T w e n t y S i d e d

Don McClane has a new anime blog.

And so another perfectly respectable blogger falls in with a bunch of these “japanimation” types I keep hearing about. What a shame.

It always starts small: just a few gateway shows on the cartoon network, or maybe watching a seemingly innocent anime with a friend, “just to see what all the fuss is about”. Pretty soon they’re running one of these anime blog things, learning Japanese, calling themselves otaku, and hanging out with girls dressed up like Beldandy.

Parents: Talk to your kids about the dangers of Japanimation today.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Kino’s Journey is a fantastic series. Kino travels from one land to another by motorcycle, visiting some very strange and unexpected towns and cities along the way. Most places she visits are more or less isolated, and only hear of other countries through travelers like Kino. Each land has different customs, technology levels, political structure, etc. To me it felt like a series of Twilight Zone episodes.

Which brings me to my favorite episode of the series. In this case, it was Kino who adopted the wrong solution. But instead of pounding the point home, the story let me follow Kino through her reasoning. It used my expectations against me, and taught me early on that I shouldn’t jump to conclusions with this series. It was a bit disturbing and stayed with me for quite a while after I saw it. Single-episode spoilers follow:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Kino’s Journey”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I watched Steamboy last night. Tremendous visuals. It’s a period piece set in Victorian times, but where steam technology has been taken a little further then we did. (And later, further than we have gone with combustion or even nuke power. More on that in a sec.) The scenery, clothing styles, buildings, and furniture are wonderfully rendered and show a great attention to the style of the time.

The main character, Ray Steam, encounters one group after another who are after the mighty super-steam technology he has in his posession. There were several factions, and they all seemed like bad guys to me, even the ones who were members of Ray’s family. Everyone is a madman or a jerk. Even the female lead is a snooty, hateful brat who has a screechy voice and beats her dog.

As the move drags on I begin to wonder if they will have a single empathetic character in the story besides Ray. (And even Ray isn’t THAT likeable. Most of the time he’s standing around with his mouth open gawking at the amazing machines or the absurd things people are saying to him. He doesn’t really get his act together until pretty late in the game.)

I think the problem is that Ray isn’t really the main character, the machines are. We spend way more time looking at fantastic machinery than at any of the characters. Did I mention the visuals are tremendous? They are. Just incredible.

Some machines are impressive. Some are whimsical. Others are preposterous…

…such as men flying around in heavy armor with steam-powered planes on their backs. Sigh.

Like I said, everyone is a bad guy and I didn’t feel particularly attached to any of the characters. I didn’t care who got the steam technology. Towards the end, I thought of Akira. This movie had the same feel for me. Like Akira, this is a story about a bunch of hateful, self-interested idiots and some sort of uber-technology. Like Akira, by the end I was watching just to see who won, but not because I was particularly interested in any of the characters. The characters made passionate philosophical speaches to which I was indifferent. Like Akira, the story seemed to really go off the rails at the end and things stopped making sense. Like Akira, the final scenes end in a confrontation that can only be resolved by animating lots of steam, smoke, vapor, mist, dust clouds, and explosions.

After it was over I looked it up, and found that Akira and Steamboy have the same writer / director. So that explains that.

All the amazing effects and eye candy got to be tiresome after a while. Each time I thought the movie had finally peaked, it went even further and came up with even more amazing (yet ridiculous) machines for us to gawk at. Yeah, I get it already. Your artists are really good.

Now get a writer and you’ll have something.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.