyazaki had done better. But when it hit the peaks and kicked into top gear, it had me 100%. Unlike Earthsea, perhaps no worse in plotting (another questionable adaptation), but not so sexy. Earthsea’s world didn’t offer quite the same capacity for ludicrous flights of pure expression, and as a feature film it didn’t offer enough introspection regarding that world to compensate for the lack of bells and whistles.

Do I get that same widescreen kick on my tv or computer? No. At best what I get is like a pop single on a crap car radio, it is a kick, it isn’t widescreen. Soul Eater is my latest poppy thrill, and I really care about the quality of the video I get there, the pure slickness helps to lubricate (sorry) the adrenaline rush. As mentioned in the comments here, if Naruto was being made by BONES, it would be a different beast altogether. Budget matters, and it isn’t just animation that’s affected, it’s art, it’s image. We’re in an image based medium, not every series demands an uber budget, but some do. And even when they don’t need them, they usually benefit significantly (like Kurenai).

CGI rarely does it for me anymore. Last time I was genuinely blown away was by Danny Boyle’s thriller in space Sunshine. Which, oddly, isn’t that fresh or ambitious visually, just bold and graceful with its effects budget. I guess that’s how I get the kick, less through the latest innovation than through being overwhelmed - seeing primary colours like I’ve never seen them before.

Animation is great for this, frankly CG can’t currently compete - the colours aren’t so pretty. I find the sheen, the sense of a disjunction between live action and the special effects, distracting. Where some people came to anime for story reasons (like serial structuring), I came for more superficial reasons. Namely the belief that the fantastic could be more effectively realised in animation (which is mostly for kids shows round here).

I’ve seen big screen Spirited Away twice, it’s the origin of my interest in anime. It is better than Howl, and just as lovely. Howl may not be a great film, but it is the work of a man whose visual flair has never really been in question. While he was still active it was absolutely for the best that he was given the chance to express himself in the biggest arenas - if all he produced that final time around was a widescreen kick, and not a classic story, then hell, it’s still magnificent on those terms.

What matters in widescreen is the visionary, and how thoroughly that visual judgement is backed by the studio. Visual flair doesn’t just distract from plot weaknesses, it offers an entirely different type of entertainment. For something like Howl, the way to fulfil that potential isn’t just a big budget, it is the cinema. Cinematic releases are a way to watch which can improve the work - making it bigger, clearer, louder. Anime is an ideal medium for widescreen entertainment, cinematic releases may well be the best way to impress the world.

It’s a commonly heard criticism - “show x didn’t do anything for me, it was just another —— show”. Sometimes there’s an suggestion that the genre itself is to blame for being inherently rubbish, often it’s more a criticism of a lack of imagination, the show failing to find its distinct identity. I imagine it’s the bane of many a genre craftsman. And there’s one obvious way out for the writer.

Shows which subvert themselves allow the writer to reassure the viewer that they too are genre-literate. It’s like saying “look, I watch these shows too, and this is an attempt to engage with the genre and with you, the fan”. It undercuts that rude implication from the critics - that the writer is just a drudge, churning out replicas. And, obviously, this self-awareness can be made funny. But winking at the viewer is like winking at a child in a swimming pool, it has implications.

The Tower of Druaga succeeded in attracting much attention (including my own) when it turned out to start up with a colossal pisstake. It was, in a way, a statement which said more about what the show wasn’t trying to do than anything else. It lampooned plot conventions, exaggerated already silly things to magnificent degrees, it was crap fantasy driven to extremes. It felt like something made by fans, according to that old adage that to really satirise something you first have to love it.

As has become rapidly apparent, the series proper is a fairly straight fantasy quest, it is marching into well trodden territory, trying to milk it for a bit more quality. And the writers chose start out by taking a potshot at their genre tools. It knows there will be cynics, and takes a chance, goes for the wink.

Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu also tried winking. Except that where Druaga countered expectations Haruhi pre-empted them. Before the series could reveal its supernatural elements it was making a parody of magical girl nonsense. Of course this parody got its laughs from being slipshod more than from being absurd - which I didn’t find all that funny. The intro also functioned as a genre-aware curveball, but instead it ended up being used an attempt at enticing the viewer through its ambiguity, in contrast to Druaga’s transparent satire.

Rather oddly, whilst I found Druaga’s opening much funnier, it was Haruhi’s which augured for a true sense of playfulness. It wasn’t such an explicit statement, just the first of many slices of peculiarity woven into the fabric. Both shows are, at their heart, sincere. Druaga is turning into an honest questing show, Haruhi had a genuine central message. But Druaga’s reality turns out to be rather close to what it lampooned. It has the odd joke (e.g. Jils’ choice of weapon in eps 2 and 3), but doesn’t follow the model of ep 1.

It’s much safer for a show to demonstrate self-awareness by being only partly genre-aware - taking the piss out of the marginal aspects (Haruhi’s espers), and leaving core ones sacred. Letting the winks at the audience serve as a playful aside. Rather in the way that Love Hina invites the absurd with gusto but tries to retain the integrity of the love story at its heart.

Incidentally, the Druaga hero Jil, as seen in episode 1, is a daydreaming deadringer for Keitaro. By episode 2 he’s moving away from this clutziness toward a more serious character (although he does successfully walk in on a naked girl by accident (”S-such talent for awkwardness, you must be…. the chosen one… the protagonist!”). I can understand why he’s started heading in a different direction, nobody needed to give Keitaro a sword. Before this character shift, I was concerned for the integrity of that inevitable climactic moment when Jil comes face to face with Druaga, gulps, leans in gently, blushes, and stabs him in the face.

It was nice to see a well deployed piece of parody, frankly I wouldn’t have bothered with the show had it not been for the buzz about episode 1. But I’m still unsure whether it has any lasting purpose. I kind of hope that the rest of the show will prove to be a blown up version of ep1 - pretending to be sincere for a minute or two before going oddball. If that’s the case, as the OP might suggest, then all power to team Druaga. Otherwise that opening feels unnecessary, because it isn’t simply humorous, it’s satirical - and so rather out of touch with the following action.

If I have a preference it’s for shows to be a only slightly self-aware. It’s one thing to have a laugh by taking on the generic a tad cock-eyed, but a thorough demolition of genre as seen in Druaga’s ep1 changes my expectations. It makes me expect a similar boldness to run through the rest of the writing, whereas instead we have only the odd laugh. A great opening operating within a generic framework reinforces my faith in the viability of a genre, a wink makes me wonder why the writer is calling attention to their own presence so loudly.

On the whole this blog has covered shows I really like, mostly because I’ve been watching the “classics” of anime, and have thus been exposed to a lot of quality productions. Frankly I don’t really like Elfen Lied, and don’t think much of its quality - so I’m going to qualify the praise this post chucks at it later on in advance…

Elfen Lied plays a pretty clichéd traumatised child/psycho line and all it really adds to the mix is a fairly gratuitously cutesy alter-ego and some invisible killer powers. It suffers from having a truly godawful male lead. Not because he’s “wimpy”, but because he’s dull, witless and worthy beyond belief.

It throws in overused elements with enthusiasm - ruthless hitman, redemption, cute little girl of ultimate powarr, evil corporation, parental absence, convenient memory loss. The most interesting thing abut the series as a whole is the way in which it curtails the ten-a-penny wider (manga) plotline which seems to threaten the fate of the world, and instead is all about the central romance. Not that I find that romance at all convincing, or touching.

But overused plot elements can always be delivered astoundingly well. Mostly I think the astounding thing in Elfen Lied is the abundance of severed limbs and red splashes. But not always. No I am not about to talk about some precise moment of dramatic excellence (because I never invested enough in the characters to notice any, if there were any). I’m on about that moment when Elfen Lied seems like it’s the alpha and the omega of the grotesque, the horrific. Yes, that means I’m talking about the start of episode 1, the gore-fest. Spoilers, I guess.

Elfen Lied takes a superpowered escape from a research lab (seen that before) and makes it nigh on impossible to see as just an escape sequence. Yes, the visceral element is important here, it’s overwhelming and thus dramatically effective. Its prominence is also a big statement of intentions aimed square at the viewer.

The OP starts it off. It’s an alien slice of elegance, ambitiously appropriating Klimpt into a creepy montage of corpse-ishly pale nudity. A case of Elfen Lied feeling remote and unassailable, something that’s lost as the plot becomes more apparent. Aesthetic boldness is the great strength of the series as a whole, and it’s important that from the first moment it demands our attention.

And then, in an instant, we’re in severed armsville, and watching a chap having his head blown away. The next death is shown through intercutting of twisting metal with a blank shot of a door. Elfen Lied starts out with the harshest of offences to the eyes, then cuts back into implied violence. It’s like the history of the horror film backwards - uncensored cruelty followed by a more psychological nastiness.

Next Lucy starts to hum a mockery of that opening theme song in her slow slow walk to the door. A man is watching her from a bloodied room. Her metal mask bears a distorted skull look, straight out of Alien. The show emphasises its own creepiness, then cuts to a clueless ditzty secretary archetype. Yes, this is established territory for horror, and Elfen Lied makes no secret of it.

This mixture of explicit and implied violence is rhythmically driven home as Lucy strolls along corridors. Again and again, atmospheric lighting, bloody corpses. There may be no other route to sickening a modern desensitised audience than to simply hammer home the cruelty of the violence we are watching until its pointlessness sticks. The faceless girl stares down a man before killing him slowly, this isn’t just gore, it’s repulsive as an idea, not just an image. Elfen Lied has taken that hyper-stylised opening and moved firmly into the morally unpleasant.

Vitally important to the sense of boldness is the stark visual presentation of these scenes. The cruel intercutting with real life for the office girls in the lab is equally blunt. In that moment when Lucy kills the secretary Elfen Lied leaps from a cruel purposefulness to total excess - the visceral gone insane. When Lucy leaves the lab and gets her helmet pinged off by the sniper it’s like an ending. It’s a condensed horror film, gone within 9 minutes.

I don’t know if that 9 minutes is really essential viewing. I certainly don’t feel that the series it leads into has much to say or even says it with great eloquence. But there’s no question in my mind that that opening sequence was captured on screen with all the vividness of a nightmare. They say that great music can be a single note played beautifully, Elfen Lied plays a bunch of ugly ugly notes, but manages to do so perfectly, just the once.

There’s this moment in the Christmas Special of Love Hina when a festive businessman charmingly gropes Motoko on the train. She turns and, having spent most of the series sending people flying (harmlessly) with swirly blasts of wind, smartly smacks him in the face, breaks his glasses in two, and floors him. A whole series of cartoony ‘girl hits pervy boy’ laughs, then BANG!

It’s a striking (sorry) moment, and a total counterweight to that first moment in which Urashima Keitaro is sent rocketing skyward by the force of girly justice, a moment oft-repeated (very very oft). In this case Motoko really hurts somebody, but she’s also hitting somebody who damn well deserves it rather than a hapless accidental victim. That’s the space Love Hina operates in - it’s half about a boy doomed to get himself hit by irate girls, and half about girls deciding not to hit the boys after all. Yes, it’s the most teenage rom-com possible, welcome to puberty, when you’re an adult Motoko will really hit you - hope you can have a laugh while you’re here.

For me, Love Hina wins when it’s funny and fails when the jokes get tedious, pretty simple. And so, mostly, it wins out. Wins out by being exuberantly silly. It’s the kind of infantile, unrestrained and clearly Japanese silliness that’s fascinating for a foreigner. Quirks abound in the pursuit of laughs. I guess that’s how you run a show with such a straightforward premise.

Oh, and the premise. A Harem? Seriously? This is the first “harem” series I’ve seen, I understand that this is but one distinctive model in contrast to others with alternate realities, or a sense of suspense as to the choice of girl. As far as I’m concerned Love Hina is a romantic comedy, the other girls are a massive part of the series but Naru has it nailed down from ep.1.

The romantic tension moments were largely played for laughs, and when they weren’t they were merely placed as surmountable obstacles in the pursuit of the chosen girl. Is “harem” just an anime with a catalogue of carefully variagated wank-fodder included for the male viewer? I’ve been known to enjoy a dash of fanservice, it just seems a bit odd to decide the genre classification of a show based on its presence - some softcore nudity is perfectly pleasant, but is it really defining? Genres are just tools for reference, is this really the label most relevant to anime fans?

Hell, the OP basically tells you that this is a romance: first shot - Narusegawa dead centre, cast introduced - Shinobu on housework (no comment), Kaola on banana, Motoko displays swordsmanship, Kitsune displays breasts, Naru spins around like Cinderella and smiles straight at the camera like the show was all about her, cast shot- Naru smiles into camera, the last shot pans across her standing next to Keitaro. There’s no element of choice here, she is the chosen one, Love Hina is monogamous - Keitaro is in the hands of fate.

I can see that there’s a divergence between Love Hina as the story of Keitaro and Naru and the experience of the viewer as voyeur. But doesn’t that apply to a whole bunch of shows? Is the presence of a bit of flesh so overwhelming that it turns the show into a harem? I know that the fanservice in Love Hina occurs in spadeloads, but so do absurdist jokes. Classifying it as a “harem” show says a great deal about the viewer, and (being a high minded and lofty individual, above mere physical desires), this viewer would have found rom-com a more helpful tag.

Anyway. Out there on the web are a number of meditations on Urashima Keitaro, many of them blunt and profane [Results 1 - 10 of about 4,970 for keitaro is a pussy. (0.16 seconds)]. He’s the series anchor, a terrifying amalgamation of the worst things about being pre-pubescent, pubescent, unlucky, and generally useless, rolled into a ball of concentrated nerd.

At the same time though, he ends up kind of admirable. He’s the teenage boy as an innocent, pure hearted and kind, but (importantly) far from lofty in his morality. It’s a nicely managed mix, and yeah, I was rooting for him all the way. Or, y’know, up till the point when the Naru-love was so firmly guaranteed that the series might as well have ended.

It is in the nature of the kind of vivid (if stereotypical) cast deployed in Love Hina that the characters will range from the appealing to the infuriating, and I think which they are depends of the viewers’ (cough) tastes. I guess genuine characters are the big thing here though, they’re what makes the show loveable, not “just” a somewhat scattershot comedy.

So then, Motoko and Shinobu genuinely show some depths and undergo change - and it’s nice that the story of each change is presented in a manner consistent with their individual styles. Kaola has a couple of throwaway mystical story episodes, but mainly gets on with deliriously laying landmines for the other cast members to step on. Kitsune gets a sort of mini-revelation to prove she’s more relevant to the plot than Kaola, but remains pretty shallow.

And then there’s Narusewgawa, the tricky one. Narusegawa’s personal emotional journey is repeated in microcosm every other episode, this tsundere thing only really makes sense when the plot is arranged about displaying it. There was a constant need to find new reasons for Naru to cycle through her traits, often rather tediously.

That said, each blushy moment adds something, and we get an incremental build up of sympathy for her. Mainly though, I found myself wondering how far light comedy is compatible with real character development. The core of the show is static, comedy from the interaction of caricatures, with added turtles. It’s kind of surprising that multiple cast members do get developed at all. That’s the trade off you get from a series which is rather too long for its underlying story - moments of artificial stretching of the fabric, but also gratifying opportunities to add nuances.

I’ve considered the significance of the popularity of the manga. Like I said before, it’s the characters that bring this show love from the devoted fans - and the manga sounds like the place to go for character. Frankly though, I don’t feel any need whatsoever to read it. I’m happy with Love Hina the throwaway show, and sceptical of the value of attempting to extract added value from a lightweight rom-com.

Love Hina the anime is a battle between buckets of goofy joy (good) and transparent cliche mining and filler (less than good). After all, only a comedy could support the kind of crap to be found here. The problem must be in making a show funny enough to bear the weight of this inherent silliness without losing the thread of the romance. Love Hina’s route of choice is to be completely unafraid to go for broke at the big plot moments (which can be hit and miss, but at least means that it hits home sometimes), and by being completely bleedin’ crazy every spare moment. Fine by me.