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Heh. This may be some sort of twisted personal best, but I’ve just discovered that a Google search for ‘Dystopian Anime’ now returns this column on both pages 1 & 2 ( who knows, maybe others too, I got bored).

Leaving aside what that actually might imply about my posting, in honor of this achievement we’ll take a little departure this evening into the just purely off-kilter, as opposed to the slightly more linear and focused oddities that my coverage usually entails.

I recall some years ago, during the midst of my redbull-fueled Netflix addiction, one evening the nascent BoL Consortium was debating the wisdom of watching a movie. Alas, the only thing we had at our disposal was an as-yet-unheard-of by any of us anime by the name of Gantz. Within the first few minutes, there were several yelps from the back of the room in addition to some notable cringing. As Cash Money put it to me recently, “It starts bizarre and crass. And ends bizarre, crass, and unexplained.”

While his description is utterly on the mark (and I’ve had more than a few cringe-worthy moments myself with this series), nevertheless there are probably a few guilty moments of that internal monologue we’ve all had at one point or another. In a sense I appreciate the attempt to make the characters sympathetic by being unlikeable. It’s a tactic that has served a number of authors well (I’m looking at you Chuck Palahniuk!), and sort of a staple of the modern sense of absurdism. It’s interesting to see it translated to the anime form.

BONUS:If you can actually finish this series and have any idea what in the blistering hell actually happens at the end, or what supporting rational there might be, I personally will find some interesting trinket and mail it to you free of charge to the address of your choice. Now that the threats are out of the way:

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Tags: Aesthetiophilia, Videophilia // 1 Comment »