Watching television like cinema

How we’re watching anime when we’re watching anime.



So the point made is that when you watch television in your own language, you can get away with not paying a hundred percent attention to it. A lot of television is watched while you’re doing something else after all, like the way we used to listen to the radio. Maybe you’re doing the dishes, or eating, or faffing about on the internet, but the assumption is that you’re not giving your full attention to whatever is playing on the screen. This as opposed to watching a movie in the cinema, where you’re forced to pay your full attention to the movie. But with anime, if you’re not fluent in Japanese, if you cannot rely on hearing the dialogue to tell you when you have to pay attention again, you tend to watch a show in the same way as if you were watching a movie in the cinema. If only because you need to see the subtitles to know what’s happening.

And because, like most television, an anime series is created with the understanding that it will be watched by people who are not giving it their full attention, so there will be redundancies built into each episode. Exposition, recaps, repeats of important information from earlier in the episode, etc. Which is fine for the original Japanese audience, but if you’re a non-Japanese, non-fluent viewer who relies on subtitles for your understanding, this redundancy stands out because you are paying attention all of the time. Especially if you’re binging a show that was originally meant to be watched weekly. You’re watching something in a way that it wasn’t meant to be watched and because you cannot look away, its redundancies are even more evident.

This is something I very much noticed in my own anime watching, where I can sometimes get annoyed by the seemingly unnecessary exposition and recaps because I am paying such close attention to it. Especially with a more ambitious series, I sometimes don’t actually want to watch as much as I want to have watched it, because I cannot look away for fear of missing something yet there are long stretches where nothing interesting seems to happen. At those times I’d rather watch something simpler, a kids show like Precure or Aikatsu which I can watch while doing something else, as they have a set formula that guides when and when not to pay attention. This is occassionally frustrating, but at least I was used to reading subtitles already.

In conclusion then, it pays to take into account for which audience and medium a series is made, whether it was intended to be watched week by week, or binged like a Netflix series. Whether or not it was intended to be paid close attention to or rather had built-in redundancies for an audience not expected to pay full attention to it. It’s still fair to criticise a series for over exposition or a reliance on recaps or repeats, but if you don’t take into account these things, you cannot understand why a series does what it does.

Cosmos vs Civilisation

Kenneth Clark is a testament to the fact that having an Oxbridge education makes you perfectly suited to spouting bullshit with confidence standing in front of pretty pictures, as funded by BBC largesse.



Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation is held up as a ground breaking documentary series, both in presentation and content. And it is indeed impressive, even almost fifty years on, with gorgeously filmed landscapes, buildings and art. But actually watching the first episode was a crashing disappointment. I knew that it was very much an old school approach to history, that this would be European and European history only, Whiggish and with very definite ideas on what civilisation entails. But still.

Clark starts out from the Fall of Rome, which is presented as an unalloyed disaster, causing the flame of civilisation to almost burn out. He then moves on to how it did manage to survive, in England and France, how new challenges arose as the Vikings came raiding and how Charlemange saved civilisation. The various successor states of the western Roman Empire are dismissed as barbarians, the Arab and Muslim civilisations barely mentioned, even the Byzantine Empire is sneered at as not quite the done thing. It’s such a narrow minded, boring view of history it set me against watching any of the rest of it.



What a difference Carl Sagan’s Cosmos makes. Sagan’s deeply humanist approach to science and astronomy sees him traveling the world to explain the history of his discpline, from ancient Greek scientists in Egypt, to meeting Japanese fishermen who refuse to eat crabs with carapaces resembling samurai to tell about natural selection, to visiting the monuments the Anasazi left behind as proof of their astronomical measures. There’s a joy and kindness in his narration that makes me want to keep watching.

This is actually my first time watching Cosmos: if it was broadcasted on Dutch television when it was originally released, I was too young for it. Yet Cosmos was very important to me growing up, as the accompanying book was translated into Dutch and available at my local library and I must’ve read it half a dozen times as a kid. It was reading this that helped make me an atheist, as in it I found a much more logical and appealing explanation for the world around me than some all powerful god having created it all from scratch.

Clark’s view of history is dour and joyless, unappealing in the extreme by comparison. Glad it was Sagan that got his hooks in my brain back then.

Your Happening World (26-06-2017)

  • the Mangaka who came in from the cold — Below is a small selection of four manga artists and one writer who are being overlooked by American publishers. They work, by and large, within the field of seinen, a loosely defined category of manga anthologies ostensibly geared towards young adult males in Japan. Admittedly the sample’s homogeneity is partly a result of my own preference as a reader towards this niche, but seinen takes on a special relevance these days as well.
  • On VidCon, Harassment & Garbage Humans — To kick off the Women Online panel at VidCon last Thursday, the moderator posed the question: Why do we still have to talk about the harassment of women? I replied, “Because I think one of my biggest harassers is sitting in the front row.”
  • Beowulf and the Comic Book: Contemporary Readings — This paper explores the appropriation of the Old English poem by modern popular culture in such a distinctive 20th-century art-form as the comic book, which proves that a heroic, legendary story already old for the Anglo-Saxons —it was set in geardagum, “the ancient days”— still elicits the interest of the audience in the modern world.
  • This week’s Bookscan chart is a wake-up call for the comics industry — Let me spell it out for you: girls and women, black and white, cis and trans alike, are the driving force behind comics readership expansion. This has been happening for a while, but it’s a full on avalanche now. It’s also something I saw coming 25 years ago. (No one else is gonna pat me on the back so I gotta do it myself.) Seeing the devoted fandoms that female content-consumers developed for anything that interested them, ESPECIALLY genre material like paranormal romance, horror and fantasy – I had a hunch that once they turned their spotlight on comics, the full force of female fandom would bowl over the fragile shreds of male safe spaces like a Mack truck through a pile of empty Axe cartons.

Angel Beats! rewatch 02 – Guild

Angel Beats logo

The second episode in the series; there may be some spoilers. After the first episode introduced the setting and main characters, the second is a bit of a breather. Our protagonist, Otonashi, is still pretty much a spectator this episode, willing to follow Yurippe and her Afterlife Battlefront (SSS) in their combat against Tenshi but with his heart not quite in it. Whereas the previous episode had exposition, this one has action. The Battlefront needs to replenish their ammunition and guns and to do so they have to go underground, to the Guild headquarters where their weapons are made. There’s only one problem.

it's a trap

The anti-Tenshi traps protecting the long way down to the Guild headquarters are still active. Because as it turned out, Tenshi herself is also on her way down. Now the battlefront has no choice but to go on and hope to make it before she catches up, while trying not to die on their own traps. This is mainly an excuse for a bit of slapstick and comedy, as well as giving the chance to develop the various SSS members a bit further through the medium of dying stupidly. After all, death isn’t permanent in this world; just painful.

blood spattered standing clock

To no-one’s surprise, it’s Otonashi and Yurippe who survive, which gives Otonashi the opportunity to ask Yuri about why she founded the battlefront, why she’s fighting god. As her answer she gives her backstory, of how one day robbers came to her house and killed her two younger sisters and brother while forcing her to search for valuables her parents had supposedly hidden. It’s that memory, that unfairness that motivates her, which explains why she can go toe to toe with Tenshi, take her on in hand combat in a way nobody else can.

Yurippe versus Tenshi

The problem I had with this though is that it’s so over the top it becomes less tragic than ridiculous. It’s too much like a superhero’s origin, too melodramatic. To be honest, the whole episode, while entertaining and moving the plot forward, feels awkward compared to what comes before and after it. Episode three especially will be gut wrenching, knowing what’s coming, while this feels like a filler episode for a longer series — it would’ve made more sense had Angel Beats! been a 26 episode series rather than a 13 episode one. Nevertheless we got some more character development for Otonashi and Yurippe, got a good sense of how dangerous and unstoppable Tenshi is and got some insight in the other Battlefront members. On the whole then this is not a bad episode, just the series having not quite found its feet yet.

Angel Beats! rewatch 01 – Departure

Angel Beats logo

I first binge watched Angel Beats! on holiday in the South of France a few years when it was far too hot for my body type to actually do anything, sitting outside on the veranda of our holiday house late at night while the rest of the family was fast asleep. My expectations were low at the time, but it turned out to be one of the most compelling and emotional series I’d ever watched. One of those series that stay with you for a long time, which is why I wanted to rewatch it now and look more closely at why it mattered so much, what it got right.

Otonashi meets Yurippe

A strong first episode is of course essential to any new series, especially when it’s an original series with no existing body of work in other media to fall back on. Angel Beats starts with the Amber gambit: the protagonist wakes up in a strange world with no recollection how he got there or even who he is. He finds himself in the stands of the athletic fields of what seems to be a high school, facing a girl holding a sniper rifle aiming at something below. That’s Yuri “Yurippe” Nakamura who informs him that a) he’s dead b) he’s in limbo and c) he’s recruited in the fight against god and d) if he doesn’t join he’ll disappear from the world. She also explains that the girl she’s aiming at is Tenshi (angel) their direct opponent, at which point our hero decides to talk to her instead.

Tenshi kills Otonashi

Tenshi introduces herself as not an angel, but the student council president, he questions her about the world he is in, she replies that yes, he is dead and should accept the world as he finds it, and then he makes the mistake of shouting at her to prove it. Which she does. By driving a knife through his heart. Waking up the next morning in the school’s infirmary he finds his blood soaked shirt and finally accepts this is real. After this the still nameless protagonist is introduced to the rest of the SSS, the resistance battlefront put together by Yurippe and infodumping happens before the episode is wrapped up by the first battlefront mission.

Angel Beats cast

It’s a large cast for a thirteen episode anime and many of the secondary characters therefore are no more than stereotypes; their introduction is remarkably efficient at establishing their parameters. There’s the smart guy with glasses (“acutally an idiot” according to Yurippe), the lead singer of the all girl band, the aggressive loudmouth, the quiet but resourceful girl, the big martial arts guy etc. And there’s TK, the bandanaed English nonsense spouting show stealer. In later episodes a fair few of the cast will get their moment to shine, but for now they’re mainly there as background characters, with the focus purely on Otonashi, as he finally remembers he’s called, Yurippe and Tenshi, with the latter as the unstoppable antagonist.



For a first episode, this does everything right: introduce the main characters, establish the plot and setting, end with an action packed climax so it isn’t all talking heads. There’s even a bit of humour, with TK and the many slapstick deaths of Otonashi. But what sets it apart is the music. Both the opening and ending theme are great, even without the emotional impact they acquire as the series progresses, but even better is “Crow Song”, played by Girls Dead Monster as shown above, during Operation Tornado, the SSS daily operation which ends the episode. The first of what’ll become an album’s worth of great rock songs, good enough that their real live counterparts would play a series of sold out concerts. GiDeMo’s music is at the heart of the series and for me will always be associated with several heartwrenching moments, this song included.