Beyond the Clouds, In Space
There is an element to Makoto Shinkai’s masterpiece, Five Centimeters Per Second, that I don’t see talked about often. In some ways, it is, in part, the failing of its narrative that we don’t quite grasp this element intuitively, yet at the same time I have my hat off to 5cm/s for just being able to include it. The element isn’t some cunningly-hidden reference, although it might be something most of us do not experience on a regular basis. The element works best when it is evoked from context of a personal encounter, yet it isn’t really something people will automatically realize when confronted with that, in person.
It’s safe to say that in Shinkai’s three latest works, he explored the theme of distance, both internal and external. Internal distance is a common theme in romance anime and manga, I feel, that the take on externalizing that space via the physical distance of a physical separation is the “spin” on the well-treaded theme. I’m not saying anything you probably don’t already know, but long-distance relationships are a plot device all to itself.
Voices of a Distant Star is the blueprint of all of this, if we think about it. And it is a story about a long-distance relationship, in a nutshell.
The thing is, where as I could be (joke inc.) talking to my mistress in Paris and Googling how to make a crib for my wife in America, Shinkai’s works look not Beyond the Ocean, in the Place Promised over an Unforgettable One Night Stand. He’s pretty much obsessed with, well, space. What stands beyond the clouds in Place Promised anyways? That ivory tower of n-strings? No, it’s deep, black, 3-degrees-kelvin space. Well, yes, there was that ivory tower of n-strings, but Shinkai has better sense than to use the exact same shtick again. When I think beyond the clouds, I think about the stuff of the heavens. Don’t you? (It wasn’t distance the keeps Takuya and Hiroki from Sayuri, but that weird comatose magic. So let’s just stuff that cosmological stuff together for the purpose of this discussion.)
It was all the more impressive that in 5cm/s Shinkai gives us his most beautiful, but also his most ordinary take on the same theme. But wait, why is there all this space exploration stuff in 5cm/s? And that’s the rub.
Takaki is a bit otherworldly, but in his dream in part 2, he sees a world beyond the clouds, in a place he should have promised. Actually, that’s the red herring, and it’s not “that element” I am drilling down to; it is the foil. I give credit to Shinkai for giving us an inside, bitter-sweet look at Takaki’s image of his future, or whatever teenage boys dream about when it involves an old crush. At the same time, what does that say about the force of reality that separated Takaki and Akari? They were children, their destinies were out of their control, at least for a time.
Invariably, some of the more ideal-romantics rage against this construct of, well, a cheap plot complex about distance. But well, yes, it’s a cheap plot complex; the beauty and the point of the exercise is in framing the issue. It’s just in this case, we’re using a deep space probe.
But why do deep space probes work? In Voices it was the simple understanding that the distance is, well, huge, that works in the same way. In Beyond the Clouds, it’s the world of dreams, an alternate universe connected by the power of love or something. I don’t know. In 5cm/s, it was the forces of the road of life, and our unchangeable circumstances.
And this is why 5cm/s failed. Just how powerful that force is, as all of us are to some degree avid viewers of media and these artificial constructs, the distance problem doesn’t seem like something that separates us as much as a challenge waiting to be overcome. After all, overcoming the difficulty of distance is only expected in love stories about the distance between two loved ones.
What is intended, I assume, is an appeal to awe. When Kanae cried and realized she was just Io and Takaki was the glitchy Voyager 2 (for example), a rocket took off on its decade-plus journey through the place beyond the clouds. While I can’t speak with authority as I’ve not witnessed it, I hear these kinds of launches are awe-inspiring. It’s like overlooking the Grand Canyon or some other mind-blowing large-scale display of nature. It is like looking into the endless depths of outer space, regardless if you’re busy wallowing in bittersweet memories of a love left behind or if you’re just bug-eyed and in awe with the insignificance of your existence in comparison with the rest of the universe.
It’s too bad that Shinkai doesn’t drill that little bit of awesome into his stuff, because I think that’s the missing link. That space stuff is awesome, and it really enhances how I feel about the work. It’s convincing.
N-list Self-Diagnostics
Mentioned here via Ani-note–basically, your favorite anime say something about you. No brainer. But it’s fun. And I’m in the mood to write some no-brainers.
As corollary, any kind of list which exercises the arbitrary selection process (eligible for copyright?) is probably saying more about the entity that makes the list than the list itself. Which is to say most top-n-entity survey lists are pretty dumb because it’s put together by a mob of people. Or it’s probably worth pointing out that your #2-5s say more about you than your #1!
I’m due to redo my top-10 lists anyways, so here’s a glimpse.
Personal favorites:
- Nadesico (Mainly just the TV show)
- Magic Knight Rayearth (Season 1 mostly)
- Excel Saga (Possibly the only Nabeshin show I truly loved)
- Millennium Actress (It formed a personal connection with me)
- Cowboy Bebop (It’s here because it’s an easy pick, and it includes the film, surely)
Even as I say this, only #1 and occasionally #3 pop into my mind from time to time. #5 comes in a lot in the context of Yoko Kanno, and while it has some mainstream appeal, it’s the only timeless context that is relevant to me on any sort of day-to-day basis. Because I would rather it look like:
- Manabi Straight
- Utena
- FLCL
- Simoun
- RahXehpon
I suspect if I didn’t watch anime in the 90s, it would have looked a lot more like that. Well, wait, I might have dropped RahXephon and FLCL because those shows work more powerfully if you have context in terms of other anime you have seen, although they are both quite potent by themselves.
There’s room for more play, for example, top 5 favorite anime films:
- Millennium Actress
- Utena the movie
- Whisper of the Heart
- Porco Rosso
- 5 Centimeters per Second
I think it’s sort of self-evident what kind of second-gen fan I am. Need more help? Favorite comedies:
- Full Metal Panic Fumoffu
- Excel Saga
- Karekano (This is more a glimpse of how I think of this show than any statement about Karekano being funny)
- Ebichu (Just had to)
- Azumana Daioh
Favorite artsy-housey tee vee (getting really specific here):
- Koi Kaze
- Haibane Renmei
- Yamamoto Yohko
- Witch Hunter Robin
- Earth Girl Arjuna
To-Heart and Hidamari Sketch would almost qualify…
And that’s a wrap. So much exhibitionist tendencies satisfied in one single post. Yea, I’m kind of not in a mood to write. It’s like I poured all my motivation into 3 tl;dr drafts talking about the same thing in three different ways, but I don’t feel comfortable posting them orz. Forgive me for boring you with a post that I normally wouldn’t do.
Celebrating Makoto Shinkai with New Video Transfer?
I’m sure you’ve seen enough headlines about this, and the critical acclaims Shinkai gets with his works.
But I’m just pacing through CrunchyRoll’s Byousoku 5 Centimeters feed now, and funnily enough the speech-like pacing of Oukashou made streaming that 480p video casually easy. It gives you a lot of places to hit that pause button so your buffer can catch up. And take a lot of screen shots. Maybe I should post them tomorrow…[maybe I will even update this post.]
Reading the Anime News Network thread, some CR guy reported that they have a new transfer of the movie. That was enough to get me interested. Let alone the new Bang Zoom dub…I don’t even remember what ADV’s dub sounded like. I guess I can always try to sneak that in tomorrow. Sufficed to say the new dub isn’t bad; I watched it all dubbed. But I probably won’t again ever, chance to choose willing.
Of course, 5cm is as beautiful in every inch and every second as I remember it to be. I don’t get to stand up and walk up to my TV like I can with the Blu-Ray version of 5cm or Beyond the Clouds, but I’ll live. This is a great deal for free (as in beer) and free (as in speechregion).
Oh, I guess I still need to watch Beyond the Clouds on CR sometime within the next 18 hours. Yea, time’s running out. This particular version of 5cm will go away. 5PM PST was it?
Looks familiar? (Gosh, I think that old cap was from a DVD rip. I don’t remember. And don’t let this prettier image fool you, I think it just has fewer jpeg compression artifacts from being recompressed.)
I am definitely impressed by the supposedly new mastered video and audio(?) for 5cm. Enough to do this post. Granted, it’s still a streaming video so the bitrate can’t compare, but this is hands down the best quality video on CR that I’ve laid eyes on.
If you care about the supposed fesitivities, visit the Shinkai Day HQ, or check this guy on Twitter. They party it up on IRC and Ventrilo and what not. Nuts.
Year in Review: She’s Going the Distance, a Great Feat of Strength
Going to mention a list of 12 lists of 12 items each. So a nested list. All 144 items. Annotated for the most part. Don’t ask me why I use these pronouns the way I do…
Happy Figure Doujinshi, Regretful Figure Purchase
It’s hard to bundle up irrelevant topics into one fell swoop, so I’m not going to try.
First thing first–Happy Soda’s Super Rats is somewhat of a photographer, going at it in his home studio and snapping away. While what I may heap upon him seems little more than empty praise, I think the value of what fancy words I have for his work-product is at least as much as the $25 I spent on it.
The specific work product, beyond his figure blog, is a self-published photo book of some of the select photos he took over the course of his figure reviews. I would like to think he covered a wide variety of selections as far as picking out pictures to put in the book. But as much as the book features high rez figure porn, the book contain Super Rat’s arrangement, notes and random focus on different figures that tickles his pickles. YMMV on that one.
Besides a few amateur-ish flaws, there’s not a whole lot to say about the book. If you like the pictures on Happy Soda, then getting this so-called doujinshi is not going to disappoint. If you like figures of anime/game/whatever girls in various states of undress, then you will probably like both.
The doujinshi is made available from Lulu, which is a print-on-demand vendor with plants in Europe, US, Australia, and elsewhere I don’t know. Not sure about exactly where. This means you can get it with a fairly low shipping cost in much of the world outside the US. I got the book from them relatively quickly and the cost is reasonable for this sort of thing. The paper quality is fine although I sort of hoped the cover material is a bit better.
Again, the book is not perfect and it’s easy to look at it and come up with a dozen ways to improve it. But, it delivers what you expect, so it is a good thing.
Regrettably, the book is on sale from October 21 to October 28, so you really have no time left to make this purchase. Well, it’s his loss, although it’s not unusual for really popular doujinshi to go on multiple runs.
[You can grab a PDF of it as preview (it’s not 100.00% the same as the paper product, but it’s close. Speaking of which, the shot with Haruka’s lower half in the book had less of an effect than seeing it in 4-page quadrants as a PDF). ]
The second bit I wanted to talk about is 5cm/s. This topic keeps coming up not only because it’s worth talking about, but it just happens to be something so thought provoking that despite the relatively few people who got to see it, a higher percent of the viewers had to vent? And venting we did. People wrote a lot about it way-back-when. All the more it seemed appropriate that a word can simply nail it to the wall.
The third bit, going back to figure and regret, is this hasty purchase. Granted the experience itself was/is valuable (first time ordering from Kid Nemo), it reminded me why I ought to stick to his drawn stuff and not falter towards the flame that is Tony Taka’s luscious character designs, rendered in three dimensions.
As you may know, Kotobukiya has been doing some limited distribution runs in the United States. This means North American retailers can get their hands on figures at a large discount since they skip over the “importer” middleman entirely. A $65 Elwing figure can be had for $45. Yeah, you can get a bad case of regret if you got that $65 figure instead.
What’s amusing is I knew all about this in an indirect way. I just didn’t do dilligence before I pressed the confirm button. So now I will rely on what makes Kid Nemo different than many other retailers–not its higher price point, but supposedly existant customer service. We will see how it turns out!
