The Animanachronism

As my Japanese is nonexistent, I’m just hoping it’s nothing scurrilous written on the box.

1. Where does moe (or moé for the pronunciation pedants among us) happen? The site of moe must be in the viewer. When, therefore, we say of a character that she or he ‘is moe’ we are identifying the presence in her or him of traits which provoke or stimulate moe in us (and perhaps in an imagined community of ‘people like us’).

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A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

Relieved of the requirement to always take itself seriously, The Super Dimension Fortress Macross has free rein to give us entertaining moments (like fishing in space) and brilliantly ludicrous design decisions (like a battleship with aircraft carriers for arms). It’s also what lies behind a sequence in the second episode which - as far as I can see - wraps up into one brief segment of animation the essence of the whole show.

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Legend of the Galactic Heroes is too long to write neatly tied-together essays on while you’re still watching the early episodes. In fact, so much happens in just the first fifteen that for the first time in my (admittedly short) blogging life, I could actually use some episode summaries - and there aren’t any, of course. I should write some, but it would be boring and I wouldn’t be very good at it. In lieu of that, I offer you some sweeping commentary which is generally spoiler-free since I hope that I might persuade others to give this classic a try, and because anything I write further into the series will probably be spoiler-laden.

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The White Devil eschews aimbots in favour of guts and friendship.

After finishing Nanoha A’s a few nights ago, I suppose I should put my thinking cap on again and examine my second dose of beamspam maho shojo goodness, attempting to produce something that bolts neatly onto the end of my previous remarks like an intellectual Dendrobium Orchis or the late application of glasses to a previously un-bespectacled girl. (Since this entry wanders a little, I felt ‘addenda’ was more appropriate than ‘addendum’.) Once again, I think I’ll write about Fate and once again I’ll use the excellent eleventh episode. (Spoilers follow the break.)

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So Kimikiss departs on the 01:36 am Steam Train of Storytelling, while I’m left standing on the Foggy Platform of Real Life, manfully adjusting my Starched Collar of Essay-Composition and emitting stiff-upper-lipped Throat-Clearings of ‘I’m not crying’.¹ I suppose writing a blog entry about it is akin to listening to the departing rattle of the rolling stock and smelling the soot on the air. To quickly jump between transport metaphors, I’m also sad to see CCY standing at the wheel of the Yuumi x Kouichi liner, having honourably overseen the evacuation of all the passengers, disappearing beneath the waves but never deserting his ’ship. (Hooray for doujins, eh? Eh?)

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At the beginning of Kaiji 24, something unusual happens. Kazutaka Hyodo (the Chairman) asks Kaiji for something. It’s not something important - all he wants Kaiji to do is to let go of his wrist - but it is a request. Having tried to beat Kaiji’s arm away with his cane, the Chariman resorts to calmly asking Kaiji to do something (he should’ve hit Kaiji on the left side of his head, but in the heat of the moment perhaps he forgot about Kaiji’s injury).

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Christ has died,

Christ is risen,

Christ will come again.

A very happy Easter to you. [And apologies if your browser doesn't support the thorn in the title.]

WordPress.com’s Global Tagcloud yesterday evening.
‘Anime’ is uncannily well positioned.

So Berkles has been making me flashback to my days of studying Philosophy at school. And, at the same time, I’ve been watching Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, partly because it has a good reputation, partly because it has ‘lyrical’ in its title and partly because one can’t watch mecha all of the time. (Entry contains spoilers.)

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This entry is dedicated to the memory of Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

Judging by the few episodes I’ve seen (how’s this for rushing to conclusions?) Legend of the Galactic Heroes is epic in scope and subject - and title: in its English rendering, ‘Legend’, ‘Galactic’ and ‘Heroes’ all convey the scale of the show. This isn’t the debased ‘epic’ bandied around on imageboards. This is the real deal. It may be the first time I’ve encountered an anime which has seemed truly Virgilian - I’d say Homeric, but I think in its awareness of war’s victims, its solemn stateliness and its focus on empire(s) the Legend is much closer to the Aeneid than the Iliad.

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It’s time to rehabilitate this chap.

So I was watching Char’s Counter Attack the other night (well, early morning) and considering Char. Why do I find him so compelling? It was then that it struck me: Char is not so very different from everyone’s favourite sketchily-drawn (and for once I mean that literally rather than figuratively) villain, the Anti-Spiral. I’ll grant that this isn’t the most obvious point of Gundam comparison for Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann (’This drill of mine whirs with an awesome POWER’ et cetera, et cetera), but I think the connection is fruitful. As you might expect, this post is laden with spoilers; enter at your own risk. Keep reading →