Miscellany: Falling out of love with Japan
Lately I’ve been turning cold towards Japanese ’stuff’. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s suddenly becoming more popular and mainstream, or whether I’m just growing tired of it, but it’s just not as cool as it once was.
Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more.
Now that’s not to say I can’t appreciate the artistic vision in some of the better animes. The Place Promised in Our Early Days(Beyond the Clouds in America) is still, despite its conceit that two fifteen year old boys would be able to single-handedly build and program a high-tech aeroplane, or its obscure plot about a girl in a coma who will cause the world to end if she wakes and stops dreaming, a beautiful dramatic work. The themes of friendship and longing are convincingly and delicately portrayed.
Similarly, the Studio Ghibli films are amongst the greatest animated stories in the world. True, few of them are original stories, but each one has a trademark charm and style imbued only by Hayao Miyazake’s team. What makes them stand out for me, apart from the wonderfully organic animated movement, is the way that, unlike a lot of Disney films, there is almost never an irredeemably evil villain in the Ghibli films. Take the witch Yubaba in Spirited Away for example. She’s the primary antagonist, and she’s pretty mean sometimes, but she’s never the evil queen of Snow White; and she is given just as much character development over the course of the movie as any of the ‘good’ characters, with scenes showing her caring for and spoiling her gigantic baby, and others showing her develop a sense of respect for the hard-working Chihiro, who she initially imprisons in her bathhouse.
Similarly, in Princess Mononoke, the first Studio Ghibli film to be translated and widely distributed outside of Japan, we have humans destroying a forest to sustain their town, and we have the inhabitants of the forest fighting back against the humans. Although the conflict is evidently highly destructive, the viewer is never given the impression that anyone is acting out of malice, or anything less than necessity. It would have been easy for the makers to say that the humans were wrong and evil for cutting back the forest, as in the eco-film Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest, but instead the film shows why the humans have to cut away the trees, and why the forest has to fight back. The message ultimately is the same caution against environmental destruction as Fern Gully’s, but in Mononoke we are given additional viewpoints.
These are the exceptions to the rule however. A lot of animé, while not lacking in charm, is largely generic, focusing on spectacle over realism, cheap visual comedy over narrative depth. Perhaps I’m being a little too hard on the genre here; all that certainly has its place, and I’ve laughed as hard at any Love Hina episode as I have at any episode of Fawlty Towers or The Office, and thought has hard about any concept in Neon Genesis Evangelion as I have at.. well, honestly, I can’t think of a comparison for that series, yes, it was deliberately arcane and had an over-abundance of Christian and other religious iconography thrown in almost at random to create intrigue (I suppose the closest comparison in that sense would be something like Lost), but as a study in troubled adolescence under pressure (namely the animé staple of saving the world), it is only vaguely paralleled by something like Donnie Darko.
I suppose that my main problem I’m having with animé, among the rest of Japan’s cultural exports, is that it seems to just be being blindly lapped up along with anything vaguely oriental, or cute (kawaii) in a Japanese way: Things like J-rock and Hello Kitty, as well as Manga and Asian horror films. Having been into animé for at least six years, and primarily Japanese videogames before that, as well as in the last couple of years getting to know more and more people with what I’ve recently learned can be termed ‘yellow fever’, I feel that perhaps I have reached saturation point with the whole thing and just need a break.
Another contributing factor could be the lack of decent Japanese videogames I’ve played lately. I think the last good, original game from the land of the rising soon I played was Grasshopper Studio’s No More Heroes, which even then was a deliberate parody of Japanese animé culture. Otherwise I’ve been playing some very good American games on Xbox 360 and the few Japanese games I’ve played have all been Wii sequels to established Nintendo franchises. Strange when, until recently, I idolised Nintendo as the purveyors of the finest quality games in the world, but since the string of brilliant Western developed games like Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, Portal and Call of Duty 4, my eyes have really been opened to the potential of the rest of the world’s games industry.
Still, with their penchant for the visually intriguing and inexhaustible stream of quirky concepts, the Japanese might warm me again to their culture. Either that or time and nostalgia will bring me back to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, Makoto Shinkai and Hideaki Anno.
Tags: Anime, Asian Horror, Donnie Darko, Fawlty Towers, Fern Gully, Hayao Miyazaki, Hello Kitty, J-Rock, Japan, Makoto Shinkai, Manga, Place Promised in Our Early Days, Studio Ghibli, The Office, Videogames
