Amused in Review

Here's a nice, and rather lengthy, appreciation of Spirited Away by Steven Den Beste, who has only recently been introduced to anime. Spoilers abound, so don't read it if you haven't seen it (like there's anyone reading this blog who falls in that category). I'd just like to call attention to the way the theme as laid out by Den Beste here:

What she (and we) feared at the beginning didn't turn out to be so formidable after all. A lot of strange and really scary creatures, like an grumpy ugly old man with eight arms, or a huge white creature in an elevator, didn't turn out to be so bad after all. That which is strange, perhaps even ugly, isn't necessarily evil. There is good out there, but you can only find it if you're willing to look.

gets a masterful little coda in the final scene in the movie, when Chihiro tells her parents about the formerly scary prospect of starting her new school: "I think I can handle it."

Eve Tushnet has some musings (inspired by Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics) about what art is. Her analysis is mostly along the lines of what makes art good, or at least satisfying to her, but when it comes to defining art she mostly shrugs; she knows she doesn't like Scott McCloud's super-broad definition designed to cut off endless debate about whether comics (or anything else) counts as art, but admits that she doesn't really have an alternative in mind...a reasonable enough approach, but I think we can do a little better. I propose the following: art is anything that intends communication by evocation. I think that's pretty broad--broad enough to include all the performing arts as well as the plastic and even architecture and decorative arts, but narrow enough to eliminate most of the things that are clearly non-art such as natural phenomena, compilations of data and so forth, while allowing wiggle room for things that aren't primarily intended as art but may be done in an artful way. For instance, a rainbow is beautiful, and may well evoke certain feelings and memories, but isn't communication; Pride and Prejudice is art because the intent of the communication from Jane Austen to the reader is to evoke certain feelings and memories that cause the reader to recognize types of people and human situations and not merely to convey certain information and fictional facts about the Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy. Similarly an ordinary dictionary isn't art, but Bierce's Devil's Dictionary is. The thing that I like about this definition is that it does a bit more than just match certain brute intuitions about what we call art: it suggests reasons for why certain kinds of things are likely to be contentious--for instance in Dadaism or found art where the either the intent to communicate or the ability to evoke anything specific or both are missing.

I've been watching the following new cartoons, and liking them quite a bit: Kim Possible, My Life as A Teenage Robot, and Teen Titans. I particularly appreciate how the anime-esque Teen Titans even goes to the trouble of having its theme song in Japanese. Anime themes often include random bits of English, particularly in the chorus, so what goes around comes around, or something. Actually, they all have pretty bouncy, hummable themes.
On the other hand, I haven't yet been able to warm to Spider-Man: the "high-impact animation" and "cutting edge cinematic effects" are just too distracting and ugly to my eye, whereas the much more highly stylized (and admitedly limited) animation of the first three is just groovy. "It ain't what you got, it's the way how you use it."

I've managed to find time for the other blogs, but not this one. Somehow reviewing always seems like it will take more time than I have to just sit and bang out an entry--I think it's because I feel like I ought to a) have the work in front of me so that I can refer to it, and b) link to amazon so you can see what I'm referring to (I've given up on the idea that anyone would actually buy anything; maybe I should give up on the idea that anyone will even click through). Of course, I'm also falling behind on reading things to review....

I've loaned the first two of this series to Wendy, so I don't have the books in front of me to refer to, even if I wanted to. This is a mystery series set in 7th century Europe, about an Irish nun and d疝aigh (judge and investigator under Ireland's Brehon law system) Sister Fidelma, and sometimes her friend a Saxon monk Brother Eadulf. The first book, Absolution by Murder takes place at the synod of Whitby in 664 when the rules of the Roman church vs. the Irish church were being debated at the behest of King Oswy to decide which Northumbria was going to follow. As mysteries go, these aren't spectacular, but the period is an interesting one, and the author Peter Tremayne knows quite a bit about it (Peter Tremayne is the pseudonym of Peter [Berresford] Ellis, not to be confused with Brother Cadfael's Ellis Peters, and is a much-credentialed Celtic scholar). I certainly didn't know how much more liberal Ireland, even the church, was with respect to the position of women and the rule of law than, well, practically anywhere in medieval Europe (or even, in some respects, modern Europe).
The second book takes place in Rome, as Fidelma goes to get the rule of her order--St. Brigid's of Kildare--approved and becomes involved in investigating the murder of the Archbishop-designate of Canterbury. Deusdedit, the first Saxon Archbishop of Canterbury died in 664 and in 667 Oswy and Egbert sent Wighard to Rome to be consecrated as his replacement. Wighard died of the plague almost immediately upon arriving in Rome, and Tremayne uses that as the basis of A Shroud For the Archbishop, moving the date back a couple years so that it follows immediately after Fidelma's first case and making Wighard's death a murder for her to investigate. I read these back to back, and I'd say my general impression is that the writing improved a little, but it was still mostly the historical background and only secondarily the characters that held my interest. The mystery aspect barely registered with me at all.
The third, Suffer Little Children, is much grimmer and more about the politics of Ireland, with lots of children and innocent villagers getting put to the sword to further the political ambitions of certain chieftains and petty kings. Again, the details of the roles and responsibilities of the Brehon judges vis-a-vis the kings and the High King at Tara, and the laws and rules of evidence are the interesting bits. As far as characterization goes, Fidelma's friend Eadulf is sorely missed.
I may sound like I have mixed feelings about the series, and objectively I suppose I do, but I rip right through the books and always learn something interesting so overall I really do recommend them--which is just as well, because I've already bought the next three or so and am just taking a short break before reading them. They've actually inspired me to using 7th century Ireland as a backdrop for a D&D campaign, for when I play with people other than my group of regulars (where we have enough campaigns with various GMS under way already).

I finally saw The Pirates of the Carribean, and not only did it rock on toast, but it did so for a completely unexpected reason. Most of my friends had already seen it and recommended it, so I wasn't surprised that it was enjoyable; what surprised me was how tightly plotted it was. For years now it seems that I've been bemoaning the lost craft of plotting action-adventure movies, where the bigger the budget and the more spectacular the special effects, the less attention gets paid to any form of coherence. Yet Pirates was not only tight, with one thing following logically from the next, it was almost intricate, with characters--particularly Captain Jack Sparrow--actually visibly planning ahead. Sure, some of those plans relied on things that would only work in an adventure movie, but at least they were plans and not random actions based on the need to incorporate certain special effects, stunts, or costumes. Let's hope that with all the money this raked in it starts a trend.

Asumanga Daioh: the Manga #1
by Asuma Kiyohiko
Azumanga Daioh is a comic strip (there's also an anime series) about a group of High School girls and their teachers. That's right, it's an actual four-panel gag strip--though the panels are laid out vertically--and I laughed out loud while reading it almost as many times as when reading Matt Feazell's Ert, or Murray Ball's Footrot Flats. That's pretty darn funny, by my standards.
It's mostly a comedy of square pegs in round holes, or to use a Japanese metaphor, the nail that stands up getting hammered flat. Sakaki is tall and elegant, so even though other girls admire her, they treat her as if she were regal and above them--and she's too shy to make it clear that what she would like is to pal around and play with kittens; Ayumu is from Osaka, so that becomes her nickname, and she ends up talking with the accent the region is famous for even though she speaks perfectly standard Japanese; Chiyo is a ten-year old genius who's in High School because she skipped grades, and the gags about her play on the cognitive dissonance this causes in most of the adults who encounter her (e.g. the lunch-room ladies decide that she must be undernourished to be so short in High School, so pile her plate with mountains of food). And so on.
You can see some of the fan-translated strips posted to the web at Azumanga-Toons. The professionally translated ones are a bit less literal, but I think punchier.