Shameful Otaku Secret!

Sadly, someone beat me to the Eliot reference here. Fortunately, it was 2DT in this swell post.

What was it Def Leppard said? It’s better to burn out than to fade away, right? I suppose the going theory would be that going down in flames makes for a much better story. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, then, is defying conventional heavy metal wisdom. Because although it takes place at the end of the world, this is not the end from some nuclear disaster or a zombie apocalypse movie. In fact, who knows exactly what happened? I suppose you could guess that global warming finally got the best of us, the seas rose, and the bulk of the earth drowned, leaving a few survivors in a simple life on high ground.

It’s that simplicity that makes YKK what it is. The easy-breezy pace of life, the high technology of humanlike robots mingling with old scooters and street markets, the weird plants and creatures that resemble man-made items of yore… it’s fundamentally weird, but only when you step back and look at it as such.

What’s pervasive in your mind throughout YKK is an almost-overwhelming sense of melancholy, of sad nostalgia. The earth itself seems to long for the glory days of humanity, even as it’s in the last phase of reclaiming itself from them. As 2DT mentions, it seems very Japanese to quietly accept the end of the world like this; after all, we don’t see what anyone’s doing elsewhere on earth, but something in YKK does give the impression that this is… just how it is. After all, what can you do? Nothing. It’s over. This is the twilight of humanity, and I only hope that we go with such grace and poise.

Part of the 12 Anime Moments of 2009, and the horse it rode in on.

2009 was a big year for anime for one solid reason: Haruhi returned. Long baited, teased, and ridiculed, fans of the 2000s’ biggest series were finally rewarded for their patience. Turns out, they weren’t rewarded all that well, but at least we got the wonderfully entertaining Haruhi-chan and Nyoron Churuya-san.

Of the things that made the return noteworthy — drops in animation quality, the near-punching of the titular (anti-)heroine, or the introduction of the book series’ central time-travel themes — one stands above: Endless Eight. Is it another troll on the fans? They certainly have reason to think that way after their treatment by Vengeful God Kadokawa. Is it a failed attempt to be clever? Who knows. It’s almost avant-garde when you think about it. No one’s ever done anything like it. But in the end, I think it was brilliant. Not just the fact that it was done, but in its execution.

See, by the close of Endless Eight (which did, in fact have an end, and that’s what makes it a ripoff), viewers were micro-focused on changes in outfits, slight variations on the dialog, and Kyon’s minute advances. So when the brain-snapping end finally came, the force of your fist in the air was enough to raise you out of your seat.

Was it, in combination with the “Sighs of Haruhi Suzumiya” story, enough to gain back the goodwill lost during the most experimental anime arc of the century? Doesn’t seem that way. Maybe the movie version of Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, one of the most well-liked stories, will fix that. Hard to say. But love Endless Eight or hate it, at least it gave us this moment.

Ah, “slice of life.” A loose categorization sometimes used in entertainment writing but rarely thought of as a genre outside anime. There in cartoon-land it lives a contentious existence being confused with other genres, added to other genres, and insisting that we’d like everything a little more if we thought of all our anime as “slice of life” with tendencies toward [comedy, mecha, earthquakes, tentacles].

The issue with cutting a small day-in-the-life “slice” from the fictional existences of characters is that there is nothing else inherent to the genre that makes it potentially interesting to watch. If someone sliced your life, chances are the audience would slice their wrists from boredom (sex scenes notwithstanding).

But that’s not to say “slice of life” has to be boring. It’s just that you have to rely on “life” itself to be interesting rather than contrived external circumstances.

What if your life was an exciting one? What if you were… I dunno, say, an astronaut? That might help. What if said life involved great danger, wonderful science, and scads of Engrish passed back and forth across crackly radios? Sounds, maybe… too exciting for a slice of life. Then ratchet it back down: you’re a garbage collector, and it’s all in a day’s work.

The first half of Goro Taniguchi’s (Code Geass, S-CRY-Ed) wonderful Planetes plays very much as slice of life, and I’m not saying that because I find that it does nothing else particularly well. In fact, it’s got exciting close shaves, satisfying romance, more than a few laughs, and sci-fi with a capital Science. But none feel out of place in the lives of the characters. When picking up space garbage — as Ai, Hachimaki, Fee, and the gang do — you might have to ram a satellite while in a fit of nicotine withdrawal. You might see people die. You might learn something new about your friends. And you might fall in love. That’s life.

What I’m talking about really only applies to the first half of the series, because I can’t keep calling an anime “slice of life” when it develops an over-arching plot structure with big character development, goals and traditional narrative conflict. Heaviness sets in somewhere around episode 17 or 18, but until that point Taniguchi (along with original mangaka Makoto Yukimura) has already cut a tasty slice that he uses to make us more personally invested in the later events.

And why does it work, even with spacemen?

We all live, uh… lives. Each boring day, each hour spent at a desk at work, each tiny little drama that doesn’t alter the fate of the world is a slice in our lives. And it’s pretty neat to see people in this near-future that’s neither dystopian nor utopian, just our potential future, going through those same slices. There’s no war, supernatural experience, or other crazy thing to make life stop or change drastically. Just regular people holding down a job and doing their best (it is Japanese after all). Thanks to some incredibly well-written/well-acted characters and a tendency to never portray anything as overly fantastic or glamorous, we can find the common points between their slices and ours.

Did I go anywhere with this? Short version, I really dig Planetes a lot. I’m not done though, so please no spoilers for me. I’m sure I’ll do another post when it’s over.