Monthly Archives: March 2016

March 7, 2016

Kizumonogatari Part 1

By omo

Kizu was a good time. Just a few points to a short movie that’s more akin to a very long TV episode here.

I watched it twice, once in NYC and once in NJ. The NYC showing gave out better loot, although it’s nothing significant. The crowd was also “better” in NY in that people more or less kept their wits together and it was less like a laugh-a-thon. These are just minor nitpicks for people who care about this stuff. Watching it twice also gives me the chance to focus on stuff other than taking the movie in, at least during the second go-around.

Kizumongoatari is the most impressionistic (for lack of a better term) thing out of Shaft that I’ve seen since maybe that vampire loli anime, or even Soul Taker. Like, that Kizu used French titles (and not even thoroughly!), is both humorously pretentious and yet appropriately chosen. They could’ve gone with a number of other languages, after all.

The feeling I can’t shake was that if I wanted an adaptation of Tsukihime, this is how I wanted it to be done.

The animation is great, I guess this is something you just have to see for yourself. There were a lot of visual references and nods. For people who didn’t come into Kizu with Bake under their belts the jokes might be lost on them, but it is all per se meaningful and perhaps most meaningful in that way to interpret the material. I thought also that if we take a step back and consider Bakemonogatari (and others) in the same way, where the only pitfall of Kizu’s predecessors was the production quality to impart the technical necessity that Kizu did not lack, but the others did, maybe I would not have gotten tired of the Monogatari series so fast.

It’s like unless the prurient stuff were of interest, there isn’t a whole lot that separates Monogatari the series with, say, Mushishi. And I think it’s a certain sort of doom when a subcultural artiste’s work is best compared to a National Geographic documentary (or its anime equivalent), (if) only in terms of content. Well, there were some token pervy jokes as you’d expect, and I’m glad there were, if only to keep the contrasting heavy and light feels of the film going.

The voice acting was good. It’s as you would expect out of our four notable voiced roles, although I think Hocchan stole the show. Sakurai’s Meme was extra irritating, which is credit on his part. Hearing the older-bodied Kiss-Shot was nice, especially in that kind of traumatic state. I guess they had to go to a baby crying to kind of make it sound at least plausible.

Kousaki Satoru’s soundtrack was tops actually, it’s appropriately knock-off in the sense that Kizu’s sense of style is equally knock-off. I was taken most particularly to the music used during the conversation between Hanekawa and Araragi, as if it was kind of ripped half from Evangelion and half from the rest of Kousaki’s works. Please forgive the drawn-and-quartered analogy in advance, but it is kind of like trying to enjoy driving a Lexus makes me want to just get back into a BMW all the more, but you would think the Lexus justifies the price tag, and is a well-appointed mechanism worthy on its own rights.

Which is to say, yeah, there is a visual/sound gag that kept resonating with the weeb audience and I don’t think it’s a bad thing. Let’s just say I hope the directorial crew for the movie got that feedback from the test audience in LA. Some jokes westerners get & like, which are sometimes not the same ones as the domestic audience.

I went into the experience already knowing what Kizu was about, and how this is part 1 of three, that you should expect about an hour, and that it is well animated. It was exactly what I expected. And it’s probably worth watching it twice in theaters. But this is mostly because I am already some kind of hardened otaku who is arguably the heart of this target audience, despite my distaste for Nisioisin…well, he has some good stuff, and some stuff not as good. More relevantly, there’s just too much of all of this, what people call TV anime. Having an elevated, polished and well-presented video entertainment as Kizumonogatari Part 1 is a welcomed change, if anything.

Leave a comment | posted in Bakemonogatari, Modern Visual Culture

March 1, 2016

GATE’s Nationalism Is Right-Wing Becaus(ry

By omo

As much GATE is obvious and per se a nationalistic fantasy about Japanese’s superiority in terms of its ability to leverage the SDF in a fantasy edge(?) case involving dealing with a barbaric & backward group of people (if they can be called that), it still deserves some observation and confirmation that this is the case.

Kuribayashi & Mercury

First of all, the SDF is constantly shown to have a high moral ground not only compared to the ruthless and backwards civilizations they are dealing with, but also there’s a lot of posturing of the SDF as the good guys even when pitched as a faction in a larger geopolitical and domestic picture. The Japanese parliament has different factions and there are some political voices that GATE mentions and shortly slant against, most notably during the inquiry of Rory. There are other snippets from the anime that we see elsewhere, including the onsen showdown between different wetworks teams of various nations. Those are obvious and stick out like sore thumbs.

Well, the question I want to ask is more that does glorifying the SDF per se puts GATE in a place along the lines of other pro-military and pro-right wing stories, and just how so? If you recall JP’s comment here, one wrinkle I have is just how “right” is, say, Muvluv’s Total Eclipse? Yeah, it is very racist, sure, and is conservative with its themes and outlooks, but how does racism equal right-wing? Just like how is GATE right-wing? It’s easier to establish a counter for a pro-SDF stance (as far as fantasy escapism goes) as a liberal work, perhaps. And you could argue that the individuals from GATE’s fantasy world are treated like normal human beings, and not, say, Terra Formar’s roaches. The world beyond the GATE is fanciful (to the degree that exploitation is definitely a motivation for various parties) but what is stopping “bad things” from happening? Is it not the SDF’s own sense of justice in terms of what it (and more importantly, its employees and officers, and arguably not just the SDF but also other officials of the Japanese government who are “boots on the ground”) deems as proper behavior? Is there a time and place to abridge agency of an occupied group? Is not GATE largely positing this hypo for the sake of showing us what happens as result? Where does dutiful intervention of foreign states stop and imperialism begin? Aren’t these questions that Japanese right-wingers wish they get to answer as real policy talk?

Of course, we don’t really expect GATE to really look into that grey area because it is a dose of reality that probably don’t resonate well in some aspects (although the series did remind me how Americans bribed Afghani chieftans with Viagara is, as far as stories go during the post-9/11 incursions), but it did go as far as to make the issue table stakes, to make it seem like an interesting tangent. Maybe someone who’s read the novel can comment.

And it’s really about how someone who isn’t getting a hard-on by all of this would answer the same questions.

To answer my not-as-rhetorical-as-it-may-seem question though, I think for every question GATE posits, it’s easy to think about how another country or political faction or outlook could answer them in a different way. It’s not quite like how, in romcom anime, the protagonist often slips when s/he is in the bathroom with a romantic interest, but there are certainly a number of valid and quality scenarios in which slipping and running into compromising situations are not in the writing. By the same token, is the massacre or show of force always required in dealing with fictional barbarians? It might be a really enjoyable thought exercise, but from the eyes of this American, is that an appropriate response? Or rather, wouldn’t slaughtering a bunch of fictional characters be the place to do it, rather than review what sort of slaughtering that has happened with Japanese soldiers on the right side of a rifle?

[There is a kind of insulting corollary to this, and it is that this sort of escape fantasy is precisely the thing Japan needs for its nationalism as an escape valve of its nationalist instincts? Like how lolicon manga is an escape valve for(ry. Not saying I believe or endorse this view (or many of my other statements in this post), just stating the argument here.]

There’s also a bigger picture issue here. I think the moment you elevate GATE from a fun fantasy exercise into a parallel to real worlds, the arguments against GATE as anything but a right-wing fantasy falls away. As a corollary, this is an inherent issue with a non-Japanese take of the story if we were to come into the story, say, as a member of another nation’s armed forces. How would Americans, or Canadians, or one of the EU countries, or Russia or China, etc… I don’t know, but that could be a good way to highlight just what’s both good and bad about GATE’s choices. I would think many of us, taken on a white-label view of GATE’s politics, will inflect our own politics on to it, and associate its high-handed treatment of the SDF with our own notion of whatever military organization we most closely associate with. And that’s not a bad thing. It also kind of makes it a right-wing thing, though.

Maybe we all can enjoy GATE innatively as what it is, and put ourselves in the protagonist’s starched uniforms. But I think soon some of us would rather make different decisions than he does. Maybe.

And I think that’s the crux of a good story about these kinds of things, harem or not. For the most part we can either enjoy or ignore that aspect of GATE, and maybe that’s enough.

9 comments | posted in GATE