Roving Thoughts archives

SSSS.Gridman's unusual soundscape

It's no secret that most anime is generously slathered with background music. Unless characters are talking, and sometimes even if they are, there's almost always BGM running in the background, a constant soundtrack for what's going on in the show. It's even a cliche than when the BGM cuts out, something serious is going on. Sometimes this BGM is used to communicate mood or comedy or the like, but often it is simply there.

SSSS.Gridman is an exception. From the start, one of the quietly unusual things about the show has been how little it uses background music. Rather than BGM, its passing moments and full scenes are filled with incidental environmental sounds; things like little noises of things thumping and squeaking, people's footsteps, the warning bells of railway crossings, the flapping and cawing of passing birds, doors opening and closing, rain falling, thumping machinery in the distance, the natural noise of busses humming along, and insects. Even when the show fills a silent time with background noise, it's not music; it's with, say, a quiet drone.

(There are times when music crops up in Gridman as diegetic sound, which is to say that it exists in the world and the characters hear it too.)

SSSS.Gridman does have background music, but it's rarely used. When the music starts up, things are about to happen, usually the kaiju fights or other climactic events touching on them. And generally the moment the fight is over, the music cuts out too. If there is music and it's not a fight, something important is happening and the show wants us to know.

(And Gridman generally considers fights over, at least for BGM, once the decisive blow has been struck. There is an explosion afterward, but the BGM does not continue through it in the way it might in another show.)

I'm sure that this is a deliberate decision on the part of the production. If nothing else, designing and putting together this soundscape has to be a lot more work than commissioning some BGM tracks and mixing them in underneath the vocals and any important foley sounds. But I don't know enough to guess why the show handled its sound this way. Perhaps it's for the same reason that the show had its animators draw a lot of what would normally have been background art, which is apparently to make the show's world feel more alive and real; see the Sakugablog discussion of this in their coverage of the first two episodes.

(Without knowing enough about anime production to be sure, I suspect that the prevalence of BGM in anime in general is because it is the simplest and cheapest way to fill in what would otherwise be completely dead silence (or voices talking in otherwise dead silence). Live action works can at least do scratch recordings during filming to have a basic 'bed' of background noise, but anime doesn't have that unless you deliberately go collect field recordings. Dead silence is somewhat unnatural in real life, which is probably partly why it's used for emphasis in anime.)

Looking back, one of the surprising things about this is how little I consciously noticed and notice both sides of BGM usage. For SSSS.Gridman, I didn't realize just how little BGM was used and how soon it cuts out. For other shows, I didn't realize how pervasive BGM usage was until I was spot-checking things as part of writing this and discovered, for instance, that it seems to be not unusual to continue BGM underneath even people talking, which is something I wouldn't have expected to need or use BGM. On the other hand, how pervasive BGM is seems to vary from show to show; I encountered others that had significant sections with only ambient noises and no BGM, although none that went anywhere as far as SSSS.Gridman.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Daiba Nana gets her day in Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight

I may have a muted and mostly intellectual reaction to Revue Starlight as a whole (per my summer comments), but there is one character that the show completely sold me on and got me emotionally invested in, and that was Daiba Nana. And whatever else I may feel about the show, episode 7, her focus episode, was an excellent and amazing thing. For me, it was unquestionably the highlight of the entire show.

At one level it's not surprising that I like episode 7, because one of my things is episodes that reveal a totally new perspective on events and force you to completely re-evaluate everything you've seen so far. I'm predisposed to love them unreasonably wherever they crop up, whether it's in an otherwise ordinary show or in generally excellent works such as Madoka Magica.

(In general I'm all for unusual narrative tricks, from this through non-linear storytelling to all sorts of things. Just do them well.)

Beyond what it revealed, "Daiba Nana" (really, that's the episode's title) was really well put together and presented, like much of Revue Starlight overall. Given something to emotionally connect with, all of the show's technical work paid off for me, as everything built up over the course of the episode to really pack a punch. The show's understated presentation with drip after drip of unwelcome, unpleasant change sold me on Daiba Nana's mindset and on why she felt the way she did and reacted as she did. Her ultimate choice was not a surprise but an inevitability, and in the process it ripped off her mask to reveal the person underneath.

(In retrospect, the episode also sold me on why she was the winner of the Revue. Out of all of the competitors, she was the one who had a concrete goal that she understood, not an abstract desire or vague target. It's fitting that Hikari was the one to defeat Nana, because Hikari too had a very concrete goal that she was aiming for.)

In the end, Daiba Nana got what she wanted but not what she needed, and on top of that what she wanted was slowly turning to ashes in her mouth. In a single episode, Revue Starlight transformed her from a cheerful cipher to a quietly, desperately lonely girl who broke our hearts and so very much needed a hug.

(If you want to read more about episode 7, I recommend Emily Rand's writing.)

As a side note, looking back, my experience of Revue Starlight as a whole was definitely interesting even if it wasn't necessarily engaging. I don't often have the experience of watching a show while knowing that things are definitely flying over my head and there's an entire layer of things going on that I'm barely grasping the edges of. Here it was Revue Starlight's entanglement with the Takarazuka Revue (part of which is its multimedia nature, where the full Revue Starlight experience extends well beyond the anime alone). In that respect I'm reminded of watching Joshiraku.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)

Sidebar: Another little impressive thing from the episode

One of the little things that episode seven showed us (at least as I remember it) is how Daiba Nana's collection of mannerisms and habits seems to have evolved over the course of her many loops. In the very beginning, Nana wasn't really 'Banana', although she clearly liked bananas. It was only through relentless repetition and refinement that Nana boiled herself down to a cheerful supplier of a stream of banana themed foods and so on, with all of the foods (and many of her mannerisms) carefully honed through far more practice than any of her classmates had any idea about. The authentic, imperfect, uncertain Daiba Nana was far in the past by the time of the first six episodes of Revue Starlight that we saw; we saw only a polished front, the person Daiba Nana had made herself into for the sake of her goal and her classmates.

The seventh episode quietly showed us that the Daiba Nana we'd seen in the first six episodes was a polished, rehearsed role, and it showed us how that had come about, how Daiba Nana wound up playing a role instead of being herself, because she had to in order to keep everything going.

(I suspect that all of this is in part something the show wants to say more broadly, about the Takarazuka Revue and other things. But even just as a character piece, it was beautiful and wholly convincing.)

Some shows that didn't work out for me in 2018

Last year I wrote about some shows that didn't work out for me, and this year I've decided to do it again for my own reasons. As with last year, these are shows that I started with high hopes, shows that by all rights should work for me, and then things didn't work out. I'm almost always sad when this happens, because I want to enjoy everything I watch and I want to have more things to watch that I enjoy. As with last year, this is not to condemn these shows, it is to create a little memorial to them and to what could have been. That these shows didn't work out for me can say as much about me as it does about the shows.

(To a certain extent, these shows teach me something about my own tastes, which is part of why I want to write all of this up.)

In the order that they aired and that I walked away from them:

• Katana Maidens - Toji no Miko: It's been a pretty long time since we had a show like this, but sadly the show we got had pacing issues that I eventually got tired of. I really do want to like action/adventure shows that revolve around women, because they're relatively rare, but this one didn't work out despite quite a lot of initial promise. There was a time when I'd have kept on watching this despite the pacing, but not this year. There's a part of me that still regrets not powering through to watch all of Katana Maidens.

• Violet Evergarden: This is a beautiful and well crafted show, one that by all rights I should have been more fond of than I actually was. I have theories about why I wound up failing to really be pulled in emotionally, but they're at best hand-waving over the fundamental reality that this is yet another KyoAni show that didn't work for me.

• Lupin III Part V: Lupin is a classic series and has been doing its general action and adventure thing for a long time, with a well honed stable of characters and a bunch of movies that I've generally enjoyed and so on. It definitely feels like I should enjoy Lupin TV series, and it also feels almost like an obligation as an anime fan to do so. But I keep bouncing off the actual TV series, with the notable exception of The Woman Called Mine Fujiko. Apparently I don't love these classical characters quite enough to follow them around for six or twelve hours or so at a time, even if that time is spread out over one or two cours.

• Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory: As I put it, the magic leaked out for me somewhere over the past decade (or more) since the last time there was any Full Metal Panic!. The good news is that the old FMP lives on in my heart, no matter what.

  (It's odd, but this hurts less than Little Witch Academia did last year. I think it's because I already have the pleasant memories of the original Full Metal Panic! series.)

• My Hero Academia: MHA is pretty good shonen action and all of that, and I stopped watching it just before a climactic arc or two that were apparently very good. My feelings on dropping it is that this says something about the pacing issues endemic in a long-running shonen series and also something about how long I'm willing to watch one series these days. I look back on the days when I could watch a hundred episodes or more of something and wonder how I did it.

  (Possible the answer is 'less other things to eat up my time with'.)

Then there's some shows that I'm more mildly let down and sad about, where it doesn't hurt as much that I and the show didn't work out.

• GeGeGe no Kitaro: There's a lot of nice things about Kitaro, and it would be a perfectly wholesome show to follow on a regular basis (with some great characters). I just don't have any real interest in following a kids show, because some of the things inherent in its nature leave me too unenthused.

  Sadly this is a bad omen for me ever really enjoying any of the Precure iterations, because they're fundamentally kids shows too.

• Golden Kamuy: This is an acclaimed action and adventure manga with some great characters and a well realized anime version (bears excepted), but I wound up not really caring about what was going on.

  Looking back over everything that worked for me and didn't work for me this year, I suspect that this is a sign that I'm losing my interest in straight action stories. Over and over again this year, I've passed or dropped shows where the primary appeal was action and intricate cunning plots going on. It's not just Golden Kamuy, it's also things like A.I.C.O., Angolmois, Sirius the Jaeger, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, and Persona 5 The Animation (and Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory to some extent).

  (On the other hand I definitely enjoyed B - The Beginning, for all that it was very firmly planted in this genre. It wasn't anywhere near high art, but B knew full well how to be both entertaining and compulsively watchable.)

• Darling in the FranXX: I said way back when that I didn't have high expectations for DarliFra, which is why I'm not more let down when I decided that it wasn't interesting enough to continue watching. When you don't expect much to start with, there's not much letdown when it doesn't work out.

(I don't list Hinamatsuri here simply because comedies failing for me is the routine state of life.)

Writing this up has helped me clarify and put into words some things that I was already feeling in my gut. For instance, it seems pretty likely that Vinland Saga is not going to be something that I enthusiastically watch in 2019, since it falls straight into the general genre area of Golden Kamuy and other similar things.

As with last year, I'm deliberately excluding shows that I finished, even though I have things I could say there (and I may do so in another entry). This is for shows that didn't work out to such an extent that I stopped watching them.

(This is part of the 12 Days of Anime 2018.)