film and animation – Everything is Oll Korrect!

The Road Home

Posted on 6 October 2021 by Richard Carroll

Shortly after I began studying Chinese, I thought it would be interesting to check out some Chinese films. I can’t really understand spoken Chinese well yet, so admittedly, any movie would be more for entertainment and a touch of cultural immersion more than a language learning tool. Nonetheless, I decided to give The Road Home a shot recently since it’s well-reviewed and looked like a film my wife might also enjoy, which is rather rare with movies I like.

The Road Home was directed by Zhang Yimou and released in China in 1999. The movie is a bit unusual in that there are essentially two narratives, one told within a framing device that opens and closes the film, the other within the central portion. I’ll be a bit free with spoilers here, because the movie’s strength is its aesthetic and themes, not the plot. At the start we meet our narrator, Luo Yusheng, who is returning from a big city to his home village upon the news of his father’s death. His father, Luo Changyu, had been the village schoolteacher for forty years and died during a snowstorm while out seeking funds to rebuild the school building. When he arrives, his uncle and the village mayor inform him that they would like to hire a car to bring his father’s body back for burial, but his mother, Zhao Di, wants his body carried back in a ceremony that hadn’t been performed since the Cultural Revolution a good twenty years before at that point. Unfortunately, though they wanted to honour Di’s wishes, they lacked the manpower to carry this out since all the young men had, like Yusheng, left for the cities over the years, so they hoped to find a compromise.

Now, this framing device is filmed in black-and-white, but here it changes to colour as Yusheng narrates the story of how his parents met and married in 1958. This part of the film is visually beautiful, but the plot here is relatively simple. Di and Changyu were eighteen and twenty years old when he came to the village to teach. Di fell in love at first sight, tries to catch his attention and succeeds after a couple attempts, and her feelings are quickly reciprocated. However, he is called away due to a political investigation; he is able to sneak back briefly, but ultimately returns after a couple years.…

That Other Return of the King Movie

Posted on 8 June 2020 by Richard Carroll

We’ve talked about Rankin and Bass’s version of The Hobbit, and you can’t talk about The Hobbit without also talking about The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, I know, it’s been three years since that earlier post, but I don’t like to be rushed. So, today we’re going to talk about about Rankin/Bass’s follow-up, The Return of the King.

“Now hold on,” you may be thinking. “That’s the third Lord of the Rings volume. What happened to The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers?” Well, I assume there were some rights issues involved, or perhaps they just didn’t want to retread the ground already covered by Ralph Bakshi’s unfortunate foray into Middle Earth, which was an animated and rotoscoped adaptation of Fellowship and about half of Two Towers and which had come out just two years earlier. To give you the timeline, R/B’s Hobbit was 1977, Bakshi’s LotR was 1978, and R/B’s LotR was 1980. I won’t go in to why things worked out that way; I don’t know and ultimately what matters is the film as we have it.

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Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals

Posted on 18 December 201819 December 2018 by Richard Carroll

Over the past year, I’ve read through a lot of academic analyses of anime and anime fandom, some on my own out of curiosity and others for academic purposes (yes, really). The overall state of academia in the anime studies field is pretty similar to what you’d find elsewhere, that is, abysmal and embarrassing. I’d say that Bl. John Henry Newman wouldn’t be impressed, but then, neither would anyone who isn’t fully embedded in the university system. Most readers probably don’t need a lot of examples, but I’ll provide a couple selections anyway just because they’re so bad they’re actually pretty funny. This is from Steven Brown, in Tokyo Cyberpunk, discussing Ghost in the Shell.

One might wonder whether such transnational hybridity and geographic indeterminacy reinforces rather than resists the dreams of the techno-orientalists by offering an illusion of Asia or Japan, such as is critiqued by Ueno Toshiya in his influential essay “Japanimation and Techno-Orientalism.” According to Ueno, Japanese animation functions “as a cultural and ideological apparatus to cover and disavow the reality of global capitalism,” which he sees as inextricably linked to the exploitation of labor forces in Asia in a post-Fordist economy. In response, [GITS director] Oshii has suggested that he is not interested in representing real nations such as Japan so much as he is in exploring the liminality of borderlines.

Here’s Samantha Close, from an article called “Fannish Masculinities in Transition in Anime Music Video Fandom.”

Politically engaged scholarship often interrogates the experiences of groups without privilege. But in order for social change to happen, privileged identities must also be reworked. An analysis of anime fandom in the early 2000s shows that fan works, such as fan video and cosplay performances, concretize masculinities that are both transgressive and desperately seeking normative confirmation. By means of queer and masculinity theory, I argue that fandom is a uniquely generative space for reworking masculinity. This will only remain true, however, if it can hold onto its subversive practices in a time of increasing mainstream attention.

Fortunately, the field isn’t a total loss. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams, edited by Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, isn’t bad. It’s a collection of essays by various authors and so the quality certainly varies from one piece to the next, but some of the entries are legitimately interesting, about anime but also Japanese science fiction generally since the book also includes SF works in film and literature. If you have any interest in Japanese SF, I can give it a genuine recommendation, especially if you can get it used or at a library. The Anime Machine, by Thomas Lamarre, also has some good material for those interested in animation as animation, and Anime: A History, by Jonathan Clements, is often recommended and looks promising, though I haven’t had a chance to read it myself.

Another legitimately good book, and the one I want to focus on today, is Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, by Azuma Hiroki, originally published in 2001 and translated for the English edition in 2009.…

The Wicker Man

Posted on 31 October 201831 October 2018 by Richard Carroll

It’s Halloween night (well, in my time zone, which is the only one that matters anyway), and when I think of Halloween, I think of Christopher Lee. I imagine that most readers will be aware that he made his name at Hammer Studios, starring in films like their Dracula series or Rasputin: The Mad Monk, and though I certainly think he was great as both Rasputin and the second-most famous Dracula (following, of course, Bela Lugosi), the film that comes to my mind first is also the one that he considered to be best he’d ever been in, The Wicker Man.

Now, The Wicker Man appears, in my observation, to be fairly well-known among horror fans, but is semi-obscure to wider audiences and what name recognition it does have comes partly from the botched remake. With that in mind, I’ll begin by offering a few observations on the film as a whole with minimal spoilers, then move into more specific remarks. I’m doing that because this is a movie where it is best to go in without knowing the ending, which has two aspects. One is the resolution to the fate of the missing girl the protagonist is searching for, and the other is the very end. Even if you already know one, I’d recommend watching the film anyway without spoiling the other.

So, the premise of this film is a classic mystery setup. Scottish Police Sergeant Neil Howie (played by Edward Woodward) has received a message from the isolated island of Summerisle, stating that a girl by the name of Rowan Morrison has been missing for several months. When he arrives and begins asking the locals about the situation, he quickly finds two things. One is that, though everyone he speaks to claims not to know her, it’s soon apparent that the locals and Lord Summerisle (played by Lee), leader of the island, know more than they’re letting on. Though The Wicker Man is typically classified as a horror movie, most of it is more like a mystery or detective story; the horror elements, for the most part, are only clear in the last 1/4 or so.

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