In Japan, that is. All the more surprising considering that Christians constitute at best one percent of the population. Or perhaps that simply makes it more exotic.

Catholicism has the deepest roots, having arrived in Japan in the mid-16th century. So the aesthetics associated with Catholic culture and architecture are the first things Japanese think about when Christianity is mentioned. After that comes the ecclesiastical structure, extrapolated from the Roman Curia.

Anime like Witch Hunter Robin and Hellsing (Catholics versus Anglicans) play off the supposed existence of an all-powerful Catholic Church that shows up in movies like Constantine, Stigmata, and The Da Vinci Code. The Catholic Church is just too cool an institution not to imagine it running a global conspiracy.

Although in A Certain Magical Index, that role is also shared by the English Puritan Church (also translated as the Church of England).

And as with the spy agencies of any country, in the paranormal action world, the Catholic Church is also a good source of skilled agents, operators, and intelligence networks. Ghost Hunt is an ecumenical paranormal actioner, so it naturally features a Catholic priest as one of the ghost hunters.

At the same time, in terms of theology, the suggestively Catholic Haibane Renmei can stand beside any of C.S. Lewis's work as an accessible Christian parable. The same is true of anime such as Madoka Magica and Scrapped Princess, though you may have to look harder to see the metaphors.

Along with Camille Paglia, Japanese writers have discovered that "medieval theology is far more complex and challenging than anything offered by the pretentious post-structuralist hucksters."

They eagerly pilfer Christian eschatology for interesting characters and conflicts (another good reason to study religion!). Kaori Yuki's Miltonesque Angel Sanctuary turns Paradise Lost into a Gothic romance, with a war in heaven and a descent to the underworld to reclaim a lost love.

At the other extreme, the quite clever The Devil is a Part-Timer (stranded in Japan, the devil gets a job at McDonald's to make ends meet) features both Satan and Lucifer as separate characters.

The only overtly religious aspect of The Devil is a Part-Timer is an institutional church roughly analogous to the medieval Catholic Church (under the Medici popes). The state religion in Scrapped Princess is largely the same.

Then there's the offbeat syncretism of Saint Young Men, about Jesus and Buddha hanging out in modern-day Tokyo. Manga artist Hikaru Nakamura approaches the subject with a goofy but respectful touch. Unless you find the concept itself heretical, there's nothing at all blasphemous about it.

Saint Young Men is hugely popular in Japan (a staggering 10 million copies sold). It won the 2009 Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize and is still in print. An anime series and movie were released in 2012 and 2013.

Most Christians react to this type of thing the same way most Mormons do to The Book of Mormon by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone: "Hey, at least they spelled the names right!" What is far more insulting is ignorance hiding behind a smug mask of condescending self-righteousness.

There's none of that here. Whether the Shinto gods in Natsume's Book of Friends or the traditional folklore of Northern Europe in The Ancient Magus' Bride, these writers have done their homework. They honestly respect the source material.

What gives manga publishers pause when it comes to the Norther American audience is the fear that somebody will whine and stamp their feet and the bad publicity will kill sales. Nobody's going to get killed. But the suits understandably get skittish about the fringe elements that breath such threats.

During the localization of Saint Tail (which features a Catholic basilica as the "Bat Cave") for the North American market, references to God were

removed from the first two volumes in a possible anticipation of a TV broadcast. Considering that Seira Mimori [the protagonist's sidekick] spends half of the time in a nun's habit, one wonders why they thought they could do Saint Tail without references to God.

Common sense finally prevailed and the censoring stopped with the third volume.

This is rarely a problem in Japan, where the whining and foot stamping mostly comes from the political right. They're strident secularists, except when the emperor enters the picture. Then they turn into strident Shintoists. Until they die, that is, at which point Buddhism kicks in with a vengeance.

"Buddhism for the dead, Shinto for the living," so the saying goes. In everyday life, Japanese move back and forth between Shinto rites and Buddhist beliefs and Christian-style wedding ceremonies. It's not that the adherents are blurring the lines. The lines were never firmly drawn in the first place.

You might expect this sort of fuzzy wuzziness to lead to the kind of apathy and neglect that emptied out the churches in secularized Europe. But in Japan, people not getting worked up about stuff can motivate the curious to mix and match belief systems in ways nobody else would have dreamed of.

And in the process, scrub the dust off of old, worn-out tropes to reveal the shining gems buried beneath.

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Labels: anime, eschatology, haibane, hellsing, history, japanese culture, movies, pop culture, religion, social studies

Jun Maeda turned the visual novel game studio Key VisualArts into a synonym for true-to-life melodramas infused with a large dollop of magical realism. In Angel Beats, his latest anime series, he skips right past the realism and goes straight for the magical. Or rather, straight for the eschatological.

In the first scene, Yuzuru Otonashi wakes up in the afterlife and promptly gets killed again. He doesn't die because he's already dead. Which is a good thing, because he's fallen in with a gang of like-minded teenagers who have decided they do not want to "go gentle into that good night," and have armed themselves accordingly.

That means fighting Angel, who's gotten very good at killing them in turn (getting killed here is like a painful time-out in the penalty box). Angel's ungentle job it is to see that they do go gentle into that good night. And that means being good students instead of a bunch of delinquents.

You see, Angel is the student council president. Purgatory is a Japanese high school. And Angel has appointed herself Charon, the ferryman.

Refreshingly, these rebels really are a bunch of delinquents, and despite all the scheming by Yuri, their bad girl leader, they're not good at being bad. Otonashi admits he would have joined whatever group approached him first. All they know is the current status quo, so that is what they defend—to their repeated deaths.

Though following Jun Maeda's reliable formula, this is executed with a good deal of dark humor that at times is quite funny.

Helped along by the fact that Angel isn't a mindless antagonist, and this hapless gang—who admit they don't really know what they're rebelling against (to quote Marlon Brando: "Whaddya got?")—aren't necessarily the protagonists. Because the only true enemy is the self.

Yeah, I know, that's about as trite as truisms get, but stick with it. It pays off.

There's an element of The Matrix here. The red pill students know they're dead but alive in an unreal world, while the blue pill students remain completely oblivious. Except here Maeda fills in the gaps that The Matrix misses, by giving all parties compelling, even moral, reasons for their opposing choices.


Though in substance and message, Angel Beats! reminds me more of Haibane Renmei, Yoshitoshi ABe's subtle and sublime meditation on grace and redemption. ABe's protagonist is Rakka, who is reborn into an afterlife that resembles a semi-rural village in mid-20th century Eastern Europe.

In the pastoral world of Haibane Renmei, there is no god to rail against, no highway to heaven, no sign posts pointing the way. Their only job is to live out their afterlives in the community while "working out their salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).

While Haibane Renmei is quiet and meditative, Angel Beats! is loud and obvious. It's the garage band version, with the volume turned up to eleven. Literally, as one of the gang's tools of subversion is a student rock band that stages illegal concerts to distract Angel's minions during their ammo resupply raids.


Angel Beats! also has a distinctly Buddhist slant. ABe created a purposely Catholic version of purgatory for Haibane Renmei. In Angel Beats! Christian salvation isn't in the cards. Whether you move onto the next world is purely a product of self-realization or satori, and only you can hold yourself back.

On this score, Joseph Smith would agree.

For our words will condemn us, yea, all our works will condemn us; we shall not be found spotless; and our thoughts will also condemn us; and in this awful state we shall not dare to look up to our God; and we would fain be glad if we could command the rocks and the mountains to fall upon us to hide us from his presence (Alma 12:14).

Everybody in this purgatory is terrified of resurrecting the memories of who they were before they died, and instead are obsessed with what could have been versus what actually was. As Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." So the dead stay dead until they face that examination directly.

Still, it wouldn't hurt if someone could figure out these eschatalogical truths first and then point the way to everybody else. Eventually joining forces, that is what Angel and Otonashi end up striving to do, until the only job left to them is to save themselves.

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Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, fantasy, haibane, jun maeda, lds, religion, shinto, your name

As previous noted, Angel Beats! never rises to the sublime hermeneutics of Haibane Renmei, and aims for the emotional—rather than the theological—jugular (a Jun Maeda trademark). But it does tackle several substantial ideas in a creative manner.


1. Like Haibane Renmei, Jun Maeda (inadvertently) addresses the problem of infant baptism. From a Catholic perspective, these teenagers have arrived in Limbo, the purpose of which is to free themselves from Original Sin.

In Buddhist terms, they must free themselves from impermanent and transient attachments and achieve satori, a true realization of their place in the universe and what matters from an eternal perspective. Grudges and regrets have to be left behind.

This is about dealing with the past and moving on. It's not about "justice" and not about what you think the universe owes you in recompense for your suffering. As Clint Eastwood's Will Munny puts it, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it."

All of the characters in Angel Beats! had miserable childhoods, perhaps Yuri the worst, hence her refusal to reconcile herself to whatever she imagines God is. But only reconciliation will allow them to live out the childhoods they were denied in morality.

2. Jun Maeda is also a game designer, so it comes as no surprise that the serpent in this garden should be a creation of computer programming. Indeed, the students who are not aware that they died and are in the afterlife are called "non-player characters" (NPCs).

Here Angel Beats! again resembles The Matrix, though Agent Smith never compellingly tempts Neo with an offer to rule in the virtual rather than serve in reality. But Yuri is offered what she imagines she's been fighting for all along.

This scene aligns with two themes explored in depth by C.S. Lewis, that we mortals are fighting on enemy territory but both sides are bound by a specific set of rules. The serpent is doing what he's allowed to do. So agency trumps order even in the afterlife.

(Another useful by-product of game design is that because games require literal logic to work, that essential disciplining structure is reflected in the narrative as well.)

3. The "big reveal" introduces a backstory that is told and not shown, which would seem a narrative mistake, until it becomes clear that Otonashi's story embodies it. In the end, Otonashi does not follow it, and so the story concludes on a very Buddhist note.

Because it is only by breaking out of the present eternal cycle (samsara) and being reborn that the players can win at this game.

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Set Apart
Angel Beats!
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Labels: anime, buddhism, eschatology, fantasy, haibane, japanese culture, religion

Continuing from my previous post on the subject, a closer look at Catholicism in Japan's popular culture. Only one percent of Japanese consider themselves Christian, less than half that Catholic, making the influence of Catholic culture wildly disproportionate to its demographic presence.

Shusaku Endo (1923-1996) wrote about Catholicism in the context of Japanese history. His definitive novel, Silence, details the persecution of the church in the early 17th century. A movie directed by Masahiro Shinoda was released in 1971. An adaptation by Martin Scorsese starring Liam Neeson is scheduled for 2016.

Forced deep underground during the Edo period (1603-1868), a dedicated few courageously kept the faith alive for 250 years in the face of fierce persecution. Those days are all bygones. Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso is Catholic. "Christian"-style weddings are a popular (and less expensive) alternative to the Shinto rite.

That includes "Christian" weddings officiated by foreign "priests." Because any gaijin who can dress up and play the part will do. A marriage license is an official document issued by the state; what goes on in the church is legally irrelevant.

So setting serious things aside, let's glance briefly at the lighter side of pop Catholic references. I say "briefly" because I can only mention a few of the dozens of titles that qualify.

As I mentioned previously, the Inquisitorial arm of the Catholic church in Hellsing and Witch Hunter Robin (among many) functions as a conspiratorial manipulator of events on the world stage, like The Smoking Man from The X-Files or the NSA/CIA in Enemy of the State (and a zillion other Hollywood flicks).


For history buffs, there's Maria the Virgin Witch. It takes place during the Hundred Years' War. When she keeps interfering in human events as an avowed pacifist, Maria gets at cross-purposes with the Archangel Michael. (The series crazily ricochets between high-brow historical fantasy and very low-brow burlesque.)

Chrono Crusade features the "Order of Saint Magdalene" as a ghost-hunting organization. The vampire hunters in Trinity Blood work for a post-apocalyptic Vatican. The heroine in Saint Tail is a Robin Hood type whose base of operation is a Catholic church.

Haibane Renmei is perhaps the most accessible exploration of Catholic purgatory (or the Mormon "probationary state") in religious literature.

Though supernatural genres predominate, there are a few real life titles, such as Rumiko Takahashi's One-Pound Gospel, about a boxer kept on the straight and narrow by a Catholic nun.

More than theology, which few Japanese (and few Americans) could explain, Catholicism is best known as a setting, namely the Catholic girls school. Based on popular entertainment, you'd conclude that every other private school in Japan is a Catholic girls school. A recent example is Maria Watches Over Us.

The live action comedy Gomen ne Seishun! ("Saving My Stupid Youth") has a Catholic girls school with slumping enrollment merging with a Buddhist boys school in similar straits. School uniforms matter a lot in Japan, and Gomen ne Seishun! ridiculously dresses the girls up in what look like training habits.


It's not available in the U.S. (though Maria Watches Over Us is). Maybe someday it'll show up on Hulu or Crunchyroll? Really, you'd have to have a heart of stone to get offended at something this silly. A world beset by religious strife calls for even greater faith in the more jocular angels of our nature.

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Labels: anime, anime lists, haibane, hellsing, japan, japanese culture, movies about japan, pop culture, religion

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.

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

Horror is a popular genre in manga and anime, especially Twilight Zone-style short stories and an often preachy permutation in which a supernatural grim reaper deals out justice and balances the cosmic scales, an existential Death Wish. I'd put Kino's Journey in the former category, and xxxHolic and Hell Girl in the latter.

I enjoyed the feature-length xxxholic: A Midsummer Night's Dream because it told the story and wrapped everything up in an hour. Mushi-shi is one of the most inventive permutations, about an Edo Period "Bug Master" who controls swarms of supernatural insect-like creatures. Unfortunately, I kept waiting for some interesting relationships to develop, and none did.

With series, after a couple of episodes, no matter how slick and clever, seen one, seen them all (sorry, but the same goes for Twilight Zone episodes too). I want to watch it adding up to something, not be told it did. Give me "high concept," bubble-gum actioners or take the time to develop a character arc beyond "indifferent hero makes sure jerk gets what's coming to him."

No discussion of Japanese anime horror is complete without a discussion of tentacle porn. But like splatter flicks, it is too devoid of ideas to offend me other than aesthetically. It also doesn't interest me in the slightest, even after a prurient fashion.

I seem to recall that the original Demon City Shinjuku (1988) movie had some tentacle porn. I'm translating the novel right now for Digital Manga. I've only got forty pages to go and haven't encountered any tentacle porn, so it seems to have been "creative" addition. In any case, the book is a lot better.

Japanese writers don't let a paucity of knowledge about the subject get in the way of borrowing heavily from European tropes and Christianity in general. In fact, that is a source of a lot of the fun! (Peter Payne likes to point out that Japanese are similarly unoffended by ignorant Hollywood nonsense about Japan.)

Hellsing (original preferred) definitely qualifies. It's the Church of England versus the Vatican! With big guns! And vampires! I love it! Its Miltonesque protagonist proves that, indeed, the devil gets all the good lines. What if the devil decided to fight on the side of good, not because he got his soul back like Angel, but because evil was so utterly hackneyed and boring?

Witch Hunter Robin is yet another X-Files/Angel-type mash-up. Super-secret police organization for tracking down supernatural ne're-do-wells employs a real witch, who uncovers bigger conspiracy Behind It All and Must Be Stopped! Japanese SF/F writers love this formula. Again, it posits the Catholic Church as the omniscient, omnipresent Smoking Man.

You know you've arrived as a world-wide religion when it generates so many stories about world-wide conspiracies.

Someday's Dreamers is not horror per se. Yume is a witch, but as with Kamichu! and Kiki's Delivery Service, this is a given in the modern world. Think Harry Potter without the muggle divide and no vaudevillian bad guys. The series begins with Yume arriving in Tokyo from the sticks to get her witch's license, which has a lot more in common with social work than magic.

The animation is so-so and the episodes clunk along didactically at times, but the concept itself is executed almost perfectly (I define a great concept as one I immediately want to rip off).

Two oddly similar and very good non-horror, life-after-death dramas: Haibane Renmei and After Life (live action).

And for something completely off the supernatural wall, the manga Saint Young Men is about Jesus and Buddha hanging out together in Tokyo. It's iconoclastic but not sacrilegious (if you don't mind divine beings kicking back and poking gentle fun at each other), and is very sweet at times without becoming cloying.

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Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, criticism, demon city, haibane, hellsing, magic, pop culture, religion, television

Haibane Renmei by Yoshitoshi ABe, directed by Tomokazu Tokoro, 2002.

Set Apart by Daniel Cronquist, WinePress Publishing, 2009 (ISBN 978-1414112565).

In a small town in a mid-20th century Eastern European country is the "Old Home," an orphanage whose residents are known as Haibane, or "gray wings." The Haibane are born from cocoons with no memories of their previous lives. They sprout flightless wings on their backs and wear glowing halos over their heads.

The story begins with the "birth" of the newest member, Rakka, and follows her life at the orphanage as she tries to remember who she is and what she is doing there. Couched as a modern fable—never digressing to explain itself—Haibane Renmei is an deeply moving study of character and personal redemption.

In his short monograph (running 80 numbered pages), Set Apart, Daniel Cronquist describes Haibane Renmei as "the most Christian anime I have ever seen. [It] has more spiritual truth in it than most American media." His book is an episode by episode analysis of the series from a Christian perspective.

Cronquist is not forcing an unwarranted religious interpretation onto the art. According to its writer and creator Yoshitoshi ABe [sic], Haibane Renmei "is not a story about any specific religion; but it is, nonetheless, a religious story" inspired by his own salvific experiences.

Though Cronquist approaches the subject from an Protestant perspective, nothing in his analysis should raise hackles in a Mormon audience. In fact, the elements of Haibane Renmei that Cronquist admits "exists outside of canonical theology" would likely be considered even less objectionable by Mormons.

Mormons should also be comfortable applying concepts such as the "veil of forgetfulness" and "spirit prison" (though I suspect ABe was thinking more of Catholic purgatory), and the "probationary state" (Alma 12:24) to key plot points.

As the Catholic Encyclopedia defines it: 

Purgatory (Lat., "purgare", to make clean, to purify): in accordance with Catholic teaching is a place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace, are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions.

Cronquist expands on the unique metaphor ABe has devised to answer (we assume, though the symbolism is well-nigh perfect) the challenge in John 3:4, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" The Haibane are "reborn" fully formed from their cocoons.

They are all children or young adults (lending support to a Catholic gloss). They live for an indeterminate amount of time and then vanish as mysteriously as they arrived.

The Haibane work alongside humans, living in the world but not of it. They amass no material goods for they can take nothing with them. Instead, "theirs is a world of spiritual growth—a second chance to move beyond what brought them there." Or as it says in Alma, "a space granted unto man in which he might repent."

Once the Haibane have come to terms with the sins that are keeping them grounded, they are are essentially "twinkled" in a "day of flight."

Cronquist's exegesis is clear, concise and insightful. Set Apart is organized as a lesson plan with discussion questions at the end of each chapter. It could easily serve as the textbook for a BYU religion course. Frankly, it'd be a lot more substantive than most of the required religion courses I took at BYU.

When it comes to Christian allegory that succeeds as art and metaphor, with Haibane Renmei Yoshitoshi ABe capably rises to the standard set by C.S. Lewis.

Labels: anime, book reviews, BYU, funimation, haibane, lds, personal favs, religion

Sorted alphabetically and not a definitive list. I'm referring only to series and movies that fit into the arc of the series.

• Ah! My Goddess (first season)
• Oh! My Goddess (the Ah! My Goddess remake more closely follows the manga, which means it runs into the problems I describe here; Oh! My Goddess neatly sews everything up in a half-a-dozen episodes)
• Alien Nine (elementary school kids saving the Earth from an alien invasion; warning: the anime ends right smack dab in the middle of the story)
• Angelic Layer (basically "Rock 'Em Sock 'Em" robots with really cute marionettes; one of those rinse & repeat sports/mecha series, but it works)
• Clannad (another fine addition to Kyoto Animation's line of game-based Y/A psychological melodrama; should be watched along with Clannad: After Story)
  
• Ceres, Celestial Legend (mediocre animation, great story)
• Elfen Lied (the opening ten minutes may be some of the blood-spatteringest ever, but I still recommend it)
• Eureka Seven (a sort of mecha version of Last Exile)
• FLCL (proving just how far outside the box an animator's mind can operate)
• Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU (proving just how fun dumb can be) and Second Raid.
  
• Gankutsuou (The Count of Monte Cristo, 2-D CG at its inventive best)
• Geneshaft
• Genshiken (an actual "adult" comedy--that is, a comedy about geeky college students who mostly act their age; compares well to CBS's Big Bang Theory)
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (both seasons and the SAC movie; best cyberpunk series ever, worth watching for the Tachikoma segments alone)
• Gokusen (these "reformed gangbanger" series are very popular, but create the impression that Japanese society is about 1000 times more violent than it really is)
• Haibane Renmei
• Hellsing (original series; imagine that "evil Angel" worked for the good guys)
• His and Her Circumstances (one of the best high school romances ever, until it self-destructed over what I've read were creative differences between the writer and director)
• Ikki Tousen
• Initial D (first season; repeats itself thereafter)
• Kamichu!
• Kanon (an ingenious reinvention of the harem genre as psychological drama)
• Kodocha (season one)
• Last Exile (any kid who loved the dogfighting sequences in Star Wars will love this; similar "look and feel" to Castle in the Sky)
• Mahoromatic (I actually didn't mind the ending, though it's clear nobody knew how to end it)
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (I hope they include the whole dance routine as a future DVD extra; update: they do)
• Midori Days
• (Seirei no) Moribito (an alternate Heian Era universe with an honest-to-goodness adult female protagonist)
• My Hime (stay tuned for the hilariously ribald fan service extras at the end of each episode)
• My Otome Hime
• Noein (a serious treatment of time-travel causality and the quantum many-world hypothesis, though it tries a bit too hard to qualify as "hard" SF)
• Patlabor (old and new and the movies)
• Ranma 1/2 (first season)
• Samurai 7 (yes, based on the Kurosawa classic)
• Scrapped Princess
• Sherlock Hound
• Shingu, Secret of the Stellar Wars
• Simoun (does a good job of creating a convincing single-gender universe, with some time-travel causality thrown in)
• Someday's Dreamers (I love the idea of treating witches as ordinary social workers on the government payroll)
• Strawberry Marshmallow (don't let the cute title and cute characters dissuade you; it's plotless and character-driven, but great fun, often poignant, and insightful)
• Tank Police (original series)
• The Twelve Kingdoms
• This Ugly Yet Beautiful World (more fan service from the people who brought you Mahoromatic, but a smart plot makes it work)
• Tweeny Witches
• Video Girl Ai (in which the hero literally craws across cut glass for love)
• Witch Hunter Robin (more witches as government employees, though with a darker X-Files vibe)
• Witchblade (the Japanese version gives us an over-the-top sexy supermom with a kid and pulls it off; the relationship between Masane and Rihoko is the best part of the series)

Why some series didn't make the cut.

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Labels: anime reviews, haibane, hellsing, jun maeda, personal favs, robots

In a small town in a mid-20th century Eastern European country is the "Old Home," an orphanage whose residents are known as Haibane, or "gray wings." The children are born from cocoons with no memories of their previous lives. They sprout flightless wings on their backs and wear glowing halos over their heads. They never venture beyond the city walls, and after an indeterminate span of time, vanish as mysteriously as they arrived.

The story begins with the "birth" of the newest member of the orphanage, Rakka, and follows her life at the orphanage as she tries to remember who she is and what she is doing there. Couched as a modern fable--never digressing to explain itself--Haibane Renmei slowly evolves through the exacting study of character into a thoughtful and moving exegesis on the Catholic concept of purgatory and the inextinguishable possibilities of salvation.

The Catholic Encyclopedia defines purgatory as "place or condition of temporal punishment for those who, departing this life in God's grace are not entirely free from venial faults, or have not fully paid the satisfaction due to their transgressions." The definition does not differ widely from the Mormon concept of "spirit prison," and echoes a similar belief in the post-mortal efficacy of "penitential works."

According to its writer and creator Yoshitoshi ABe [sic], the idea for the series arose from his own salvific experience. Though he does not identify a specific religion, if the metaphor fits, I say use it. But I found it especially telling that the burden carried by one of the main characters turns out to be suicide. By carefully documenting her unconscious desire for absolution and the self-imposed hurdles that stand in her way, Haibane Renmei tells a powerful story of personal forgiveness.

UPDATE: Daniel Cronquist's book on the subject discussed here.

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, haibane, lds, personal favs, religion