If I were to select one Anime title to show someone as an introduction to Japanese animation as it’s done today, it would not be something by Hayao Miyazaki. It would be Makoto Shinkai’s The Place Promised in Our Early Days. I consider this film to be an exemplary work of the highest quality and artistry, exploring elements of science fiction, fantasy, technology, politics, romance, and friendship, with deftness and subtlety. I blogged about it many months ago, but the pre-Flash video embedding no longer works, so I’ll have to do a fresh transfer of a choice scene.
Shinkai’s follow-up to Place Promised is 5 Centimeters Per Second: a chain of short stories about their distance. Eric has wanted me to blog something from it for a while, and now that the DVD is about to be released in America, I will. The final part of the movie includes this musical montage of flashbacks. Seeing it shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment of the movie. I transferred this video from the Japanese DVD.
With the Writers Guild of America on strike, TV is full of re-runs, of course. Last night I caught a MADtv show that featured TV parodies, including a hilarious take on what they say are Japanese soap operas. However, Eric informs me the writing is in Korean, and cast member Bobby Lee is Korean-American. Anyway, six months ago I featured the Japanese romantic comedy Train Man, and I can see elements of that in this parody.
Long before Ergo Proxy, even before Astro Boy, the first anime to reach America, one of Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil cartoons made fun of Disneyland.
A couple of months ago I posted Ergo Proxy as Eric’s anime pick. We’re still going through the series, and the last few installments have been really good. I’ve blended a bit of one of them into the prologue of the next episode to highlight the contrast between them. Don’t try to make any sense of this!
Eric says that Mushi-Shi is a relatively obscure title. Indeed, it took a week for a copy to arrive in Massachusetts from a Netflix distribution center in California.
Like Kino’s Journey, Mushi-Shi is about a wanderer, with a series of mostly self-contained stories. But unlike Kino, the character Ginko isn’t exploring for its own sake, but rather he’s a healer-for-hire who exorcises parasitic creatures called Mushi.
Caution: This video depicts what is known to comic book fans as an “injury to eye motif,” and it’s yucky and gunky!