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Posts Tagged ‘anime’

Now, it’s been years since I’ve been anywhere near the video games industry, but I still like to keep up with it in an armchair capacity. One of my favorite sites by which to do this is a blog called gamesetwatch, a collection of essays and links to articles by many industry leaders. One article they had recently was a retrospective on “Time Gal”, one of those old laser disc arcade games that had animated cutscenes that you control via pressing the correct button or moving the joystick in the right way. The author, Todd Ciolek, (who also writes X-button, a fine column at the Anime News Network) pointed out that Time Gal was the first game to have a non-licensed character that players could recognize as human. He goes on to praise the game for having a heroine that was so cute and chirpy, but then there was one line that just made my head spin.

“Misogyny creeps in, of course: Time Gal’s already skimpy clothes get ripped away by T-Rexes and Fist of the North Star mutants alike, and she’ll scream about being struck on the chest or getting bitten on her partially exposed rear. Pioneers are not always proud.”

It wasn’t just what he said, it’s how he said it. Misogyny. You know, creeping in like that. Here you are, pushing through the glass ceiling, but let one of those things on your chest slip out and BOOM! There’s misogyny. The word here is written with such complacency, such blasé, that it’s almost as if the author was describing the sky as blue. To use such a powerful word as misogyny in that way tells me that he doesn’t even believe in what he says. And why should he have to? He’s only preaching the gospel truth. You can see it repeated all over the ‘net. To show women as sexual in any capacity is misogynist. That’s it. Finito. End of discussion.

When there’s an idea that becomes sacrosanct and, dare I say, unexamined, it bothers me. Untested truth is what keeps us from moving forward, making connections and seeing the greater scheme of things. This is part of a pattern I keep seeing again and again in video game criticism. Why is a scantily clad girl in a video game defined as misogyny? “How is that not misogyny!?” is not a valid answer.

Despite being male, I think I can put my liberal arts hat back on and take a crack at this one. Misogyny is the hatred of women. If a woman getting her clothes torn suggestively in a fight is misogyny, then there are a couple of assumptions at work here. The first is that this is sexual objectification, where a woman is judged by her physical attributes independent of her personality and intelligence. This is demeaning to women, and that makes it misogyny.

I have a problem with this. This also assumes that the way a woman looks and how she presents herself has nothing to do with her personal taste, her habits or the culture she comes from. It would seem that this imagery is only defined by how I see it. Big, white male me. Now this tells me that if I look at something and get a rise out of it, it immediately becomes misogynist. I am indirectly dictating what can and cannot be depicted in regards to women. It doesn’t matter if anyone else finds the game cute or funny. Is that feminist? Hell, is that even humanist?

So now that we’ve found out what misogyny is, what’s feminism? What images do game companies produce if they want to be forward-thinking and catch that ever-elusive female audience? Many would point to a game called Portal. It’s about a battle between a sarcastic computer and Chell, a barely seen female protagonist in a formless jumpsuit with no dialog, no expression, and no personality. She is seen as the perfect feminist archetype, as opposed to blond-haired traitors like Super Mario’s Princess Peach. Of course, this can’t explain why Peach herself has female fans all over the world and why her own game, Super Princess Peach, has sold over a million copies.

That, my friends, is why we can’t have compelling video game characters. This is why we live in a video game world populated by bald space marines and sullen amazonian axe-murderers. When we intentionally wall off a part of human nature, we blind ourselves to potential avenues of creativity. A specific, easily recognizable character can make the difference between millions of dollars in revenue and billions.

Sara and I got a membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery as a wedding present so last Friday we opted to go see an exhibition called “KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art”. The isn’t the first anime/comic themed exhibit at the art gallery. In 2002 there was “The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture” which took a lot of Astroboy, Iron Man, and Ghost in the Shell comics and called it cyborg culture. The link between all of the works was a little tenuous. I found this exhibit to be much more interesting.

On display were the last three Krazy Kat drawings ever made, lots of (very good) independent comic artists like Seth and Daniel Clowes, as well as some Manga Artists that aren’t as well known in the west, like Junko Mizuno and Mamoru Nagano. The animation exhibit displayed clips from Macross, Patlabor, and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. There was also a display on the history of animation, from Gertie the Dinosaur to Toy Story. The video game exhibit was compiled by Will Wright, creator of The Sims and Spore. It traced the progress of video games throughout the years, starting with Pac-man, going through Super Mario and leading up to Grand Theft Auto and Quake. This was followed by a pop art exhibit containing modern art about comics, animation and video games.

Now, I’ve blogged about the art gallery before, and I wasn’t too happy about how free expression had completely overthrown the idea that you need the talent and craft necessary to communicate the ideas. It’s kind of impossible to do anything in animation or video games without some level of craft but I still had this nagging thought that the exhibitors at the art gallery viewed the abandonment of rules as progress. Works that made less and less sense were being touted as the future of their respective media. Even in the video games, the procedural generation of random worlds was held up as being superior to scripted stories and artistic control. As I walked through the pop art exhibit, I came across a series of works called “No Ghost Just A Shell”, and I had realized that I stepped into the dimension of arrogant intellectuals who had completely missed the point.

“No Ghost, Just a Shell” is the work of two “artists” named Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. They bought the rights to a character they called “Annlee” from a Japanese character development studio. She was kind of a sad girl with elf ears who probably wouldn’t be able to carry on her own series. They decided to create an exhibit around her. Now, this would have been a good thing if she was in the care of people who could communicate like human beings. Instead she was at the mercy of cold, logical modern artists whose penchant for ambiguity is only outpaced by their arrogance. In kinder life Annlee would’ve been given a backstory, a few doujinshi, maybe someone would even cosplay as her. She would be, you know, loved. Here, in a perversion of the Velveteen Rabbit story, she gets dissected and deconstructed by bunch of euro-trash hipsters who put her in looping video installations speaking gibberish and repetitive pop art posters. The so-called triumph of the work was that the artists got a legally binding agreement that all rights to make works based on Annlee revert back to Annlee herself. However, since no one else can draw her now, she is effectively dead because some self-aggrandizing academic wanted to explore the “idea” of copyright.

The whole thing reminded me of Gulliver’s journey to Balnibarbi, where he found scientists who were so obsessed with analyzing the natural order of things that the land had turned barren from all their absurd experiments. These artists are doing the same thing with the realm of ideas. Slavish devotion to the new and the unique has created a culture where art is irrelevant. The modern art movement was started because the world of art was so detached from people’s lives, but the resulting trend ended up making art today more detached than ever. Soon they will have even lost the ability to shock.

Sara and I left the Annlee installation feeling confused and a little sad for the elf-girl that had gotten mixed up in all this. We passed another video installation called “Cosplayers” by someone named Cao Fei. It was a video of young chinese men and women exploring, fighting, and running through the streets of Guangzhou, China in anime costumes. The plaque near the installation said that the youths in the video were fighting against a society that had disdain for the imaginary, and threatened them with stifling homogeneity. It was a little obtuse, but unlike the Annlee it was actually trying to express something. The costumes were well done, and the contrast to the oppressive buildings in the background was quite neat. It reminded me of how seeing cosplayers at conventions kind of took you out of the mindset of the real world. The work was relatable and I could experience it, instead of just staring at it and trying to fashion Emperor’s clothes for it in my head. If there are more artists out there like Cao Fei, perhaps all is not lost.

It took a quarter century, but it looks like we now have a true sequel to Super Dimensional Fortress Macross. Best known to those of us in the states as the first season of Robotech, Macross was a landmark TV series in terms of character arcs, ideas, and gee-whiz animation. Repeating the success of the series has not been so easy. First there was the Direct-to-Video series Macross II, which was relegated to “parallel universe” story status by fans and creators. From what I’ve seen, Macross 7 is essentially a 49-episode music video. The closest we’ve come to sequels have 1994′s Macross Plus and 2002′s prequel Macross Zero, which were stunning, yet all too brief. For a while there it seemed like Robotech was doing a better job of continuing the series by splicing two other anime series into the continuity. But then came Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, and the less said about that again the better. After all that, it seems like we’ve got a series that takes the ideas of the original Macross in new directions while at the same time keeping true to the original. That series is Macross Frontier.

The show takes place 50 years after the original Macross. The human race was almost wiped out in the first series by a war with the Zentraedi, a race of alien giants. After the armistice, the two races decided the most sensible thing to do would be to repopulate the galaxy. The construction of huge colonization fleets began, as well as further military development to keep the fleets safe from rogue Zentraedi fleets, or anything else that might come along. The fleet called “Macross Frontier” is the focus of the show. The protagonist is 17-year-old Alto Saotome, who enrolled in pilot’s school against the wishes of his Kabuki star father. This involves learning to fly in power-suits known as EX-gear, which serve as a basic interface for any aircraft known to man (I want one!). Alto and his stunt flying team end up doing a show for a rock concert starring “Cheryl”, the latest pop idol who’s taking a galaxy-wide tour of all the Macross fleets. During the concert, the fleet is attacked by mysterious bio-mechanical creatures known only as “Vajra”. A few of the space monsters make it back the colony fleet and start wreaking havoc. In true mecha anime fashion, Alto has to commandeer a damaged Valkyrie transformable fighter with his EX-Gear to protect Ranka Lee, the sister of Ozma Lee, the squadron leader trying to protect the fleet. Alto eventually finds out the squadron leader, along with his high school friends are working for SMS, a private military contractor that handles the jobs that the regular military is too hidebound to do effectively. He must make the difficult choice to join SMS and protect himself and his loved ones.

It’s been a while since an anime series has caused me to geek out like this. It was the balance of realism and the fantastic that got me into anime in the first place, which I guess makes me different from the fans who were attracted by the intricate power fantasies of more popular shows like Dragon Ball Z or Pokemon. I’m really glad we get to see how full-grown Zentraedi fit in to this Post-Terran society on the far reaches of space. Private Military Organizations like Blackwater security are active in real war zones today, so transposing the concept to a starship fleet is also interesting. The animation and mecha are bar-none the best I’ve ever seen. The love-triangle storyline of the original is also present, with both Ranka and Cheryl vying for Alto’s attention. Despite his pretty-boy looks, Alto is so typically male that he’ll be able to fuel romantic misunderstandings for the rest of the series.

There are a few nits I’d like to pick though. Some of the characters seem “borrowed” from the original series or other anime series entirely. Alto, Michael and Luca are basically Vermillion Wing from Macross, only prettier. Ozma Lee is essentially the same as Roy Fokker (although fans of the original must have got a great scare when he uttered “I’ve lost too much blood!”. That was how the original character died). I also hope that some of the major mysteries of Macross get solved, such as the fate of the SDF-2 Megaroad, which went missing 6 years after the original series taking most of the original surviving cast with it. Anime Directors have this obsession with ambiguity that prevents them from properly ending series. The term may come to be known as the “J.J. Abrams’ Lost Syndrome”. Despite all of this, Macross Frontier looks like it will be one of best anime mecha series in a long time. It’s too bad that due to some legal SNAFU with the production company it’s not going to be released until Satan skates to work.

Image courtesy of the Macross Compendium
Macross Frontier © 2007 Big West/Macross F Project, MBS

“…if natural-gas safety precautions were so poor that entire city blocks could explode via broadband modem, we’re certain the guys at 4chan would have done it by now.” -Cracked.com

There have been a lot of rumours going around about this group called “Anonymous” that set up a world-wide protest against the Church of Scientology. I’ve been trying to figure out just what Anonymous is and what’s the deal with their internet home, “4chan”. There are media reports, articles on wikipedia, but just like the film “The Matrix”, no one can be told what 4chan is. You must experience it for yourself.

Actually no, you shouldn’t. The Random Image board of 4chan.org (also known as /b/) is not for the faint of heart nor the faint of gut. 4chan is a place where the only rule is that there are no rules. It is an internet image bulletin board system that has the unique distinction of not requiring a log-in of any kind. In an age where social networking sites collect personal information the way some old ladies collect cats, it’s refreshing to come to an on-line community that asks for your opinion but not your social insurance number.

The highest valued commodity on 4chan is laughs or “Lulz”, as 4chan users call them. Any expectation of taste, truth and accountability is promptly punted into orbit for the sake of ‘Lulz’. Board members call each other “fag” the way communists call each other “Comrade”. A common thread subject would be “Laugh and you lose” where users post the funniest images they can find. 4chan is a source of a great many internet fads or “memes”, the more popular of which being the “LoLcats” meme where funny pictures of cats are given captions in pidgin English. Other popular thread topics include matching pictures to a specific caption, “Dear Anonymous” advice columns, and one thread where Sinistar was eating through the webpage, flying around your browser and screaming “I LIVE!” It’s possible to use 4chan for mere entertainment purposes. It’s kind of like fishing. You may find yourself wading through many a proctologist’s nightmare to score that one picture of Batman riding an elephant.

So there you have it. If you see some protesters with “Anonymous vs. Scientology” signs out there, I hope I’ve shed a little light on where they come from. While there’s no doubt some of those Guy Fawkes look-a-likes are out there on good intentions, I’ve got my own theory about why the denizens of 4chan are out on the picket line. There are religious organizations that are much more dangerous than Scientology, but the legacy of L. Ron Hubbard has a certain flavor of Wacky that the pranksters of the Anonymous want for themselves. Convincing celebrities that they’re infested by dead aliens is a prank of sublime proportion. If it’s not done for the Lulz, it shouldn’t be done at all.

I believe this is how they coined the internet term, “Full of Win”.

Tommy Lee Jones plays an Alien directed to study life on Earth, and in this installment runs afoul of Japanese cosplayers and Café Maids.

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Found Via Anime News Network