Anaglyph’s Anime Appraisals

I should preface this post by noting that I’m by no means an expert on fiction in any medium; I’m not a professional writer; I don’t have a degree in literature or even media studies; I’m just someone who has read quite a lot over the years and watched a lot of tv shows and movies - ignorant in other words. Any observations made in this post may well have emerged from a certain rear orifice rather than having any basis in reality; they’re just the impressions of an uneducated bumpkin. Please feel free to correct any misapprehension.

Before I started watching anime I became interested in Japanese (and East Asian in general) horror films after watching Ringu late one night and being unsettled by a horror film for the first time in maybe twenty years. After collecting a few DVD’s it started to seem to me that there was frequently a distinct difference in the way the stories were told compared to their typical Western counterparts. And this impression has carried over into anime.

A nonlinear approach to plot seems to crop up often, reaching its apex in Takashi Miike’s mind-bending Audition; a film that utterly abandons all semblance of conventional linear narrative halfway through. While I’ve yet to see an anime that reaches quite such surreal hights, even a series as straightforward as Maria-sama ga Miteru starts with some flashbacks that are slightly confusing; at least for me it took a second viewing to fully grasp the sequence of events. Flashbacks are hardly a rare device in the West but they’re almost always employed in a way that leaves no room for misunderstanding.

Another thing that seems quite common is a dilution of the classic beginning, middle, and end structure. Series that completely switch their direction and tone halfway through seem not uncommon. One of the first series I watched seemed as if it was going to be light-hearted fun for its entire run but ended up crushing the cheerful optimistic heroine in degradation and defeat and finally left her dying as a pathetic broken wreck at the end. (That pissed me off incidentally.) While this sort of change of tone isn’t unseen in the West it’s rarely quite so sudden or unexpected. The transition is often virtually non-existent in the series where I’ve seen this happen and leaves a feeling of a beginning and end structure without much of a middle. It could be attributed to the way anime is produced, but it happens in several of the films I’ve watched as well.

In general Japanese fiction seems less concerned with expository detail and is content to leave things vague and get on with the story at hand. Ringu left much of the details of why things were happening as suggestions and impressions, and sick anime girls just have weak bodies instead of suffering from cancer or some other clearly defined disease. Characters frequently tail off halfway through a sentence and leave you wondering what, exactly, they were going to say. A series might be set in the Victorian era and make no attempt to justify the inclusion of high tech gadgetry. There seems to be less of a drive to advance from one plot point to another and more of a desire to linger on the importance of a scene or create an atmosphere. Perhaps it’s a more poetic approach.

In short, the sort of methods you see in arty films over here seem to be fairly mainstream in Japan. At least, that’s the impression I’ve received during my short and limited exposure to Japanese horror films and anime.

Then again, I could be talking out of my arse.

One final thing. In all my years of watching Western tv and movies I can’t recall ever hearing someone’s stomach rumble in hunger. It’s happened no doubt, but it must be a rare event indeed to have no memory of such an occurrence; and yet in a mere six months of watching anime there have been at least four times that I’ve seen this. I don’t know what it means, but it must be significant!