Category Archives: Essay

The Necessity of Shingo Natsume

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“My style is to have no fixed style. Other people would accuse me of having a style, though. It may be that I understand myself the least.” – Shingo Natsume

I’ll admit, I got off on the wrong foot with Shingo Natsume. My formal introduction to his work was One Punch Man, a show that seemed to me an embodiment of anime’s increasing artlessness and lack of narrative ambition, the growing divide between animated aesthetic form and meaningful narrative, emotional, or thematic content. It was simply “man punches hard” animated as beautifully as possible, and “man punches hard” is a story anime has told countless times, a story perhaps only outnumbered in its evocations by “me horny.” And as the years have gone by, it seems this divide between form and content has only widened, with modern animator troves like Jobless Reincarnation offering nothing of substance, while sequels and indistinguishable light novel adaptations dominate the wider landscape.

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Bloom Into You – Volume 5

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The first word I’d use to describe Bloom Into You’s manga, particularly in contrast with its animated adaptation, is sparse. Panel compositions are often defined by their vast, empty spaces, leaving plenty of room for the characters’ lingering, unspoken thoughts. This is a fine choice for a story like Bloom Into You, a story so preoccupied with the sense of deficiency or emptiness that haunts its two leads. Emptiness is what Touko sees when she considers what the future might bring – a wholly empty sky, the nothingness where her voice trails off, and the blueprint of behavior left by her sister ends.

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Sanctuary, Destiny, and The Deer King

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If you were to make a list of the most distinguished animation directors of all time, Masashi Ando would be one of the first names included. In spite of never serving as a director himself, Ando has collaborated with and elevated the works of practically all the greatest film directors of the past thirty years. Ando has worked as character designer and animation director on some of Hayao Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon’s most esteemed films, and has continued to cement his legacy by collaborating with the next generation of talent, with his guiding hand on animation direction contributing to Your Name’s global success. As such, when it was announced that Masashi Ando was working alongside fellow Ghibli alumni Masayuki Miyauji in directing a feature film, at least a touch of hyperventilating was in order.

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Witch Hat Atelier: Magic and Its Misuses

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The first volume of Witch Hat Atelier was absolutely delightful for all sorts of reasons, ranging from its charming heroine Coco to the ornate illustrations that bring her world to life, imbuing every page and panel with a vitality born of soft line and incidental detail. But what most impressed me about this manga, so much that I in fact centered my first reflection on it, was Atelier’s insistence on treating magic as a practical, practice-oriented craft, rather than some fantastical power that some gain naturally and others could never possess.

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Chainsaw Man – Volume Two

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The second volume of Chainsaw Man is a good deal like the first: irreverent, incendiary, and too preoccupied with the base necessity of things like food and shelter to concern itself with high-minded heroism. As Denji and Power are drawn further into the machinations of the Public Safety Bureau, they remain emphatically indifferent to its goals, finding more motivation in the prospect of boobs or gum than the pursuit of justice or civil order. And how can you blame them? What has justice or civil order ever done for them, either when they were wild and desperate on the streets, or now as imprisoned agents of the state? If Denji and Power come across like beasts, it is only them reacting to a world that’s already assigned them that designation, a world that wouldn’t accept them even if they played by its stultifying, hypocritical rules.

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Intimacy’s Vanguard: Kaze to Ki no Uta

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Modern anime convention rests upon a scaffolding that has been built up over decades, a series of aesthetic and narrative conventions established one seminal work at a time. The more I explore this scaffolding, the more I find to appreciate in modern anime; as such, I was eager to check out Kaze to Ki no Uta, the film adaptation of one of the earliest and most influential works of shounen-ai manga. The manga’s explorations of sadomasochism, incest, and other charged topics made it controversial from the start; in fact, author Keiko Takemiya’s editors waited seven years from her first conception of the story to actual publishing. And its release was a lightning bolt; a hit from the start, it would help popularize shounen-ai more generally, opening the door for manga and anime’s subsequent explorations of queer identity.

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Yuureitou – Volume 4

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It’s been six chaotic years since I last wrote about Yuureitou, yet the work is such a singular, insistent creation that jumping into it was as easy as if I’d never left. Yuureitou clearly has a few key influences, and is not afraid to bash them together in strange, sometimes even ludicrous ways, all for the sake of promoting a unique emotional or dramatic result. Part Hitchcockian thriller, part reflection on gender identity, and part grindhouse or Hammer horror, Yuureitou is happy to swing wildly between these passions at a moment’s notice, daring the audience to challenge its nature much like the manga’s characters often do. The manga buries itself in the messiness of identity, and through its meandering course exemplifies the multiplicity of our experience, the reality that we are all composed of jagged, contradictory instincts and emotions.

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Thunderbolt Fantasy: Bewitching Melody of the West

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It is always a delight to return to Thunderbolt Fantasy. The production’s puppet theatrics are genuinely entrancing, and Gen Urobuchi is to my mind one of the greatest writers to ever work in anime. His stories of mankind rallying against brutal architectures of despair, be they oppressive governments or supernatural phenomenon, are always brimming with thoughtful arguments, hard-tested themes, and engaging characters. But as a show like Thunderbolt Fantasy demonstrates, Urobuchi is also perfectly comfortable outside of those questions of human nature and utilitarianism, weaving thrilling tales of swordsmen and wizards that are also enriched by his intelligence and wit.

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Spirit Circle: Why Do We Live?

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Why do we live, and what do we live for? There is no score sheet to play towards in human existence, though some might frame wealth, power, or some other metric as their own measure of success. But can a human life be measured in terms of success or failure? Is failing to seize opportunity failing at life itself, or are such disappointments themselves intrinsic to the experience? Is a life born into suffering worth any less than a life born into splendor, or is suffering somehow meaningful as well? Maybe seeking meaning in life is itself a trap, one designed to rob us of enjoying what is in favor of pining for what might be. If our only certainty is change, perhaps our most vital skill is mutability, and thus “why do we live” demands an answer as flexible as life itself.

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Anxiety in the Plague Years: Bo Burnham’s Inside

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It’s a little tricky for me to go about “unpacking” Bo Burnham’s Inside, as the special is largely concerned with Bo Burnham unpacking himself. What does Bo feel, and how does Bo feel about that, and how does Bo feel about feeling that way about that – all these questions and more are answered as the special progresses. Across an hour and change of songs and sketches, Burnham offers a wildly self-conscious reflection on the already self-conscious ways we present ourselves as modern, perpetually online human beings, exacerbated by the forced solitude of the COVID age. Through cataloging and critiquing his every wayward thought, Burnham seeks to paradoxically create something universal, something that speaks to a common experience of watching the world burn from inside your own shrieking brain. It’s harrowing, hilarious, and maybe even a touch profound. 

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