Kannagi: Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About?
Kannagi peaked @ episode 7.
And that is fine. I think if I dropped the show right here and now, I would have already gotten my money’s worth, so to speak. Kannagi had made a fan, and it will get my money. I’d save the rest of my time left, lest my passion and curiosity for the things I like get the better of me. It would be a fearsome anti-dilemma, if such a thing exists.
But when you have Yukata Yamamoto and Hideyuki Kurata at the helm, this is really just a glimpse of what they are capable of doing.
And yeah, Kannagi is a Sony! As I hope you already know, A1 Pictures is 100% owned by Aniplex, which is a company under the Sony conglomerate umbrella. The lovely jab at Blu-Ray Disc and Beta is not only the highlight, but also how to stick it in the show while sticking it to the man. A best of both worlds.
Does it surprise anyone when Akiba-kun went on and talked about the equally godly episode with the guest animation director and the connections? Animating a cockroach’s POV is something you only do for your friends? We can only suppose.
To end with drawing comparisons to a totally random and different show–in the pilot episode of Karekano, we’ve also seen peddling of bamboo poles. Coincidence? No way. Nobody frets about sex in that series, right…?
Xam’d Episode 14 - Meanderingly Shocking
This is suppose to be an OSHI episode, but I have a hard time bringing my emotions into the game.
Xam’d Episode 13 - A Miserable Feat of Strength
After the storm that was the last Playstation 3 patch and the PSN nonsense, Xam’d has returned with episode 13.
That was a nice break for me. But as you know, episode 13 was leaked way back when, so this episodic review is probably not news to you.
Sadly I still hate writing about anime at 2 in the morning, and it looks like thanks to the waves of games coming out this may have to be the case for the next 3 months. I guess I get what I deserve. Oh well, it just means looking at Xam’d through these groggy eyes and trying to get a laugh out of myself.
Some facts before we start. Just to recap–Xam’d in the US is broken into 2 seasons, total up to 26 episodes. The break in the weekly release on the US PSN store is because we were ahead of the Japanese store, which started its release in September. Now they have caught up so we’re going 1 ep at a time together with the Japanese fans.
During that break, I swapped cameras. I doubt you can tell though.
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.
Election 2008
君は誰とキスをする?
Shojo Kawamori–bringing politics to anime since 1982.
(shameless stolen from someone else; thx uncreative)
If you’re in America, go vote tomorrow if you haven’t already.
