The Yard Sale
I don’t know what passes for new gods. From my Judeo-Christian upbringing I can only say that, “Man, Japan, there’s way too many.” That said, Tama and Kagami are both fine specimens. I’m sure companies like GSC or SEGA will come out with something worthy for a household shrine. Oh, spoilers ahoy.
I, like many others, read Anime News Network’s news feeds. I, unlike many others, also read a lot of tweets. By a lot  I mean I probably go through 2000+ a day on average.
But let’s put that into perspective. Twitter is a massively popular social platform compared to ANN. In fact, it’s kind of incomparable because one is really just a news site–I’m guessing it’s the sort of thing some people check once a day to get their daily dose of news. Maybe some people do the same with twitter; it certainly allows for that sort of slow-paced, not-drinking-from-a-fire-hose sort of consumption.
What I’m trying to get at is I’m wondering why people share the ANN story to the Makoto Shinkai’s new movie trailer, rather than the Youtube page itself or Shinkai’s tweets. I am going to assume this is mostly because these people either didn’t click through ANN’s embedded Youtube video, in other words engaging the content without digging in; or because it’s more convenient to share that.
We've posted new trailer for ????? "The Garden of Words" with English Russian French Korean Chinese subtitles. Enjoy! http://t.co/8ShWiHAAPD
— ??? (@shinkaimakoto) February 21, 2013
The reason why I’m wondering is largely because the ANN story basically copy word-for-word everything the Youtube page has. The Youtube page has English-translated credit and English-language film synopsis and everything. It’s Youtube, not some awkwardly-programmed 20th century Japanese website. Maybe if I was reading about this news the first time, getting it from ANN makes sense. But as someone who read it from Makoto Shinkai’s twitter account, it feels really cheap? I don’t know how to put it in the right way.
I’m sure there are plenty of reasons to do it either way, but why does it feel oddly off in this specific case? Is it because Shinkai tweeted it in English and some of us were fortunate enough to see it? It’s no different than say if FUNi or Sentai did something and ANN reported it, although typically you don’t get the kind of layering we get here in those cases. Actually, maybe another factor here is that watching that movie trailer as an embedded video feels wrong. You really should watch it in high definition, and that’s something no news source reporting it mentioned.
Instead of me making something out of probably nothing, consider it a PSA: If you haven’t seen the latest trailer for Koto no Ha no Niwa, and you think Shinkai’s animated movies are possibly something interesting, do yourself a favor and go to Youtube, select it for the language you would like for the annotations, and change the resolution to 1080 and let it cache before you watch it. I promise you it’s 10 times more gorgeous looking than most embedded resolution you’ll find.
Bonus: A lot of us were initially surprised at casting Kana Hanazawa as the female lead. Shinkai actually tweeted about it shortly after the initial wave of tweets, saying he had trouble deciding who to select for the role, especially since Hanazawa is younger than the lead character, but her acting won him over. If you want to read between the lines, it probably means someone older got passed over for the role!
Bonus 2: Some people were disappointed about TENMON not partnering with Shinkai again on Garden of Words. While I’m definitely looking forward to more TENMON, I’m okay with the new guy. In this case the new name is Daisuke KASHIWA–seems like a post kind of guy who turned to soundtrack/neoclassical music, according to his last.fm profile. Seems like right up my alley.
So I was watching The Unlimited — Hyoubu Kyousuke as it slowly turns into this psychological study of the backstory of Hyoubu Kyousuke, the namesake character at the center of the story. We see how there’s all this ZKC trapping to the show and for the most part that is the fun and game part of ZKC and Hyoubu Kyousuke. It also turns from this internationally-wanted terrorist group slash Psi-user humanitarian effort into this made-and-born-in-Japan episode about where a human experiment project (in the form more like the X-Men) come about.
What I’m trying to say is that as the show progresses, it gets increasingly Japan-centric both in terms of the setting but also in terms of the characters. I guess it can’t be helped that ZKC is mostly a Japan-based thing so the characters and their organizations and the underlying government ploys are tied to that geography. It cannot be helped that Kyousuke is this foreign-born (from Manchuria in the 1930s) Japanese in the first place. Just as it cannot be helped that anime is really a made-for-Japan sort of thing.
I don’t really think it is particularly problematic, but it’s interesting to point out how over the course of the series, the age of the characters appearing and having lines slowly decreases on average. At first it’s basically Kyousuke, Andy, and the guys and girls who are in the tough business of whatever international-spy-intrigue things. Then it gets the Japanese kids involved, like the ZKC themselves. Then the little girl character Yugiri gets a lot of screen time. Then now we go back to the past when Kyousuke is just a wee lad.
I’m not sure what to make of it, I just want to know how did my bro-tastic, superpower-intrigue genre anime turn into this.
You know, if the War on Pants came AFTER this show, I might be more receptive to it. At this point, however, I’m just hoping the ending to this doesn’t suck. Which is probably a futile thing to wish for, given how it is sort of a prequel-slash-spinoff. Just like how Hyoubu Kyousuke is probably struggling with some deadly condition, in which every time he goes “Unlimited” it robs some of his life, maybe this anime is also the slow decaying mess that slowly loses part of what it’s good for with every passing episode. I don’t know.
I laughed when Hashihime titled it “youth movement.” I guess it’s true when most of GJ-bu’s cast members are under 17 years old. But it’s not even the first or the lowest-on-average otaku anime in terms of seiyuu age. There’s this (now-licensed) anime called Sasami: Magical Girls Club where, at the time, all the main voice acting girls were 13 years old. I assume it’s licensed because it is a tangential hinge on the Tenchi Muyo franchise, and it’s probably not a horrible show, I don’t know.
I want to raise this point because what I think is a good job isn’t that GJ-bu is full of young’uns. I think what is good is the profession of the seiyuu idol has seen yet another subtle transformation.
In Magical Girls Club, the series is more like a launch vehicle for a potential teenage idol unit, working with girls already on an idol entertainer track. You can check ANN for details. On the other hand, the girls in GJ-bu are on the seiyuu track, groomed to probably become actual seiyuu-idols.
Seiyuu idols are not a new thing. They’ve been around for maybe a couple decades now, as a genuine career path, at least enough of a path to make a name for yourself; the Shiinas, Hayashibaras of the world. But one Nana Mizuki doesn’t make an industry; she’s just an icon of a larger underpinning of systems and businesses and more importantly, entertainers of varying degrees of success. And honestly, Nana is more about anison than idol. Idol, in my mind, is like Yukarin Tamura and Yui Horie, who are also groomed in the same steps but are nurtured not with the money of a hit success, but a cult-like following. Their businesses are not so different, but I think there’s a reason why I don’t think Nana’s generation will raise another Tokyo-dome caliber seiyuu.
Well, people might take issue with me saying Nana Mizuki is mainstream, and I understand where they’re coming from; it’s like saying AKB0048 is not mainstream. But I think that is making “not mainstream” a meaningless indicator if I have to go the range from, say, Ibuki Kido, to a girl a month older, Juri Takahashi (of AKB48 team A). One is clearly, actually, mainstream enough to be called that. Nana is mainstream enough for Kohaku, so that has to count for something. But if Nana is not mainstream, to satisfy the semantic arguer, then everyone else is waaaaay not-mainstream. Super un-mainstream. Super-super-stream not-mainstream.
But it’s nice to see a deeper integration and talent cultivation for the likes of Kido and Miyamoto. Maybe the debutante Chika Arakawa will build on her possible success here. I mean, think about it. It isn’t that kids did anime voices; some of my today’s favorites include the ever-present Miyuki Sawashiro who started at 13 years old and ex-child performer Maaya Sakamoto who started at 15. It’s distinctly different than, say, Yuuki Aoi’s Murasaki at 15, because that was the case where they hired a kid to play a kid, not so much because they were grooming her career to be whatever the petit-pas that Aoi is trying to do today.
Actually, what is Yuuki Aoi trying to do anyway? I think this is kind of exactly not the thing, say, Yui Ogura is doing. That’s what I’m talking about. But that might be jumping the gun. Maybe we just like kids in our anime playing our animated kids. Is that what the Forever-17 club is trying to do?
I feel the story of Psycho-Pass is a key to unlock a certain understanding from From the New World. I guess in order to talk about it, there will have to be some spoilers.
There are some key elements in Shinsekai Yori that keeps it beautiful–like this ever-present human darkness. It’s like every given life that is born to society, society plays Russian roulette with statistical odds in the production of a monster. The monsters in Shinsekai Yori are world-destroyers in the most literal sense. A character refers to it as a nuclear bomb, and I think most of us would agree. It becomes the nightmare scenario where even if 99.999999% of mankind is perfectly upstanding and good, all it takes is one bad apple to ruin everything.
In the same way that is the exact same perspective from Psycho-Pass (if in that society, humans are much worse on average). In order to play this numbers game with statistics (which already assumes a lot of different qualities about the human condition that you and I might not agree with) we can skew the odds heavily in society’s favor if everyone just give up on something. In Psycho-Pass, it’s the obvious flaws with the Sybil system. It does a clumsy job of illustrating it for us, but they’re spelled out plainly.
In Shinsekai Yori, the scheme is much more sinister. It’s so sinister, that we don’t even get a good look at it. It’s so well-disguised, we can call it simply, human evolution. It’s when we de-evolve ourselves to limit the conscious capacity to commit murder, to hypnotize our children so to limit the power of their minds, and ultimately kill the potentially dangerous elements of our society in the form of children-killing-by-committee. We never really got a up-close look at all this, except maybe the scene where Saki goes over the details of her terms with the Ethics Committee chief. We never really get a close look of the hypnosis or the way these visual triggers were genetically added into the strains cultivated at the village they were living in. We don’t know how the memory manipulation were done besides what we could guess by inference. It’s not really the focus of the narrative, but these things are pretty important.
Of course, it may only seem like “de-evolve” from the perspective of a world where not everyone is a live bomb ready to go off. In some ways, the scenario in Shinsekai Yori is what engineers called an edge case. You can look at it in the context of, say, gun control, or in the context of an effective way to prevent crime. You could also look at it in the case where how can power and responsibility coexist. There are a bunch of different ways to tackle the same framework underneath. It’s in this overarching context that I examine the stories about Saki and Satoru and Maria and all those kids, in that the values we perceive to be important to cherish and reinforce in life may run against these survival, political, societal, and even evolutionary forces.
Unfortunately, this also means in a season where I’m watching Psycho-Pass and Shinsekai Yori at the same time, Psycho-Pass is more like Psycho-Passe, and if it isn’t for Urobuchi’s sensual murders I probably would have already dropped it out of the weakness for themes. Of course, I don’t think most people are approaching Shinsekai  Yori as an ethics experimental pressure chamber, and Psycho-Pass has other redeeming values too, but for me I can’t take all this Mole Rats business any other way.
Actually, an experiment is a good way to phrase it. The fantastic setting is oozing with realism in Shinsekai Yori. There are pluses and minuses to this approach, that said, but it feels like after 17 episodes the experiment has finally began.