Rynling R&D

Hayao Miyazaki teaches Hideaki Anno how to say "Arigato"
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5wha4e

No comment, just: I love them both so much.

Blue Thermal (available to watch on YouTube here) is a lighthearted sports anime movie about a college aviation club. The protagonist, Tamaki, is a ditzy freshman who means well but lacks self-confidence. She’s scouted by the mature and handsome aviation club leader Kuramochi, who’s impressed by her preternatural skill at piloting a glider.

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In the end, Blue Thermal is a pleasant way to pass an hour and a half. Not much happens, but that’s okay. The animation is lovely, and not every story has to be exciting or profound.

Goodbye, Don Glees! (available on YouTube) is a 2022 big-budget anime movie directed by Atsuko Ishizuka, a female animator and storyboard artist who has worked with Madhouse for almost twenty years. The movie is supposed to be a bittersweet comedy about three high-school kids going on a short mountain adventure over summer break, but the tone is weird.

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I’m going to say that Goodbye, Don Glees! is a solid 5/10 movie. It’s not offensive, but it’s not particularly memorable. For me personally, I’d give it a pass in favor of The House of the Lost on the Cape (available on YouTube here), another anime movie with similar themes that came out at around the same time and is actually fun to watch.

I’ve been enjoying listening to the Dark Souls podcast (this one right here), as the two hosts share my taste in horror and humor. They’re also respectful of real-world differences both in terms of how they talk about stories and how they treat actual people, which I appreciate. Just because you make dick jokes doesn’t mean you have to be gross.

I find the banter between the hosts and their guests to be a lot of fun and super relaxing to listen to when I’m working in Photoshop, and I also like learning about the stories of Dark Souls and Elden Ring, both of which cater to my niche interests but are unfortunately too difficult for me to play. (I mean, I’m trying! I’m just very bad and very slow.)

Anyway, I skipped ahead in the podcast to listen to their episode about the manga Berserk (here), and one of the hosts said something interesting about horror and how it works.

( Content warning for discussion of Berserk, both spoilers and sexual violence.  )

The Real History of 'Perfect Blue' and 'Requiem for a Dream'
https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/the-real-history-of-perfect-blue?s=r

In the end, the real question we need to ask is much bigger than Aronofsky. It’s even bigger than Kon. The question is, “Is it right for Western directors to use anime as an idea factory, without paying its overworked creators a dime?”

Kon bled for his films. He storyboarded every moment in detail, obsessively, and still never saw success in his lifetime (he died in 2010, around a week before the premiere of Black Swan). It stung him to see his concepts treated as the rough drafts for other people’s films. He battled to create those concepts, until the end.

This is such a good essay, even if you haven't seen Requiem for a Dream (which I haven't) or Perfect Blue (which admittedly isn't for everyone). Honestly, this is a good essay even if you're not into anime. Sometimes an essay is so well-crafted and well-researched that it has value simply as an interesting piece of writing.

I do love Satoshi Kon though. God I love Satoshi Kon. It's wild to think that Tokyo Godfathers almost didn't get made.

I finished watching ODDTAXI last night. Because I'm not super into crime drama, it was never going to be one of those anime that fucking changed me holy fuck, but it's still a solid 9/10 show with interesting art and excellent writing and voice acting.

About halfway through, around Episode 7, you start to get a sense of why everyone looks like an animal. I don't want to spoil it, except to say that there are no actual elements of fantasy or science fiction. The twist is something that could only be done with animation, and it's brilliant.

I think the closest comparable show is probably the first season of Durarara, which also has an urban ensemble cast who all turn out to be connected at the end. In addition, both shows are oddly heartwarming despite being filled with child trafficking and murder.

All of the ODDTAXI characters appear as human during the final episode, and it's really cool. I think getting to see what nonhuman characters look like as human might be one of my favorite visual tropes. The story game Mutazione handles this in an interesting and memorable way too. If I had to be honest, I think this is one of the appeals of Ganon for me as well, that he's secretly human (and also attractive). Fingers crossed that Breath of the Wild 2 does as good of a job with its villain-monster's human form as a one-season anime about a middle-aged taxi driver.

Yumi is a 35-year-old housewife who decides to open a small bakery in Jiyugaoka, a suburb to the west of Tokyo. Her architect husband leaves his firm and starts working from home so that he can help take care of their ten-year-old son, Haruki.

Yumi’s cheerful and energetic best friend from high school, Chie, is an accounts manager for a restaurant supply company, where she is constantly harassed by gross older men. When Yumi goes to Chie to inquire about outfitting the bakery, she listens to Chie’s tales of woe and invites her to become her partner in the business.

Chie happily accepts the invitation, and she and Yumi open a bakery together. They decide to call their new business Pan no Kangei, which means something like “the warm sense of welcome you feel when a restaurant offers you freshly baked bread” but is officially translated as “Invitation of Bread.”

An upperclassman whom Yumi and Chie admired in high school, Sakamoto-san, works in the editorial department of a lifestyle magazine, and she visits the bakery to write an article. Sakamoto-san is beautiful and intelligent, but she is unhappy at her job because she feels as though the long hours she puts into writing for the magazine don’t leave her time for the creative work she always dreamed of doing. Yumi and Chie invite her to be the third partner in the business, so she leaves her corporate job and takes on the task of managing the bakery’s branding and social media accounts while working out her surprisingly violent frustrations on the bread dough every morning.

In every episode, Yumi and her friends try their hand at creating a new menu item, but they sometimes have trouble getting it right. They’re aided by a German sports reporter named Lars who lives in the neighborhood. While taking his Golden Retriever Lola out on walks, Lars visits the bakery and encourages the three women by telling them stories about the origins of various European pastries.

In the second half of the season, the bakery takes on a high school student named Momoka as a part-time worker. Momoka is the older sister of one of Hakuri’s friends, and she’s a video game otaku who has trouble talking with people. Yumi was also shy as a teenager, so she sympathizes. She invites Momoka to spend a few afternoons helping out at the bakery after school, and Momoka’s fantasies of heroes and monsters end up serving as the inspirations for several new confections.

Although the Pan no Kangei bakery gets off to a somewhat rocky start, by the end of the season it has become a neighborhood favorite, as well as a space for Yumi, Chie, and Sakamoto-san to reignite their high school friendship and rediscover the joy of the dreams they had when they were younger.

I have now watched Azumanga Daioh, Nichijo, Encouragement of Climb, and Yuru Camp with my husband. We've also watched a handful of anime movies like Whisper of the Heart, Ride Your Wave, and Weathering with You.

Being a straight adult man, my husband is the target demographic for these sorts of "cute girls doing cute things" slice-of-life anime, and he really enjoys what we've watched so far. He also seems to be a fan of the pastel moé art style.

So this morning he picked up my Blu-ray set of Madoka Magica, and he was like, "This one looks fun, do you want to watch it together?"

My husband is a fan of European football, and he spends a lot of time scrolling through football Twitter under a pseudonymous throwaway account. Most of the accounts he follows are British. He got annoyed with not being able to watch the region-locked videos people linked to, so a week or two ago he set up a VPN. (If you’re curious, he uses ExpressVPN, which is $8 a month and seems to be working nicely for him.) His computer now registers as being in the UK, and he employs this for the nefarious purpose of watching a few minutes of football videos a day and being amused by the British ads that Twitter shows him (mostly for snacks).

Even though he doesn’t use it much these days, my husband never stopped paying for his Netflix account, and it recently occurred to him that, with a UK address, he could watch British Netflix.

So the other day I was standing in the kitchen waiting for tea to brew, and my husband was sitting on the couch looking at Netflix UK. I asked him if he’s found anything to watch, and he started complaining that Netflix keeps trying to show him animated movies. He told me that they look Japanese.

I was like, “Okay, yes, go on.”

And he was like, “Have you ever heard of Studio Ghibli?”

I moved to a new apartment during the pandemic. Due to one thing and another (mainly the city of Philadelphia being hot garbage), I haven't been able to set up an internet connection. I have an unlimited data plan with my mobile network, so I use my phone as a hotspot, and it works fairly well. Unfortunately, the mobile network won't connect to my PlayStation 4, which means that I can't stream anything on my tv. I can use the HDMI cable for my drawing tablet to project my laptop onto the tv screen, but it's a hassle and doesn't look great to begin with.

This doesn't bother me, since I haven't been interested in movies or television recently, but it's been tough on my husband, who loves cooking shows and European football but hates watching things on a small screen. The obvious solution is to watch DVDs, but the only DVDs I own are anime. This is therefore what my husband has been watching for the past six months, and it shows. I wrote a short comic about this (here).

My husband was sad when we finished Azumanga Daioh, so we started watching Nichijou. He immediately got the opening song stuck in his head (to be fair, it's really catchy), and it blew his mind when I told him that the musician, Hyadain, uses voice modulation software to sing all the parts. My husband wanted to know if Hyadain has done anything else like this, so I told him about Super Mario Hyadain. If anything, this song is even catchier than the Nichijou OP, and I've caught my husband listening to it on his phone a few times.

So earlier today he said to me, "I never thought Bowser was in love with Peach, but I guess that makes sense. That's really sweet. Do you think anyone's ever written fanfiction about them?"