Shigofumi ~ Letters from the Departed ~

Shigofumi ~ Letters from the Departed ~ is an anime and light novel series created by Amamiya Ryo about a typically emotionless, silver-haired moe archetype called Fumika, whose job it is to deliver letters from the dead (the titular shigofumi). She has an annoying talking staff called Kanaka and a faintly fetishistic retro postal worker's outfit that, intentionally or otherwise, makes her look a bit like Boogiepop.

In terms of content, most episodes are hamstrung by the kind of cliched character archetypes and cookie-cutter sentimentality that plagues a significant proportion of anime and light novels, as with the fourth episode, where some heavily yurified schoolgirls go on a training camp with their tennis club while one girl, Ran, deals with her feelings about the death of the mother who abandoned her as a child. As pulp genre fiction it works fine, but given how seriously the series takes itself, as viewers we should expect and demand more realistic characterisation. Why did the mother never contact Ran after leaving even though she'd been secretly going to all her daughter's tennis matches to support her? Why, when discovering this via the mother's (very long) shigofumi, does Ran react in the way she does? Unfortunately, without letting Ran's feelings for her mother step beyond broad strokes melodrama, the script is unable to breathe life into the premise.

The series' main plot thread involving Fumika is similarly rubbish. Her father, a supposedly genius writer called Mikawa Kirameki (it translates as something absurd like "beautiful glittering river") is a ridiculous character and impossible to take seriously. Once more, if Shigofumi was going for overblown camp, he could have been brilliant -- a mad writer who drafts his novels by inking them with a glass calligraphy brush onto his young daughter's naked body (further abuse, either sexual, physical or both, is hinted at but not directly shown) would have been camp melodrama gold (melodrama can be brilliant if done well) in the hands of someone like Ikuhara Kunihiko* -- but the po-faced seriousness with which it approaches all situations means any potential enjoyment on such terms is strangled at birth.

The purpose of Kirameki and Fumika's equally self-absorbed mother Kirei (meaning "beautiful" -- subtlety not welcome here) is unclear. Is it a satire on the way artists obsess over creating physically attractive characters that they use and abuse, objectifying them as items of beauty, treating as a blank slate on which to paint their stories, and denying them the free will to look after their own destiny? If that's the case, it could be seen as a criticism of the moe phenomenon as a whole, in which characters are blank, puppet-like constructs created from a database of superficial fetishistic elements and lacking in any of the driving emotions and motivations that genuinely good writing requires. The trouble with that is that Shigofumi is guilty of precisely these crimes, with its awareness of the world beyond genre cliches only accentuating its inability to abandon those selfsame cliches.

On other occasions, Shigofumi's limitations are imposed by its audience's own lives, as in the stupid and self-obsessed episode about the thirty-something otaku who learns he has terminal cancer, gets beaten up by thugs, mistakenly arrested for child abduction (by comically abusive police) and suffers the disapproval of his family, before finally bravely sacrificing himself to save a small girl from a truck -- the absurdity of which is accentuated by the script's utter, straight-laced faith in its own gravity.


The episodes that show the series at its best are conversely the ones that attracted the most controversy. Episode 3, which deals with the suicide of a seemingly happy schoolboy, hangs on the casual thought (or sometimes temptation) that crosses everyone in Japan's mind once in a while when standing on a railway platform: "It would be so easy to just jump." That it interweaves this simple and easy to relate to thought with a devastatingly accurate parody of the kind of hand-wringing nonsense spouted by rent-a-quote TV "experts" whenever these kinds of situations occur imbues the episode with a layer of biting realism that seems, in part, to have led to the episode being partially censored for its initial broadcast.

Episode 6 is even more hard-hitting with its harsh portrayal of bullying in school and the unpleasantness that results. The episode concludes that humans are social animals, and that when we remove one of our own from society (i.e. by singling out and bullying someone), we also remove an important part of what makes that person human. One boy can't take it and commits suicide. His successor as the target of the bullies responds with violence. The role that web forums like 2ch can play in these situations is also captured with striking accuracy (giving the episode a blackly comic Densha Otoko vibe) and again the episode got into trouble, being banned by at least one TV station.

There's also some good stuff going on with the music, which is atmospheric in a way that recalls the darker end of Kanno Yoko's instrumental work on the Macross Plus soundtrack. Despite the fact that there are only two out and out good episodes (detailed above), the deeply flawed remainder offers up a lot of interesting ideas and directorial flourishes as well, albeit fewer and fewer as the series progressively loses itself in futile attempts to make worthwhile drama out of largely worthless characters. In these moments, Shigofumi reveals its best side where it satirises how the media trivialises and cashes in on people's suffering, as well as the way that we as consumers are complicit in this.

It's also interesting in the way it represents the recurring theme of how people deal with abuse and in the process makes plain a lot about the way Japanese society discourages victims from speaking out. The girl whose father forces her into pornography, the boys being bullied at school, the man with cancer all feel they must suffer in silence. At the end, when the physical Fumika (rather than the spiritual mail carrier Fumika) awakes from her coma and announces that she wants to press charges against her abusive father, it comes as a shock to the audience and to the other characters. One character even rebukes her for being disrespectful to her father.

Ultimately, however, it fails because the creators are tragically unable to reconcile the maturity of their real-world social and philosophical awareness with the unrealistic caricatures that comprise the standard pick-and-mix anime characterisation to which they cleave so closely and with such misguided loyalty.

*Interestingly, Shigofumi scriptwriter Okouchi Ichiro was responsible for two novelisations of Ikuhara's camp, gender-annihilating masterpiece Shoujo Kakumei Utena (Revolutionary Girl Utena).

Allison & Lillia

Watching Allison & Lillia, Madhouse's anime adaptation of Sigasawa Keiichi's Allison light novels, I was drawn in absolutely by the idyllic and beautiful, yet also strangely bleak, depiction of the not-quite-1930s-Europe fantasy world in which the story is set. Coming from the pen of the author who wrote Kino no Tabi (Kino's Journey), that the world is whimsical and faintly unreal is no surprise, but it's nevertheless pleasing.

The other intriguing aspect of it is the detailed recreations of real aircraft of the era, from Allison's beautiful yellow DeHavilland Tiger Moth to the Sikorsky S-42 flying boat and Focke-Wulf 190 fighter that appear later in the series -- also credit to the show's makers for showing a visible and believable development in aeronautical technology from the biplanes of the Allison segments to the WW2-era planes of the Lillia episodes that occur 15 years later.

What throws this care over the show's atmosphere and attention to the show's detail into sharp contrast is the lack of care and attention over the characterisation.

That the plot is also utterly ridiculous could also be a source of consternation, but taken in the context of the way the world of Kino no Tabi defiantly clung to its own internal logic throughout, I think there is a sort of consistency in Allison & Lillia too. Almost no one is ever killed, pilots shoot out the engines of opponents and destroyed planes are always accompanied by gently billowing parachutes. Villains are almost never considered beyond redemption, and deeply rooted feuds between families or even nations are easily solved by what seem like the most absurdly simple reasons. This is Sigasawa's world, and he decided with Allison to create the kind of charming, dreamlike world where these situations are everyday reality.

Now in a simplistic world, the characters should also be simplistic, and few could be more simplistic than feisty blonde air force pilot Allison herself. Allison is one of the loveliest and most likeable characters you will ever find in anime and woman-loving (but not womanising) enemy pilot Carr Benedict is as dashing a fighter ace as you could ever wish to meet -- of particular note was a wonderful scene after the time-skip where a palace retainer accidentally catches Benedict and his wife Fiona (by now Queen of the mini-Russia Ikstova) in a passionate embrace. They simply continue kissing until they have finished, and then turn to the retainer and continue their business completely unabashed. In an anime world where the slightest hint of outward affection or an honest display of one's feelings usually results in furious blushing, laughter and frantic rubbing of the back of one's head, their lack of shame is truly refreshing.

The problems with characters begin with Allison's childhood friend Wil. He is in many ways a typical Japanese male character in that he is utterly, ignorantly oblivious to Allison's feelings for him, to the point where she eventually has to wrestle him to the floor and demand he kiss her to make her feelings clear. However, this is mitigated for the most part by the fact that in other ways he's obviously pretty intelligent and many of his actions reveal an obvious affection for Allison, and partly simply because Allison likes him and her being such a likeable character herself, it naturally rubs off on him. He makes one particularly selfish decision just before the time jump, but again mitigates it just enough that you can keep liking him.

Wil and Allison's daughter Lillia and her pathetic boyfriend Treize are the shitstorm that ruins the series though. Replacing the lovable Allison and the flawed yet just about forgiveable Wil as the main characters after the time jump, they turn the story from a whimsical and faintly surreal meander through a 1930s fairy tale into a predictable run-through of anime romantic comedy's worst cliches.

Where Allison was fiesty, direct and forthright in her desires, Lillia is like every ditzy anime schoolgirl -- selfish and cruel in her treatment of Treize, and prone to acts of unbelievable stupidity. Treize is no better, constantly dithering about the "right moment" to tell Lillia the truth about himself (he's the secret "backup" prince of Ikstova, dontchaknow, and darned if he doesn't want Lillia to be his princess!) but instead breaking into fits of nervous laughter, blathering inanely, and, yes, furiously rubbing the back of his head. Needless to say this brash, loudmouthed pandering to cliche is kryptonite to the fine balance of the show's charm.

There seems to be a subtext in the presentation of male lead characters that being emotionally retarded and suffering from a crippling inability to express yourself is somehow a desirable character trait and evidence of one's inherent integrity. If the love you feel for a girl is deep and true enough, goes the thought process, you should be unable to express it without the most unbearable trauma. If it's the kind of thing you can say easily, then you can't mean it enough. Since we're in the business of making drama here, this argument carries some weight, but only if the characters are otherwise believable and well-written. If the characters have no obvious depth in any other aspects of their characters, how can the audience be expected to suspend its disbelief and accept that there is depth in this one?

It's telling that the two most refreshing characters of the series, Allison and Benedict, are the two who are most emotionally self-assured. Allison's strength also serves to make her moments of uncertainty, where she lets flickers of the 15 year-old girl beneath the impetuous air force pilot show through, all the more touching and believable, and it's largely the lack of any of the traditional character conflicts that is what makes Allison's half of the series so much the superior of Lillia's.

Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday's Dreamers) is Crap

Just watched the first episode of 2003 anime Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto (Someday's Dreamers) and within 10 minutes the main character, Yume, has fallen over twice while trying to cross a road and tried to run away in fear from the sight of a man with no shirt on (he didn't even have his bits out). She later gets given a free pizza and only eats one piece before going to bed because she's so just so gosh darned dainty.

How, for either a female or a male audience, can this kind of feebleness be considered a desirable character trait in a female lead? I'm trying to think back over old anime and wondering if things were always thus or whether I should be blaming moe for this phenomenon. The girl-falling-over-when-running thing has been there since time immemorial, but the girl-falling-over-when walking-somewhat-briskly thing seems like a new extreme.

I know raging against this kind of insipid characterisation is pissing in the wind but this is just plain insulting to both men and women. It's even more insulting, of course, to the presumed target audience (male, no girlfriend) because the message it sends to them is, "You can't deal with real women. You are such sad losers that you can only cope with even the idea of women if they are presented as grotesque parodies of the most sexist ideals of femininity."

The setting of Mahou Tsukai ni Taisetsu na Koto is around Tokyo's hip and rather pretentious Shimo-Kitazawa district, which sets the scene for some gently amusing character conflict between the cringeworthily awful Yume and the laid back bohemian types she's likely to encounter there, with some semblance of character development presumably involving Yume being brought out of her shell somewhat (oh, but not too much, understand -- let's not get crazy here). This is the escape clause. The fig leaf of self awareness that the show flashes in front of its misogyny, that says, "Hey, I know she seems pathetic, but look how we acknowledge that fact thus proving that we aren't the sort of people who get a boner over emotionally retarded male fantasy chicks."

The representation of Tokyo is interesting, with actual real, recognisable shop fronts and billboard advertisements in the backgrounds, and it's always nice to see subculture districts other than Akihabara portrayed, but whatever good this show might have to offer, it's already lost me.

Looking Inward / Looking Outward: Part 1

I've mentioned before about the inward-looking nature of the modern otaku mindset. Original "OtaKing" Okada Toshio recently criticised this tendency in his book Otaku wa Sude ni Shindeiru, enraging hordes of angry nerds in the process, and in that point at least I think he's right. Okada's criticism dovetails with Azuma Hiroki's idea of the "database culture" where designs are "based on the large accumulation of anonymous types and elements". At one extreme it's ironic self parody, as with this scene from Lucky Star, where Konata breaks the fourth wall by remarking on the unwitting fan service that Miyuki has provided. The gag itself (Miyuki wins the race on a photo finish because her breasts were bigger) is cliched and unfunny, and it is Konata's acknowledgment of the trope that is the real joke in the scene. This kind of postmodern humour has itself become a cliche in much media now, but it is nevertheless popular with otaku because it parallels the kinds of discussions and analyses of tropes that they have themselves. Lucky Star's success was in large part because of the way it reflected the otaku's own lifestyle back at him, as in the scene when Konata finishes watching an episode of Haruhi Suzumiya no Yuutsu (produced by the same team as Lucky Star), makes her own snide judgement of it and immediately turns to the ensuing online flame fest.

This scene from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei takes what Lucky Star is doing a step further. Here the trope being parodied is the cliche of the onsen resort episode which always involves one tedious example of someone going into the wrong bath and getting embarrassed. Here the situation is turned on its head as only the male teacher is embarrassed whereas his female students are uniformly unbothered. It ends with him feeling that his masculinity has been debased by the unflinching response of his students (foreshadowed cleverly by the distinctly feminine way he is shown getting into the bath to begin with). They top it off with Kafuka actually parodying Lucky Star itself and by parodying something that is in itself a parody, Studio Shaft stake their claim to being teh no.1 133t p05tm0d3rn15tz, until someone can parody them.

Of course, the critical rejoinder to this is that regardless of the irony and self-parody, knowing that your gag is cheap and lazy doesn't make it any less cheap and lazy. The creators also can't stop fans from consuming their work unironically if they choose to. A friend of mine who I usually trust to give me the heads up on any new trends or memes in otaku culture alerted me recently to what he called "the most dangerous anime ever" (NSFW) and suggested that he felt that the show in question, Strike Witches, represents the birth pains of a fourth generation of otaku. Whether this is true or not is hard to say, but at least it represents the extreme development of much of what third generation moe culture represents. The characters themselves are designs constructed directly from the moe database complete with cat ears and tails. None of them wear trousers or skirts ever, for reasons spuriously rationalised as having something to do with the mechanical propellors that they attach to their legs in order to turn them into anthropomorphised representations of World War 2 fighter aircraft.

In Gainax's Otaku no Video from 1991, based in part on Gainax co-founder Okada's own life, an early scene showing the main character, Ken, undergoing his otaku training specifies Star Trek, Doctor Who and John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids as required knowledge. On the other hand, in Strike Witches every aspect of the show is designed to reflect some recycled aspect of Japanese anime culture. The story is entirely subservient to the database and the database is something that has been compiled purely by refining fetish elements from previous anime. Inevitably, as fans turn inwards, the creators of the shows follow them and in all creative aspects Strike Witches shows precisely the kind of inward looking tendency that Okada seems to be criticising in his book.

The otaku's rejoinder to that would be that Okada is criticising them for failing to do something that they never intended in the first place and that he is merely confirming that he is out of touch with what is really happening in fan culture. Putting aside the disturbingly extravagant panty fetishism for a moment, the whole girls=aircraft aspect is a radical and interesting reassembly of two standard base elements. Otaku aren't confusing these girls with real live females and would think you were weird if you implied otherwise. These girls aren't even meant to represent human females: they are a nominally female creation from an entirely different evolutionary model -- children of the database, if you will. In the modern otaku's view, Okada is like Tem Ray, the scientist who created the Gundam Mobile Suit and witnessed its birth, but who ends up a madman, crawling around a junkyard and making useless suggestions to improve a machine he no longer understands.

Part 2 is now up.

Children and The Unknown

I've been watching an anime from a few years back called Mujin Wakusei Survive (Uninhabited Planet Survive) recently and finding a lot to like about it. Partly due to the way it generally avoids letting itself get defined entirely by moe cliches (is that tautology?) and the refreshing accompanying lack of fan service, but mostly because of the sense that it actually feels like the kind of thing that would have had a big effect on me had I watched it as a child.

A lot of recent anime (basically post-Evangelion) has been created by otaku from the first and second generation, who grew up watching classic shows of the 70s and 80s and there is a nostalgic tendency towards revisiting these shows or trying to recreate some of the atmosphere of these shows. Now I have nothing against this, and few pastiches and parodies in the history of irony and postmodernism have been as spot on as Gekiganger 3, but on the other hand I never grew up with this kind of stuff when I was a child, and this kind of melodramatic, cliched action, where heroes of good do battle against evil never really affected me. The works that have stuck fast in my memory since childhood have been those that dealt with a journey into the unknown.

A lot of the appeal of fantasy literature clearly comes from the way it describes unknown worlds, and the purpose of a quest is in many ways simple a pretext for taking the reader on a package tour of a world that the writer has created. Miyazaki Hayao's work resonates because of the strength of his world building whereas something like Final Fantasy: Legend of the Crystals fails to resonate because the world building is ill thought out, even compared to the game (FFV) it was based on. Obviously it's made worse by the fact that the main character is both a Pure-hearted Hero of the most obnoxious type and a classic Mary Sue, but these are both symptoms of the same dearth of imagination on the part of the hacks responsible for its creation.

Esteban from Mysterious Cities of Gold was a Pure-hearted Hero and re-watching the series he's undoubtedly annoying at times, but it remains easier to empathise with him because the world itself draws you in. The designs of the architecture, the mecha, the costumes and the soundtrack work together to create a consistent atmosphere, evocative of the place, the time and the emotion (is there any child alive in the 80s who didn't want to ride the golden condor?) And finally, the structure of his quest, stepping constantly further and further into the unexplored unknown, can't help but drag you along with him.

Likewise, another fragment of my childhood that couldn't help but have a powerful effect on me was Stewart Cowley's Terran Trade Authority book series. In particular the second half of the book Great Space Battles, which dealt with short stories based mostly around the colonisation of new planets. What made these tales (and others in the follow-up SpaceWreck) so powerful was again down to the world building. The fascinating, detailed, evocative artwork, even though the pictures were compiled from numerous unrelated sources, was eerie and wonderfully alien, and the writing maintained a single viewpoint throughout, never allowing us to know the whole picture, always holding the truth just out of our grasp. After each story we are left with a real sense of the unknowable vastness of space and of the unimaginable dangers and wonders it contains.

Coming back to Mujin Wakusei Survive, its this sense of the unknown that makes it so involving. The story is a sort of Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club kind of thing with a bunch of mismatched classmates crashing on a small island on an unknown planet during a school trip (it makes more sense in the context of the show, OK?) and struggling to survive its perils. There's no attempt to be deep, philosophical or "edgy" and it's perfectly likeable as a solid, unpatronising children's cartoon. Some of the characters are problematic -- does Howard really need to be such a twat? Why does the sickeningly pathetic Sharla sound like she's about to burst into tears with everything she says? Could Bell please open his eyes? Oh, and Kaoru, your angst is annoying and self-indulgent so just stop it, OK? On the other hand, in Luna and Menori there are two strong, independent female characters who both consistently take on leadership roles and handle them believably. Menori in particular is flawed and aware of her flaws, but also strong enough to overcome them and is by far the most well-written character.

Throughout, however, it is those memories of Cowley's tales of the colonisation of space that I'm constantly reminded of. Whereas Mysterious Cities of Gold portrayed the adult characters as either outright evil or at least somewhat unreliable, thus forcing the child leads to be self-sufficient, Mujin Wakusei Survive takes the Narnia route of removing adults from the picture early on -- in fact from the start adults are rarely seen, with Luna living alone and Menori taking on many of the adults' roles during the school scenes. The early episodes where the children are mapping out the island, searching for food and fresh water, and trying to build a home are particularly good. The island is presented as a real place that rarely tests the audience's suspension of disbelief too close to its limit (at least for a children's show it doesn't) and if I were a child watching this, I think this is something that would have carved a firm place in my memories.

Blade of the Immortal anime - first impressions

Hiroaki Samura's Mugen no Junin (Blade of the Immortal) has hit TV screens. Difficult to see whether it's going to be any good or not, but Studio Bee Train and Koichi Mashimo at the helm suggests that it will be flawed with moments of inspired brilliance.

A few quick observations:

No Yuki Kajiura this time. This is a bad thing.

Unlike previous Bee Train shows like Noir, they don't have a problem showing blood in this one (it's on TV Tokyo's cable subsidiary rather than the main channel so presumably not subject to the same censorship). This is clearly a good thing.

The "death murals" of Samura's artwork are obviously impossible to recreate fully in animated form, but Manji's death strokes are sometimes stylised in an interesting way. This may turn out to be a good thing.

While it focuses mostly on Manji's background and motivation, the story manages to interweave the beginnings of Rin's and Anotsu's story threads and hints at the Mugai-Ryu arc as well. This is probably a good thing.

Despite her small role, the way Machi's madness is presented is handled pretty well. Key moment is the way she awakes from nightmare recollections of her husband's death with the screams of the dream segueing into her hysterical laughter upon waking. This is undoubtedly a good thing.

The Villain Of The Week deploys the Crazy Voice as a substitute for believable characterisation. This is a bad thing.

Manji's character design has become a bit less of the lean, wiry Sid Vicious-in-a-kimono nihilist punk samurai that he was in the manga and taken on a slightly more conventional square-jawed beefcake look. This is not a good thing.

Has Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei started a new wave of kinbaku-themed opening credit sequences?

Has Shinreigari started a new wave of Shiina Ringo-styled opening songs?

Anime Cliches #01: Pure-hearted Hero

His voice has a volume range that starts with a shout and increases depending on the amount of emotion he needs to express. Often for additional emphasis he will shout the same thing over and over again. He is particularly fond of shouting the name of Ethereal Girl. During the rare moments of confusion and uncertainty, for example when speaking to a girl, he will entirely lose the remains of his primitive ability to construct full sentences and resort to meaningless, directionless interjections like, "But I..." and "It's not like that. It's...", and "...[girl's name]...". This is not a problem though. It is a well-established fact that inability to express complex emotions is regarded as a sign of sincerity and is considered an extremely desirable character trait by women.

Fortunately, as the main character he is protected by the most powerful kind of plot shield -- one that not only protects him from physical harm but also shields his brain, a tiny object as small and hard as a walnut, from any consideration of the consequences of his behaviour or any doubt as to the righteousness of his every action. He reacts to moral ambiguity with confusion and shouting but don't be fooled; as we already know, shouting=emotion and it is a well known fact that reason is obliterated when the emotion index reaches approximately 85dB. If your words don't fit in with his worldview, he will stick his fingers in his ears and shout "lalala" until the narrative is able to contort itself around his narrow moral absolutism and teach you a lesson.

As a rule, the more serious the story and the more real the dilemmas faced, the more infuriating he is.

Stats:

Romantically compatibile with:
- Ethereal Girl

Natural Allies:
- Wise Old Woman
- Annoying Mascot Creature
- Impressionable Child

Natural enemies:
- Relativist
- Utilitarian
- Misanthropic Villain

Plot Shield:
- 10/10