Year in Review: Sunshine & Kisses Drive to Origination, Shrine Maidens Lost Memories in Coded Euphoric Frontier
Running for your lives.
With style.
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…
ef - a Sequels of Some Disappointments, Shh.
The more I think about it, the less I want to write about ef.
As the second season, ef - a tale of melodies, comes to an end, it becomes increasingly clear to me that the two seasons were planned in conjunction. However there were a couple shocking continuity issues, one which is best cemented by the ending scenes in both season 1 and season 2. The other is the more mind-boggling Australia/Japan continuity problem, although some could consider that to be a feature and not a bug, so to speak. It begs the question why did these inconsistencies appear? I must’ve missed something.
It also makes me wonder if I can truly appreciate the core content to the show without experiencing the entire package–both the games and the two season of anime. The stories as I hear from the game suggest that the anime are indeed complementary, rather than adaptive. And likewise, a tale of melodies complements a tale of memories; they are only sequel by definition, not by function, much like the two games are parts of a whole.
If a tale of memories was an emotional sledgehammer, then a tale of melodies was just a stake underneath it. I get the feeling lots of people were looking for anther hammer and they find this notably less impressive nail-like thing, leading to disappointment.
If you’re looking for more of the same, then it might be wise to stay within your ignorance. A tale of melodies is not for those searching for the same soulful sequence as told through Chihiro’s flying pages, Miyako’s call log, or Kei’s layups. However, the same visual sequences as described, now applied to paintings, violins and arias, tell a different story.
The flaw in the second season is within the detachment of flair and substance. The visuals tell me look not just between the lines, but beyond. In fact, that was also my favorite thing from the first season. So maybe they aren’t so different…?
Make no mistake, ef-melo has hefty amounts of both flair and substance; but if we could say that Kei and Kyosuke’s neglected story arc was the point of ef-memo–capturing that perfect shot of Kei as she bounces into the gym for morning practice, then the point of ef-melo is the overarching story documenting Yuuko and Yu’s reunion that played out through both seasons, forcing him to recite that silly line about miracles. It is no coincidence; the overarching narrative of both seasons is about Yu and Yuuko, but we just didn’t know enough from the first season to understand where to put down the jigsaw puzzle pieces. It is with Yu that Chihiro’s Fifty-First-Dates make sense and we understand why she is trying to write a book (4th wall satire!). And why Miyako and Kuze dealt with the opposite sides of loneliness. And why the entire story is an interwoven tapestry about building an “euphoric field” [See that picture? See what I mean by Chihiro? See what I mean by stake? Does someone get why she lives with Yu now?] and passing on the holiday cheer when it’s both seasonally appropriate and when it is not. It’s about your personal pursuit of creative excellence and doing what you were born to do. The two stories describe a composite, self-searching journey as the different characters find love for people, places and things that are meant to be loved, and learning what true love really means in a personal way. And one way for each cast member.
It’s… Baccano! But better scripted, I might add. With a 4th wall dimension (mostly relegated to Kyosuke).
I guess my point, overall, is that you can’t see that larger picture without the less-cohesive ef-melo. And if you did not see that when you finished the second series, you have then truly missed the main point of the exercise.
Curiously, the last anime that made me write something like this was Martian Successor Nadesico, and I totally wanted to write more about that the more I thought about it. Age and wisdom behoove otherwise; ef is one of those secrets that are best kept to those who are looking for it. It rewards appropriately.
A Quickie on Mental Bandwidth
Author’s notes are often interesting because they point to interesting things. That is if you can read past the knee-jerk-ish explanation and suppress the reactive instinct to point and laugh about his seems-totally-wrong-to-me assumptions…and bring it down down to his level.
Generally speaking the concept of mental bandwidth is a logical one, but just like most things to do with human perception, it is flawed to an extent. In this case, it’s not only flawed in that it doesn’t apply to every person, but also because they’re just measuring it wrong.
Reaching from my personal anecdotes, the sampling bias here is that I only bother to watch twice (or more) shows that really catches my attention. Specifically, I’d watch the raw once it comes out, and the sub again soon after. This season, for example, it’s just ef, but back in 2006 I was really crushing on things like Haruhi, Simoun, and a few others. The bias here is that I like to watch shows that are visually expressive–think FLCL or Paranoia Agent (lol) or ef, for example–which means that bandwidth becomes a real problem. And I’m not even taking subtitles into the equation. Take Satoshi Kon’s works for another example. He purposely jams and packs his films to the brim so it not only constantly engages your mind and your senses, you can do it again by rewatching it and get more out of the works than you did the first time.
In short, rewatching the same show over should have a drastic, different effect than watching it the first time. In fact, that much should be extremely obvious. It’s obvious enough that people who do rewatch their classic favorites go out of their way and note how similar it is the way their hearts flutter as with their first encounter, as if that shouldn’t the case! Plus, what may be an unremarkable visual cue the first time through may turn out to be a huge attention-grabber the second time because now you’ve gotten closer to the creator’s state of mind. A trivial non-mentioned item can be as big as a continent (of Australia) on your second peruse through ef a tale of memories, for example.
The other side of the coin is equally true as well. And that’s the usual case. There’s little point to rewatch a lot of the anime out there. We just don’t do it. (In another sense, it’s like watching parts of Fushigi Yuugi and you know she’s saying “Tamahome” and he’s saying “Miaka.” You don’t need subtitles for it.)
Needless to say if you rewatch a show again, subtitled, you should expect a different experience than watching it for the first time, no matter what format you saw it in the first time or second time.
That said, sometimes the subtitles just get in the way. I’ve ranted about this a couple years ago too but the point is once you understand what happened, you can just pay attention to other things and thus notice more details. (Or in some cases, you just don’t care about what the characters are saying but how they are saying it.) In essence that’s what I do when I rewatch anime. It’s probably an odd reason to do so but I can’t help myself. If you have a penchant for Makoto Shinkai’s 5cm/s, then you’d know what I’m talking about after your 15th time through the cinematic trilogy. It’s when you’re in the zone, you’ve come to know the words by heart even if you can’t recite it, but it’s like a man dying of thirst, squeezing on a wet sponge for all the water its got with all the strength he has left. Every moving shadow, every shade of color, every photoshop lighting effect. It all start to mean something.
It’s no longer about bandwidth. You are throttled by your internal limitation on what you can understand and perceive.
Thankfully most of the time you don’t have to go that far. Despite my crappy jokes I think it’s a general fallacy to compare a subtitled-translated production with one that isn’t for people who are struggling with the language and culture. Because, gasp, you can pay attention to the subtitles too. I believe that is the reason why we think there is a limit on mental bandwidth, even if I imagine many people can watch anime with subtitles and miss nothing they would otherwise miss when watching anime without, at least for certain titles. It makes much more sense to measure bandwidth by doing a blind test/survey and see how well a random sample of people understand, say, Ghost in the Shell subbed versus dubbed. It’s a movie where the dialogs matter and also visually stimulating. It would be an interesting experiment regardless what the results turn out to be.
ef: esoteric femininity
Of the myriad things the letters ‘e’ and ‘f’ can stand for, that one stood out today. For that matter, of the myriad new shows this season, many solid entries, too, ef stands out like neatly folded (or unfolded, for that matter) underpants.
It is an unintentional effect, but maybe that is because my brain really lives inside my balls? When the blood gets flowing, my mind makes way not for fleshly instincts but ascends. Like a leaping whale breaking the surface of the sea, a momentary clarity that pierces through complexity to reveal its simple underneath, or in reverse, reconstruct the intricacies of a simple, elegant principle in motion.
Like how the gaze of a thousand men and women that pierced Nagi Hirono’s naked body? I think there’s something to be said about that, the scene, and why it’s there. As terse as some may do so.
Thematically, hoping to state the obvious, ef catches the attention of its viewers with a striking view of its heroines. Okay, bad pun. Can we even call the way ef present them as “view”? I think the women in the show are the reason; they are what makes ef such striking visual amateur-avant-garde-SHAFTxSHINBO festivals. It’s like, you can’t put a tropical fish in a freshwater tank; and girls like Miyako, Chihiro and Kei (and Nagi, Yuko and Mizuki, hopefully), their issues, and their charm points have to be framed in their own special way.
Because women like them don’t exist in the vacuum of our real world. Or when they do, they don’t stand out like a single rose out of a patch of brier. It’s not like Chihiro’s memory of Renji, at any rate.
The game of finding and producing moe blobs and selling character appeal to the moe-otaku crowd is not always won by logic or reason, so the popularity of ef (Yay? Chihiro made it past Saimoe ‘08 QF?) in the same character-driven, character-appeal-driven market stands strong because of the unique characters, their equally unique characterization, and a shameless plea towards the esoteric. Make no mistake; it’s not because they are “better” characters by logic or reason. The femininity displayed in ef is still mostly ordinary; I would point them out if I was better equipped to analyze what makes an anime girl an anime girl, but I’m not.
But that is not important. At the hands of an artful storyteller, even the ordinary is radical.
