Category Archives: Essay

A Girl on the Shore – Part One

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“We used to wait / We used waste hours just walkin’ around / We used to wait / All those wasted lives in the wilderness downtown.”

– Arcade Fire

Inio Asano certainly has a way with words. Or it might be better to say he has no way with them. His stories seem translucent, any wisp of authorial voice appearing only in the fringes of unvarnished naturalism. He gives his characters’ interiority the drama they believe it deserves, but any magic in his stories is the magic of the world as it is. Characters interrupt each other and start again, tossing out simple observations and losing their trains of thought. You can feel the wind blowing between the staggered refrains of his mixed-up kids.

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Clarity and Humanity in The Beginner’s Guide

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The following post will contain plenty of spoilers for The Beginner’s Guide. I generally don’t include warnings like this, but consider the game is only a couple hours and well worth your time if you haven’t played it, I figured I might as well let you know now!

It feels more than a little awkward to be offering criticism of The Beginner’s Guide. After all, the game’s “villain,” if you can call him that, is a figure so intent on assigning a specific meaning to someone else’s work, and giving it a solvable “answer,” that he drives that friend out of creation altogether. On top of that, the game regularly analyzes itself – even if the narrator is incredibly presumptuous in the ways he defines and redefines the work of his friend, many of the questions the game implies are so directly entertained by that one self-conscious voice that analysis almost seems superfluous. The Beginner’s Guide is a set of concise arguments laid out both in dialogue and in actual, physical game space. It doesn’t have to say “for example” as it talks about some principle of game design or the fan/creator relationship – you play the example as the theory is discussed.

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The Magic of the Stage in Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju

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My newest editorial is up over at ANN! This one very unsurprisingly tackles my favorite show of the season, Rakugo Shinju, going into it largely from the perspective of how its framing choices elevate its performance scenes. Rakugo definitely gives me more than enough to talk about, and it was actually kind of a challenge here to decide what not to discuss. The show is a fantastic work, the easy highlight of the year so far, and I really enjoyed digging into it. I hope you enjoy the piece!

The Magic of the Stage in Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju

Rakugo

Missed Chances in Colorful

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I really, really wish Colorful were a better movie than it is. The kind of movie that Colorful is trying to be is a great idea – a painful, intimate portrait of depression, where any slight hints of the supernatural are really just there to better illustrate the context of the protagonist’s life. A movie that fully embodies the mindset of feeling divorced from happiness, and the reality of an unhappy adolescence. Colorful works somewhat better in retrospect, but even looking back on its trials, it’s a messy, awkward movie, one too caught up in its own bitterness and too hamstrung by its conceit to really invite the audience in. But it certainly tries to be something.

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The Song We Heard When We Were Young: Solanin

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“Solanin” is the correct title for this story – but I’ll get to that later. First, as these things generally go, I should lay out some context.

Written and drawn by Inio Asano when he was around twenty-four years old, Solanin is roughly as twenty-four years old as any story can be, complete with faded jeans and tacky shoes and shirts you probably should have left at college. The story’s protagonist is Meiko Inoue, a girl stuck in a job she hates a year and a half out from an aimless formal education. Her boyfriend Taneda lives in her apartment with her, not because this is a considered long-term arrangement, but because his part-time design work doesn’t pay enough to cover rent. Meiko is stressed about her work, but doesn’t see any alternatives; Taneda is supportive to a fault, but insecure about his own expectations and about what Meiko wants him to be. Together they are nervous and unsure and basically the same as any other young person who feels like this can’t be what adulthood is really like.

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Ripples and Shadows in Angel’s Egg

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Angel’s Egg has a firm reputation as one of the premier “anime art films,” for whatever that’s worth. In anime fandom, it doesn’t really mean much; fans have a tendency to scorn the unfamiliar, and when you get to the kind of visual storytelling or narratively disruptive scene-setting that are often part and parcel with “arthouse film,” people who are into anime for the girls or robots tend to check out. “Pretentious” is the word – a word that in fandom dialect has come to mean anything outside of the familiar, and when your “familiar” is almost strictly genre fiction for teenagers, the Other can be a fairly broad place.

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Parallel or Together in the Idolmaster

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It’d be easy for the Idolmaster movie to be a strict love letter to the fans, and barely a movie at all. The Love Live movie did that, which wasn’t really a surprise – Love Live’s always been a series in direct conversation with its fandom, and so the fact that its movie was basically just the cast doing their bits and then a bunch of cute performances seemed pretty appropriate. And The Idolmaster is a series with so many good moments that it’s essentially created its own robust vocabulary of character and narrative touchstones to reference. You could have a sequence of Iori and Yayoi being an awkward couple, an extended return to the Sunday game show, a bit where Hibiki and her dog conduct an interview with some grumpy antagonist, and there you go – ninety minutes achieved, checks are in the mail.

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A Fire Burns in Concrete Revolutio

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Aw dang it’s time for a new essay yeaaah. Concrete Revolutio is absolutely stuffed with great ideas, so the biggest issue here was really just tying them all together into a coherent piece. I’m pretty happy with the result, and hope you enjoy the writeup. The show’s only half over, but it’s already one of the richest narratives of the last few years, and I really, truly, desperately hope it sticks the landing. A good second half could make Concrete Revolutio a legitimate classic.

Anyway, enough preamble, let’s get to the writeup!

A Fire Burns in Concrete Revolutio

Concrete Revolutio

The Star Under Lights: Millennium Actress

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Millennium Actress’s credits open with the view from a train, as light flickers past in a tunnel before giving way to city skyline. It’s fitting that an animated movie about the deception of film begins with those flickering lights; the light of a train on a tunnel is itself one of the simplest forms of animation, a series of starkly lit shots creating the appearance of motion. As the view transitions to a bombed city under blue skies, the image shifts, with a plane overhead melting into first a modern passenger jet, and then a rocket in space. Fluid transitions across time and space are an accepted part of reality in this world; what matters is not the base nature of the world, but the dramatic throughline of the object in flight. What catches the eye is what remains. What we remember is what exists.

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Forgiveness For When Marnie Was There

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It’s hard to forgive. As self-focused creatures, we want to believe in a just world, one that will repay our pain with some equal kindness or justice. When we are wronged by others, when we are abandoned or let down, we don’t want to simply accept that pain as the cost of engagement. We want others to understand how much they’ve hurt us, and to give us back the hurt they’ve caused. Forgiveness means acknowledging that things aren’t fair, and that sometimes we must give more than we take, and that embracing others in spite of pain is a constant wager of sacrifice, a road on which the friction of disappointment may one day wear down the strength of our love.

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