setsuled

There are a lot of pointless remakes out there but I think I've seen the most pointless remake of all time. I got Netflix for the month for a few reasons, one of them being I really wanted to see the new Ranma 1/2 series. It's an adaptation of the same first volumes of the manga that the first anime series adapted back in 1989. In many cases, it's a shot for shot replica of the old series only now it's drawn and coloured on computers instead of with pencil, ink, and paint. Nudity has been censored with "doll anatomy" and it has a new score by a different composer.

Even many of the voice actors are the same. Hayashibara Megumi returns as girl-type Ranma and she's still great. But many of the actors playing teenagers certainly don't sound like teenagers, particularly the character of Nabiki who now sounds like an old woman.

I don't know why this thing was made. I work in Japanese schools and I hear kids talking about Ranma 1/2 exactly as often as I heard them talk about it before this new series came out.

Was there anything I liked? The scene where Ranma meets Kuno has the same dialogue--Kuno demands to know Ranma's name but before Ranma can reply Kuno says it's better form to give his own name first. In the new version there's a slight pause and Ranma says awkwardly "douzo", "go ahead." That was kind of funny but it didn't justify a whole remake.

Ranma 1/2 (the new one) is available on Netflix. Oddly, when I searched for "Ranma", it wasn't even the first title that came up. I'm not sure what that means but if it means the show's not popular I wouldn't be surprised. Some people on YouTube have made compilations of clips comparing the new and old versions. Sometimes the dialogue overlaps precisely:





I guess this is like when Gus Van Sant remade Psycho. At least he had a new cast and shot it in colour so he made some effort to be different.

X Sonnet #1904

Exhausted words for "red" deplete the shade.
Infernal rings diffuse the air and sky.
With phony coins, the counterfeiter's paid.
The only dream became a daily lie.
Surprising spots of time return to mind.
Betrayal lurks in slowly boiled brains.
The ghost of vengeance seeks a kill to find.
The story's told in blood and whisky stains.
Reforming cities never costs a god.
Deserving roads obey the wheels above.
Some greater damage rusts a metal rod.
The lack of lightning killed a demon dove.
A couple eggs were lost beneath the grill.
For making yoghurt, raise a local mill.

The combination of Star Wars with Japanese animation is an idea with so much potential so I was excited when Star Wars: Visions was announced. It premiered yesterday, an anthology of short anime films from some prominent Japanese studios produced for Disney+. The final result is interesting, sometimes quite good, but more often disappointing. For the English voice casts, some relatively big names were recruited, including David Harbour, Lucy Liu, and George Takei. But I only watched a few minutes of the English version before switching to Japanese. As is often the case, the English dub is awkward and unnatural sounding and drastically changes the meaning of the original dialogue.



The best three stories are "The Duel", "The Elder", and "Lop and Ocho". "The Duel" is obviously inspired by Yojimbo but doesn't follow the concept of a ronin playing both sides of warring factions. Instead, a lone warrior fights against an Imperial takeover of a village. It's almost entirely in black and white except the glow of electronics--like lightsabres and droid eyes--are in colour. The hero (Masaki Terasoma) comes off as really cool, using few words and precise attacks. He's intriguingly mysterious and the other characters marvel over the fact that he uses a red lightsabre.

Another story, "The Ninth Jedi" from Production IG, also makes sabre colour a plot point. In this case, a sabre smith creates lightsabres that change colour automatically based on the spiritual alignment of the wielder. This was an idea I really didn't like. The idea of the human soul being reduced to colour codes is even worse than the Dungeons and Dragons alignment system. "The Ninth Jedi" is set some time after Rise of Skywalker and involves the ruler of a planet trying to resurrect the Jedi. The protagonist is the teenage daughter of the sabresmith who, like Rey, is inexplicably expert in lightsabre use the moment she picks one up and is able to deflect blaster fire. Production IG has made some impressive things in the past but I'm used to weak output from them by now. So I wasn't surprised this was a letdown.

I was more surprised by the weakness of "The Twins", which was directed by Kill la Kill and Panty and Stocking director Hiroyuki Imaishi. The story involves two powerful Dark Side Force users, twins, a man and a woman, in command of two Star Destroyers. They're using kyber crystals to combine the two ships into an ultimate weapon but then the brother (Junya Enoki) turns to the Light Side and tries to run away with the crystal. There's an over-the-top and ultimately meaningless fight sequence and I was reminded of the weak last twelve episodes of Kill la Kill instead of the magnificent first twelve episodes.

More than half of the stories involve kyber crystals for some reason, the essential component of all lightsabres. Considering how often crystals factor into anime and Japanese video games, I suppose it makes sense.

"T0-B1" from the studio Science Saru is about a robot boy seeking a kyber crystal so he can become a Jedi. This story is cute but too obviously Astroboy.



I was disappointed by the first Studio Trigger short, "The Twins", but "The Elder", directed by Masahiko Otsuka, is mostly pretty good. A Jedi master, Tajin (Takaya Hashi/David Harbour), and his Padawan, Dan (Yuichi Nakamura/Jordan Fisher), go to investigate reports of a Sith on a remote planet. The relationship between the two men and their personalities are nicely established over the course of the investigation. The story's main idea about the inevitable deterioration that comes with time and age was surprising and very effective in the context. It felt like a genuine moment of mono no aware. The only disappointing part of this one is when one character gets slashed in the gut with a lightsabre and makes a complete recovery shortly thereafter. Nearly every story had one stupid moment where something really amazing and horrifying that happened was immediately softballed in an implausible manner. Disney claims to have been hands-off but this felt like studio interference. At least the women don't look like Jean-Claude Van Damme.



Despite the fact that I don't like the furry aesthetic, I really liked "Lop and Ocho" from Geno Studio. Set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope, it involves a very Japanese-looking community on a planet occupied by the Empire. A bunny girl named Lop (Seiran Kobayashi) is a slave of the Empire until she's rescued by the local leader, Yasaburo (Tadahisa Fujimura), and his daughter, Ocho (Risa Shimizu). Seven years pass and Ocho has decided her people must cooperate with the Empire while Yasaburo is still against it. A nice sense of genuine, personally motivated political tension is created, with each side having clear, understandable motives. Stylistically, too, this is one of the nicest looking episodes.

All the stories have good visuals, except maybe "Tatooine Rhapsody".

Twitter Sonnet #1476

The shadow shirt attracts a sudden breeze.
The even heat absorbs a dream of mist.
Reminders float on ships on purple seas.
On lines of green we kept a changing list.
Another hand assists the falling wish.
A probing question bounced an offered truce.
Another hand of cards produced the fish.
We gather late to praise the giant moose.
A speaker jack awaits the mouldy floor.
For heaven's sake, the smaller shoe was laced.
We scratched a music sheet across the door.
The staff are sunk beneath a treble case.
The kyber crystals weigh the painted mind.
A glowing sword destroyed a melon rind.

I realised recently the sensei America needs right now is Zetsubou Sensei (Zetsubou meaning "despair"). Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (さよなら絶望先生) was a manga that ran from 2005 to 2012 which was turned into an anime series with three seasons, airing from 2007 to 2010. The anime never saw an official release in the U.S. possibly because it was never a very mainstream success in Japan and its humour may have been deemed too reliant on Japanese politics and media. But watching the first episode again to-day, with its focus on the madness inherent in aggressively imposed interpretation, I can't think of anything that more accurately reflects the American psyche.



I always thought the fundamental conflict between the series' two central protagonists was genius. There are two principle layers to it--on the most superficial layer, Itoshiki-Sensei (Hiroshi Kamiya) is a high school teacher who interprets everything in the most negative way possible and his student, Kafuka (Ai Nonaka), named after Franz Kafka, interprets everything in the most positive way possible. Itoshiki is always trying to commit suicide and Kafuka is always coming up with reasons why there's still hope and life is worth living. But the first scene of the first episode quickly establishes the sinister second layer--Kafuka's rationalisations are so paper thin that they only serve to underline the negative reality. Her choosing to interpret her parents' attempts to hang themselves as attempts to make themselves grow taller only serves to compel the mind to contemplate suicide as the end point of the puzzle Kafuka's madness presents. Kafuka's positive interpretations act as a sort of funnel drawing the mind to a deeper despair.



Itoshiki's negative interpretations are often similarly ridiculous. He talks to the school councillor about his belief that his credit card info is being stolen every time he swipes his subway card, he talks about how the symbol on a baseball cap resembles the kanji for "hair" making it sad that the man wearing the hat is bald. He tells the councillor he feels better after talking about these things. Whenever Kafuka's attempts to save his life inevitably threaten his life worse than his actual suicide attempt, he always says, "What if I had died?" His compulsions to view things negatively are so patently irrational there's no rational solution to them on their own terms--the reality is that they're a form of catharsis for him. He subverts a typical assignment where a teacher asks the students to list a series of hopes for the future by asking them to list only goals they despair of accomplishing. By hitting the negative potential pre-emptively, he can mitigate some of the pain. But the flaw in this technique is highlighted by how Kafuka serves as his foil.



As fiction in the U.S. becomes increasingly focused on alternate interpretations and what these interpretations suggest about the interpretor, Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei is well ahead of us. Now that the U.S. has a cruel, post-modernist joke occupying the office of president, madness has become the reality so it's become mad to adhere to prior forms of realism. We can try to find solutions by setting up large, negative interpretations, conduct witch hunts with no foreseeable rational solutions under the delusion that by keeping busy we're making a form of progress. Or we can subscribe to superstitions, like Kafuka interprets a hikikomori (shut-in) student as being a Zashiki Warashi, a household spirit, because a psychological condition like that of the hikikomori couldn't possibly exist within Kafuka's social circle.



Just as Trump can deny global warming by talking about extremely cold temperatures despite scientists having said that climate change could result in colder winters. It's not that people don't have the capacity to understand the more complicated reality behind the name "global warming", it's that Trump and others rely on the superficiality of words themselves to create the perceived reality. A version of reality so paper thin it only highlights how bad things really are.



There are many flavours of madness and so Itoshiki sensei has an entire classroom of students, each with his or her own method of altering reality. Chiri (Marina Inoue) demands strict, measurable reality so when she's decided to slice a cake to evenly divide it among classmates she loses herself in increasingly complex computations as more students enter the room. Meru (various voice actresses) is typically too shy to speak but frequently spreads abusive e-mails and online comments. Each student in his or her way tries the limits of Itoshiki's negative outlook. Sometimes the humour on the show falls flat but for the most part it's become more and more insightful as time has gone by.

Happy Christmas Eve, everyone. This seems like a good time to talk about all the shows this year that had a humanoid with a deer skull for a head as a protagonist. Really, that's only one show, Production I.G.'s beautiful The Ancient Magus Bride (魔法使いの嫁), which concluded its first season yesterday. Consistently strong production quality on every level--animation, music, design, backgrounds--assist in making this sweet story about lovers with communication problems truly memorable.



The setup in the first few episodes gives us a variation on Beauty and the Beast--the fellow with the deer skull head, Elias (Ryota Takeuchi), purchases the shy red headed Japanese girl, Chise (Atsumi Tanezaki), at an auction. Elias is a magician and he intends for Chise to be both his apprentice and his bride.



As in most versions of Beauty and the Beast, the story quickly finds ways to push against the inequality inherent in this setup. Elias seems to think nothing of taking off Chise's clothes to bathe her--he seems neither lustful or sadistic, and her self esteem is so low she doesn't make any objection. But a visit to a witch friend of Elias' in the second episode, Angelica (Yuuko Kaida), provides an opportunity for a character to voice exactly the objections to the scenario most viewers would be thinking. Angelica, a young mother, wastes no time rebuking Elias for his presumptions. As with Beauty and the Beast, though, it's not surprising Elias doesn't see a more effective way of getting a bride, given his physical appearance.



But the characters' psychological issues become far more pertinent than physical appearance as the series progresses. Elias and Chise find their instincts to express affection for each other blocked by bad self image, cognisance of the strangeness in their artificially arranged relationship, and a fundamental inability to access emotions. The middle episodes of the series introduce a series of stories that reflect disconnected relationship dynamics in different ways--a man who loses his soul trying to save his sick wife without regarding her wishes on the subject; Chise's dog familiar, Ruth (Koki Uchiyama), and his inability to connect with his dead former mistress; and, the most amusing of the lot, an elderly gardener who doesn't know he's the object of affection for an invisible succubus.



Chise's past is only hinted at--her parents abandoned her and her shyness and the suspicious readiness with which she accepts offered affection and the semblance of family are ascribed to her abandonment issues. Elias' past is shown in more detail in the season's penultimate episode and we see how, like Frankenstein's monster, he was met by hatred and suspicion from villagers. Hatred and suspicion that may not be unwarranted.



Elias tells his mentor, Lindel (Daisuke Namikawa), with only mild concern, about how everyone else seems so distant and he has trouble understanding connexion. His concern is scarcely greater when we divulges he may have done some truly monstrous things which aren't left ambiguous.



There's effective tension in all the issues presented--a lot of fantasy anime handles the monster-guilt love story with too many caveats, usually amounting to the "monster" never having done anything truly wrong, resulting in a very simplistic world of justice. This series effectively creates the tension in ambiguous questions about how much monstrosity is someone responsible for, about how much suffering and restriction one truly deserves, and about whether or not affection needs to be justified. It's all effectively couched in a lovely fantasy world with side stories about dragons turning into trees and communities of cats that give the characters further opportunities to show how their instincts are reflected in an outside world. A very good series.

Twitter Sonnet #1067

A rising lake returns the boots at last.
A footless fish's late return unmarked.
To miss a lucky fin condemned to fast.
It had no hand to hold nor ear to hark.
A bleeding candy stripe obscures the red.
In turning holly scarlet leaves're sharp.
A fitting cider wet the waiting sled.
The giggling aether taunts a ghostly harp.
A stocking rain for feet bestowed the gift.
In needle trees a time ignites the wick.
For rodent's rest the dog creates a rift.
The ducks of mice return as clocks'll tick.
A desert fleece confers a snowy thought.
The boiling peppermint stirs in the pot.

The vampire child Shinobu was once known by the delightfully decadent name Kiss-shot Acerola-orion Heart-under-blade and audiences were finally able to see her in action this year in the latter two films of the three part Kizumonogatari (傷物語). Each film is just over an hour long, released separately in theatres in Japan over the course of 2016, the final film being released at the beginning of this year. Serving as prequels to Bakemonogatari, these films are much more about sex and violence than the show--some really impressive violence, mind you, and some okay sexual titillation.



Kizumonogatari finally shows us the events referred to so frequently in the first season of Bakemonogatari, which always felt like it was picking up on a story already in progress. We finally get to find out how Araragi (Hiroshi Kamiya) met Kiss-Shot (Maaya Sakamoto) as well as his know-it-all classmate, Hanekawa (Yui Horie)--though her amusing catch phrase is "I don't know everything, I only know what I know." And we get to see the events that led to Araragi becoming a sort of half vampire.



I honestly found the first film disappointing, especially because we only get to see Kiss-Shot briefly before she's turned into a child. One of the more frustrating trends in anime over the past decade has been more and more focus on sexualised children which, putting aside any moral issues, I simply don't find very attractive or exciting. The child vampire Shinobu was part of a really nice concept in the first Bakemonogatari series--a mysterious, mute child demon who existed in Araragi's shadow, there was something really intriguing in her as an artistic expression of the psychology in the relationship between two people or even just as a portrait of Araragi's mind by itself. In subsequent seasons, she became more an object of loli fan service, and with several other child characters introduced the show moved disappointingly in this direction in a lot of ways. The first season introduced one of the best, and best designed, female romantic leads in an anime of the 21st century, Senjogahara, but ever since then she's been sidelined increasingly in favour of loli characters.



To anyone who hasn't seen it, by the way, the first season of Bakemonogatari is absolutely amazing, and the exceptional quality of its writing has often to do with a subversion of the growing, depressing trend in anime to depict beautiful women as docile house pets or transparent tsundere. For whatever reason, after the first season the show has gradually moved away from this.



It's still not as bad as some and Kizumonogatari improves a great deal in its second portion, though Hanekawa isn't as good as Senjogahara at calling Araragi on his bullshit. There's a lot of business involving her panties which is pretty hot but seems implausible considering their very platonic relationship in the first season. But there's a well executed 2001: A Space Odyssey gag the first time Hanekawa shows Araragi her panties.



And thankfully Kiss-Shot doesn't spend much time as a kid in the second portion. Araragi having to deal with his attraction to her while also facing the reality that she's a vampire is nicely done but hardly new territory--maybe it's for that reason production company Shaft chose to begin adapting the light novels with the introduction of Senjougahara.



Kizumonogatari has a very different visual style to the series, relying on a more uniform amber colour palette that looks okay sometimes and giving the girls preposterously large breasts which are more often ridiculous than hot. But people obsessed with equal time fan service might be pleased to know there's a lot of attention paid to male physique, too.



The more limited colour palette doesn't bother me as much as the film's indulgence in the currently popular "blush and shine" effect which my eyes tend to read as big pus filled blisters or pimples.



But where Kizumonogatari really shines is in the action sequences. The middle portion is the standout as Araragi is forced to face three vampire hunters in order to retrieve the limbs that have been stolen from Kiss-Shot. The series has often used Araragi's ability to regrow body parts for effective comedy and horror, sometimes both at the same time, but the action sequences in this film take it to a new level.



It's not just in the animation. The composition and sequence of shots smoothly tell kinetic stories, as in Araragi's first bout with a hunter named Dramaturgy who's a lot stronger than the high school lad bargained for. Shots of Araragi desperately trying to escape the big man, running through the high school, are creatively constructed and it's always easy to follow the action and get an idea of the environment and the characters' distance from each other.



The final film has a gratuitous, imaginary makeout scene with Hanekawa obviously there for fan service. It's a bit disappointing due to another current trend in anime, doll anatomy, where topless women are shone without nipples but a lot of the stuff between Araragi and the adult Kiss-Shot is nice to watch.