I would like to let a few more famous and/or eloquent folks speak for me for a minute, on a variety of relevant topics that I have encountered and dealt with over the past two years.

DISAGREEMENTS

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
-Mark Twain

COMMON DEBATES

Too often we… enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
-John F. Kennedy

MOE

I’m cute — and God I hate that. Because that’s not cool. I’m like your niece, and nobody wants to date their niece.
-Kelly Clarkson

THE SPHERE

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

NEW ANIME SEASONS

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.
-Ernest Dimnet, The Art of Thinking

GRSI

I would not join any club that would have someone like me for a member.
-Groucho Marx

4CHAN

Youth doesn’t need friends – it only needs crowds.
-Zelda Fitzgerald

FANDOM

A man always remembers his first love with special tenderness, but after that he begins to bunch them.
-H.L. Mencken

YOU GUYS

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.
-Irving Layton, poet

IN CONCLUSION

If you haven’t figured it out yet… I’m taking my ball and going home. It’s been real.

I will be back either sometime or never. Sayonara!

So, here are the 10 (surface level) reasons to love Revolutionary Girl Utena. Be warned a thousand times, if you haven’t seen the full series, there will be spoilers. Most are vague, but they’re there.

10. Balls

Be-Papas didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. Kunihiko Ikuhara and co. were hardly amateurs. But it still amounts to a debut work, and it’s one of JC Staff’s first TV productions to boot.

Yet Utena comes out of the gate with a sense of purpose that few veteran productions come close to. The confidence is almost ridiculous, giving Be-Papas the sheer gall to try a million things that no one else had really done before. That sense of putting one’s balls on the table and saying “here you go, this is what I have” is what allowed all the other elements of this list to exist. So here’s to Be-Papas’ giant brass ones.

9. Surrealism

Symbolism in anime is nothing new. And to be honest, much of the symbolism in Utena is simple stuff. But rather than being incidental or enhancing, it’s everywhere, making the line between reality and allegory appropriately nonexistant. The series is packed so densely with out-of-context imagery that playing “spot the symbol” is a fun game, and playing “spot the red herring” can be even more fun. Sometimes the images only color the experience, sometimes they provide a direct line to the allegory of the overall story, and sometimes… well, here’s Ikuhara on one of the big questions:

“[Mickey’s] stopwatch contains the key to open all the mysteries of the world. And Mickey is the only one who knows that. So I don’t know what it is either.”

In the same interview, he treats Nanami’s egg similarly, so you have to wonder — either Ikuhara doesn’t want us to get the answers easily, or he doesn’t even have them all. And that would be fine, too.

8. Repetition

I did a whole post on Utena’s repetition patterns and how they mirror the practice in visual design. And that was just the Student Council Saga. The series continues to use repetition through each arc, to awesome effect. It’s amazing how much mileage Ikuhara got out of so little new footage per episode. The repetitive sequences don’t seem rote or tiring — in fact, for me they were exciting in themselves.

The beginning of “Absolute Destiny Apocalypse.” A Black Rose candidate descending the elevator. Touga saying “Listen? Do you hear it?” These are the culmination of a story, the satisfying climax to the buildup of the first part of each episode. The repetition also reinforces how similar each plan by End of the World to wreck Utena really is, and how futile those plans are every time. And of course, it enforces just how different the final duel really is.

7. Sex

It’s amazing really, how much you can get away with when you don’t explicitly say or show too much. To me, the sexual element in Utena could be shockingly overt at times, but without any showing tits or actual penis talk (unless you count “polishing your sword”), it slides right by. Sex is a lot of things in Utena, but usually it’s a means to an end. The characters (many of whom are just middle school students) casually use sex as a tool to get back at each other, or as a weapon to destroy innocence and nobility.

And Akio’s car? Those scenes made me feel like a middle-aged housewife reading Danielle Steel, all fanning myself and loosening my collar.

The sexual ambiguity of the characters further enhances the air of debauchery: Everyone pretty much seems ready to fuck everyone else, regardless of gender. Wakaba’s innocent yuri crush on Utena sets the homoerotic baseline, with the other extreme covered by Touga and Akio’s chest-groping photo sessions.

6. More Shoujo than Shoujo

That all makes me think: A lot of this long-haired beefcake shit and rosy borders are probably par for the course with flowery girls’ manga, but shoujo is really just a base context for Utena. Ikuhara uses that as a framework and then both expands and subverts it, often in the same moment. You know what moments I mean, right? How about when Utena and Anthy symmetrically lay down in their beds, silhouetted in a dramatic arched-back pose? Or the mirror image of that same pose starring Akio and Touga as they watch a duel… from a gilded bed? It’s both a Gurren-Lagann-esque inflation of shoujo elements and a hilarious parody of them. And that brings me to…

5. Humor

What does Utena have in common with another symbol-heavy hit of the 90s? Well, quite a lot, including Be-Papas member Yoji Enokido. But one thing it has that Anno’s ode to misanthropy lacks is an ever-present sense of humor. Utena is rich in both standard anime humor and in parody of its genre. And what about those Nanami episodes?

4. Nanami

Yes, Nanami. She’s exemplary of Be-Papas’ subversive methods: they masked story and character development in seemingly throwaway comedy filler episodes. Ultimately Nanami was an important lens through which to view Akio and Anthy’s relationship, but that lens was polished by her constant comedic abuse at the hands of elephants, runaway horses, curry powder, and of course her beloved Touga-Onii-sama.

3. Chu-Chu

Nuff said, but if you need help: Watch the final episode. Ikuhara says that Chu-Chu tried to be more like Akio so that Anthy would like him, but at the end he removes his tie and earring in the world’s cutest gesture of independence and change.

2. The melancholy of coming of age

There’s plenty of anime that could be described as “coming of age” stories. But the best of them always have a unique way of getting that same timeless idea across. For some reason, Utena’s end reminded me of Philip Pullman’s vicious indictment of C.S. Lewis. He attacked Narnia not for its religiosity but for what he saw as condemnation of the very idea growing up. Utena does strike me at first blush as taking up the Narnian (that is, traditional) side of the argument. Loss of innocence is not necessarily as bad a thing in be-Papas’s world as in Lewis’s (although it happened to Utena in a manipulative, not-so-nice way), but growing up does mean the abandonment of certain strengths that only the pure can have. I suppose it’s open to interpretation whether Anthy was right, that Utena can’t be her prince because she’s a girl, but I’ll save any more musing on this for when I have enough words for a post in itself. I would love to hear others’ thoughts on this, beyond the obvious.

1. J.A. Seazer

Seazer’s importance to the anime can’t be understated. It’s even possible that Ikuhara’s whole idea of an anime about revolutionizing the world was generated by Seazer’s music, even if Seazer’s purpose was a bit more specific than Utena’s pretty abstract kind of revolution. And in turn, Utena brought the 1960s countercultural icon back into the limelight for the first time in many years.

If you doubt how much Seazer’s music colored Revolutionary Girl Utena, just imagine it without, or maybe with some other more traditional anime music. Suddenly the vibrantly surreal and representative world becomes a little more normal and shallow. Seazer’s bizarre imagery — inscrutable lists of items found at the apocalypse, obsessive meditations on the human body, and symbols borrowed from religions around the world — is the cornerstone to the multi-tiered fortress of Utena’s allegorical storyline.

So…

The sound that races through the End Of This Post

These ten things just came to me without much thought, but there’s plenty more to love about Utena. Not to mention, any of these ten items could make a post in itself, and hopefully some will someday. Is there anything you particularly liked about Revolutionary Girl Utena that I missed? Or do you just hate Chu-Chu (you heartless bastard)?

There are a few things to which you can attribute my fandom. Chalk it up most notably to Evangelion, the “show that made a million fanboys.” Before that, my interest was spurred on by ultraviolent Kawajiri’s OVAs like Ninja Scroll and Wicked City. Before that, the dark atmosphere of Vampire Hunter D fascinated me.

But before all of that, before I was even old enough to have the slightest idea what “anime” was, I watched cartoons on TV. Now, in the days before “japanimation” became something that companies could sell, the name of the game was adaptation, usually of 10-20 year old shows. And the adapters got everything wrong. They renamed the shows to some stupid nonsense (involving the word “Star” and a verb, usually). They threw Macross in a pot with some Mospeada and Southern Cross and stirred until it curdled into Robotech. And they replaced any lines that they didn’t feel like translating with random yelling and screaming. After all, who cares what them Japs wrote in the first place — it’s just some dumb kid’s show from the country where they make our radios (Contrast this with the aforementioned 90s, when “AUTHENTIC ANIME FROM JAPAN” is here and it’s NOT FOR KIDSSSSSS).

But occasionally, they were right. Yes, “Tranzor Z” is a dumb name. As is Deviline. And Dr. Demon is far less threatening than Dr. Hell. But what’s really important? The giant fucking robot that comes out of a waterfall and tears the shit out of bad guys, occasionally getting upgrades along the way. That’s what’s important. And on Saturday mornings, I sat transfixed as Tranzor Z did just that. I didn’t know or care how old the series was by that point, or what the names of the characters should have been. I was glued to the TV regardless.

So Shin Mazinger Shougeki Z-Hen’s first rocket punch, circa episode 3, wasn’t just an amazing moment. It was a moment of time travel. Time travel that Imagawa himself was obviously partaking in (and milking). Shin Mazinger is full of these moments. After all, it’s specifically built using all the parts you remember and love (some of them upgraded), without all the parts you didn’t like, and then constructed at 20 times the size of the original just so the impact isn’t lost on your cynical adult mind. It’s the Gurren Lagann principle: Its Gainax creators wanted to transport viewers to their childhood by increasing the scale to match your own widened picture of the world. And they did a great job, but they lacked the specificity of Imagawa’s angle. This is childhood, and this is hands down the greatest moment in anime 2009.

If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, call a horse a horse.

The beauty of a human-emotion based story is that it’s context-irrelevant. Mizuhito Akiyama, the writer of the light novel Iriya no Sora, UFO no Natsu (Iriya’s Sky, Summer of the UFOs) managed to create a tale of intense pathos and understated love can live inside a saga of manipulation, secrecy, and conspiracy.

I spent a bit of time early on worrying about how Iriya is not a sci-fi story: science (speculative) fiction generally means creating some sort of technology or alien-based situation — plausible or not — and speculating what might happen to humanity in that situation. Iriya, however, follows the pattern of moe-based bishoujo series and eroge: create a cute girl with a terrible backstory and portray the simple inevitability of what will happen. In this case, rather than some vague but potentially girl-killing disease, it’s a potentially girl-killing war between aliens and earth. Or is it?

It’s appropriate then, with this downward path to tragedy, that Toei’s OVA adaptation of the light novels was helmed by Naoyuki Itou, the director of their Kanon adaptation. The sickening sense of the inevitable that Iriya no Sora pushes in its second half is pretty similar to the Makoto arc of Kanon (though I didn’t see that adapation — I’m going by the Kyoto ’06 version).

But it’s pointless to bemoan what something isn’t. Regardless of your opinion of the bishoujo meta-genre and whether it has any place in your precious science fiction fandom, the OVA has its own merits and faults. Aaaaaand… the faults are many.

For one, Toei is not who you look to for balls-out great animation. Their heyday is long past, and even footage of Kenshiro was recycled quite a bit. It’s not awful, not by a longshot, but the CG is uninspired and character designs just aren’t that appealing. Newer guys like Kyoto and SHAFT can make a prettier heroine and a less irritating-looking male lead these days, and Toei’s generic shocks of hair in the front just aren’t doing it anymore.

The bigger problems, which probably stem from the short length of the OVA, are the baffling pacing and forced situations. The events of episode 5 are a bit of an enigma, not so much in the “what?” department, but the “why?” one. If you want to be an apologist, you can just let it be — the story is simple and you probably won’t have an issue following it. But if you really expect events to flow naturally, you’ll feel pretty jarred by a sudden change of heart that just as inexplicably changes right back. Ultimately, these events are water under the bridge in the overarching plot, but taking up a whole 6th of the series with badly conceived plot development makes for a bad ratio.

The good stuff is a little more sparse, and mostly comes from the strength of the original story. It’s nothing new (did I mention Makoto, or maybe inevitability?) but it tugs at the heartstrings at just the right times, and the characters have just enough guts to elevate them above the noncommittal Key-types. Punching, slicing out tracking implants from your own neck with a box cutter, even killing are all possible in Iriya’s world of love conquering all.

In the end, tragedy is inevitable, but it’s not quite that manipulative kind of tragedy from the “cry game” VNs. It’s still rich in moe, an attribute which in my mind will keep this from being completely sci-fi. And with all that pathos and cute-girl factor, I wish the character design was a little more appealing. But overall, you could do a lot worse than Irya No Sora, considering its small time investment and fairly consistent level of enjoyability.

Yesterday I mentioned one of the going theories about Bakemonogatari: that either in Nisoisin’s original story or in the mind of Wackiyuki Shinbo, protagonist Ararararararagi became a parody and an indictment of the spineless nice-guy semi-lolicon tendencies of the viewer. It’s potent stuff; after all, we love to be talked to directly, don’t we? And most movies, books, and anime would just as soon preach at you or humor your worst qualities, so it’s almost refreshing to be sneakily made fun of.

But Bakemonogatari isn’t the first time people have thought about this. IKnight, despite claiming to reach no definite conclusion, ruined pretty much anyone’s ability to write about Gundam 0080: War In The Pocket with his breakdown of the typical “war sucks” standard that most Gundam (supposedly) carries. But despite the excellent case he makes that it’s not always as simple as that, what little Gundam I’ve seen and enjoyed is at its best when it’s making that point. War does suck, especially in a world where even the basic movement of the military devices creates huge collateral damage. And while 0080’s Al might have managed to float through a lot of serious events without grasping the full weight of that, one moment stopped him cold, and probably did the same for you.

I’m talking of course about the harrowing scene after Bernie and Chris’s battle, in which Al finally realizes who’s inside that mean old Feddie mobile suit — and what she’s done to his friend. Al’s temporary catatonia paired nicely with my own shock at the brutality of execution of that scene. It was coming since the moment Chris first entered the Gundam, but I just didn’t expect it to be so intense when it happened.

You can say what you want about war-machine fanatics making the Gundam “war sucks” experience a big ourobouros of irony, and you’d be right. But in moments like this, it’s still the king of hammering home its grim message.

Whether you look at the online response or the crushing domestic sales of the DVDs, Bakemonogatari is not only one of the biggest shows of the year, it’s a huge win for SHAFT and Akiyuki Shinbo, the love-him-or-hate-him iconoclast director. Personally I think it’s one of his best works, and when you think about it, an adaptation seemingly custom made for him. And a big part of that success at large comes from the popularity of its lead haremette, Hitagi Senjougahara.

Now, whether you believe in her authenticity is up to you (thanks ghostlightning). And whether you believe in Shinbo’s version of protagonist Ararararararararagi as a vicious indictment of the viewer, well that’s up to you too. Personally, you can’t discount thinking about either angle. They make this scene that much more delicious. What is she getting at? Is it a giant joke? Why English? To emphasize the joke? Or is Senjougahara, underneath her scary stapler-wielding exterior, so uncomfortable expressing such a sentiment that she has to switch off to another language just to get it out?

Much of this was never quite answered, although Senjougahara finally showed more than just a hint of very real sincerity that gives us plenty of hints. In the end, she really was a girl, and a lovely one at that. And though that final episode was the crowning achievement in the whole surreal ball of wax, this bizarro world confession remains a standout moment that will probably stick in my head longer than most of this list.

Solanin covers the same post-college years as Honey & Clover II that I sometimes get nostalgic for (I call them the “adulthood isn’t really gonna be so bad after all” years). It’s the time when you’re unburdened of the responsibility of school, and the current burdens of work-life don’t seem so bad yet. Doesn’t take long for that to change. But I digress.

Solanin is an empowering, uplifting story that makes following your dreams seem like a realistic and manageable proposition. A small chunk of your dream is still your dream, after all. It’s a feel-good story with lovably flawed characters, and a live performance scene that really makes you feel like you’re in a club watching a band give it their all (which, let’s face it, many bands don’t always do).

But there is a moment. it’s the moment when drummer Billy decides that playing a show is the right thing to do. It’s a mixed bag because he’s also come to the realization that he’s done. The “dream” is over, he’s become that guy who gave up on it. And his only choice left is to reclaim that tiny slice.

This moment haunts me. Dead serious. As a musician, I’ve never planned for huge success — in fact, the types of music I’ve played have never enjoyed widespread notoriety at all — but I always hoped I could get some albums out on real labels, travel around in a van playing music, and hopefully meet some people in other places who’d heard me and were into the same kinds of things. I still don’t know if I’ve given up on that. But that one page of Solanin made me realize that I was Billy too.

I suppose if I lived in a manga it’d be easy to claim that slice of a dream, but my band (who play the most accessible, potentially-successful music I’ve ever done) lives the reality of the situation weekly. We’re no longer the bums that Solanin’s characters are, and jobs, spouses, children, and other commitments threaten at every turn to strike even that small chump-change dream down. But in those moments, I suppose I can always think of Meiko, Katou, and Billy living their moment.

In terms of quality — animation, writing, characters — as well as that pure glued-to-the-screen factor, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 stands out in a (mostly) unimpressive field of competitors this year.

But I think what will stand out in most people’s minds is the moment when they realized… it.

When exactly it happened is something that some viewers had to go back and establish. But for many, this handy infographic sums it up.

Legend:

A: Oh my. This is bad. I wonder if…
B: Oh, it’s really true. And the denial… it’s so heart-wrenching.
C: How, uh… how long are they gonna keep this up?
D: argaaargrgrgashflakjsdasdfklhja

Now the question is, did that slight overemphasis lessen the impact? I suppose it did, but the feeling of disappointment passed. That’s partially due to the strong final episode, which I know left my household all dewey-eyed, and partially due to the simple fact that the series as a whole was great. I haven’t seen that level of emotional intensity, whether it be the very real sense of fear and danger early on or the tragedy of later episodes, in a long time. So regardless of how you feel about “the thing” and its corresponding moment, at least there’s a strong series to go with it.

That’s the name of the 14th episode of Planetes and it means what it says in more than one way, some of which will spoil you if you haven’t seen this marvelous show, so don’t read on if that’s the case.

The first half of Planetes is basically a slice of life of orbital garbage collectors, set in a marvelously intricate sci-fi near future. There’s workplace drama, issues of ambition and social status, and even some office romance. It’s actually the culmination of that workplace fraternizing that provides the turning point. Hachimaki’s forced to reexamine his priorities in light of his relationship with Tanabe and his opportunity to make it to Jupiter. Not only that, the tone of the show starts changing dramatically from that point.

Really, the sad truth is that it never got any better for Tanabe and Hachimaki than their first kiss. It was all downhill from there.

Ghostlightning became briefly obsessed with the concept of what happens after the climactic hookup, and who can blame him — anime so often gives us a “chase is better than the catch” feeling by focusing 13-50 (or more) episodes on getting to the culmination of a schoolkid’s crush and showing us nothing of what happens after. Of course, that implies that everything is idyllic and wonderful, and that there’s no possible drama in two people who admit that they’re in love with one another. How incredibly unlike real life that is.

In the end, Hachimaki righted his wrongs and realized that his dreams could coexist with the more mundane aspects of his life (as long as they were willing to wait seven years…), and he tied it up in a really romantic and cute kinda way. But in the context of both the series and anime as a whole, episode 14’s “turning point” was a hard moment to top.

This is a short one, because honestly I don’t feel much like writing about Honey & Clover right now. I already did it, (warning: same pancake) and though I feel like there’s more to say, I’m not sure how to say it because H&C kind of flew by in my brain.

Why?

Because it’s the first thing I “marathoned” in a really long time. The marathon is the catnip of the anime fan, and the bane of the ones with real lives and jobs. It’s what happens when you are so sucked into a series that you’re preoccupied by its characters during work or school. You’re distant in conversation with real human beings because you don’t care what happens to them, you care what happens to HAGU DAMMIT. And you have to bear witness to the constant fight between your unstoppable desire to keep going and your sad knowledge that you’re bringing the end on sooner.

In this case, bring it on because it was worth getting to the end again (as evidenced by how many re-watches a mere mention could trigger). So the moment in this case…? It’s realizing that I was in the thick of a marathon and I wasn’t going to stop until it was over.