Sneha Jaiswal's Blog, page 283

Japan Sinks – A Review

It took us three days to finish ‘Japan Sinks’, the latest anime series to hit Netflix. Directed by Masaki Yuasa, this 10 episode show focuses on how a series of earthquakes wreak havoc in Japan and tracks the journey of a family struggling to survive.

The first episode starts with a mid-air scene, where a chubby man is reading a newspaper on the plane, the headlines talk of the Olympics. The scene then changes to a high-school sports ground, where the viewer is introduced to the protagonist Ayumu, a teen athlete who is aspiring to be part of the Olympic team. In the very first few minutes, devastating tremors ripple through the ground in Tokyo, leaving most of Ayumu’s team dead. The bustling city resembles a post-apocalyptic nightmare, with crumbling buildings, uprooted trees, burning skylines and dazed citizens.

Ayumu runs away from the bloodbath in her locker-room and manages to re-unite with her father, gamer-brother Go and their chirpy mother, who turns out to be the chubby man on the plane. “Oh, the boy is a woman!” I exclaimed while watching the scene. I am mentioning this misunderstanding on my part to highlight the weak animation. To somebody who is used to watching Studio Ghibli movies from Japan, the animation in this series was not very impressive.

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What makes ‘Japan Sinks’ interesting is the fact that the makers do not hold back in showing very graphic scenes, that help heighten the impact of the tragedy unfolding around the central characters. It’s rightfully rated 18+, with ample blood & gore. Almost every episode has some gut-wrenching deaths and unexpected twists. Dramatic events take place in quick succession. You have problems, problem-solving and more new problems. The characters do not have the time to grieve for those who are dead.

While I haven’t read the novel this series is based on, the story explores a lot of themes – teen love, family ties, alienation, sexual abuse, racial prejudices, eerily idyllic cults and attachment issues. But none of the themes are explored beyond the surface, because there is no time. Fair enough. But from episode 5, the series suddenly slows down and our pack of survivors, which includes Ayumu’s family and two other young men find themselves welcomed in ‘Shan City’, which is inhabited by a cult-like community. The characters finally get to spend some relaxed hours, but even then, as a viewer, you don’t really establish a connection with any of them.

Towards the end of the show, some of the stuff just stops making sense, especially Aymu and her brother’s incredibly good luck – they find everything they need to survive miraculously. So the climax wasn’t as great as it could have been, neither was it moving enough. For example, a few days back, I saw the animated film ‘Your Name’ and was moved to tears in the end. But ‘Japan Sinks’ doesn’t have any powerful cathartic moments, despite being a tale of human resilience in the face of disaster.

This original Netflix series however does make for good weekend watching with a feel-good ending. Ordinary people are the heroes of this series. Had the animation been a little better, it could have been ground-breaking.

Lockdown Blues

Here’s some trivia – there are at-least five books called ‘Lockdown Blues’, some fiction, some non-fiction. Since my debut fiction book is called ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’, Amazon usually shows me ‘similar books’ on the sides, that’s how I know this. Although, it makes one wonder why people don’t do a simple google check before deciding on the name of their book?

Anyway, that’s not what this post is about. What I really wanted to write about is how the restrictions owing to the Covid19 pandemic is slowly beginning to bring me down. I feel a lot less motivated to write these days. All I want to do is drink coffee and then sleep. The irony!

Here’s what has really upset me though – the state where my publishers are based at is under lockdown again, till August 31st! Which means, readers cannot order paperbacks for another month. Like I said once earlier – I can’t really complain about lockdowns if my book is about it. I am allowed to feel a little low about it though.

The only positive way to look at it is – at least there are the e-books! So if you like reading general fiction, please get a copy on the kindle store. And if you get the book, do leave a rating/review, it means a lot to independent authors like me. Following are some links (it is also available for kindle unlimited members) –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

Amazon France

If I’ve missed your country, look for it on Amazon or on your kindle store.

Fangs. It’s Cute. That’s it.

If you are on Instagram, chances are high that you’ve seen someone share a comic by Sarah Anderson. She makes these simple but adorable doodles that are very relatable. Owing to her popularity, she has ventured into publishing too. I finished reading a comic series called ‘Fangs’ by her.

So ‘Fangs’ basically chronicles the relationship between a vampire girl and a werewolf boy. Smells a little like twilight, doesn’t it? What disappointed me about this book was that it’s more like a scrapbook than a ‘comic series’. It’s just a bunch of funny/cute banter between the vampire girl who loves to dress up and the werewolf boy.

You have plenty of cartoonists out there making adorable panels that scream ‘hashtag relationship goals’. Sarah Anderson pretty much does the same in this, except that her protagonists aren’t humans. Here is a sample panel from her instagram account –

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If you are looking for a coherent tale, you won’t find any. However, if you are in mood for some random adorable Vampire-Werewolf romance to just pass some time, take a bite of ‘Fangs’.

In Awe of ‘Your Name’

Once in a while I will watch an animated film that cannot be reviewed, just because it’s so damn good that you might not have the right words to appreciate it. The 2016 Japanese film ‘Your Name’ (Kimi no Na wa) directed by Makoto Shinkai is one such gem. I want to stab myself in the eye for watching it four years later, despite seeing the trailer all those years ago.

This Japanese film is about teenagers Taki Tachibana and Mitsuha Miyamizu, while the former is an aggressive Tokyo boy, Mitsuha is a soft-spoken country girl longing for a more exciting city life. In the trailer it’s pretty clear that the two of them randomly keep switching bodies. A concept that is not new in cinema. I really enjoyed watching the 2006 body-swapping Hollywood film ‘It’s a Boy Girl Thing’ as a teen. But unlike the American romantic-comedy, ‘Your Name’ despite being quite humorous in parts, makes for a very poignant and deeply emotional movie watching experience.

The story arc is brilliant. What starts off as a funny, light story about two teens swapping bodies randomly, soon evolves into a fantastical tale about love that transcends time & irrevocable tragedies. The movie has some delicious twists, you would savor some of the unexpectedness with all your heart.

What makes this film even more exceptional is the beautiful animation, some frames are like live moving paintings. Makoto Shinkai the director, who also wrote the story, says he was by a town he visited in 2011. So a lot of scenes in the animated films are sketches inspired from real places in Japan, that gives the animated landscapes a touch of almost magical realism.

It’s no surprise that ‘Your Name’ went on to become the highest grossing animated film to be made in Japan. If you are an animation enthusiast like me and haven’t watched this film yet, you know what to do.

P.S. You can find me on  Facebook, Twitter  and Instagram 

Old Mails, Teen Me

Do you still have an e-mail account that you used back in school?

My first email account was on Hotmail (now known as Microsoft Outlook – guess they figured out just how shady Hotmail sounded) and I had created it when I was probably thirteen. So freaking long ago. There were a couple of weird Yahoo email accounts in between, all long-forgotten. But guess what – I still have access to my first Hotmail account.

I used the same Hotmail account till I was in college, after which I pretty much stopped using it. It continues to exist because my Facebook account is linked to that email. Here is the deal, I am the sorts that rarely checks emails. My last job as a TV journalist involved minimal mailing too. So only recently did the realization hit me – that the first account is a small treasure trove of correspondence that contains the remains of my teenage self.

Yesterday, I was looking for an old short story that I had written when I was probably seventeen and had to go way way back into my outbox list to find it. So glad that my teen self was smart enough to email some of my fiction to myself. I wish I could have done it with all the stuff that I wrote. Sigh.

Not only did I find the short story I was looking for, I also found some more that I absolutely have no memory off. One of them reads like “Goosebumps” met “Mills and Boons”. Hard to decide if that’s a good thing or bad.

But here’s a screenshot of the most interesting email I found amidst all the other nostalgic stuff –

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This 2008 email was sent to the ‘Opinion’ team of Deccan Chronicle, a leading south-Indian newspaper. I honestly have no memory of the show. Especially because I pretty much quit watching television in 2011. But there was a time when I was a total couch potato, who consumed a LOT of Bollywood films and shows.

Here is the text of the mail, since the screenshot is not very clear –

‘It is hard to believe that the celebrity participants are actually professionals who work in popular tv serials. They are always ready to pounce on each other and fight at the slightest opportunity. It might be a gimmick for trp’s but it only makes you want to switch to some other lesser irritating show.‘

Got to say, I chuckled at the mail and was proud of my teen self. They did not publish my silly opinion but here’s the fun part – seven years later, I landed a job with the same publication in Mumbai and pretty much headed the online team of Deccan Chronicle.

P.S. You can find me on  Facebook, Twitter  and Instagram 

Death & Darker Realms #19

“Pieces of my mind
Running everywhere
Nothing to bind
Threads of each share
Fragments float
To deep dark ends
Choking any note
Of saner friends”

First few lines of poem number nineteen in ‘Death & Darker Realms’, a collection of 40 poems. Some of us suffer from procrastinating too much on multiple things. There are others who will obsess over one specific issue. And then there are those like me, who can’t fixate on one problem and will think about a million other things constantly. What category do you fall in?

For the full poem, you could get a copy on Amazon. The e-book is just Rs 49 for Indian readers. Following are some country specific links  –

Amazon India

Amazon U.S

Amazon UK

Amazon Australia 

If you are not into poetry, then maybe you could check out my debut fiction book “Love, Loss, Lockdown“, a collection of short stories set against the Covid19 pandemic. It’s free for Kindle Unlimited subscribers.

10 Lessons For New Indie Authors

As a self-published author of two books, the last eight months have been a constant learning experience. A lot of it has been the “oh fuck, I should’ve known this before” sorts.

Here are the top 10 things I learnt as a new Indie author, even if some of it might sound absolutely useless to some.

I did close to ZERO research on promoting the first book. So all the ‘5 ways to sell your book’ articles were gobbled up after my debut book was out in the market. You need to read them up before publishing. Not after.Focus on building your social media presence before your first book is out. It’s okay if you are not even sure when it will be published. Just start getting active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and whatever platform you deem suitable to promote a book.I did not have a GoodReads account. It’s where all the readers are. And it is one of the best places online to get people talking about your book. So you know where to be.Twitter was a ‘I don’t understand this shit’ territory for me. Despite having an account since 2011, I was never really active there. There is a burgeoning ‘writing community’ on the site, with a lot of supportive members. So get on to Twitter and start tweeting.If you are self-publishing via Amazon, do not use their free promotional period on the very first week of the book’s release. First, let all those who you know are willing to pay for your work buy it. And once you think everybody who would have paid for the book has gotten it — go in for the free promotional campaign. Everybody loves free books. Especially total strangers.Cross-link as much as you can. If you are active on multiple social media sites, drop all relevant links. For example, if you have a blog where you do book reviews, leave a link to your book at the end too. Along with links to your other social medial profiles. My insta handle is writer_jaiswal and my twitter handle is miss_jaiswal. See what I did there? Moving on to point number seven…There is pretty much no point in reaching out to small individual reviewers, unless they are genuinely interested in your book. Go through their reviews, a lot of them have generic template bullshit that could apply to 100+ other books. Nobody is going to buy your book by reading that.Get active on the Q-A site Quora and use relevant questions to promote your book. I see a lot of writers doing that and it works in their favour. In fact, some people first get famous by writing answers on Quora and then use that following to promote their book. There are writers out there who have published books by just compiling their Quora answers. Nifty little trick.Do not at any point feel bad about having to do all the promotional work all by yourself just because you couldn’t land a deal with a traditional publisher. Even with a traditional publisher to your name, you still have to do the promotions largely by yourself. So it’s still a lot of hard-work. I have seen famous traditionally published writers with less than 5,000 followers on sites like Instagram. While a lot of random unknown people tend to have 10k plus followers. Unless you are JK Rowling level famous, you HAVE TO engage with people online to build a following. Doesn’t matter if the most prestigious publisher in the world printed your debut novel.Try and NOT pay for reviews. I have NEVER paid for reviews. While I don’t mind giving my book for free in exchange of a review, I wouldn’t pay anything for it. Promotional pages with more than 100,000+ followers have reached out to me, asking me if I would be interested in having them review my book for an XYZ sum. It’s obviously very tempting to let somebody with a large following do a review for you. But hey, if they are taking money for it, they are probably just interested in the money, not your book. And despite their claims of ‘we will do a honest review’, they are going to be kinder to you, just because you’ve paid them. So you are not going to get a genuine evaluation of your content. And such reviews are just misleading for readers.

Note to readers: This was originally published on Medium.com, where I’ve just started writing. If you are fellow Medium writer, let’s connect – https://medium.com/@writer_jaiswal. I’ll follow back

How Social Is ‘Too Social’?

Maybe the title of this post makes sense only in my head, but let’s ignore it. Here is a question I am dying to ask just anybody who is willing to answer – How many social media accounts is ‘too many social media accounts’? Optimists who believe in the power of self-promotion will probably say “there is no such thing as too much social media”. Especially if you need to promote stuff.

Here’s the thing, there was a point when I did not have an instagram account and even wanted to delete my Facebook account. Because except for posting my travel pictures occasionally, I would never do anything on Facebook. The only reason I did not flush it out of my life was because it was more useful than LinkedIn when it came to looking for media jobs. I am not kidding. I studied in one of the top Journalism colleges in my country and they have a very strong alumni network on Facebook. So almost every second day, some or the other alumni posts media-related vacancies on the college page.

Now I am on

Instagram Twitter WordPressQuoraFacebookLinkedIn

And just today I published my first post on Medium.com about “10 Things I learnt as a new Indie Author”. After I finished publishing the post, I wondered to my self “aren’t I on too many social media sites?!”.

Apparently not. What do you think?

Ghibli’s Iron Giants

Don’t you just love it when a random conversation with a stranger online sparks a story idea for your next post? I do.

Yesterday, I stumbled upon a tweet about how the next Hayao Miyazaki film will take another three years to be made. For the uninitiated – Hayao Miyazaki is the co-founder of ‘Studio Ghibli’, and those guys make amazing animated films.

For loyal Ghibli fans like me, three years is a long wait. So I tweeted about it and it led to a conversation with a fellow animation enthusiast.

After discussing our shared admiration for some of the films, he happened to mention ‘Laputa’, also known as ‘Castle In The Sky’, which was the first film made by Studio Ghibli in 1986. Both of us felt that the film wasn’t very impressive. Our exchange reminded me of an interesting thought that had struck me while watching it – that the robots in ‘Laputa’ had reminded me of the U.S animated film ‘The Iron Giant’, which came out in 1999.

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‘Laputa’ in the Ghibli creation is a floating Island city, with friendly robots and many riches. We see these friendly giants taking care of birds and plants in the city which is no longer inhabited by humans. While the robots are not as elaborately drawn as the one in ‘The Iron Giant’, it’s not too far-fetched to believe that ‘Laputa’ may have served as some inspiration for the American film.

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In the American film, the robot comes from space and is a friendly sentient being. The giant then strikes an adorable friendship with a little boy and the story is about their unlikely bond. Kind of like ET, the 1982 film, but I liked it a LOT more than ET.

Well, anyway, I don’t really know if I am the only one who noticed the uncanny resemblance between the robot from ‘The Iron Giant’ and the ones in ‘Castle in the Sky’. But the thought is interesting, that the Japanese movie may have spurred the imagination of American animators. MAY HAVE.

Ruben Brandt, Collector

‘Ruben Brandt, Collector’, is a weird little animated gem of a film that will not appeal to those who are put off by abstract art and experimentation. No, seriously, this will fuck with their head and they will probably stop watching it after the first few minutes. If you fall in that category, you have been warned.

The plot is pretty intriguing, it’s about a psychiatrist (Ruben Brandt) who uses art therapy to help clients. But he is himself tortured by famous art pieces in his dreams. His clients, who are all criminals, decide to help him back – by stealing the masterpieces that haunt him. It’s the ‘face your fear’ technique. So you have a motley crew of four thieves, gallivanting around the world, robbing paintings by classical masters from art shows & museums. Even the iconic Louvre is not spared. Bonny and Clyde be damned.

There is also a parallel story of a private investigator, who is trying to unravel just who the fuck is behind the crazily impossible art heists. So you also have a classic cat and mouse chase going on.

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Directed by Milorad Krstić, this Hungarian thriller is intelligent, poignant and darkly humorous. It’s a cool blend of art house meets film noir, kind of like Andy Warhol blending in with Renoir and having a baby with Alfred Hitchcock. Yeah, maybe that’s not possible. But just saying.

What I love about this psychological thriller is that it has a dash of a lot of themes that wouldn’t ideally be thrown together. It’s realistically absurd in parts. But also unreal and fantastical in other bits. And each character is not just unique, but also drawn differently. The animation is just something else.

The writers spring up a neat little twist towards the climax, that explains pretty much everything, including why art-pieces haunt the psychiatrist Ruben Brandt.

The pace of this film however is on the slower side and can really test the patience of those who seek immediate gratification from crime films. A little bit of chopping would have done this one great good. But I really enjoyed it.

The film is available on Netflix.

P.S – On an unrelated note – I published my second book ‘Love, Loss, Lockdown’. It’s a collection of short stories, check it out.