Roving Thoughts archives

My views on Eureka Seven AO's ending

On the one hand, AO did not have a bad ending. It gave us good answers to our questions, it was well made, it had a bunch of quite nice action sequences (easily up to or exceeding the standards of the show to date, which have not been low), it gave Ao himself several good scenes to show various aspects of his growth, and it wrapped things up in a satisfactory way.

The problem is that in the process of doing this, the show took the entire cast of interesting, complex characters that we'd become emotionally invested in over the course of the story and reduced them to bystanders and spear carriers. None of them had their stories and themes resolved, none of them were given endings the way Ao was; they were all just ignored and wiped away. Naru was particularly badly done by (partly because her storyline raised some of the most interesting questions and themes of the show).

In effect the ending rewrites what the entire show was about. If it was actually about all of those character conflicts and themes that we thought we saw in the show, the writers dropped the ball at the end. My standard use of Occam's Razor says that instead, I was reading all of this depth into the show when the writers didn't deliberately put it there.

This has the unfortunate effect of reducing the whole show in my eyes. First, the whole thing leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I liked those characters and it annoys me to see them treated so shabbily by the ending. Second, the ending kind of turns Eureka Seven AO into a show about spectacle and Ao and that's not really enough; Ao himself is not a strong enough character to carry the show alone.

(In retrospect I wish that the other characters had known what was at stake if the Quartz Gun was fired again and had told Ao to go ahead anyways. That would have made it their conscious sacrifice as well as Ao's. But see above about reading things into the series that probably weren't actually there intentionally.)

Liked: I don't regret watching it. In the end it was still a good series; it had good production values, various moments of awesomeness, and good characters and character interactions. It was just let down by the ending.

Rewatch: No, and I'd actively avoid one. I don't think I could rewatch it just for the spectacle and for Ao's character development, partly because the other characters are such an integral part of the show right up until the last two episodes change that almost completely.

(This is kind of an elaboration of my tweet about this.)

My favorite Miyazaki movies

This all started with The Cart Driver's top 30 anime list; I wound up both thinking about what my own top 30 list would look like and raising my eyebrows that they only included one Miyazaki movie (my untempered first reaction was that basically all Miyazaki movies would make my list). In the end, while I like all of Miyazaki's movies that I've seen and think that they're all very good I'll admit that I like some more than others. I'm not going to try to rank them against other anime (not right now at least), but I'm going to list the ones that I've decided are my current favorites and picks as the very best of his work.

First, I haven't seen any of Ghibli's films since Spirited Away, including both Howl's Moving Castle and Ponyo; however, based on commentary I've read about both, I doubt that seeing either would change this list. Given that, my choices today are:

• Tonari no Totoro: I can't possibly be objective about Totoro; I watched it at exactly the right time for it to settle firmly into my heart and as a result it's my emotional favorite of all Miyazaki movies. But beyond my personal attachment, Totoro is the Miyazaki movie that is most purely about joy and wonder, with essentially no plot or tension to distract you. The movie is all about Satsuki and Mei having a series of happy, joyful experiences, from discovering and chasing around the soot spots to Mei falling on Totoro's fuzzy stomach to waiting in the rain with Totoro to, well, almost every moment in the film. Even the ending climax is not really tense and is most memorable for the cat-bus's spectacular run (speeding across the fields with people not seeing it, trotting along the high-tension wires, and if you've seen Totoro your memories may be flooding back here too). It is sentimental in the best way.

  Or in short, Totoro is Miyazaki's love letter to the wonders of childhood, the distilled essence of wandering around and having marvelous things happen. And it is a very, very well written love letter.

  (Totoro also has what's probably my single most favorite moment of flight in all Miyazaki movies, and that's saying something given that Miyazaki movies are just full of spectacular flight sequences.)

• Porco Rosso: I might not have listed this without the Cart Driver's prompting, but they're right. This is Miyazaki's most grown up and adult movie and at the same time also his most numinous; while other Miyazaki movies have more magic and more fantasy, in them it is more mundane, routine, and explicable than the one restrained, transcendent scene in Porco Rosso. Porco Rosso makes no attempt to explain the things that are not real and in doing so makes them more powerful. As his most adult movie it's also the one that's the most indirect and restrained, deliberately not showing us things and not giving us direct, clear answers.

  (As a result of this, Porco Rosso is the least straightforward and accessible Miyazaki movie, which is why I might have skipped over it initially.)

  I feel that this is the movie where Miyazaki most wears his heart on his sleeve. Miyazaki loves flight in general, but this film is filled with so much love for a particular realistic sort of flight (ie, between-war small airplanes) and for its time and place. Miyazaki also does us the service of not forgetting or ignoring what is in the background of this time and place, the way that might have happened in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.

  (There is nothing in the straightforward plot of Porco Rosso that required us to be carefully reminded of the growth of Italian fascism.)

• Spirited Away: This is Miyazaki's best adventure story (Porco Rosso has an adventure but is more a meditation on Marco's situation) and best fantasy. It is about children (or at least a child) without being childish, and is not so much about growing up as about growing into yourself and into what you can do. As a fantasy it presents the best-realized, most interesting world of fantasy in any of Miyazaki's works, full with both beauty and terror, because Miyazaki understands that the fantastic is both; you cannot have the different without also having the disturbing and the dangerous.

Again, I like all of Miyazaki's films and think they're great. The other films are just not as great in various ways as these three; these are the ones that I think are the purest, most refined Miyazaki.

(I feel conflicted about Mononoke-Hime. There's a lot to like about it and maybe I'm underrating it, but somehow I feel that it doesn't completely click with me. Maybe I need to see it again. Call it something close to an honorable mention for now.)

PS: I don't think that Miyazaki's messages in Mononoke-Hime, Nausicaa, and Castle in the Sky are flaws in any of those films, although some people disagree with this view. I don't rate any of those as highly as these three for other reasons.

Sidebar: going outside of Miyazaki

I've deliberately confined myself to Miyazaki's films here. If I was to go outside of that to films by Studio Ghibli people in general I would immediately point you to Gauche the Cellist, an early work by Isao Takahata. If you like classical music (as I do), this is a beautiful 'sense of wonder' film that's well worth your time.

(That it's entirely built around classical music probably makes it inaccessible to people who don't at least somewhat like the music.)

Looking back at the Summer 2012 anime season

As before it's time I got around to taking an honest look back at the Summer 2012 season, to go with my early impressions and my midway update.

Shows that I actively watched (and finished where applicable), in descending order:

• Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita: My favorite show of the summer, which I've written a chunk about.

• Eureka Seven AO: My second most enjoyable show of the summer, only a little bit behind Jinrui. I don't have an overall opinion on the series yet since we're still waiting for the last two episodes.

  (I wrote some stuff about it at the end of here.)

• Moyashimon Returns: I take back my grumpyness from my midway update. The best way I can put it is that the final plotline of Returns shows the series growing up and maturing, shifting from a bunch of ultimately lightweight stuff to something more nuanced. I liked this tone shift but I understand not everyone did. Also, I enjoyed a seiyuu overlap.

  (It's not just that Returns got serious, although it did in a way. It's that things became more complex and nuanced and felt more real as a result. There were no easy answers or one-dimensional characters.)

• Campione!: I'm sure people are going to laugh at me, but I quite enjoyed this all through. Part of this I can attribute simply to its execution, but I argue that it's less recycled and cliched than it might look on the surface. I mentioned Erica Blandelli in my midway update and another example (per a tweet) is that victory in fights was about gaining knowledge and solving mysteries, not more power. All of this made it fun to watch, for all that it doesn't particularly aspire to be deep.

  (This sort of calls for an entire entry that I'll probably never have the time and energy to write.)

• Sword Art Online: My views turned out not to fit in a paragraph, so I put them in an entry of their own. Short version: I don't think it can really be called good but it was clearly watchable because I did and do. I attribute this more to good production values than anything else.

• Kyoukai Senjou no Horizon II: I wound up watching this all the way through, purely for the absurd spectacle. The advantage of Horizon as compared to, say, Aquarion EVOL is that the non-spectacle bits made so little sense and I cared so little about them that it was easy to tune them out. Also, there weren't that many of them since Horizon packed most of its exposition into the first season.

  If I'm a smart person, I will not watch any future seasons this gets.

• Dog Days': as I expected, nothing really happened in this season; it never went anywhere. The show wasn't boring exactly and it was idly enjoyable throughout, but I did wind up kind of feeling that watching it was wasted time. Light entertainment is not quite what I want out of my limited time. In retrospect I stuck with this mostly out of nostalgia for the first season (and the inability to let that nostalgia go).

  The thought of another season doesn't fill me with enthusiasm.

• Oda Nobuna no Yabou: In the end most of this was merely ordinarily entertaining and the show's complete inability to let Nobuna do anything got rather irritating. In retrospect I should have skipped it, but I got captured by my initial enthusiasm and it was never quite bad enough to push me to stop watching it.

  (It's not that this was bad; it was acceptably entertaining. It's just that I'm trying to do better than merely 'acceptably entertaining' these days.)

Watching slowly:

• Joshiraku: my views haven't changed: it's entertaining and amusing but I don't find it funny enough to watch very fast.

Declared as misses:

• Hagure Yuusha no Estetica: I dropped this right after I wrote my midway update, as I mused about in the update. I have no regrets, especially since apparently its ending is basically 'continued in the light novels'.

Overall there were four shows that I unapologetically enjoyed, one show that I found compulsively watchable but seriously flawed (SAO), one show that a smarter person might not have bothered with, and two shows that I probably should have dropped. Oh, and in retrospect I stuck with Hagure much longer than I should have; I could have bailed out in the second episode when it made its taste for excessive fanservice clear.

(In general I was, as usual, far too optimistic and willing to stick with shows.)

This season makes me happy in one specific way, after last season: my favorite show wasn't an action show. On the flipside, most of the rest are (I count Dog Days' as an action show, despite how little real action it had; it was more of an adventure show, but that's close enough).

(I could be happy that my third most favorite show is also not an action show, but not really; there's a big gap between my feelings for AO and my feelings for Return. Return was nice, AO was very good to great.)

My views on Sword Art Online

I have divided views on SAO. On the one hand, I don't think it's very good. On the other hand, I keep watching it anyways. There's at least two aspects to this.

The frustrating thing about SAO is that a great many of the small-scale details are nice, it's just that the large scale plot and characters are stupid, cliched in a bad way, and irritation-inducing. I like to fool myself that this is the sign of a good director being forced to closely follow not-great source material (presumably in order to appease the fans of the original light novels so that they buy the ever-important Blu-ray releases). These little things combined with the good production values are a large reason that I keep watching despite all the stupidity.

Another reason that the show is more interesting to me than you might expect is that SAO is very much about a game and it never loses sight of this. At the start of the show I expected that the 'trapped in a game' part of the premise would mostly be used to justify ye generic fantasy setting and you could just as well have transported all of the characters to some alternate dimension. This turns out to be not at all the case; that the characters are playing a game is a constant presence in the show and makes it far more interesting than yet another fantasy setting. I may grouse about the characters being stupid in how they approach SAO the game, but they're realistically stupid in that many of their behaviors feel like recognizable MMO gamer behaviors. I've seen plenty of fantasy shows, even plenty of shows about people from this world pulled into a fantasy world in various ways, but a show about a fantasy game is relatively novel.

(One of the frustrating things is that SAO shows flashes of having something interesting to say about the whole 'stuck in a game' premise but then generally drops or fumbles it immediately.)

Finally, it's clear by now that Sword Art Online is not a good adaptation. There are many nonsensical moments and when they happen it frequently turns out that the show has left out important information, dropped relevant scenes entirely, or made changes to a scene so it makes less sense (for example, see the comments on this summary of episode 19). At this point SAO is less a standalone adaptation and more of a highlights reel for fans of the original work, who have the context to fill in all of the missing pieces and make the characters less stupid. If you lack the context, the show remains comprehensible and watchable but it's periodically stupid and jarringly odd. This is clearly the fault of the studio and the core creative team for the anime.

(I'm sure that the SAO Blu-rays will sell like hotcakes anyways.)

Sidebar: on .hack

Speaking of shows about (fantasy) games: I know about the .hack franchise. I think I watched part of the first episode of .hack//Sign and stopped, and saw one episode of .hack//Roots and was very much not impressed (I actually just found my old capsule review of it, which is part of a personal historical artifact that I may revive someday). Maybe sometime I will take another run at the franchise but commentary about .hack//Sign being slow does not make me enthused.

Lens flare in anime

If you've watched anime for long you've probably seen a scene with lens flare in it, either in the form of streaks of light or as sharp diamonds. Lens flare is commonly used in beach scenes and other situations where the animators want to communicate that the sun is very bright; they'll pan a shot up to include the sun and as the sun enters the picture, throw in the flare. Generally the single callout in a single shot is the only time you'll see lens flare in the scene. As I mentioned last entry, lens flare is a really striking case of the anicamera deliberately emulating (old) cinematography for the aesthetic effect.

Here is the thing: lens flare is a lens defect and artifact, an undesirable property of camera lenses. It's not how we see bright lights with our bare eyes and it's not something that photographers want (and they go to some effort to avoid it). Old camera lenses could flare badly but modern still camera lenses go to significant effort to reduce or almost entirely eliminate lens flare; such a lens used in the same situation in real life would be unlikely to flare anywhere near as much as anime depicts (and real lens flare is often significantly less attractive than the lens flare that anime depicts).

(I don't know directly about modern cinematography lenses, but I suspect that they too do not flare very much these days; there's no reason that the improvements from still camera lenses would not have carried over to them.)

This makes anime's use of lens flare very clearly an aesthetic decision; it's not imitating how we see the world or even how a good modern camera does. Anime is doing extra work and deliberately invoking something that still photographers avoid either because the animators think it looks good, because they want things to look cinematographic (in a cliched way), or because they're using it as a signal that means 'this is in bright sunlight'.

(In anime, as in cinematography, all well lit scenes have pretty much the same apparent brightness level so true 'real world' brightness has to be communicated by other cues. Part of it is environmental, where we just know that a scene outdoors in sunlight is brighter than a scene indoors under normal artificial light, but sometimes anime throws in explicit indicators. Even artificial ones like lens flare.)

PS: this is where I direct interested parties to the tvtropes entry on false camera effects.

The unconstrained anicamera

Before I start talking about some of the things that the anicamera takes from real cameras I want to expand on a point that SeHNNG made at Altair & Vega, namely that the anicamera is unconstrained by physical reality. Specifically it is unconstrained by reality when it 'photographs' a scene, whereas when you film or photograph a scene how you do so is often imposed on you by physical constraints. There is a continuum of these constraints; the anicamera is at the unconstrained end and generally still photographers are at the most constrained end with cinematographers in the middle. This is not because film cameras are better or more flexible than still cameras but because cinematographers generally have more money. To show what I mean, here's two examples.

First, if a still photographer wants to take a picture of a group of people in a relatively small room they will almost always have to use a wide angle lens, which introduces perspective distortions from what we consider a 'normal' view. Cinematographers just build a soundstage where the room doesn't have one wall, allowing them to back up enough so that they get a normal perspective. Second, still photographers who take pictures of buildings often spend a great deal of money on special lenses in large part to compensate for the fact that they can't feasible take their pictures from ten or twenty feet (or more) up on a ladder. Camera booms are standard equipment on film sets; filming a broad overview of a building from thirty or forty feet up is almost trivial for a cinematographer.

The anicamera takes this further by enabling shots that would not be possible even in cinematography; at best film could fake them with special effects. One example comes from the first battle in Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, where the end of the battle has a dramatic continuous pull-back that starts from a closeup on a character in the battle and pulls all the way back to overlooking another character who is at least a mile or two away. You could not possibly film this in real life; there is no lens that could zoom in and out that much and no camera platform that could physically cover the distance fast enough. And the pull-back is necessary for the impact of the shot, because it involves Shirou turning to look towards Archer; only the continuous pullback lets us clearly understand what it means that Shirou turned and looked in the direction he did.

(Another way that the anicamera is unconstrained is that it takes up no physical space. You can thus have anime shots taken from spots in a setting that would be very difficult to get equipment into in real life. To some extent this could be faked on a soundstage but even that has limitations.)

Apart from enabling otherwise impossible shots, this matters because it means that how things look in anime is almost entirely an aesthetic choice. The look of a scene or a shot is never forced by physical constraints in the way it can be in still photography and cinematography. The corollary to this is that whenever the anicamera takes from real cameras it does so for aesthetics, admittedly sometimes because a lot of cinematography has established that those aesthetics work or at least trained audiences to expect them.

(The clearest, most striking case of this is lens flare. But that's another entry.)

Some notes and views on Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita

I was planning to make this a carefully written coherent entry, but that's not happening. So this is going to be more or less point form notes before more of my thoughts slip out of my mind.

I was previously somewhat ambivalent on Jinrui. I take that back because in retrospect there were only two episodes that I felt were beating me over the head and I've become convinced that those episodes were necessary. I now feel that Jinrui was the most interesting show of the Summer 2012 season; it was the one that most consistently fascinated me and made me think and it had the highest number of moments of awesome. It was at least sometimes subtle and beautiful, which is more than most shows ever manage.

I wrote my theory of decline partly with Jinrui in mind. I think that a low birth rate is the best explanation for humanity's decline, but that's partly because Jinrui doesn't really explain the decline. There's some evidence for it, especially in the school episodes (11 and 12), but I think there's also some counter evidence. In particular, in both the first and third episodes we see a fair number of other girls and young women of Watashi's rough age (and in the first episode they're all in one village).

(If anything, young men seem to be the missing element. Although we do see some of them other than the Assistant.)

As I tweeted, I think that the school in #11-12 isn't there to educate the students but instead to socialize them, something that's necessary because many children are growing up without other children around (as suggested by Watashi's opening narration in #11). One strong reason I feel this is that both Watashi and Y are clearly both very smart and quite well read (Watashi from the very moment that she shows up at the school); 'unschooled' clearly doesn't equal 'uneducated' in their cases. In any school that really wanted to put them in an appropriate grade, they'd rapidly be moved up through the grade levels. But instead the school forces them to sit in various early grades for a fair amount of time, which makes perfect sense if the real goal is to socialize the kids instead of just teach them.

(As noted, I kind of think that the school shut down because it wasn't working. As demonstrated by Watashi and Y's experiences, its pupils may have been getting progressively weirder and more disturbed over time and the school environment itself may have been feeding that. This is probably taking this theory too far.)

For the record, if people have any doubt by now:
Liked: absolutely, at least right now. Once I got going with it, it was the highlight of the season (against strong competition from Eureka Seven AO).

Rewatch: quite possibly, because I strongly suspect that there are things I will pick up on a second watch.

(I do hope for someone to do a roundup post on Jinrui commentary and analysis. I want to read it all, because I'm sure there's things about Jinrui that I missed.)

Sidebar: Jinrui and Eureka Seven AO

The quick summary is that these are both good shows but they are so different that I can't compare them directly. Jinrui is a show that is very much about (meta-)commentary, analysis, and paying close attention to the non-obvious. AO is a much more conventional show that is at the same time somewhat less obvious and more subtle about things; it never pushes its themes to the forefront in the way that Jinrui sometimes does. You can enjoy AO purely on its surface narrative while I'm not sure that Jinrui is always interesting at that level.

Despite all this I found Jinrui more interesting and fascinating than AO; it made me think in a way that AO didn't. Jinrui also had more straight up awesome moments than AO did (eg, eg). This is not to say that AO has been without awesomeness; AO just spreads it out over more time rather than concentrating it in focused moments.

Brief early impressions of the anime of the Fall 2012 season

As before, here are my impressions of another season's first few episodes, or at least of the shows that I've bothered to watch. I'm reusing the same format as last time and for the same reasons. This time around I'm trying to be harsher than usual because my goal is to only watch anime that I'm going to really enjoy; I have enough other things competing for my time.

Hits:

• Magi - The Labyrinth of Magic: So far this is a straightforward adventure story but I'm finding it nicely done. It's not deep but it's enjoyable. One reason I like it is that it has that rarity in an action show, a strong female character who is going to be one of the main protagonists.

• Shin Sekai Yori - From the New World: This is this season's deep and serious show (well, the successful one). It's well done and interesting so far, with intriguing mysteries and decent characters. Bits are a little bit clumsy but I'll forgive them since the rest is so good and interesting.

• K: After the third episode I've become convinced that this show is consciously trolling us, setting up cliched situations and characters only to deliberately do the opposite of what we expect. It's great (assuming you like that sort of thing, which I do when it's done well).

  (A smarter person would have become convinced after the ending of the second episode. Or even during the second episode.)

• Zetsuen no Tempest: What I like most about this show is the main characters, who are much more interesting, complex, and nuanced than the usual run of the mill spuds in your typical action anime; I look forward to the show exploring them more. As an action anime it's otherwise decent (and enjoyable) but ordinary.

  (It's worth mentioning that the action seems well animated and well done, since a lot of alleged action shows cheat massively on this.)

• Girls und Panzer: This surprised me by being much more interesting and enjoyable than I expected (once I was persuaded to give it a try by all sorts of praise in the anisphere). It's not exactly deep and you really don't want to think about the setting, but it's quite fun so far. While it could fumble things, I suspect that the staff has enough of a handle on what's fun about this setting to keep things going for its entire run.

  (The protagonist has some sort of tragic past lurking in her background, but this seems to be mandatory these days.)

Either this season is really good or my attempt to be strict about what I'm going to watch is an abject failure so far.

Need to see more of because I can't make up my mind:

• Robotics;Notes: After two episodes, I would have to describe this as quiet. It isn't as flashy and splashy as the other series and it's not moving as fast; that makes it easy to overlook and to discount. It's well made but the characters are perhaps a little too stereotypical and predictable for their own good; still, they have a certain amount of depth and interest to them. At this point I don't doubt the quality of the execution in the show; I expect it to be solid throughout. I just don't know if it's going to wind up going anywhere interesting.

• Sakurasou no Pet na Kanojo: After the first two episodes, I was going to brush this show off as not sufficiently good to overcome its fundamentally generic premise. Then the third episode came along and at least temporarily upended all of that by not taking any of the easy, cliched approaches to its up-till-then stereotypical situations and in the process injecting a bunch of brutal honesty into the proceedings (and changing our view of at least one character). This burst of maturity and solidity may well fade into a predictable heart-warming resolution of the current plotline, but right now there's at least the chance that this show is going to do something genuinely unexpected and unusual. I'll watch the next episode and see how it goes, although I don't have really high hopes.

  (This did get adopted from a light novel, after all. The chances of a a successful light novel series doing something genuinely daring and unusual are low.)

On the edge:

• Ixion Saga DT: This is totally not taking itself seriously at all; it's full of slapstick and other deliberate comedy, all of which is well enough done to amuse me. But it hasn't had many jokes so far and if it runs out of decent ones, that's it. The third episode was kind of marginal, so I don't know how long I'll last with it.

  (Even if it doesn't fumble the jokes, if I was being sensible I should probably stop watching it as not quite sidesplittingly funny enough to justify the time. But it's so hard to stop watching things that are entertaining but not hugely so.)

  One fundamental difference between Ixion and K is that K is playing things in a straight-faced deadpan, while Ixion wants to make sure we know things are funny. This is one reason K is better.

• Psycho-Pass: This is a great example of copying the superficial form of good things without understanding what makes them good, since it's clearly trying to be Ghost in the Shell and various SF films. It aspires to be deep and serious and meaningful, but Shin Sekai Yori has at least twice its depth (with characters half the age). The second episode was mostly an extended and clumsy info-dump, and the characters are mostly a collection of predictable cliches (like the old man who's world-wise and cynical because hey, he's old, right).

  Oh, and apparently we're likely to have a patented Gen Urobuchi shock surprise turn at some point, where everything turns dark(er) and what ideals we've retained are betrayed and we see characters destroyed and so on. My anticipation for the brutality is palpable.

  (That was sarcasm. This is the Internet, so I want to make sure people understand that.)

  I don't know why I'm leaving this marked as on the edge instead of a miss. I guess I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream that this could be good.

Misses:

• CODE:BREAKER: I want to like the setting, the plot, and the idea of the characters because all of them sound promising. In practice I've ended up completely uninterested in the actual characters and what happens to them; they're boring (and sometimes stupid) and I just don't care about any of them.

Not for me:

• Chousoku Henkei Gyrozetter: I watched the first episode for some reason and while this is not bad as such it's also not appealing enough to get me to watch another episode given that I am very much not in the target demographic for this show. What I find most interesting about it is the ending animation, which is worth watching once to see the logical result of the availability of computer-driven CGI character dance animation (as seen in, eg, the IM@S games and the Pretty Cure ending animations) when combined with CGI models for other things. Like, oh, your show's giant robots.

  That's right, CGI giant robots doing an idol dance routine (complete with the hand gestures). You know you want to see it. Here, have a link for your convenience.

• Kami-sama Hajimemashita: This is perfectly good shoujo romantic comedy and seems decently well done in the two episodes I watched. But it's not striking enough to overcome the fact that shoujo romantic comedy is pretty much just not my thing.

  (Sometimes a romantic comedy show is striking enough, so I keep watching one every so often to see if this one clicks. Kami-sama seemed promising since it had the supernatural element, but that wasn't enough to overcome the relatively ordinary feeling situations.)

• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: I'm just not in the mood for MANLY SHONEN ACTION this season; I couldn't even make it through the first episode of this when I tried (I gave up at the point where Dio leaps from the carriage). It doesn't help that Jojo's is painting with a brush so broad that it's more of a roller.

• Chuunibyou demo Koi ga Shitai!: This is probably the season's most praised and well-respected show that I have no interest in at all.

  The animation is spectacular though (from the Youtube clips I've seen). Someday someone will assemble a clip show of all of the striking fantasy bits.

Actively passed on (that I feel like mentioning explicitly):

• Busou Shinki: I might give this a try if it was about the shinki fighting, but apparently this is mostly a comedy anime about them doing housework and getting themselves into trouble. So, no. Pass.

  (One of the reasons that I'm passing is that I have a very bad reaction to the whole anime habit of taking warrior women and turning them into cute dojikko who can't do things and get themselves into trouble.)

  It's a real pity, though; some of the combat sequences look pretty spectacular. I reserve the right to change my mind about this later. Maybe I'll experiment with fast-forwarding through all of the boring and irritating bits and just watching the fights.

• BTOOOM!: Another entrant in the 'trapped protagonist forced to fight for his life' genre that I've decided I have no interest in.

• Little Busters!: I believe that I've liked exactly one Key-derived anime, and in that one I didn't like the half of it that everyone else apparently did.

  (I liked the modern-age parts of Air but not the flashback to medieval Japan; the former were interestingly different, the latter were all too ordinary fantasy Japan.)

Mentioned for completeness as still continuing: Sword Art Online. The execution continues to be decent enough (and entertaining enough) to overcome all of its flaws.

(I can't count Eureka Seven AO as 'continuing', since it doesn't have episodes currently airing; we're just on hold for the concluding two episodes in November.)

Bokeh in anime: selective focus, blur, and the anicamera

SeHNNG recently wrote about the anicamera, the imaginary camera that 'films' anime. As it happens I have an interest in this area, so today's topic is the interesting issue of out of focus blur in anime.

(Well, interesting to me, partly because I'm an amateur photographer.)

Most anime scenes have everything in focus (what photographers would call infinite depth of field). This is the natural look of painted and drawn art and what we think of as the conventional way things are, but it's not entirely realistic; real cameras and lenses can at best fake it, and film usually doesn't have everything in focus this way even if we don't consciously notice when we're watching. However, every so often anime likes using selective focus with areas deliberately out of focus, sometimes together with shifting the focus from one person in the scene to another to draw your attention along with it. In this as in much else anime is consciously emulating film cinematography, which uses selective focus and focus changes for very similar reasons.

Back in the days of physical cels, my understanding is that this selective focus was achieved when the cels were filmed. Instead of stacking all of the cel elements that made up a shot right on top of each other, you'd add some sort of spacers to separate some cels from the others and then focus the camera on the particular cel you wanted in focus; the cel to cel distance was enough to throw the others at least somewhat out of focus. In the new modern world of digital animation with no actual camera creating the final shot, selective focus is presumably created by selective deliberate blurring of appropriate digital layers in the image as it's composited together.

This is where we get to talk about photography (and cinematography) with physical lenses. One of the things that (some) photographers care about is bokeh, the characteristics of the out-of-focus blurred area of a picture. Different lenses can give you quite different bokeh; some are considered good and smooth, others bad and harsh. Back in the days of physical cels, the blur you got in a selective focus scene was determined by the lens used in your rostrum camera; you got whatever blur the lens gave you and that was that. But in the new world of digital animation, the blur you get is created by software. And software can do whatever you want.

Which brings us to the interesting bit. Now that the anicamera is fully virtual and all software, someone has to actively decide what the out-of-focus blur will look like. The bokeh of a selective focus anime scene is now entirely up to the people creating or using the software. So I wind up wondering things like whether some directors deliberately try to make the blur look natural (or to emulate a specific camera lens or look), if people painstakingly emulate the specific out of focus look of traditional cel animation rostrum cameras, or if the programmers just do a simple generic image blur and call it a day.

So far I don't think I've seen any anime that's deliberately done a high-bokeh scene, one where almost everything is thrown out of focus (the current common cliche for still portraits and certain sorts of lazy artsy photographs, and sometimes seen in films shot with DSLRs). It may come someday, though, especially if this look enjoys a burst of popularity in film cinematography.

(I suspect but don't know for sure that physical cels couldn't do this sort of drastic out-of-focus areas. Software almost certainly can if someone wants to create it, especially if the scene is being partly created in 3D and then flattened during compositing.)

My view of the chronological order of Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita episodes

(There are some semi-spoilers for Jinrui here, but this is deliberately mostly opaque if you haven't actually seen the show.)

I'll put my conclusion first and then write on about my justifications later. Based in large part on Vance's comment at A&V, my assumed chronological order of episodes is: the school portion of 11-12, 10, the epilogue of 12, 7-8, 5-6, 1-2, 9, and ending with 3-4.

There is a clear ordering of some episodes: the school portion of 11-12, 10, 7-8, and then all episodes with the Assistant (1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 9) in some order. It's strongly implied that 1-2 follows shortly after 5-6, since Watashi's hair is cut at the end of 6 and episode 1 is the only other episode where she has short hair (and she returns to long hair before the end of the episode).

(Although I think the ordering is sensible, I don't think the show supports Vance's logic about the relative positions of 9 and 5-6. In 6, Watashi is rationally afraid because she's around a bunch of angry people who are upset over what she's deliberately done; in 9, her screwup is mostly accidental and pretty much private.)

The position of the non-flashback epilogue of 12 is not clear to me. It has to go after 10 (since Watashi has fairies) and before 3 (since the epilogue is the first time since school that Y and Watashi have seen each other). I think it can't happen shortly before 3 since the dialog between Y and Watashi in 3 implies that it's been a while since they saw each other. Based mostly on Watashi's relative equanimity in 7-8 onwards, I prefer to put it between 10 and 7-8.

It makes both internal and thematic sense for 3-4 to be the chronologically last episodes. In internal logic, 3-4 is where Watashi is the most hands-off and concerned about the fairies and their enthusiasms (an attitude that makes sense for her to have after 9). It's also where the faeries are the most overtly weird and ostentatiously magical in what they do. And, as Vance mentions, it's set in winter or very early spring, unlike all of the other episodes. Thematically, 3-4 can be read as a meta-commentary on the show itself and episode 4 climaxes with the characters' (manga) series being canceled, the characters waking from a dream, and so on. Applications to the end of the anime series itself are obvious.

(Read this way, many of the lines at the tail end of 4 can be given double meanings. Consider Watashi's line that the fairies' mangas are too hard, for example, given that Jinrui itself requires work to understand at more than a superficial level.)

I have no idea what chronological order the original light novels are in and I'm not sure it matters. I'm inclined to consider the anime a separate creation from the LNs instead of an attempt to adopt them literally. (The things I see in the anime may be there in the LNs too, but I'm not assuming that. Jinrui feels like something where the anime may have gone in its own direction.)

A theory of decline

One of the periodically recurring tropes in anime is humanity being in decline; not through a loud apocalypse or for any visible reason, but people are just quietly diminishing. This season's Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita puts this in the series premise (the title of the show means 'Humanity Has Declined') but there are plenty of others, such as Sora no Woto and the classic Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. In the version of the trope that I'm thinking of, the cause of the decline is never stated (and the decline itself is often just a background detail, not the main focus of the show). One of the things that this generates is a lot of speculation about why humanity is in decline in any particular show. What catastrophe do the creators imagine having hit us?

As it happens, I have a theory on this. Japanese creators are almost uniquely placed to vividly feel one particular quiet catastrophe in real life: a low birth rate. The Japanese total fertility rate is one of the lowest in the world, well under the replacement rate necessary to just hold the population level constant (see eg Wikipedia). The effects of this decline are apparently visible all over Japan, especially in less attractive areas with lower populations. The whole issue is considered a serious problem (especially when combined with an aging population), with various government attempts to encourage children, discussion in the press, and so on. Extrapolating Japan's very real issue with a low birth rate into a future setting is a natural thing to do.

(As you'd expect, I believe that one of the most visible signs is fewer and fewer schools with fewer and fewer pupils. This has cropped up as a plot point in contemporary shows; for example, I remember the climax of the GTO live action series taking place at a now-shut-down rural school that one of the characters had attended.)

A really low birth rate is a great fit for the typical anime decline of humanity. It's slow but devastating, it's quiet, and there's nothing really to fight or to make a fuss about. There's no singular event that's causing the problem, just a whole collection of small individual decisions. Life goes on, the world shrinks (because there are fewer and fewer people in it), and so on.

(And with fewer people in the world you start to progressively lose technology that you no longer have the manpower to run the infrastructure for. It takes a lot of people all through a supply chain to run a modern chip fab, for example, especially once you include things like the transportation infrastructure, the water supply, and so on.)