Self-promotion Corner

I generally try to keep my music geek activities separate from my non-music geek stuff, but I'm going to break that rule for now since this here CD includes some of my own real music what I actually played on.

This album is a CD/R of cover versions of the legendary Japanese idol pop trio the Candies featuring 14 Japan-based underground artists. Track 6 is a cover of "Heart no Ace ga Detekonai" on which I played some very simple synth and which I flatter myself to suggest I "produced". The band goes by the name Trinitron, and it's possible to hear the song, along with Yamaco's far better cover of "Sono Ki ni Sasenaide" (if you ever wondered about the basis of the idol trio from Perfect Blue, just check out the linked video) on my label's Myspace.

As I said, it's only a private CD/R release, so if anyone's crazy enough to want it, your best bet's either directly from me or via Koenji's premier purveyor of weird, self-released avant-garde unusualness, Enban.

Valentine's Candies (CAR-91)
01. その気にさせないで / Yamaco
02. 春一番 / TE☆SY (From Cand☆es)
03. ハートのエースが出てこない / Umbrella-X
04. 春一番 / 春風堂
05. 年下の男の子 / cottonioo
06. ハートのエースが出てこない / Trinitron (N'toko+Ian Martin+friends)
07. あなたに夢中 / Puffy Shoes
08. 危い土曜日 / 地盤沈下
09. 二人だけの夜明け / うるせぇよ
10. 春９０００ （「春一番」のカバー） / やまのいゆずる
11. A muk aihsa say (plaque translation therapy) （「やさしい悪魔」のカバー） - snip n` zener
12. 年下の男の子 / Jahiliyyah
13. 暑中お見舞い申し上げます / ruruxu/sinn
14. 微笑がえし / Killer Condors

OK, that's that done, and now back to the more comfortable business of writing about why everybody else is wrong.

Summer Wars: Not as Good as They Say

I don't think I've ever seen any kind of anime receive the kind of universal acclaim afforded to last year's summer smash hit Summer Wars, Hosoda Mamoru's follow-up to the genuinely very good Toki wo Kakeru Shojo. Review after review and analysis after analysis hailed Hosoda as the successor to Miyazaki Hayao, the Japan Media Arts Festival picked it out for the Grand Prize (the absolutely masterful Kemono no Souja Erin, surely!), and fans queued up round the block for weeks to watch it.

I know what you're thinking: so what's wrong with it that makes it so popular?

Summer Wars certainly has its moments. There's some snappy dialogue, some larger than life characters, and some nicely-played dramatic interaction early on, but it also can't help diving too far into abstraction in the latter part, and that's primarily where it falls down.

Nationalism and patriotism (and whatever you say, there really is no practical difference) in film or television tread a fine line. Within a film -- diagetic patriotism, if you will -- it can be an effective way to represent a particular character's personality, and it's fine or even admirable. Where the film itself is pushing the patriotic buttons (non-diagetic patriotism) then it's more troublesome. Old war films like In Which We Serve sometimes get away with it by being brilliant, and The Green Berets gets away with it nowadays because the gift of hindsight (and preferably a handy pair of irony-shaded glasses) makes it seem endearing and naive. Others, such as Takahashi Tsutomu's hilarious women's baseball manga Tetsuwan Girl, get away with it simply by being so unbelievably absurd (intentionally or otherwise) that there is no other option than uproarious laughter at least twice a page. Still others, like Itami Juzo's Tampopo, tread a more complex path between sending themselves up and retaining a perverse pride in their own eccentricities.

Summer Wars attempts this latter path, perhaps largely succussfully. Again and again it plays up to an imaginary past of traditional Japanese values, uncorrupted by American culture, with every family member representing some patriotic (yet never humourlessly so) ideal of Japaneseness, from the stern yet kind-hearted, nagitana-wielding matriarch to the family history buff/karate teacher/fisherman uncle, to the teenage video game champion, to the baseball-fixated fat woman whose position in the family I couldn't determine. Only black sheep illegitimate child Wabisuke has a troubled side, and you know he's bad news because he's been in America. Still, even he lets us know early on that he can be saved when he mentions that for all its inferiority to the US, Japan still does better beer.

The scenes with the family are, as you can imagine with such two-dimensional characters, desperately cliched, but they are nevertheless the most effective and enjoyable parts of the film, working as an affectionate sending up of Japanese life (or at least Japan's image of itself, which in these postmodern times can often seem more like reality than the dreary truth does,) as well as pushing a lot of the right dramatic buttons. For the first forty minutes or so, Summer Wars is, while by no means reaching Itami's level of quirky social satire, nevertheless a top notch film.

The second half/two thirds of the film, after the grandmother dies (old people in Japanese films exist primarily to die so that their troublesome family members can weep a bit and reflect on their lives) shifts the focus from the family drama more fully towards the problem in the online world of OZ, and this is where Summer Wars goes completely off the rails.

The presentation of OZ is fascinating, with designs clearly influenced by Japanese artist/fashion whore Murakami Takashi (who also provided the visual impetus for Hosoda's short film/Louis Vuitton commercial Monogram). This is also interesting in the way it shows how Murakami's work has gradually come to be accepted and incorporated into anime culture, despite initial resistance from otakudom at the way he (many at the time felt) exploited otaku culture through his work. Not just through Hosoda's work, but also in many of the designs in last year's Kūchū Buranko anime, it seems that the anime world is increasingly coming to accept Murakami as one of their own.

The problem with it is that while OZ is an interesting visual concept, it's difficult to sustain emotional engagement in such an abstract world. By showing us the real characters behind the avatars during the first part of the film, and by regularly cutting back to events in the house, Hosoda presumably hopes to give us a "real world" starting point to latch onto, but he fails. The final hour of Summer Wars basically amounts to watching people sitting around a computer screen, and it's boring.

The fact that the villain that they're fighting against is an entirely impersonal, motiveless computer programme called "Love Machine" makes it even more difficult to care, and by the denoument, when Natsuki enters OZ for the final confrontation with Love Machine, all possible interest I had in any of the characters or events had been stripped away.

Azuma Hiroki spends a whole chapter of his book Dobutsuka-suru Postmodern (Otaku: Japan's Database Animals) discussing the ways otaku culture fetishises a self-congratulatory and imaginary image of Japanese history, particularly the Edo Period, and then warps and twists them to incorporate their own, more recently developed fetish objects. With the image of Natsuki's avatar during the final confrontation, Hosoda appears to have lifted (or paid tribute to) as many of the traits that Azuma identifies as he possibly can, fixing her up with a miko's outfit, fluffy animal ears, and later a pair of angel wings (to show she's levelled up, natch). This is interesting, but self-referentiality isn't what the film needs at this point. The whole final portion of the film becomes completely tied up in rules: the rules of the games, the rules of the computer world and the network, and the rules of otaku culture. Humanity, irrationality, emotion, and character lose their power to influence the plot, and are relegated to a reactive role, the characters' faces telling us when we should be caring about a particular lump of pixels moving around on a computer screen.

People claiming that with Summer Wars Hosoda has unseated Miyazaki as the king of anime filmmaking are deluding themselves. 2008's Gaki no Ue no Ponyo demonstrates that Miyazaki is still miles ahead in terms of originality, clarity of vision, character writing, pacing and emotional engagement. In fact even the Hosoda who made 2006's Toki wo Kakeru Shojo is miles ahead in those respects too. Summer Wars is an interesting premise that starts off by no means unpleasantly, but quickly gets eaten up by its own concept.

Holden Caulfield, What's it All About?

Obviously every time a famous writer or other artist dies, there's the usual round of sentimental tributes as people fall over themselves to say just how much Dick Francis or whoever means to them, although for most people, their death is more likely simply an opportunity to remember the work of a writer you might recall being forced to read at school, or perhaps whose book you read and kind of liked a long time ago. Deaths, to most of us, serve as happy reminders that, yeah, that book that I hadn't thought about once for the last twenty or thirty years wasn't bad.

For me, J.D. Salinger was one of those writers, and more than anything I might have cared about his life or the minute body of work he could be bothered to publish, his death made me think, "Male lead characters in anime are rubbish, and Holden Caulfield gives us some hints as to why."

Without going into too much detail (Catcher in the Rye is a short novel and probably one you've pretended to have read on numerous occasions, so why not track it down and read it for real?) part of what I find appealing about Caulfield as a character is a combination of his knowing, often penetrating ability to size other people up, and his lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of himself (this is a trait you also see in the play/film Alfie, and a key factor in allowing the audience to feel pathos for a title character who really does some horrible things.)

Catcher in the Rye's most recent Japanese translator, and one of Salinger's most famous Japanese fans, the novelist Murakami Haruki, has drawn on these aspects of Caulfield's personality in the past, most frequently applying them to young, proto-moé female characters like Yuki from Dance, Dance, Dance, Midori from Norwegian Wood, and most strikingly May from popular metaphysical harem drama The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

It's significant that in Murakami's mind the character of Holden Caulfield maps most closely onto a female character, whereas his male characters more often drift through his stories in a state of weary passivity. Sure, part of this is derived from the insouciant cool of Raymond Chandler's classic detective Philip Marlowe, but where Marlowe was quick off the hip with a wisecrack or a punch to the guts, Murakami's heroes are a bit more, you know, bland. They are, he seems to be trying to tell us, ordinary guys, trapped in this dizzy maelstrom of crazy women.

Many anime heroes, like Holden Caulfield, have a protective relationship with their little sister, but, like Murakami's male heroes, they are also overwhelmingly bland. Caulfield is brash, frequently out of control, and self-destructive, and Salinger isn't afraid to show Caulfield's flaws leading him into dispiriting, humiliating situations; however, in his flaws he's also charming and vulnerable, as well as pro-active and driven. Caulfield operates at a higher level of reality to us, he is his readers' strengths and flaws magnified, he is extraordinary. Now look through a few character summaries of most popular boys' anime and count how many times the lead character is introduced with the hateful phrase "XXXX is an ordinary high school boy". The only weaknesses a typical anime hero is allowed to have are shyness around girls, a lecherous streak, and weakness of nasal blood vessels. All he can do is react to external stimuli, either in the form of more active (often female) characters around him, or the anime scriptwriter's favourite deus ex machina, destiny.

Time was that every disaffected teenage boy/celebrity assassin in the world carried a copy of Catcher in the Rye in his pocket, so closely did Holden Caulfield's travails resonate with the trauma of youth. Nowadays, anime (and in Japan the light novel) has eaten up huge chunks of the offbeat, faintly alternative youth culture party cake, but the level of its male character writing has still to see its voice change, grow its first pubic hair, and take the first step out of its perpetual pre-adolescence.

Death and Motivation

J.D. Salinger just died. I don't do sentimental tribute posts, but expect a post on quality character writing soon, with a relevant amount of time devoted to why current anime screenwriters are such phonies. Natch. Sometimes it takes the death of a hero to make me get off my arse and write something that I'm not getting paid for.

Recommended reading on moé

Two excellent posts cutting to the bone of that mysterious beast that men call moé here and here. Very little for me to add here at this time, except to say that one should take anything that 3G otaku, however literate their writing appears, have to say about otaku culture with a big bag of salt. They are sociopathically sophisticated in the art of sef-delusion.

A Tale of Two Paprikas

Kon Satoshi gained something of a reputation with his 1997 film Perfect Blue as a director who likes to take a, let's say, "liberal" approach to his source material when working on an adaptation. As a result, a read through Tsutsui Yasutaka's original 1993 novel Paprika also throws up numerous interesting differences with Kon's 2006 adaptation. These differences can be summarised under the categories of "structural" and "thematic".

Kon's film is structured more as a mystery and a thriller, with key information withheld or expressed only obliquely until more dramatically opportune moments. The missing DC Minis are introduced right from the get go, Osanai acts as a friend and an ally initially, and Inui seems to be a cranky and troublesome boss, but isn't revealed as the villain until later on. Parallel to this, the characters of Noda and Konakawa are combined into the single character of Konakawa, and his rank in the police force is reduced to that of a simple detective. As a result, the film presents a neat parallel between Paprika's investigation into Konakawa's dream and the evolving mystery of the theft of the DC Minis.

On the other hand, Tsutsui's novel makes it clear from very early on that Osanai and Inui are up to no good. The novel is still a thriller, but it is psychological rather than a mystery. Atsuko/Paprika's enemies are established from the start, and we follow her path through the developing series of plots and machinations at a far less frenetic pace.

Similarly, the connection between Atsuko and Paprika is established explicitly, even to the point of detailing how Atsuko changes her appearance, adding freckles and moving her voice to a more girlish register to complete the disguise, whereas in Kon's film the connection between them is a little more blurred. Kon hints that they are the same person, and eventually states it clearly, but he never explains exactly how two such physically different people could be the same. Is it a physical disguise, or is it a blurring of reality and dreams through the use of the DC Mini? By the end, the two have separated completely, appear alongside each other, and even argue over which one is more real.

How the two versions of the story deal with the boundaries of reality and dreams crosses over into the area of thematic differences. Kon, in the film version's stunning opening sequence, makes it clear that he views the boundaries as fluid right from the start, whereas Tsutsui breaks them down at a much slower, more measured pace. For Kon, with that opening rush through clips of The Greatest Show on Earth, Tarzan, Roman Holiday, and a spy thriller that might be From Russia with Love or possibly North by Northwest, the breaking of those boundaries mirrors the way the audience of a film set aside one reality and step into another, as well as the way the director of a film takes a world from his own imagination and recreates it as an entirely new reality on the screen.

In Tsutsui's novel, cinema is certainly a minor theme, particularly in Noda's dream, but he seems much more interested in the details of mental illness and psychotherapy (which Kon largely glosses over), and in particular issues of sex and sexuality. There are some sharp observations about the way Japanese society frowns on attractive women also displaying obvious intelligence in public, but mostly sex is portrayed as the battleground where the novel's competing philosophies slug it out.

The homosexual relationship between Inui and Osanai plays out as faintly abusive one, based on power, and throughout the story, Osanai shows himself unable to view sex outside of expressions of power. Atsuko, portrayed here as much more sexually assured than her equivalent in the film, has a much more empathetic attitude to sex. As Paprika, she often forms close attachments with the patients of her dream analysis, and on one occasion actually has sex with Konakawa in a dream as part of his therapy (compare with the slap across the face she directs at him after he kisses her in the film). Towards the end of the film, as the dream world and real world merge, she is happily engaged in concurrent sexual relationships with three different men, often all at once.

The collision between Atsuko's empathetic approach to sex and Osanai's power-based approach comes in a scene where Inui directs Osanai to rape Atsuko. Osanai, confident in his good looks and desirability, is convinced that all he needs to do is force himself on her and she will become subservient to him. That all he needs to do is "break" her. Unable physically to resist, Atsuko resigns herself and in fact decides to use it as a chance to work off some of the physical need for sex that she hasn't had time to act on because of her work. However, once she shows herself willing to act as a proactive partner, Osanai finds himself unable to sustain an erection and is forced to beat a humiliating retreat. Even then, Atsuko chides herself for mocking his sexual inadequecy and not empathising with him more.

Finally, with Inui, the main villain, there are key differences. Kon portrays him as an old, crippled man who wants to use Osanai's young, attractive body to renew himself. In the novel, there is an entire subplot that is absent from the film, dealing with Atsuko and Tokita's nomination for the Nobel Prize and Inui's jealousy after he lost out to a British scientist many years ago. The battle lines with Inui, however, remain the same as with his protege Osanai. Power and domination versus empathy and understanding, brainwashing versus therapy, and interestingly Christianity versus Buddhism. Inui's dreams are deeply infused with European, particularly Christian, imagery. As Tokyo descends into chaos, mythological creatures from ancient bestiaries do battle with Buddhist deities in the city streets. Inui takes the form of the demon Amon, quotes lines from the Jesuit training manual, summons griffins, and creates vast cathedrals from nothing, while the two barmen, Jinnai and Kuga, battle them as Acala and Vairocana.

Singling out which is the better of the two is a pretty much meaningless exercise and the two are different enough that you could enjoy both without one ruining the other for you. The fact that Tsutsui himself appeared in the film as the voice of Kuga (acting alongside Kon himself as Jinnai) suggests that he had no problem with the hatchet that Kon took to his story, and it's obvious reading the novel why the director of such films as Perfect Blue, Millenium Actress and the TV series Paranoia Agent would be interested in it.

There are definite issues (possibly on the translator's side) with the quality of writing in the novel, particularly the way it hammers away through the third person narration at points that could be better expressed more subtly through the characters' actions; but perhaps the most unusual point from the point of view of Kon's back catalogue and Tsutsui's novel, is the way the film version shies away from the most controversial aspects of the novel. Tsutsui followed the release of Paprika with a three year self-imposed strike in protest at the Japanese literary establishment's squeamishness around taboo issues like mental illness. However, despite Kon's track record of touching on controversial social issues such as suicide, homelessness, prostitution and Japan's militaristic past, the film version of Paprika is mostly shorn of the novel's most pointed aspects. As it stands, Kon's film is a superb fireworks display of postmodern cinematic trickery, in some ways influenced more by Godard and Truffaut than it is by Tsutsui's novel, but lacking a lot of the meat of its printed forbear. In a sense it can be said that Paprika (1993) is a triumph of the "what", while Paprika (2006) is a victory for the "how".

Suzumiya Haruhi: The Case for the Defence

A harsh and well-aimed salvo from the ever-enjoyable Colony Drop at the moment which puts me in the hateful position of being by default on the same side of the argument as hordes of people for whom I feel nothing but disdain and a smidgen of pity.

Summary of Colony Drop's position: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is shit.

Transcription of first comment beneath the original article: your a faget

Summary my feelings about typical Haruhi fans: Sigh.

My defence of Haruhi rests largely on four main pillars. Firstly, it is a postmodernist's paradise, not just for the wealth of references to other anime (Lucky Star has more and is a worse show), but also the way it uses genre cliches not as lazy "look at this, this often happens, now laugh" crimes of self-referentiality, but as metaphors that draw analogues between oft-repeated one-dimensional pop cultural tropes and the lives of the real people that were born out of the same culture.

Secondly and relatedly, as I have talked about at length before, it is a show with big themes that takes a sharp look at genuine contemporary sociological issues in Japan and other post-industrial societies. Yes, the members of the SOS-dan are stereotypes taken straight from Azuma Hiroki's database, but Haruhi is a distorted caricature that contains something real at her core. Similarly Kyon is an audience surrogate but he succeeds as an audience surrogate by actually being a character that not only articulates the superficial characteristics of his target audience, but also embodies their deeper concerns. Modern Japanese and other citizens of other post-industrial transnationalopolises emerge from childhood and face an adult world filled with employment practices that are either hangovers from previous generations (Japan's postwar work-all-the-hours-God-gives-and-never-change-careers lifetime formula) or dehumanised neo-liberal dystopias (free contracts with no benefits and you're fired at the first hint of economic bad times). There is a massive segment of society that is overeducated and immediately disenfranchised, and it clings to its memories of childhood as a response to its missing place in adult society, whilst at the same time being too clever and aware to be able to accept those memories on their own terms anymore. The tension between these two conflicting characteristics is represented by Kyon and Haruhi, and is what makes them real as characters, as well as what gives the show it's zeitgeist punch. Haruhi and Kyon are the only characters in the show that matter, because they alone embody the show's central dilemmas -- the intertwining strands that link childhood and adulthood, the known and unknown, the expected and the desired. One can find them irritating as characters and I can't help that, but in the context of the series, their motivations come across to me as as sincere and so I can be carried along by them.

The third pillar is Haruhi's mastery of structure, particularly in how it plays the plant and the payoff. The initial out of sequence broadcast was very carefully designed to drop hints in earlier episodes of things that wouldn't be explained until later ones -- the appearance of a pile of unused laptops in one episode, with the story of how they were acquired only appearing later, for example. The new series adds to this by each new episode coming in at a particular point within the chronology of the original series and illuminating details that had previously been left hanging such as the reason why Haruhi seemed to recognise Kyon on their first meeting. In addition, the show's non-sequential broadcast emphasises its own postmodern aspects. By cutting up the plot it shrugs its shoulders dismissively at the aspects of the show that are most open to criticism and by focussing on the key points in the relationship between Haruhi and Kyon, it nods its head towards the emotional meta-narrative that is the true heart of the drama.

The fourth pillar of my support for Haruhi is a little more (subtle pun alert) vaguely defined. In some ways it is just one of a number of cartoons that have appeared over the last dozen years or so that demonstrates the emergence in the world of anime of something resembling the Nouvelle Vague/New Wave movement in French cinema of the 1960s.

Like Haruhi, the classic French New Wave film takes delight in intellectualising trashy pop culture. In fact the origin of the Nouvelle Vague was the critics' journal Cahiers du Cinema, which was precisely that: a magazine where geeks over-analysed trashy Hollywood movies and took huge amounts of delight in aspects of the filmmaker's craft that the creators of those films themselves had likely never even considered. As a result, even when the Cahiers writers were directing films that played on traditional Hollywood themes, they were never simply repeating or pandering to Hollywood tastes, because firstly they were creating from the perspective of fans, which puts a layer between them and their source to begin with, and secondly they were creating from the perspective of critics, which meant that their own work could never take its source at face value.

The end result is a lot of clever-cleverness, which is undoubtedly a question of tolerance. A lot of people find Godard and early Truffaut unbearable because of the insufferable self-referentiality of their films, but they nevertheless represent something important in French cinema of the 1960s. Their fans would argue that rather than being a cold, introverted gang giggle, the self-referentiality is part of an exhuberant expression of their own generation, where the process of filmmaking and the romance of cinema's inherent deception is celebrated. The hero of French New Wave was often a faintly detached, bohemian, 1960s everyman who was dragged, half-interested, through a cinematic looking glass and then dumped at the end of it with a nonchalant Gallic shrug. Like Kyon, he was an audience surrogate (or at least a surrogate for what the audience wanted to be), but like Kyon he was also something seperate from the genre heroes he sometimes emulated. He could exist within the action whilst simultaneously being aware of the screen that framed him. In order to relate to him then, the audience too has to accept a world that is both within the frame, but also able to view the frame from a third person perspective. In essence, the audience becomes a participant in the events of the film rather than simply a passive viewer.

The most New Wave moment in Haruhi is the episode (Episode 0) that shows the film Haruhi directed for the school festival (Nooooooo! Heavy meta overload!) What it shares with its French cousins is a love bordering on obsession with the minor mechanics of filmmaking. It simultaneously indulges practically every cliche of bad anime and tokusatsu shows, whilst at the same time dissecting, critiquing and satirising them in a way that the Colony Drop writer would perhaps find deeply annoying; however, that argument only works if you take the position that firstly the indulgence trumps the critique, and secondly that these two aspects are the only things going on. The key aspect that makes this episode such a good piece of filmmaking and writing is really the attention to detail in the way it explores the whole filmmaking process through Haruhi's inept production. We don't see her physically on screen but we get to see Haruhi herself as a character by viewing the world through her own camera lens. She is made more human by the way she gets small things wrong like the many continuity errors and the appearance of boom mics in frame, and also by her unthinking adherence to meaningless directorial cliches such as the vertical panning shot at the end of a scene. At the same time she is recognisably herself by the manic and usually unexplained plot shifts that she forces on the viewers. There's something quite Spinal Tap about the way portraying something done badly can illuminate the process by which the good stuff is also created, and there's also a sense of postmodern romance and elation at seeing a character who is so into the process of creation that they don't care or even notice how bad it is. It was the first episode I ever saw of Haruhi and it provided the lens through which I viewed the entire series.

Of course I'm not saying that any fan of French New Wave would necessarily go for Haruhi because their frames of reference are entirely different, but structurally they are doing something similar. Part of what makes Haruhi so easy to hate is that it is wilfully of its own generation, in the process driving a wedge between itself and fans of the previous generation of anime fans (or fans of the previous generation of anime). Nevertheless, shows like the execreble Kannagi also do this, without any of the intelligence and attention to the minor details of plotting and filmmaking that Haruhi does.

Summary of this blog post: Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu is good.