The specific memories might be Japanese, but the sentiment is universal.
Anime
Shirobako
Shirobako is anime getting meta, an anime series about making an anime series, about five high school friends who were in the anime club together going to Tokyo and trying to make it in the industry. On one level it’s pure wishfullfillment of course, a little rose tinted perhaps, but that barely matters because the first three episodes I watched were sooo good. This is the sort of series I both want to race through to continue the story and want to saviour because there’s so much in each episode.
Its main attraction is not just the insider’s look into how an anime studio really works and the crises they face, but seeing competent people at work, in an environment familiar to anybody who has worked on time critical projects. Much of the first three episodes consisted of having scheduling conflicts, deadline issues and project managers changing their minds about mission critical features at the very last minute. Not to mention co-workers dropping the ball and having to pick it up yourself. Funny too, in a relatively understated way for anime.
What also makes it interesting for me is to see the differences in office culture between here and Japan; much, much more formal in the latter if this is an indication. (Though of course office politics are similar in most countries.) If you like to check it out, it’s available for free streaming from Crunchyroll.
The best(-ish) 25(-ish) anime of all time
New to anime? Looking for the highlights? Try Glass Reflection Top 25-ish Recommended Anime:
Granted, this is not a perfect list by any measure, very much weighted towards the present and the more blokey sort of anime, with noticable omissions. But it is a good starting point and a way to inspire yourself to seek out more. You may have noticed I’ve been on a bit of an anime kick lately, mainly because I finally got off my ass and got a home entertainment system sorted, consisting of getting my Chromecast up and running, using Plex Media Server to stream everything from a net drive. It works surprisingly well, even when I’m away from home. Oddly enough, by making it easier for myself to watch my anime, I ended up watching more. This top twentyfive list was a neat way to think about what to watch next or seek out.
And since I posted this to MetaFilter anyway (and you may want to check out the discussion there) and it’s a waste to throw away all the links I found, I thought, why not post it here too? Below the cut is the complete list with links to reviews, trailers or discussions of them.
Loveable like the clatter of iron tracks
Admittedly, it sounds like Girls und Panzer should be awful. A bunch of typically stereotyped anime high school girls are bullied by their overpowerful student committee into taken up tankery, the refined and genteel sport that makes proper women and wives out of young girls, with the main character being reluctant to enter the sport again because of a mysterious accident in her past at her previous school. Done wrong it could be an endless series of fanservice panty shots, crappy slapstick and a trite plot to justify it all.
Luckily it’s better than that. Yes, the idea is silly, but the series takes it seriously, which makes all the differences. The tanks are recognisable like their real world counterpart, each with their own strengths and weaknesses and the tactics used are relatively sensible. Of course, since this is at heart a sports anime, the battles shown are more like those in World of Tanks than real warfare, something fans of the former have taken to heart. Especially because every now and again there are awesome moments of grognard nerdiness like this:
But without a good story, all this tank nerdery would be pointless. And what Girls und Panzer has is the classic sports underdog story, where the plucky newcomer with no pedigree, no experience, underestimated by the competition has to win for reasons. It’s a formula, but a well done formula: you know they’re going to win, but you don’t known how and there’s genuine tension as the odds are stacked against them. They don’t always win; there are losses too and there is a learning curve.
The characterisation, at first broad, is deepened too over the course of the series, which packs a lot in just twelve episodes (and two recap specials as the production got into trouble). Two things make it stand out from many other, similar looking anime series. The first is that all significant characters are women (only three men appear in minor parts) who work together to overcome adversary, with no sniping, no back biting, none of the silly little rivalries you see in other series. The second is that there are no villains, nobody cheating or gratitiously nasty: even the people dismissive or somewhat insulted by the newbies entering their sacred sport are won over. That’s what makes this special. That and showing how you can use a Type 89 to kill a Maus.
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Feeling under the weather enough today that I had to stay home from work and what better way to recuperate than with tomato soup and a Hayao Miyazaki movie? I hadn’t seen Kiki’s Delivery Service yet though it was released in 1989 and I’d had it in my collection for donkey ages. It seemed the perfect movie to curl up on the couch with a cat for.
Kiki is a thirteen year old girl who wants to fly in her mother’s footsteps and become an independent witch; thirteen is the traditional age for a witch to do so. So she packs her bag, takes her cat and sets out on her mother’s old broom to fly to a new team and be a witch in training for a year, during which she’ll have to discover her speciality. She ends up in the port city of Koriko, which is somewhat inspired by Stockholm but apart from that is an undetermined Europeanesque city in an unnamed country in an unspecified but slightly old fashioned looking time period. I love that aspect of Miyazaki’s work, of how here and in Howl’s Moving Castle he creates a world that’s certainly not modern, but can’t quite be pinned down to one period either.
What’s also great are all the subtle character touches: the way her cat behaves and his body language, the way Kiki herself is apprehensive going to the outside toilet in the place she’s staying in for her first night in the big town. She’d been taken in by the proprietor of a bakery at the outskirts of town, who is very friendly, but her husband is the strong and silent type and when Kiki nearly runs in to him when she’s going to the toilet and he’s starting work, it’s clear she’s uncomfortable and wants to avoid him, in a way you would be staying with a strange family for the first time.
But what struck me the most watching this was how many strong and strong in different way women there were in it. It’s not just Kiki: there’s Osono the baker, who gives Kiki room and board and inspires her to start her flying delivery service. There’s Ursula, the painter, seen above, who Kiki meets on her first, not very succesful assignment and who is crucial to help her overcome her crisis of confidence in the last third of the movie. There are others, like the witch she first meets on her way to town and who gives her advice on how to spent her year in training, or the elderly customer and her servant whom Kiki helps and who help her in turn. This is a movie that passes the Bechdel test with flying colours and is full of women who help each other, rather than being rivals for a male protagonist’s affection. Not to mention men who are supportive of them, not wanting to put them down, like Osono’s husband and Kiki’s friend Tombo, who she has to safe (and does) in a genuinely tense climax.
It’s something that shouldn’t be special, should not be so noticable but it does seem sometimes like we backslid quite a lot from the eighties, in that we may be lucky to have two women in a given movie, let alone half a dozen not defined by their relationship to a man.