Featured image: Unknown title and artist, originally found on Loveydoveship.
Have yourself some Shugo Chara! fan art. Alas, this image has been shared so much across the interwebs that I have failed to trace it to its source. It’s a depiction of the protagonist Amu in her four magical forms. In any case, if you are interested in the title, don’t miss my review.
Sometimes, when I’ve had a bad day, I just want to watch some cuddly talking animals bleed to death.
This is, again, an old review salvaged from my previous, now-defunct blog and subsequently edited. Were I to write it today, I’d probably give fewer spoilers, so considered yourself warned. In any case, these are still two of my all-time favorite novels, so I think this review belongs over here. I can relate it to magical girls by pointing out that both these books are about talking animals, and magical girls are usually accompanied by talking animals. Or something.
There’s an old joke, dating back to the 1960s, about what would happen if Bambi fought Godzilla. The correct answer, known to anyone who’s read the original novel Bambi by Felix Salten, is that Godzilla would get his ass kicked, at least if he made the mistake of standing between Bambi and a doe in rut.
Felix Salten’s classic novel, an often dark and brutal story originally published in , has been eclipsed in most people’s minds by the Disneyfied version, though since I originally wrote this review, a number of lavishly illustrated productions of the book have come into print. I can vouch for none because I read this book in a 1929 printing, but some of the new editions are beautiful at least at first glance—though I have been warned that some contain an abridged text, so I pass that warning on.
In any case, Godzilla would also likely meet his demise if he made the mistake of harassing the lady friends of the bunny rabbits from Watership Down, except the rabbits would most likely coerce somebody else into delivering the beat-down for them—maybe Bambi, in fact.
So if Bambi teamed up with the Watership Down rabbits to open a can of whoopass on Godzilla, especially if they maybe, I dunno, used some powered mecha armor that somebody left in the woods or something, that would be kick-awesome. Or maybe the rabbits could all drive armored vehicles that look like giant rabbits that shoot lasers out of their ears, and then Bambi could drive a vehicle that looks like a giant stag, and then they could combine together into a super giant robot that maybe looks like a jackalope. I would totally watch this Bambi vs. Godzilla movie in the theater.
Continue reading “Double Book Review: ‘Bambi’ vs. ‘Watership Down’”
You don’t know real pain until your waifu turns into a bird.
I am continuing to salvage content from my previous, now-defunct blog. This is a lightly edited version of a post that originally appeared over there: I am not entirely happy with it and may revisit this title at some point in the future, but in any case, this is my review as it presently stands.
Princess Tutu, directed by Shogo Koumoto. Starring Nanae Kato, Noboru Mitani, and Takahiro Sakurai. Story by Ikuko Itoh. Hal Film Maker (–). DVDs produced by AEsir Holdings. 26 episodes of 25 minutes (approximately ). Rated TV-14.
After I got an Amazon gift card for Christmas, I thought to myself that I could use it to buy some edifying, uplifting literature, or I could use it to acquire more brain-rotting magical-girl junk. It’s no mystery which choice I made, and I have no regrets: I picked up a complete DVD set of Princess Tutu, which I knew by rumor and reputation but had not previously seen.
The first time I heard of Princess Tutu, the tale of a clumsy girl who receives the power to transform into a magical ballerina, I assumed it was a saccharine, fluffy, and disposable story on a par with something like Lilpri. I would have been cool with it if that were the case—since I’m totally into that—but in fact, my assumption was entirely incorrect because it is so good. This is easily one of the best anime series I have ever seen. It is the best magical girl series I have ever seen. This is an anime that rises, at least at times, to the level of high art.
I recently completed a small project I’ve been meaning to get to for a while: I went through all the posts in my hyperbolic but half-serious series of essays, “Why I hate Cardcaptor Sakura” to make improvements and corrections. I’d like to do this with several of my posts, but that particular series brings in most of the site’s traffic, so it got priority.
If you’ve read those essays already, there’s no reason to re-visit them unless you happen to be a masochist. WordPress has been through some updates since I wrote them, and I’ve learned more about writing for the web, so I went back to improve HTML semantics, add headings, clean out dead links, and insert additional links to make it easier to move from one essay to another. I also corrected typos and grammatical errors when I found them and occasionally rephrased a sentence to remove ambiguity, but the content is still the same.
On my list of things to do is to sit down with the Clear Card Arc, a sequel to Sakura that appeared about the same time I wrote those essays. I haven’t got to it yet because, though I exaggerated in the essays for the sake of entertainment, I mostly meant what I said: I don’t particularly enjoy Cardcaptor Sakura, so I’ve put off the task of slogging through more of it.
I have no timeline for when I might get around to the sequel; I have a bad habit of starting blog projects and then losing track of them when I get interested in other blog projects, so I should probably make fewer promises.
Featured art: “My Everyday My HiME -Feb 16- Sketch of Mikoto” by Pearlpencil.
I am still watching My-HiME, so today’s featured art is of one of the show’s main characters. At the moment, I don’t have much else to report. Life is busy but in a good way, as you might expect, as the magical girl and I are preparing for our first baby.
To prove that we (or I, rather) live in a solipsistic universe and that the rest of you don’t exist, I recently learned of the existence of the Old Fashioned, a simple cocktail that lays claim (truly or not) to being the original cocktail. I thought it sounded really good and have been wanting one, and then I saw that a lot of people on my social media feeds were drinking them.
I needed to join in, so I bought a bottle of aromatic bitters and tried a few experiments.
The Old Fashioned pictured here is simple: I made it with brown sugar doused in bitters and dissolved in a spoonful of water. Then I added two shots of Maker’s Mark and some orange peel, and stirred with ice.
I’m quite pleased with the result: The bourbon still stands out, but the bit of water, flavoring, and sweetener takes away the “burn” typical of neat or on-the-rocks whiskey.
This may become my go-to drink.
Adam Lane Smith, an energetic and prolific author as well as a psychologist and self-help guru (two careers I consider deeply suspicious, admittedly) has an interesting essay on the degeneration of some beloved franchises in an essay entitled “The Scheduled Murder of Men’s Entertainment.”
In particular, he discusses the Star Wars sequels and what they did to Luke Skywalker, but he goes into greater detail about the God of War video-game franchise, which I admit I’m not familiar with.
Kratos slinks away from Greece in shame, finds a wife, has a son, and then neglects and abandons them both. When he is around them, he spends all his time agonizing over how ashamed he is of himself and everything he’s ever done. He’s hiding from the entire world and from himself. The makers originally intended to show him fat and out of shape. His (now dead) wife lays out a plan to reunite the verbally abusive deadbeat dad with his resentful son but she has to trick them both into doing it.
Following the tendencies of two of his professions, Smith delivers an analysis of this that is compelling:
The problem is that the creators are espousing a very specific post-modern nihilistic outlook brought about by weak fathers or absent fathers. Modern creators supported by Hollywood and big corporations have crushing attachment problems and broken relationships with their own fathers for a variety of reasons. They’re used to their saintly single mothers conditioning them to despise their own fathers. Men grow up worshipping their mothers, and women grow up seeing all men as worthless children incapable of real love.
As I read this essay, I keep hearing in my head the line from Fight Club: “We’re a generation raised by women. Maybe another woman is not what we need.” Of course, Fight Club meant this as a nasty joke (every generation ever is raised by women, as the audience is supposed to realize when hearing Tyler Durden pontificate), but Lane is serious, as have been many other commentators on the same subject.
The concern that the current trajectory of civilization is emasculating has been around for a while, going back at least to the publication of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but probably predating that. The Fight Club novel, also, immediately predated several nonfiction works on the same theme, and the film adaptation became a movie of choice for a lot of Gen-Xers probably because that theme was already in the forefront of the national mindset: The director intended the movie to be ironic, but many of us viewers treated it as dead serious.
Back at the end of the 1990s, these fears of emasculation were easy to dismiss—but that is no longer the case; now that the American Psychological Association has come right out and declared manliness a pathology, claims of attack on manhood cannot be called mere paranoia.
Sharp observers have noted for years that popular entertainments consistently treat fathers as worthless deadbeats or at least fools. This probably traces to Freud, but it has become most pronounced in the last three decades. Smith makes keen observations of the otherwise inexplicable destructions of characters such Luke Skywalker and Kratos: The storytellers responsible for these works simply cannot imagine a man growing old without also becoming crotchety, worthless, and a deadbeat. It is an ugly mixture of self-hatred and, more importantly, hatred for daddy.
Smith’s suggested solution to this problem is more stories that showcase manliness and masculine virtues, some of which he’s written himself. He’s correct that we now have a dearth of these: Simply browse the latest children’s books available at your public library, and you will see a quite a selection of grrrl power (and a peppering of smut, which blue-haired librarians love to give to children), with very few works designed to interest boys.
Admittedly, I prefer to write stories about girls myself, but I begin to think it’s time to ressurect the classic pulp genre of manly male adventurers who have young boys for sidekicks, in the vein of Terry and the Pirates or even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I don’t think any of the “pulp revival” authors have shown much interest in writing child characters, so maybe I should consider filling that gap.
Featured image: “Mai-HiME” by limandao.
I just started watching My-HiME, which came out in , a signature year for magical-girl anime, seeing as how it also saw the release of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and Pretty Cure. My-HiME did all right for itself, producing some spin-offs, though I don’t think it had quite the same impact as Nanoha or especially Pretty Cure, which became a commercial juggernaut.
All three of these shows upped the amount of violent action typical of the genre and did it for three different demographics: Pretty Cure was shoujo, Nanoha was seinen, and My-HiME was shounen.
The opening episode of My-HiME is certainly promising, with a creative action set-piece and some excellent animation.
In any case, I’ll talk about it when I finish it. It’s considerably longer than the last show I reviewed, and my current schedule does not give me a lot of extra time for TV, but I’ll do what I can.
Featured art: “Magical Girl Natsuki Is Here to Deliver Cupcakes” by @oregaihanboshi.
Prétear, written by Kenichi Kanemaki and directed by Junichi Sato. Hal Film Maker (). 13 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 312 minutes). Rated TV-14.
Available on Funimation.
Funny story: Although it looks like a much earlier series, the information on Prétear from the Funimation site claims that the show comes from 2010. Since that’s the year before Puella Magi Madoka Magica made its appearance, I was all set to interpret this show as the end of an era, the last of the primarily Sailor Moon-influenced magical-girl anime before Madoka took over the genre. But Funimation’s metadata is wrong (which is good because that means I wasn’t crazy when I thought there was no way this was from 2010); Prétear is actually from 2001.
That, however, suggests perhaps equally interesting connections: It bears some apparent influence from Revolutionary Girl Utena, and it also predates Princess Tutu by just a few years. It comes from the same studio as Tutu and resembles it in some respects; so while this isn’t a bridge between Sailor Moon and Madoka, it might be a link between Utena and Tutu.
