Honda will stop selling motorcycles with 50cc and smaller internal combustion engines in the next fiscal year. That means drawing the curtains on the Super Cub, once the most popular motorcycle in the world. With a four-speed clutchless transmission geared for utility, the Super Cub sold 100 million units since going into production in 1958.

Alas, in recent years, the popularity of the 50cc motorcycle class has waned due to the

proliferation of electric bicycles and the rise of electric scooters. Around 1.98 million motorcycles in the category were shipped in 1980 but the number plunged to around 90,000 by 2023.

Stricter emissions regulations factored into the equation as well.

I had a 400cc CB400T Honda Hawk in college. When I first lived in Japan almost half a century ago, Super Cubs equipped with delivery rigs were ubiquitous on the backstreets of Tokyo.

My rekindled affection for Honda motorcycles this time around is thanks to one of my very favorite anime. Super Cub is based on the light novels and manga by Tone Koken and was made into a 2021 series by Studio Kai.

Koguma is a high school student living a lonely life in the exurbs of Yamanashi Prefecture. Her life undergoes a major change when she buys a vintage Super Cub to commute to school. Her Super Cub catches the attention of classmate Reiko, a Super Cub fanatic, and Shii, whose eccentric parents run a German-style bakery and coffee shop that Reiko frequents.

What follows is textbook slice-of-life storytelling. The only episode with a traditional narrative arc has Reiko attempting to conquer Mt. Fuji on a Super Cub (which actually has been done). The rest might better be called "Zen and the Art of Super Cub Maintenance." Of course, one of those classic Super Cub delivery rigs makes a cameo appearance.

The series concludes with a Super Cub road trip chasing the cherry blossom season down to the southernmost tip of Kyushu. Yeah, it's basically a six hour commercial for Honda, but what a great commercial it is!

The Super Cub C125 is available in North American. Its 125cc engine makes it a full-fledged motorcycle and not a scooter. (The original Super Cub had a 49cc engine to avoid being legally designated a motorcycle in Japan.) If the day comes that I find myself with a couple of grand burning a hole in my pocket, I have to hope it will still be on the market.

Super Cub is streaming on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, business, japanese culture, personal favs

Founded in 1981 by Yoko and Hideaki Hatta, Kyoto Animation didn't produce its first branded series until 2003. But it learned the ropes during those two decades. Beginning with Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, a hilarious riff on the mecha genre, Kyoto Animation has become one of the most influential studios in series animation.

Like Studio Ghibli, Kyoto Animation established itself around a core group of in-house directors (Yasuhiro Takemoto, Tatsuya Ishihara, Naoko Yamada). It produces television series and films with consistent production values perhaps only matched by Studio Ghibli. Basically, everything Kyoto Animation does is worth a look.

Below are the Kyoto Animation productions I've seen so far and links to the main streaming sites (Crunchyroll, Funimation, and HIDIVE). Wikipedia has a complete list.

Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu (CR Fun).

Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid (Fun) After a bit of comic relief with Fumoffu, our team gets back to serious business of saving the world from a new mecha menace.

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Fun) The modern cult classic about the hyperactive Haruhi, who just might destroy the universe if she gets bored, and her time-traveling classmates tasked with stopping that from happening.

Kanon (Fun) See my review here.

Clannad (HD) See my review here.

Clannad: After Story (HD) See my review here.

K-On! (HD) When Yui joined the Light Music Club (kei-on in Japanese), all she thought she had to do was listen to music. But it's a very talented rock band, and now she's got to master the guitar fast. K-On! pretty much defined the "look and feel" of the slice-of-life genre.

Hyouka (Fun) See my review here.

Tamako Market (HD) An adorable slice-of-life series about the daughter of a mochi merchant in the Tamako Shopping Arcade and a snooty talking bird who quickly develops an unhealthy fondness for mochi.

Beyond the Boundary (CR HD) See my review here.

Amagi Brilliant Park (CR HD) After Seiya Kanie gets roped into saving the local amusement part, he discovers that the costumed mascots aren't wearing costumes. They're creatures from another world (watch for the crossover character from Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu).

Myriad Colors Phantom World (CR Fun) Ghostbusting is a high school club activity in this parallel universe where Shinto spirits and deities have a habit of raising havoc in the real world.

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid (CR Fun) As if working sixteen hour days as a computer programmer isn't tough enough, Kobayashi's new roommate turns out to be a fire-breathing dragon.

Tsurune (CR HD) Hanging out with a bunch of alternatively obnoxious and overly angsty teenagers is actually tolerable when they're members of the high school kyudo team (the martial art of Japanese archery).

Labels: anime, anime lists, business, kyoani, personal favs

My preferred approach to analyzing anime is to examine the narratives in terms of interlocking genres. Generally speaking, commercially successful art conforms to established structures and favors certain types and tropes. Storytelling no more needs reinventing than the wheel.

Structure presents no barriers to creativity. Rather, a foundation of the "same old" presents new opportunities to surpass the expectations of the audience in unexpected ways. A prime example is Madoka Magica, which discovered eschatological horror within the magical girl genre.

And invented a whole new way of telling an old story that soon took on a life of its own.

Take an archetypal tale like Beauty and the Beast, mix in western magic, eastern theology, Jungian psychology, and a bit of The X-Files (especially in the balance between the light and heavy dramatic elements), set it in England, and the result is The Ancient Magus Bride.

In her ongoing manga series and twenty-seven episode anime, Kore Yamazaki's unique approach is to mix and match the beastly elements. Aside from his height (six-foot seven or so) and the horned wolf skull that hides his demonic visage, Elias Ainsworth is every inch a proper English gentleman.

Although from all appearances an ordinary Japanese teenager, Chise Hatori is a psychological basketcase. Her mind is as much a beast as is Elias's appearance.

Driven half-mad by her mother's suicide and the second sight that allows her to see the yokai and ayakashi (monsters and magical beings) that populate the mortal realm, Chise resolves to kill herself as well. At the last minute, she is persuaded to sell herself to a trafficker in the black arts.

Elias Ainsworth brings the auction to a halt with an outrageous offer of five million pounds.

He takes Chise to his cottage in the English countryside, where he bluntly admits to acting with ulterior motives. He has identified Chise as a rare "Sleigh Beggy." This Manx term refers to a kind of fairy that once inhabited the Isle of Man. Chise turns out to possess extraordinarily magical powers.


But she has little idea how to use them and every attempt inexorably saps her strength. If nothing is done, she will die in a few short years.

Chise becomes Elias's apprentice and a member of his eccentric family. When not traveling about the British Isles solving paranormal problems like Mulder and Scully, Elias dotes on her and vows to save her life.

His "purchase" of Chise included a marriage contract. Elias treats the marriage as a done deal but doesn't act on it. He is, in fact, bewildered by his growing fondness for her. Like Data in Star Trek, his affection for Chise only heightens the differences between him and the humans among whom he dwells.

And when she leaves, he sits in the living room and sulks. At times like this, Elias is basically every overly-introspective introvert ever. But, of course, the Beauty returns to the Beast, in a stunning and exhilarating scene that casts even the Disney version into shadow.

Except there will be no neat resolution to their strange relationship. Elias has a beastly side considerably more untamed and dangerous than the fairy tale. And yet Chise will later formally propose to him, a scene made all the more poignant precisely because Elias is not a frog about to turn back into a handsome prince.

The second cour picks up when the first left off (the OVA exploring Chise's backstory takes place between the two cours) with little morality plays featuring characters that will play important parts later. And then The Ancient Magus Bride dives into the gothic horror genre in a highly compelling concluding arc.

The story of an immortal longing for death is a darker version of the 2017-2018 season of Lucifer. The immortal in Lucifer is Cain (of Cain and Able). In The Ancient Magus Bride, the immortal is Cartaphilus, the "Wandering Jew" of medieval folklore.

An Armenian archbishop, then visiting England, was asked by the monks of Saint Albans Abbey about the celebrated Joseph of Arimathea, who had spoken to Jesus, and was reported to be still alive. The archbishop answered that he had himself seen such a man in Armenia, and that his name was Cartaphilus, a Jewish shoemaker, who, when Jesus stopped for a second to rest while carrying his cross, hit him and told him, "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" to which Jesus is said to have replied, "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day."

The conflict here focuses on means and ends. Cartaphilus is fascinated by Chise, a magical being doomed to die while he is doomed to live. A supernatural Dr. Frankenstein, he schemes to graft her body into his and absorb its nature. He does not care how many innocents are sacrificed along the way.

Elias, likewise, will do anything to protect Chise, except Chise cannot allow him to do anything, to become a mirror image of Cartaphilus. Ruth (Chise's canine familiar) wryly observes that the relationship has shifted from Elias teaching Chise how to be a mage to Chise teaching Elias how to be an human being.

This is very intense stuff. Thankfully, the high drama is leavened by the use of comical double-takes in the chibi (super-deformed) style. Another constant delight is voice actor Ryota Takeuchi, who plays the part of Elias like a double bass. Visually, The Ancient Magus Bride is a treat from beginning to end.

It can seem at times that the entire budget for the anime went into creating the breathtaking background art, that often brings to mind verdant Turner landscapes. This is Merlin's Albion, the England of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fused with the Shinto cosmology of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.

As depicted in anime such as Mary and the Witch's Flower, Witch Hunter Robin, Black Butler, and even Hellsing, Japanese fantasy writers are fascinated with the world that lies beyond the English wardrobe, and delight in fusing together two cultures a literal world apart.

For example, although she began her enchanted life as a banshee, Silky has become a species of brownie known as a silkie, a female spirit "associated with the house rather than the family who lives there. But like a brownie, she is said to perform chores for the family."

The silkie closely resembles the Japanese zashiki warashi, a house spirit that blesses the homes of those who treat it well. Silky is no singing candelabra but she does create a warm and inviting place where this strange menagerie endeavors to become better at being whatever species of the supernatural they happen to be.

The anime follows the manga through volume 9 (March 2018). Kore Yamazaki is still writing the manga. One of her clever touches is titling each episode with a well-known English proverb. (I did the same thing in Angel Falling Softly.)

Labels: anime reviews, japanese culture, magical girl, miltonesque, personal favs, thinking about writing

The "single dad" is a melodrama and sitcom character that defines its own genre. Plenty of single moms inhabit television as well. But a single mom is expected to already grasp the basics of child rearing, and that pushes the conflict in a different direction.

By contrast, regardless of his competence in every other aspect of his life, the single dad is presumed to have a built-in learning curve. Hence the "dumb dad" premise. This plot device has seen an upsurge on Japanese television, in live-action dramas, manga, and anime.


Sweetness & Lightning tackles three genres at once: the single dad, the teacher-student romance, and the cooking show.

Recently widowed high school teacher Kohei Inuzuka never learned to cook, so he and Tsumugi, his spirited five-year-old daughter, eat takeout almost every meal. Until Kotori Iida, one of his students, hands him a flyer for her family's restaurant.

Kotori's (divorced) celebrity chef mom no longer has the time to run it, but Kotori wants a reason to keep the lights on. Realizing that his daughter hasn't eaten a decent home-cooked meal in ages, Kohei takes Kotori up on the offer.

The problem is, Kotori doesn't know how to cook either. But with her mother's recipes, the help of Kotori's classmate (whose family runs the local vegetable stand) and Kohei's college friend (a cook), they tackle a new recipe every week.

The relationship between Kohei and Kotori is handled so subtly that it can be read as romantic or platonic or something in-between. These dinners quickly become the highlight of the week for all three.

The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by Kodansha Comics.

Yotsuba&! [sic] is a manga series by Kiyohiko Azuma, now in its twelfth year. Mr. Koiwai adopted Yotsuba abroad (the details are scant). The stories focus around her daily adventures in Japan. Think of Yotsuba as a kindred spirit of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

An English translation of the manga is available from Yen Press.

Marumo's Rules is a 2011 Fuji TV series. Mamoru Takagi adopts the twin children of his best friend when he suddenly dies of cancer. The plot description in Wikipedia sums up the whole genre:

Together with the help of his landlord and the landlord's daughter, Mamoru [nicknamed "Marumo"] manages to take care of the twins. They face many challenges, with Marumo struggling to balance his time between his work and parental responsibilities.

A cute narrative device is that when Marumo discusses his problems with the family dog, the dog talks back.

(No English versions available.)


Hinamatsuri is based on the manga series by Masao Otake.

One day, Hina drops into the condo of yakuza Yoshifumi Nitta through an interdimensional portal. Some sort of bio-engineered child assassin with telekinetic powers, Hina doesn't know what what she's doing there. She assumes she's on a mission and Nitta is her handler.

This mistaken assumption comes in handy when Nitta has her literally defenestrate an entire rival gang in one fell swoop. But after that, Nitta is stuck with her. So he tells people that Hina is his long-lost daughter, and before long they have assumed their respective roles.

As a brand-new dad, Nitta finds himself with the responsibility of turning this tiny version of Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 into a functioning member of society.

The anime is available on Crunchyroll. The English-language manga is published by One Peace Books.

My Girl is a manga series by Sahara Mizu, made into a TV Asahi series in 2009 starring Masaki Aiba of the mega-boy band Arashi. (As far as I can tell, the members of Arashi are much better actors than they are singers, and they're not terrible singers either.)

Attending the funeral of his ex-girlfriend (who'd been living abroad), Masamune Kazama discovers that not only did she have a child, but she had his child, who now really is his child. What follows is a how-to/day-in-the-life melodrama that defines the next series too.

(No English versions available.)

Bunny Drop is a manga series by Yumi Unita, an anime series by Production I.G, and a 2011 feature film.

Daikichi's grandfather had a child with his live-in maid. Daikichi only finds this out at his grandfather's funeral. "If the old man was still alive," he grumbles, "I'd give him a high five." He points out to his mother, "That'd make her your sister." She retorts, "And your aunt."

Nobody wants to take responsibility for Rin, the five-year-old girl. Finally (if only out of disgust with the rest of them) Daikichi takes her home. He soon decides to make the arrangement permanent.

Bunny Drop is a sweet, unadorned drama that avoids most of the stereotypical melodramatic devices. Like My Girl, it succeeds by making a virtue of ordinariness and by featuring protagonists who are believably decent human beings striving to do the right thing.

However clueless Daikichi may be at first, he doesn't stay dumb, and grows quite insightful into the strange, topsy-turvy life Rin has led, while cheerfully saying goodbye to his "me-time" and his climb up the corporate ladder.

The anime (based on the first three volumes of the manga; English translation available from Yen Press) is drawn in a pencil-on-watercolor style that gives it a subdued picture book quality. I found it quite pleasant and entirely appropriate to the subject matter.

The anime is available on Crunchyroll and Tubi.

The Japanese government actually has a "Minister of State for Measures for the Declining Birthrate." If government agencies were ever that creative, I could imagine them commissioning television series like these to encourage young men to take up the reins of fatherhood.

Unfortunately, regardless of the good intentions in the regard, it doesn't seem to be working (in Japan and every other country with the same problem).

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, cooking shows, demographics, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, manga, personal favs, social studies

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


But enough with that, back to the trailer.


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

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

Stand Alone Complex is a straightforward cybernetic police procedural.

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

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

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


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

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

Related posts

The Shirow franchises (1)
The Shirow franchises (2)
Back to the social welfare future
Haafu and half

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

Yes, it's time to discuss movies I haven't seen yet! (And anime series I have.) But the subject fascinates me, so I can't resist talking about the film, though without speaking to its artistic merits. (Since it is a Makoto Shinkai film, I can promise you that it will look gorgeous.)

Until this year, Makoto Shinkai's oeuvre could be described as the "anime art house masterpiece." In my opinion, his only successful long-form film was Children Who Chase Lost Voices (also titled "Journey to Agartha"), based on the Izanagi and Izanami (Orpheus and Eurydice) myth.

The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5 Centimeters per Second certainly took us somewhere, but I'm not certain where, and I'm not convinced he knew either (though it was awfully pretty getting there).

His extraordinary skills as a cinematographer have never been in doubt. But Shinkai's talents as an auteur (wearing the producer, writer, and director hats) truly leap off the screen in his short work: She and Her Cat, Voices of a Distant Star, and The Garden of Words.

Rather, I still believe that it is Mamoru Hosoda's talent for accessible storytelling and his firm grasp of the structured cinematic narrative that places him more in the tradition of the legendary Hayao Miyazaki.

Until this year, that is. The caveat is necessary because over the summer (2016), Makoto Shinkai's latest animated film rocketed into the stratosphere, earning over $190 million in its home market (which is about a third the size of the U.S. market).

Your Name is currently the seventh highest-grossing film ever in Japan. The only animated films to earn more are Frozen and Studio Ghibli productions. The box office is strong enough that it is certain to reach second place at the $200 million mark.

(Among all movies ever released in Japan, Spirited Away occupies the top spot with almost $300 million, followed by Titanic, Frozen, and the first Harry Potter film. Then comes Howl's Moving Castle and Princess Mononoke.)

Of course, the big question is why.

As with Children Who Chase Lost Voices, Shinkai seems to do his best in the big-budget category when he's got another producer looking over his shoulder. In Your Name, he does everything but produce. It might be a good idea for him to keep on not producing his films.

Joe Konrath believes that artistic success has a lot to do with creating a deep backlist, working hard, and then counting on plain old luck. Makoto Shinkai put in the hours and built a fan base and an impressive catalog of work.

And then everything clicked: right place, right time, right subject matter.

Certainly the story he tells has a lot to do with it. The BBC does a pretty good job explaining "Why the story of body-swapping teenagers has gripped Japan."

The body-swapping plot device is hardly a unique one. The modern genre goes back to Vice Versa: A Lesson to Fathers, a 1882 comic novel by Thomas Anstey Guthrie, and brought up to date with Freaky Friday in 1972. Disney has made and remade movies based on the book three times.

A better comparison is the anime Kokoro Connect, in which the seemingly random body-swapping (which turns out to be under the control of a "higher" power), also "touches on universal themes such as coming of age, adolescence, and the struggle to assert your identity in a confusing world."

Shinkai himself credits a poem by Ono no Komachi, one of the two Komachi poems that also inspired my novel, The Path of Dreams (the translation here is by Jane Hirshfield from The Ink Dark Moon):

Did he appear
       because I fell asleep
       thinking of him?
If only I'd known I was dreaming
I never would have wakened

In the Freaky Friday films and its descendants, the body-swapping plot device is played for laughs. There are humorous moment in Kokoro Connect, but as with Your Name, it is not primarily a comedy. For Shinkai, not primarily a comedy means there are still comedic elements.

To be sure, Shinkai doesn't make depressing films. But "upbeat" is not usually the word used to describe them. "Contemplative" and "introspective" might be more accurate adjectives, with an emphasis on interior melodrama.

Mamoru Hosoda has always been able to leaven the pathos with humor, while Shinkai can be fairly criticized for an often unrelentingly earnest approach. His lighter touch in Your Name undoubtedly accounts for its appeal, even while addressing a solemn subject.

The story's real-world antecedent, which he candidly admits to, is the Tohoku tsunami, that in March 2011 killed almost 16,000 people. In Your Name, Shinkai provides the necessary psychological distance by making the disaster a more exotic and less disastrous meteor strike.

But it is still a disaster whose worst aspect could have been avoided with the proper information. Hence the "time slip" denouement (knowing how a story ends ahead of time doesn't bother me).

Which prompts me to hypothesize that the focus of attention on the "body-swapping" business perhaps misses the point. This is far more about transmigration of the soul. In Kokoro Connect, these transmigrations are simply happening in real time without death getting in the way.

That makes it more of a reincarnation story, which brings to mind the quite similar ending in Angel Beats. Theologically, what we find here is a salvific view of reincarnation, that portrays rebirth as integral to the moral evolution of the individual, a second chance to get things right.


"To die with a peaceful mind will stimulate a virtuous seed and a fortunate rebirth." This is the theme of Angel Beats.

The consciousness in the newly born being is neither identical to nor entirely different from that in the deceased but the two form a causal continuum or stream. Transmigration is influenced by a being's past karma.

By placing this "fortunate rebirth" in the context of the survival of an entire community, as opposed to the tribulations of a bunch of angsty teenagers, Shinkai has greatly expanded the scope and reach of the genre, and formed it into a national touchstone.

Your Name is slated for an Oscar-qualifying run in the U.S. this fall. In any case, it is unlikely to gross even a tenth of its Japanese box office. Spirited Away pulled in $10 million, and, sadly, that's actually a respectable amount for a Japanese film.

Spirited Away presented an otherworldly cosmology to audiences used to fairy tales filtered through the Disney lens. Critical opinion aside, it will be interesting to see how well the transcendental message of Your Name communicates across cultures.

Related links

Makoto Shinkai
Mamoru Hosoda
Voices of a Distant Star
Angel Beats! (Yahoo CR)
Kokoro Connect (CR)

Labels: anime, buddhism, hosoda, japanese culture, personal favs, religion, shinkai, social studies, your name

Following up on my previous post about ghostbusting Japan, here is an abbreviated list of some more recent anime releases that epitomize the genre. I'm limiting myself to titles that fit primarily into a Buddhist or Shinto framework.

There is considerable overlap in the magical girl genre. The "Divine Tree" in Yuki Yuna is a Hero has a Shinto vibe to it, though as with Madoka Magica and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, the causes behind the effects are "scientific" (alien science up to no good) rather than theological.


An eclectic crossover is Ghost Hunt, written by Twelve Kingdoms author Fuyumi Ono. The ghostbusting team includes a Buddhist monk, a shrine maiden, a Catholic priest, a spirit medium, a paranormal researcher, and, of course, a couple of high school students. They've got all the bases covered.

Noragami does an excellent job with all of the core elements: the purification of fallen souls, a teenager with second sight, the (Shinto) God of Calamity, getting into a literal shootout (firearms are involved) with Bishamon, the (Buddhist) God of War, and the divine working for a living.


Noragami was one of last year's big hits, a nicely balanced mix of action, comedy, theology, and some pretty intense dramatic scenes stressing the wages of sin and the trials of atonement (as I pointed out before, by no means does monotheism have a monopoly on hellfire and damnation).

Kamichu! takes a purely Shinto approach. One day, Yurie, an ordinary schoolgirl, becomes a Shinto god and gets put in charge of the gods and youkai in her neck of the woods. The aesthetics of the Shinto cosmology in Kamichu! is similar to that in Spirited Away.

Makoto in Gingitsune is a shrine maiden (not a kami) but she can communicate with the shrine's kami. The final episodes nicely depict a community purification ceremony. There is a whole shrine maiden genre, perhaps the most popular series being Rumiko Takahashi's Inuyasha.

Beyond the Boundary, Myriad Colors Phantom World, and Kekkaishi stick to the teen supernatural superhero formula and hue closely to Shinto eschatology.

Beyond the Boundary features freelancers that cooperate—and sometimes compete—with the powerful clan that runs the local cartel on youma hunting.

Your mileage may vary, but the comic relief works for me (the entirety of episode six is a standalone comedy), and as a teen romance it is certainly unique. Mirai Kuriyama kills Akihito Kanbara the first time they meet, and then a dozen times after that. Otherwise, they get along fine.

But Akihito is an immortal half-youma so getting killed isn't a big inconvenience (at first). Despite the occasionally goofy material, it is an intense and compelling drama with several great character arcs (be sure to watch the credits in the very last episode all the way to the end).

Ghostbusting is a school club activity in the parallel universe of Myriad Colors Phantom World. It's an episodic series with a conventional harem setup. Thankfully isn't a harem show. The artwork is nice and it succeeds at being fun and informative.

Episodes are introduced with little tutorials about theology and applied psychology that take the subjects seriously as they relates to the ghostbusting business. Episode four, for example, revolves around omagatoki, which also figures into Serpent of Time.

Kekkaishi is the lower-budget version of Myriad Colors. The -shi in Kekkaishi and Mushi-shi means "master of." A "Kekkaishi" is a master of a spiritual barrier, a common tool in the genre. They're also used in Beyond the Boundary.

Being a Kekkaishi is the "family business," and two families in town compete with each other, generally to comedic ends. There are some shared similaries with Noragami about how youma go bad.

The live-action film of Mushi-shi was released in the U.S. as Bugmaster, which makes it sound like a 1950s B-movie. Mushi-shi is infinitely more subtle than that. It's about a roving demon-fighter who deals with problems caused by insect youkai.


Think Twilight Zone or a solo Supernatural with a period setting.

These last three titles are closer to the conventional horror category, with creepier characters (both antagonists and protagonists) and plenty of blood & guts action and gore.

Ghost Talker's Daydream is basically Ghost Whisperer, except that the heroine works in an BDSM club (because ghosts don't hang out in BDSM clubs) and dead people mightily annoy her. She really doesn't care what happens to the dearly departed as long as they leave.

In Corpse Princess, Makina is the shinigami ("god of death") of a murdered girl. She now works for a Buddhist order as a ruthless assassin of malevolent shinigami who've gone bad.

Tokyo Majin leans more more toward the wuxia genre. The teen demon fighters are martial artists and possess Buddhist superpowers. One of the MacGuffins is something called the "Bodhisattva Eye." But they spent most of their time battling fairly conventional zombies.

Related links

Ghostbusting in Japan (1)
Japanese genre horror

Beyond the Boundary
Corpse Princess
Ghost Talker's Daydream (Amazon). Only a few anime episodes were made and I recommend avoiding them. The manga is better (explicit material).
Gingitsune. Gingitsune and Kamichu! can also be classified as "family-friendly" slice-of-life series.
Kamichu!
Kekkaishi
Myriad Colors Phantom World
Mushi-shi
Noragami

Labels: anime, anime lists, anime reviews, buddhism, japan, japanese culture, personal favs, pop culture, religion, shinto, superhero

Chihayafuru is based on the award-winning manga by Yuki Suetsugu. It begins with Chihaya Ayase (her name is coincidentally the same as the first line of an Ogura Hyakunin Isshu poem) hanging recruiting posters for the high school karuta club. (See my previous post on the subject.)

Since there isn't a high school karuta club, she needs five members to form an official one (an official club gets an advisor, a budget, and a room).

Her first recruit is Taichi Mashima, one of the kids she learned karuta with in elementary school. The story then flashes back to their childhoods. Arata Wataya, the new kid in their elementary school homeroom class, is a karuta wizard, having been taught by his grandfather, a grand champion.

Chihaya, Taichi and Arata venture to the community center to join the local karuta club. The club president, Dr. Harada, is overjoyed to find three new members on his doorstep. Taichi is better than Chihaya. Arata is in a league of his own. But Chihaya is undaunted in her quest to be the best.

After elementary school, the three of them go their separate ways. In Japan, kids in the same neighborhood will usually attend the same elementary school; starting with junior high, the school they attend depends more on their academic goals and abilities.

Taichi is accepted into a prestigious junior high. Arata returns with his family to far-flung Fukui when his grandfather falls ill and grows out of touch. When we next meet him as an older teen, he speaks with a strong Hokuriku accent.

Arata has also grown out of touch with karuta. The most poignant dramatic arc in the first season involves Chihaya's efforts to re-inspire the person who first inspired her.

Now in high school, Chihaya has reached A-level, the highest rank in competitive karuta. But she's far from the top. Taichi hasn't played since elementary school but gets dragged along by Chihaya's enthusiasm. With another classmate they once competed with and two rookies, the club is on.

Chihayafuru follows the basic structure of the high school anime sports series. A big difference is that karuta isn't exactly a spectator sport. At first, there's no way to replay an entire karuta game in real time and hold our interest.

As the players get better and we become more familiar with the game, the competitions get longer, and begin to approximate real time. Similar to The Big Windup, commentary comes in the form of inner monologues that reveal the strategies, strengths, and weaknesses of each player and team.

Character profiles of the players and their opponents—examining what drew them to such an obscure and difficult sport in the first place—are depicted in often surprisingly intense melodramatic vignettes (accompanied by lush orchestration).


Now, stories about melodramatic teens usually appeal to me as much as fingernails scraping across a blackboard. A big problem with otherwise compelling teen romances like Kimi ni Todoke is that, as Kate puts it, the characters have too much time to "sit and around and get angsty."

A job, a sport, a serious hobby helps to mitigate that. The nascent love triangle (usually another annoying dramatic device) in Chihayafuru stays mostly nascent, largely because Arata is on the other side of Japan. And Chihaya's monomaniacal focus on karuta precludes such distractions.

Neither is it resolved (I'll have to start reading the manga). But there is a pay-off in the penultimate episode of season two when Kanade (the club medievalist) realizes the implications of a poem Chihaya wrote for a homework assignment and lectures Taichi to pick up his game (a cute scene).

So there's a lot more involved than the protagonist going from success to success. Common to anime sports series,the struggle, the hard work and effort, the growth and the team effort are what matter the most.

Kanade insists they wear traditional hakama and learn what the poems mean (think of how well the average educated person understands Chaucer). The club nerd calculates "batting averages" based on card placement. Taichi and Nikuman-kun rise quickly to match Chihaya's abilities.

For Chihaya, being the biggest fish in her own small pond doesn't mean there is nothing more for her to learn right where she is. She's still got a long way to go to become the "queen" of karuta. But her unrelenting passion for a game based on medieval poetry will surely take her there.

The videos below are from the 2016 Queen (women) and Meijin (men) matches. (I mentioned hakama above, which the competitors are wearing.)



Granted, at first it'll make about as much sense as, well, Cricket (though it should be obvious when a "dead" card is read). But once you've watched a season of Chihayafuru, you'll know exactly what is going on, even if you don't understand a word of Japanese.

Crunchyroll and HIDIVE have the three seasons of the series to date.

Related posts

Play ball!
Poetry in motion
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, anime reviews, chihayafuru, japanese culture, personal favs, sports

As discussed previously, there's a manga or anime for practically every sport, an entire subgenre for baseball alone. Competition makes for conflict and great story material, and that includes a fascinating series about a literary card game that quickly became one of my all-time favorites.

The game is kyougi (competitive) karuta, the latter word borrowed from the Portuguese carta during the Edo period and applied to Japanese playing cards in general. Here it refers specifically to the game of "singing karuta" or uta-garuta.

To be sure, even in Japan, more people know about karuta than can play with it with any competence. The Tokyo high school baseball regionals involve hundreds of teams. Only a dozen or so can muster enough members to compete in the Tokyo karuta regionals.

They'd all fit in a single gymnasium with room to spare.

The centuries-old game is based on a Heian period poetry collection known as the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu ("One hundred poems by one hundred poets"), compiled by the court noble Fujiwara no Teika in the 13th century. Not the kind of game that makes the average teenager sit up and take note.

In competitive karuta, given the first three lines of a waka, players pick the card with the last two lines. Skilled players can identify cards by the first one or two syllables of the poem. The game involves lots of memorization, short-term spatial memory, sharp hearing, and good reflexes.

The reader card is on the right. The player card on the left is written in kana, a purely phonetic syllabary. (Courtesy Tofugu.)

The best players become experts in assimilation and coarticulation,  the phonological processes by which the articulation of one phoneme influences the pronunciation of the next. That way, two poems that begin with identical syllables can be differentiated before the second syllable is spoken.

Fifty cards of the one hundred are randomly selected, each player receiving twenty-five, which they arrange in front of them. They have fifteen minutes to memorize the cards before the game begins. So players line up their cards to maximize ease of location and speed of identification.

A reader proceeds through a full, randomized deck (there are CDs to practice with: set the player to shuffle play), meaning that fifty cards will not be in play. Mistakenly choosing a "dead" card will cost one of your own.

A live card can be—is often—selected from the group with a sweep of the arm. With well-matched players, quick reactions matter, so this sweeping motion may be executed with considerable force, sending the cards flying. Multiple cards can be selected if the target card is included.

Towards the end of a match, a player can group his remaining cards together and hit them all at the same time; though if none of those cards are the right card, a penalty is exacted.

A player can also reach over and grab a card from his opponent's side (which requires being able to read the cards upside down), and then give his opponent one of his own (again, a strategic move). The first person to empty out his side wins.

The result is a formal poetry reading combined with a fast-moving athletic performance that gives competitive karuta a "chess boxing" vibe. It really is "poetry in motion." Oh, and that anime series? It's Chihayafuru. More about it next time.

Related posts

Play ball!
Chihayafuru
Hollywood made in Japan

Labels: anime, baseball, chihayafuru, history, japan, japanese culture, literature, nhk, personal favs, sports

She and Her Cat is a rough short by Makoto Shinkai that can be found on the Voices of a Distant Star DVD. She and Her Cat—Everything Flows is directed by Kyoto Animation veteran Kazuya Sakamoto, who does an excellent job capturing Shinkai's sense of mood and atmosphere.

She and Her Cat—Everything Flows consists of four eight-minute episodes that tell a complete story. If you know how long cats live, and that we meet Daru (the cat) when she is in elementary school, the story of a life. Except it doesn't quite end like that.

But, well, it does.

As I've noted previously, mono no a'wa're is Shinkai's specialty, referring to the classical Japanese aesthetic concept of the sublime found in the ephemeral nature of things, of the beauty found in loss. Or as Jung phrased it, "In the shadow is the gold."

Kazuya Sakamoto tells a surprisingly upbeat story about what is too often a tediously downbeat subject. Death and estrangement haunt these scant thirty minutes without being mentioned. But so do rebirth and reunion. (A cat as the narrative point-of-view doesn't hurt either.)

A'wa're isn't about gloom or nihilism. It's the simple recognition that nothing lasts forever. Meaning the bad things in life don't last forever either. Cats have nine lives, after all, which makes them at least as long-lived as humans. The things that are no longer here aren't really gone.

They've simply come around again in a different form, including a cat like Daru.

She and Her Cat—Everything Flows can be viewed in its entirety on Crunchyroll.

Labels: anime, anime reviews, cats, personal favs, shinkai

Tracing the provenance of an anime title can get tricky at times. Anime titles often originate in manga and light novels, though sometimes the anime comes first and the manga follows. A third important source is the visual novel.

In the U.S., the visual—or interactive—novel is the medium of the future, and always will be. But it's been well-established in Japan for twenty years (there's a lot of cultural information in that fact that deserved a Ph.D. dissertation). One of the big players in visual novels is Key VisualArts.

Co-founder and scenario writer Jun Maeda is largely responsible for Key's first three titles, Kanon, Air, and Clannad, which established Key's own sub-genre of magical realism fused with operatic melodrama.


Kanon and Clannad (that's the two-part anime series, not the New Age Irish band, though they're not bad either) are two of my all-time favorite tear-jerkers in any medium. Hope Chapman does a good job analyzing how  Jun Maeda pulls it off in "Why Clannad Made You Cry."


The paradoxical reason, Chapman points out, is not because "life sucks and then you die." Even done well, that approach is only depressing and ultimately silly and self-indulgent.

If a likable character dies in a story, that's sad. If a likable character dies and their loved ones suffer for it, that's sadder. If a likable character dies, their loved ones suffer for it, and then they get killed in a freak accident right after a messenger runs up to tell them that their family dog has also kicked the bucket, you've started spinning a bad comedy routine.

Rather, the exact opposite. "Make 'Em Laugh," as Donald O'Connor argued. And so, "For every five minutes of weepiness in Clannad, there's at least twenty minutes of comedy (and that's a conservative estimate)."

This joy—far more than suffering (Tolstoy was largely wrong on this point)—draws us into the lives of the characters and builds the expectation that more good things can and ought to keep on happening.

Just as importantly, though, when the good things stop happening, they can't stop happening forever or we're right back to nihilism. As Chapman puts it, with Maeda, "Karma Always Comes Through." The scales of justice balance, even if it takes a bit of magical realism to make it work.

Maeda uses magic to express his own feelings about the unfairness of reality, by "breaking" it just enough to give his characters what they've earned. If tragedy is usually absurdly unfair, why can't triumph come from equally absurd fairness?

C.S. Lewis noted the ("educated") human propensity to infuse more "authenticity" in the negative than the positive, even when the one is no more factually substantive than the other. And when it is that essential faith in the "happy ending" that accounts for the human will to exist in the first place.

The joy of the happy ending, or more correctly of the "good catastrophe," the sudden joyous turn (for there is no true end to any fairy tale)—this joy, which is one of the things that fairy stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially "escapist." It does not deny the existence of sorrow and failure, but it denies universal final defeat, and thus is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy.

Tolkien's word for this was eucatastrophe, "the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom." Like Lewis, Tolkien applied it not only to fiction but to theology.

The universality of the eucatastrophe has fashioned it into a framework on which solid storytelling can be constructed. It shows up across the spectrum of style and genre, from thoroughly westernized fairy tales like Disney's excellent Tangled to anime like Scrapped Princess and Madoka Magica.


The pervasiveness of the form and the formula is easily criticized as "convention." But the key word in the "same only different" is the "same." That sameness exists for a reason: ignoring convention is a good way to create uniquely bad art.

His respect for, and mastery of, the formula is what makes Jun Maeda a storyteller whose work always deserves a second look.

Related posts

Angel Beats!
Clannad
Kanon

Labels: anime, jun maeda, light novel, movies, personal favs, pop culture, religion, social studies, television, thinking about writing, writing

Along with Mamoru Hosoda, Makoto Shinkai comes closest to capturing the cinematic "look and feel" of Studio Ghibli (Shinkai cites Castle in the Sky as his favorite anime). However, I think Hosoda hews much closer to Miyazaki's (and John Lasseter's) emphasis on story driven by plot and character.

Shinkai waxes moodier than I usually care for, emphasizing affect over effect. But, boy, can he capture moods! His visual palette is stunning, exquisite, and deeply evocative. Voices of a Distant Star is less a film than a narrative poem. (It's also the best version of Ender's Game that isn't Ender's Game.)

(Click on images to enlarge.)

The excruciatingly gorgeous 5 Centimeters per Second vividly captures (especially in the last scene) a very real moment of self-realization. You want honest emotions? Like, man, I'm grokking it totally. But I'm not sure I'd call it "entertaining." Not beyond the dazzling cinematography.

In other words, 5 Centimeters per Second may be the most beautiful work of literary fiction ever created.


One exception in the collection is Children Who Chase Lost Voices. This retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice (Izanagi and Izanami) visually merges the worlds of Totoro and Princess Mononoke in a young adult adventure through the underworld. Death and loss is still the subject, but less meditatively.


Mono no a'wa're is Shinkai's specialty, referring to the classical Japanese aesthetic concept of the beauty that can be found in loss and in the transitory nature of things, "a gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life."

A'wa're isn't about being nihilistic or deliberately depressing. It's the simple recognition that nothing lasts forever, and if you know where to look there's beauty in that too, so it doesn't have to completely bum you out.

Shinkai's oeuvre truly comes together in Garden of Words, a story told in images that suffuse the senses like a Monet exhibition. No cinematic rain has ever felt wetter. Though here Shinkai does drive toward a specific resolution that pays off in the final frames (stick all the way through the credits).


Senri Oe's 1988 hit single, "Rain," inspired the screenplay. In the movie it's performed by Motohiro Hata.

In Garden of Words, Shinkai has given a well-established romance subgenre (in Japan) a poignant twist. Once you realize that, the film is worth watching again to see how he advances the plot without showing his hand, and how many subtle touches come alive with the additional context.

Netflix still carries The Place Promised in Our Early Days in its dwindling DVD catalog. All of the titles are available at Amazon in one form or another. She and Her Cat is included as an extra on the Voices of a Distant Star DVD.

 • She and Her Cat (short; cats)
 • Voices of a Distant Star (short; science fiction)
 • The Place Promised in Our Early Days (science fiction)
 • 5 Centimeters per Second (contemporary)
 • Children Who Chase Lost Voices (fantasy)
 • The Garden of Words (short; contemporary)

Labels: anime, crunchyroll, hosoda, miyazaki, personal favs, shinkai, studio ghibli

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

I hope they keep heading down that road.

Related posts

The Shirow franchises (2)
Appleseed
Appleseed: Ex Machina
Appleseed: Alpha
Ghost in the Shell: Innocence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related posts

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

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