I am thankful for anime, part 2!
Aha, let's see if I can do a few more of these.
This is a continuation of my "Top 10 Anime Episodes of All Time," the first post of which can be found here
6. Ghost in the Shell, Standalone Complex, episode 25, Smoke of Gunpowder, Hail of Bullets
As one of the more prominent and iconic franchises to come out of Japan, I'm not sure that this series needs a lot of introduction. Based on manga by Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell (hereafter GitS) has seen many different iterations, including at least two movies, two animated series, an OVA/movie hybrid, and untold amounts of merchandising tie-ins. The core of the series is Motoko Kusanagi, a human cyborg who works in Section 9, an elite paramilitary arm of Japan's version of homeland security forces, living in a future cyberpunk world where technology has come to muddy the definition of humanity.
The first movie, as well as the original manga series, tell the central story of Motoko's life, where as a key operative at Section 9 she encounters a net-based AI, with whom she ultimately merges. GitS: Standalone Complex is a series set during her time with Section 9 well before those key events occur, and as the series title suggests, contains many stand alone episodes which tell what amount to an exciting one-shot cyber detective stories. But there is actually an underlying plot arc to this series that involves a mysterious cyberterrorist known as "The Laughing Man," and the true meaning of "Standalone Complex" becomes clear through this overarching plot; that stand alone individuals in society, acting independantly and according to their own free will, without any level of coordination, can create a singular event that is much bigger than any of them, and which hints at a kind of collective will that has a kind of pre-consciousness, a sort of biological artifical intelligence that is created through the technological interconnections we have created between ourselves and society. It's a fairly complicated and sophisticated idea, and I'm not sure I do it justice in my description here. But this is the backdrop against which the episode I reference has been set.
By the time this episode has occured, Section 9 has already solved the case of "The Laughing Man." However, for political reasons it is determined to hold of revealing this information to the public, and for even more political reasons, the very existance of Section 9 has become a liability for the government, and it has been decided to jetison the entire divison. The head of Section 9, agrees to this, but with extreme reluctance, and soon afterwards all of the members of Section 9 are targeted for capture and possible elimination by the actual military. In the final episode of the series, this "elimination" order is revealed to be a ruse, but first time through the series, this fact has not been made clear.
As you can see, there is an intricate plot leading up to this episode, and the events of this episode occur in this context. We follow several of the characters, but particularly Batou (a cyborg who works in Section 9 and who has an unspoken but very deep love for Motoko), as they attempt to evade the military. One by one, they are captured, and several are seemingly destroyed. Batou had been ordered by Motoko to stay alive, and to lay low, after the official disbanding of Section 9. He noticed that she did not have her gold wristwatch with her, which she said was at a safehouse. This concerned him, because that watch represented her extermal memory device, a way to assure herself that she was still herself, even as her brain was switched from body to body. So he decides on his own to go to her safehouse and retrieve it, thus recklessly going into a place clearly monitored by the military who were trying to capture him.
Throughout the series, we have seen the relationship Batou himself has made with the Tachikomas, aka Think Tanks, AI-enhanced military equipment which had been designed to be used as field aids, for transportation and as armament/weaponry, but also as tactical aides with the ability to act independantly and with some level of intelligence as supportive troops. Earlier in the series, they had all been sent back to the lab, because they had been found to have achieved a level of awareness dangerous in a military weapon. In this episode we find out that a few of them were still in existance, having been disarmed and assigned to civilian roles as higly advanced robotic helpers in service positions. The remaining Think Tanks discover through the media that Section 9 is disbanded, and decide according to their own will to go find Batou and support him.
The theme of this episode is, quite simply, devotion. Both Batou's devotion to Motoko, and the Think Tanks' devotion to him. The action scenes as he evades capture at Motoko's safehouse are breathtaking, but no more so than his resolve to go there in the first place. And then.. and then... just when it looks like he is about to be killed, the Think Tanks show up and battle the military mecha. They provide temporary aid, but it soon becomes clear that they are completely outmatched. In a scene of intense action and almost transcendental emotion, the Think Tanks decide to sacrifice themselves in order the save Batou, and in that very same moment come to understand the concept of death, and thus gain what truly appears to be awareness... right before they die.
In the series that follows this one, we get a similar scene of Think Tank sacrifice, but that one seemed cheap and obvious, played for emotional effect. Here there is no such feeling; instead, this is simply raw storytelling, pure and honest and unffected.
In the face of that, it almost seems incidental to talk of Batou's brief reunion with Motoko, the moment they have at her last safe house as he protect her from the searchlight of a passing police helicopter, the way he calls out to her as she is shot by a sniper the next day. But each of these moments is delicately rendered, the emotion clean and strong, and even now that I know the secret of what happens at the end, I still find this episode beyond beautiful.
5. Digimon 02, episode 8, Ken's Secret
Notorious. Absolutely notorious, for anyone who ever was a Kensuke shipper. For almost anyone else, this might not be anything more than a fairly amusing and utterly trivial example of halfway decent children's programming.
But for those who know, who really know: it was magic.
I've not only been an anime fan for a long time, I have also had a long and storied history of being a serial "shipper," having fictional characters in various TV shows, books, movies, etc that I developed a very real fondness for. Love for a character is weird: it feels weird, and especially in the pre-internet days, it felt completely freakish to have any kind of emotional feelings for characters... for words on the page, for drawings. For ideas. But people have been punch drunk on ideas for centuries: look at Thomas Jefferson and his love affair with Liberty, for instance. And characters are not really "just ideas": they are designed to create the idea of real life, to exist in the mind with the kind of emotional resonance that a real person might have, and it is the degree to which they succeed or fail that determines how true to life they really are.
And, honestly? Having had my share of love affairs with real flesh and blood people, there really is no comparison. Fictional loves are "pet loves;" in some ways they are easier to enjoy because they can be as perfect as we want them to be, and like our pets, it's pretty much impossible for them to treat us poorly. It's just so different; real human lovers are LOVERS, in every sense of the term. But fandom loves are daydreams, gorgeous stories that add a golden glow to life without taking away the need to go out and actually live it.
But before Digimon kind of fell into my life (pretty much by accident), I had no idea. I had my lifelong love of Starscream, but he was like an insane pal that I enjoyed but didn't want to get too close to, and I spent most of my time fantasizing about ways to make him well. Ken... well, Ken was different. He was also satisfyingly insane, but despite the fact that he was as psychotic as they come, he was also brittle and isolated and resentful and smug. He was, in a word, real.
The premise of the Digimon series is that there is another world connected to our own, which has been created by our technologies, called the Digital World. It is inhabited by digital monsters which are born out of our collective mythologies and folk tales, and these guys can bond with human partners (aka the Chosen Children) and feel off a pure ganbaru overload in order to fight off evil forces that want to destabilize the digital world. And trust me, this is the GENEROUS explanation, giving you my grown-up interpretation of very simple concepts that are at best half-explained throughout the course of the series.
Digimon 02 is, obviously enough, the second series. It starts with the next generation of Chosen Children (wretchedly, in the American dub called Digidestined), and they are all called to fight a new evil, a boy styling himself the "emperor" of the Digital World, ruling over it like a cruel Roman dictator and enslaving the inhabitants. We know from almost the start that this Digimon Emperor... the "Digimon Kaizer"... is Ken Ichijouji, a talented young genius of Japan, a boy who is absurdly talented in schoolwork and even more absurdly talented in sports.
Dreamy.
However, the other Chosen Children do NOT know, at least not going into this episode. Daisuke, the leader of the current group, dutifully hates the Kaizer, but he has a kind of boy crush on Ken Ichijouji, who is one of his soccer idols, and the episode starts with him pretty much swooning over his upcoming match with the team from Ken's school. Seeing the irony, it is so delicious. Daisuke has never met Ken in real life, but Ken has that mysterious fame that young prodigies are often depicted as having in certain kinds of anime series. This is not just a local fame, but apparently a media fame that extends across all of Japan, and only the absolute freakishness of Japanese culture suffices to explain.
At the soccer game, at first it looks like Ken is not going to show, and Daisuke is absolutely crushed. But he carries his team in the first half to a 1-0 lead against Ken's team (Ken in absentita): considering that Daisuke goes to a no-name local school whereas Ken goes to a prestigous apparently world-renouned private school, this is a huge accomplishment. At the half, Ken shows up, and Daisuke LIGHTS UP WITH JOY to see his idol/rival. Ken, of course, knows exactly who Daisuke is (OMG MY DEMON RIVAL!!!!) and hones in on Daisuke with scary intensity, telescoping his vision to get an AMAZING IMPOSSIBLE CLOSE UP of Daisuke's smiling face. Grr!
Ken, predictably, dominates this half, scoring goal after goal with an almost insulting amount of ease, ruling his team like a mini dictator (hint, anyone?). Giving it up for lost, at the very end Daisuke makes a desperate save and blocks Ken's last shot, tripping Ken up in the process. This surprises Ken, because that move "never fails." After the game, Daisuke floats over to Ken, and at first Ken is suspicious, but Daisuke basically falls all over himself complementing Ken, and Ken relaxes and even deigns to shake Daisuke's hand.
Ken's exact words (from the dub), preserved for their beauty: "Well, farewell for now, my worthy adversary. Until we meet again, in battle."
The next day, The Chosen Children meet in the Digital World in an area that is under the Kaizer's control, with intent to remove the local control tower that gives him power to enslave the Digimon in that area. The Kaizer somehow captures everyone but Daisuke in a trap, and Daisuke runs around like a fool until he finds the Kaizer. Ken, as the Kaizer, taunts him, forcing him to get on his knees and beg for the life of his friends (!!), and then finally producing all of the other Chosen Children as captives hanging from ropes nearby. Ken tells Daisuke that he must chose one of this friends to save; the rest will be eaten by a Dragon type Digimon. This, of course, is beyond outrageous, and of course Daisuke cannot choose.
Anyway, a Whole Lot of Stuff happens, and Daisuke tackles the Kaizer and pushes him down a cliff, which they slide down together while still fighting. Ken starts running off at the mouth ("I see I've neglected to factor in that you're one of those all or nothing types. I can’t believe the same person made me look like a fool twice!"), and then Daisuke notices a cut on the Kaizer's leg, at the exact same spot where Ken had received the cut from him during the soccer game the previous day, and Daisuke is crushed... CRUSHED... I mean, you have never seen anyone so crushed, crushed... to discover that his beloved idol and his hated adversary are ONE AND THE SAME. Ken, laughing like a crazy loon, escapes on an Airdramon.
Er, how can you not love all that? Seriously?
I have to say, even though I fell for Ken at first, the real alchemy was in the fact that it wasn't just him alone that held my attention. It was also Daisuke, who I came to appreciate slowly over time (eventually he might have even become my favourite, but I refuse to definitively say). But also, it wasn't just Daisuke. It was the dynamic between them, which was started so simply in this episode, and which developed as the series progressed into a beautiful emotional codependancy between two misfit psychological freaks of nature. Daisuke and Ken together were healthy; apart, basketcases of the highest water. They were soulmates and their hearts beat as one. But best of all, despite all this wackiness, despite how over-the-top and even WRONG it was, this was actually a profoundly beautiful emotional relationship that transcended the show. Digimon 02 itself was a harmlessly fun diversion, but this particular pairing (and other pairings that came out of it, to be sure) was something strikingly real. With depth.
Digimon 02 is preposterous. It also remains the best, most favourite fandom experience I've ever had.
This is a continuation of my "Top 10 Anime Episodes of All Time," the first post of which can be found here
6. Ghost in the Shell, Standalone Complex, episode 25, Smoke of Gunpowder, Hail of Bullets
As one of the more prominent and iconic franchises to come out of Japan, I'm not sure that this series needs a lot of introduction. Based on manga by Masamune Shirow, Ghost in the Shell (hereafter GitS) has seen many different iterations, including at least two movies, two animated series, an OVA/movie hybrid, and untold amounts of merchandising tie-ins. The core of the series is Motoko Kusanagi, a human cyborg who works in Section 9, an elite paramilitary arm of Japan's version of homeland security forces, living in a future cyberpunk world where technology has come to muddy the definition of humanity.
The first movie, as well as the original manga series, tell the central story of Motoko's life, where as a key operative at Section 9 she encounters a net-based AI, with whom she ultimately merges. GitS: Standalone Complex is a series set during her time with Section 9 well before those key events occur, and as the series title suggests, contains many stand alone episodes which tell what amount to an exciting one-shot cyber detective stories. But there is actually an underlying plot arc to this series that involves a mysterious cyberterrorist known as "The Laughing Man," and the true meaning of "Standalone Complex" becomes clear through this overarching plot; that stand alone individuals in society, acting independantly and according to their own free will, without any level of coordination, can create a singular event that is much bigger than any of them, and which hints at a kind of collective will that has a kind of pre-consciousness, a sort of biological artifical intelligence that is created through the technological interconnections we have created between ourselves and society. It's a fairly complicated and sophisticated idea, and I'm not sure I do it justice in my description here. But this is the backdrop against which the episode I reference has been set.
By the time this episode has occured, Section 9 has already solved the case of "The Laughing Man." However, for political reasons it is determined to hold of revealing this information to the public, and for even more political reasons, the very existance of Section 9 has become a liability for the government, and it has been decided to jetison the entire divison. The head of Section 9, agrees to this, but with extreme reluctance, and soon afterwards all of the members of Section 9 are targeted for capture and possible elimination by the actual military. In the final episode of the series, this "elimination" order is revealed to be a ruse, but first time through the series, this fact has not been made clear.
As you can see, there is an intricate plot leading up to this episode, and the events of this episode occur in this context. We follow several of the characters, but particularly Batou (a cyborg who works in Section 9 and who has an unspoken but very deep love for Motoko), as they attempt to evade the military. One by one, they are captured, and several are seemingly destroyed. Batou had been ordered by Motoko to stay alive, and to lay low, after the official disbanding of Section 9. He noticed that she did not have her gold wristwatch with her, which she said was at a safehouse. This concerned him, because that watch represented her extermal memory device, a way to assure herself that she was still herself, even as her brain was switched from body to body. So he decides on his own to go to her safehouse and retrieve it, thus recklessly going into a place clearly monitored by the military who were trying to capture him.
Throughout the series, we have seen the relationship Batou himself has made with the Tachikomas, aka Think Tanks, AI-enhanced military equipment which had been designed to be used as field aids, for transportation and as armament/weaponry, but also as tactical aides with the ability to act independantly and with some level of intelligence as supportive troops. Earlier in the series, they had all been sent back to the lab, because they had been found to have achieved a level of awareness dangerous in a military weapon. In this episode we find out that a few of them were still in existance, having been disarmed and assigned to civilian roles as higly advanced robotic helpers in service positions. The remaining Think Tanks discover through the media that Section 9 is disbanded, and decide according to their own will to go find Batou and support him.
The theme of this episode is, quite simply, devotion. Both Batou's devotion to Motoko, and the Think Tanks' devotion to him. The action scenes as he evades capture at Motoko's safehouse are breathtaking, but no more so than his resolve to go there in the first place. And then.. and then... just when it looks like he is about to be killed, the Think Tanks show up and battle the military mecha. They provide temporary aid, but it soon becomes clear that they are completely outmatched. In a scene of intense action and almost transcendental emotion, the Think Tanks decide to sacrifice themselves in order the save Batou, and in that very same moment come to understand the concept of death, and thus gain what truly appears to be awareness... right before they die.
In the series that follows this one, we get a similar scene of Think Tank sacrifice, but that one seemed cheap and obvious, played for emotional effect. Here there is no such feeling; instead, this is simply raw storytelling, pure and honest and unffected.
In the face of that, it almost seems incidental to talk of Batou's brief reunion with Motoko, the moment they have at her last safe house as he protect her from the searchlight of a passing police helicopter, the way he calls out to her as she is shot by a sniper the next day. But each of these moments is delicately rendered, the emotion clean and strong, and even now that I know the secret of what happens at the end, I still find this episode beyond beautiful.
5. Digimon 02, episode 8, Ken's Secret
Notorious. Absolutely notorious, for anyone who ever was a Kensuke shipper. For almost anyone else, this might not be anything more than a fairly amusing and utterly trivial example of halfway decent children's programming.
But for those who know, who really know: it was magic.
I've not only been an anime fan for a long time, I have also had a long and storied history of being a serial "shipper," having fictional characters in various TV shows, books, movies, etc that I developed a very real fondness for. Love for a character is weird: it feels weird, and especially in the pre-internet days, it felt completely freakish to have any kind of emotional feelings for characters... for words on the page, for drawings. For ideas. But people have been punch drunk on ideas for centuries: look at Thomas Jefferson and his love affair with Liberty, for instance. And characters are not really "just ideas": they are designed to create the idea of real life, to exist in the mind with the kind of emotional resonance that a real person might have, and it is the degree to which they succeed or fail that determines how true to life they really are.
And, honestly? Having had my share of love affairs with real flesh and blood people, there really is no comparison. Fictional loves are "pet loves;" in some ways they are easier to enjoy because they can be as perfect as we want them to be, and like our pets, it's pretty much impossible for them to treat us poorly. It's just so different; real human lovers are LOVERS, in every sense of the term. But fandom loves are daydreams, gorgeous stories that add a golden glow to life without taking away the need to go out and actually live it.
But before Digimon kind of fell into my life (pretty much by accident), I had no idea. I had my lifelong love of Starscream, but he was like an insane pal that I enjoyed but didn't want to get too close to, and I spent most of my time fantasizing about ways to make him well. Ken... well, Ken was different. He was also satisfyingly insane, but despite the fact that he was as psychotic as they come, he was also brittle and isolated and resentful and smug. He was, in a word, real.
The premise of the Digimon series is that there is another world connected to our own, which has been created by our technologies, called the Digital World. It is inhabited by digital monsters which are born out of our collective mythologies and folk tales, and these guys can bond with human partners (aka the Chosen Children) and feel off a pure ganbaru overload in order to fight off evil forces that want to destabilize the digital world. And trust me, this is the GENEROUS explanation, giving you my grown-up interpretation of very simple concepts that are at best half-explained throughout the course of the series.
Digimon 02 is, obviously enough, the second series. It starts with the next generation of Chosen Children (wretchedly, in the American dub called Digidestined), and they are all called to fight a new evil, a boy styling himself the "emperor" of the Digital World, ruling over it like a cruel Roman dictator and enslaving the inhabitants. We know from almost the start that this Digimon Emperor... the "Digimon Kaizer"... is Ken Ichijouji, a talented young genius of Japan, a boy who is absurdly talented in schoolwork and even more absurdly talented in sports.
Dreamy.
However, the other Chosen Children do NOT know, at least not going into this episode. Daisuke, the leader of the current group, dutifully hates the Kaizer, but he has a kind of boy crush on Ken Ichijouji, who is one of his soccer idols, and the episode starts with him pretty much swooning over his upcoming match with the team from Ken's school. Seeing the irony, it is so delicious. Daisuke has never met Ken in real life, but Ken has that mysterious fame that young prodigies are often depicted as having in certain kinds of anime series. This is not just a local fame, but apparently a media fame that extends across all of Japan, and only the absolute freakishness of Japanese culture suffices to explain.
At the soccer game, at first it looks like Ken is not going to show, and Daisuke is absolutely crushed. But he carries his team in the first half to a 1-0 lead against Ken's team (Ken in absentita): considering that Daisuke goes to a no-name local school whereas Ken goes to a prestigous apparently world-renouned private school, this is a huge accomplishment. At the half, Ken shows up, and Daisuke LIGHTS UP WITH JOY to see his idol/rival. Ken, of course, knows exactly who Daisuke is (OMG MY DEMON RIVAL!!!!) and hones in on Daisuke with scary intensity, telescoping his vision to get an AMAZING IMPOSSIBLE CLOSE UP of Daisuke's smiling face. Grr!
Ken, predictably, dominates this half, scoring goal after goal with an almost insulting amount of ease, ruling his team like a mini dictator (hint, anyone?). Giving it up for lost, at the very end Daisuke makes a desperate save and blocks Ken's last shot, tripping Ken up in the process. This surprises Ken, because that move "never fails." After the game, Daisuke floats over to Ken, and at first Ken is suspicious, but Daisuke basically falls all over himself complementing Ken, and Ken relaxes and even deigns to shake Daisuke's hand.
Ken's exact words (from the dub), preserved for their beauty: "Well, farewell for now, my worthy adversary. Until we meet again, in battle."
The next day, The Chosen Children meet in the Digital World in an area that is under the Kaizer's control, with intent to remove the local control tower that gives him power to enslave the Digimon in that area. The Kaizer somehow captures everyone but Daisuke in a trap, and Daisuke runs around like a fool until he finds the Kaizer. Ken, as the Kaizer, taunts him, forcing him to get on his knees and beg for the life of his friends (!!), and then finally producing all of the other Chosen Children as captives hanging from ropes nearby. Ken tells Daisuke that he must chose one of this friends to save; the rest will be eaten by a Dragon type Digimon. This, of course, is beyond outrageous, and of course Daisuke cannot choose.
Anyway, a Whole Lot of Stuff happens, and Daisuke tackles the Kaizer and pushes him down a cliff, which they slide down together while still fighting. Ken starts running off at the mouth ("I see I've neglected to factor in that you're one of those all or nothing types. I can’t believe the same person made me look like a fool twice!"), and then Daisuke notices a cut on the Kaizer's leg, at the exact same spot where Ken had received the cut from him during the soccer game the previous day, and Daisuke is crushed... CRUSHED... I mean, you have never seen anyone so crushed, crushed... to discover that his beloved idol and his hated adversary are ONE AND THE SAME. Ken, laughing like a crazy loon, escapes on an Airdramon.
Er, how can you not love all that? Seriously?
I have to say, even though I fell for Ken at first, the real alchemy was in the fact that it wasn't just him alone that held my attention. It was also Daisuke, who I came to appreciate slowly over time (eventually he might have even become my favourite, but I refuse to definitively say). But also, it wasn't just Daisuke. It was the dynamic between them, which was started so simply in this episode, and which developed as the series progressed into a beautiful emotional codependancy between two misfit psychological freaks of nature. Daisuke and Ken together were healthy; apart, basketcases of the highest water. They were soulmates and their hearts beat as one. But best of all, despite all this wackiness, despite how over-the-top and even WRONG it was, this was actually a profoundly beautiful emotional relationship that transcended the show. Digimon 02 itself was a harmlessly fun diversion, but this particular pairing (and other pairings that came out of it, to be sure) was something strikingly real. With depth.
Digimon 02 is preposterous. It also remains the best, most favourite fandom experience I've ever had.