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Sep 16, 2015
I have always considered myself an appreciator of the avant-garde. I seek that which is novel, experimental, and paradigm-altering. Anything that fits comfortably into a category – and fulfills every expectation the label connotes – usually fills me with an elitist sense of ennui. I take solace in my own elastic and ever-expanding expectations that I long for to be broken. It is the anarchic jubilation of FLCL, the esoteric symbolism of NGE, and the psychologically-charged thrillers of Satoshi Kon that find themselves awarded my sparing 9’s and 10’s. As such, I was quite intrigued by another anime that ostensibly belonged to the same grouping
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– Serial Experiments Lain.
A cursory scan of the Wikipedia article tells me that Serial Experiments Lain “demonstrates influences embracing philosophy, computer history, cyberpunk literature, and conspiracy theory, and it was made the subject of several academic articles.” Doubtless, then, it was an anime of intellectual proportions, intended to titillate the mind as well as the heart (for it is more often than not the heart that anime reaches, an art-form that seems geared towards the warming of our inner-being through the evocation of a colourful, dream-tinged world of wide-eyed youth). I sat down, hungover, on a Tuesday evening, and prepared for a real tour de force.
The first episode conjures up a universe that is unnervingly dark. The ominousness of Lain is almost viscerally transmitted by the artwork and soundtrack. The OP is truly haunting – a wistful, creepy paean to the show itself. Lain herself initially appears as the archetypal shy schoolgirl who just wants to make a few friends – as if Shinobu from Love Hina was randomly transported to a bleak, sinister world of impending doom, where instead of a well-intentioned but goofy landlord to find comfort in, she has a new supercomputer.
The premise for a discussion about the validity of making friends in the virtual realm is thus opened: are they as real as friends that exist in the three-dimensional world, and if so what actually distinguishes “The Wired” (what the internet is referred to as in the show) from “the real world”? Lain does have some sort of friends at her school, and they do make the effort to build some bridges with her. The most prominent member of this group – Arisu – says, “I’m sure there’s a really social girl just waiting to get out of that shell of yours” to Lain after an invitation is extended to go jiving at a nightclub. Thus a very believable and endearing relationship is constructed – the seemingly more-sure-of-herself Arisu tries to befriend and ingratiate herself with the socially anxious Lain, and this acts as quite an emotionally impactful subplot.
All is well, then?
Alas, the only empathetic moments of the show are created by this relationship. This is because there is something tangible to hold onto – we’re willingly pulled into the Good Samaritan play of Arisu, and root for the formation of her friendship with Lain – when everything else starts getting confusedly deconstructed. Lain’s relationships with her family and other cast members are not sufficiently grounded, and when the going gets weird, one just doesn’t care.
For the going certainly does get weird. Samuel Taylor Colebridge famously said that the “suspension of disbelief” was a necessary pre-requisite for one to experience a story in its full intensity. In Serial Experiments Lain’s case, the disbelief not merely has to be suspended but completely annihilated before one can even begin to fathom what is going on. Whereas Neon Genesis Evangelion - an anime that often betokens comparisons - established its characters, setting, and plot before the psychedelic hammer started smashing the framework to pieces, Lain befuddles and perplexes by the end of the second episode. From there on the show essentially functions as a mystery, drawing the viewer into an endless guessing game whilst cryptically vomiting up documentary-like segments about various renowned scientist-philosophers and their strange, kooky ideas before delving back into the story (if it can even be called such).
Many of the ideas contained therein - both in the documentary-like segments and the actual dialogue - are indeed very interesting. A lot of ground is covered. The trouble is, it feels hurriedly spewed out, and sometimes has a very tenuous connection to the overall show (for instance, an interlude about John C. Lily’s mind-expansion practices). One is unsure whether to try and forge some sort of link out of these expressed ideas in order to come to some sort of grand understanding, or if they’re just there to add to the heady atmosphere.
In spite of the lack of anchorage the show affords, the atmosphere is maintained throughout. The artwork, music, and directing act as robust pillars holding-up a watery and incoherent world. Even if I was unsure of what exactly was happening - I began to blame an inability to concentrate, assuming I’d missed something, but upon closer inspection realized that I was just dazed by the constant non-sequiturs - emotions were still communicated to me, and I was struck by fear and paranoia without quite knowing why. It has been said that some things are meant to be experienced rather than understood, and the basic, stripped-back experience of Lain is at times profound - but one can tell that the show is trying really hard to push a point, and the rapid structural degeneration makes the didactic attempts seem feeble.
Serial Experiments Lain is certainly avant-garde. It is a veritable whirlwind of ideas, rouged-up in the cosmetics of a spine-tingling thriller. But it is, for all intents and purposes, a mess. One day, perhaps, another anime will come along, perched upon the shoulders of Lein, and take the original impetus that drove its creation and deliver it, this time, fully-packaged and sealed. Until then, we’ll just have to content ourselves with this curious melee of madness
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Sep 3, 2015
Ping pong - or, rather, table tennis - will forever remind me of the dissatisfying lunch-times I expended in fruitlessly playing it with my school fellows on a rainy day. To me it was the equivalent of table football; a miniaturized version of an actual sport intended less for the pursuit of physical glory and excellence than the sake of sheer enjoyment, accessible even to those who lacked the prowess and stamina required to partake in the full-sized namesakes. In short, a mere game, no more noble or dignified than Monopoly or MMORPGs.
It wasn’t until my first excursion to East Asia than I became aware
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of the magnitude it possessed in the lives of some people. Teaching English at a university in China, the topic of ‘sports’ predictably reared its head for one day of the two-week crash course I was flailing my way through. And invariably, ‘table tennis’ was mentioned - and not once, fleetingly tacked onto a list of nouns. Indeed, in games of pictionary I hosted to pass the time as innocuously as possible, the word ‘table tennis’ would be shrieked before even the slightest smudge of chalk had attempted to delineate the designated word. The frequency with which a student mistakenly presumed table tennis to be the selected piece of vocabulary reached such absurd proportions that it turned into somewhat of a running-joke, where even on days when the curriculum stipulated topics unrelated to sport, table tennis was self-satirically invoked.
“Why”, I asked the class one day, “is there such an unusual interest in table tennis?”
“Because,” one plucky student in the front-row answered, “it is our national sport.”
“And so,” I followed-up, “are you the best in the world at it?”
“Yes,” he sniggeringly replied, “much better than the Japanese.”
Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered an anime about table tennis that included a Chinese character and, furthermore, was directed by Masaaki Yuasa, the mastermind behind the animated adaption of The Tatami Galaxy.
The shared aesthetic of the two shows is the first registered thought upon one's initial viewing - before character or story or soundtrack can make themselves known, one is smacked by the ambivalence of watching an anime that doesn't look at all like an anime. This has been known to deter some - including a rather poetically-adverse housemate of mine - before the first episode is even over, but it enchanted me, and entranced me into a universe that only the works of Yuasa could inhabit. The artwork is scruffy, cartoonish, and two-dimensional. A cursory evaluation would make one think that it was drawn in haste, without finesse. And yet
it also struck me as sinister, bleak, and withering: the markings of a comfortless world.
And this is perfect - because this is the crux of the show. There is no comfort to be found anywhere. A grand purpose is usually where we think we will find a simulacrum of meaning in this world of ours - to be a writer, a musician, a baker, a politician, a husband, a wife, a parent, a capitalist, a saviour - and a lot of anime side-steps answering any big existential questions by ascribing their characters these sorts of teleologies that more often than not define the experience of what you're watching. But in Ping Pong The Animation the chosen purpose of the characters, table tennis, proves to be too elusive for most of them to grab ahold of (they're either too bad, too old, too injured, or don't care enough), and even the ones who (however temporarily) succeed in the sport (for, yes, that is what table tennis qualifies as outside of this parochial island I am stranded on) never quite manage to find a true sense of completion or fulfillment.
The first two character we are introduced to are Makoto "Smile" Tsukimoto, and his childhood friend, Yukata "Peco" Hoshino. They have interlinking backstories that are revealed in mystifying patches that have us trying to scramble together some sort of picture of their respective motives for playing the sport. We're then treated to a fairly appreciable range of other characters, all of whom have their backstories sufficiently fleshed-out despite the eleven-episode limit placed on the series. This means that no times is wasted, which on the one hand is good, but on the other isn't as the lack of space produces a rather scrambled effect (perhaps, I venture now, the purpose) and by leaving no time to reflect or breath unintentionally nullifies the rather profound message that lies at the heart of the narrative.
The anime contained many devices parallel to your run-of-the-mill pre-teen shounen, for behind the surrealistic imagery stands a story about a selection of young men all competing to become the best (besides, at first, "Smile", who is largely apathetic about winning and losing, and will forfeit matches in order to save the pride of his opponent), and who have to finish in the final four of their regional tournament in order to progress onto the next level of play. Our heroes battle it out for a shot at the title - cue training montages, and esoteric talk of special moves or abilities that are being honed - but first they must come face-to-face with the indomitable, menacing, seemingly invincible cadre that comprises the main rival school, and they have a grand master helping them out, and etc., etc., etc,. It would not be too inconceivable for one to believe that Ping Pong The Animation was written by the team who produced Beyblade after they'd spent six months holed up in a shed sniffing glue.
Living in the post-postmodern era, one can never be too sure that irony isn't afoot, and I half-suspect Ping Pong of parodying the hackneyed tropes of table-top shounen. But what is of real virtue about this anime is that it makes so many serious, thought-provoking points about the concept of sport itself and, by extension, of life itself. It questions more than any other media I've ever experienced: what is the point of playing sport? It was as if by the end of the final episode it envisioned the sort of world where Goku and all the other Z-fighters had been spontaneously sapped of their fighting abilities, and it was declared that there would never be a threat to Earth ever again, and they were now all struggling to find new identities whilst looking rather foolish in the process of doing so.
Parody or not, however, I can't stomach the tropes that usually accompany shounen, and for that I found myself faintly bored during some of the matches - the outcomes of which were all too predictable (though perhaps that was, again, the point). There's a heartening dollop of comedy that finds its greatest expression through the Japan-China rivalry that, as I have experienced first-hand, is all too fierce. But I'm afraid, in spite of the grandeur of the animation and the pleasingly didactic nature of the show, I'm going to award it a 7, for it at times failed at the ultimate goal: entertainment.
Reviewer’s Rating: 7
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Aug 26, 2015
Hitherto, I had been reluctant to foray into the world of music-themed anime. I envisioned five-minute long performances interminably seguing into one another, puncturing the narrative into a bullet-holed score sheet through which one could just about discern an actual story. If I wanted to listen to music, I contended, then I would listen to music, and not try to parcel the experience into a twelve-episode series about neurotic high-school students. Music to flavour anime, to nourish it, to help support the scaffolding that sustained the universe one was willingly entering - yes, of course, that I would heartily accept.
But music in anime as
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an end, and not a means?
Such a presumption proved fallacious. After I tackled the first few episodes of Kids on the Slope, I realized that offered here was the musical elements of Cowboy Bepop and Samurai Champloo raised by a few degrees, finally nudged into the narrative; the music had graduated from its former position as a condiment to an ingredient. Shinichirō Watanabe had finally delved head-first into an anime about music.
But only nominally so.
Kids on the Slope is a cocktail, and jazz functions here in a similar manner to gunmanship and swordsmanship in Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. The nucleus of the show is similarly parallel: two males, both of whom excel in the designated surface theme, are bound in an unlikely alliance with one female, and the three of them get into all sorts of hi-jinks and hullabaloos until their joint adventure ultimately culminates in [spoiler alert].
The social commentary here is a lot more obvious, though, and the historical setting is utilized to its fullest as the pressing problems of the mid-to-late sixties bare their teeth at us intermittently. The exhibition of Japan’s post-war consciousness, scarred and humbled, is amplified by the location, Kyushu, where a noticeable presence of US military bases force the local population into contact with gaijin. Changing social attitudes are framed in this racially uncomfortable setting besides the transition from jazz to rock ‘n roll; John Coltrane is dead, and girls are throwing their knickers into the air for four unlikely lads from Liverpool. Kaoru and Sentaro, our two jazz-playing protagonists, are sitting at the end of a musical arch, plugging away at an increasingly unpopular art-form as their celebrity-status-seeking contemporaries don electric guitars and sing love, love me do.
Diverging from the templates of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, Kids on the Slope sprouts love triangles galore. Indeed, the series gives School Rumble a run for its money in terms of the immense pile-up of interdependent, ill-fated romances that form a cat’s cradle at the heart of the narrative. Thankfully, we feel a sufficient amount of pathos to at least somewhat care about the hearts of each of the characters presented to us in this angst-ridden drama - but in twelve episodes, the romantic endeavours of five people can feel a little unconvincing at times, squished as they are between social commentary, historical reflection, and musical appreciation.
Brother Jun, although an admittedly necessary character for the disenfranchised-60s-university-student perspective he supplies, was drawn a little hastily, and his escapades with his semi-forbidden young lover, Furika, felt slapped on. It was Sentaro, subtly and lovingly revealed to us through a series of heart-rending flashbacks, that charged at the frontiers of my tear-ducks; he is crafted in fully-fledged three-dimensional glory, and acts as a representation of a torn-in-two post-war Japan for reasons I shall, out of courtesy to prospective viewers, not disclose.
The aesthetic is satisfying; pristine, cerulean, and colourful, it nevertheless conservatively tip-toes around anything that could be described as creative. This lack of exploration is encapsulated in the bland opening which, though concerning an anime about jazz, bizarrely contains no jazz, and is instead a beige, happy-clappy, pseudo-J-pop ordeal that does, grudgingly, grow on you. This blip aside, there is a coherence to the show - it is a cohesive product, polished and complete, and I would have finished it in one sitting if the leaden feeling in my eye-lids didn’t dictate that I instead take two.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jun 22, 2015
Cowboy Bepop overhangs any critical appraisal of Samurai Champloo. Notwithstanding the shadow cast over all subsequent anime by Cowboy Bebop in general, the very fact that Samurari Champloo was also directed by Shinichirō Watanabe tends to betoken a parallel a critique of the two. Indeed, this comparison is not exactly void, for there are a number of motifs that conjoin the two shows together, and render their functionality and (where appropriate) overall message as almost indistinguishable.
Cowboy Bebop fuses the disparate thematic strands of jazz, the space age, country westerns, and martial arts into a disconcertingly plausible universe that challenges our assumptions about the
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black-and-white categories we use to fix certain types of experience into carefully demarcated compartments - be they fictional, musical, or artistic. On the whole, however, I would contend that Cowboy Bebop is a decidedly non-didactic show, and succeeds through its masterful directing, scripting, and soundtrack as opposed to its capacity to push a coherent idea or agenda, and either reform or revolutionize the viewer’s conceptions about the world around them.
It seems unfortunate to me, then, that Samurai Champloo lags every-so-slightly behind its predecessor on all three of these accounts - directing, scripting, and musical score. Whilst certainly flourishing in these areas (if not to the virtually inimitable standards set by Cowboy Bebop) it is not alone sustained by them; and yet I would accord it the same rating as Cowboy Bebop. This is because Samurai Champloo manages to, ironically, succeed where Cowboy Bebop merely sufficed - in promoting a narrative, idea, or agenda that proves to be both thought-provoking and paradigm challenging. The fusion of Edo-era Japan, samurai culture, hip-hop, and urban lifestyle is more jarring and chasm-surmounting than the combination of themes, styles, and motifs in Cowboy Bebop. It is not simply showing us that things don’t have to be kept in their correct, pre-labelled spheres of experience, that hip-hop is not just urban and American whilst samurais are not just ancient and Japanese, but so riotously and seditiously laughing in the faces of conservatives and reactionaries everywhere.
This conflict between modernity and tradition is perfectly captured in two of the central characters - Mugen, the rash, foul-mouthed ex-pirate (spoiler alert?), and Gene, the serene, traditionalist practitioner of Bushido - whose attitudes and belief-systems are at such odds with one another that it’s remarkable that they stay together for more than a couple of days, let alone the whole leg of the journey from Edo to Nagasaki. The universe of Samurai Champloo is also, perversely, at conflict with itself; the nationalistic and isolationist policies of the Tokugawa shogunate are continually transgressed upon and parodied by the inclusion of rebelliously modern themes, such as beat-boxing and graffiti. History is presented to us with a reassuring sense of accuracy, and then suddenly distorted as it metamorphoses into an eclectic tapestry of competing and complementary motifs drawn from both the modern and traditional world.
There are innumerable instances of this, and it is difficult to restrain myself from mentioning all of them. Perhaps one of the most simple and salient occurs at the very beginning of the series, when Mugen and Gene first meet and engage in an impromptu sword battle that leaves no clear victor - Gene, well-studied in swordsmanship, remarks that he cannot understand why he is unable to defeat Mugen, because the latter is so undisciplined and technically unskilled. In other words, his very rigid conception of what is and is not good swordsmanship is thrown asunder by the definitively modern ethos of Mugen - who is so uncompromisingly individualistic that, when asked by a security guard (who is stationed at a checkpoint, an omnipresent feature of the Samurai Champloo universe, presumably to mock overly stringent migration controls) to step on a picture of the crucifix (another motif frequently poured into this already heady mix) to ascertain that he is not a Christian, he refuses to do so, preferring detainment or even death over having to submit to anyone else’s authority.
At the very end of the series, a revered and masterful samurai tells Gene that “you were born in the wrong era, and so was I”, in reference to the relative stability and peace of the Edo era that saw samurais as increasingly irreverent. I couldn’t help but thinking that all of the characters in the show were born into the wrong era - from the homosexual Dutchman to the baseball fanatic villager - and that it is both to the benefit of society and the individual to welcome, tolerate, and even encourage a variety of differing cultures in order to reap the fruits of diversity.
Then why, if this show is as profound as I’ve (somewhat disingenuously) detailed, does it only deserve an 8? Well, I must come clean, this show is not exactly a George Bernard Shaw play - it is, above all, good fun, a fairly enjoyable 26-episode romp replete with a juicy subtext for pseudo-intellectuals to hinge onto so they can convince themselves that anime is as artistically significant as any form of high culture. And whilst I mainly watch anime because of how irresistibly fun it is, it really needs to blow my socks off to roll into the hall of fame that is ascribed to 9s and 10s. Samurai Champloo occasionally limped into silliness, and rested its laurels on standard, cross-genre anime tropes that have long since ceased to entertain me; there is, at times, a slightly stale stench emanating from the improbable journey of Mugen, Gene, and Fuu, but the series is a classic all the same, and if you want to look more deeply into it, I’m sure you’ll unearth all sorts of wonders to ramble on about.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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