Jul 4, 2011
Tekkon Kinkreet
(Anime)
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Much of anime prescribes to a “more is more” design principle—practicality and logic be darned—and many a transformation sequence has benefited from it. By contrast, Tekkon Kinkreet triumphs because it delivers two hours of arresting visual poetry, and its able to root its visual fancies in character and story. Its Charles-Dickens-by-way-of-James-M.-Cain plot loses emotional punch by the end, and the elementary vocabulary used to visualize the third-act moral struggle seems beneath the rest of the movie, but I suspect the mess has some of the best design and layout work I'll ever see. It deserves a viewing.
Mar 6, 2011
Black Lagoon
(Anime)
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In Black Lagoon you'll see glimmers of Tarantino, the Coens, Leone, Woo and Peckinpah, but instead of fetishizing gunplay with slow-motion “ballet” (ugh, what a metaphor), slide kills and post-modern self-awareness, the show looks to Neitzsche, Heidegger and Sartre for meaning in its violence. In short, it's a different beast. Black Lagoon posits a shadow world of unrestrained vice, where violence is not just essential for survival, but essential for being. (Dig that title--it's the abyss staring back at us.) Like Fight Club, Black Lagoon finds existential meaning in violence, and it finds that meaning with great frequency and great
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Nov 16, 2010
Durarara!!
(Anime)
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With an alpine principality's worth of characters and more non-sequiturs than open mic night at the Cabaret Voltaire, it would be easy to write off "Durarara!!" as formalist wankery and an example of style over substance. Indeed, it's both those things, but gosh darn it, dad, it's ART. And it's good art: a welcome novelistic approach to televised anime (it's the "The Wire" of its genre) and a postmodern melange of fantasy and realism, eternal myth and technological ephemera, that has the good sense to ground its convoluted narrative in well-drawn emotions. It also helps that it shows you frequent glimmers of
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Nov 6, 2010
So Ra No Wo To
(Anime)
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If Sora No Woto does anything right (and it does a few) it manages to establish a compelling fragility in the balance between life and death, comedy and tragedy, order and chaos. Teenaged girls are a rare prism through which to view the experience of war, but when the doe-eyed characters are pressed into stark relief with the ugly reality of war-torn future-past Japan-Europe, the results are pretty devastating. In this respect, the ambling, episodic nature of the show is absolutely necessary as one begins to dread the times the balance teeters into tragedy. It always feels like there's a lot at
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Nov 3, 2010
Kami nomi zo Shiru Sekai
(Anime)
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Submitted for your approval: a young otaku (in a cravat) addicted to the fantasy world of dating sims. In any other show, our delusional hero would be confronted with the stark glare of reality, learn a very special lesson about the true meaning of friendship, put down his Playfation Portable and go play softball or something. But while logic zigs, The World God Only Knows zags. Instead of confronting fantasy with reality, it takes fantasy and ladles on more fantasy by having a magical demon girl swoop in and confirming that girls in the real world do in fact behave as they
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Nov 2, 2010
Skip Beat!
(Anime)
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We know the story of the plucky girl making it big in the glitzy world of showbiz. It's the story of Bridget Jones, Josie, the Pussycats, and even Hanna Montana. Skip Beat! puts a welcome spin on it, and it's not just the (fascinating) insight into the Japanese entertainment industry. The story is consistently compelling throughout, and the surreal imagery is inventive and keeps the tone light and humorous, even as its emotions are scathingly deep.
While it's not beneath the show to humiliate the characters or make them look foolish, they are complex and principled, and the show has enough compassion to ... 
Nov 2, 2010
Toaru Kagaku no Railgun
(Anime)
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You have to slowly burn through four episodes at the start, but with that out of the way, Railgun's well-structured narrative pays off with a stunning mid-season story arc that ends with a big, big bang. As an allegory of Japanese youth's angst over post-middle-school stratification, it's literal visualization of a hopeless future is both enthralling and downright frightening.
The second half of the season builds gradually, piece by piece, as the show seems content to tell the tangential backstory of whatever tertiary character has shown up to that point. But when the climax comes, the show's patience (as your's) is rewarded with an ... |
