Back to Wyatt's Profile Wyatt's Profile

Anime is often highly archetypal, and not in the colloquial sense of "cliche". The term archetype can also refer to the notion of foundational "types" or symbols that recur throughout various time periods or cultures. These types have spiritual and philosophical meanings. The premise of Gamba's Adventure, of a mouse that journeys to liberate a colony of mice from their wicked tyrant, is a liberating savior narrative that evokes Moses and the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. A shallow artist would use this powerful, time-tested story as a means to help give structure and heft to their work. The great Osamu Dezaki, director of ... Gamba, does the opposite. He recognizes the innate spiritual meaning of his subject matter and directs the show in a way that matches those crucial feelings.

A mouse's adventure could easily come off as trite, full of cutesy obstacles that will be easily overcome. Conversely, Gamba's Adventure reveals its ambitions from the opening scene, where Gamba, sitting in the dirty sewers of a Japanese city, imagines what the ocean must look like and sees a utopian, rainbow filled vision. This image is too grand to be cute; it expresses Gamba's hope as viscerally as he feels it. Soon after, Gamba tells local tough guy (mouse) Yoisho that he is a coward for not joining in the fight against the evil Noroi. Yoisho tearfully replies, "I know!". That moment of guilt is devastating, and makes tangible how defending the weak is, for the main characters, a moral obligation.

Gravity permeates every aspect of the series' visual design. The scratchy backgrounds by Shichiro Kobayashi contribute to the reality of the setting, making us understand the real danger the mice face. The cities are full of bent nails and rickety wooden shacks. Chuuta, the escapee of Noroi's wrath, is so beaten down when he first appears that one fully believes Noroi must be stopped. The fight scenes with enemy animals are violent. Our heroes bite and smash rocks against other animals, whose size and viciousness makes them utterly terrifying. Even one-off antagonists like a group of rabid dogs feel like the mystical creatures Odysseus runs into on his famous journey. When the roaring waves threaten to drag a character out to sea, one feels the reality that a mouse has almost no chance to prevent such an outcome. The ED has a shockingly ominous tone, and the lyrics threaten that the evening sun will "bleach the skulls of you and your friends". How fittingly metal. There can be no disappointment when Noroi is finally introduced. Few Shonen manga antagonists have been as chillingly demonic since.

The positive aspects of the setting are rendered with striking weight as well. Gamba's righteous gaze towards his destination is so convicted that it is, indeed, hype. Kobayashi's backgrounds make no two sunsets look alike, and all of them are awesome. One mini-arc takes place in a forest full of juicy fruits. Dezaki and Kobayashi make it seem like paradise.

Dezaki was no doubt aware of how bizarrely engaging he made this children's show. Even Digimon Adventure, my favorite children's anime, does not contain the same level of danger and physicality of Gamba's Adventure. It makes for an aesthetic delight, but it also takes the heart on a ride. When a traitor to Gamba's crew is told by Noroi, "a traitor has no home", one is reminded not of fictional mice but of the seriousness of our own lives. Gamba's nerdy pal Gakusha realizes that a village's communal song has a hidden meaning in the lyrics. The hidden meaning that Gamba's Adventure has for us all is to make us see our whole lives as a journey just as perilous, as bursting with opportunities to do good, and to do so bad.

Mobile Suit Gundam is known as an "anti war" series, but, miraculously, it conveys this worldview not through dialogue but viscerally, visually. Quite a few times throughout the series, when protagonist Amuro Ray will destroy an enemy mech, it will cut inside that mech to show the screaming person inside for the moments before their horrible death. This device never loses its power not only because it isn't overused but also because the emotion behind it is so sincere. Without saying a word, Tomino gifts the faceless, abstracted enemies the empathy that the soulless Mobile Suits have robbed from them. Not only are these explosive ... images more evocative than most any dialogue would be, but they also allow the show to portray everyone compassionately without at all validating the enemy ideology. Mobile Suit Gundam is broadly anti war, but make no mistake, it is not relativistic.

The blood curdling screams of Amuro's slain opponents also contribute to the physicality and immediacy of the show's combat. Much has been said about Mobile Suit Gundam as a "real robot" series, one whose militaristic setting, relatively measured science fiction concepts and abundant tragedy set it apart from the "super robot" shows that came before. These qualities have the effect of making the action scenes feel dangerous. Our scrappy heroes are in such a believably beat down ship, and we are made so painfully aware of death looming around every corner, that every fight becomes gripping even though there is one in nearly every episode. No two mobile suits ever seem to be destroyed the same way, and Tomino never makes us feel as though the outcome of an individual skirmish is meaningless. There is a relationship between being terrified and being invigorated. Gundam's violent, explosion filled battles exemplify this tension rivetingly.

There are plenty of rip-offs of series antagonist Char Aznable, but no one seems to rip-off Amuro. He's angsty, certainly, but his introduction as a grease monkey in a tank top, wrench in hand, is too manly for him to be comparable to mopey Mecha boys like Shinji. He's torn apart by guilt about the lives he's taken, but also frighteningly quick on the draw. Amuro's ability to kill the second he feels he needs to is exhilarating yet deeply upsetting. It forces us to see the dark side of the mecha genre without depriving us of its pleasures.

The complexities continue. Amuro is chauvinistic, but his chauvinism is examined by the narrative. Scenes of Amuro's rudeness to his sweet childhood friend Fraw Bow, who has an obvious crush on him, play like a sociological study of male/female dynamics. One feels terrible for Fraw when watching these scenes, but Amuro's behavior is too believable to write off as the show merely saying Amuro is horrible. This is both because Amuro is callous not intentionally cruel, and because I don't believe for a second that someone would write that character and not relate to his behavior.

The show in general is able to depict the flaws in someone's behavior without condemning them. This applies to heinous villains and to mild assholes like Amuro's crewmates Kai Shiden and Sleggar Law. Nearly every character is redeemed by the end, and no one is reduced to a demeaning stereotype. One female character is reunited with her arranged fiancé after having fallen in love with a crew mate, and my eyes rolled, knowing that this fiancé character would be some kind of irritating doofus, or really sexist, or really wimpy. Turns out he's none of these things. He's a fairly honorable guy willing to make serious sacrifices for the woman he loves, but he's also cowardly, and his mind is somewhat warped from living a life of wealth. This characterization is honest, and makes the female character's choice understandable but not a no-brainer.

It may seem as if I'm focusing particularly on romantic relationships but it's Tomino that focuses on them. Anime tends to not be very romantic, and if it is sexual it is only for the audience, not the characters. Mobile Suit Gundam is unique for its depiction of desire as a motivating factor in life-or-death scenarios. The series recognizes how quickly erotic flames can be lit, and how powerful they can be. Two particular moments plunge into the depths of vulnerable, passionate emotion that is shared in a great kiss. Tomino depicts sexuality as an underpinning of many interactions, and painfully sincere emotion as the underpinning of sexuality. Far from abstracting human experience with sex into emotionless metaphor, Mobile Suit Gundam unearths feelings so intense and embarrassing they make us wish our love was as cynical as some say.

Mobile Suit Gundam is, in many senses, "just a mech show". It is distinguished not by its "reconstruction of the genre" but by its dimensionality. Its believability and attention to emotional detail create a full portrait of a war. One witnesses numerous motifs that develop this portrait: child soldiers, orphans, lovers torn apart by distance and death, killing born of both ideological conviction and interpersonal pain. Through Mobile Suit Gundam, Tomino gives us a multifaceted experience with much of what makes up a war, and leaves us with excitement for a new way forward.

School Days is sometimes praised for being a takedown of the harem genre, and for its parallels to Shakespeare. Yet Puella Magi Madoka Magica is a Shakespeare-esque deconstruction of magical girls, and it's no good. What makes School Days great is not its relationship to other art but its precise depiction of teenage neuroses. If director Keitaro Motonaga wanted merely to skewer harem tropes and punish his characters for their immorality, they would not have been portrayed so compassionately.

School Days portrays the unique tragedy of early high school, where children barely more mature than they were a few years earlier are suddenly acting like ... adults. Sekai initially seems friendly but flirtatious, even slightly suspicious. The reality of the situation is revealed by her lifelong best friend who says "Sekai is the type of person who cries for hours when she's sad". One realizes that Sekai's sexual forwardness is an attempt by a sweet, outgoing girl to channel her natural extroversion into something "cooler", less "embarrassing". It's affecting because it's believable; who didn't know a girl in middle school who cried over everything? Each character is revealed for the middle schooler they are beneath their high school clothing. The ED shows the smiling faces of the cast at their best, a frequently heart-wrenching contrast to the shadows of their former selves seen just moments prior. Even Makoto, the sex-fiend protagonist, becomes sympathetic in moments when the show reminds that not so long ago he was a normal, kind boy. The ensemble cast allows the series to tackle many of the different ways people fall into (sexually) hurting themselves and others. Director Keitaro Motonaga manages to save devil-may-care nihilism, one of the most obvious causes of sexual irresponsibility, for a brief conversation between three nameless side characters. Our named characters have thornier motivations.

Despite the sympathetic perspective, no character is alleviated of responsibility for their mistakes. School Days achieves some of Robert Bresson's aim to make the audience feel the omnipresence of God. Each decision feels moral, even apocalyptic, with every wrong move being physically painful to watch. The series is constantly gripping and substantial because one is made to remember that every action has consequences. One female character sees a play after committing a secret, devastating, emotional crime. "Do you believe that if no one was to hear your words, you could get away with anything?" one of the masked actors says. The girl, in response, disappears. It is a frightening moment, but it also inspires self reflection. An especially painful juxtaposition occurs when Makoto breaks a girl's heart, and is visibly about to apologize and comfort her, but instead, for no clear reason, chooses to walk away. His neglect of his natural, human inclination towards goodness is excruciatingly true to life.

School Days is not a well animated series, and even sadly contains two episodes full of Ecchi through the use of unfortunate angles. Despite all the sex in the series, however, none of it is lingered on or portrayed in a titillating manner. Motonaga is a sneakily poetic filmmaker. A kiss timed to the wonderful ending song of the second episode is a primer for gasps to come. A POV shot of Sekai guiltily glancing down at her feet is damning; raindrops falling on Kotonoha's phone is crushing; a fireside dance intended to begin a relationship takes on a bittersweet fondness when it is revealed it is actually the end of one. One particular act of violence spills black blood, a chilling counterpoint to the glowing ketchup present in the Kara no Kyoukai films. The show is full of montages, and don't be surprised when emotions well up while watching them. In School Days, they are far from a way to easily condense information.

None of the series reads like build-up because every episode is climactic, but the characters still feel far more than they say, and those feelings have to come out at some point. School Days is very dramatic, yet crucially no one sheds tears until they absolutely cannot help it. When the tears finally fall, one gasps both for the believability of the performances and the candor of their confessions. The final episode is famous for obvious reasons, but pay attention to the final dialogue scene, in which Sekai admits her rationale for kicking off the entire plot. Her explanation is catharsis for all the shattered hearts in the series, and ours too.

The special begins on a recap of the Marineford War arc that moves too quickly. The sequence would be easier to process if it had been one continuous take moving horizontally. A later scene returns to the war at a slower pace but is blobby, not bloody. Outside of the level of consistency, nothing in the animation goes beyond what Masaaki Yuasa had done by 2014. After Ryuu Nakayama brought empathy to Chainsaw Man through nonstop naturalistic animation, and in the year where Midori Yoshizawa cut to a live action, all red POV shot of a mad dash down the street, it is hard to ... be impressed by the cutesy, endearing but not profound idiosyncrasies of one sweet Nami fangirl. Compositionally, the girl zooming through town on a vehicular bubble is a dynamic delight, while other shots seem literally flat. The art style itself is affectation for its own sake. It doesn't express anything about the One Piece world that Oda's art style has not already.

Ishitani indulges in the brilliant premise, but not enough. The depth of fandom is how celebrities appear liberated from the mundanities and cruelties of one's particular life. Easy references are insufficient to engage this deep, human subject. A rowdy bar argument about who may be the world's strongest swordsman seems too detached, as if we are watching from the vantage point of someone who does not share their excitement. A shopkeep in love with Brook's music sports deep black makeup under her eyes, a Goth touch implying an inner life that is otherwise unexplored. The protagonist's love of Nami, bluntly exposited as being predicated on Nami not having big muscles or a devil fruit, is not overpowering because Ishitani does not show us the suffocation of living in a world where only the strong are celebrated.

The special's best scene, which is moving as opposed to pleasant, depicts the violent backstory of a Marine in love with Straw Hat Luffy. The Marine's leg is shredded by a falling boat, a harrowing, tactile detail that makes up for the film's other depictions of war. Though it contains the film's best expression of the awe a distant role model can inspire, the heart of the flashback lies in the relationship between the Marine and his younger brother. A reverse chronological montage conveys the older brother's understandable irritation and the younger brother's heart melting sweetness. The rest of the sequence uses a star of light as a primal symbol for Love. The best images are all contained in these few minutes: blood gushing from a screaming mouth, an admiring yet bitter gaze at the back of a hero running ahead, a coward turning from what is obviously right.

The ending is saccharine, built around the lazy device of a vague speech set to music. The climax would be more affecting if the flurry of images shown were new, and not shots that were already shown earlier. The protagonist bravely chooses to focus on the moon instead of the finger, but the depth of that choice is under-emphasized. A post-credits sequence would have been unnecessary if the final scene had properly expressed the gravity of the situation. The film as is could use a beautiful epilogue, but the one we got expresses nothing that is not already in the story proper.

We can use all the auteurs we can get, and as few show-boats as possible. One Piece Fan Letter toes the line. Ishitani would do right to sacrifice the noticeable for the substantive.

The first Japanese film I've seen that criticizes Japan in a World War II context. Kayoko's mother mentions that her abundantly lovable daughter freely offered up her baby doll to the government when she heard it would help win the war. Her mother's specific mention that donated kewpie dolls are used to build plastic explosives twinges the heart with pain. The utter excitement that Kayoko's brothers have when they say that Japan will defeat even America because they're teamed up with Germany and Italy reminds of children debating which of their favorite superheroes is stronger. Yet the film is not hateful. Kayoko's father's comment that ... they'll definitely win the war because "Japan is God's country" is sincere, which induces understanding in the audience for what misguided nationalism feels like on the ground. This moment expresses a warm "hate the sin, not the sinner" mentality that allows for vicious clarity without partisan rage.

The majority of the film does not touch on the war, despite my opening paragraph, but rather is made up of a series of episodes from Kayoko's childhood from 1940-1945. These episodes are charged with the vividness and affection that Terrence Davies put into Distant Voices, Still Lives. I was not shocked when I discovered that this film is based on an autobiography. These are not vague images of domestic bliss to heighten the dread of inevitable tragedy. Each episode is tangibly specific, evinced by the rich backgrounds, the unique toys that the children play with, and the multifaceted dynamics at home. The variant title "Kayoko's Diary" is frustratingly incorrect but nonetheless profound: the film has the idiosyncrasy and love for small details of a child's diary. Not just any child, but the big-hearted Kayoko. The film would not work if her cheerfulness were not credible, but thankfully that is not the case.

Not treacly, "Who's Left Behind" inspires holy tears. It is a catharsis for Kayoko and Japan that sets both free from the extremes of wallowing and stoicism and trudges on with hope, faith and love. Witnessing this healthy wellspring of emotion should do the same for us.

Okiura makes naturalistic animation seamless in a way never seen before or since. He breaks through the potential uncanny valley of total animated realism and finds empathy and pleasure. It almost distracts us from the film's utter hopelessness. The script has no belief in good cheer or hope. It seems a fairy tale written by the wolf. The film ends with a whimper, fitting of its passive view of fascism as a dry, logistical, inevitability. Okiura, one of the world's greatest animators, is also unable to bring the piercing close ups and hefty perspective shots that a realist animated film like this would need to ... make up for its lack of splendor. The movement of the characters stuns, but the compositions, color choices and editing are too subdued to leave the same impact. The political premise of in-fighting between different military arms of the government is thrilling on paper, but is bogged down by complexity in practice. Most scenes in the film are enjoyable on the grounds of the animation and atmosphere alone, but when the characters start expressing emotions, the emptiness of the film's perspective and characters becomes too heavy for it to bear.

Kenshin sees his guilt in a separated pool of water and blood. The sign of the cross that marks his forgiveness, redemption and decades long suffering is made (consciously) by the combination of a slain man’s forgiveness and his dying fiancée’s desire to express that forgiveness. Through these moments Furuhashi actualizes what was subliminal in the manga and original TV series (Kenshin emerges, in a boat, from under a metaphorical Torii gate in the television series’ first opening).

Though not as rich as the great anime films, this OVA is nonetheless beautiful. Furuhashi’s occasional use of live action footage, like the brief POV shot of ... Tomoe running through the trees, or the real life water in the background of a scene that is otherwise animated, is electrifying. A scene of marital consummation has the sentimentality and romance of shoujo manga. The sword battles are rendered with a frightening snappiness and grotesquerie. The abstraction of the final episode, culminating in an associative montage, is the aesthetic peak (it even has the best fight).

In the opening scenes, Kenshin’s mentor speaks of a world doomed to destruction, a species of people who cannot avoid sin, and the dangers of following the rules of men (including oneself) above… an alternative that goes unmentioned. The answer is implicit. Kenshin finds salvation (victory) in a doomed world.

This was a decent episode, I quite liked some of the star-studded images in the final battle. I think with the hype of Enkidu and Gilgamesh meeting again after so long, the battle could have been even better. Nonetheless, it was unique and conveyed the majesty of their powers. The set up for Jack the Ripper's existential dilemma was compelling as well.

However the portrayal of Alexandre Dumas as a lecherous, annoying idiot (complete with hip hop music in the background, in case you didn't get it), was the most racist thing I have ever seen in an anime. I could not believe what I ... was seeing. Whoever's decision it was to present the famous Black author in such a hateful, inaccurate and flagrantly racist manner should be ashamed. We should not keep quiet about such things.

Gege Akutami's manga Jujutsu Kaisen is deranged, taking after Attack on Titan's grotesquerie and Hunter x Hunter's horror movie aesthetics. Thankfully, Gege was inspired by Togashi's creativity for supernatural abilities as well, leading to Jujutsu Kaisen being the most ambitious and engaging shonen action series of its decade. This season renders these fights exhilaratingly, with greater clarity and intensity than the manga. Director Shota Goshozono and his staff do the complete opposite of merely animating the panels (during one fight there are regular cuts to a moving POV shot) while also, even more impressively, avoiding the share-ready showboating that plagues many big anime productions. These ... battles are thrilling episodes of danger and kinetics, not fourth wall breaking animation showcases to be appreciated out of context. They are tense, violent and frightening; one gasps at the characters' feats of impossible strength as if seeing them in real life. That immersive spirit is precious, now as ever.

Equally importantly, someone on the staff for this second season has a bigger heart than Gege, which shows most in the first few episodes that depict the backstory of Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto. A montage of a beach time hangout, a strikingly grounded moral argument over a game of basketball, and an infectiously innocent, sweet portrayal of Riko Amanai handily elevate the flashback above the manga's depiction, but the killer is the opening and ending for this stretch of episodes both being rendered as though Geto and Gojo are the two best-friend main characters of a 50 episode adventure series. It's a stunning, sentimental gesture. The series does eventually drown in its own nonstop combat, but even that brings more poignancy to a lovely early episode where Kugisaki and Fushiguro plot to get Itadori a date with an old classmate who crushes on him (Itadori and Kugisaki even bicker at length about a new horror movie!). Beauty is all the more beautiful when it seems so far away.

Throughout Kaiji, Fukumoto submerges the audience in the subjective experiences of individuals going through extreme suffering. He does this not for the sake of a detached notion of "psychology", but rather to induce an edifying empathic response. These are mythical stories, tapestries of human life, suffering and the inextricability of the two from each other. The famed, repetitive sequences in which we enter into someone's (usually Kaiji's) thoughts and are barraged by wavy lines, screaming, neurotic thinking and visual metaphors involving death, not only dramatize our (contemporary) suffering but link it to eternity. Fukumoto relates all to all: we see Job in the characters and ... we see ourselves in them too.

However, Fukumoto tends to spin such a yarn out of the intellectual battles that Kaiji ends up in that readers are left conflicted. Half sharing in the agony of Kaiji's psychosis, half delighted by Fukumoto's witty plot twists. Part 4 of Kaiji makes the solemnity and universality of the story more apparent and inescapable (even oppressive) than in past arcs. This is apparent in the gruesomeness of its main "game". The meat of the story is nail biting but it is too obviously disturbing to be entertaining. A life or death mahjong game does not force you to consider its lethal consequences at every moment, but the "Salvation Game" of Part 4 is disturbing in its very visual construction. It is not only this factor that makes Kaiji Part 4 so grave, however.

Part 3 is mostly magnificent and jubilant, but undercuts itself more often as it goes on, and Kaiji begins to truly panic. Most potently, the victory that Kaiji eventually achieves becomes slightly underwhelming because Fukumoto highlights the randomness of it all. Kaiji didn't "deserve to win", and he barely escaped being cut into pieces. When the psychopathic villain Muraoka is defeated and Kaiji is not only spared but given millions of dollars, Kaiji expresses ambivalence rather than joy. It isn't just that he doesn't seem that happy about the money. He also begins to feel sympathy for Muraoka, who, while writhing around on the floor out of madness and agony after losing, has wet his underwear.

Part 4, then, picks up right where Part 3 left off both narratively and thematically. Fukumoto shifts Kaiji into the background for the entire Part and dramatizes the inner lives of the chillingly cruel villain Kazuya, and three new characters, Mario, Chang, and Mitsuyama. The former is a revelation: through Kazuya's deranged, vulnerable speeches detailing his sympathetic but evil ideology, Fukumoto makes the Dostoevsky influence present in his depiction of inner monologues extend also to long, emotionally charged discussions of what is essentially theology. While Kazuya talks about his belief that human nature is unchangeably completely evil, like a great Dostoevsky speech, revulsion at his hatefulness and incorrectness take a back seat to compassion and partial understanding. Fukumoto gives him the floor, and Kazuya expresses his thoughts so vulnerably and fully that the reluctant Kaiji feels it; he is unable to completely refute Kazuya, not only because Kazuya is a better rhetorician, but also because Kaiji knows he's onto something. He does not merely see a twisted logic in Kazuya's explanation. Kaiji empathizes with the suffering, and ultimately the cynicism, that Kazuya expresses. To see yourself in someone you despise is true connection, and to depict that as an artist, particularly in a genre that thrives on treating opponents as less than human, is true boldness. That Kaiji continues to disagree with Kazuya despite feeling the sincerity of his longing for understanding and mutual honesty is what makes it work. It's the difference between a work that evokes the universality of human experience and a nihilist polemic.

One may imagine that the time spent with the new characters, three incredibly poor and incredibly close friends, must be less moving than that time spent with Kazuya. After all, Kazuya's perspective as someone born into immense wealth is one we have not seen before in the series, whereas Kaiji himself is, like these three friends, poor, caring and sentimental. But expanding the focus beyond Kaiji and people he knows makes it clear that the mythical aspects of the manga serve its empathic purpose, rather than the other way around. If this had been a manga about immortalizing the struggles of Kaiji alone, then the empathy shown towards Kaiji (or even his "equals" like Kazuya, who he gambles against) would be tools that aide the depiction of some sort of battle of the gods. Fukumoto, thankfully not a tedious writer, does the opposite, and places the audience so totally in the experience of Mario that it is as though he was the main character. As he once related the reader, Kaiji and the history of man's suffering, Fukumoto now links Mario to Kaiji, and Kaiji to Kazuya. The particulars of life and suffering are not limited to rich or poor, Japanese or foreigner nor to major characters or minor. It's immensely rewarding because Mario's life is not only so similar to Kaiji's but also so different from Kaiji's, as revealed through numerous evocative details of backstory and inner monologue. His childhood of working long hours in the heat, scavenging through garbage to make the equivalent of one US dollar a day is too moving to be reducible to a thematic purpose. As is his love/hate relationship with his spirited, generous, happy Christian brother, whom Mario describes as "the weird one" when compared to the countless men in their environment who, under such cruel conditions, simply gave up. In one mind blowing moment, Kaiji even seems less virtuous than Mario! Had the notion of universal experience been (over)emphasized to the point that the specifics of individuals' selves and lives were overlooked, the manga would be no less tedious than those aforementioned stories which seem to assert most people as backgrounds for the all important duel between protagonist and antagonist.

Though it is in many ways a tangibly sickening, cynical work, Kaiji Part 4 is not unsettling. We all know we suffer unbearably. Fukumoto responds by pointing out that everyone else suffers just as much. It's as much a comfort as it is a challenge.