Over the span of a decade or so, I'd been putting together a collection of Yokohama Shopping Log from Honto. I got to volume seven before it went out of print and Honto exited the physical books business.

Happily, a few years later, the English translation has been published and the Japanese edition is available as an ebook.

Imagine that life as we know it came to a screeching halt. When the apocalypse was over and the dust settled, what remained looked like northern Maine in the summer and Yokohama was reduced to the size of Bangor. The world as we know it is over and human civilization has entered its twilight years. But otherwise we all feel fine.

Alpha Hatsuseno is an android (indistinguishable from a human being). No, she and her robot allies are not hunting down the few stragglers left. When she's not exploring the Hudson River School landscapes on her scooter or during one of her walkabouts, she runs an off-the-beaten-track coffee shop on the coast.

Until the coffee shop gets wiped out by a typhoon. But, hey, that's life. A good excuse for another walkabout.

In some places amidst the crumbling infrastructure, the street lights still come on at night. In others, the street lights have evolved into trees that glow in the dark where the streets used to be. The planet finds a way forward, simultaneously disintegrating and remaking itself as it takes a leisurely stroll into oblivion.

I like to imagine Yokohama Shopping Log as the sequel to Girl's Last Tour, as if Chito and Yuuri and their halftrack fell through a wormhole and ended up in the bucolic countryside of Non Non Biyori or Super Cub or Laid-Back Camp.

In the English language, the ending of the world has been most famously memorialized by Robert Frost.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

But contrary to Dylan Thomas, there's something to be said for going "gentle into that good night." Yokohama Shopping Log exemplifies the iyashikei genre that portrays "characters living out peaceful lives in calming environments." As it turns out, the world will not end with fire or ice but with a long wistful sigh.

Written and illustrated by Hitoshi Ashinano, whose show-don't-tell pen and ink artwork is often devoid of text. Published in Japan by Kodansha and by Seven Seas in the United States.

Related links

BookWalker (English emanga)
BookWalker (Japanese emanga)
Amazon (Kindle and paperback)

Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, bookwalker, ebooks, japanese culture, manga, manga reviews, technology

The human species has been going places ever since our ancestors learned to walk upright. With our restless feet taking us to every corner of the planet, it was only a matter of time before we started telling stories about how we got there, who we met, what we saw, and the interesting stuff that happened along the way.

And thus was born the road trip genre.

Convergent literary evolution consequently produced epic road trips as far-flung as The Odyssey from the western tradition and Journey to the West from the eastern tradition. The theme established here and elsewhere is that getting there isn't so much half the fun as it is pretty much the entire point.

So it comes as no surprise that, at the end of the story, there is no there there, no end of the line, no actual destination in mind. Just the journey. Consider the rootless gunman from classic American westerns, epitomized by Shane and Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars.

They're going someplace. We don't know where and they don't either. They'll know where they're going when they get there.

The Man with No Name was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, a ronin wandering across Edo period Japan. He had plenty of company. In fact, at one point in the Zatoichi series, he crosses swords with the blind masseur, who is also always on the road in search of a good dice game and a righteous cause.

In the world of narrative fiction, the eternal road trip is a neat device to keep the writer from telling the same story in the same place.

Written in the 16th century, Journey to the West follows the legendary pilgrimage of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled from China to Central Asia and India to obtain sacred Buddhist texts. The story and characters have inspired countless adaptations, Dragon Ball perhaps being the most famous.

More recent examples of the road trip include Kino's Journey and Spice and Wolf. The road trip can show up as an arc in a longer series, as when Yuuta bikes off to the northern tip of Hokkaido in Honey and Clover. And often turns into a heroic journey, as in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But Girls' Last Tour may present us with the road trip in its purest form.

The story begins in medias res with no explanations, no backstory. Chito and Yuuri are driving a halftrack through a huge and desolate industrial complex, looking for a way out. They finally emerge into a gray winter day. The whole world is gray. All around them are the remains of an apocalyptic military conflict.

They are apparently the only survivors of an unnamed military organization that fell apart through sheer entropy. Their uniforms and helmets place them in the first half of the 20th century.

Chito's halftrack is based on the Kleines Kettenkraftrad HK 101. Yuuri carries a bolt-action rifle and has what appears to be a Balkenkreuz on her helmet. Early on, they stumble across a graveyard of military equipment, including the wreckage of a Cold War era Tupolev Tu-95.

The remnants of every war ever fought everywhere. From there they venture into a ruined and depopulated megalopolis built by a highly advanced civilization. They are wandering through the decline and fall of a 22nd century Roman Empire that has so far regressed to the early 20th century and will certainly fall further.

And maybe that's not such a bad thing. Rather than with a bang or a whimper (T.S. Eliot), or with fire or ice (Robert Frost), this is a world destined to simply fade away. Hopefully to be reborn again another day.

Related links

Girls' Last Tour
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End
Honey and Clover
Kino's Journey (2017)
Spice and Wolf (2024)

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, geography, history, japanese culture, manga, politics, thinking about writing

In contrast to the ending of Scrapped Princess, I found the atonement scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to be a weak representation of the material being analogized. Furthermore, it makes no sense disconnected from its Christian eschatological framework. And requires a huge suspension of disbelief to make sense of it even when it's not.

C.S. Lewis's hand-wave in this regard is "deep magic," which I think is his way of saying, "Stop asking why." I don't blame him. The Doctrine of the Atonement in the Catholic Encyclopedia covers all the arguments and analogies the dedicated church-goer of any faith has ever heard of and dismisses them one by one as "close but not quite." Ultimately, it can't do much better than the tautology it begins with:

Atonement is the Satisfaction of Christ, whereby God and the world are reconciled or made to be at one.

That sounds awfully Deepak Chopra. The saying, "Fish discover water last," resonates here. Lewis tremendously advanced the cause of Christianity by reframing it in the context of medieval legend and mythology, his areas of expertise. But I think it's necessary to look further afield, to audiences not culturally conditioned to make snap connections between the analogy and the thing being analogized.

Taking Scrapped Princess as a case in point, I can't say whether author Ichiro Sakaki and director Soichi Masui intended the metaphor to be extended this far, but Scrapped Princess frames this bedrock principle of Christian theology with a clarity and logic I've never seen before.

The Earth of Scrapped Princess (which could be viewed as a sequel to The Day the Earth Stood Still) was long ago on the losing side of a literal war in the heavens. After the surrender, the planet was stripped of its advanced technology and sealed inside a kind of global "Biosphere Two." Now called "Providence," it is ruled by a computer system that makes its will known through the "Church of Mauser."

The system maintains Providence in a permanent Middle Ages. The primary means of control is the church (an obvious nod to Rome). But there are several other subroutines running as checks and balances to this goal. Aside from the human Inquisitioners, angel-like beings known as "Peacemakers" (self-aware but cruelly stoic robots) that can trigger Armageddon and reboot the Middle Ages all over again.

Human nature being what it is, sooner or later people start getting too big for their britches, begin discovering the "old technology" (a nod to the Renaissance), and generally causing problems. And so the slate has to be wiped clean.

The other, seemingly contradictory routine is the "Providence Breaker." This independently-running program is designed to terminate the entire system when certain conditions are met, and return to the human race their free agency. It tests for these conditions by raising up a "savior" who is prophesied to destroy the world. If she dies before her sixteenth birthday, then nothing happens and the subroutine restarts.

The anime series doesn't explore all the alternative options, but the following exegesis does fit the material: a Napoleonic figure who rises precipitously to prominence and plows through church and state wouldn't trigger the Providence Breaker either. Because that would inevitably result in a repeat of the same situation, the reason for the world being in this state in the first place.

Rather, the savior has to die to save the world, literally have her blood shed to trigger the Providence Breaker. In the end, Pacifica is betrayed by her own kin, just as Mauser, the original designer of the system, originally betrayed human freedom for "the greater good." (Compare to King Hezekiah trading away future liberty for a present peace in 2 Kings 20:16-19.)

Up to that point, Pacifica has been protected by her mecha "Dragoons" (Knights Templar), and by her followers. If they are not strong and resourceful enough, she will die before her sixteenth birthday. If they are too strong, then their power will corrupt absolutely and nullify the effort. It is only on the razor's edge between these two extremes that her atonement becomes efficacious.

In the end, telling Pacifica that "you were born to destroy me," Mauser's virtual ghost leaves the final choice between peaceful tyranny and chaotic freedom up to her. When Pacifica chooses the latter, like a good deist, Mauser instructs the human race that it is now time for them to take responsibility for their own actions and their own future. And shuts itself down.

This interpretation comes to a logical conclusion and makes a clear, comprehensible point. Not that it's necessarily doctrinally correct (depending on what doctrine you adhere to), but as my old violin teacher used to say, if you're going to play the wrong note, at least play it well. That shouldn't be too much to ask of religious theologies that claim to have the power to damn or save us for all eternity.

Related posts

The catechism of Angel Beats!
Scrapped Princess
The passion of the magical girl
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Labels: anime, apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, eschatology, magic, religion, robots

This is one of those funny juxtapositions that tests just how big an anime geek you are.


Sitting on the back of the truck is a baby ohmu (okay, a plastic replica), a species of giant bug dreamed up by Hayao Miyazaki for his post-apocalyptic epic, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

In the movie, a baby ohmu is kidnapped by the bad guys in order to stampede the rest of the herd into destroying the last defensive redoubt outside of Nausicaä's village.


When ohmu really get their dander up, their eyes glow red. These particular ohmu are not happy campers. So you'll want to steer clear when the parents show up (triggering a classic eucatastrophic climax).

Labels: anime, apocalyptic fiction, japanese culture, miyazaki, pop culture

The "concept as plot" approach to storytelling works well enough if the story being told is kept short and simple. Because a concept, no matter how complex and compelling, isn't a plot.

Yet some ideas are so neat that you can fool an audience into treating them as if they were.

To a point. As Abraham Lincoln famously said, "You cannot fool all the people all the time."

That pretty much describes the arc of M. Night Shyamalan's career. He made getting fooled a heap of good spooky fun The Sixth Sense. But it went to his head and his movies got increasingly repetitive and self-important. Then the feeling was, "Fool me twice, shame on me."

The Matrix elevated "high-concept" to a half-billion dollar franchise by letting the audience in on the secret at the start. We do love a shared secret. But after dipping into the same conceptual well three times in a row, the water started to taste brackish.

Patema Inverted sets forth with one neat idea, and it's good for a hundred minutes of screen time (and not much more). There are enough loose ends at the end to justify a sequel, but a sequel would demand an actual plot. A concept is a told joke. We got it already.

Patema is the heroine, and the "inverted" (sakasama) means exactly that. In this quasi-dystopian future, there is an "above ground" tribe and a "below ground" tribe. Gravity works the opposite for each tribe.

The story about how this happened is covered in the first thirty seconds and then forgotten (until the end), which is a smart way to do it. When you're building on "concept" alone, don't belabor it. The more people think about it, the more holes they'll find.

There are enough holes in Patema Inverted to make a sieve (to start with, how the economy actually works), but out of sight, out of mind.

Otherwise, the one (annoying) flaw in the movie is that the "above ground" world is one of those by-the-numbers Orwellian societies ruled by one of those by-the-numbers cartoon villains, spouting off in religious terms without a religious context anywhere in sight.

(Shutting down inquiry by declaring curiosity a sin works in Scrapped Princess because it's couched in the framework of a powerful and pervasive medieval religious organization. There's none of that here.)

As a general rule, if you have to toss a dramatic foil into the mix in order to create actual conflict, there isn't any actual conflict. But if you do, make sure it's Hugo Weaving.

The backstory, brief as it is, suggests a better approach. The "dictator" should have been the last descendant of the scientists who caused the problem in the first place, desperate to hide the enormity of their error. Yes, scientists make mistakes and they have egos too.

Thus his interest in Patema's tribe: still trying to figure out what went wrong without revealing to anybody what they did wrong.

That aside, Patema Inverted is a fast-paced, fairly family-friendly (though not for acrophobes) exploration of a surprisingly deep philosophical idea. Director and writer Yasuhiro Yoshiura's clever use of perspective literally asks: "Which way is really up?"

In this case, as in so many, the answer all depends on where you happen to be standing.


A big shout-out to GKids, the U.S. distributor, which now also manages Studio Ghibli's back catalog. That includes the young-adult melodramas Ocean Waves and Only Yesterday, never before released in the U.S. (But still no date on the DVDs or streaming.)

Labels: anime, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, gkids, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, science, science fiction

One reason Frozen was so successful in Japan is that it's a spot-on execution of the "magical girl" (mahou shoujo) genre. As with Akira Kurosawa and the Hollywood Western, the inspiration goes round and round. With Puella Magi Madoka Magica, this cross-cultural fertilization has produced a near-perfect hybrid.

The magical girl traces her roots back to the television classic Bewitched (1964). A dubbed version soon showed up on Japanese TV and inspired Toei Animation's Sally the Witch (1966).

Sally the Witch defined the narrative formula in several key ways:

• The heroine (a teenage girl) must keep her magic secret.
• When she uses magic, she needs a special magical phrase and an enchanted object like a baton (a supercharged wand).
• A magical servant (or familiar) accompanies the heroine back and forth between magical and normal worlds.

Though this basic approach remains as popular as ever, the genre has evolved to include tomboyish protagonists, fierce rivals, evil antagonists, dark outcomes, weird weaponry, and "fan service" (you won't find that in a Disney cartoon).

Also unlike its Hollywood precedents, magical girls often battle the bad guys under the direction of a shadowy (extraterrestrial) organization monitoring the planet. Though wielded in "Abracadabra" terms, their powers align with Arthur C. Clarke's dictum: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

There's a lot of Batman in a magical girl. In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, that designation belongs more to Homura Akemi, Madoka's self-assigned Dark Knight. Like Batman, hers is the morally murky world of a person who has seen too much and done too much and gotten nowhere. Brute force is pretty much all she has left.

The enemy Madoka is being recruited to combat are malevolent witches zombifying people from the shadows. The magical girls battle them in a kaleidoscopic netherworld that was apparently designed by Henri Matisse after a bad hangover, a medieval contrast to the shiny, post-post-modern "real" world (click to enlarge).


Said Jung, "In the Shadow is the gold." The shadows are dark and deep. There are bigger conspiracies at work here, and those witches aren't what they appear. A devastating revelation tells Madoka they are souls in need of redemption, transforming Madoka Magica into an exploration of the doctrine of universal reconciliation.

The first two episodes deceptively duplicate the cutesy magical girl formula exactly, until the end of the third, when somebody's head gets bitten off. And not any old someone but a main character. Imagine a Disney cartoon abruptly reverting to the original Grimm version, with the rest of the cast viciously turning on each other.

Elsa going off the deep end in Frozen is actually according to the formula. Magical girls often go off the deep end or end up fighting other magical girls who've gone off the deep end. But in Madoka Magica, the stakes quickly escalate beyond internecine rivalries.

It's about the value of a soul and what prize, what noble goal, could temp you to give it up. If that sounds Faustian, it's on purpose: the series makes repeated references to Goethe's Faust. To briefly review the Faust story:

Faust is a scholar who is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, so he makes a pact with the Devil, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. "Faust" and the adjective "Faustian" imply a situation in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success for a delimited term.

All magical girl have a cute familiar (and recruiter). In Madoka Magica, it's the rabbit-like Kyubey. He's revealed (by Homura) to be Mephistopheles. Madoka would seem at first to be Faust. If so, she's a very cautious Faust (again thanks to Homura), not following the rest of the magical girls when they jump off the cliff.

The temptation is that Kyubey really can grant them anything they can possibly imagine. Giving the average teenager god-like powers is not a good idea, especially when the scales of the universe must inexorably balance: the greater the bestowed "gift," the greater the damnation that awaits them when they fall.

And yet such divine power opens the door to the possibility of an atonement. The first part of Madoka Magica is largely a retelling of the temptation of Christ (Matthew 4:1-11). Madoka's guide through the wilderness is Homura, who appears as an Old Testament prophet, speaking harsh truths none of them wants to hear.

With kindness comes naivete. Courage becomes foolhardiness. And dedication has no reward. If you can't accept that, you are not fit to be a Magical Girl.

Except it is courage and kindness that drive her forward. Like Peter drawing his sword in the Garden (John 18:10-11), Homura tries to prevent the inevitable. "By grace we are saved, after all we can do" (2 Nephi 25:23) sums up her character arc, especially the doing part. But also like Peter, Homura cannot "save" Madoka from her destiny.

Madoka and her fractious apostles (Homura on her right).

For in the end, Madoka must take up her cross and lay down her life to save her friends (John 15:13). As with Scrapped Princess and Haibane Renmei, the freewheeling elements of genre anime fantasy in Madoka Magica plunge right to the heart of Christian eschatology.

Unconstrained by a cultural rule book dictating what is and isn't "acceptable," Japanese fantasy writers reshuffle the metaphorical deck with few self-imposed constraints. The plotting must also be disciplined by grounding the narrative in some sort of plausible logic. There must be rationality behind the resolutions.

Reading too much science into fantasy can get problematic. Fortunately, Kyubey sums up the "magic door" simply and expeditiously, and is convincing enough for the tale to hang together.

C.S. Lewis resorts to a literal deus ex machina with his hand-wave of "deep magic" to resurrect Aslan. (The White Witch must have missed that particular script meeting.) But Madoka's decision aligns with the rules of the game exactly as Kyubey has explained them. What makes Kyubey terrifying is that he's stone cold rational.

It's the same premise as Monsters, Inc., this time taken to grotesque (yet logical) extremes. Angst comes into its own as a compelling plot device! Which also makes the reason for targeting teenage girls darkly hilarious. As a result, Madoka's solution rings that much more true within the framework of the story and Kyubey's scheming.

To be sure, Madoka is a Lorenzo Snow kind of savior (with some Buddhist sensibilities thrown in for good measure, plus a neat theory of divine omniscience): "As man now is, God once was."

Supposing that God was once a teenage girl with a penchant for pink.

Related posts

The atonement of Pacifica Casull
Haibane Renmei
Tweeny Witches
Scrapped Princess
The magical girl

Labels: anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, crunchyroll, eschatology, fantasy, haibane, magic, magical girl, miltonesque, personal favs, religion

I've described the high-tech metal band DragonForce as a bunch of talented artists who take themselves seriously enough to create the best-crafted product they are capable of, but not so seriously that they spoil the product in the name of "art."

Appleseed: Alpha is a great illustration of that in a visual medium, pulpy entertainment done as well as could be expected on a reasonable budget (dirt cheap by comparable Hollywood standards) and delivered in a hyper-digital medium. It's earnest without becoming ponderous.


The setting is completely different from the previous movies and series. If anything, it owes more to The Road Warrior (with robots instead of biker dudes), and comes to a "Hulk smash!" conclusion: take out the bad guys and kill the mecha Godzilla to keep it out of the hands of the much badder guys.

The easy-peasy plot is a vast improvement over previous Appleseed efforts, that had such tangled narrative structures it was a miracle the villains could remember what they were supposed to do next. Here's a key to good quality schlock: don't over-complicate the premise and stick to what works.

Which ultimately does make Appleseed: Alpha more interesting for reasons other than the story.

To start with, it's a demonstration of how much digital animation technology has improved since Appleseed (2004). There's a scene in Appleseed: Alpha (2014) where my attention was drawn to Deunan's hair--down to the individual strands--shifting ever so slightly as she moved her head back and forth.

That kind of detail was impossible with Appleseed. As I described the state of budget digital animation back in 2004:

Hair is a bear to render digitally, so it's stylized the same chunky way it is in hand-drawn anime. Shading as well uses a limited palette. The resulting low-res digital characters seem caught in a flatland between two and three dimensions, appearing hand-drawn sometimes and like sophisticated marionettes at others.

Evidence that Moore's Law hasn't been repealed shows up in unlikely places, like the cost of rendering digital cartoons.

The backgrounds in Appleseed: Alpha often leap right over the "uncanny valley" straight into a world you could easily mistake for real. Human faces, however, remain firmly planted on the other side of the valley (granted, there are so few human faces in Alpha that it rarely spoils the effect).

As a result, in the emoting department, the human Deunan is upstaged by the cyborgs. Even Ms. Killer Robot (with her runway model moves) has more personality. Not having a face helps. All the rendering in the world still can't infuse a digital face with the same "soul" as hand-drawn animation.

Comparing the Deunan to Madoka (from Puella Magi Madoka Magica), for example, abstract art wins hands down over photorealism (though I'm still impressed by the hair).



Maybe the day is coming when we will increasingly risk losing ourselves in a computerized Matrix that is indistinguishable from what we once knew as "reality." But it isn't here yet, and like the self-aware AI that's supposed to be soon taking over the world, I seriously doubt that day will ever arrive.

Related posts

Appleseed
Appleseed: Ex Machina
Baby DragonForce
The "uncanny valley"

Labels: anime, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, japanese movie reviews, movie reviews, movies, robots, shirow, technology, uncanny valley

I noted in my review of R.I.P.D. the lazy tendency to equate "ugly" and "evil." Though in the "realistic" world of crime drama, the opposite is true. Watching Law & Order, you could be forgiven for concluding that every crime in New York City was committed by a well-coiffed Manhattanite.

And yet the stereotype stubbornly persists in the F&SF realms. One of the nice things about Frozen was having the handsome young prince be the villain. Space opera especially seems fixated on humanity's struggles with grotesque alien creatures. (That "hive mind" thing is getting old too.)

This does open the door to B-grade actioners like Species and Lifeforce that play against type by casting a fashion model as the alien villainess and giving her many opportunities to take off her clothes. Though these movies could also be read as Victorian allegories about the dangers of sex.

Darth Vader was most interesting when he was cool and wanted to "end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy." Then the whole thing degraded into a mud wrestling match, reducing the moral stakes in Star Wars to white hat/black hat terms that make old westerns look sophisticated.

Compare, for example, these two quite different depictions of the devil by Ray Wise in Reaper and Peter Stormare in Constantine. Ray Wise's performance in particular is a perfect illustration of C.S. Lewis's observation that

The greatest evil . . . is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.

Peter Stormare only shows up in the last ten minutes of the movie, yet appears fully realized as Constantine's thus-far invisible antagonist (though not, in fact, his real enemy).


And then there's Al Pacino playing the devil, who ever since Milton made him the biggest anti-hero in literature (with all the best lines to boot), has no doubt been dying to be played by Al Pacino. Again opposite Keanu Reeves in The Devil's Advocate.


The creepy in these scenes comes from their characters, not from the special effects department and certainly not from their appearances. Granted, we're back in rich white dude territory (so they must be bad). But at least they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies.

Jagi Lamplighter points to the equally galling trend in "literary fiction fantasy" of making bad guys not really bad but misunderstood (unless they're rich white dudes). I give the silly Independence Day a wide pass because it insists that, naw, these aliens are just plain nasty.

I mean, they go around destroying all kinds of stuff without filing an Environmental Impact Statement first. The gall!

Related posts

The Big Bad
Constantine
R.I.P.D.

Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, miltonesque, movies, religion, television

I'm fine with the same only different. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, an early 19th century playwright, poet, and Whig Member of the British House of Commons, archly said of a fellow politician,

The gentleman has said much that is good, and much that is original; but that which was original was not good, and that which was good was not original.

In other words, I quite enjoyed Pacific Rim, a fun, blow-em-up, alien invader film, even though it is a carbon copy of Independence Day. Except underwater. And with monsters and mechas instead of fighter planes and spacecraft.


Mecha is a well-established science fiction/fantasy genre in Japan, featuring futuristic mechanical devices, especially gigantic human-piloted robots (as distinct from Iron Man type exoskeletons).

I generally avoid mecha series because mecha don't make sense tactically, ergonomically, or thermodynamically. As Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington pointed out:

If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

Shorter version: the ain't no such thing as a free energy lunch. Adhering—if only in spirit—to the Second Law of Thermodynamics would greatly improve science fiction across the board.

The appallingly bad science in most Hollywood science fiction notwithstanding, compelling characters and a well-told story can make up for a lot in the stupid department (the scientifically stupid Independence Day being a case in point).

Pacific Rim is certainly the best live-action mecha movie ever made. It's exceptionally faithful to its Japanese roots, not only in the robot designs but in the mind-melding between the pilots, key to mecha series like Simoun and Eureka Seven.

They even got an actual Japanese actress (Rinko Kikuchi) to play an actual Japanese character!

Still, there's nothing wrong with being good and original. It's high time Hollywood got past the Independence Day premise: aliens trash the Earth to exploit its natural resources. Thankfully, the invading aliens are invariable really dumb.

Pacific Rim logically falls apart when it's revealed the monster are being directed by sentient beings. At least the aliens in Independence Day attacked en masse. If conquering the Earth is the objective, doing it piecemeal makes no sense.

Except to give the beleaguered humans a sporting chance. Though this revelation comes late enough in the movie that it can simply be shrugged off.

A few delightful characters help the medicine go down: a pair of mad scientists reminiscent of Leonard and Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, and Ron Perlman as a dealer in dead monster parts (watch the final credits to learn his ultimate fate).

Mecha anime series closer to fantasy than science fiction make the bad science easier to intellectually digest. But there is one series that succeeds as hard science fiction: Patlabor. (Sorry, but Neon Genesis Evangelion does nothing for me.)


Patlabor starts out by establishing a realistic premise: "Patrol Labors" evolved out of heavy construction equipment. A drunk at the controls of a semi-sentient earth mover could cause a lot of problems, necessitating equally equipped cops.

True to the spirit of the Second Law, they're hauled around on huge flatbed trucks and their batteries constantly have to be recharged.

The Patlabor franchise is also responsible for an outstanding entry in the albeit tiny category of monster vs. mech movies, a well-crafted and deeply moving drama in any genre: the feature-length Patlabor WXIII.


Unlike the mecha-centric television series, WXIII is a traditional police procedural, with the mechas playing a supporting role. The monster is man-made, the product of maternal love and human tragedy. No aliens invade and no apocalypse looms.

As I've argues elsewhere, small and mundane human problems often make for far more compelling drama than the ending of the world.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, movie reviews, robots, science, science fiction, technology

Inspired by the horrible mistranslation of a book (that will never be published), the bassist for a 1970s punk band (whose records hardly anybody will buy) writes a song (that nobody understands) and saves the world from destruction. This is one whale of a Fish Story.

Starting only a few hours before a giant comet collides with the Earth, and jumping backwards and forwards through time, Fish Story documents a half-century chain of unpredictable cause and effect as it traces this trail of breadcrumbs to its near-apocalyptic conclusion.

A story that could have easily succumbed to art house ponderousness instead allows the absurd premise to play the straight man to the darkly comical cascade of not-quite-coincidences that follow. The result is a plot that is surprisingly comprehensible and thoroughly enjoyable.

By the time we get to the irresistibly cute Mikako Tabe, who resists being taken too seriously even when being held hostage on a ferry boat by a murderous doomsday religious cult, we're more than ready for a seat-of-the-pants solution straight out of Red Dwarf.

Despite its convoluted narrative structure, Fish Story never tries to be anything less than obvious. In the process, it quite cleverly points out how misunderstandings take on lives of their own, and how willing we are to read great meaning into literally nothing.

This is an important message for writers and politicians alike: what you wrote or said means what everybody but you thinks it means, not what you meant.

For those put off by non-linear storytelling, rest assured that a montage at the end knits the key incidents together into a single timeline, like the answer to a tricky algebra question at the back of the book. In any case, Fish Story just made me grin, and that's enough.

Labels: apocalyptic fiction, japan, japanese movie reviews, mikako tabe, movie reviews, pop culture, thinking about writing

Maybe you missed it, but the Second Coming didn't happen last year. Remember that Harold Camping guy? He had it scheduled for May 21, and when that didn't pan out, October 21. Oops! As with all unprovable negatives, Reverend Camping should have doubled down on the proposition:

"Hey, how do we know Jesus didn't return? He could be currently holed up in an undisclosed location. Like Japan!"

Incidentally, Camping's "apology" is a beautiful piece of spin. First he blames God, and then he blames the model. Yep, Dispensationalists (along with astrologers) were avid computer modelers (these days using actual computers) long before anybody was talking about "climate change."

"Amongst other things I have been checking my notes more carefully than ever. And I do find that there is other language in the Bible that we still have to look at very carefully and will impinge upon this question very definitely."

I suggests that all future presidential and Supreme Court candidates adopt that template (just swap in "Constitution" or any debatable chunk of legislation for "Bible") into their PR repertoire.

On the heels of the world-not-ending came the concern trolling (does the mass media do anything better?) about the world's population reaching seven billion. Another reminder of how much Dispensationalism and the latest environmentalist cause du jour have in common.

Just like global warming, "overpopulation" once triggered exactly the same apocalyptic visions of doom and gloom, and calls for a dictator of the world to save us from ourselves. Okay, nobody says it out loud now, but that's what it'd take to make any of these utopian schemes work.

By "work," I mean "address real problems," unless, again, an authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it ends up running things. Again, note how both religious and secular utopians pin their hopes on an angry, almighty god to save us from ourselves.

Except that the biggest authoritarian government with a big army and few qualms about using it isn't exactly on board.

As P.J. O'Rourke puts it, "There are 1.3 billion people in China and they all want a Buick." Stopping continental drift would be easier than convincing China to cut its carbon emissions in a meaningful way (rather than nod solemnly until the earnest environmentalists leave the room).

We're all going to be doomed by global warming until the globe warms and doom doesn't arrive. But take heart. At that point, some other looming environmental catastrophe will rouse us to action, and the end of the world will again threaten our existence in equally exciting ways.

Besides, everybody knows the world is really going to end in December.

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, environmentalism, religion

With the treacle and dreck filtered out, the stories so far on Terra Nova have been retreads of average fare on Stargate or Star Trek. Unfortunately, they're constantly bogged down by the "Wesley Crusher" syndrome and the even deadlier Sarah Connor Chronicles syndrome.

The former tries to "connect" with the teen demographic with a wimpy teenage character whose presence shatters suspension of disbelief. The latter tries to "broaden" the appeal by layering on soap opera plots (as if dinosaurs and killer robots didn't provide plenty of conflict as is).

A running joke on Buffy is that the Apocalypse is right around the corner and all she cares about is getting a date to the prom. Some people in Hollywood apparently don't think that's a joke (memo to Hollywood writers: stop trying to relive and romanticize your high school years on my time).

The problem is further compounded by having critical story elements depend on said teenagers doing stupid stuff. The result is to turn off the core geek demographic, who want to be intellectually challenged, not pandered to, and who want to leave their idiot teenage years far behind.

Discussing the politics of ressentiment, Daniel Foster gets right to the point:

Nietzsche was correct to point out that the leaders of men, the successful few--you might even call them the one percent--are too busy acting, doing, and accomplishing to complain about their "emotional crises."

(Incidentally, one of my favorite names for a conceptual alien race is the "Nietzscheans" on Andromeda.) Or as a reviewer on IMDB puts it,

I don't want to watch another show about the estranged dad, the angsty son, the nerdy daughter, the innocent child, the worried mom, the hot girlfriend and the over-confident military guy.

To be sure, Stephen Lang as Commander Nathaniel Taylor makes a pretty good Nietzschean. But this James Kirk or Jack O'Neill has no Spock or Samantha Carter to act as a counterweight. And no mission to get the blood moving every morning, besides babysitting a bunch of listless ingrates.

A competent, go-getting alpha male with no goals. A supposedly brilliant doctor who spends all her time treating oopsies and dealing with whiny teenagers. Man, that's so depressing. Scotty, hurry up and fix the transporter and beam me back to dystopia!

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, robots, television reviews, thinking about writing

The best part of the Terra Nova pilot was the dystopian introduction, only because it reminded me how much I'd like to see a noir detective series set in the Blade Runner universe. That got my hopes up.

Then the whole thing started sliding down the stupid scale. Some tropes--like overpopulation, the environment being more polluted than in the past, and society becoming more violent--are so pervasive that people readily accept them when they're contrary to the facts.

In any case, the climate was much warmer, the CO2 levels at least four times higher, back during the Cretaceous. But I'm willing to give hackneyed tropes a pass as long as the writers get the rest of the science plausible right.

Alas, bad science fiction always has that moment when it becomes clear that the writer and director and producer couldn't care to get it right. The jocks show up in their SUVs (what is this, Road Warrior?) and bargain for stuff (why not just shoot them?) with a box of meteoric iron.

Meteoric iron is iron that comes from meteors. What are they going to do with it? Make hood ornaments? You'd need tons of iron to make the steel to support that level of technology in a community that size. What are they supposed to do if the axle on one of those souped-up SUVs break?

Besides, how do a bunch of rebels living in a jungle canopy keep them going? As transportation, ultralights make more sense. Another top priority would be transporting the components of a rocket system through the time rift so they could launch navigational and weather satellites.

Several massive extinction events occurred between then and now, caused not only by asteroids, but supervolcanoes and ice ages. If the survival of the human race is the whole point, they'll need to gather a lot of hard data about the planet to stay ahead of the Darwinian grim reaper.

And speaking of culling the slow and the stupid from the herd, running around in shorts would sure do it, not to mention stripping down to a bikini in a prehistoric rain forest. Okay, maybe they chlorinated the water and bombed the place with DDT first (the contrarian in me likes that idea).

I was hoping for a Cretaceous version of Star Trek or Stargate, about exploring the "strange new worlds" in our own past. What I got was a painfully predictable soap opera about the most exclusive summer camp for spoiled rich kids ever, and run like a country club penitentiary.

Where are the explorers? A prehistoric Ferengi or two looking to get rich? There should be splinter groups and outlying colonies all over the place, not just one bunch of ineffectual conspirators. Our Guy in Charge would be working overtime keeping the unum in e pluribus.

That means multipurpose, military/scientific scouting teams, the challenge of establishing and enforcing the rule of law, and keeping the colonies from splitting into tribes warring over limited high-tech resources. That means plenty of story possibilities.

Instead, the primary concern is a squabble between the preps and the jocks so arcane nobody can explain it. I'm getting the feeling they can't explain it because the writers haven't got a clue. But who knows, maybe it's a scheme to get rid of the "useless third" of the population!

Because this bunch sure isn't useful for anything.

Compared to them, the Ingalls family was more adventurous. As Kate says, "the Stargate philosophy is that exploration is better than playing it safe, no matter what the consequences." Terra Nova is all about playing it safe and fretting over the consequences. That's boring.

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, science, science fiction, television reviews

This year's NHK historical docudrama is about Ryouma Sakamoto, Japan's most brilliant and charismatic 19th century revolutionary (in the traditional sense of being open to new ideas and then seeking pragmatic ways of implementing them).

As the program vividly illustrates, the arrival of Commodore Perry's "Black Ships" was no less shocking to both the populace and the powers-that-be than an invasion from outer space.

Two centuries earlier, Japan could boast of having one of the most advanced societies in the world. But in 1853, Perry's steam-powered warships confronted the Japanese with technology beyond anything they could imagine.

A mere fifteen years later, after ruling uncontested for 250 years, the Tokugawa regime was crushed and swept from power in a civil war that lasted a matter of months.

Add to that regular earthquakes, volcanoes, and typhoons, the occasional suicidal end-time cult, two atomic bombs and losing a world war, and it's no surprise that the apocalypse has become part of the national consciousness.

Japanese F&SF writers love apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic plots. And perhaps perversely, Japanese love being entertained by them. They come in all shades and varieties. To name a few of the sub-genres off the top of my head:

• Japan sinks into the Pacific (Japan Sinks).
• Japan (or parts thereof) is destroyed by rampaging monsters. Or robots. Or aliens. The Gozilla series covered all of these at some point.
• A secret conspiracy destroys Japan (or parts thereof) to keep an even bigger conspiracy secret (Vexille). Attempts to explain said conspiracy usually result in much tangled logic and head scratching in the denouement (Evangelion).
• More specifically, Tokyo gets destroyed. Repeatedly (Akira).
• Instead of destroying Tokyo, aliens park the whole city in a different dimension (RahXephon).
  
• The oceans rise, threatening to inundate most of metropolitan Japan (Patlabor). Toss in a mutant sea monster (Patlabor: W-13).
• Earthquakes, with both natural and supernatural causes and effects, wreak havoc (Demon City Shinjuku).
• The planet is rendered unlivable by external astronomical events, like the Moon exploding (Cowboy Bebop).

The apocalyptic event is often an excuse to wreck the current social order (Burst Angel). Japan is such an orderly society that if you want to inject a Mad Max element—or postulate that everybody's as well-armed as Americans—you need an upheaval first to make it believable.

The cheesy but fun (and even poignant at times) anime version of Witchblade combines a Tokyo-wrecking conspiracy with supernatural earthquakes, rising seas, and law & order so gone to hell that superhero gunfights (among barely-dressed babes) can break out at any moment.

The best defeat of extraterrestrial invaders occurs in Magic User's Club, wherein the heroine turns the alien spaceship into a giant flowering cherry tree.

My favorite post-apocalyptic series is the Yokohama Shopping Log (not available in English). A combination of natural disasters and rising oceans has destroyed most of the "post" in postmodern Japan. But all things considered, life didn't turn out half bad.

Think of Little House on the Prairie with modern plumbing and an android as the protagonist. Seriously, reading this manga is better than an antidepressant. Maybe the world ought to end on a more regular basis.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, apocalyptic fiction, demon city, environmentalism, geology, japan, movies, pop culture, robots, sakamoto, superhero, ww2

The world is always ending and never will.

That is, until the sun goes nova, a black hole swallows up the Earth, or a nearby star collapses in a gamma ray event that turns us all into irradiated food. Since we can't prevent any of those things from happening, there's no point worrying about them (asteroids we can actually do something about).

But we love imagining that "it's all over (almost)," largely because Sunday School is boring. Plus that "love your neighbor" stuff isn't as much fun as hoping the son of a bitch fries when the big one hits. Thus every screaming headline is treated as evidence that the big, bad Damoclean Sword is about to go into free-fall.

Yet as Stephen Pinker and Jared Diamond have pointed out, during the 20th century, even including WWII, a member of the human species had a lower chance of suffering a violent death than at any time else during recorded history. We mistake news of bad things with the incidence of bad things happening.

What we're mostly witnessing presently is the inevitable shifting of the momentum of history from one part of the globe to another. Having previously identified and invested ourselves with the ascension of the West, this decline arouses much angst. But in the long view, it's another day at the office.

The "West" is aging so fast (along with China, Japan, and most of the developed world) that any call to arms in order to usher in Armageddon would first send us scurrying for our walkers.

Doomsayers used to warn us that when the nuclear apocalypse came (assuming, improbably, that all those long-dormant missiles would obediently fire when the button was pressed), only the cockroaches would survive. Human beings are more resilient than cockroaches and thrive in far more extreme environments.

It's unfortunate that Chinese history during the Three Kingdoms period and Japanese history during the Warring States period isn't a regular part of the high school curriculum. It would impress upon students how resilient the human animal is under extreme duress.

During the Three Kingdoms period, attrition rates in many areas exceeded 50 percent of the entire population. That'd be like the population of the U.S. dropping from 300 million to 150 million in a single generation. Now China is our principal loan officer.

True, it took a few centuries, but it wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't even the end of Chinese civilization. The history books simply marked the beginning of a new dynasty.

These same historical periods saw great social change and advances in technology and culture (ditto the aftermath of the Black Death). Give the human race a challenge and after a bit of Darwinist pruning it'll rise to it. This end-of-days stuff makes for entertaining movies. But in real life it's a cop-out.

It's hard to match the presumptuousness of a bunch of wet-behind-the-ears teenagers selling the secret sauce to save our souls. Except that they're dim bulbs compared to to the blinding arrogance of the secular evangelists who claim they are going to save the whole bloody planet.

The new religion of catastrophic environmentalism has also embraced the apocalypse, along with the fundamentalist's fear of change. But just as much worse changes have happened to human civilization in the past, much worst changes have happened to the planet itself than we're capable of inflicting.

And will happen in the future, regardless of anything we do or don't do. Planetary catastrophic change—earthquakes, volcanoes, ice ages, oceans rising and falling—is what the planet does normally. (The mean temperature of the North Slope of Alaska was once thirty degrees warmer than it is today.)

We've turned into roosters convinced the sun rises on our command. We're quite capable of fouling our own nests, but only in the sense that a horsefly fouls the windshield of a tractor-trailer cruising down the interstate. It's not like the tractor-trailer cares. A swish of the windshield wipers and its gone.

Let's keep in mind who's really in charge. There are more bacteria on earth—in mass and number—than all other living things combined. For that matter, there are more bacteria in the human gut than cells in the human body. The bacteria keep us around because we're convenient.

Our ultimate fate is to become compost. It is more comforting to believe that we're standing at the fulcrum of history, that like Archimedes we can move the Earth if given enough leverage (or "political activism"), rather than accommodating ourselves to whatever direction the Earth wishes to move in.

Except not that mundane, sausage-making politics. Or anything that requires any actual risk to life and limb. Just idealistically protest stuff and vilify those of different (political) faiths (the ones counting on you being "left behind"; it's apparently a very mutually-annihilating sentiment).

Merely declare your "awareness" of the situation and you are saved! (Wait, I forget, is that evangelicals or environmentalists?)

An interesting fact about white people is that they firmly believe that all of the world's problems can be solved through "awareness." Meaning the process of making other people aware of problems, and then magically someone else like the government will fix it. This belief allows them to feel that sweet self-satisfaction without actually having to solve anything or face any difficult challenges.

Making every conflict, every frustrated objective, every twist and turn in the course of geological and human events, into a Manichean contest of wills buys into the same fanciful thinking as the conspiracy gnostics who insist they're the only ones who really know what's going on (and then can't shut up about it).

It's a trap that teenagers easily fall into, what with all their "goth" posturings and dour convictions that nobody (let alone their parents or teachers) has ever suffered as much as them in the whole history of the world.

But teenagers grow out of it. Adult, middle-class Americans indulging in non-fiction apocalyptic fantasies are like twelve-year-olds gathered around the campfire telling ghost stories and scaring themselves for the giggly thrill of it, knowing that in the morning they'll be driving home to the suburbs.

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, environmentalism, geology, history

Recently in the New York Times, David Brooks described Avatar as an illustration of the "White Messiah fable," a popular narrative formula in which

a manly young adventurer who goes into the wilderness in search of thrills and profit. But, once there, he meets the native people and finds that they are noble and spiritual and pure. And so he emerges as their Messiah, leading them on a righteous crusade against his own rotten civilization.

Somewhat in Cameron's defense, the Messiah and his "white man's burden" is a fairly universal trope. And not confined to white men. Its seeds germinate at the heart of any reactionary or revolutionary cause, especially those that can attract true believers with no actual skin in the game.

Its appeal is undeniable. In contrast to the monomyth hero formula that has a lowly beta catching a lucky break and making the most of it through sheer hard work (Rocky), being a Messiah vaults you to the top of the pecking order solely because of your inherent moral superiority. Because of who you are.

It helps if you're Kevin Costner or Tom Cruise.

This is the corrupting feudal apple in the primordeal Eden. Despite our equalitarian pretentions, we really do believe that some animals are more equal than others. Moral superiority requires no effort to possess. You need only announce its presence within you and hew to the proper political platform.

As I point out in my review of The Last Samurai--also cited by Brooks--this version of the "White Messiah" fable actually gets the audience to root against democracy and for an oppressive aristocracy. Saigo Takamori's rebellion was the early articulation of an imperialistic vision that led inexorably to WWII.

We ignore the obvious because identifying with the Tom Cruise character allows us to virtually zoom straight to alpha status without having to go through the grueling Darwinian guantlet demanded of the natives. (If they had the good luck of being born to the right parents, that is. Who cleans the latrines on Pandora?)

As Slate's David Edelstein observes, "Movies can manipulate you to root for just about anyone, anytime." So the deeper question is not just why it is so easy to root out our lurking aristocratic inclinations, but at the same time make us actually root against our own culture and the ones who brung us.

A big reason can be found in M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (his last good film): without monsters, there's no need for monster killers. The two are complementary. The one rationalizes the other's existence, the good becoming only as good as the evil is evil. As Shakespeare's (not yet) King Richard puts it:

Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to see my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain[.]

What makes Peter Parker the hero is not just his strength but his morality--"with great strength comes great responsibility." This is not a bad thing. In the information age, moral superiority is as telling an alpha marker as physical superiority. But again, without moral supervillains, moral superheroes are out of a job.

Except there just isn't enough easy-peasy supervillainry to go around. Unless the Luther family lives in town. It becomes necessary, then, to proselytize. To sully our names far and wide. Conveniently, the ideological causes that consign the west to the heart of darkness also vault us to the top of the food chain.

These "humble" convictions that posit the United States as the controlling variable in ruining everything--from the climate of the planet to war and peace everywhere on the earth to the survival of every species of life--make us all supervillains. Demi-gods. Masters of the universe. B-B-B-bad to the bone.

Not only that, but theatrical conspiracy theories from Three Days of the Condor to The X-Files to Enemy of the State are, despite themselves, celebrations of unbelievably efficient centralized government apparati found nowhere in nature (except in the Orientalist fantasies of Tom Friedman).

Americans are not alone in this. Apocalyptic Japanese SF fantasies such as Vexille, Akira and Evangelion are really about the Japanese destroying themselves because they're just so darned clever. Michael Crichton's Rising Sun is a similarly backhanded paean to superior Japanese wizardry.

We're great, which makes opposing ourselves even greater. There is no deeper fount of justification and self-righteousness than self-abnegation. The sinner sees the light and preaches reform. And just like in that old time religion, the man on the silver screen suffers for us, takes upon our sins, and redeems us.

That's what Messiahs are for. I mean, it's a whole lot easier than doing it ourselves. All that is required is to watch, agree, and applaud. Because living like those Rousseauan "noble savages" really lived would bore us out of our freaking skulls (if we managed to survive the first hard frost, that is).

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Labels: apocalyptic fiction, deep thoughts, miltonesque, moral outrage, movies, superhero

Vexille is a pastiche of every post-apocalyptic, mecha, and special forces anime series made in the last decade, plus Dune, Star Wars, The Road Warrior, The Matrix, The Terminator, I, Robot and The Stand (I'm sure I left out a few). And like an Island of Dr. Moreau mutant creature, it inherits all of their genetic abnormalities to one extent or another.

Thus an elite taskforce is tasked to keep conspiring androids from taking over the world from their Death Star-type island fortress (with the required design flaws in its supposedly impenetrable defenses). This island sits in the middle of Tokyo Bay, while the rest of Japan has been reduced to a desert full of giant robotic sandworms and macho guys driving supercharged dune buggies.

In the it's-so-bad-it's-good department, I rather enjoyed it because it is so shamelessly derivative and yet takes itself so seriously.

It was directed by Fumihiko Sori, who produced the digitally-animated Appleseed. Both have the same look and feel, 3-D anime with motion capture. I don't mind it, as it avoids the "uncanny valley" problem that comes with trying to approach the "human" look too closely, and the motion capture eliminates the jerkiness that comes with low-cost, hand-drawn animation.

Appleseed is considerably smarter than Vexille, though it still employs a thoroughly 1960s Star Trek plot involving a pair of rogue mainframes. For intelligent mecha/special forces fare, I'd recommend Ghost in the Shell: SAC, Patlabor and Full Metal Panic: Second Raid. As for pale imitations of The Road Warrior, well, there's always Beyond Thunderdome.

The most interesting thing about Vexille is that the bad guys are Japanese and the Americans come riding to the rescue. Granted, our American heroes are as cardboard as any B-grade action flick, and they don't end up saving anything but themselves. But I can't remember another film in this genre where the Americans ride off into the sunset while Japan goes down the tubes.

Perhaps the closest thing is the final scene of Planet of the Apes (Charlton Heston version). Vexille doesn't come anywhere near that level of pathos (except stereotypically), and it's sort as if told from the apes' point of view.

On the other hand, one sign of being a "developed nation" is making movies about how wicked bad we all are. Vexille is about how the nation of Japan drives itself to extinction because the Japanese are so darned clever. An eye-rollingly ginormous X-Files type of conspiracy is necessary. But that implies one heck of an efficient civil service. Even that's a back-handed compliment.

So to conclude on a complimentary note, Vexille provides further proof that, as Gerald Ford wisely observed (widely misattributed to Thomas Jefferson), "a government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take away everything you have." Or as Ronald Reagan put it, "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are: 'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.'"

Think of it as a libertarian moral fable.

Labels: anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, ghost in the shell, mainframe, politics, robots, uncanny valley

Of the common fantasy motifs, perhaps the most resonant is that of the protagonist who, discontent with the banality of the "real" world, stumbles across, or is pulled through, a doorway to another world. Through perseverance, bravery, sacrifice, and direct action (Joseph Campbell's twelve-step program for heroes), she achieves the knowledge and self-confidence necessary to save herself and/or her adopted kingdom.

Shadow of the Moon being a case in point. Consider as well: The Wizard of Oz, The Phantom Tollbooth, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Shoji Kawamori and Kazuki Akane's Escaflowne is a fascinating addition to the genre.

Here, Hitomi, an angst-ridden Japanese high school senior, is transported to the world of Gaea, in a parallel universe from which you can see the Earth and the "dark side" of the Moon (adorned with a giant stone eye). She is the "Wing Goddess," disgorged as if born from the heart of the War Dragon Escaflowne, yet with no knowledge of how to call or control it.

From the onset, Hitomi’s is an almost existential presence. Her helplessness in organizing her own fate is of no small moment, for the control of Escaflowne will determine the victor in the apocalyptic war between Van and Folken, two brothers locked in an interminable internecine conflict that echoes Jacob and Esau. Van’s first impulse is to kill her for refusing to yield control Escaflowne to him, while Folken attempts to kidnap her to gain the same power, a power she does not believe she possesses.

Hitomi’s role in the conflict finally becomes apparent as the showdown between Van and Folken reaches its inevitable fury. Her role is, in fact, simply to be. She becomes a talisman who, according to her own desires, will catalyze either the apotheosis of Van’s abnegation or Folken’s annihilation. She must choose between the rightful but dispossessed king, and the severe elder brother: the overman.

In Jungian terms, she is their anima, and they her animus. The heroic journey is one of the self through the long, dark night of the soul. Hitomi’s once frivolous toying with thoughts of suicide suddenly sharpens to a point in the substance of Folken’s Nietzschean offer of eternal peace and infinite atonement through total extinction, the promise to resolve all internal doubts in glorious self-destruction.

The alternative choice is that of forgiveness, of reconciliation. And so it is at that cathartic moment of abreaction when Van accepts himself, accepts Hitomi, accepts Folken as brother, that the war abruptly ends. And the moment in which Hitomi accepts Van, accepts Gaea in its totality, Gaea vanishes. She disappears from the reconciled world on silver wings, for she is the Wing Goddess.

To be sure, the movie is perhaps better judged in terms of its theme and intent than by the particulars of story and plot. The film is specifically titled Escalflowne: A Girl in Gaea, to distinguish it from the series. In the process of truncation, gaps show up in the galloping plot and characters that spring onto the stage with fully-developed vendettas and alliances that must be explained in a few lines of dialogue.

At any rate, the intricate complexity of the world, the wonderful matte art, is compelling enough on its own. The screen spills over with that medieval post-modernism that Japanese anime art directors love so: soldiers in 16th century samurai garb flying around in massive dirigibles, firing cannon out portholes like tall ships (a trope later used in The Last Exile). That is, when they're not whacking each other's heads off with swords.

As mentioned, the movie is a redacted retelling of the television series. A good deal of Hitomi’s backstory has been left out, along with the romantic sub-plots. Director Kazuki Akane's explanation is that the fan base for the series was overwhelmingly female, and he wanted to broaden the base for the movie version. Well, maybe.

He also engineered a complete character redesign for the movie. Character design is one of those specializations that emerges when an industry reaches a critical mass in relationship to everything else in the field (like the position of "story runner" in Hollywood television production). The only example of obvious character redesign in an American production I can think of is between the first and later seasons of The Simpsons.

The "look" of animation in Hollywood is typically considered the product of the studio, unless the source is directly attributable (i.e., Peanuts cartoons look like the Peanuts strip). In Japanese animation, though, there are specialists in character design as well as mechanical design (to handle the robots and all the things that go whrrrr). A particular artist's name in the credits will raise expectation about the "look and feel" of the final product.

These changes not unexpectedly outraged devoted fans of the series. But I found I quite liked these editorial decisions (and even more so after watching the series). Despite the redactions and adaptations, anybody familiar with fantasy should be able to fill in the blanks on their own. After all, the real fun in practicing literary analysis is being able to ignore what the author might have actually meant in the first place.

Labels: anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, robots

Outsiders often observe a culture with sharper eyes than those in it. Gorgeously animated and smartly written, the anime series Scrapped Princess asks how we should react to an apocalyptic revelation that everybody believes is going to happen, but nobody is quite sure how or why. Without becoming ponderous or pontifical, Scrapped Princess delves into eschatological dilemmas that we "end times"-obsessed Americans often have trouble dealing with in other than heavy-handed Manichean terms (e.g. Left Behind, End of Days, Stigmata).

When we meet her, the titular princess, Pacifica Casull, is a bratty teenager on the run with her step-siblings, Shannon and Raquel. An ancient prophecy has identified her as the "poison that will destroy the world," and the "Church of Mauser" has decided to deal with any uncertainty about the interpretation of the prophecy by having her killed. As the story begins, a potpourri of assassins, mercenaries, and wannabee knights are in pursuit of the trio. In their sister's defense, Rachel proves herself a powerful priestess and Shannon a mighty paladin.

Two classes of archangels appear as well: Dragoons sent to protect Pacifica, and Peacemakers sent to carry out the will of the Church. But the most formidable of Pacifica's enemies is Christopher Armalite, an agent with the secret police, who eventually begins to question the rationality and morality of his actions. Yet another existential dilemma presents itself when Shannon's guardian angel, Zefiris, blandly informs him that he and their allies have been genetically programmed to rise to Pacifica's defense.

The question of predestination versus free will forms the central conflict of the story, a conflict that eventually extends to the entire world. It soon becomes apparent that this "medieval" civilization in fact is the remnant of a devastating conflict that occurred thousands of years in the past. Readers familiar with Dave Wolverton's Golden Queen novels (among others) will recognize the "back to the future" motif, along with Arthur C. Clarke's useful adage: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

With humankind trapped inside a Rousseauan bell jar, Pacifica must choose between the guaranteed safety of enforced innocence, and the perils of freedom and self-determination. But a fall from Edenic grace demands a sacrifice. In our iconoclastic age, fantasy is particularly adept at analogizing the complexities of scriptural symbolism. In this respect, Scrapped Princess finds the right balance, illustrating how the demands of prophecy, triggered by betrayal, are answered with blood and magic, culminating in resurrection and redemption.

I consider this no small achievement. In contrast to the ending of Scrapped Princess, I found the atonement scene in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe a weak representation of the material it was analogizing. I don't know if author Ichiro Sakaki intended the metaphor to be extended this far, but the European setting of the series, and the representation of the Church of Mauser as the return of the Holy Roman Empire ("neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire"), makes it hard for me to believe he wasn't aware of it. In any case, it works wonderfully.

Related posts

The atonement of Pacifica Casull
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Labels: anime reviews, apocalyptic fiction, eschatology, magic, personal favs, religion, science fiction