Tonight’s tip comes by way of the illustrious Nekogirl, and frankly I can’t believe I’d overlooked it this long. A classic anime from the mid eighties, Fist of the Northstar is about as dystopian as they come. We’re talkin’ the Mad Max of anime here. Seriously, Give it just the first five minutes of episode 1 and you’ll see what I mean.
Actually, on second though, that may literally be the opening to Mad Max. Except in Japanese. And about 7 years later. And with the addition of more head-explody.
Really though, who wouldn’t want more of that?
Naturally though the plot thereafter strays a bit, but the balance of drama and sheer violence is astonishing.
I look back fondly on those naive days when it was 1999, when we partied like it was well…1999. And we were damn sure of it to. Because our computers told us so. Right up until the point where it wasn’t any more, and they were predicted by many to go ‘kablooey’ in a most ungracious way.
Except of course they didn’t, and continued chugging along to the great dismay of many newly unemployed COBOL programmers. As someone remarked to me recently “you had only to whisper the word COBOL to someone in a suit and it was worth 10k.”. Those were the heady days of the pre-millennium.
But there was always this niggling little thought in the back of our minds that maybe, just maybe, this was actually the apocalypse. That this time around it might be different. There was an air of excitement and unease that informed every action. People braced. They spoke quickly. They took that extra shot of vodka and to hell with it. Either we all die, or we figure out what to do once the hangover goes away.
Except, of course, nothing happened.
It’s been past ten years now, and given the global state of affairs I think it fairly safe to assume that by now everyone should more or less have woken up.
Let a man have his dream.
Although it is interesting to posit alternate reasons as to why exactly the Earth stubbornly failed to end on schedule those many years ago, which brings me around to tonight’s feature. Clamp’s X/1999, originally a manga series, and later adapted for both television and eventually film.
Tonight’s feature comes to us via a tip picked up from Japundit from Peter Payne’s J-List. In his post, Payne had ruminated that the emotional content and engagement in anime were the driving force behind its growing appeal and worldwide reach. I’d like to interject just a few thoughts of my own. While I think these sorts of universal storylines, and emotionally familiar and personally reminiscent characters are a fantastic force in storytelling (think for instance of Campbell’s hero cycle as displayed in Star Wars, which is a further execution of Beowulf). I think that misses a little bit of exactly why this is compelling to so many individuals. Much of the beauty I find in anime, and indeed, a work like Star Wars, is that it has the power to express tremendously complex philosophical and emotional concepts in what would be considered on the surface as a very basic form. It’s not unlike reading a layman’s guide to quantum mechanics. You have the ability to take much more away from it than the narrative or presentation actually impose upon you.
That said, there’s also the issue of stylization, which plays largely into how these narratives are perceived. If you’ve ever looked into anime, you’ve likely heard plenty of jokes about Moe, or alternatively, overt male androgyny (Disclosure: I’m still working on male anime hair). I theorize that there’s actually an extremely clever design behind the stylistic forms we associate with anime, and it’s the same one that keeps kittens and babies safe from predators.
They’re supposed to be exaggerated. You identify more with them that way.
Encountering a stylized human form (large eyes, exaggerated features, childlike behavior). Has always engaged an emotional parental response; it’s a biological imperative. This is what our young are born looking like. No wonder they evoke an emotional response. And look at what gates that opens for storytelling:
You may have noticed that out of the line up this column has produced, I’ve done my best to shy away from some of the more obvious picks (well, unless they were really good) for dystopian anime. I haven’t done Appleseed, or Ghost in the Shell, or any of that lot. Despite the subject matter being fitting. Rather, I have chosen to weekly trawl the interwebs in search of somewhat more inaccessible fare.
Seriously? 4chan? What was I thinking? My eyes bled for a week after that.
But nevertheless, I think it’s turned out well. Its in that spirit that I bring you Shangri-La.
Because you knew after last week, there just had to be another dose of Ecopocalypse!
Ahh, the classics. I can’t believe I’ve neglected to include this in the Friday line up so far. Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaa. It’s entirely probable that you’ve seen this already, but I can’t help but give due deference to one of the more formative films of my life.
Picture, if you will, a young boy growing up media-less in the wilderness of Northern New England in the early eighties. When one day his family discovers it’s possible to rent a VCR for the weekend; they’d only had two broadcast channels up until then.
Yes, I said VCR, stop snickering.
This was one of the first films they rented. I can’t suppose what stroke of fate led them to it, a Father’s love of Scifi and a passion to impart it to his children, or perhaps a desire to ride out the impending blizzard with the comfort of animation. Nevertheless. There was the young Etruscan (if such a thing could be said to exist), camped out during the worst storm of the year with a bowl of popcorn at the foot of the couch, marveling at this new piece of technology and watching what is frequently referred to as one of Miyazaki’s greatest works; the boy’s first exposure to anime. I can recall that the Father was so impressed that by the end of the weekend, before the VCR had to be returned, every neighborhood child (all three!) had been around to the house to watch it with us. Not to mention educated about ecological disaster.
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. [Read more →]
Ok, ok. You may have already seen this one as it was fairly widely released in the US. But that doesn’t detract from its loveliness. What does detract from its loveliness is the fact that it somehow ended up as a PS2 game. I’m still scratching my head over that one; done properly it could have turned out to be a tour-de-force, but ended up being a bit of a rote shooter. Nevertheless, the storyline (once it gets going) is a dystopian dream. Not, of course, the bits with all the shooting but rather the character development over the course of the series, which is on par with many of the longer running anime out there. Mafia controlled mega-corporations, human enhancement, gutter-punks rising to riches, all abound in Gungrave.
