Rumiko Takahashi is probably best known for her more famous, long-running manga series. For my fandom generation, that would be Ranma 1/2, and for many others they probably have more fond memories of Inuyasha. Whether or not either of these is the case for you (or if you’re more a Maison Ikkoku or Urusei Yatsura wild card), you probably have a certain image of her craft in mind. However, like many artists, she has the ability to surprise with her storytelling range.
I always tell people that I’m a fan of sports anime, but that comes with the caveat that I’m extremely picky about the sports anime that I actually watch. If the tone is too juvenile or if the characters are too unlikeable (for a genre that relies so much on character interactions and growth, it’s wild to me how many contain just shitty characters), I won’t actually continue watching the series. So I suppose that I might not really be a sports anime fan, but instead just a general anime fan who happens to like some sports series (in the same way that I enjoy a few comedies, some mecha anime, etc.).
For many years I was kind of the de-facto anime provider for the anime club I attend. Mostly this was because I had been maintaining a version of this website for many a season, giving me insight into a lot of anime that wasn’t as popular with mainstream fandom but was still great and worth sharing with others. The other reason was probably because I was an adult with a job who could afford to constantly buy new anime DVDs (I’m not sure how that’ll go now that I’m paying for a kid, haha). Now that I’ve taken a slight step back from it for the time being (I continue to call myself an “alumni advisor” for the club but I think that’s just a title I’ve given myself rather than a label others would use) I’m getting the opportunity to see how tastes in anime have changed with newer fans. Or, how much they’ve stayed the same.
I’ve never been much of a Pokémon fan. I played the first-gen game when it was released in the US (as well as about three weeks worth of “Pokémon Go”) and I watched about a season of the cartoon series, but that’s about as far as my interest has ever reached. That said, one thing I’ve always appreciated about the franchise (in addition to its variety of cute creatures) is how ripe its setting is for all kinds of creative related media.
We’ve gotten more than a week into this Halloween list without talking much about Yokai, so I figure it’s about time to remedy that. Yokai are a category of spiritual entity within Japanese folklore. It’s a broad term that encompasses both malevolent and benign spiritual beings, with forms that run the gamut from inanimate objects to animals to humanoids. While the concept of Yokai has existed in Japanese culture for centuries, it was the late manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, who as a child was taught about them by an older female relative, who re-popularized them within a pop-culture context.
We human beings consider ourselves to be intellectually and culturally advanced. We’ve conquered the world and wield technology and innovation the likes of which would be unimaginable to our cave-dwelling ancestors. But in reality I believe we’re not really as divorced from our ancient selves as we like to think we are. Many of us have visceral reactions to strange noises, or being alone in the dark when it’s a little too quiet. There are reasons why elements of body horror in a piece of media are so effective.
I’ve heard it said that the dreams we have during the night are part of our brain’s way of processing the events of the day. It’s one of the reasons why sleep deprivation is such terrible torture – being forced to forego that kind of mental processing is enough to instigate psychosis. That time sleeping isn’t just for assembling the logic puzzle of human interactions, but also to process the complexity of our own emotions.
I feel like I’m starting to get into the groove with parenting my baby (now that I’ve said that, he’s going to start crawling and none of this will be accurate anymore, of course). This week, while I was holding him during his nap, I managed to actually watch some anime! And, of course, because it’s October, I wanted to watch something from my list that I could include on this list. Enter yet another poorly-advertised Netflix exclusive, titled Vampire in the Garden.
When I think of Halloween, I don’t always immediately think of music. While Christmas has its share of iconic carols, Halloween’s contributions to the musical canon are somewhat fewer and farther between. Once you get past “Monster Mash” or the soundtrack of A Nightmare Before Christmas, it gets much more difficult to name specifically Halloween-appropriate tunes. If you’re in the mood for a few of my own suggestions, might I recommend “Ghosts n Stuff” by deadmau5, the soundtrack to Over the Garden Wall, and today’s spooky selection, Adam by Eve: A Live in Animation
So apparently there was a new “Indiana Jones” film released this Summer. My life’s been a bit hectic the last couple of months, so though I had some mild awareness of it, I didn’t get a chance to go see it. Earlier in the year, however, I did watch an anime series that reminded me a bit of Indy and his archaeological adventures, and I suspect that my time may have been better spent doing so (did anyone see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny? Was it good? Let me know if I should try to check it out).