Category: Animé

With the Writers Guild of America on strike, TV is full of re-runs, of course. Last night I caught a MADtv show that featured TV parodies, including a hilarious take on what they say are Japanese soap operas. However, Eric informs me the writing is in Korean, and cast member Bobby Lee is Korean-American. Anyway, six months ago I featured the Japanese romantic comedy Train Man, and I can see elements of that in this parody.
[flv:/Video/DEC07/MADTV.flv 400 300]

We’re finished with the anime series Ergo Proxy. The ending was pretty good, with the usual grand speeches and battles and massive explosions.

One of the change-of-pace Ergo installments had a mocking parody of Walt Disney in a scratchy black and white movie, gesturing like Hitler.

[flv:/Video/OCT07/ErgoDisney.flv 448 252]

Long before Ergo Proxy, even before Astro Boy, the first anime to reach America, one of Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil cartoons made fun of Disneyland.

[flv:/Video/OCT07/Beanyland.flv 400 300]

A couple of months ago I posted Ergo Proxy as Eric’s anime pick. We’re still going through the series, and the last few installments have been really good. I’ve blended a bit of one of them into the prologue of the next episode to highlight the contrast between them. Don’t try to make any sense of this!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/ErgoProxyDoubles.flv 448 252]

Eric says that Mushi-Shi is a relatively obscure title. Indeed, it took a week for a copy to arrive in Massachusetts from a Netflix distribution center in California.

Like Kino’s Journey, Mushi-Shi is about a wanderer, with a series of mostly self-contained stories. But unlike Kino, the character Ginko isn’t exploring for its own sake, but rather he’s a healer-for-hire who exorcises parasitic creatures called Mushi.

Caution: This video depicts what is known to comic book fans as an “injury to eye motif,” and it’s yucky and gunky!
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/SEP07/MushiShi.flv 448 252]

The granddaddy of anime is Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a TV show that held much fascination for me in childhood. Partially a mixture of Frankenstein and Pinocchio, Astro Boy was often whimsical to the point of being surreal. Here’s Astro wishing he had a mother, in a scene seemingly inspired by Salvador Dali.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/Astro.flv 400 300]

Dali himself did dally in film, as seen in this scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/AUG07/Spellbound.flv 400 300]

That eerie sound is a Theremin, also heard prominently in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend. A staple of horror and science fiction films, the Theremin was famously used by Brian Wilson in “Good Vibrations.”