Redline is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated anime film to come to the U.S. in years. Seven years in the making, with stellar hand-drawn animation (I really cannot overstate it), Redline‘s release in the U.S. was a point of anxiety (no one was picking it up, or announcing dates), but Manga Entertainment and Anchor Bay (remember Anchor Bay? I had no idea that they were owned by Starz now) finally picked up the license and announced a release. And there was much rejoicing.

The film was heavily hyped within in my Twitter feed (I mostly blame @ABCBTom), and reviews from the anime press have been gushingly positive. From what I gather, however, the film is being less well-received by posters at the ANN forums, speaking to perhaps a generational gap between those in the position to be reviewing the film for high-profile sites and those commenting on said sites.

I’m afraid I fall someplace in the middle. Redline is a technical achievement of the highest order. I cannot remember the last time any film, animated or otherwise, looked this good. And for much of the film, I’m grooving on it, though never totally engaged. In the last 20 minutes, or so, I became totally disengaged to the point of boredom, which is exactly the thing you don’t want to happen in an action film.

Everything you need to know about Redline is summed up by JP and his TransAm. Yes, JP, in the future, races a very souped up TransAm against giant, futuristic vehicles (calling them ‘cars’ would be incorrect). Likewise, JP doesn’t use the weapons or gadgets that his competitors use. He relies on his skill, his engines, and the nitro boosts that are built into his car.

JP and his TransAm are reflective of the film’s general approach to animation. Animation increasingly relies on computer animation and motion capture (so does live action cinema, but all cinema is animation anyway, so the difference is essentially one of semantics) for its work. Inbetweening is done by computer programs, not by a hunched over (and underpaid and overworked) animator.

Redline, like JP and his TransAm, avoid an over-reliance on advanced technology, complete with its bells and whistles, favoring a closeness to older forms of technology. Labor went into this, labor that couldn’t be mass-produced or left alone to render while a computer did the work, and it encourages a fetishization of the process, in much the same way that JP fetishizes his TransAm “purity”: Racing is the engine and the driver, not the gadgets; animation is the inbetweening and the human hand in the process, not code and processing speeds.

Paired with this aesthetic throwback approach, Redline skates along with a thin plot. Redline is quasi-legal racing on a galactic scale, and JP seeks to win it all, having gotten into racing after seeing the dedication of Sonoshee, another racer, during his youth. This year’s final tournament, the titular race, takes place on Roboworld, a world of cyborgs who want nothing to do with the race, but the race come to them anyway. The racers must survive each other as well as the Roboworld military and its secrets.

Redline‘s minimal plot is of little concern to me. The movie’s quieter moments are highlights for me, like JP exploring the refugee moon of Roboworld in preparation for the race, but the film, like all action films, is about the set pieces. And, for the most part, the film is successful in this regard. The opening sequence is a solid introduction to Redline‘s world, and the beginning of the final race is busy and chaotic, but in very good ways.

However, the minimal plot means there is zero room for stumbling, and the film does stumble. Roboworld’s Funky Boy, a secret (and illegal) biological weapon, awakens during the race, and dispatches most of the military units and puts most of the racers in a rough spot. While this does give the chance for JP and Sonoshee to team up and engage in racing-as-a-substitute-for-sex at the end, it’s Funky Boy’s rampage that brought the film to a halt for me.

Part of this is timing. The race is hitting its peak and is interrupted by this obvious and unnecessary Akira homage. And when the race resumes, the urgency of the race has to struggle to regain its former excitement, and it never did for me. With Funky Boy’s rampage putting most of the racers out of commission, it becomes a race between two teams who can use the power-up of streamlight (the movie’s Chekov’s gun) best, not so much the skill involved. This is, frankly, boredom on top of boredom, leaving the end of the film just a nice moment as JP and Sonoshee win the race*, albeit without a vehicle (not that this seems to matter).

*There’s a gender reading to be made of Redline and how women function in it. And this article gets the point across, albeit in a “Just read some Freud and now I see phalli everywhere” sort of way.

So while Redline is a celebration of animation, I don’t think it represents where anime should go. The medium’s television output is bogged down in moe, stories about spirits and demons, slice of life narratives, or all three, and comes off as derivative, catering to small niches of viewers, and generally engaging in the worst of many trends in an effort to license as much merchandise as possible. And it is tiring.

But Redline is a nostalgic throwback to anime’s “golden age”, full of ultra-cool characters (and character designs), luscious animation, and a mash-up of sci-fi tropes (Cyborgs! Ambitious military! Aliens! Sexy women! (okay, that last one is pretty much the norm for most visual media)). Returning to that “golden age” is only a worthwhile experience for those who experienced it and miss it. And Redline does provide a way to get away from current trends, but only so far as to embrace older ones, not create new ones.

It is, essentially, a breath of fresh stale air.

I opted for Television Studies first as both a primer for Legitimating‘s discussions and as a refresher on my own knowledge of the ins and outs of television studies. Likewise, still being a relatively young scholar, I haven’t read many of these sorts of single unified texts that seek to provide a broad overview of a single field or approach. I’ve read individual essays, book chapters, and the like that do similar things as Television Studies (including many of the ones that Gray and Lotz cite here), but I wanted to read something that was specifically designed as an introduction for a few reasons.

First and foremost is an issue of pedagogy. Books like Television Studies or Routledge’s Film Guidebooks (I can recommend Brigid Cherry’s Horror from that series) serve primarily, at least in my mind, as texts given to undergrads in introductory courses to provide both an orientation to what could be a brand new area of study and to provide a common ground on which for those in the course to speak to one another. So I’ll say upfront that as I was reading Television Studies, I was primarily reading it through this lens, asking myself how the book as a whole, as well as individual chapters, would fit into a syllabus, what kind of a syllabus, and how students might respond.

The second reason for wanting to Television Studies is directly related to my first reason. That these books are primarily expected to be used in introductory courses, or as a self-guided introduction as the case may be, they are inherently very political books. These books define and parse out the field or subject, policing borders and establishing ideas of what is/could be expected for someone operating in that field. And if you’re familiar with academia, you know that we take the defining of a field seriously.

So on the one hand we have a book that should be evaluated on its pedagogical value, but on the other, we have a book that delineates what something is, whether it be a field of study or a film genre. As a result, we have to consider what histories are told, who the major figures and/or theories are, and so forth, and the potential impact that can have on whatever topic the book is addressing since such books are used to train and educated younger scholars.

Where does that leave Television Studies?

The book is successful as an introduction to the television studies, and would fit snugly into a variety of syllabi, ranging from an introductory television studies class (supplemented with readings mentioned in the text, of course) to taking individual chapters away from the wider context of the book, and using them to highlight one of the particular areas — Programs, Audiences, and Institutions — in a class that focuses on  that area. Likewise, in my own experience as a graduate student, I think any of the chapters, but particularly the Introduction or the Contexts chapter, would fit well in a survey of theories of media studies or mass communication. (The book could work in a graduate seminar on television studies, but I think that reading the texts mentioned in the book itself would significantly more valuable.)

Each of the body chapters covers the highlights of their topic’s important authors, books, or essays, delving just enough into a particular text to provide a basic sense of its argument before moving onto the next one. Often such discussions don’t last any longer than two paragraphs, which gives the book an excellent sense of breadth while still supplying just enough depth to prime students for additional readings or analysis.

The introduction provides a nice history of how televisions studies got to where it is today, and I particularly appreciated Lotz and Gray’s discussion of the role social sciences played in helping develop television studies. This aspect of television studies’s history is often glossed over (at least in my experience) in favor of highlighting its association with the traditions of cultural studies.

I would likewise recommend Television Studies to scholars unfamiliar with the contours of television studies. As I was reading, I was thinking of a colleague of mine who has been trained in film studies and his experience rooming with two television studies graduate students at last year’s SCMS. And while said colleague has since taken a television studies class (an achievement I take full credit for!), had this book been around last year, I would probably point him to it so he’d have a sense of things.

On a personal level, I was pleased that as I was reading along, that I was nodding and marking and being able to follow Gray and Lotz’s discussion of the larger works within television studies, both because such discussions has firmly taken root in my brain and because I was recognizing my own education in this area in the text.

Both of these aspects, my own reaction to the book as well as the brief story about my colleague, bring me to the book’s parsing out of television studies. I imagine the more academically-centric of you, especially those within the television and wider media studies field, may already have a clue as to how Gray and Lotz believe that television studies should be practiced based on their body chapters that I mentioned above.

Gray and Lotz position a television studies project as one that  considers those three areas of a site of analysis: the program (or text), the audience that engages the program, and the institutions/industries that produce/market/regulate it. Gray and Lotz make room that a project sometimes can’t reasonably cover all three and do it well* (I’ve ready plenty of books that attempt to do it, and normally one of those aspects (typically the institution) will fall short), and that the research question may not necessarily allow for all three to be addressed.

*And they do nod to the the one book that does it well, D’Acci’s Cagney & Lacey book.

But they stress that any project and any researcher that decides to ignore one of those areas without first thinking deeply about how each of those areas influence one another and make gestures to those influences in the final project, is losing an important aspect of what marks television studies.

Indeed, the claim that the book ultimately makes, and where Gray and Lotz stake their concept of television studies is this (variation on the) circuit of culture approach of study.  As referenced above when I mentioned the history Gray and Lotz provide, here we see the indebtedness that television studies has to cultural studies, a field whose history considered these three things to varying degrees.

This claim is the basis for how Gray and Lotz position television studies to “studies of television”, singling out psychological studies of television and violence or the thematic analyses associated with literary studies as the latter and not how they conceive of television studies. You may have likewise noticed that I haven’t referred to television studies as field in this post (at least not directly). This is because Gray and Lotz, by highlighting television studies and “studies of television”, position the former as an approach.

And this is the perhaps the largest intervention the book makes, shifting the question of whether television studies is a field to making it a way of understanding a site of analysis. They mention doing a “television studies approach to YouTube”, but with the framework Lotz and Gray supply, you could, theoretically, carry out a television studies project centered on a book, as odd as that would at first appear.*

*I say ‘book’ only because I remember a particularly frustrated literary scholar at the 2010 Flow Conference in Austin who didn’t understand the obsession with industry that she was experiencing during panels, and I remembered thinking from my table during the panel about why she wouldn’t want to know about the industry that was publishing the books she was studying, and then thinking what a valuable project that would be.

That above asterisk, along with my earlier mention of nodding along, probably indicates that I do agree with this idea of television studies as an approach. It is something that through my education has been drilled into me as the most productive way of considering an object of study. Gray and Lotz do make room that this television studies approach could also be called media studies (I consider myself a media scholar, not a television scholar, for what it’s worth), basing this in the ideological and departmental tensions within universities as well as the nomenclature between the U.S. and the U.K.

I’m going to wrap up here. There are a number of other aspects to the book, including a discussion of convergence, paratexts, and a call for an expanded look at televised media beyond the U.S.-U.K. systems, that I feel the book address well enough, but the above were the primary concerns I had as I was reading and considering the book’s place within the discourses of television studies.

If all of this isn’t clear, I do recommend Television Studies for both those academics within media studies, but also those who may associate with media scholars and are interested in what they (and I) do. It is accessible to a wider audience, so I do think if you’re interested, you’ll have little trouble navigating the book.

I, of course, welcome comments and questions down below.

I used to read buy a fair amount of manga, but not a lot of variety. I jumped in on Bleach as it was starting here in the U.S., and I read Naruto, Fruits Basket, Death Note, Emma, Genshiken, Hot Gimmick, Nana, and probably a smattering of other titles along the way. But due to the lack of new titles that looked interesting (I didn’t go to manga blogs to find new gems, instead flipping through books at Borders) and, more importantly, a lack of funds, I dropped manga from my purchasing routines. I rarely checked out the section at Borders (hell, I rarely went to Borders at that point) and that was that.

But with an increased cashflow and a desire to get back into comics again, I took advantage of Borders’ going out of business sales and picked up a number of titles after I was given recommendations by a number of folks on Twitter, including @MangaCritic, @animeresearch, @ABCBTom,  @edsizemore,  @OneGreatTurtle, @PhoenixTerran, and @Jrnemanich (If I missed someone, apologies).

So below you’ll find some thoughts on the 10 series I picked up a volume or three of over the past few months. There’s a decent variety here, from a baseball series (I know!) to yonkoma about a cat who runs a ramen shop. Most of these are relatively recent titles, however.

Library Wars: Love & War by Kiiro Yumi (Vol. 1)

*in best trailer announcer voice* In a world where the government has created a violent taskforce to destroy books it deems a danger to society, only one thing stands in between them and total informational domination: The library.

Seriously. In Library Wars, Iku Kasahara is a young recruit to the Library Defense Force, a militia organization that defends library collections and occasionally those of bookstores (they’re demilitarized zones). Despite being a bit naive and innocent (this is a shojo title, after all), Iku is driven to do well after a member of the LDF saved a book she wanted to buy from being confiscated when she was a young girl. She must deal with a handsome drill instructor who is both cruel and kind to her, survive basic training (complete with rifles!) make friends, and, of course, learn to navigate the stacks in a quick manner.

The first volume is mostly set-up and introductions to both the character and the world, as is often the case. It moves at a brisk pace, and despite Iku being a fairly standard shojo heroine, she’s not completely grating (as they sometimes can be). Part of this is the narrative’s stakes of books and information as driving forces, it prevents the occasional (overwrought) melodrama from creeping into both the story and the character. I wasn’t particularly keen on the book until the last section in which Iku receives a promotion and must memorize a huge section of a library to be successful. It’s a series to continue with, but I liked some the later titles significantly more.

Yotsuba&! by Kiyohiko Azuma (Vol. 1)

From the same man behind Azumanga Daioh is this story of the 5-year old girl Yotsuba who moves to a new house with her adoptive father, makes a considerable impression on the family next door, and then has a series of slice-of-life sort of stories that deal with the fact that Yotsuba is ignorant of a number of things, including doorbells, television, and catching cicadas.

The premise is a bit flimsy, but provides for a number of fun scenarios that serve to highlight the challenges of raising an energetic kid who wants to know about everything (and most kids, even if they’re not energetic, want to know about everything). The title refers to the structure of each chapter that deals with “Yostuba & [something].” In the first volume in particular, Yostuba learning about global warming through air conditioning units is a small treat, as she deals with “enemies of the Earth” who have ACs (including her father).

Neko Ramen: Hey! Order up! by Kenji Sonishi

A 4-panel strip (the yonkoma linked to above), Neko Ramen merges two things I enjoy, namely cats and ramen, into an occasionally funny yarn about Taisho, a talking cat who strives to become a master ramen maker. However, his experimental approach to ramen (mixing milk, strawberries, and noodles for instance) may be holding him back. Taisho only seems to ever have one customer, a salaryman named Tanaka, and even he wonders why he continues to frequent such a bizarre shop.

The humor is hit-or-miss, but as a gag-heavy comic, that’s to be expected. However, if you’re not a fan of cats and/or ramen, you’re going to be really out of luck with the title as most of the gags rest on a basic knowledge of both. Taisho’s belligerent and selfish albeit caring attitude, nicely captures the idea of a cat, who, as cat owners know, can be all of those things at once. Tanaka makes for a fine straight man (at the end of the volume when we’re given all his statistics, he apologizes for being so normal),

Bunny Drop by Yumi Unita (Vol. 1)

Perhaps the more serious companion to Yotsuba&!, Bunny Drop deals with the standard thirty-something slacker named Daikichi who adopts  the illegitimate daughter, Rin, of his newly-deceased grandfather after no one else in the family wants anything to do with the child. Rin is silent and moody and Daikichi doesn’t know the first thing about raising a kid, including buying clothes, dealing with bed-wetting, and setting up daycare for Rin.

I enjoyed the art’s clean style and the up-and-down struggles of the narrative, but it never really grabbed me too much. That being said, like with The Drops of God (discussed below), Bunny Drop is one of those titles, at least with its premise, that provides an avenue for people who are tired of superhero comic books, and want something different. This is just something I’ve noticed some a number of American comic fans, but they likewise seem hesitant to delve into manga as well.

not simple by Natsume Ono and House of Five Leaves (Vols. 1, 2) by Natsume Ono

I combined these titles together due to both being by the same mangaka, and not wanting to dwell too much on not simple, a title I found to be rather shameless in its desire to rely on shocks, twists, and taboos in an effort to make you care about what are otherwise poorly developed characters. In it, Ian searches for his sister after escaping from an abusive family and child prostitution. Indeed, the story piles on alcoholism and incest to create a world of unbearable suffering with occasional moments of light. And while the stripped down art is a pleasure, the pileup of cliches, especially notable being only a single volume long, makes the story less than worthwhile.

House of Five Leaves, on the other hand, is a more engaging tale. The ronin Akitsu Masanosuke (called Masa), a sickly and bashful man who struggles to remain employed, finds himself drawn into a kidnapping ring (the titular Five Leaves) after garnering the attention of its leader, the mysterious Yaichi. The books thus far deal with Masa learning about the band of misfits in flashbacks, trying to learn about Yaichi (who Masa suspects is better than he lets on), and also become more self-confident.

The artwork is similar to, though less stripped-down, not simple. The band of outlaws, including a thief and a spy, a trying to reform himself gangster and father, and liberated geisha, is colorful but tragic in that they seem to be good people trapped in a cycle of violence and illegality that they are unable or unwilling to escape. Masa, likewise, due to his general passivity, provides a nice entry way for both the reader to engage the story and a way to motivate flashbacks and information in organic ways.

Cross Game by Mitsuru Adachi (Vols. 1-3)

I used to really like baseball when I was younger. I had posters, collected trading cards, listened to games on the radio. My first ballpark game was the first game that Fred McGriff had with the Braves, and it was also the day the stadium had a fire in a press box. I eventually became disinterested in baseball, and most sports in general, making the praise I was seeing for Cross Game in my Twitter feed similar to the gushing for Friday Night Lights that regularly appears in the feed as well.

Like with Friday Night Lights, I decided to give Cross Game a go, despite my disinterest in sports narratives. It is to Cross Game‘s benefit that the first volume’s first third is decidedly more centered on emotional connections that ground the central characters (chapters 8 through 10 of this series are not to be underestimated in their emotional power) and establishing the summery nostalgia that is often associated with baseball before it settles into more traditional shonen sports title of training, rival teams, mysterious aces, and militaristic coaches.

Through the genre/demo hangups, Cross Game still succeeds hangs its hat on the summery nostalgia as the team of misfits and second stringers play the game for the game (and other reasons), which gives them that pure baseball purity feeling that I’m sure a lot of people miss (perhaps myself included).

A Bride’s Story by Kaoru Mori (Vol. 1)

Emma was one of my favorite manga before I lost touch the medium (I’m a sucker for an upstairs/downstairs romance), so when I heard that Mori had a new book coming out, I was pumped for it. A Bride’s Story occurs in the early 1800s in Central Asia. Amir Halgal is married off to a boy 8 years her junior for political reasons, and now lives with that boy’s tribe. While the story is about Amir fitting in (she’s a skilled archer, hunter, and rider compared to the women (and some of the men!) of her new tribe) and developing a closer relationship with her new husband, the every day life aspect of traders and merchants traveling through the region comes to the forefront.

The art is painfully detailed, and the story relishes in smaller moments (chapter’s 2 emphasis on the beauty on woodcrafting is the prime example) while still hinting at the larger societal conflicts in play, including Amir being too old for a new bride (she’s about 20), the age reversal at play in the marriage (typically the woman is younger), and her old tribe deciding they’d like her back to marry her to someone else, A Bride’s Story has depths that promises more riches.

The Drops of God by Tadashi Agi and Shu Okimoto (Vol. 1)

So you’re tired of superheroes and violence and sex in comics. How about a comic about wine (and sex, there’s a little bit of sex here)? Yes, wine. The Drops of God is a comic wherein decanting a wine becomes a moment of “What do you mean it’s not awesome?“, wherein you never knew that descriptions of actual wines could be compared to paintings, Queen, and long lost loves.

Shizuku Kanzaki is the son of the recently decease Yutaka Kanzaki, the foremost wine critic in Japan and the world. Shizuku, however, hates wine. Despite being trained by his father in the finer bits of wine tasting and evaluating, Shizuku became estranged from his father due to the obsession with, going so far as to become a beer company salesman. But when Yutaka dies, he leaves behind a wine collection worth roughly 2 billion yen (about $26 million).

However, this collection is not for Shizuku to claim outright. Instead, he must beat young wine critic Toomine Issei — the so-called Prince of Wine  who wormed his way in by become Yutaka’s adopted son a week before the old critic died — in a series of blind wine tastings. Each man must describe 13 wines in a vein similar to how Yutaka himself described them in order to claim the inheirtance.

The series is rife with shonen tropes, despite being a seinen title. There’s training of a talented but reluctant and headstrong hero , the formation of a group of people to support said hero, a totally evil rival, and being super over-the-top when it comes to the battles and training (Issei develops his palette by tasting soil samples from vineyards). But it all works due to the series’ intense research. All the wines discussed are actual wines, the people who made the wines are discussed with detail and care (I know who Henri Jayer is!), and the series goes out of its way to make drinking and describing wine accessible and enjoyable (no stuffy discussions of wine’s taste here).

And it’s this last point that is one reason why the comic works. The series gives love to both expensive and inexpensive wines, describing both with equal amounts of excitement. Likewise, with Shizuku being a complete novice and being assisted by a book-smart sommelier-in-training, the book allows those who may not anything about wine (beyond what they like) to feel comfortable reading a title about wine.

If it’s comparable to anything, The Drops of God is the beverage to serve alongside Pixar’s Ratatouille. Like the film, The Drops of God shows how anyone can enjoy the more “elite” things in life with a little assistance from a caring instructor. Indeed, Issei’s ability to describe a wine in a detached and elegant way wins him plush mansion, but much like Anton Ego, he misses the emotional point that the selection had in the first challenge, an aspect that Shizuku is able to pick up.

There’s plenty of humor to be found, as Shizuku is often drawn with dog or bunny ears to display his eagerness, there’s an Italian wine otaku who works with Shizuku, one who considers all other wines shit and sprinkles Italian into his every day conversation. The panty shots of Miyabi are an unfortunate and unnecessary inclusion, but luckily they’re brief and don’t appear again (at least the first volume).

All in all though, The Drops of God is a remarkably good book, one that, along with Cross Game and A Bride’s Story, I’d recommend to folks who don’t necessarily like comics.

So, as should have been expected, I was excited by the idea of an anime adaptation of the game when it was announced last year. But I was also intrigued by the logistics of adapting this particular sort of video game (a mix of classic dungeon crawling with dating simulations) to a more linear narrative mapped out over 26 episodes.

I won’t be doing weekly write-ups on the show (instead I’ll drop in and out when I feel particularly spurred to write something about an episode), but I wanted to address the first episode and some of the elements of the game that come through in the episode that feel particularly interesting, and my own unfamiliarity with animes based on video games.

Already the challenge of the anime is that the nameless protagonist (in the show named Yu Narukami) is also silent. He says and thinks what either what the game mandates or what the player selects from a limited number of options, leaving him without much of a personality, and a personality that can change based on how the player plays the game, interacts with the NPCs.

This more or less carries through into the anime. Yu doesn’t say a whole lot, but people are always eager to talk to him about, well, everything. Even after he is sucked into the TV, we don’t see him relating the events to Chie and Yosuke. Instead the scene begins with them reacting to that news. Yu barely speaks, only really to utter “Persona” at the end of the episode as he has his awakening and fights off some Shadows. And in this scene that a bit of Yu’s personality comes through. He swears, gets angry, and generally looks a little drunk on the power he just activated.

The idea behind a nameless and silent protag in these games is that they’re cyphers for the player to project a personality and name, particularly their own, onto the character based on the options the games present. It’s a quick method of immersion into the game universe by putting the (assumed male) player into the game.

So what does this do for us, as viewers when this carries over to a different medium? Do our expectations for the character change? Do we expect Yu to behave like a lead character, with a personality and needs and goals and thoughts of his own? What does Yu think about being shipped off to Inaba (he doesn’t seem particularly thrilled, but not necessarily unhappy either in a brief scene where he is first unpacking)?

I’m not sure how common approach is. My familiarity with games-to-anime is practically non-existent, which leaves me at a loss for properly addressing this. I can see how Yu is a weak link in the show in the expectation of the show as a show. Unlike with a character without voice or name in a game, a character without a voice or name in a show, one that we never see really acting, but rather reacted to, can limit the ability to engage the narrative through a central character.

This is, admittedly, the perspective of classic narrative expectations in which that central character provides an audience with a way to become immersed into the story, someone to care about and relate to. So is it fair to evaluate the show on this criteria in that it so completely adopts the perspective of the game in telling its story? I don’t know.

Other aspects of the game flow into the series, particularly the use of the weather forecast as a transition between days and Yu’s character attributes graph as the cards show between commercial breaks (in this episode, still at zero). The use of the weather forecast is interesting as the weather determines how quickly the group will have to save someone. In the game is creates a deadline for the player to work against and balance other elements of the game against. How does it function here though, beyond a stylized transition?

The character attributes graph in the game is determined by how the player does certain activities (how often the character works, answers questions correctly in school, etc.) and this in turns determines what characters the player can interact with, what sidequests the player can perform and when. Does the show intend to show Yu’s attributes to grow in-show (will little green music notes appear above his head when he does something correct?), or will it only show growth on the bumps based on the advances of the narrative?

Ultimately, lots of my questions can very quickly be answered in that Persona 4: The Animation is a transmedia product, meant to cash in on the success of the game and its franchise, raise awareness of the re-releases and spin-offs, and nothing more. It’s telling that the adaptation/translation of a game that sold about 110,000 copies here in the United States (as of 2009) was licensed and put on Hulu. Who’s the audience here? Obviously the Persona 4 fans, but who else? Does it reach non-players to get them into the games? I’m sure that’s the point (apart from hopefully grabbing DVD sales if it should come to that), but I’m curious how successful that would be.

The animation is clean and detailed, so it’s clear that money went into this, which is not always the case with transmedia products. Likewise, the production hired the game’s main voice cast to reprise their roles for the anime. Lacking the original cast for this sort of a transmedia experience can cause it to be quickly dismissed as a lazy cash-in. And the production’s use of things like the weather forecast and the attributes graph indicates a desire to be faithful to the source material, to make it feel as familiar as possible.

But I’m still left trying to determine to what end. How do these elements coalesce into a unified show that can be judged on its own merits instead of just as an extension of the brand? Or should I even bother thinking about the show in that manner?

FINAL THOUGHTS

• Despite the general tone of the above, I did like the episode. And like my Twitter pal Tom pointed out, it covers a lot more ground in 20 minutes than the game does in twice that time.
• There’s only 26 episodes for the show, so I can only suspect that at least one episode will be a level-grinding episode that acts as a clip show catch-up for us, which would be a clever way to do that, really.

Summer Wars

I was excited about Summer Wars for a while. You had Mamoru Hosoda directing, fresh off of the delightful The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (seriously, you should watch it), Madhouse doing the animation, and notion of the world shutting down as it had given up much of its basic functions to a single online entity (in this case, OZ) rang especially hard as it was seeing release in the U.S. around the time Julian Assange was all over the place.

So my expectations were fairly high for Summer Wars, and while I wasn’t totally disappointed, I was a bit more than surprised by the movie’s overall arc. I was expecting something of a young kid saves the day from artificial intelligence while in the countryside sort of a deal. And I did get that. What I was not expecting was the emphasis on the intergenertional family unit and the tensions inherent with that dynamic.

Yes, Summer Wars is what would have happened had Ozu been alive to direct a cyberpunk film.

The sense of traditionalism that runs through the movies — from the grandmother’s ability to rally old contacts through just her name to concerns over black sheep of the family to playing Koi-Koi with the malicious AI — roots Summer Wars firmly in a nostalgic vein, with family connections (and baseball) as an oasis in a high-tech world that could crumble at any time.

The animation is slick throughout, with the sequences in OZ both stylish and easy to follow (despite the sheer amount going on in those scenes) while the more idyllic scenes set around the house give a lovely feeling of summer and a crowded household that truly loves one another, faults aside.

Evangelion 2.22: You Can [Not] Advance

On the flip side of that coin, Evangelion 2.22: You Can [Not] Advance doesn’t have any sanctuaries to escape to. Sure, you could go to an aquarium in the middle of the ocean or make an extra lunch for the clone of your mother, but your family isn’t going to help you. In fact, any family you have is most likely going to get you killed (or just go a little insane).

Reviewing 2.22 seems a little silly since, really, if you’re not into the Evangelion franchise, there’s really no reason for you to watch it. If, however, you are into Evangelion, then 2.22 is an interesting experiment in scrambling and reliving the milestone TV series. Unlike the first installment in the Rebuild project, 2.22 begins to deviate from the television in significant ways while still remaining relatively true to the series (man, they still really hate Askua, don’t they?).

Mari doesn’t add a whole lot to the movie, beyond satisfying a glasses fetish (because it’s pretty much the only fetish that isn’t there). I was frustrated that, in their rush to compact everything, that we lose storylines that I particularly enjoyed, including those sections in which everyone is trying to get along with other after Askua’s arrival. Likewise, we seem to lose a lot of the Angels in the process, though it hardly seems to matter. Zerul, the fourteenth Angel that nearly destroys NERV (and spurs Shinji to become a pilot again almost almost leaving), is now the tenth Angel (yeah, I know), and it the big finale of the movie, and it’s all pretty much the same but kind of different.

I don’t know that I necessarily liked the movie, though I think I generally liked it more than 1.11. But like with the entire project, I’m still trying to determine if movie  is even necessary (I mean aside from a financial point of view, then of course it is). It’s an interesting retelling of the same story (Gendo goes to the Moon, sees Kaworu!), but I’m not sure where it’s all going, or why I should really care, except that I like the franchise and am I mildly interested in this type of authorial re-writing.

Anno certainly isn’t Lucas (and vice versa), but I do wonder how largely similar they’ll end up being once Rebuild is done. While Lucas’ tweaks don’t impact the overall story (though some issues of characterization, depending on how deeply you wish to read into Han shooting in split second self-defense or Vader now shouting “NOOOOOOOOO!”), whereas the Rebuild project does make fairly extensive changes to events and characters.

Likewise, there’s some interesting transmedia overlap as the seemingly inching forward manga version of the story has been dipping in and out of influences, including, most noticeably, Kaji and Shinji’s visit to an aquarium, or Rei’s slightly more open nature. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I actually rather like these additions, but that the convergence of both avenues of the story is a fascinating one.

Ergo Proxy

Keeping myself brief here since, really, I didn’t like Ergo Proxy very much. Sure, the animation is nice and all, it really is, but the overall story is the kind of claptrap that came as a result of Ghost in the Shell and Evangelion‘s popularity. It confuses style with substance, and assumes that naming statues that the god-like Regent speaks from after philosophers (Derrida, Berkeley, Husserl, Lacan (Kristeva also appears)) is very cool, but ends up just seeming very pretentious, especially sine they’re arranged and posed as replicas from the Medici Chapel.

Indeed, the entire project is pretty pretentious. Ergo is very noir in a lot of ways, but stumbles in executing it with any ability as issues of self and the city are intimately intertwined (not to the mention the general lighting and mood of the series). There’s no clear sense of what any of it really means, and falls into other pseudo-metaphysical nonsense that doesn’t amount to anything interesting. Indeed, it reminded me a hell of a lot of the equally dreary and ultimately pointless Gilgamesh.

There were a few interesting episodes, namely the game show episode and the episode where Pinno (a young girl robot who is treated as if she were human) ends up in some sort of Looney Tunes/Disney-inspired theme park and animation style. Both episode are bizarre breaks from the show’s oppressive seriousness due to the jarring changes in tone and format, but still manage to take themselves far too seriously. Kind of like the series as a whole.

Highschool of the Dead

I seem to be operating on spectrums here. If Ergo Proxy is too serious for its own good, Highschool of the Dead is fairly serious insofar as it is serious about killing zombies, doing panty shots, and making sure every woman who is over the age of 12 has a D-cup or larger bust size. Indeed, if you like boobs and zombies, then this is the series for you. If you do not like either of those things, or are only partial to one of them, I’d skip it entirely. (Though I’d recommend just skipping the series even if you do like all of those things.)

Characters are taken right off the shelf, that’s how stock they are: Blank, vaguely heroic male hero leads the group and is the object of affection for the girl next door type, the strong and silent type who harbors a dark trauma, and the arrogant genius who is insecure and has a cute little fang. You also have a military otaku and the ditzy school nurse to round the main cast, until a cute little girl and a puppy join the team.

Annoyingly, the series makes gestures to being self-aware of being in zombie situation (they rarely say the z-word), including mentioning movies and video games, but then they just keep making the same damn mistakes or play all the zombie stuff relatively straight, making me wonder just how much attention these kids were paying to their zombie media products.

The series, actually, reminded me a lot of The Walking Dead first season, in that characters run from zombies, assume they’re safe, have to double back, finally get some place that should be safe, and then have to leave. But, you know, with lots of misogyny…which, come to think of it, still falls in line with The Walking Dead. But at least the women in The Walking Dead have a smidge more agency than any woman in Highschool of the Dead.

Oh, and then there’s this.