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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frozen is the biggest grossing non-Ghibli animated film in Japan. A great Disney production, it's also a perfect execution of the "magical girl" and "sister" anime genres, both emphasized in this trailer.


The "magical girl" genre depicts an otherwise "ordinary" girl trying her level best to live a "normal" live, despite her magical powers, which she must keep hidden while striving to master and control them.

Although Sailor Moon blazed the trail (it's more of a goofy superhero show, "Little Wonder Woman"), Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha really defined the genre, along with Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service.


Tweeny Witches, Magic User's Club, Someday's Dreamers, Cardcaptor Sakura, Magical Girls Club, Pretty Cure, and most recently, the critically acclaimed Puella Magi Madoka Magica, are all very watchable.

The cuteness notwithstanding, series like Nanoha, Tweeny Witches, and Madoka Magica have surprisingly dark and convoluted plots, and the even cuter Magical Girls Club is quite complex.

The "sister" genre is literally just that, about sisters or siblings (or close cousins), with some comedic quirks, idiosyncrasies, sibling rivalries and sit-com scenarios commonly thrown in.

Good examples can be found in My Neighbor Totoro, Ranma ½, Strawberry Marshmallow, and K-On. Lately, My Little Sister Can't Be This Cute spawned a bevy of "My Little Sister is _____" titles.

Strawberry Marshmallow and K-On (along with Magical Girls Club) are also representative of a sub-genre featuring a group of (unrelated) girls who carry on like sisters in a big, extended family.

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Labels: anime, anime reviews, fantasy, japanese culture, magic, magical girl, pop culture, superhero

With Tangled (2010) and now Frozen (2013), Disney's once floundering in-house animation studios have equaled and even exceeded the standard set by Pixar. Of course, with John Lasseter in charge of both, that may have become a distinction without a difference.

Nevertheless, while Pixar continues to project an aura of artistic sophistication unmatched by its competitors—perhaps reflecting the lingering influence of its founder—Disney Animation productions strike me as more broadly human in their dramatic appeal.

And certainly more broadly comedic. Many of the laugh-out-loud moments in Frozen come from the efforts of the snowman Olaf to literally keep himself together. He's a one-man Calvin & Hobbes running through the movie, totally hilarious in a somewhat disturbing way when you stop to think about it.


Humor of a more urbane sort is provided by Anna (the redhead) and Kristoff. Disney has again tapped into the snap, crackle and pop of the great screwball comedies. To be sure, Anna, Kristoff (and the reindeer) are a copy of Rapunzel, Flynn Rider (and the horse). Hey, with repartee like this, more of the same is fine by me.


But don't get too distracted. As with the magician's slight of hand, the fun and froth on the surface mask a surprising degree of moral complexity beneath. (Too many Pixar movies, by contrast, prove less profound than they look.)

Frozen dares to lead with a pair of antitheses, not only bad consequences springing from good intentions, but ill-intentioned people successfully pretending to be good. Tangled gives us one too, but the audience is in on the deception from the start (that Rapunzel's "mother" is evil).

The ingenious touch is Elsa's barn-burner of a power ballad, "Let it go." It sounds at first like an anthem for the self-esteem movement. Except that, by the end, it's become clear that Elsa "being herself" will kill her sister and destroy her kingdom with a Midas-like curse that turns everything she touches to ice.

Elsa doesn't need to "let it go." She badly needs to get over herself. That's what the movie is actually about.

To be fair, Elsa doesn't understand herself or her own abilities. As she and her world change, what she has to "let go" evolves too. She's not the only one. Anna needs to grow up. Fast. Falling in love with some random guy at first sight is a really bad idea, especially when it's just an excuse to get out of the house.

There's a great scene where Kristoff says, "Maybe your sister wants to be left alone," and Anna replies, "Nobody wants to be left alone." Ah, spoken like every clueless extrovert who's ever lived.

Prince Hans, the object of Anna's initial affection, is a fairly complex fairy tale antagonist, the stereotypical nice guy who isn't. Though it wasn't as big a gotcha as I thought it'd be. Nice guys don't chain up the queen in a dungeon. But isn't he simply "being himself" and looking out for his own self-interests?

With twelve older brothers, he probably has self-esteem issues too. Well, tough nuts, kid. That doesn't justify being an exploitative, homicidal jerk. I appreciated how unsentimentally the tables are turned on him in the end. No instantaneous change of heart or slap on the wrist after "lesson learned," thank goodness.

Speaking of changes of heart, the one other failing in the film (aside from the missing backstory explaining Elsa's "gift") is the same one I noticed in Tangled: rushing through the "emotional resolve" (Rapunzel's reunion with her parents is cut too short), especially when the denouement starts on such a great note.

After all, Elsa has just brought her sister back from the dead. A few moments of reflection, a little hesitation, some sisterly recognition and encouragement (the first song in the movie, "Do you want to build a snowman?" poignantly establishes the depth of their relationship), would make the payoff all the more profound.

The movie wouldn't have suffered for running 1:43 instead of 1:42. Or 1:44 to work the backstory into something sequel-worthy. (Is this a sex-linked recessive trait that doesn't express in males? That would make both her parents and her sister carriers. Fascinating.)

And one minor linguistic quibble. No, not the droll anachronisms scattered throughout the script. I love those. A mere one word in the lyrics. Specifically, the vagueness of the antecedent in "Let it go" bugs me. Let what go?

Granted, as noted, that vagueness does allow the meaning to adapt to an ever-shifting context. Still, I think the Japanese translation improves on the original with the phrase ari no mama ("[take me] as [I] am"). Takako Matsu delivers a bravura performance.


Here's the English version sung by Idina Menzel. Quibbles aside, she does very well as Elsa.


Oh, and stick through the credits to the very end. First for the "legal disclaimer" that comes right after "Production Babies" (get out your magnifying glass). And then the abominable snowman makes a curtain call.

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Labels: anime, criticism, fantasy, japanese movie reviews, language, magic, magical girl, personal favs

This is one live-action film I never saw a need for. It doesn't debut in Japan until next March and who knows when it will get here. But I'll lower my expectations and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

If you haven't seen the Studio Ghibli/Disney version, you're missing a great animated film (with a top-notch English language cast too), especially if you're looking for strong female role models.


A lesser-known anime classic in this vein is Magic User's Club. The humor is on the juvenile side at times, but it takes a clever approach to the old alien invasion storyline.


And in the process we learn that sitting on a broom (sans a pillow) hurts your butt, and the best way to deal with a malevolent (well, very nosy) alien spacecraft is to turn it into a giant cherry tree.

Labels: anime, japan, japanese tv, magic, movies, studio ghibli

Japan's Empress Himiko can be compared to King Arthur, a historical character that exists more firmly in folklore than in actual history. Unlike Arthur, Himiko is depicted as more of a Merlin, less the tragic hero than the dissolute villainess.

Himiko ruled the Yamatai Kingdom during the second and third centuries. She was erased from the earliest Japanese histories, Kojiki (712) and Nihon Shoki (720), but is repeatedly mentioned in contemporary Chinese dynastic records.

The Chinese histories suggest why later regimes wanted to pretend she didn't exist or greatly downplay her standing:

Then a woman named Himiko appeared. Remaining unmarried, she occupied herself with magic and sorcery and bewitched the populace. Thereupon they placed her on the throne. She kept one thousand female attendants, but few people saw her.

The "keyhole" (kofun) burial mounds associated with the era also reflect Korean influences on the Yamatai court that the Nara and Heian courts might have wanted to expunge for political reasons (she does seem the King John sort).

Like Camelot, the geographical location of the Yamatai Kingdom is hotly debated in Japanese archeology, with new theories cropping up on a regular basis.

Labels: history, japan, magic, serpent notes, serpent of time

The Qi Men Dun Jia (奇門遁甲) is a school of astrology based on astronomical observations and Chinese metaphysics. It  is widely used today, as a component of the Luo Pan or Feng Shui compass.

As with blood type divination, the conviction that important activities should be initiated on "auspicious dates" has not diminished in Japan, Korea and China, modernity notwithstanding (or, as with blood type, thanks to modernity).

Of course, as they say, there's an app for that (note the magic square in the center of the compass circle).


In Japanese and Chinese folklore, the more tails a fox spirit has--as many as nine--the more powerful it is.

Labels: china, japanese culture, kitsune, magic, serpent notes, serpent of time

Chapter 2 of Serpent of Time takes place at Hikone Castle on Lake Biwa.


Like Loch Ness, Lake Biwa has a dragon. According to the classic fairy tale, the Dragon Queen of Lake Biwa entreated Fujiwara no Hidesato to slay the giant centipede that killed her children. As a reward, he was given a bag of rice that never ran out. He was known ever since as the "Lord Bag of Rice."


But perhaps Lake Biwa's most incongruous aquatic attraction is a Mississippi-style paddlewheeler called "The Michigan."


When I was a kid, my family often vacationed on Lake George in upstate New York. We rode across the lake a couple of times on a steam-powered paddlewheeler, the "Minne-Ha-Ha." Incidentally, Lake George has its own aquatic monster, though this one is an admitted hoax.

There's something about deep-water lakes that seems to attract magical serpents and paddlewheelers.

Labels: history, japanese culture, magic, serpent notes, serpent of time

The problem I have with LOTR is the same one I have with the Star Wars sequels, Harry Potter, The Dark Knight, even Narnia: I don't care about the bad guy. His goals and motives are incomprehensible, or he goes about achieving them in the dumbest way possible, or conversely, he's omnipotent—except when he isn't for purposes of plot.

Not caring about the bad guy, it's hard to care about the conflict challenging the good guys. What would Sauron do if he got the ring? Bad things! Um, what bad things? No idea, but it'd probably be more interesting than this movie!

The first Stars Wars is instructive in this regard. Darth Vader is a cog in a machine. His ostensible superiors disrespect him to his face. We get that he's defending a fading way of life in an efficiently managed Empire where the galactic trains all run on time. (It's not clear what the rebels bring to the table as a viable political platform.)

Then Lucas got all preachy and Manichean and perversely tried to "humanize" Vader, revealing that he had no idea what motivates anybody to do anything, except that we again see a disturbingly common pattern in all these movies: bad people are really ugly.


And incredibly dim and ineffective. Rowling (more ugly) has conveniently summed up everything she doesn't understand about villainy in her own arch-villain:

That which Voldemort does not value he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.

Voldemort was steeped in that culture. He couldn't not understand it. Nobody that clueless could gather around him the best and the brightest, and then almost pull off a successful coup d'état. The great villains of history have always had a finger planted firmly on the pulse of the popular will and the governing zeitgeist.

There's a basic confusion here about the means by which people rise to power, and the ways in which they exercise it once it has corrupted them absolutely.

If anything, Voldemort is a carbon copy of Joss Whedon's first Big Bad, the "Master" from season one of Buffy. Whedon's villains improved considerably after that, reaching the epitome of cool, calculating evil in the person of Sunnydale Mayor Richard Wilkins (Harry Groener).

And the coolest, most calculating thing about Mayor Wilkins? He got elected. Compared to him, Voldemort is a cardboard cutout.

Which is not to say there aren't good uses for cardboard villains. Where would James Bond be without them? But they have short half-lives. Take the (ugly) villains of Independence Day. They serve the purpose well for two hours. Any longer and their unfathomable stupidity would become intolerable.

Similarly, the one redeeming characteristic of "Evil Angel" was that he was a two-hundred proof nihilist. But two-hundred proof nihilism gets boring fast, which is what prompts Spike's famous monologue:

We like to talk big, vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." It's just tough guy talk. Strut round with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is I like this world. You've got dog racing. Manchester United. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here.

Both Buffy and Angel eventually succumbed to too many Big Bads destroying the world too many times. Though to give credit where it's due, Whedon did come up with another real bad beauty, the law firm of Wolfram & Hart. Okay, "evil lawyer" is playing to stereotypes, but good art doesn't dispense with stereotypes; it fully fleshes them out.

Destroying the world is easy and dull. Corrupting it using the kind of enlightened people who contribute to PBS and wouldn't be caught dead (or living dead) at McDonald's or Walmart and earnestly believe they're doing the right thing for the greater good (and for your own good) is a much more rewarding challenge.

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Labels: deep thoughts, harry potter, magic, movies, pop culture, religion, star wars, television

My translation of Demon City Shinjuku is off to the publisher (scheduled for release in August). It's an inventive YA thriller with a teenage martial arts superhero and a distinct wuxia twist. It's definitely the most accessible novel I've done for Digital Manga.

Demon City Shinjuku is an omnibus volume. The second novel features as its villain: King Nebuchadnezzar II! And his awful wife, Semiramis (a prototype for Princess). Has anybody cast them in that role lately?

First published in 1982, Demon City Shinjuku was Hideyuki Kikuchi's debut novel. The bulk of his work since has been based in the Demon City Shinjuku universe. The massive Yashakiden series (I'm working on the final volume now) revises and extends the themes he introduces here.

Kikuchi writes near-future fantasy and urban horror (Yashakiden moves from YA into hard-core, Joe Konrath/Stephen King territory), always risky in the prediction department. He generally sticks to monsters and magic, but in a few places the anachronisms start to show up.

I still remember a passage in an Isaac Asimov novel I read as a kid that describes "miniaturized vacuum tubes," even though the field-effect transistor was first prototyped in the 1920s. The most informed science writers can fail to anticipate how some technologies will take off (and others won't).

On the other hand, I don't know if Kikuchi picked the year out of a hat, but there is this paragraph:

Since 2010, the entire world had been gripped in a dark curse. In the face of economic recession, growing regional conflicts, and rising crime rates, President Rama was as resolute in his actions as he was charitable in his words. And changed the world as a result.

To pick nits, crime rates have fallen in developed nations (if anything, the correlation between economic recession and crime seems consistently negative). Places like Mexico and the Middle East, though, are a very different story. And Kikuchi nailed the world recession business exactly.

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Labels: demon city, dmp, light novel, magic, translations, yashakiden

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

I previously mentioned the delightful romantic dramedy I'll Still Love You in Ten Years.

To summarize: imagine that Leonard Hofstadter and Penny (but make her a young editorial assistant) from Big Bang Theory get married. She de-geekifies him, he becomes rich and famous, they end up loathing each other. So he borrows his old professor's time machine and goes back to when they first met in order to break up the relationship.

(Incidentally, I identify completely. This is exactly how geeky introverts think.)

The restrained NHK style gets it exactly right, pushing the physical relationship off to the side and focusing on what makes people fall in love despite themselves, without getting too full of its philosophical self. Ten years ago, it would have made a great Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle. As a stage play, it'd be a nice answer to Saturday's Warrior.

There's only one small special effect in the whole series--a 1000 yen coin from 2020 disappears when the disrupted timeline is restored. We never see the actual time machine. We're only shown a small theoretical prototype in the professor's lab. It's simply stipulated that the time machine exists.

In other words, it's a magic door. That's all we need.

The "magic door" approach comes from an episode on Red Dwarf where the crew discovers a "space-time portal" that will permit them to travel back in time in order to warn themselves of the disaster that will befall them a few weeks hence.

"What is it?" Cat wants to know.

Lister offers up the typical technobabble explanations of it being a "interstellar dimensional space-time continuum" or whatnot. But with every explanation, Cat only gets more confused and keeps repeating, "But what is it?"

Finally Lister says, "It's a magic door."

And Cat says, "Oh, a magic door! Why didn't anyone say so!"

Call it the Goldilocks problem in science fiction and fantasy: explaining too much or explaining too little. Fantasy with pretensions to "hard SF" often succumbs to the former (Star Trek). A good example of the latter is Jin, an otherwise excellent time travel drama from Tokyo Broadcasting System.


Dr. Jin Minakata (Takao Osawa) is a 21st century surgeon who gets caught in a "time slip" (as it's called in Japanese) and saves the life of Saki's (Haruka Ayase, on the left) brother before fully realizing where he is, and before realizing that he has just done something thought utterly impossible back then.

(Incidentally, Osawa and Ayase also pair up in Ichi, a pretty good Zatoichi spin-off, with Ayase playing against type as the blind-but-lethal swordswoman.)

Following the iron-clad rule that time travelers must travel to interesting times and immediately meet interesting people, as soon as he figures out he's in 1860's Edo (Tokyo), he promptly runs into Sakamoto Ryoma (exuberantly played by Seiyou Uchino, Rika's time-traveling husband from I'll Still Love You in Ten Years).

The episodic conflicts involve Dr. Minakata figuring out how to use his skills with mid-19th century technology. Though Japan had yet to go through its industrial revolution, it still had some of the best specialty steel, silk and ceramics makers in the world. So Minakata could have many of his surgical instruments custom made.

He next sets out to invent penicillin. Granted, the most drastic improvements in health over the past two centuries came from public sanitation. But the Edo government was about to collapse, so a major public works project wasn't in the cards. It's a clever choice, as is having a soy sauce factory handle the mass production.

Although the plots have to be manhandled a bit to set up the medical case for each episode, they're well-researched (at least I found them convincing) and completely fascinating. It makes for a good basic course in pharmacology and emergency medicine. I'd like to see what Dr. House could do in a Civil War-era hospital with 21st century knowledge.

The series conflict involves Minakata's 21st century fiancee, who is in a coma after an operation he convinced her to undergo. He has a photograph of the two of them, taken at her bedside. As he begins to treat one particular patient (the geisha on the right, who's the splitting image of his fiance), the photograph begins to change.

In time, his fiance appears to return to health. And then starts to disappear. Minakata concludes that if he cures his patient, a series of cause and effect will cause her to vanish from history. Add to this his knowledge that Ryoma was assassinated in 1867. Does he act in the present or preserve the future he knows?

It's an interesting set of conflicts and dramatically very well done. There's only one problem with the series: there's no magic door.

A magic door is vaguely implied in the pilot episode. But later, what was implied doesn't seem to exist. The premise gets shuffled off stage with a bunch of literary handwaves and pretty cinematic flourishes and a WTF metaphor about a fetus in a bottle that never made any sense (I don't think it made any sense to the director either).

Maybe Minakata hit his head and he's the one in the coma. Maybe he's not a man dreaming he's a butterfly, but a butterfly dreaming he's a man. Whatever. However clever it looks on paper, this "We're too good for concrete fantasy" business gets my goat. My magical realism better have magic. If here be dragons, I expect real dragons.

Though in this case I suspect they're trying to keep all their options open by not committing to any one plot device. Unfortunately, when it comes to the integrity of a narrative, that kind of halfheartedness never serves storytelling well.

The series is good enough that you can answer their hand wave with one of your own and keep watching. But lacking a physical hook on which to hang the premise--an earthquake, say, or an errant MRI machine--despite the satisfying conclusion, the protagonist's lack of other options detracts from the dramatic impact.

Perhaps the manga on which the television series was based handles it differently. And because most series television in Japan consists of a dozen episodes and that's it (or a dozen episodes a year, very frustrating with ongoing series), it's possible they could come back for a season two (and TBS has just announced there will be).

But they'd still have to come up with a magic door.

Labels: criticism, introversion, japan, japanese tv, japanese tv reviews, kate, magic, sakamoto, science fiction, television, television reviews, thinking about writing

Clannad (reviewed here) by itself is pretty good. Together with After Story, the writer/director team of Fumihiko Shimo and Tatsuya Ishiyara, together with Key Visual Arts and Kyoto Animation, have again (as they did with Kanon) produced a real work of art.

Granted, tastes differ. You've got to like big-eyed moe. You've got to like melodrama. Let me rephrase that: you've got to like MELODRAMA. And the shameless yanking of heartstrings. A healthy toleration for an interminably ailing heroine also helps (paging Dr. House).

But beneath the super-cute surface and emotional manipulation (though it's so transparent it's not) shines a compelling story with keen insight into the human comedy.

While Clannad labors mightily to tell everybody's backstory (remaining true to its interactive, "visual novel" roots) and gets a bit lost in the weeds at times, After Story eventually pushes all the supporting characters to the side and focuses on Tomoya and Nagisa.

The story begins on a light note, wrapping up the loose ends as high school graduation nears. The next several episodes comprise a straightforward depiction of the bright kid who's blown his chance at college getting his act together and landing a job in the trades as an electrician.

(The favorable depiction of the trades in popular entertainment is an unfortunate rarity outside "reality" or DIY-type shows like American Chopper and This Old House.)

From there we move into family drama territory, with Tomoya and Nagisa getting married and moving into their lower-middle-class digs. Then things turn dark, and a pair of achingly tragic story arcs follow--hardly surprising given all the foreshadowing, but still terribly wrenching.

I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's advice to writers: "No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them--in order that the reader may see what they are made of." And so Tomoya is plunged into the refiner's fire.

I mentioned previously that I missed Fuko after her storyline is apparently resolved in Clannad. As with Kanon, this first and rather odd foray into magical realism turns out to define the narrative for the rest of the series. Fuko's reappearance signals that reality is not all it seems.

The haunting and poetic "lonely robot" sequences that begin in Clannad are finally given purpose and knit together. As with Kanon, the ending clarifies the substance and structure of the middle. What was simple and obvious at first turns out to be considerably more complex.

Shimo and Ishiyara never point a finger at it. As with Kanon, it's up to us to get the subtext. Nagisa articulates the theme early on, but it's easily dismissed as glib philosophizing. By the end of the combined 48-episode series, Shimo and Ishiyara have given that glibness heart and soul.

Call it the Heisenberg principle of dramatic development: the universe evolves to meet our expectations of it. Tomoya's self-involved despair is not an independent variable. Rather, the way he sees the world orders (and disorders) the world. After Story turns this idea into an existential reality.

Rest assured that things do end happily, and the drama is leavened by quite funny comic relief. We're taken through a gauntlet to get there, though.

After Story concludes with a pair of "alternate world" episodes that posit two different "what if" beginnings to the series. Neither equals the alternate world episode at the end of Clannad, which could stand on its own as a brilliant short film. They do qualify as pretty good Jack Weyland material.

And then the series ends a second time. The first "ending" left me a tad dissatisfied. The second ties up the frayed threads and pays off completely, impressing me at just how good melodrama can be when skillful hands know how to give the transcendent its moment on the stage.

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Labels: anime reviews, jun maeda, kyoani, magic, personal favs

Clannad is best examined in reference to Kanon. It's pretty much the same, only different. Which is to say it's very much worth watching. Good, not great, though there are many moments of greatness. The better the idea, the more it should be ripped off. The world hasn't run out of worthy homages to Pride and Prejudice.

As with Kanon and Air, the story and character design were created by software developer Key Visual Arts. The anime version was produced by Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo. This team has a good thing going. I hope they keep at it.

Clannad, like Kanon, is on the surface a high school harem melodrama with a wise-guy male lead (Tomoya Okazaki, voiced by Yuichi Nakamura), surrounded by a bunch of girls with "issues." But while Kanon starts out with a story derived from traditional folklore, Clannad begins as a theater of the absurd.

Tomoya sets out help Nagisa join the drama club. The drama club was shut down for lack of interest. They can start it up again if they can attract a quorum of members. But they can't officially recruit because it's not a club. And nobody wants to join because nobody's interested in joining what's-not-a-club. That sort of thing.

The comic relief is broader. The repartee between Tomoya and Fuko is fall-down funny (though the patter can be tough to follow even with subtitles).

We also find out about everybody's "after school special" problems much earlier. This makes Clannad more by-the-numbers, less dramatically complex than Kanon. Rather than weaving several stories together, the narratives follow one after the other in an episodic fashion, almost independent of each other.

The story arcs thus tend to hang separately than together, and never quite surmount the first featuring Fuko (or address the implicit magical realism). The writer seems to have realized this and has Fuko popping up randomly throughout the series doing a "magical girl" parody that though funny, only serves to remind how much she is missed.

Anybody who's seen Cipher in the Snow will recognize the same theme in the Fuko arc. Both Clannad and Kanon deal seriously with the weight of memory and loss and the burden of guilt—and about disparate people uniting in a common cause largely despite themselves.

The concluding arc featuring Nagisa tries to tie up the lose ends, but raises more questions than it settles—about Nagisa's parents, about the relationship between Tomoya and his father, about the metaphorical significance of the poignant "lonely robot" vignettes—and doesn't quite deliver on the original promise.

If anything, Clannad is cursed by an abundance of good ideas and the inability to choose the right ones to follow through on. (The story as a whole becomes much clearer after seeing Clannad: After Story.)

Which is perhaps why, far and away, the best-written episode is a stand-alone short story tagged onto the very end (it expands upon a secondary character and conflict raised during the series). Rather than focusing on group dynamics, it's about two individuals coming to terms with each other and their place in the world.

Essentially, a high school senior slacking his way through life realizes he's not half the man his girlfriend thinks he is and finally grows the heck up. In only twenty minutes, the story comes to a well-crafted conclusion and a satisfying moral point but without a hint of moralizing. It is a superbly directed and edited short animated film.

Although Clannad takes a more meandering and uneven path than Kanon, it does begin and end on two very high notes.

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Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, kyoani, magic, magical girl, personal favs, robots, romance

Like space opera and romance, the "harem" anime genre is easy to make snooty fun of because most of it is so bad. Sometimes on purpose, often unintentionally. But just because the bulge of the bell curve ranks high on the kitsch index doesn't mean there's nothing on the "amazing" meter a few standard deviations out.

At one end of the harem spectrum, for example, is Elfen Lied, a blood-spattered S/F horror series. And at the other is one of the most poignant romances—and most complex psychological dramas—I've ever seen, with a demanding, multi-layered narrative structure that indeed deserves to be described as "literary": Kanon.

The story has a long and twisted pedigree (though not that uncommon in anime), having originated as an "adult" video game in 1999 (a "visual novel," for which there is no counterpart in the U.S. gaming market), then a G-rated version, and consequently as a light novel series, a manga series, a drama CD, and two anime series.

But it was the latest—2006—version produced by the innovative Kyoto Animation, directed by Tatsuya Ishihara and written by Fumihiko Shimo (who penned three episodes of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya), that molded it into an authentic work of art. Voice actor Tomokazu Sugita also deserves a lion's share of the credit.

Sugita is probably better known as Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, the straight man to the frenetic Haruhi, the grounded center of whatever maelstrom she's cooking up next.

Haruhi's world is so unhinged that it's all Kyon can do to keep it from flying apart. In the process, though, we don't have many opportunities to invest ourselves deeply in the fate of the characters themselves. As in any madcap sitcom, we always expect some crazy rabbit to get pulled out of the hat by the time the credits roll.

That's a good part of the fun, but at the end of the fourteen-episode run, it seems more that the writers wrote themselves into one too many corners than the story came to a carefully scripted conclusion. Like a Mobius strip, you could feed the last episode into the first one and start the whole thing all over again.

I highly recommend the series for its quirky exuberance, Sugita's straight-man performance, the dance number in the opening credits, and because its general craziness inspires equally inventive fan analyses. The individual parts aren't only greater than the whole, they're often downright brilliant.

Kanon, though, exists as a completely realized artistic effort from beginning to end, where the characters are so changed in the process that there is no going back. It may not seem that way at first, as Yuichi's unflappability comes across as too nonchalant, given the quirky, illogical nature of the events around him.

But this is on purpose. Nothing in Kanon happens for lack of a better idea at the time.

As the story begins, Yuichi Aizawa (Sugita) has moved to snowy Hokkaido to live with his aunt and niece while he finishes his senior year in high school. He initially comes across as an unusually normal teenager, more a counterpart to John Cusack's Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything than the typical teen romantic lead from anime-land.

Unlike the neurotic, clinically introverted, "lesser male" harem protagonist, Yuichi has reasonable good sense of himself, is prone to reflection rather than panic, and doesn't turn into a tongue-tied imbecile around girls. He's pretty much a rock, if a slightly cynical one, a more extroverted and involved "Kyon."

To be sure, few teenage boys of any stripe are that calm, cool and collected. The neurotic "lesser male" of harem comedies is probably closer to reality. But as Ron Rosenbaum quips in Slate, "I hate characters I can identify with. I read to escape myself; I'm tired of my identity."

However, it does turn out that Yuichi has one thing very wrong with him: he's forgotten practically everything about the last time he lived there. Still, he treats this massive case of amnesia with suspiciously good cheer as he becomes reacquainted with a half-dozen girls who know him for important reasons he can't remember.

The series proceeds with a series of interlocking stories about how each of their screwed up lives (varying from "somewhat" to "a lot") relate to Yuichi. Little by little these experiences pry open the lid of his memories and the tragic truth we suspect lies at the heart of it. And the brilliant gem of hope that resides there also.

Uniting these stories is the series-long arc about the mysterious Ayu Tsukimiya—who runs through the closing credits wearing a knapsack sporting a pair of wings. She shows up at first as comic relief, but as the other variables fall away she moves closer to the center of the story, just as Yuichi moves closer to the truth about himself.

To be sure, a staple of the Hollywood melodrama, from Rebel without a Cause to Ordinary People to Good Will Hunting is the angst-ridden young man with the troubled past who works through his "issues," usually with the help of empathetic shrink and a faithful girlfriend.

Not to denigrate the genre (I liked the aforementioned movies), but it's awfully solipsistic stuff, all about how tough it is being me and how much I deserve to be loved because nothing bad that ever happened to me is really my fault. As the credits roll, we cheer the resurrection of the protagonist's self-esteem.

There's not a shrink to be found anywhere in Kanon, which argues instead that the one effective way to work through your "issues" is to do good by others. I know, even writing that it sounds saccharine. This is where Fumihiko Shimo's script and Tomokazu Sugita's performance carry the day.

Like Hugh Laurie's Dr. House, Yuichi doesn't run around doing good because he's a selfless altruist brimming over with charity for his fellow (wo)man. Rather, like House, he's drawn to the people he ends up helping out of curiosity about their plights and about his own curious mental state. And does more good as a result.

"Well, this is an interesting development," you can all but hear him thinking. So when the ninety and nine finally band together to care for the one, it comes across as authentic. In fact, the whole series could be read as an argument for why, in the final episodes, a bunch of teenagers should act so selflessly.

Kanon ultimately only makes sense after you've seen it. The pieces won't fall together until they're all there. Along the way, it can be treated as fantasy, magical realism, or straight psychological drama. In comparative terms, Orson Scott Card's Lost Boys springs to mind, as does The Sixth Sense.

Like The Sixth Sense, Fumihiko Shimo relies on the viewer jumping to the wrong conclusions. Still, he tips his hand early on with an updated version of "The Fox Wife," a classic Japanese fairy tale. This story-in-a-story creates the lens through which the rest of the series should be viewed.

If you would forgive the spoiler, what we have been watching all along are the stories Yuichi told Ayu while she was in a coma at the hospital. Except that, aside from one key scene, the points at which the surreal invades the real aren't clearly delineated, and that's fine with me. As Fox Mulder would put it, I want to believe.

Storytellers who build castles in the air and then preen as they shoot them down annoy me. If the castle's floating in the air, I know it's a castle in the air. As a case in point, does Mai possess healing powers, or is that a literary device too? Or another story-in-a-story? Hey, stop overthinking everything!

There's no overthinking the message of Kanon, though. Contrary to the assurances of the pop psychoanalytic culture, a true understanding of the self comes not from discovering your inner whatever, but from looking outwards at the rest of the world and examining why it is there and what it has to say and dealing with it.

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Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, jun maeda, kyoani, magic, magical girl, personal favs, romance

In purely cinematic terms, Prince Caspian is better than The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I liked it more as a movie. Aside from too little Tilda Swinton, the characters and the conflicts are more interesting and "authentic." And yet it all adds up to utter nonsense.

Paradoxically its superior quality makes this clearer. I've read the Narnia books many times, but watching Prince Caspian it fully registered what about C.S. Lewis and the Narnia series specifically Philip Pullman finds so annoying: Lewis cheats like crazy.

The first big cheat in Prince Caspian is Lucy's insistence that she's seen Aslan, and that means they should do X instead of Y. We believe Lucy because she's a cute kid and was right the last time. Plus she's the protagonist and she's really, really sure of herself.

Outside the fanciful Y/A universe, this is a dreadful rule of thumb when it comes to taking advice from anybody, especially children. Bright lines are drawn between "adulthood" and "childhood" because (among other reasons) the judgment of children is so bad.

A passionate insistence isn't a substitution for the facts. Neither is it the equivalent of "faith." Else we should follow after every self-assured ideological zealot that comes down the pike.

Back in the real world, religions (and organizations in general) come up with various ways around this problem. For example: official spokespersons. If Lucy was the "designated person who talks to Aslan" (i.e., a prophet), that would have changed the equation considerably.

It's a classic "appeal to authority" either way, but at least the chain of attribution would remain clear. Nobody in Prince Caspian can decide who the heck is in charge. No wonder they resort to magic when they screw up massively and their backs are up against the wall.

Which makes this magic business the even bigger cheat, and the more invidious one.

All fantasy and science fiction cheats. Rather than "Once upon a time," such stories should begin, "Assuming that the standard laws of physics don't apply and the second law of thermodynamics can be violated at will." (Literary fiction cheats too, except about human nature.)

But we accept these hand-waves as a matter of course. We are willing to suspend our disbelief and consume a simile of reality as long as we're not expected to treat it as an actual reflection of reality. That's why it's called make believe.

More importantly, we accept these inventions on the condition that they conform to the internal logic of the story. But Lewis relies instead on a context outside the narrative. He exploits external connections between fairy tales and Christianity to connect the dots.

Calling it "deep magic" is another way of saying "Just because." This is not only a Narnia problem. When it comes to the Christ figures in all his books, Lewis punts. Seriously, what exactly does Aslan do in Prince Caspian other than show up at the last minute like an M1A1 battle tank?

I can't help thinking of the scene in Red Dwarf where Kryten invades a Jane Austen virtual reality simulator in a tank because the crew blew off the lobster dinner he'd been slaving over all day. One of the funniest things I've ever seen. But, really, this isn't much different.

Anyway, being generally short on battle tanks, I can imagine the faithful resorting to all sorts of cargo cults to get Aslan to reliably show up when the chips are down. Based on Prince Caspian, I guess it comes down to trusting in unknown forces and taking an intellectual swan dive off a cliff.

Oh, and getting a whole lot of people pointlessly killed first.

But if I wanted New Agey, self-actualizing claptrap, hey, give me Richard (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) Bach. The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, set himself the task of reconciling an upstart Jewish sect with the cosmology of the Greco-Roman-Egyptian universe (Acts 17:23 NIV):

For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

The end result was modern Christianity. But what we've lost since then is that original cosmology, the known and unknown gods that ruled Paul's world. The gods of the Old Testament and The Aeneid, full of parts and passions. Gods that could be argued and wrestled with.

Mormon Gods, in other words. At least before Mormonism got embarrassed of them.

Labels: criticism, fantasy, lds, magic, movie reviews, pullman, religion

Yes, I've beaten this dead horse before, but Harry Potter strikes me as the teacher's pet, BMOC, sports jock, and trust fund baby all rolled into one. All the reasons I was glad to get out of high school and never look back. Frankly, Malfoy is only there to make Harry look less insufferable by comparison.

Not to mention that I never detected anything admirable about his principles, except that whatever is good for Harry Potter is good for Hogwarts (the Nietzschean "Superman," kiddy version). By the time the business with the house elves rolled around (cue Randy Newman's "Sail Away"), I tossed in the towel.

If Voldemort was what it took to shred that corrupt society to ribbons, so be it. You know, breaking a few eggs to make the omelette. And I just can't enjoy a fantasy series that's turning me into an unrepentant Marxist.

Granted, the nice thing about stories that take place "once upon a time" in historical romances and period dramas or in a "galaxy far, far away" is that we can filter from our minds the actual state of affairs on the ground.

Hence we worry about Darcy and Elizabeth and not about how the landed gentry got so landed, or the permanent underclass that served them, or the perverse incentives of primogeniture. Watching 300, we happily ignore the fact that the Spartans could enjoy be manly and Spartan 24/7 because of the (invisible in the audience) slaves.

But inject a contemporary observer into the mix and that suspension of disbelief becomes problematic. No sane democratic soul can believe for a second that the world of Gone with the Wind didn't deserve to get crushed under the heel of the Union Army.

I say this all as a long preamble to this declaration: Tweeny Witches is the un-Harry Potter, getting right everything it gets wrong. I don't doubt that Harry Potter figured into writer/creator Keita Amemiya's thinking, but in this case he took a good idea poorly executed and made it great.

As the title suggests, the heroine is a sixth grader who literally falls (though not down a rabbit hole) into a parallel, magical world. After accidentally wreaking a good deal of havoc that gets her and her new friends into big trouble with the authorities, she deduces that this world is the source of the Magic Book her father once gave her.

After which she goes about wreaking a good deal more havoc. On purpose. You see, Alice has principles. Not very sophisticated principles--she's only eleven--but ones worth sticking to, and ones that actually mean something. And ones that cost her dearly.

The most important rule in science fiction and fantasy is the Second Law of Magic Thermodynamics: there's no free lunch. You don't get to be a great witch or wizard (or Quidditch player) just because you won the genetic lottery and your parents were loaded (as Warren Buffett would put it).

And power comes from something, not out of nothing. Mumbo-jumbo, hot air, and waving wands are not enough to make the world go around. The fossil fuel running the magical engines in this case is mined from faeries and sprites. Cornering the faerie and sprite market is how the people in charge remain in charge.

The faeries and sprites are an odd and ugly bunch, but Alice finds the tradeoff disagreeable from the start. A natural resource being ugly doesn't make it any more harvestable than the pretty ones.

To be sure, the most gouge-your-eyes-out-with-a-spoon annoying Hollywood trope ever is the one about the cute kid who decides that squids are adorable and squid-eaters are EVIL and so by the end of the movie the entire calamari business goes bankrupt so the little twerp can feel all self-righteous about herself.

Yeah, right.

Alice's idealism more realistically traps her between one rock and a hard place after another. No, she can't have her cake and eat it too. Clinging to a guileless outlook on life doesn't automatically mean life will conveniently distill itself into an oil and water mix of good versus evil.

Yes, there are cardboard bad guys, but they're mostly there to chew on the scenery and tie faeries to the metaphorical railroad tracks. And they're also there to remind us that there are "bad" guys, and then there are even worse guys—but whose goals, under close examination, could be as worthy as yours.

Both sides are pursuing utopian, zero-sum solutions to a real problem that is only exacerbated by their implacable sense of rightness.

Alice's true antagonist is Head Witch Ateria, a close analogue to Pullman's Mrs. Coulter, with ulterior motives piled high. And while Ateria is willing to let the ends justify the means, she's not a blithering, jack-booted idiot (which, be honest, Voldemort is). She knows that you keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

As C.L. Hanson puts it, "If there's anything more boring than the hero who's perfect, it would be the villain who delights in evil just because he's pure evil."

Though Ateria could kill you with kindness or crush you with an iron fist, she's not evil. She may even possess the capability of being truly good, which is a whole lot more interesting. This is just as true for the opposing warlocks. When the two sides finally meet, the real enemy, they discover, is in themselves.

A terrible—and yet understandable—betrayal will make this truism literal (a comparison to Edmund in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe comes to mind).

Putting the story's moral complexities to the side, every second of every episode of Tweeny Witches is a visual joy to behold. The artwork and design strike the eye as a quirky combination of Hayao Miyazaki, Charles Addams and Maurice Sendak. A world truly to lose yourself in.

The title sequences and the short "bumper" episodes seemed to have been drawn straight from the mind of Edward Gorey. And listening to the closing theme song ("Dooby Doo Wah") will put a smile on your face for the rest of the day.

It's fun, imaginative, often honestly scary, and a little warped. Alice is the perfect amalgamation of Bart Simpson's brattiness and Lisa Simpson's smarts and Lyra Belacqua's fearlessness—a kindred spirit with such iconic female protagonists as Anne (of Green Gables) and Harriet (the Spy).

Like Claudia (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), she learns that there's no point to running away from home unless, as T.S. Eliot put it (and which Alice takes as her motto), "The end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time."

Labels: anime reviews, fantasy, harry potter, magic, personal favs

Neil Gaiman wrote Stardust as a "fairy tale for adults." I'm not sure he's added something that substantial to the literary and cultural canon (unlike--and I shall return to this later--William Goldman's The Princess Bride). But he has certainly concocted a refreshingly sweet and thoroughly uncynical love story. A rare enough thing these days.

The story begins in the town of Wall in England, which happens to share a literal wall with the magical, other-dimensional village of Wall. After a brief introduction establishing Tristan Thorn's genealogical roots on both sides, we fast-forward two decades to his futile attempts to woo the pretty but vapid Victoria.

Meanwhile, the king of the world on the magical side of the wall (Peter O'Toole) lies on his deathbed. Apparently, succession in this world is a last-man-standing affair. With his dying breath, he flings the crown jewel into the heavens and promises the kingdom to the first of his fratricidal sons to retrieve it.

In short order, Secundus (Rupert Everett) gets pushed out a window. The rest of bump each other off in short order, until it's down to Septimus (Mark Strong). Despite the high body count, the violence retains a Saturday-morning cartoon flavor throughout, with all the dead princes hang around as wisecracking ghosts for the rest of the movie.

Meanwhile, careening through the sky, that crown jewel knocks a star out of orbit, which falls to Earth in the form of an annoyed Claire Danes. Seeing the shooting star (from the other wide of the wall), the still vapid (and conniving) Victoria promises to consider (only consider) Tristan as her beau if he retrieves the meteorite for her.

And meanwhile, a seriously aging witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and her two harpy sisters set off after the star as well, because consuming the heart of a star bestows eternal youth.

This trio of shaggy dogs commence chasing each other all over the gorgeous British Isles and Iceland, at one point running into the captain of a flying schooner (Robert De Niro) who catches and cages lightening in bottles.

De Niro strikes the one clunky note. Except that he throws himself at the role so hard his leaden performance becomes entertaining in its own right. Based on my reading of Gaiman's novel, I did have questions about Claire Danes, imagining the role going to an actress with a more Audrey Hepburn kind of whispiness.

Danes, though, completely won me over. So did newcomer Charlie Cox as Tristan. Pfeiffer is pitch-perfect throughout. Extra kudos to her for being willing to play a bitter, cranky rhymes-with-witch. It's not hard to see in her character a metaphor for Hollywood's lusting after eternal youth at any price.

Once the premise is established, the story develops pretty much as you'd expect it to. Fairy tales of this sort, after all, belong to the "same only different" genre. A good love story doesn't make us wonder who's going to fall in love with whom, but how. And how they navigate the mine fields designed to keep them apart.

By the second half of the movie, though, it becomes clear that at least the theatrical version of Stardust desperately wants to be The Princess Bride. Charlie Cox has turned into Cary Elwes' younger brother, and De Niro's Captain Shakespeare essentially provides the off-screen backstory for the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Hence, while Stardust is very good, the question I found myself asking myself was why it's not great. Why it's not The Princess Bride.

The easy answer is that though Neil Gaiman is a fine writer, he's no William Goldman. More specifically, the reason is Mandy Patinkin as Inigo Montoya. This part is filled in Stardust by Septimus. Except that we've already established that the princes are an unsavory, expendable lot, so we don't root for him.

To be sure, the showdown between Pfeiffer and Cox (echoing that between Prince Humperdinck and Westley) lacks for nothing in the big climax category. Except that vanquishing a wicked witch by itself can't equal the dramatic tension created between Inigo Montoya and Count Rugen: "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die."

So Stardust ends up being what The Princess Bride would be sans Inigo Montoya and Mandy Patinkin. Like I said, pretty darned good. Without the Montoya subplot it becomes a "purer" and more straightforward love story. Just not another modern classic.

Labels: magic, movie reviews, personal favs

At the library the other day I noticed a dozen newly-released paperback editions of Diana Wynne Jones's Chrestomanci and Dalemark series, clearly an attempt to leverage the Harry Potter phenomenon. Well, if that's what it takes, then that's what it takes. Gift horses in the mouth, and that kind of thing.

The first book in the Chrestomanci series, Charmed Life, was published about the time I became too sophisticated for young adult literature, a problem that has since been remedied by age. But age also has the benefit of allowing one to experience authors I'm pretty sure I read Back Then as if for the first time. (See: Red Dwarf, when the AI unit has Lister erase its memory so it can re-read all the Agatha Christie novels.)

My reaction: amazement. Several times I found myself stopping to flip back to the title page to check the original copyright date. Yep, 1977. Because I kept thinking, she borrowed this from Rowling, right? And that? And this bit here? That one, there? But, no, excepting the possibility of time travel, the other way around, more likely.

I'm not talking about plagiarism. Other than the common elements of the "family romance," there is little resemblance in plot or character (although Chrestomanci himself is routinely referred to as "he whose name should not be spoken," by those who are terrified by its mere mention).

I would make the following comparison: an entire arm of the publishing industry (legal and samizdat) is devoted to the third-party exploration of copyrighted universes, expansions upon existing characters and settings that are, frankly, often better than the original. Dave Wolverton's Star Wars novels, for example. In Japan, there's the whole doujinshi movement.

Nothing even that specific, in this case; rather, a "sense of the world" which makes Jones's and Rowling's universes seem so similar. Call it convergent evolution: establish the same environmental variables, the same shaping narrative, and you end up with remarkably similar creatures at the end of the biological tree.

But this is somewhat besides the point I'm getting to (to quote Monty Python: "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who"). The question is, why Rowling and not the far more talented Jones? Now, to be sure, Diana Wynne Jones is hardly a commercial or artistic failure as an artist, just not warping-the-fabric-of-space successful the way Rowling is.

Let's explore some possible reasons:

1. Not too close for comfort

Rowling snugs the Muggle universe and Magical universe side by side. In Chrestomanci, Jones is thinking more along the lines of L'Engle: parallel universes. Moving from "our" universe to the Chrestomanci universe is difficult, and entails serious repercussions.

Morever, in the Chrestomanci universe, as in Rowling's, advances in modern technology have been hamstrung by the pursuit of magic. But unlike Mr. Weasley's fascination with all things Muggle (one of my favorite characters), that world is too far away in Chrestomanci to have immediate relevance. You can't take your Sony Walkman with you.

I am no fan of the theory that children must identify with characters that are somehow copies of themselves, socially/racially/economically. Half the fun of a story is getting as far away from yourself as possible (besides, all those Star Trek aliens behave exactly as you would expect a normal human being to, unlike the normal human beings).

But there is something to be said for easing the ability to project oneself onto a protagonist. By making transit between the normal and the magical as simple as literally taking the train, Rowling makes it that much more accessible to her readers, who can imagine making the journey themselves, without having to make the existential leap of abandoning everything they know.

Consider, as well, Hogwarts. As foreign as the British boarding school may be, its social structures and politics are recognizable to any secondary school student. Chrestomanci also has a school of magic, in a castle, but it only has four pupils. Harry Potter for the home-schooled, perhaps.

2. If it's not baroque, don't fix it

Simply in terms of style, you can say this about Harry Potter's universe: there's a whole lot more of it. The entire Chrestomanci series would fit inside Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Rowling perhaps demands comparison to Dickens, who (and I'm paragraphing somebody else) wrote long because nobody back then had television.

Rowling didn't simply prove that kids will read a LOT given good reason to, but she also disproved the canard that they will only read simple, short, solipsistic stories about themselves, and furthermore that only nerds will wade through baroque, 1200 page genre fantasy epics, such as Robin Hobb's Liveship triology (BTW, recommended!).

Rowling's American editors actually did edit her manuscripts, removing the more "British" examples of the language, but I doubt that was ever necessary. It's all about the narrative, about "what happens next."

3. Market timing

I've heard Madeleine L'Engle speak directly to this matter. When the manuscript of Wrinkle in Time was first circulated by her agent, it was turned down with hardly a second look. It languished so long in publishing purgatory that L'Engle feared it would never see the light of day. But that delay, she believes now, in large part accounted for its success. By the time it was published (1963), an audience had evolved that was ready to embrace it.

Jones, an Oxfordian who attended lectures by Lewis and Tolkien at Oxford (suppressing envy, suppressing envy), started publishing in the 1970s. Charmed Life came out the same year as Star Wars, and for the next decade Space Opera (much of it very bad indeed) ruled the day and soaked up all those wandering attention spans instead.

Harry Potter, in contrast, arrived on the scene when the trend in young adult publishing had been for a decade towards "utterly unmemorable, dreary, pointed tales in which girls and boys learn their lessons--actual and moral--in the most punishing way possible," what Moira Redmond terms "Dreadlit." The neuroticism of Dreadlit, she notes, "may be the millionth reason why children like Harry Potter so much."

Incidentally, the amazing Ghibli Studios has done a very good job with Jones's Howl's Moving Castle, with Miyazaki coming out of retirement to direct for likely the very last time. Although not as well received as his previous feature efforts, I find that Miyazaki's visual depiction of Sophie's every-changing appearance makes her one of his most subtly and insightfully-rendered of all his female protagonists.

Labels: book reviews, harry potter, magic