In the afterglow of last week’s Fruits Basket anime announcement, it dawned on me that 2019 is going to be a particularly exciting year for anime. Enthused, I dug a bit deeper into what 2019 has in store for us and, well, hold on to your hats!
It’s Autumn in the UK now. It’s cold and wet outside, the nights are drawing in and there’s the first inkling of frost in the mornings. Don’t fret though, a new anime season is here to keep us alive, so pour yourself a hot drink (unless you’re one of those weird people that doesn’t like hot drinks. I know you’re out there and I’ll never understand you) and settle in for some freshly baked, long overdue anime opinions.
A balloon is a fragile thing. When Riko releases her balloon into the sky at the end of Made in Abyss, we see it lift its tiny payload.
It’s crazy.
How can something so fragile and small make it all the way to the top, past all the dangerous creatures and sharp rocks?
A message in a bottle cast into a bottomless ocean.
Along the way, it’s snagged on a branch, but is somehow found, repaired by friends and sent back on its way. Still rising, still carrying its message. Step by step, progress. Through the clouds and giant bugs, it finally comes to a rest; at the top. Against the odds, the balloon made it, tattered and ripped, but made it nonetheless, conveying its message to Riko’s friends. It’s like a dream, something that should never be possible, only the faintest of hopes.
I am a dreamer, I think. There’s a lot I really like about Made in Abyss but when I was thinking about it last week, the first scene that I wanted to rewatch was the balloon scene. I can still feel my heart beating watching it. Going down into the abyss is a one-way deal, there’s no going back. In life, there’s no turning back either, things cannot be undone.
The passing of time is like entering the abyss, it changes us, for the bad and the good, it’s sometimes hard and painful, but for all that sense of insignificant struggle, we can make things, even great things, standing on the shoulders of our family, friends and colleagues. Those things can rise, too.
Watching anime, I go through peaks and troughs.
The start of the year was a peak, but throughout February, I’ve been in a bit of a trough trying to find something new to watch and fall in love with.
At some point, I remembered that there’s a whole bunch of Shonen Jump anime that I should get back in to. I mean, I never finished Naruto Shippūden. Naruto is the reason I became an anime fan in the first place, my gateway drug. Apparently I’ve seen 573 episodes of One Piece too. I used to love One Piece and somehow it’s still going, with my last count showing 826 episodes and rising. Bloody hell, that’s a lot.
In 2017, Masaaki Yuasa directed The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl, which is a film set in the same fictional universe as his 2010 series The Tatami Galaxy. I really liked The Tatami Galaxy. I remember thinking that it was a more conventional (and therefore more accessible) anime than his other works at the time (Mind Game, Kemonozume and Kaiba) but it was still unmistakably his anime: raw, hyperactive and cathartic. At that same time, I didn’t know anything about its author, a certain Tomihiko Morimi, who I’ve later realised has a signature style all of his own. He wrote The Eccentric Family too.
Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
Tall grass and open skies
That’s where we’ll be
That’s where we’ll meet
(Yvette Young – A map a string a light)
In Girls’ Last Tour, Earth has been ravaged. Life has been all but extinguished. A permanent winter. All that’s left are cities. Concrete jungles powered by technologies long since abandoned. In that world travel two of the last people, Yuuri and Chito, on their trusty old motorcycle. From skyscraper to subway they move, searching for food and supplies amidst the lost civilization, trying to make sense of the symbols and artifacts left behind by their parents and grandparents generation. What to us are graves, factories, transistor radios and songs, are to them a mystery. Strange, magical things.
I can’t speak for Japan, but right now in England, young adults are having a hard time. Money seems harder to come by than ever for many who are working all hours to afford their month’s rent, let alone buying a home without a mortgage that’s loaded with high interest rates. It’s a scary, often bewildering time, struggling to keep your head above water in the town or city that you grew up in and trust deeply, a place that’s now indifferent to your pain.
That alienation and desperation is captured by the street rappers’ in Devilman Crybaby. They may be my favourite part of the series.
Don’t give up!
Through preference as much as necessity, the way I’m consuming anime today is different to how I used to, say, 10 years ago. Back then, I relied on downloading fansubs and watching anime as it aired in Japan, one episode per week. I was in deep. Today, I hardly rely on fansubs at all, because it’s easier to stream something from Crunchyroll, or Netflix, or where-ever, than to get a torrent file. Of course, I’m paying for subscriptions at those sites too, which alludes to a big difference from back then: I have a full-time job, the upside of which is that I can afford nice things, the downside is that I have (much) less time to enjoy them.
Hey guys. I know, I know. It’s been nearly 2 years. Putting pen to paper hasn’t been easy. I’ve been a bit jaded and distracted, but still, I think about writing. Every time I walk away, something brings me back. It’s because I love writing. I honestly miss it. This year I put down some resolutions, and one of those was to write again for this blog. I’m rusty, though. I’ve been thinking about where to start, but every time I think I’ve got something, the inspiration drifts. There are so many voices, so many opinions, so much noise, it’s hard not to feel small, or like a drop in an ocean. The more I think, the less confident I feel, but I still remember, I like myself when I write. I will keep going.
After a long absence, it is time for me to officially step away from writing here (just me, not the site’s other writers). As a parting post, I would like to share my thoughts on anime that stand the test of time. Even older titles that were created with a Japanese audience in mind can still be relevant today. I was reminded of this recently when the real world seemed to imitate one of my favorite movies, Mamoru Oshii’s Patlabor 2.
