One of the nice things about cinema and television, as media, is that they can transport the viewer to an imagined world with greater precision than a novel or radio drama. This isn’t to say that books do a bad job at it, and, in fact, I find that a well-written story will often immerse me in the world of the tale far better than if there were visuals. However, because television and film are audiovisual media—rather than “videolinguistic,” to create a word—they can effectively create a world that all viewers will at least perceive as the same, if not necessarily interpret similarly.

And honestly, this is one of the reasons I like that we’re seeing so many cinematic and television adaptations of famous novels. It’s nice to see an old work return to popularity among the I-don’t-want-to-read-it generation, and plenty interesting to actually see how other people interpreted the same stories. Yet it is the act of cementing these stories—forcing them into a single, uniform scheme of the senses—that makes them accessible to our oh-so-lazy lives.

Continue reading “Villian’s Exposition: Faulkner in Anime?”

Does anybody still remember the huge environmentalist craze of the late ’80s and early ’90s? The 50 Simple Things books? Captain Planet? Ahh, those were the days, weren’t they, when all we needed to do to make the world a better place was to use canvas bags at the supermarket, cut the plastic rings from our 6-packs and sort your recycling properly.

Now, of course, there are such matters as more fuel-efficient cars, realistic solar power plans and all sorts of other issues designed to combat climate change on a grand scale. Continue reading “Villian’s Exposition: Blue Seed and Arjuna”

Ahh, the space opera: an epic tale of conflict and human emotions told in the timeless backdrop of the space between the stars; the modern-day successor to the classical romances of the middle ages, featuring such names as King Arthur and Sir Lancelot.

Although the quintessential space opera, Star Wars, is American, it is a genre that works especially well when animated, and as such it is a common setting for anime. While there are many that stand out, for the purposes of brevity – and to better adhere to the material I’ve already bothered preparing for this article – I’ve decided to focus your attention on two this month: Space Battleship Yamato and Martian Successor Nadesico. Continue reading “Villian’s Exposition: Yamato and Nadesico”