Thursday, January 04, 2007
My sis has been complaining that I haven't updated my blog for DAYS (it feels like an eternity to her because she goes online every night) so here you go, a new blog post.
I've been making good use of the Animax cable channel for the past week. So far, I've watched 3 anime films on that channel - Tokyo Godfathers, Innocence and the Rurouni Kenshin OVA: Seishouhen. I know these films are not the most up-to-date, but for someone who doesn't download fansubs and is slow to catch up with the newest developments in the anime scene, they're good enough.
Tokyo Godfathers was a funny, heartwarming film that was just right for the X'mas season. It's about 3 homeless friends- an unemployed middle-aged man, a teenage girl and a transvestite (he actually calls himself an okama) - who find a baby girl in a rubbish dump on X'mas Eve. I particularly liked how the film suggested that the baby, likened to an angel, brings about all the happy coincidences in the film through symbolic repetition of the name "Kiyoko" and the angel motif, allowing the 3 main characters to find their families and to cement their relationship as an unconventional 'family' of homeless tramps with good hearts. My mother was the one who recorded the film and even she became interested in it, which says a lot about the film.
Innocence, which everyone in the anime fan community probably knows already, is the sequel to the path-breaking Ghost in the Shell. Ghost is thematically profound, and Innocence apparently tries to be even more profound, which is a bit of a problem. The film is so heavy, I think you can't really grasp it till you have watched it a few times. The 2 main characters, Bateau and Togusa, kept spouting esoteric quotes and references to Descartes, Milton, the Old Testament, Chinese/Japanese poems (the words are in Chinese but the characters speak them in Japanese) and what-have-you that they ceased being convincing as policemen anymore. And I guess I favour subtle allusions that are worked into the fabric of the narrative rather than this sort of direct quoting, which makes the intertextual references feel jarringly disjunctured from the main narrative.
But the film is praise-worthy for its attempt to explore philosophical questions on human existence. It questions whether there is any clear-cut distinction between so-called 'human beings' and dolls (which brings to mind Coetzee's use of the doll imagery in Age of Iron) and the 'human' desire to project themselves forward in creating artificial, ideal, 'immortal' copies of themselves (which brings to mind Freud's The Uncanny). The film seems to work on the basic assumption that is derived from the previous film, Ghost, that the only 'human' thing about 'human beings' is their "ghost", that vague, intuitive quality that I suppose can be called, more spiritually, the 'soul'. And that perhaps the so-called 'human' body may actually be an entity that restricts one from being 'free' and is thus in a sense mechanizing, as exemplified in the newfound freedom of Major Kusanagi who exists disembodied in the matrix of the computer system (reality?). Heh, perhaps I should recommend this film to be studied as one of the texts of the Body module.
Lastly, I finally got the chance to watch one of the RK OVAs!!! I had wanted to get my hands on them for ages, but was too much of a cheapskate to pay the $90 for the VCD back in my sec sch days. I was so excited when the OVA started, I was squealing away like a crazy person. Unfortunately, I was quite disappointed by the end of the OVA. Seishouhen is 50% compressed repetition of what went on in the TV anime series (for people who don't know the series and for fans to reminisce, I suppose), 10% Jinchuu Arc (which does no justice to Enishi at all!) and 40% over-the-top melodramatic speculation over how the lives of Kenshin and Kaoru end. The story is told from Kaoru's perspective and focuses on how the relationship between her and Kenshin develops, which I guess is alright, but turning Kenshin into a hippie activist who leaves his family and runs all over the world giving compassion to people who suffer from "poverty, illness and suffering" like Mother Theresa and then contracts some terminal illness, and Kaoru into a masochist who willingly contracts Kenshin's illness to create a "bond" of suffering between them, smacks of supreme smarminess. Sure, Kenshin is a rurouni who seeks to atone for his past crimes, but given that his basic principle is to "use his sword to protect those around him", I don't think it's convincing that he neglects his own family to 'help' in ways the film the film doesn't even show the viewer the less-fortunate in Mongolia...
Ok, enough of the blathering already. Diana, PY and I watched Hitchcock's Rebecca yesterday. The most memorable line: "Ugh, this medicine tastes awful! Give me that chocolate!"
kaoru said at 10:12 AM
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