Category Archives: Essay

Light Through Glass: Rebels of the Neon God

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Rain splatters against the phone booth glass, drops falling like the embers of fireworks spiraling in the distance. Their trails are lit by an indistinct whirl of city lights, perhaps cars or fluorescent signs, made obscure and thus somehow entrancing, their uncertainty of form promising riches and wonders. The beads of water are like liquid jewels, a beautiful contrast against the soot-streaked interior. Two boys huddle inside, hungrily passing cigarettes between them, then inserting a screwdriver into the terminal. A waiting bag is filled with the phone’s bounty, loose coins a pale imitation of those glittering lights – but here in the city, all truly bright things are indistinct and out of reach.

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Sailor Moon and the Pleasures of Adaptation

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The past few weeks have seen me charging through Sailor Moon, which I’ve long considered one of the most egregious outstanding gaps in my anime education. The series pits Usagi Tsukino and her fellow middle schoolers-slash-sailor guardians against a wide array of foes, as they stumble their way through adolescence while also fighting off supernatural beasties on a seemingly daily basis. Though most episodes follow a fairly similar pattern, the show remains consistently heartwarming, and has been a generally rewarding ride – though not, I must admit, for precisely the reasons I expected.

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What We Do To Bond: Eva 3.0+1.0

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The world did not need more Evangelion. The original series and its capstone film still exist, and are still phenomenal; the Rebuild series could not recapture that lightning in a bottle, nor could it meaningfully improve on the artistry with which Gainax and their collaborators first brought their ideas to life. The original Evangelion was a masterpiece that permanently altered its medium, for better and for worse. The Rebuilds can only hope to echo or augment their predecessor, whatever power they might possess existing largely because they are positioned on the shoulders of a colossus.

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Common Faults and Monsters

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Like most films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Monster begins quietly, tracking the shoes of a child as they silently navigate a grassy embankment. The movement is furtive, hesitant; the boy we are following seems uncertain of his destination, yet cordoned in his wandering by fear of reprisal. Beyond him, electric lights glimmer in reflection upon a dark river, while the sirens of the city howl in the distance. We pull up: a firetruck, a bustling crowd, and a great burning building looming in the distance. How can such an aberrant form coexist with this gentle moment, this private odyssey of youth on the riverbanks? Odd how a panning of the camera can change a scene so utterly, make beauty into ugliness, or the terrible glorious to behold.

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Phoenix – Volume 3

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Phoenix’s first volume took us back to the dawn of Japanese history, detailing the selfish ambitions and overwhelming violence of the island’s origins, how “Japan was formed as a nation through invasion, war, and slaughter.” Its second volume sped forward to the end of human history, offering a vision of the future where our shortsightedness and distrust of the Other led to the destruction of not just our species, but life on earth altogether. Though the phoenix itself embodies hope of a better way, that hope is clearly a distant one; for as Tezuka has continuously demonstrated, individual acts of charity or enlightenment cannot halt the overall tide of tribalism, indolence, and desperation for personal glory that seems to define our greater nature.

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The Boy and the Heron

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Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today I’m thrilled to announce that we’ll be stomping our way through Hayao Miyazaki’s latest allegedly final feature, last year’s How Do You Live?, released abroad as The Boy and the Heron. Though its original title refers to a 1937 novel by Genzaburō Yoshino, it is apparently not a direct adaptation, and that’s frankly all I want to know about it. The film’s own promotion was limited to a single, ambiguous image of a man decked in a bird-like costume, implying both extraordinary confidence on Studio Ghibli’s part, and also an apparent desire for audiences to enter the film with no meaningful preconceptions.

That’s an easy enough request for me to fulfill; new Miyazaki films are rare events, and I count myself lucky that I’ve been able to admire this last act of his illustrious career in real time. From animating feats of fancy in Toei’s early films like Puss ‘n Boots and The Flying Phantom Ship, Miyazaki went on to spearhead some of the greatest TV productions of the ‘70s and ‘80s, before forming Studio Ghibli and becoming anime’s premier international ambassador. His remarkable catalog needs no introduction, and recent works like The Wind Rises demonstrate he’s still as passionate and determined to express a personal truth of artistry as ever. Let’s see what The Boy and the Heron has to offer!

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Witch Hat Atelier and the Magic of Discovery

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The inside cover of Witch Hat Atelier’s sixth volume offers us a beautiful vision of undersea life, all captured through a diamond window pane as Coco stares outwards, hand pressed curiously, almost longingly against the glass. The text echoes both the magnificence of the scene and the necessity of care and confinement, stating: “The Assembly at the bottom of the sea. A bulwark to bestow witches safety, a prison to confine witches daily.” As Witch Hat Atelier has told us time and again, the unbound potential of magic means the most necessary quality of any would-be mage is restraint, an understanding that magic must be handled with care if it is to avoid inflicting more harm than it resolves. Albeit unknowingly, Coco destroyed an entire river ecosystem to save one human life – and to be frank, the fact that she didn’t understand what she was doing is no point in her favor. Humans are capable of unimaginable wonders, but ambition untethered by experience and restraint is frequently a recipe for disaster.

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Blue Flag – Volume 3

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The first image of Blue Flag’s third volume, presented before we even get to its opening chapter, is of Taichi and Touma playing happily as friends, captioned with “Together as children despite the differences in their interests.” It’s a moment that captures a great deal about Blue Flag – the manga’s veneration of the incidental, deeply specific moments that survive in memory and ultimately shape our perception of our own life, as well as its indifference to the superficial markers of alleged kinship or similarity that define so many adolescent relationships. No common interest could equal the bond of shared experience and sympathy connecting Taichi and Touma. The people who are most important to us are not necessarily the people who are most like ourselves – they are those who inform and expand our understanding of both ourselves and others, securing their position among those dazzling incidental fragments that encompass our life in retrospect.

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Phoenix – Volume 2

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The first volume of Phoenix offered a bleak portrayal of human nature, emphasizing how we are fundamentally little different from the ants and the beasts, and how our superstitious clamoring for eternal life is ultimately a self-destructive fool’s errand. Though individuals were occasionally able to rise above the small-minded perspectives and fanatical loyalties that defined them, the overall portrait of humanity was a grim one, a detailing of a species too preoccupied with personal glory to even achieve the philosophical unity with nature of animals. The only balm against this scorching condemnation was the assurance that at the very least, the events taking place were far, far before our time, a reflection of a less civilized era of humanity.

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Phoenix – Volume 1

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I’ll admit I know embarrassingly little about Tezuka’s life and work, beyond the obvious impact he had as both one of the pioneers of manga and the originator of TV animation. There was short-form anime before Tezuka, but it was the cutthroat bargain he struck in terms of “limited animation” that allowed anime to be in any way financially viable as a weekly television medium. And to be honest, his bargain was itself a pretty loose interpretation of “financially viable,” a labor-heavy yet nonetheless bare-bones adaptive method that still has repercussions in how animators are criminally underpaid today.

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