In Which I am Tired and Talk About Cartoons

It has been a crazy week.  I’ve spent the last half-hour coming up with something else to write here, without success.  Between a trip to Tennessee, workshops and hangouts and podcast recordings and SEEKRET PROJEKTS which I can’t wait to start talking about, I’m basically spent.

Final edits to Last First Snow continue apace.  Basically everything I could say would be a spoiler, which is a shame, because if you can’t trust The Internet, who can you trust?

Hm.  On second thought, don’t answer that.

I finished The Bone Clocks, which I loved on most individual pages and have more complex feelings about as a unit; I see where James Wood’s review in The New Yorker‘s coming from, but I diverge with him on so many particulars, generally to Mitchell’s benefit, that I will offer my own analysis as soon as I have spare psychic cycles to do so, which should be, well.  Um.  Let’s say next week.

Started watching Gurren Lagann, AKA The GAINAX Mecha Anime I Haven’t Yet Seen.  Four episodes in, I’m not certain what I think.  The show’s done impressive, risky psychological work already—I’m thinking specifically of the Episode Two Reveal, if any of y’all have seen it before.  It seems aggressively resistant to the creation of a status quo, which I do appreciate, having seen too many anime series waste too much time, and it’s utterly mercenary in its storytelling, also a relief.  The fight scenes are awesome, the animation is cool and weird, and I like the music a great deal.

That said, Gurren Lagann is, so far, diving deep into a lot of the hyperactive gender politics that bore me in shounen (boy’s) anime—c.f. Kamina’s constant crowing about “proper manly behavior;” I’d accuse him of overcompensating if the plot so far hadn’t gone out of its way to reinforce his concern (“the manly art of combining!”). And then there’s Leeron, who’s, well, let’s just call him problematic and get on with our lives.  Meanwhile, female lead Yoko demonstrates my least favorite shounen trope, that of The Girl Who In Spite of an Awesome Character Design Never Gets To Do Anything But Look Pretty and Moon Over The Male Lead—she has this crazy cool sniper railgun, and is ostensibly this badass Mad Max-esque warrior, but her railgun has yet to influence the outcome of a fight.  She shoots at stuff, sure, but I don’t think her bullets have done more than dent a robot chassis.  And that’s not even to mention the series’ gaze: she’s wearing a bikini, and the camera spends an awful lot of time ogling her.

I’m only four episodes in, admittedly—but dammit, episode five of Evangelion is the episode where Shinji falls on top of Rei and the whole shounen anime “durr I just tripped and ended up groping you on accident” visual joke ends up played for total horror, shame, and discomfort rather than humor—a brilliant and chilling subversion.  And ep 4 of FLCL, as close as that series gets to a filler episode, is the one where 13-y-o boy Naota hits his father in the head with a baseball bat in a fit of sexual jealousy, only to discover that the thing he thought was his father was actually a robot that looked like his father, which leads to him rescuing his real father from the cupboard into which he’s been stuffed—some serious Iron John levels of investigation of male sexuality, desire, and manhood, carried out in maybe 5 minutes of screen time.

Now, I’d argue that Evangelion is (among other things) a damning, daring feminist analysis/critique/deconstruction/etc. of giant robot shows and “boy’s own stories” in general, which returns again and again to the viciousness and brokenness of human relationships and the warping (dis)embodying effect society has on the female mind and form, even as the women in Eva fight to build and preserve their own identities, and to seek pleasure from life.  (And it’s telling that The Dystopian Future Ushered In by Shinji’s Failure—the horror into which he wakes in the third Rebuild movie—is basically a world in which the women are doing just fine without him thank you very much.)  (Oh no, I’m going to have to write that long post about Eva and feminism, won’t I?)  FLCL, meanwhile, is a brilliant and compassionate look at the tangled mind of a confused adolescent that externalizes his central concerns through giant robots and rock & roll—and yet FLCL still manages (IMO) to represent the women Naota encounters (& to many of whom he’s attracted—this is a show about being an adolescent boy) as their own subjects, with internal lives, goals, desires, and plot impact.

 

Which is to say, Eva and FLCL are special shows, though neither of them’s perfect—while to me, so far, Gurren Lagann seems all id.  There’s nothing wrong with the id, but it’s pretty simplistic.  That said, there seems to be enough love for this series that I’ll give it more time.