Category — Books

With the first episode finished, it’s no longer enough for Kaiba to merely look original. This follow-up wasn’t as visceral or as exciting as the first, but one scene in-particular struck me as really quite lovely. Nine minutes in, ‘Warp’ and friends, flying high in their aircraft, glimpse out of near-by window. What they see is a river of gleaming ‘Roe’ (a liquid-golden egg of human memory that appears after that person’s physical body has expired) floating into the vast expanse above. As animated art alone, scored with a soft, melancholy tune, it’s a moment that looks and feels wonderful, yet it takes on an added poignancy because we know that every egg, and the sky is full of them, represents a unique person. As far as I can tell, the Roe have no direction, no identifying features, they just float aimlessly, carrying their memories, destined for nowhere. Is this a comment on life? If so, I suppose it’s sounding dreary and hopeless, but the scene itself feels as beautiful as explained. It’s true that there is something small and insignificant about one individual egg (person) in a thousand, yet each one gleams golden in the sky, just the same as any other, so pretty, adding to the scene. Without the Roe, essentially, without life, the sky would be dull and empty. I’m reminded of a favourite line from Kino’s Journey; “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is”.

As if you couldn’t tell already, I have a fairly contrarian nature. I’ll start off on the opposite side to popular opinion just because I hate walking in-line with all the other otaku. Sometimes that’s justified, other times, not so much. I was wrong to doubt Macross Frontier. The first episode was exciting, well-animated and intriguing. In particular, the surprise attack on Frontier reminded me why I love space opera, it felt epic. That’s an over-used word these days, but it was that kind of thrilling. Big, sweeping, grand, destiny, bravery, love, death; themes of great consequence. Also, I liked a lot of Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack, but I wish she didn’t go the cliche-JPop route with Sheryl. The way she crafted Sharon Apple’s personality for Macross Plus felt so much more lively and authentic; she was the believable idol of a distant future, beautiful yet alien. In comparison, Sheryl could be any number of contemporary female pop-stars, just a little too same-y for my tastes. I guess it’s a little unfair to compare Frontier to Plus, considering the latter is a golden-age classic and it had Kanno in-collaboration with Bebop’s Shinichiro Watanabe, but I have some high standards for my dearest musician.

Earlier this evening, I caught the second episode of BBC4’s ‘Worlds Of Fantasy‘. I have to say, it’s a fascinating, almost moving, documentary series charting the past and present of fantasy fiction from a sober, critical point of view. In a way, I’m just a relieved to have found a programme willing to seriously analyse the careers of, say, Philip Pullman and Tolkien, without feeling the need to treat their most popular works as un-adult or kids-fare. I guess it’s an honest approach I find almost irresistible.

One of the major themes of this second episode was looking at how reality, and real-life experience, often so tightly under-pins the unreal landscape of the genre. A regularly stated, serious criticism of fantasy literature (or, indeed, any kind of fantasy media) is that it’s merely a vehicle for the reader’s own desire for escapism. Taken at face value, that may be the case, but so much of what I’ve read is multi-layered, at once foreign and enticing, yet echoing deeply-seeded, utterly human feeling.

A great example explained in the documentary is how Frodo’s journey across the corpse-infested, stinking swamps on his way to evil Mordor reflects horribly on Tolkien’s own sad experiences in World War I, during which he served on the front-line through out the infamous Battle of the Somme, where more than one million people were killed or wounded in just four months of bloody, muddy combat. Some people might have documented those memories in the form of an autobiography, but, as one critic explains it, fantasy writers tend to explore their own lives in an indirect, side-ways fashion. I think capturing these feelings in such a way, removing them from a specific time, context or place, creates a resonance or feeling that echoes forever, in a way that we’re no longer viewing the situation as something in the past, but instead, as a relevant, timeless human emotion.