Types of Anime

Anime has a young audience, probably because of the form of animation appeals better to younger people, but it also can appeal to adults as well.  The films of Hayao Miyazakihave made families in the west more aware of Japanese Anime but it is not films I wish to concern myself.  As an adult who watches anime I can suggest some very good anime that is not overly kiddish and off the top of my mind there are five worth checking out:

Kino’s Journey

Kino and her motorcad with sidecar (which is also her sidekick) travel, as the title suggests, across a fantastical land.  They only spend three days at each town and each one of them offers up a different philosophical thought experiment and reflections.  Such towns are those that have discovered the secret of mind reading, those that banned the reading of prohibited books and those that force people to fight to the death in a tournament to improve their circumstances.  Each episode (of which there are thirteen) is stand-alone but does eventually come to a conclusion.  Kino is packed with deceptive simplicity where much more deeper and bigger issues are at play so that repeated viewing is rewarded.   

Serial Experiments Lain

The female protagonist of this series (also thirteen episodes) deals in complexity but is rather more swallowed up by it that successfully navigates it.  Lain is a seemingly ordinary schoolgirl who, after the suicide of one her friends, gets involved with the world of the web and discovers sides to herself that she never knew existed.  Lain is also worth repeated views but this may not clear anything about it’s plot development as it is a deeply puzzling piece of work that will often leave you thinking that you missed something.  This is anime as French New Wave film and if you like that style than you might like the disaffected tone of Lain.   

Eden Of the East

A bit more accessible than Lain, this anime packs in a lot in it’s much too short thirteen episodes.  The quick version of the story is about this boy who has lost his memory and finds himself in possession of a God-like phone that can do almost anything for him.  It’s a brilliant idea and it’s excellently executed, up until the last episode that is but focusing on the good things.  Very clever and satisfyingly original but won’t take you too long to get through. 

Texhnolyse

This anime is a moody piece set in the technological future where a boxer crosses the line and gets his arm cut off by a gangster group only to replace it with a robotic one, he then goes for vengeance.  Interwoven in this is a girl with a creepy mask and a man with a backpack and we follow them as they go deeper and deeper into the city.  Is quite violent at times and is certainly not for children (not so much because of the violence but because of it’s pacing, they would be bored silly).    

Paranoia Agent

It’s difficult to say out of these which is my favourite but on most days it is this one as it is all the things I love, a clever idea well done, disturbing story and most of all memorable scenes.  It’s about several different people who are all attack by a kid with a golden baseball bat and roller blades and about how they recover as well as uncovering who the kid really is.  This will knock you off balance as it comes to it’s unexpected conclusion and though it is only thirteen episodes long it really is a perfect number as each episode does more than it’s fair share in engaging the viewer with avid interest.

So there we are, anime doesn’t have to be just for the realm of children’s entertainment but it can also but used to create adult (or at least adolescent) art.  Some may be disappointed that I have not mentioned Death Note or Cowboy Bebop but I thought that five was a good enough number to start with, though they are short, and maybe if I watch more I will have more to write. 

The Twinning of Michael Haneke and Franz Kafka

 Michael Haneke is the perfect person to adapt Franz Kafka.  This was my first thought when I saw the film The Castle in the library.  Watching it I am only confirmed in my opinion.  He is perfect because his films depict an acute coldness in a random, violent world.  He was the filmmaker who directed the sadistic Funny Games, where two young men torment a family, a work in the genre of ‘house invasion’.  The White Ribbon, which shows death in small town Germany, The Time of the Wolf about an apocalyptic world and a family’s attempts at survival and Benny’s Video where a love interest shoots his possible girlfriend with a secretly acquired bolt gun.  A bundle of laughs he is not.

   

This is what makes him great at adapting Kafka; he understands the terms of the cruel absurd that the Czech author was writing under.  Haneke is ok with a story that is neigh-on impossible to interpret, he’s ok with showing humanity in some of it’s worst lights and he is more than capable of rending the images of the book into cinema.  He is, as I say, the perfect choice.

  

 When I read The Castle I was struck by how visual it is and its sense of desolate beauty was potent.  If there is any work of literature can accurately depicts the dark logic of nightmares it comes from Kafka.  This is also what makes Kafka a problem; he makes reading into a torturously painful experience.  It is quite an experience, especially when you think that he never really finished most of his longer stories, so to think of them that they could go on is fairly unbearable.  There has been nothing I’ve read that has scarred me so piercingly, only Paul Auster’s Oracle Night comes close, so treat this is a sort of warning.  As someone once wrote ‘when I read Kafka’s novels I feel for him, when I read his diaries I feel for his family’.

   

There has also been some talk about exactly how ‘great’ Kafka was.  I read an article that argued how he was vastly overrated and that he really couldn’t be understood unless you lived in Prague about the same time as he did.  This impossibility to interpret Kafka gives rise to whole schools of Kafka studies making it, like some other modernist texts, more like something to do with the occult.  I appreciate the uncompromising strangeness of his writings, which can make anything meaningful out of it obscure, and perhaps there is something to be said of deconstructing them in a way that removes the author’s intentions more away from the critical discourse, but I believe that it is his images that remain relevant to people decades on. 

   

The images in Kafka are the images of being in-between things, of rationally not knowing what to do; of being stuck and inadvertently guilty of something we did not realise was a crime.  These are images, I imagine, that people can respond to as they call out to our pity and compassion to these hopeless protagonists.  Certainly they resonate with me.  It must also resonate with Haneke as he displays the barbarous bureaucracy in delicious beauty and poise.

   

Kafka is difficult and maybe it is best just to treat them as stories that have no meaning outside of their words, and, really, is that not enough?

A Gothic Place

'I do not know this place,

Though here for long I have run'

I have been brought to this place.  By who I do not know; however I do not think I arrived here by myself. 

  This place is old.  The ground where the church rests upon is ancient, which may account for the familiarity I feel for it.  I do not remember ever coming, or being, here.

'Summer's pleasures they are gone like to visions every one,

And the cloudy days of autumn and of winter cometh on.'

The sun is strong and falls golden over the grass and the graves, through the branches of the trees resting between the shadows.  As I open the decorative gate I see a picture crystalised by light.  Though it is bright my skin is cold and I walk slowly up the path closing the black gate behind me.  All I know, all I know about these steps I take is that I must follow the bright angels; but where have they gone now?  The plants are too green and too pure a colour to be real.  I feel myself living in a dream of an unknown sleeper.  This landscape seems solid enough to walk on but in the edges of my eyes there is a blur of shades.  Just what is happening to me?  I watch myself absorbing this scene and I feel that everything looks perfect.  There is a silence in the sky that not even the birds will break and my voice has evaporated in the serenity.  This beauty's source comes from an unkown yet undying fountain.  The roots of this beauty's fountain run down deep into the earth. They are strong and well nourished.  Beside this my body felt like a wasteland with my muscles as dry as dead wood and my heart as dust.  I felt barren and hard.  I feel that I have lost a thing and in wishing to mourn do not cry.

'I have seen this turning light,

For many a day.

I have not been away

Even in dreams of the night.'

Inside the grey stone of the church the air feels cooler, like the feeling of a weightless breeze, and the light rejuvinates the coloured glass of the stained windows.  This is something old and there is a sense of returning to a different childhood; it is like mine but wholly unlike mine.  This sense of this moment is recurring, it is a sound caught in an echo, eternal but fading in and out of my awareness.  I sat down on an oak pew and my mind caught in the space between the roof and the floor, above the beams, by the arch, I am unravelling my tight knitted bonds and the sensitive flesh recoils in pleasure.  At heart there is a stronger sense of pleasure of what name I have forgotten by remember feeling long ago.

'Moonlight and dew-drenched blossom, and the scent

Of summer gardens; these can bring you all

Those dreams that in the starlight silence fall:

Sweet songs are full of odours.'

I still feel tight inside as something will not let go.  I know that I have been followed by ghosts.  I'm sure that they watch me now.  I am tired from running and all I wish to do now is to lie down and sleep.  I do lie down but t is not nearly as comfortably as I need it to be.  I close my eyes and pretend that I really am drifting off into that place of sleep.  Only I know that I cannot fool myself and so soon I get up with dread and with insomnia of living.  The weight of myself is heavy enough to be not lifted yet also not able to rest properly.  I have been scared for so long now that I am numb to the frightened feeling.  Will this really continue on this way...will it not end...?  I can no longer comfort myself, not even with the thought of death for I know that it will not come for me yet.  I am sure there are ghosts in this place.  They are here somewhere.  I wish that I could see them and talk to them.  They have to hide away from me but not leave me alone.  I am death-in-life.

'I have questioned many a ghost

Far inland in my dreams,

Enquiried of fears and shames'

'The dark and winding way

To the day within my day.'