Back in 2020, the weekly Japanese women's lifestyle magazine Anan featured Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 on the cover of its July 8 issue, with feature articles about directors Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki and voice actress Atsuko Tanaka.

Atsuko Tanaka was the voice and soul of Motoko Kusanagi. Alas, the past tense is necessary here, as Atsuko Tanaka died on Tuesday at the age of 61. Her list of credits on ANN includes over four hundred video game and anime roles, including Harumi Kiyama in A Certain Scientific Railgun and Flamme in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End.

But she will be forever remembered as the Major, one of my favorite characters of all time in any medium and the one that truly ignited my interest in anime.

A fascinating cultural conundrum revealed by the advent of manga and anime in America is that traditional Japan is so much better at creating believable female action characters than progressive Hollywood. Motoko Kusanagi is a girl boss you never doubt deserves to be in charge.

Nor is there any mystery about why Aramaki has her back or why her mostly male team is so willing to follow her lead.

Although the movie directed by Mamoru Oshii made Motoko and Ghost in the Shell famous, it was Kenji Kamiyama's Stand Alone Complex series and Solid State Society that defined the canon, into which Kamiyama and Aramaki have done a good job retrofitting their latest installment.

The opening arc of the new series takes place in a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. Yeah, a bit on the been-there-done-that Mad Max side. But the series returns to form and Kamayama's classic Stand Alone Complex cyberpolice procedural roots once we get the Scooby Gang together again and back in Japan.

I like Purin taking over from Batou as the Tachikoma wrangler. The only real mark against SAC_2045 is that the Post Human storyline falls too far down the AI-as-antagonist rabbit hole. Granted, this AI is more interesting than most and Purin is the driving force during the concluding arc.

I wouldn't mind an episodic spin-off series that focused on Purin and the Tachikoma solving odd problems and investigating street-level cases.

At its best, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is a cyberpunk Blue Bloods, and I consider that high praise. I can easily imagine Section Chief Aramaki and Commissioner Reagan trading places or teams and soldiering on with barely a hitch.

The origins story Ghost in the Shell: Arise is on Crunchyroll (with a younger Motoko voiced by Maaya Sakamoto). Netflix has Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. Unfortunately, the rest of the installments in the Ghost in the Shell franchise are scattered all over the map.

Tubi has a dubbed version of the original movie. Many of the titles are on YouTube and Amazon Prime, though it might be more affordable to track down the DVD and Blu-ray editions. Anime News Network has an encyclopedic media review for the entire franchise.

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, crunchyroll, ghost in the shell, japanese culture, streaming, technology, thinking about writing, tubi

Kyoto Animation's gorgeously animated Violet Evergarden, based on the light novels by Kana Akatsuki, begins with a premise I didn't expect, then takes off in a different direction from that, and finally ends up in a pleasantly familiar place, albeit with an unusual main character.


The story takes place in an alternate universe Leiden (Holland) shortly after the end of a Great War. As revealed in brief flashbacks, Violet Evergarden was a kind of Wonder Woman during the conflict, a teenage super-soldier paired with her handler, Major Gilbert Bougainvillea.

Although a strategic victory, their last mission leaves Violet without her arms and Major Bougainvillea missing in action and presumed dead. Discharged and fitted with artificial limbs, Violet is handed over to Gilbert's friend and commanding officer, the affable Claudia Hodgins.

The first episode resembles the early chapters of Anne of Green Gables, as Claudia tries to get one of Gilbert's relatives to take in this odd and socially maladroit girl. Like Marilla, Claudia concludes that he is in a better position to look after Violet's interests than anybody else.

Also retired from the military, Claudia runs the CH Postal Company, a secretarial service that makes the most of the word processor of the day, the typewriter. But its real forte is not simply transcribing but composing correspondence for clients who can't write or don't know what to say.

This particular line of business struck another note of familiarity.

In the NHK drama Tsubaki Stationery Store, when her grandmother dies, Hatoko (Mikako Tabe) inherits her stationery store. The store never sold much actual stationery. Rather, her grandmother wrote letters for people who couldn't find the right words to write what they really meant.

For Hatoko, estranged from her grandmother in the years before her death, picking up where she left off results in an emotional struggle that constitutes the core of the drama.

The demands of such a job present a seemingly insurmountably high hurdle for Violet, not because of her prosthetic hands, with which she can type faster than any of the other "Auto Memory Dolls" (as the typists are known). But because of her complete lack of emotional intelligence.

She is basically a female version of Data from Star Trek. She interprets language literally. Common circumlocutions confuse her. She reflexively salutes her superiors and answers "Ryoukai" to casual requests (the military equivalent of "Aye aye, sir").

It's no surprise that her first attempt to communicate a client's intentions—and not her literal words—ends badly. So why does she insist on pursuing an occupation she is manifestly unqualified for? Because of Gilbert's last words to her, the words of the most important person in her world.

"I love you." And she has no idea what that means. (Yeah, I know, cue Foreigner.)

At this point, director Taichi Ishidate extracts the story from the stalemate with some narrative slight of hand. He basically hits the fast forward button and levels her up to experienced Auto Memory Doll mode in two episodes.

Utterly implausible from a mental health point of view. But Ishidate is correct that letting Violet "find herself" through work, by getting her out of the house and going on adventures, is infinitely more interesting than her spending the next half-dozen episodes in psychoanalysis.

Violet gets another Wonder Woman moment when she takes an assignment in the country of her old enemy and runs into a gang of insurrectionists out to scuttle the peace talks. (It's hard not to note a few resemblances to the ending of Ghost in the Shell.) But she's not going back to that life.

Her character arc thus takes her from a soulless war machine to a soulful Kwai Chang Caine with killer secretarial skills. Sort of as if Sandy in the classic British sit-com As Time Goes By had previously worked for Judi Dench when Judi Dench was M in the James Bond films.

I reminded of Kate's observation that Dean Cain's Clark Kent in Lois & Clark is his default self (in Japanese, his honne). Superman is the costume (his tatemae). Similarly, Violet Evergarden is about a superhero shedding the costume and finding her real "normal" self.

As noted, the setting is an alternate universe version of early 20th century Europe. The orthography is not recognizably Roman. The typewriters resemble the vintage manual I grew up with (before my dad brought home a used electric IBM Model D).

Violet's artificial arms are more sophisticated than any modern prosthetic.

That along with the anachronistic fashions that pop up here and there lend Violet Evergarden a steam punk ambiance that brings to mind the worlds of Masaki Tachibana's Princess Principal, Katsuhiro Otomo's Steamboy, and Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso. It's a world with a lot of room for growth.

The special and the first movie serve more as additional episodes that fit into the latter third of the series.

In the special, Violet is tasked to write a letter to a soldier lost on the battlefield. As it turns out, the soldier's fiancée, a famous singer, intends to use the contents of the letter as the lyrics in an opera about the war she is producing along with the soldier's father, who is the conductor of the orchestra.

The two movies are wide-screen theatrical releases, starting chronologically with Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll.

An aristocrat hires Violet to tutor his illegitimate daughter (the war having depleted the family's pool of marriageable heirs). During the war, the daughter took an orphaned girl under her wing. Several years later, that girl tracks down Violet and asks her to reunite her with her "big sister."

The second movie begins in the present day with the descendant of one of Violet's clients from the series. This framing device takes us back to the events following the first movie, while reviewing all of the major plot points to date. And then concludes with Violet's search for Gilbert.

Both theatrical films are rip-your-heart-out tearjerkers. The former is far more effective in this regard than the latter, as the latter tries to cover too much material in too little time. Gilbert's inner conflict alone is so complex that doing it justice would require considerably more screen time.

Taichi Ishidate should have used the framing device to structure the entire story or left it out. Doing both doesn't really work.

So despite running over two hours, the ending feels rushed. Violet Evergarden deserved another cour. Nevertheless, it delivers an emotional payoff that (almost) persuades me to overlook its other faults, and both movies conclude on life-affirming notes (be sure to sit through the credits).

The entire franchise is available on Netflix.

Violet Evergarden (the series)
Violet Evergarden Special
Violet Evergarden: Eternity and the Auto Memory Doll
Violet Evergarden: The Movie

Labels: anime, anime reviews, ghost in the shell, kyoani, mikako tabe, television

Having complained about the eye-rolling superness of too many (if not most) comic book superheroes, I should point out that the protagonists in action-oriented series, from James Bond to John McClane to Indiana Jones to Himura Kenshin, are superheroes in everything but name, only more "normal."

Not to mention police procedurals that are really excuses for action series, like Hawaii Five 0 and NCIS: Los Angeles, or that contain a supernatural element, like Lucifer and iZombie and Supernatural.

Jim Caviezel as John Reese in Person of Interest is a true superhero, especially when paired up with Michael Emerson and his "Machine." This is essentially the premise of Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, though Ghost takes place in a world where everybody has a "Machine."

Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed John Nolan as Mr. Greer, in the Decima Technologies arc that dominated the last third of the series, "Samaritan" was little more than yet another comic book supervillain that rehashed all the old Big Bad Mainframe cliches.

By contrast, Enrico Colantoni as Carl Elias is a billion times more interesting. A vulnerable bad guy who can do the right thing is hard to beat.

The best episodes of Person of Interest had them tackling problems that prove more complicated than they first appeared (true of good police procedurals in general), but more complicated because of human complications, not superhuman ones.

I'd love to see a franchise like Spider-Man eschew the supervillains and the city-wrecking apocalyptic plots. Okay, the good guys can do a little pounding, but that still won't solve the problem, not if the goal is a conviction that'll stand up in court.

Actually, Wonder Woman largely did just that, which is what so elevated it above the competition. Okay, Wonder Woman cheats by using World War I as the setting, but at least Diana isn't the one wrecking the cities (aside from the odd belfry).


Alas, based on the previews, Diana will henceforth no longer be an independent woman (with a couple of human sidekicks), but will be chaperoned by a bunch of superguys and frustrated by a bevy of silly supervillains. As if the success of the first movie was a fluke.

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Labels: ghost in the shell, person of interest, superhero, television, thinking about writing

I'm sure that somewhere along the line, the final cut of Logan was heavily influenced by Deadpool, which proved that a decidedly not family-friendly superhero flick could find a niche and deliver healthy box offices receipts.


And, as with Deadpool, it mostly works. Which isn't to say that being dark and gritty for its own sake (for ART!!!) is necessarily a good thing. I imagine Disney will keep things in check. I actually found the cussing less objectionable than the non-stop killing of "redshirts."

Nothing is more morally weird than the way the MPAA rates movies.

I'm not a devotee of superhero movies, so I don't have a long list to compare and contrast. But Logan is better than most. Though on an absolute scale it's still not very good, especially compared to Deadpool and Wonder Woman.

Logan is redeemed by Wolverine being so broken down he's almost "normal." Unfortunately, the plot of Logan was old when The X-Files did it to death—some evil corporation or government guy making and/or chasing "gifted" children around. The Ghost in the Shell remake has the same problem.

(Logan perhaps works best as a clever way to reboot the franchise, though I don't get why they clumsily set it in the "near future." By the time those kids grow up it will be the near future and time to start rolling sequels off the assembly line.)

In the process, Logan makes clear how more interesting the whole series might have been had Jackman's Wolverine that vulnerable all along. And had Patrick Stewart's Charles Xavier been that unstable from the start (the same way Stewart's manic Picard in Star Trek: First Contact is so refreshing).


And how much Wolverine not having to share the stage with a crowd of other heroes-in-tights improves the drama. Alas, comic book franchises these days are all about the "universe" of characters occupying them, which can't help but get unbelievably stupid in very short order.

Okay, so the R-rated superhero flick is now a thing (although anime has been doing it for ages). But here's another variation on a theme for the superhero franchises to test out (at the end of their run).

As with Logan, invent some alternate universe where all the rest of the boring superheros have been killed off except for the actually interesting (and vaguely plausible) one. Then let him deal with a world where all of the supervillains have been killed off too.

Labels: ghost in the shell, manga, movie reviews, superhero, thinking about writing

As I've noted previously, back in the day, Hollywood made (often very good) movies in and about Japan on a regular basis. The over-the-top camp of You Only Live Twice played well in Japan. Shogun showed up at the right time on American television, with the rights leads (Toshiro Mifune alongside Richard Chamberlain), and with sufficient verisimilitude.


More recently, The Last Samurai gave western audiences the same story from Dances with Wolves while Japanese audiences got an fantasy version of the Satsuma Rebellion. As with Rurouni Kenshin, fantasy versions of the Satsuma Rebellion abound in Japanese historical fiction (it's Japan's version of The Wild, Wild West).

The Last Samurai did reasonably well on both sides of the Pacific.

On the other hand, Memoirs of a Geisha didn't do anything that Japanese historical melodramas don't do on a weekly basis, and without any Japanese actresses in the leads. What was exotic to western audiences was ho hum in Japan.

Silence is an art house film that Martin Scorsese got to make because he's Martin Scorsese, so the box office is beside the point. But he filmed it in Taiwan for $46 million ("low budget" in Hollywood), did a good job recreating a recognizable Edo period Japan setting and finding good excuses for his Japanese actors to speak English.

Why 47 Ronin cost $175 million is beyond me. Its budget probably had a lot to do with the relative success of The Last Samurai. But at those nosebleed levels, it was never going to recoup its investment, Keanu Reeves notwithstanding.

It was too "Japanese" for western audiences, and audiences in Japan had no interest in a "Hollywood rendition of Chushingura bearing no resemblance to the historical epic." And barely any resemblance to Japan, period. Shooting anywhere but in Japan is fine until it it's obvious you're no longer in Japan.

The message wasn't going to resonate. It didn't resonate in 1941, when a version of Chushingura commissioned by the Japanese military and directed by Kenji Mizoguchi was also a commercial failure. It's been sourced for Japanese  television miniseries over twenty times, except it's Masterpiece Theatre material, not Marvel Comics.

Though 47 Ronin does prove that Ko Shibasaki, who has the lead in NHK's 2017 Taiga historical drama, can hold her own paired with a big Hollywood star. And with the right direction, Japanese actors can speak okay English. Although it (accidentally) also proves that speaking no Japanese doesn't guarantee anything either.

Mismatched cultural assumptions and a needlessly "adapted" adaptation sank 47 Ronin. Same for Ghost in the Shell. Paramount blamed social politics for the failure of the latter to rise to blockbuster status. I think it more accurate to say that these movies weren't nearly good enough to justify the amount of money spent on them.

At the end of the day, critics don't have much of a say in what audiences will like and pay money to see. And neither do the accountants.

The Marvel and DC universes are the current Comstock Lode of the entertainment business. Alas, the richest veins at the Comstock Lode played out in a decade or two. After that, it took more and more work to produce less and less, until the mines eventually closed.

Well, there's a whole lot of gold in them there manga and anime hills. All Hollywood has to do is figure out the mining technology that will refine that precious ore into movies that American audiences actually want to watch.

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Labels: business, ghost in the shell, history, japanese culture, movies, movies about japan, nhk, shogun

Yes, another movie I won't be seeing for a while.

Okay, I'll get to the trailer. But first this silly whining about Scarlett Johansson not being "Japanese." Silly because she's playing an android whose only "human" component is her brain, and has swapped "shells" more than once. Besides, phenotypic racial characteristics in manga and anime are highly malleable, to say the least.


It's true that casting Japanese as Japanese in Hollywood is a perennial problem. But in Hollywood, everything's ultimately about the box office, which also points to a perennial supply and demand problem.

As an Asian-American ethnic group, Japanese (1.3 million) lag behind Korean (1.7 million), Vietnamese (1.73 million), Indian (3.18 million), Filipino (3.41 million), and Chinese (3.79 million).

Except for the cream of the crop (Ken Watanabe), a Japanese actor with any kind of talent can get more and better work in Japan (and won't have to speak English). The reverse is true too, which is why (with rare exceptions) "Americans" in Japanese productions are so often played by Europeans who "look" the part.

So while Star Trek creates roles for Japanese actors, aside from George Takei, it has a hard time finding Japanese actors to play them. Thus we have Rosalind Chao in Next Generation (who doesn't look Japanese) and Linda Park in Enterprise (who more or less does) and John Cho in Star Trek (close enough).

I always wondered why they just didn't make Linda Park's character Korean. It's not like there was any continuity to preserve.

In any case, the setting of Ghost in the Shell is postmodern and post-mini-apocalyptic, taking place in a Japan that, like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, has become a polyglot tossed-salad of Asian cultures. So it's hard to hung up about the specifics of national identity.

Anyway, who's to say Johansson isn't Japanese? How many people know that Dean Cain (Lois & Clark) is a quarter-Japanese? (I didn't until I looked it up.) Risa Stegmayer (American father, Japanese mother), co-host of NHK's Cool Japan, doesn't look especially Japanese, especially seated next to the very Japanese Shoji Kokami.


Meanwhile, the very Japanese Hiroshi Abe plays a Roman architect in the Thermae Romae movies.

This anecdote by Peter Payne (who lives in Japan, where he runs an online store for otaku) is a good antidote to this plague of third-party offense-taking:

Once I was watching an episode of Alias with my [Japanese] wife, and there was a horrid scene in which some female spy went to "Japan" (which appeared to be shot in a sushi restaurant about ten minutes from West Hollywood), painted her face white like a "geisha" and proceeded to extract information from her target despite not knowing his language. I was livid that in the 21^st century TV producers couldn't even come close to getting basic imagery right, but my wife was enthralled with it, laughing at each new hilarious plot twist.

It's always a good idea to make sure that those on whose behalf you are getting offended would actually get offended by what you think would offend them. Because they might not have the slightest idea what you are talking about. (See also here.)


As far as that goes, the great Takeshi Kitano plays Aramaki in the movie, which I do consider inspired casting.


But enough with that, back to the trailer.


Based on this small sample, it looks like the movie is using material from Masamune Shirow's manga (the girl-on-girl stuff), Mamoru Oshii's animated film (the opening sequences are an exact match), and the second season of Stand Alone Complex (directed by Kenji Kamiyama), in which the Major gets some hefty "shell" repair.

The live-action version also draws its existential moodiness from Oshii. Like Blade Runner, Oshii's versions are more psychological thrillers, far "heavier" than the manga. The same shift in tone can be seen comparing the Patlabor anime series to Oshii's Patlabor feature films.

Stand Alone Complex is a straightforward cybernetic police procedural.

Like Sherlock Holmes, Major Kusanagi has adapted to the needs of the director, the story, and the medium. Shirow's Kusanagi is a futuristic take on a Connery-era "Jane Bond." Oshii's is closer to Rutger Hauer's Roy Batty from Blade Runner, while Kamiyama's approximates Mark Harmon's Gibbs in NCIS.

Explaining why he broke with Oshii's interpretation, Stand Alone Complex director Kenji Kamiyama quipped, "The first episode would be the final one!" People would get bored of watching a character search for her identity for half a year."

So far, I rank Stand Alone Complex and Solid State Society as the best of the bunch (the Tachikoma robots being no small reason why). Like The X-Files, the Stand Alone Complex seasons are tied together by season-long arcs, interspersed with science fiction stories that work well on their own.


But we'll have to wait a while to see where Hollywood's live-action version ranks in the franchise.

• Ghost in the Shell (manga) 1989–1990
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 1995
• Innocence (theatrical release) 2004
• Stand Alone Complex (TV anime series) 2002–2006
• Solid State Society (movie in the SAC arc) 2006
• Arise (OVA series) 2013
• New Movie (movie in the Arise arc) 2013
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 2017

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Labels: anime, demographics, ghost in the shell, japan, japanese culture, k-drama, manga, movies, nhk, personal favs, pop culture, social studies, technology

In Appleseed (1985), the future is still run by giant mainframes. That was soon to change.

The "difference engine" was first proposed in the late 18th century, but this now well-worn trope truly came into its own as mainstream entertainment in the 1950s with the Tracy/Hepburn comedy Desk Set (1957) and NASA's adoption of the IBM 7090 at the dawn of the space race.


Only four years after Appleseed, Masamune Shirow saw the future and the future was networked. The last line in Ghost in the Shell (1989) says it all: "The net is vast and infinite."

This marked a true sea change in the genre. The "computer" would no longer be a single "character" (an electromechanical dictator) but part of the landscape. This is especially true in the Stand Alone Complex series, in which cyber is simply there, like the water and air.

As Google chairman Eric Schmidt put it recently, "The Internet will disappear." Meaning that it will become as ubiquitous as electric power and radio waves, treated as a given, as if it has always existed and has always been available, and so is only noticed when it is not.

Alas, too many Hollywood science fiction writers are stuck on the mainframe as the "Big Bad" and "hacking" as a magic wand. A quarter century ago, Shirow got it right.

• Ghost in the Shell (manga) 1989-1990
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 1995
• Innocence (theatrical release) 2004
• Stand Alone Complex (TV anime series) 2002-2006
• Solid State Society (OVA movie) 2006
• Arise (OVA series) 2013
• Ghost in the Shell (theatrical release) 2017
• Plus 1997 and 2015 video games.

Right from the start, Ghost in the Shell throws a wrench into the sequel machinery. Kusanagi merges with the AI at the end of the first movie. In Innocence she appears only virtually. So the only place to go without completing trashing the premise is backwards.


Thus Stand Alone Complex is a prequel. The two SAC series are not only superior to the original but rank among the very best in the genre. The latest installment in the franchise, Ghost in the Shell: Arise, is a prequel to the prequel, including an "origins" story.

The real stars of SAC: the Tachikoma robots (Wikipedia Commons).

And talking about allegiance to established canon (or the lack thereof), Dreamworks has signed Scarlett Johansson for a 2017 live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell. The casting has already raised questions among fans about how a "Johansson" can play a "Kusanagi."

The obvious solution can be gleaned from A Fistful of Dollars (Yojimbo). Or Edge of Tomorrow (All You Need is Kill). Clint Eastwood and Tom Cruise are models for "occidentalization." Just keep the plot moving and don't bury the story beneath piles of ponderousness. A good story will always shine through.

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Labels: anime, computers, ghost in the shell, mainframe, movies, robots, science fiction, shirow

Manga artist Masamune Shirow was the first to capture the true scope of cyberpunk in the late 1980 and early 1990s. Taking visual inspiration from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), he defined the look and feel of the genre in ways that Hollywood is still catching up with.

The opening scenes of Ghost in the Shell owe a lot to Ridley Scott.

Black Magic (1983) got an OVA (meaning: direct-to-video). The goofier  Dominion Tank Police (a personal fav) spawned two TV anime series besides the two manga series (1986 and 1995). For most manga artists, that'd be more than enough success for a lifetime.

But it was Appleseed (1985) and Ghost in the Shell (1989) that took on lives of their own. Neither franchise demonstrates much allegiance to an established canon. With new production teams taking up the reins each time around, every iteration gets its own reboot.


Examining his original manga, you will notice that Shirow and Frank Frazetta share a similar visual aesthetic that gets toned down (a lot) for anime (and that includes the Ghost in the Shell movie). Shirow has also published two dozen art books and poster collections.

• Appleseed (manga) 1985–1989
• Appleseed (OVA series) 1988
• Appleseed (theatrical release) 2004
• Appleseed: Ex Machina (theatrical release) 2007
• Appleseed: XIII (TV anime series) 2011
• Appleseed: Alpha (theatrical release) 2014
• Plus a 1988 video game.

Appleseed sprang back to life after a fifteen-year break using motion-capture digital animation for all productions. I guess if you go full digital once, it gets easier to keep on doing it that way, because that's what they've done, including the television series.


The first two films and series stick to the original premise: Deunan Knute and her cyborg partner (and boyfriend), Briareos Hecatonchires, are members of an elite SWAT team/special forces unit in Olympus, the futuristic, post-apocalyptic city at the center of everything.

The one odd discontinuity up to this point is that in XIII, Deunan looks and acts barely out of her teens, and XIII includes origins materials that make it a prequel to Appleseed. (I seem to recall that the origins material in Appleseed is different too.)

The real wildcard is the latest, Appleseed: Alpha, which jumps completely out of the established timeline. Deunan and Briareos haven't even gotten to Olympus (and aren't even sure they ever will), and yet they are clearly older and wearier than in the Olympus arc.

Alpha is, at heart, a classic road movie, and that's a good direction to go in. Olympus pulling the strings from afar rather than up close creates more latitude in the storytelling. Besides, the whole utopian society (but it's rotten underneath) cliche is pretty tired.

On their way to the mythical Olympus, Deunan and Briareos keep getting sidetracked. And at the very, very end (wait for the credit roll), we learn that Olympus plans to keep on sidetracking them. I'm game. I like the direction Appleseed: Alpha is taking things.

I hope they keep heading down that road.

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Labels: anime, computers, ghost in the shell, manga, personal favs, science fiction, shirow

John Dvorak points out the problem with the public paranoia (overhyped by supposedly reasonable guys like Elon Musk and even Stephen Hawking) over
artificial intelligence (AI) "taking over the world and threatening mankind":

Much of this stems from the projection of human feelings and motivation onto a machine. Humans are often mean-spirited and evil, so by extension a smart robot or computer would end up the same way for some unknown reason.

The most likely end-point of these AI threats is Marvin the Android in Hitchkikers Guide to the Galaxy. Infinitely intelligent, this AI device was infinitely bored and depressed, and devolved into an Eeyore-like character.

Another good example is Holly in Red Dwarf, an increasingly absent-minded supercomputer that prioritizes things like erasing its memory banks so it can enjoy reading Agatha Christie all over again.


The Matrix runs off the rails in what I call the "battery scene," in which Laurence Fishburne totally messes up the Second Law of Thermodynamics. What he should have shown Keanu Reeves was a handheld game console (the "smartphone" wasn't quite ready for prime time in 1999).


Say we willingly integrated ourselves into the Matrix, and thus a co-dependency arose. The Matrix's existential sense of "self" arose out of the fusion between hardware and wetware. This makes the revolutionaries into secessionists threatening to undo a duly-constituted union.

Which is essentially the plot of Ghost in the Shell, and especially the Stand-Alone Complex episodes. The objective of the AI in the former, after all, isn't world domination (its original design), but mobility and independence, which it achieves by fusing with Kusanagi's android shell.

What has so far rescued Person of Interest from the Terminator trap is the dependence of the machines on human interaction for a sense of purpose. People exist to be saved or ruled over. But either way, it seems the gods need human beings more than human beings need the gods.

The real IT threat isn't smart machines but browbeaten sysadmins who expose backoffice systems to the Internet because some suit wants to plug into the company intranet and access his Facebook page. Sony being a case in point. Why were all those servers even accessible?

Labels: computers, ghost in the shell, movies, person of interest, robots, technology

Coinciding with the theatrical reboot of the Ghost in the Shell franchise in Japan, Microsoft commissioned a three minute short/Surface tie-in ad.


If you have a pressing need to kill lots of bad guys and steal computer data, the Surface is the tablet for you!

Labels: advertising, anime, ghost in the shell, shirow, technology

The original Ghost in the Shell manga by Masamune Shirow and the film by Mamoru Oshii proved to be as iconic as Blade Runner, and truly defined the cyberpunk genre in the anime world. Even so, the later Stand-Alone Complex television series far outdid the originals in getting cyberpunk right.

Not only by avoiding the stale "robots are taking over!" meme that Hollywood writers can't get past. But in imagining a technological society just short of the "Singularity" (one of those evolutionary steps that will always be just over the horizon), and yet no more or less dystopian than this one.

The human species keeps muddling through, as it always has and always will.

The series is being rebooted in a four-film series featuring a new cast, designs, director and writer (though still produced by Production I.G.). It's a prequel even to Stand-Alone Complex, taking Kusanagi back to the beginning of her career with Section 9. This is a series I definitely want to see.

Labels: anime, computers, ghost in the shell, manga, robots, shirow, technology

Only three out of 254 foreign applicants passed Japan's national nursing exam this year. In 2009, 15,382 nurses from the Philippines alone took the U.S. exam. The language barrier in Japan may prove an insurmountable problem. Hence the desire for "nurses" that can be put together on an assembly line. Marketwatch reports that

The Japanese government has spent one hundred million dollars in grants [to Japanese firms] over the last [decade] to develop personal robots for their own eldercare crisis, yet no viable solutions have been developed by them to date.

But Atlanta-based GeckoSystems boasts that it is getting much love from Japan and China because it is

a dynamic leader in the emerging mobile robotics industry revolutionizing their development and usage with "Mobile Robot Solutions for Safety, Security and Service."

Based on what I've seen so far, be prepared to be totally underwhelmed. Frankly, I think a medical translation system would be a more achievable goal. I can't help thinking of two already-proposed "solutions."

In Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society, the computer running the Medicare system comes up with an ingenious solution to the problem (pretty much the opposite of Soylent Green), and then goes all HAL 9000 on anybody who gets in the way.

Though the whole concept of an "Elder Care Robot" sounds eerily like the one satirized in Roujin Z. The movie was released way back in 1991, making it all the more prescient.

My brother points out that this really isn't about language. A foreign nurse who would even attempt to take the qualifying exam will likely speak and understand Japanese better than any robot ever will.

It's not as bad as the silly business about Japanese not being able to eat American-grown rice back in the 1980s, but there is clearly regulatory capture going on.

The examination system in Japan long ago devolved into a tortuous sorting machine, not an evaluation of thinking ability. The Japanese equivalent of Stand and Deliver focuses more about test-taking strategies than mastering a complex subject like calculus.

For every ministry (and the industry group backing it) that wants A, another ministry and industry group wants B. But rather than debating it and committing to a single course, group B "graciously" concedes A, then renders A meaningless with gatekeeping strategy C.

Like passing a law and then "forgetting" to fund it.

In this case, all B has to do is nobly insist on the "same standards for everybody." The examination system (credentialism run amok) is Japan's "third rail," a prisoner's dilemma writ large, that everybody knows is hopelessly flawed but the entire society is hopelessly wedded to.

Labels: business, ghost in the shell, japan, medicine, politics, robots, science

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

It's rare that science fiction actually predicts the future. Sure, the first Star Trek series got the cell phone right. But especially on social issues, most plots are about the here and now. This is not a bad thing, as science fiction and fantasy settings provide an aesthetic distance that gives freer range to the arguments being made.

One in a while, though, an artist sees the future so clearly that you can believe time machines exist. Namely, the British newspaper The Telegraph recently quoted "medical ethics expert Baroness Warnock" saying, "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives--your family's lives--and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service."

Now watch Ghost in the Shell: Solid State Society. It covers the same issues and their implications brilliantly. Referring to the "Noble Rot Senior Citizens" (to translate the Japanese literally), in his grandiose, ends-justify-the-means soliloquy, the villain in the movie practically quotes Lady Warnock verbatim.

Two years ago, Kenji Kamiyama saw the future. Okay, he only saw two years into the future, but do that on a predictable basis and you'd be richer and wiser than Warren Buffet.

I don't fear the kind of revenge exacted on behalf of Kamiyama's senior citizens against their Lady Warnocks ever becoming a reality, but I wouldn't be surprised by something metaphorically akin to it. In any case, I do expect to see this battle between the "haves" and the "want-to-haves" looming up in our rearview mirrors very soon.

To be sure, I'm not too worried, as I happen to be just old enough (a very late baby-boomer) to anticipate getting grandfathered into whatever soak-the-younger-generation scheme gets conjured up in the name of compassionately "sharing the wealth," just before the whole system goes broke.

Labels: anime, ghost in the shell, publishing, social studies

I like to imagine that one day during the filming of Freeze Me, the producers approached writer/director Takashi Ishii, clapped him on the shoulder and said, "We all know the plan was to make a slick, updated "Pinky Violence" sexploitation flick, but, damn, this doesn't look half bad! I know, let's turn it into an art house film!"

So what could have been a kick-ass, soft-core revenge movie instead ends up an unsatisfying pile of faux "independent film" pretentiousness. And still manages to be just as misogynistic.

The story goes as follows: after getting raped by a trio of knuckle-dragging thugs, Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) has moved to Tokyo and made a new life for herself. Then thug number one shows up and, blackmailing her with a video made by his cohorts of their previous "encounter," announces he's ready to pick up where they left off last time.

A bunch of degrading sex later, Chihiro has had it up to here and caves his head in. Well, it was about time. The problem is, she has no convenient way to dispose of the body in downtown Tokyo. So she buys an industrial-sized freezer (delivery included) to store the corpse in while she figures it out.

Then thug number two shows up wondering what happened to thug number one and decides to avail himself of the same opportunities. Chihiro spends less time putting him on ice as well. And then thug number three—well, you get the picture.

But all this freezing is sucking up the power in Chihiro's rabbit hutch of an apartment, and it being the middle of the summer, the only way to keep from throwing a circuit breaker every five minutes is to turn off the air conditioner. Then the only way for her to cool off, natch, is to take lots of long showers.

Now, to be honest, I could have spent the entire 100 minutes just watching Harumi Inoue take showers. In any case, at this point in the film, we have the makings of a clever black comedy, with plenty of eye candy thrown in.

I was even willing to forgive Chihiro her maddening passivity during the first third of the movie. It's the standard Death Wish revenge fantasy formula: pacifist gets shocked into action and delivers violent justice to evil-doers ("a conservative is a liberal who got mugged"). Except that once the revenge is delivered, the plot grinds to a screeching halt.

Here is the rest of the movie (seriously):

Chihiro's loser boyfriend discovers what's in the freezers, and after some "It's not you, it's me" sex, he gets it too. Then she jumps off the balcony. I guess. It's kinda vague. Because it's an "art" film, don't you see. Oh, and it's raining. And it's at night. The end. Wow, moved and impressed, aren't you?

I don't know if the producers truly had the Pinky Violence films in mind as an antecedent, but Freeze Me is certainly less a homage than a betrayal. And sadly indicative of regressive and repressive strains in "modern" attitudes about women and sex. (By the way, the best Pinky Violence parody/homage is the hilarious Kamikaze Girls.)

During the early 1970s in Japan, with television eating away at profit margins, just like a Reese's peanut butter cup commercial, the "pink" (soft-core porn) genre collided with the yakuza action genre and produced a series of low-budget exploitation flicks featuring biker chicks slicing, dicing, and taking their clothes off.

A few of them, such as Delinquent Girl Boss with Reiko Oshida, don't actually suck. With her husky Lauren Bacall voice, Oshida totally sells the role as a bad girl in control of her environment and her own fate, willing to use both her fists and her sexuality to achieve her aims.

I consider Oshida's Rika the archetype for such modern anime heroines as Motoko Kusanagi (Ghost in the Shell) and Kumiko Yamaguchi (Gokusen). But watch Delinquent Girl Boss and then Freeze Me and you can't help but wonder: What happened?

One way I measure the relative quality of a bad movie is how long it takes me to doctor up a better script. It took me about five minutes to think of a better last half to Freeze Me.

Let's say a cop starts poking around—a female cop—wondering why the thugs haven't been reporting to their probation officer. The heat is on, and Chihiro has to figure a way to get rid of the bodies. And no way is she going to cram them down the garbage disposal. She's got to come up with something ingenious, and the cop is beginning to sense what's going on.

Ah, a physical and a moral dilemma. Now we've got pure film noir material. A comparison that springs to mind is Bound by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Freeze Me could have hummed and purred as well. Instead it alternately shivers and sweats and clunks and gives up without a fight.

I blame Thelma & Louise, which should more appropriately be titled: "The Original Dumb & Dumber." This supposed paean to film feminism follows the exploits of two unbelievably stupid grown women who have spent their entire lives as victims of impulse and circumstance and aren't about to let a little (almost justifiable) homicide stop them.

The good-guy cop (Harvey Keitel) finds them such a pathetic pair that he starts emoting like a father in pursuit of his two dimwitted daughters. Their exploits inspire pity at best, contempt at worst. Not once is logic ever allowed to compete with emotion, let alone overcome it. So why not just drive off a cliff?

It's hard not to read a very obvious metaphor into the final scene: the caring man stands by helplessly while the newly "liberated" women cast themselves into oblivion. And a woman actually wrote it.

It doesn't help that so many "artists" are so willing to read "profundity" into self-immolation, if dressed up with enough psychobabble or multiculturalism. It takes years of indoctrination to find something noble in dying for nothing, as Clint Eastwood did in the morally obtuse Letters from Iwo Jima.

Eastwood should have heeded his own advice: "A man's got to know his limits." Then again, Dirty Harry Callahan was much more sensible about things like that. Hells bells, even Rambo has a smarter motto. It's "Live for nothing, die for something!" not the other way around.

To be sure, there are plenty of movies about guys going out in a blaze of pointless glory—Barry Newman in Vanishing Point, James Cagney in White Heat, Michael Douglas in Falling Down, Newman and Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid—but the directors stress that either they really deserved it or there was absolutely no other alternative.

Even then, think about it for five minutes and it's still pretty damn dumb.

And yet for far slighter provocations, women are expected to jump off cliffs, tall buildings (Vertigo) and balconies, and throw themselves under trains. I'm sorry, but I just don't see how depicting women as so unimaginative and psychologically vulnerable is supposed to counter the stereotype of women as the "weaker sex."

I ask along with Erica Friedman, "What the hell is entertaining about reading and watching women being complete idiots and being abused by men?"

Which is why there's something more invidious than the lazy, pretentious plotting going on in Freeze Me. And again, I think this is so deeply ingrained—even in modern, leftist Hollywood—that it goes without comment. That is, it is verboten for women to use sex to level the playing field with physically more powerful men.

Trespassers must be punished! Or as Emily Bazelon puts it, "Whenever a woman sins, or contemplates sin, blam!—she's immediately run over by a truck."

Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things serves as the textbook alternative to Freeze Me. His Machiavellian women are similarly punished, but in proportion to the rules they deliberately—and with self-interest foremost in mind—break. Playing with fire will get you burned, in other words. And it's the man lying in the pool of blood at the end.

Ishii's Chihiro, on the other hand, seems mostly guilty of not playing the proper victim. "Life sucks and then you die" may strike the adolescent mind as profound during the teen goth years, but adults know that having to live with your choices is a heavier burden.

The last scene in Secret Things morally redeems all of its excesses, because it straightforwardly depicts two women who have learned something from their bad decisions, and who know where those scars came from. The last scenes in Freeze Me and Thelma & Louise only confirm that the unexamined life is not worth living.

And so, their lives unexamined, they stop living.

Brisseau's treatment of the subject does get so explicit at times (Ishii is restrained by comparison) that you get bored (bored with sex and nudity—now there's a crime!), or much worse, you start giggling. (The "orgy" scene: just don't do it!) Nothing kills the dramatic mood and the sexual tension faster.

But it is the vulnerability of Ishii's and Brisseau's men in the face of such female wiles that clarifies why some governments and cultures enforce misogynistic laws to prevent stuff like this from happening. The don't-objectify-me left joins hands with the don't-tempt-me right to demonize female sexual desire as the root of all societal evil.

Rika in Delinquent Girl Boss broke free of these constraints way back in 1971. It often seems we haven't moved much beyond that high water mark since. As I observe here, it's as if feminists have been busily manning the Maginot Line while the old school chauvinists have been sneaking through Belgium the whole time.

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Labels: criticism, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, japanese movie reviews, moral outrage, movie reviews, sex, yakuza

If you didn't like Ghost in the Shell, you're not likely to like the sequel, because much of is more of the same, although so much of the more looks absolutely fantastic. The most striking and intricate noir cityscapes since Blade Runner. On the other hand, even if you loved the original, you won't necessarily love the sequel, because, well, much of it is more of the same. It all depends.

Ghost in the Shell—to date the best interpretation of William Gibson's cyberpunk classic, Mona Lisa Overdrive—stands alongside Blade Runner, Dark City and The Matrix as one of the handful of films that do the genre any cinematic justice. Consequently, Innocence, as with all such sequels, begins burdened with the expectation that it will somehow out-geek and out-pontificate the original.

To be sure, it doesn't have as many problems as those dreadful Matrix and Star Wars sequels. It avoids resorting to empty philosophical babble (scripted by people not as smart as their characters) in an attempt at faux profundity. There's nothing worse than film makers, who after the fact discover that they produced something profound, and then the next time around try to be profound on purpose. The results are always ugly.

Babble there is, but it's not empty. Director Mamoru Oshii started with good material, and it's been ten years since Ghost in the Shell. But Ghost is the Shell was structured to make a particular existential argument, and with a compelling female protagonist (Motoko). At times, Innocence turns into a My Dinner with Andre (with androids). Hey, I liked My Dinner with Andre, but you want to tell Batou and Togusa to shut up and go shoot some more yakuza.

Innocence is built upon the foundation of a great idea—that the only way to make a robot "real" is to clone a human soul—and is buttressed by the eternal question of what ends justify what ends. The lead, though, is buried by one too many is-this-a-dream-or-reality sequences. Perhaps Oshii thought the idea too obvious and thought it necessary to muddy the waters. Complexity is one thing, but I prefer stories that don't rely on a tangle of tangentialities to keep the audience from figuring out the ending.

The last twenty minutes is worth waiting for, except that it also prompts you to ask why the middle third couldn't have been at least ten minutes tighter or ten minutes more relevant, and why we had to wait this long for Motoko to show up and provide something more than whispered subliminal warnings and cryptic clues you'd only remember if you'd watched Ghost in the Shell about fifty times.

Oshii admits this on the commentary track, which is doubly annoying. Better to embrace clarity in the first place than ask for forgiveness afterwards. But I still recommend the film. There's something to be said for being too talky and too cryptic rather than too dumb. Too much Matrix leaves the eyes glazed over with its self-important navel-gazing. Too much Star Wars actually kills brain cells.

Moreover, I'm not yet ready to give up on hand-drawn animation, especially when it comes to human characters. Even in zillion-dollar productions like Shrek, digitally animated people have that Final Fantasy look that ends up looking less human than traditional pen and ink drawings. Besides, if you can't tell the difference between "real life" and "art," then what's the art for? The Louvre would replace the Mona Lisa with a (digitally scanned) photograph.

One final gripe with the R1 DVD release specifically is that the subtitles combine the closed-captioning track with the subtitle track, which is unbelievably annoying. I spent about five minutes fiddling with the remote and failed to find a "normal" subtitle track. A big boo, hiss to distributor DreamWorks. They can do better than this.

Labels: anime reviews, ghost in the shell, robots, shirow, yakuza

I approached Appleseed: Ex Machina with expectations set admittedly too high, in the hope that the sequel would get beyond the silly premise of the original. Instead, the sequel only left me appreciating how much better a film the first one was. Yes, the plot was incoherent at times, but better structured and more interesting overall.

The Matrix proved that carried along by a sufficiently complex and ingenious plot, an idiotic science fiction premise (starting with that business about the batteries) can be stretched out for ninety minutes. Appleseed managed that. Appleseed: Ex Machina doesn't (and neither did the The Matrix sequels).

All the eye candy and video game shoot-em-ups makes the movie an entertaining-enough diversion. But Appleseed did such a good job proving what a really bad idea it is to create an authoritarian society with utopian pretensions run by a bunch of genetically-engineered androids and a ginormous mainframe.

And then Appleseed: Ex Machina proposes that the answer to all those inherent problems are more dispassionate androids and a bigger mainframe, with even more total control of everything. We're even treated to crowds of mainframe-controlled zombies, looking as cornily Roger Corman as it sounds. As economist Donald Boudreaux puts it:

A far greater danger to Americans' prosperity than a President with a poor speaking style and a penchant for standard-fare political shenanigans is the spread of the belief that economic salvation lies in having someone "in control."

But back during the 1960s, the mainframe was the only way to harness enough computing power in one place to do anything useful. By the 1970s, the Cray supercomputer had further cemented the metaphor of the super-smart, centrally-located, all-powerful electronic brain, generously time-sharing out its intelligence to us mere mortals.

If anything, Appleseed is a tribute to a bygone era, when despondent Marxists could dream of benevolent dictatorships putting a chicken in every pot and making the trains run on time. But run by computers, which would make it all totally cool. Yet by the 1990s, Cray Computer Corporation was bankrupt.

The Internet was instead about decentralized, distributed computing using off-the-shelf components.

But the Star Trek universe is still ruled by mainframes. The Matrix universe is run by mainframes. The Star Wars universe is run by mainframes (all conveniently located in one location, without redundancy or backups). Hollywood has mainframes on the brain.

Recall that every other episode of the original Star Trek had one of these Edenic societies blowing a major fuse. At least they got that part right. "One ring to rule them all" became "One mainframe to rule them all." It does give the protagonist and easy objective: toss the ring into the volcano. Or nuke the mainframe.

And then rebuild the blasted thing all over again, exactly the way it was before. A never-ending public works project to beat all public works projects, I guess.

One notable exception is Ghost in the Shell, created by Masamune Shirow after he wrote Appleseed. Second time around, Shirow got it exactly right: a decentralized, distributed, chaotic world where nobody can be in control of everything, and the worst problems are caused by people trying to be in control of everything.

It becomes the contradictory job of the good guys in Section 9 to exert authoritarian force in resisting that authoritarian impulse (ditto: Jack Bauer). But good premises make good stories precisely because the conflict is built in and perfection is elusive. Not surprisingly, every Ghost sequel has equaled or exceeded the original.

Take seriously the notion that a technological, utopian paradise is possible in the here and now, and like all socialist realism art, the essential conflict can only boil down to evil (capitalistic) forces trying to destroy Eden. It sounds high concept at first, but it'll always end up as high camp in the James Bond/Austin Powers/Star Trek vein.

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the end of the world (not again!) was turned into a running joke. The underlying plot devices in Ghost in the Shell, by comparison, are surprisingly mundane. Stop aspiring to perfection, and the challenge of wrestling with ordinary desires and frustrations opens the door to transcendence.

Consider the original and its four sequels in terms of the primary plot device:

Ghost in the Shell	Industrial espionage
Innocence	Prostitution
Solid State Society	Medicare funding
SAC: I	Medical drug trials
SAC: II	Terrorism and separatism

To be sure, Solid State Society is a tad deeper than that, but the questions raised by a high-tech society with an aging population and a low birth rate—also explored in Katsuhiro Otomo's comic Roujin Z—are questions about the value of life itself. It makes sense why the various players would be driven to a murderous crime wave.

I thought the free-wheeling world of Star Trek: Enterprise made it the best of the series, though the Orwellian UN-in-outer-space meme still hovered there in the background. In Serenity and Firefly, Joss Whedon created the best space opera series to date by getting back to a messy libertarian world that was recognizably real.

Naive and idealistic politics, however well-intentioned, make for bad movies. Imperfect people battling an imperfect system make for good movies. As novelist Richard Russo puts it, "unrelenting virtue is not just unrealistic but uninteresting." Appleseed: Ex Machina takes on the task of making an uninteresting idea interesting. And mostly fails.

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Labels: anime reviews, annoying stuff, ghost in the shell, mainframe, politics, science, science fiction, shirow, uncanny valley

Plastic Little has long suffered an undeserved reputation that its U.S. distributor has only encouraged. ADV's liner notes delightfully boast of its "graphic violence [and] gratuitous nudity." Okay, we'll stipulate that the nudity is indeed gratuitous (and at times just silly), but it's also innocuous. The violence is PG-13 at the worst. Not that Plastic Little is without its problems in other departments. But they're not enough to sink this ship.

Essentially, you've got two hours of plot distilled down to fifty minutes, as if they ran out of film stock halfway through the project. The result is a storyline (except for the aforementioned scenes of gratuitous nudity) stripped down to the bare bones: a microscopic setup, a few dabs of character development, and the action sequences. Another hour's worth of compelling questions are left unanswered: what Guizel is actually up to, besides being generally nasty; where all those ships came from in the big showdown; how a pet shop hunter came to be so heavily armored; whether or not Tita is a lesbian . . . .

Such trifling matters notwithstanding, Plastic Little exemplifies anime's unique ability to make the most of its female characters' sexuality, and at the same time present them as compelling and believable protagonists who can hold her own in any rough-and-tumble situation. As Antonia Levi observes, "[Women in anime] may be heroes or villains, saints or sinners, but they rarely blend into the background. And they rarely wear much in the way of clothing . . . . Men will watch because of the sex and women will watch because of the strength, or so the popular wisdom goes."

The popular wisdom is only half-right. Anime bucks the tried and true truism that girls will watch a movie about boys but boys won't watch a movie about girls--but for reasons more substantial than what in otaku-speak is euphemistically known as "fan service." When Captain Tita swings into action, it's no stretch of the imagination that her male crew willingly follows her into battle. And it's no stretch when she dukes it out with the bad guys and prevails. She is completely believable as a literal "leader of men," willing to act before it becomes necessary to react.

(Recall the rooftop standoff between Clint Eastwood and John Malkovich in In the Line of Fire and you can't help but cheer Tita's far more satisfying solution to the same dilemma.)

The paradoxical fact remains that in anime, particularly in action roles, female protagonists, far more so than their comparable Hollywood counterparts, do not rely "on the kindness of strangers" for their well-being. It's remarkably oxymoronic. Women in Japan pursuing a professional careers still have a hard row to hoe. Business is definitely a "man's world," the glass ceiling almost bulletproof. And the majority of married Japanese women with children drop out of the workforce to become housewives.

It sounds like a model neo-Victorian world. Well, not quite. Perhaps because Japan parted with its feudal past only a century and a half ago it has not fallen prey to the sloppy, wishful thinking that confuses equality with sameness, and sameness with the neuter gender, and thus expressions of femininity with powerlessness. To quote Levi:

Traditional Japanese women control the family budget, keep their husbands on strict allowances, determine most major purchases, and have the majority voice in how their children are reared and educated. Under some circumstances they not only keep their own [sur]name, but also bestow it on their husbands and children.

Levi points out that, in the standard Hollywood fantasy setup, the standard device is to get rid of the father. But in Japan, you get rid of the mother. Because the presence of a strong, responsible woman "would kill all the fun." Levi also observes that (to the extent that you lend credence to such things) Japanese girls score much higher on "self-esteem" scales than American girls, and muses that perhaps it is because "Japanese women derive considerable prestige from performing their traditional roles in a satisfactory way."

But what constitutes a "traditional role" points to more important differences between the superficially similar Victorian and Tokugawa-era social structures. A search through the historical antecedents reveals a rich repository of female role models that anime can draw upon. To begin at the beginning, Japan's creation deity, Amaterasu, is female. The miko, Shinto priestesses, are often cast as your all-purpose spiritual guides and ghostbusters (Inuyasha, Shrine of the Morning Mist, Kamichu!).

The historical record also reveals numerous examples of the female warrior, women such as Hangaku, Tomoe Gozen, and Masako Hojo, who were as fierce and competent on the battlefield as any man. Throughout the Tokugawa era, women of samurai lineage were trained in the martial arts, particularly in the use of the naginata, or halberd. Judo, archery, and kendo remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes.

The only comparable European counterpart is Joan of Arc, an exception that proves the rule by its exceptionality. This may explain the trepidation with which Hollywood casts female action leads, in stark contrast to even low-budget Hong Kong action films. The last film actor to fill such a role convincingly was Linda Hamilton in Terminator II. Television has done better with Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. "Before Buffy," Hillary Frey argues, "the only women who kicked ass on [American] television did so metaphorically, in the courtrooms or in the ER."

And in an analysis of the two series, Salon writer Stephanie Zacharek, borrowing from Camille Paglia, points to "the identity of sex and power [and] the permeation of eroticism by aggression" in a dramatic arena in which "the masculine hurls itself at the feminine in an eternal circle of pursuit and flight." Zacharek concludes, "In this dynamic there's no such thing as the weaker sex."

Yet the physicality demanded by this "dynamic" continues to prove problematic. I'm a die-hard Buffy fan, but it still takes a lot of clever camera work to make Sarah Michelle Gellar look good when she's whupping the bad guys. It's hard to come up with a single Hollywood actress who could hold a candle to Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh, or Ziyi Zhang in that department.

Obviously, no anime character is checked by the limitations of an actor's physical training. But this is only half an excuse. Physical strength is a single facet of aggression. Gerard Jones sums up the anime melodrama heroine as follows: "[She] can be flirtatious, cute, embarrassed, silly, self-indulgent, and knowingly sexy. And if [she flies] into a savage rage against a villain [or boyfriend], it [is] likely to be a much more personal and more human reaction." Ryoko in Tenchi Muyo and Akane from Ranma 1/2 come to mind. Even the demure Yukino in His and Her Circumstances—you do not want to get this woman really pissed off.

More recently, Moribito and the Japanese version of Witchblade offer up adult women (rather than overgrown teenagers) as action heroes. In the former case, Balsa's compassion is not presented as a feminine impediment to her ability to fight, the Achilles heel that every villain predictably seizes upon. In the latter, even though Masane is sexualized in often eye-rolling ways, her switching in an eyeblink between "mom" and "superhero" does not strain belief in the slightest.

Denying to women the efficacy of affective as well as physical power are remnants of Victorianism, which, perversely combined with the more self-destructive trends in gender feminism, concluded that for women to achieve "equality" they must shed those feminine attributes that so easily give them power over men. Hollywood up to the early 1950s somehow escaped these influences, promoting actresses such as Lauren Bacall (To Have and Have Not), Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday), and Grace Kelly (Rear Window) who could be beautiful, sensual and tough as nails. Not to mention that Hollywood's first megastar, Mary Pickford, ran her own production company and was a founding partner of United Artists.

But over half a century on it can be argued that American popular entertainment has only recently again embraced the concept that beauty is not inimical to emotional or physical strength. Of course, a healthy libido has always been considered an asset for any man, real or fictional. The little girls who flocked to Britney Spears concerts and to Charlie's Angels movies, figured this out. And all the better that it shocks! shocks! their parents and moral guardians.

This dichotomy is obvious in the persona of Captain Janeway (Star Trek Voyager), repressed and dispassionate to the point of being sexless, ruling with all the rousing disposition of a 19th century schoolmarm. Her Captain Bligh demeanor should have gotten her shoved out an airlock shortly into the first season. Why, asks Stephanie Zacharek, in a similar vein,

is playing a depressive writer or an anti-death-penalty nun automatically considered superior to (or more difficult than) playing a kook (like Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby), a prostitute (like Jane Fonda in Klute), or a femme fatale (like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity)?

Compare Janeway to Major Kusanagi, the purposely dispassionate protagonist of Ghost in the Shell, whose smatterings of feelings you actually do care about. And when she tells her (male) subordinates to jump, you understand why they ask "How high?" on the way up, and don't take their eyes off her on the way down. In the Ghost in the Shell television series (Stand Along Complex), Kusanagi's abilities as a commander are even more pronounced, easily making her the most competent law enforcement officer of either sex on either side of the Pacific.

The wretched original English dub of Ghost in the Shell drives the point home: the only way most American producers know how to depict a "tough woman" is to turn her into a tough (foul-mouthed) guy. With a push-up bra. Minnie Driver's pitch-perfect voice-over of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke is proof that it can be done right. Calm, cool, and scarily in control. U.S. distributors should watch, listen, and learn.

Ironically, Rick Berman went a long way to correcting his own mistake on Star Trek Voyager with Seven of Nine, who all but took over the series from the moment she was introduced. Not surprisingly, Seven and her celluloid sisters-in-spirit—Xena and Buffy—would be quite at home in anime.

Perhaps even more illustrative is Kumiko Yamaguchi in Gokusen (voiced by Risa Hayamizu). Yamaguchi is a freshly-minted and idealistic high school math teacher at an inner-city boy's high school, a stock character in television drama and comedy. The catch is that Yamaguchi is the scion of an established yakuza family. And, no, she's not the good girl running away from her past. She's going to run the "family business" and (often literally) pound an education into the heads of her juvenile deliquents. There's never any doubt, whether in the classroom or holding a tight rein on her own gang members, who's in charge. And her femininity is never in question. She can knock 'em dead in a kimono, not just with her fists.

American television does seem to be growing up faster than film. Chris Carter and Gillian Anderson created a breakthrough character (half of one of the great television duos of all time) in FBI agent Dana Scully. Joss Whedon and Sam Raimi paved the way with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena. Andrea Parker's underappreciated "Miss Parker" in Pretender redefined the bad-guy-worth-rooting-for in ways that have not been matched since. Andromeda delivered a two-for with Rommie (Lexa Doig) and Valentine (Lisa Ryder). Joss Whedon answered the call again with (the shamefully short-lived) Firefly, featuring American television's toughest girl-with-a-gun, Gina Torres as Zoe.

Over and over, action series provide the best role models. Amanda Tapping as Samantha Carter on Stargate. Jill Hennessy as medical examiner Jordan Cavanaugh and Jennifer Garner as superspy Sydney Bristow. Jolene Blalock (Enterprise), who stands out in her supporting role, is Seven redux, down to the body suit and the attitude. I was initially most encouraged by Hennessy, who at least initially was not compelled to apologize for the fact that, yes, she is an excessively gorgeous woman. Garner, in contrast, came across as excessively stoical (she's neither a Vulcan nor an android).

The contrast between Garner and Hennessy is illustrative. The argument can be made that Garner's Sydney Bristow started out working for a bunch of murderous conspirators, so it's no wonder that she should be a tad distant and humorless. But, then, being around someone who hates her job week after week isn't a whole lot of fun for the viewer, either. Here we get back to the either/or problem that so often plagues the female action lead: you can be one or the other, but not both. Yet the whole point of Captain Kirk's life (and Captain Picard's and Captain Archer's) was that he loved being a starship captain. There was never ever any conflict on that point.

Men have long been permitted to wallow in their eccentricities (or sexual peculiarities) without becoming any less acceptable in their roles, as CSI's quirky Gil Grissom (William L. Petersen) demonstrates, or Mel Gibson's borderline psychotic protrayal of Riggs in Lethal Weapon, or Tony Shalhoub playing a neurotic genius in Monk. For several seasons, Joss Whedon populated Buffy with the most interesting female characters ever on television, but the pickings are sparse. The unconventional, competent and relatively angst-free woman Hollywood still has a problem dealing with.

Stephanie Zacharek got it right when she wished Hollywood's veteran actresses "the chance to get ahold of something more valuable than your typical ho-hum actorly prestige: I wish them more opportunities to wear bad-girl lace, without having anyone hold it against them." Or as Rowan Pelling puts it, "Why can't we admire and applaud strong women who are calling the steps of the dance? The qualities of the femme fatale are no longer prized by Hollywood or the wider world."

With the the exception of Buffy and the Scoobies, lead female action roles remain mostly consigned to sidekicks (Emily Deschanel in Bones) or (even rarer) lone wolves. Perhaps leaders of other women (Charmed), but not leaders of men. Leading is a supporting role, as illustrated by Epatha Merkerson's supporting role in Law & Order, Tamara Taylor's supporting role in Bones, Lauren Holly's supporting role in NCIS.

There is no better illustration of this propensity than a 2003 episode of Enterprise ("Twilight"), in which not only does T'Pol give up command of the Enterprise to care for an ailing Captain Archer, but it is also strongly intimated that she was not really cut out to command a starship. Not like those manly Earth men. Talk about a woman's place being literally in the home. Back to the future, indeed.

So there's plenty of room for give and take on both sides. While Hollywood goes about rediscovering what it knew about women sixty years ago and subsequently has fogotten, Japanese society would greatly benefit from applying to daily life what its manga writers and anime directors have long been bringing to its silver screen dreams.

Labels: anime, buffy, deep thoughts, ghost in the shell, manga, sex, shinto, shirow, social studies, superhero, yakuza