April 10, 2024
Christianity is cool
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Related posts
Pop culture Catholicism
Pop culture Buddhism
Pop culture Shinto
The Ancient Magus' Bride
Constantine
Haibane Renmei
Hellsing
Madoka Magica
Scrapped Princess
Labels: anime, eschatology, haibane, hellsing, history, japanese culture, movies, pop culture, religion, social studies
March 03, 2016
Lucifer
I have a fondness for movies about the end of days like, well, End of Days. The world doesn't necessarily have to end. But the devil does have to shown up to get his due. Call the genre "Miltonesque" because, as they say, Milton gave the devil all the good lines in Paradise Lost.
These are often the smartest movies about religion, even when dancing right up to (and over) the edge of camp. It's one thing to posit "evil" as a mindless Manichean force like gravity or radiation. But if the devil is going to argue his case on screen and in person, he's going to have to make sense.
Pointing to performances by Ray Wise in Reaper, Peter Stormare in Constantine, and Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, I argue that what makes them such compelling devils is that "they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies."
Much in the same way that the structure of the police procedural disciplines the storytelling, tackling the big philosophical questions in an accessible, story-driven manner disciplines the dialectic. And now to the above list we can add Welsh actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar. Yes, that Lucifer.
The devil, you see, is on a sabbatical from hell, and has camped out at a posh nightclub in Los Angeles. There he meets Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), who is investigating the murder of one of his patrons. It doesn't take long for Lucifer to conclude that solving crimes is a simply brilliant way to pass the time here on Earth.
So now we have the eschatological police procedural.
Meanwhile, Mazikeen (Lesley-Ann Brandt), Lucifer's demonic chief-of-staff, and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside), a bounty-hunting angel, form an uneasy partnership in order to get Lucifer back in Hell where he belongs. Lucifer is in no mood to comply, despite discovering that he's slowly becoming mortal, an alarming fact he treats with fascinated delight.
Lucifer hearkens back to Angel (before Whedon cluttered up the cast and the storylines) and the Spike-centric episodes of Buffy. It's also the theme of Hellsing. Alucard (that's Dracula spelled backwards) joins forces with Van Helsing largely because modern evil is so boring.
It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg have creation and writing credits, from the characters they developed for the DC Comics series The Sandman. Gaiman knows his British apologists (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, to start with), or maybe he just breathed it all in growing up.
The penultimate scene in the first episode has Lucifer getting his partner shot because he doesn't want her to kill the bad guy. This echoes the conclusion of Screwtape Letters, in which death is seen by the tormenting demons as a defeat for the devil.
As far as Gaiman's Lucifer is concerned, death is a cop-out. He wants the wicked to suffer. He wants the punishment to fit the crime in the most exacting terms imaginable. After all, he explains, he doesn't perch on your shoulder exhorting you to sin. That's all the work of human free will, not him.
And yet he gets all the blame. Well, then, the sinners deserve all the punishment.
The devil as the supreme legalist also hews nicely with Mormon theology, according to which God and the Devil differ not so much in ends as means. The real question is not salvation, but the cost to the soul. And the question on Lucifer's mind is the cost to his own.
Being that this is L.A. and no preacher will get anywhere near him, hopefully the answer will come from his shrink (Rachael Harris). With some backroom coaching from Amenadiel, the result in episode 6 is a counseling session worthy of the King Follet Discourse.
When he's not debating whether the unexamined life is worth living as an actual human being, Tom Ellis plays Lucifer as Ferris Bueller on his day off from Hades. The lovable rouge, the bad boy constantly surprising himself by doing the right thing.
He and Lauren German cook up the kind of chemistry we see between Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu on Elementary, where the sparks can fly without the risk of veering into rom-com territory. When she calmly parries his seductive entreaties the first time they meet, he leans in and peevishly asks, "Did my father send you?"
There's a whole lot of theology packed into that question.
Woodside and Brandt's uneasy relationship mirrors that of the leads. They dominate the screen whenever they take over a scene. In particular, Woodside's commanding presence versus Ellis's devil-may-care attitude is a great illustration of opposites that are different sides of the same coin.
Lucifer is currently scheduled for a 13 episode run on Fox. At this point, the "morality" arc seems to be working its way towards an inexorable conclusion. While I expect Lucifer to get his wings back and not end up a literal fallen angel, I couldn't spell out how this is going to happen or what might come after that.
Even if nothing comes after that, Lucifer will still make a great one-and done, sporting a metaphysical heft too rarely seen in a prime time genre series.
These are often the smartest movies about religion, even when dancing right up to (and over) the edge of camp. It's one thing to posit "evil" as a mindless Manichean force like gravity or radiation. But if the devil is going to argue his case on screen and in person, he's going to have to make sense.
Pointing to performances by Ray Wise in Reaper, Peter Stormare in Constantine, and Al Pacino in The Devil's Advocate, I argue that what makes them such compelling devils is that "they're bad with reasons, motivations, and no apologies."
Much in the same way that the structure of the police procedural disciplines the storytelling, tackling the big philosophical questions in an accessible, story-driven manner disciplines the dialectic. And now to the above list we can add Welsh actor Tom Ellis as Lucifer Morningstar. Yes, that Lucifer.
The devil, you see, is on a sabbatical from hell, and has camped out at a posh nightclub in Los Angeles. There he meets Detective Chloe Decker (Lauren German), who is investigating the murder of one of his patrons. It doesn't take long for Lucifer to conclude that solving crimes is a simply brilliant way to pass the time here on Earth.
So now we have the eschatological police procedural.
Meanwhile, Mazikeen (Lesley-Ann Brandt), Lucifer's demonic chief-of-staff, and Amenadiel (D.B. Woodside), a bounty-hunting angel, form an uneasy partnership in order to get Lucifer back in Hell where he belongs. Lucifer is in no mood to comply, despite discovering that he's slowly becoming mortal, an alarming fact he treats with fascinated delight.Lucifer hearkens back to Angel (before Whedon cluttered up the cast and the storylines) and the Spike-centric episodes of Buffy. It's also the theme of Hellsing. Alucard (that's Dracula spelled backwards) joins forces with Van Helsing largely because modern evil is so boring.
It should come as no surprise that Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg have creation and writing credits, from the characters they developed for the DC Comics series The Sandman. Gaiman knows his British apologists (C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, G.K. Chesterton, to start with), or maybe he just breathed it all in growing up.
The penultimate scene in the first episode has Lucifer getting his partner shot because he doesn't want her to kill the bad guy. This echoes the conclusion of Screwtape Letters, in which death is seen by the tormenting demons as a defeat for the devil.
As far as Gaiman's Lucifer is concerned, death is a cop-out. He wants the wicked to suffer. He wants the punishment to fit the crime in the most exacting terms imaginable. After all, he explains, he doesn't perch on your shoulder exhorting you to sin. That's all the work of human free will, not him.And yet he gets all the blame. Well, then, the sinners deserve all the punishment.
The devil as the supreme legalist also hews nicely with Mormon theology, according to which God and the Devil differ not so much in ends as means. The real question is not salvation, but the cost to the soul. And the question on Lucifer's mind is the cost to his own.
Being that this is L.A. and no preacher will get anywhere near him, hopefully the answer will come from his shrink (Rachael Harris). With some backroom coaching from Amenadiel, the result in episode 6 is a counseling session worthy of the King Follet Discourse.
When he's not debating whether the unexamined life is worth living as an actual human being, Tom Ellis plays Lucifer as Ferris Bueller on his day off from Hades. The lovable rouge, the bad boy constantly surprising himself by doing the right thing.
He and Lauren German cook up the kind of chemistry we see between Jonny Lee Miller and Lucy Liu on Elementary, where the sparks can fly without the risk of veering into rom-com territory. When she calmly parries his seductive entreaties the first time they meet, he leans in and peevishly asks, "Did my father send you?"
There's a whole lot of theology packed into that question.
Woodside and Brandt's uneasy relationship mirrors that of the leads. They dominate the screen whenever they take over a scene. In particular, Woodside's commanding presence versus Ellis's devil-may-care attitude is a great illustration of opposites that are different sides of the same coin.
Lucifer is currently scheduled for a 13 episode run on Fox. At this point, the "morality" arc seems to be working its way towards an inexorable conclusion. While I expect Lucifer to get his wings back and not end up a literal fallen angel, I couldn't spell out how this is going to happen or what might come after that.
Even if nothing comes after that, Lucifer will still make a great one-and done, sporting a metaphysical heft too rarely seen in a prime time genre series.
Related posts
Christianity is cool
Constantine
Devil of a role
Hellsing
Lucifer (Fox NF)
Labels: anime, deep thoughts, eschatology, hellsing, miltonesque, movies, pop culture, religion, television reviews
March 05, 2015
Pop culture Catholicism
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.)
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.
Related posts
Christianity is cool
Pop culture Buddhism
Pop culture Shinto
Anime genre horror
Constantine
Hellsing (Fun)
Madoka Magica (CR)
Scrapped Princess (Fun)
Labels: anime, anime lists, haibane, hellsing, japan, japanese culture, movies about japan, pop culture, religion
August 08, 2011
The Bow-wow Detective
The prize for the police procedural with the goofiest premise goes to Deka Wanko ("Bow-wow Detective"). Based on a manga by Gokusen creator Kozueko Morimoto, it's about Ichiko Hanamori, a rookie cop who possesses a dog's olfactory powers.
For unknown reasons, Ichiko runs around in impractically poofy outfits and manages several costume changes an episode. Well the reason is that Mikako Tabe looks really cute in them. She's the moe version of Abby Sciuto (NCIS).
Tabe makes the whole thing work because she's an excellent comic actress and plays the whole thing with a straight face.
The show is flagged as a goof from the start. The give-away is that Ichiko carries a gun. Cops rarely carry guns in Japan. The entire country can go years without a single police shooting (Utah is lucky to go a month without a police shooting).
A nice touch is that Ichiko can figure out things with her nose that would never stand up on court. So she has to work with her "ordinary" detective partners (who don't necessary believe in her superpowers) to provide the proof that will convict the bad guys.
Hollywood could make a go of the concept, albeit toned way down, something like Lie to Me, which I consider more a superhero show (and perhaps is even better when considered in that context).
Most manga premises of this sort tend to turn the volume up to eleven, which might work when you're maybe doing a dozen shows, max. But in a continuing series, they end up burning out the actors and quickly burning through all the plausible plots.
Here are three more quasi-superhero shows based on manga that would make good Hollywood properties (again, toned way down and paced for longevity):
My version of Hellsing would be Angel, except with an only grudgingly good Spike in the lead (and who might actually be the devil himself, but got bored with modern evil). And I'd lose the whole X-File-ish backstory.
The last one is basically Ghost Whisperer, except the heroine works in an S&M club (because ghosts don't hang out in S&M clubs) and she hates dead people. She also has a head of hair that strangles people who piss her off.
She gets talked into working for the local exorcism agency that cleans up crime scenes after the cops are done (and ends up playing detective). Like Someday's Dreamers it posits the existence of the supernatural in a very workaday fashion.
The manga can be quite good (I haven't read the English translation). A hacked-together anime version is quite awful. Incidentally, the anime version of Gokusen is quite good. A live action television series was hugely popular and I loathed it utterly.
 |
| "Something about this case stinks!" |
For unknown reasons, Ichiko runs around in impractically poofy outfits and manages several costume changes an episode. Well the reason is that Mikako Tabe looks really cute in them. She's the moe version of Abby Sciuto (NCIS).
Tabe makes the whole thing work because she's an excellent comic actress and plays the whole thing with a straight face.
The show is flagged as a goof from the start. The give-away is that Ichiko carries a gun. Cops rarely carry guns in Japan. The entire country can go years without a single police shooting (Utah is lucky to go a month without a police shooting).
A nice touch is that Ichiko can figure out things with her nose that would never stand up on court. So she has to work with her "ordinary" detective partners (who don't necessary believe in her superpowers) to provide the proof that will convict the bad guys.
Hollywood could make a go of the concept, albeit toned way down, something like Lie to Me, which I consider more a superhero show (and perhaps is even better when considered in that context).
Most manga premises of this sort tend to turn the volume up to eleven, which might work when you're maybe doing a dozen shows, max. But in a continuing series, they end up burning out the actors and quickly burning through all the plausible plots.
Here are three more quasi-superhero shows based on manga that would make good Hollywood properties (again, toned way down and paced for longevity):
• Hellsing
• Someday's Dreamers
• Ghost Talker's Daydream
My version of Hellsing would be Angel, except with an only grudgingly good Spike in the lead (and who might actually be the devil himself, but got bored with modern evil). And I'd lose the whole X-File-ish backstory.
The last one is basically Ghost Whisperer, except the heroine works in an S&M club (because ghosts don't hang out in S&M clubs) and she hates dead people. She also has a head of hair that strangles people who piss her off.
She gets talked into working for the local exorcism agency that cleans up crime scenes after the cops are done (and ends up playing detective). Like Someday's Dreamers it posits the existence of the supernatural in a very workaday fashion.
The manga can be quite good (I haven't read the English translation). A hacked-together anime version is quite awful. Incidentally, the anime version of Gokusen is quite good. A live action television series was hugely popular and I loathed it utterly.
Labels: anime, hellsing, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, manga, mikako tabe, pop culture, television reviews
February 24, 2011
Anime genre horror (2)
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.
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.
Related posts
Japanese genre horror (1)
Christianity is cool
Ghostbusting in Japan
Labels: anime, anime reviews, buddhism, criticism, demon city, haibane, hellsing, magic, pop culture, religion, television
November 25, 2009
"Hellsing" closing theme
The theme for the closing credits roll (called the "ED" in anime) of Hellsing (original series) is "Shine" by Mr. Big.
November 23, 2009
Hellsing
Vampires used to be evil. Then they turned into bad boys (Spike), or good boys except when they were bad (Angel), or at least functionally amoral (Milada). Then Stephenie Meyer came along and her good-guy vampires out-Jack Weylanded Jack Weyland! I say it's time for some dark contrarianism.Hellsing [sic] is as contrarian as they get. Granted, it's far from perfect. Newbie Scooby Seras Victoria deserves more character development, and I would put Integra Helsing's backstory up front. A little subtlety in the monster-killing department wouldn't hurt.
I prefer the 2002 TV series to the gorier Ultimate OVA, even though veteran screenwriter Chiaki Konaka is vilified in some quarters for his creative additions to Kouta Hirano's manga. In any case, both get way too carried away with the whole X-Files conspiracy meme (which Japanese SF writers love).
The Catholic Church is a big part of the conspiracy as well, but as with the Grand Inquisitor in Witch Hunter Robin, you never get the feeling that there's some hidden agenda at play. It's just that as a worldwide religious organization that's actually organized, the Catholic Church coolly fits the narrative bill.
(Though the Mormon Church is certainly "international," it still lacks its own Dan Brownish worldwide conspiracy theory. I vaguely recall an actioner written three decades ago that tried to tie the Mormon Church to Carter's MX missile plan for Southern Utah, but both fell thuddingly flat.)
I like the idea of a Buffy-type series where the vampire slayer allies, not with good Angel, but evil Angel. Plus the Miltonesque implication that Alucard isn't simply "devilish," he is the devil. Like Lewis's Screwtape (and Buffy's Spike), he's appalled by modern evil because it is so nihilistic and dull.
Lesser demons get dispatched with Victoria's 30mm "Harkonnen" shoulder-fired cannon or Alucard's distinctive .454 Casull Longslide. It takes a real villain to amp him up to full-vamp mode.
The anime series could be easily stripped of the more flagrant anti-Papism and reset in the U.S. It would work well as a live-action series with the same irreverent tone as Reaper (the most theologically sound show on television), which also features a devil (the delightful Ray Wise) you love to hate.
And now that I mention it, Reaper is out on DVD. Once you get past the first couple of monster-of-the-week mode episodes, it turns into one of the smartest religious satires since The Screwtape Letters.
UPDATE: watch the Hellsing ED by Mr. Big.
Labels: anime reviews, crunchyroll, hellsing, lds, miltonesque, personal favs, religion
December 31, 2008
I watched the whole thing
Sorted alphabetically and not a definitive list. I'm referring only to series and movies that fit into the arc of the series.
Why some series didn't make the cut.
- 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.
Related posts
Anime horror
The birds, bees, and the trees
Miyazaki's European flying arc
Play ball!
A slice of Japanese life
Labels: anime reviews, haibane, hellsing, jun maeda, personal favs, robots
September 12, 2007
I didn't watch the whole thing
I'll sample just about any anime series that gets at least three stars on Netflix. Whether I'll keep watching after the first DVD is another matter. So I've sorted through the last several years of my Netflix history and made a list of some of the series that I believe paid off straight through to the end.
To start with, I'll mention a few of the exceptions: titles I didn't finish or did and still can't recommend, and why.
The Read or Die TV series, for example, started well but I thought it sagged toward the end and started repeating itself (repeat after me: hostage-takers don't have your best interests in mind!). Initial D does repeat the same storyline over and over, yet I didn't get bored (though I won't be watching season two of Initial D).
Ah! My Goddess (the condensed version) and the first season of Oh! My Goddess are excellent, but watching the second season, I find myself getting fed up with Belldandy and Keiichi. (Even in season one, the best of the later episodes feature Urd.) There comes a point at which the relationship has just got to move on.
Ditto: Ai Yori Aoshi. When the protagonist is actually a college student (and not even one of those pretend hentai college students), I expect him to act a bit more mature than a thirteen-year-old. Besides, the harem genre really gets old after a while.
Ditto: Ranma 1/2, a true classic. The brilliant first season is hard to match. As with many U.S. television series, the inability to resolve the primary relationship (Ranma/Akane) turns tedious, and they pile on extra characters to distract you. Still entertaining, but not after a fashion that drives you from disc to disc in the later seasons.
Midori Days, to compare, is an extremely welcome relief in this respect, actually featuring male protagonist who grows up over the span of the series.
Tenjho Tenge starts out well as another teen-exploitation action series--pretty much a copy of Ikki-Tousen--but then gets bogged down in an extended flashback that takes up the entire middle third of the series. I kind of lost track after that. I'd rather watch a show just about Bob and Chiaki.
Most anime series derived from manga stick pretty close to the original pacing. But such fidelity is also not always the best recourse. I prefer the first Hellsing series than the supposedly more faithful remake, which is too heavy on the splatter and too impatient with the plotting.
The anime version of My Zhime ("Mai Otome Hime") also improves enormously on the juvenile premise of the manga (which should be avoided at all costs).
I have a hard time explaining why I haven't finished watching some series. Conceptually, Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop are two of the better science fiction series, but if I don't add the next disc to the queue, out-of-sight, out-of-mind. (Watching the "director's pick" DVD of Cowboy Bebop episodes probably didn't help.)
And despite the cult religion that is Evangelion, it wore me out after a while. I'm too old for all that angst, and mecha is always a hard sell for me. Sorry. I gave up on the original Full Metal Panic, but loved the dumb and dumber comic spin-off, Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU. There's no accounting for taste.
Part II: shows that made the cut.
To start with, I'll mention a few of the exceptions: titles I didn't finish or did and still can't recommend, and why.
The Read or Die TV series, for example, started well but I thought it sagged toward the end and started repeating itself (repeat after me: hostage-takers don't have your best interests in mind!). Initial D does repeat the same storyline over and over, yet I didn't get bored (though I won't be watching season two of Initial D).
Ah! My Goddess (the condensed version) and the first season of Oh! My Goddess are excellent, but watching the second season, I find myself getting fed up with Belldandy and Keiichi. (Even in season one, the best of the later episodes feature Urd.) There comes a point at which the relationship has just got to move on.
Ditto: Ai Yori Aoshi. When the protagonist is actually a college student (and not even one of those pretend hentai college students), I expect him to act a bit more mature than a thirteen-year-old. Besides, the harem genre really gets old after a while.
Ditto: Ranma 1/2, a true classic. The brilliant first season is hard to match. As with many U.S. television series, the inability to resolve the primary relationship (Ranma/Akane) turns tedious, and they pile on extra characters to distract you. Still entertaining, but not after a fashion that drives you from disc to disc in the later seasons.
Midori Days, to compare, is an extremely welcome relief in this respect, actually featuring male protagonist who grows up over the span of the series.
Tenjho Tenge starts out well as another teen-exploitation action series--pretty much a copy of Ikki-Tousen--but then gets bogged down in an extended flashback that takes up the entire middle third of the series. I kind of lost track after that. I'd rather watch a show just about Bob and Chiaki.
Most anime series derived from manga stick pretty close to the original pacing. But such fidelity is also not always the best recourse. I prefer the first Hellsing series than the supposedly more faithful remake, which is too heavy on the splatter and too impatient with the plotting.
The anime version of My Zhime ("Mai Otome Hime") also improves enormously on the juvenile premise of the manga (which should be avoided at all costs).
I have a hard time explaining why I haven't finished watching some series. Conceptually, Full Metal Alchemist and Cowboy Bebop are two of the better science fiction series, but if I don't add the next disc to the queue, out-of-sight, out-of-mind. (Watching the "director's pick" DVD of Cowboy Bebop episodes probably didn't help.)
And despite the cult religion that is Evangelion, it wore me out after a while. I'm too old for all that angst, and mecha is always a hard sell for me. Sorry. I gave up on the original Full Metal Panic, but loved the dumb and dumber comic spin-off, Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU. There's no accounting for taste.
Part II: shows that made the cut.
Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, hellsing, netflix, science fiction, serpent of time