I don’t know about you but I don’t go to the cinema very often. It’s just so expensive these days. It is very rare that I really want to pay so much just to see something on a big screen surrounded by crashes and bangs. Since 3D got popular, it has only gotten worse. The last thing I want to do is pay more for an over-hyped special effect which at best is unnecessary and at worst distracting.

Most of the time I only go to the movies to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster, which means having to endure (and paying extra for the privilege of wearing) those 3D glasses but it does give me the relief of understanding everything in the film. In Japan dubbing foreign films is not so popular, even with animation, so non-Japanese films appear in their original language which 9 times out of ten will be English.

I can happily sit in the cinema for a couple of hours, turn my brain off and enjoy some vacuous entertainment the way Hollywood wants me to. The only distracting thing is the presence of Japanese subtitles which you can’t help but try to read during a film’s duller moments (or in the case of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the whole damn film). In 3D movies the subtitles annoyingly jump out at you as well, making them even more in your face, literally.

However when I want to see a Japanese film, I would prefer to see those subtitles that seem like such an annoyance when watching films in my native tongue. Thus with Japanese movies, despite living in Japan, I generally have to wait for some sort of American DVD release before I can watch them. There are some films though, generally adaptations of things from other media that I love, which I just have to see NOW. Thus I have been to the cinema a few times to sit there straining away, trying to work out what is being said while all around me sit there all relaxed munching on popcorn.

The feeling I get from other people and, to be honest, deep in the dark recesses of my own heart is that people would rather not pay expensive cinema prices to sit in a dark room and have incomprehensible words played at them at high volume. I think there is a bit of a fear there and I can say that the few Japanese movies I’ve seen at the cinema are all remakes of stories I know well anyway.

You can count those films on less than 1 hand too, the two Evangelion remakes, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney and Rurouni Kenshin. Watching them has been very unique and eye-opening experiences.

I watched the first Evangelion film a long time ago and went in with no delusions that I would actually understand anything. I hadn’t been studying Japanese for very long and was just along to watch the pretty colours and flashing lights projected on the screen. There was very little different from the tv show that I had watched an obscene number of times so I knew everything that was happening even if I didn’t understand what they were saying.

The 2nd Eva film played havoc with my expectations however. I left the theatre pretty proud of myself, happily declaring that I had understood 70% of it despite them deviating from the TV series in some ways. I also marvelled about how unexpected these changes were, especially when they switched around characters and had me thinking they had killed an important cast member off. That had caught me totally off guard and I was so shocked. It was only when I watched an English subtitled version of it that I realised they had flat-out said that the character would be there two scenes before hand AND that she wasn’t dead just in sick bay all along. I felt like a right fool and watching the English translation made the film worse in my eyes. They should have kept it a secret until the last-minute and they should have made it seem like they had killed that girl off, it would have been so much better.

With Phoenix Wright, the first part stuck close to the original story, so I took it all in my stride and enjoyed it. The finale of the film took place in a court room, with all the specialised words that entails, coupled with the fact that it differed from the game quite a bit by the end. I was completely lost as the credit began to roll.

It felt like the end had dragged on for ages and as a result I did not enjoy it as much as I could have. The fact that the English version of the game it was based on changed all the names of the characters didn’t help me keep track of who was who either.

And so, 800 words into this post, I finally get to the reason I’m writing this. Last week I saw the Rurouni Kenshin movie. I thought it was as about as good as a live action anime adaptation can be. All the actors cast looked and acted the part, there was a nice mix of playing it mostly realistically with the odd impossible moment.

Before I watched it I was wondering how it could tell all of the first third of the (rather large) Kenshin story in one movie. In the original, the stories were told one after the other but in this film it had them happen concurrently and it weaved the various tales together well. Sure, they cut out one fan favourite character but replaced him with another to make up for it. Kenshin is an anime that I really loved when I first watched it and there is even a flashback scene that is almost shot for shot the same as in the Kenshin OVA, which I thought was a nice little bit of fan service for those that know its significance.

I thought the film was wonderful and I felt that I had understood a large chunk of it, I have been studying Japanese for a good 5 years now after all and I know the original story pretty well. I am eager to watch a translated version of the film to find out if I understood the plot correctly or I just made assumptions based on educated guesses.

Finally, I have to mention the best reason to go to the cinema in Japan, the anti-piracy message that plays before the film. The camera may be doing something illegal but he sure can dance!

To Japanese women just about everything can be described as cute. That boy, those clothes, that drain, those leaves on the floor, that lunch box, anything. This leads to a bit of a rejection to this word and all it stands for, as far as I am concerned.

Moe (pronounced mo-é) is Japanese term for super cute things, it is mired in geeky subculture. Especially stuff such as maid cafés, cat girls and anime. According to wikipedia anime moe character designs have:

Large eyes (1/5 size of face)
Small nose
Flat face
Tall iris
Body 5.7 heads tall
Thin limbs
Large head
Colourful hair
Fringe over eyes

And I don’t like it one bit.

When I see an anime or manga with intense moe styling I am usually rather put off and refuse to even give it a chance. This all changed though when I first heard about an anime series called Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

My relationship with this show did not get off to the best of starts, at first I was put off by the silly name and then I saw that it was a Magical Girl anime, the genre that brought us Sailor Moon. Finally I saw the character designs and they were as moe as can be. As a result I completely wrote off the show as something sickly sweet for little girls.

The show just wouldn’t go away though and I found various essays about it invading my internet browser. Most of these said that this show was something special and different. Suddenly things about it’s production started to jump out at me. While the frilly, frilly character designs were off-putting, some of the background designs I was noticing looked like the contents of a deranged fever dream and were very intriguing indeed. I also read that a former hentai director was one of the main creative minds behind it and that showed it may just be trying to do something different, so I decided to give it a go.

Things did not start too well, it seemed like it would be a very by the numbers TV show albeit with some funky dream scape sections. Just about as I was going to give up on it something unexpected happened that caused me to let out a gasp and the show revealed it’s true colours.

It is just so DARK….

…and cruel.

From here on in it begins to deconstruct what it is to be a magical girl and that maybe it is not all dainty outfits and lolly pops after all. Once you get into the mindset of the show you can certainly see where all the plot threads are going as they are introduced but it is fun to see just how far they push it.

Once the dust settles you realise that this is a landmark show. Much like Evangelion before it, it takes what has been done before and puts a new spin on things. Like Evangelion there will be hundreds of copycat shows appearing that don’t quite understand why this show was so successful in the first place. Unlike Evangelion however, it does not seem to have broken into mainstream consciousness and may remain something that only anime fans are really aware of.

It not a perfect show however, I do like that this series took my preconceptions of moe designed shows and threw them in the bin (and then stamped on it a bit) but it is perhaps a little too dark for it’s own good. Once you realise that nothing good will ever happen to any of the characters it all becomes a bit too depressing for it’s own good. It’s hard to tell if it even ended on a high note or not.

Madoka Magica has shown me that I should be a bit more open to media which has aspects that would put me off normally. God knows I get frustrated when people ignore the things that I recommend because of some silly reason, I had better stop doing it myself.

I really should give the K-Ons (more moe designs), Babylon 5s (can’t take another Star Trek style scifi), Battlestar Galaticas (same) and Bright Eyeses (I blame Jo Whiley) of this world a try because I just might end up liking them.

I really should have remembered the melon bread.

I’ve been a bit of an anime fan for a long time. However, recently I have become a bit stuck in my ways, I don’t really watch too many new shows and those that I do usually have something in common with the old shows that I love. Either they are some kind of sequel or made by the same production company or something.

Of these new shows some have delighted me (Evangelion films), some have disappointed me (Macross Frontier) and others have confused me (Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt).

Nothing that has been made in the last 10 years has entertained me quite as much as the old TV shows and films I watched in my teens. Something that many of those shows had in common was the music, brilliantly written by Yoko Kanno.

Back in the day I used to enjoy listening to soundtracks while doing school or university work. I found that listening to them let me think more than regular songs. I guess it was the lack of lyrics that helped. Now that I have no essays to write, pretty much the only soundtracks that remain on my MP3 player are those by Yoko Kanno.

As I grow older I am always seeking out new musical experiences in a hope of finding something that can touch my very soul in the same way Ringo Shiina’s music did when I first heard it. That day has not yet come but sometimes when I hear a bit of music for the first time I get an odd feeling of déjà vu and think that I have heard the song before. I dig around my brain and realise the similarity is often with a Yoko Kanno song. This is happening with extraordinary regularity and although I’m only listening to them for the first time most of these pieces were written way before Kanno thought her stuff up.

The time when I really reached braking point with her music though was when I first listened to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space by Spiritualized, an album described by the BBC as a towering artistic statement. I thought it was indeed a great album but I felt that nagging feeling while listening to it that I had heard music like this before. Straight after listening, I played the 1st Ghost in the Shell soundtrack and lo and behold half the songs on there were pretty much directly lifted from that Spiritualized album. I was kind of disgusted, especially as Kanno was an artist I held in such high regard and I just found that my favourite song of hers was basically a rip off of another work.

So for quite some time I basically stopped listening to her music. Shunning her whenever her music came up when randomly playing my entire music library but I did not remove it. You see, I think it is just too good. Whether she lifts some of her music wholesale from others or not, almost every piece of music she creates sounds wonderful and is a joy to listen to.

I am obviously aware that music is not created in a vacuum, people will always be inspired by others with what they write. However taking music written by others and claiming it is your own is a very bad thing indeed. I am unable to check if Kanno credits the people whose work she uses because the CD’s of hers I own all are in England and the credits in them are probably in Japanese anyway. When I googled to see if others had noticed the same things I had, I saw that with some of the songs people have accused her of plagiarism for, she had actually worked with the original writer when creating her music.

Another way to look at it is to think of Cowboy Bebop. Cowboy Bebop was a wonderful TV show which she worked on and that show’s entire ethos was Jazz. While I don’t know much about Jazz, I hear that people often “quote” other songs and work them into their own sounds. Cowboy Bebop was a show that did this from its very core. The show worked by taking inspiration from other films, TV shows and pop culture and working it into it’s own story, taking other great ideas and changing them, putting a unique spin on them. The show’s music was no exception, just the other day a friend linked a Jazz song (Sing, Sing, Sing by Benny Goodman) on twitter and I gave it a listen. I found that the opening bars were just like Cowboy Bebop’s song, Black Coffee. However after the opening the songs do go in separate directions.

So maybe Yoko Kanno’s way of creating music is the Cowboy Bebop way, the Jazz way. Taking “licks” from other works and doing new things with them and creating great things. Maybe she finds happiness when someone notices her inspirations hidden in the songs she writes. This I think is a very cool way to make music, however I also think that she should be careful sometimes, the things she did with Synchronized’s music is not so much a homage but dangerously close to copying.

If you want to hear some of these similarities in her music for yourself you can check out a few videos people have made on Youtube.

Last week the time that I had been dreading finally arrived, I had run out of contact lenses. When I came to Japan I brought about 12 boxes of them with me, a whole years supply. Just so I would avoid the trouble of getting hold of them here.

Well to cut a long story short, trouble has a habit of finding me and I needed to have an eye test before I could get hold of any more contacts. While in the waiting room for the eye test I discovered a coffee table book which had pictures of famous glasses wearers.

Who should I spot right next to Woody Allen but….

Gendo Ikari.

Evangelion: transcending reality.

The eye test itself was fairly straight forward thankfully. The only stumbling block was that rather than giving me an eye chart of Roman characters they presented me with a Hiragana one. My Hiragana reading ain’t too bad these days but not when all I can see is a blurry mess anyway. This led me to sound like a complete pleb.

“KA, FU, MO, SA no GI! No SA! No it’s CHI!’

Ugh, and it turned out that it was KI all along.

… then what would you call nerdy metal?

I’ve recently discovered the band Animetal, who cover animé theme tunes in a metal style. They make the geek in me rock out.

\m/

Watching all these theme tunes again is giving me a huge nostalgia kick.