Category: Animé

Wherego Ergo?

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]

Ergo, Ergo Proxy?

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’s Anime Pick — Mushi-Shi

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]

Do Robots Dream Of Electric Mothers?

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.”

Girl-God Raises the Yamato

An episode of the previously-blogged anime Kamichu took us rather by surprise. Girl-god Yurie’s spirit form travels to the bottom of the Pacific ocean to raise the spirit of the Japanese battleship Yamato, for an elderly man who left the crew before the ship’s sinking in 1945. I’ve spliced a few scenes together.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/KamichuYamato.flv 425 240]

What surprised us was how the episode rejoices in the legend of the ship — the largest ever built — without political overtones or, for that matter, ever mentioning WWII. The PBS program NOVA has a good section about the Yamato on its Web site. The old man in the cartoon who rhapsodizes about sailing on the Yamato says he was born in 1920, so either he’s supposed to be well into his 80’s, or the show takes place some time ago.

Eric’s Anime Pick — Ergo Proxy

Besides giant robot battles, another fave Anime theme is the hot female agent/assassin who begins to suspect she isn’t working for the good guys. (See previous post about Kurau.) Ergo Proxy is another example along these lines. So far we’ve watched it through episode 4. The series has some subtly stylized, if dark and monochromatic, artwork and an attention-holding narrative.

[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/JUL07/ErgoProxy.flv 425 240]

The theme song played over the closing credits, “Paranoid Android,” is by Radiohead, a band I featured here. The song heard during the opening is by Monral.