December 11, 2003

GAINAX shows are like snowglobes: pretty and diverting, but ultimately pointless.

The site on which I host my writing challenges is currently down until Brennen gets stun-software.com online. I’ve completed my 500-word monologue, though. Have you?

My art teacher came down with something nasty and so didn’t come over for my drawing lesson last night. So I took care of a few things around the apartment — washing the pile of dishes, taking out the trash — before plopping down in front of the TV to watch a little anime.

I had made it a third of the way into the 90-minute Barefoot Gen, the chronicle of a boy living through the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I managed to get through another thirty minutes of it last night before turning it off. It was horrible, though necessarily so. The horror is the whole point, really; the film’s saying, “This is what happened. It was hell. Let’s not forget it.” It reminds me a bit of the 9/11 tributes which used footage of the actual attacks. Yes, it’s painful. It’s supposed to be, as a remembrance.

So, I switched off the movie after seeing as much as I could handle, and after pacing my apartment for awhile, popped in the disc for Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem (ahhh, I do love that title), the hour-long Daft Punk/Leiji Matsumoto music video. I was amazed. The movie certainly goes in directions I never would have expected, but ends with a refreshingly mature finale. Matsumoto’s 65, after all, and he brings a certain gravitas to this action/adventure tale.

I then further unwound with an episode of Earth Defence Family, which is the epitome of everything that attracted me to anime in the first place. In the middle of silly, over-the-top action, the show will drop in a touching character moment. It’s incredibly fun, and yet it’s about things. I love it.

After that, I watched the first episode of Macross Zero, which is pretty much everything I’d hoped it would be. I’d say it’s as good as the first episode of Macross Plus, which actually isn’t saying all that much. I’m reserving my opinion until I’ve seen more of it. It certainly seems more serious than Macross Plus. And it doesn’t have Sharon Apple, which is a shame.

In other news, John C. Dvorak has a cute rant about uniformly beige/cream/black technology. Why?!

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