Tags: man night review anime animation
Published : 4 months ago (Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:08:12 PDT)
Searched:
http://tinser-genavy.livejournal.com/14585.html 0 links
Related posts
This is it. I'm stuffing my face with my foot. Samurai X: Trust & Betrayal or Rurouni Kenshin: Tsuiokuhen is the best anime I have ever seen. I never though I'd write such a sentence, but there you go. If Anime Planet were up right now and not under reconstruction, I'd update my list to reflect this revelation.
Before tonight, I held Invader Zim as the show most happiest to be an animated television show. Everything about Zim couldn't have been done in any other medium. Not even comics, the medium which the show's creator, Jhonen Vasquez, started out in. as a crazy, insane person who drew merely to satiate the voices in his wall. That Nickelodeon gave him a show is a subject for another time. That he created the most animated bit of animation ever is the focus here. Invader Zim was happy to be what it was and is, an animated television show. Even though it remains unfinished, every moment of the show sings the praises of it's medium, like Evangelion, like Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner, like Mickey Mouse. Zim has been usurped. I never thought that was possible.
Rurouni Kenshin is a show I was familiar with before I saw this four part OAV (Original Animated Video, Japanese equivalent of direct-to-video) tonight after weekend where I saw the joyous union of two friends and an evening/night of spiritual discussion over cigar smoke and bourbon with friends who were joyously un-unionated (yet.) However, the TV show wasn't half as moving or honest or poetic as this eighty eight minute show was. (forgive me if the length is wrong, wikipedia doesn't have the running time listed.) Cartoon Network ran Rurouni Kenshin the TV Show along side Sailor Moon and DBZ on Toonami. An endless series of comedy that has this flaky dramatic core. Kenshin, a man who slays to save, to make a path for a new world to blossom. He destroys the old world. The directors of the TV show have to be kicking themselves. They let this story of Kenshin's origins slip through their fingers.
Trust & Betrayal doesn't wait for you. It pulls you along, moving between time periods of the main character's, Shinta-turned-Kenshin, life as an innocent walking into a world of murder. Kenshin is an assassin, a man who kills other men. He does so unquestioningly, believing he's bringing about a new world where no one has to kill. He meets Tomoe, a woman who smells of plum blossoms. Scorned from the death of her fiance, she plots to kill Kenshin, assassinate the assassin until she falls in love with him, culminating in the most tragic of ends, but then how else does love complete itself in this sinful world?
The moments this OAV projects are majestic. A second don't go by without a transfixing detail gracing the screen. Kenshin's eyes lighting up by the fire at dinner, the comb moving through Tomoe's hair, water running down the stream, the blood from a kill splattering on an umbrella. Animation depends upon abstractions. To render something so real, so striking, so true in the fictional sense and to make it 'real' or at least as real as lines and colors arranged to trick your eye into seeing movement from static images, there is nothing else one can ask from an animated anything. Trust & Betrayal couldn't have been done in any other medium. It is right there, on the same pedestal as Chuck Jones' One Froggy Evening and Disney's Steamboat Willie. This is what animation is all about.
One of my friends called Trust & Betrayal the man's Titanic. To love and be loved by one's enemy, I don't know, as a Christian that's what I'm called to do, at least first one. It's easy to imagine the perfect woman or man, and the situation(s) where love could blossom. At a day job, on a cruise, during the fourth of July. To love that who hates you, who plots to kill you, who holds in her hand the knife where your fate hangs; that's a different story. Forgive me for writing this, ladies, but it's a man's story. God forgive me; I feel like a man, despite the cigar smoke and the bourbon. My foot tastes good. Really good.
(images found from Google image search, piece of fan art found at this site, but if you're the artist, please lemme know for proper credit where credit is due or removal if removal is due.)
|
