FunBlog

Steven den Beste and Ubu Roi have been conducting a spirited debate on their blogs about Shakugan no Shana. (Ubu’s posts are here and here; Steven doesn’t have permalinks for his posts but you can read his review here.)

To summarize and oversimplify: Steven was initially enthralled by the horror/adventure story, but was greatly annoyed by the inclusion of “high school angst.” Ubu agreed that “angst” is bad but argued that the adventure story is only background; the “real” story is about Shana’s character development and personal growth. (I agree with Ubu, but most people are going to watch it for the adventure story. The personal growth story takes extra effort to follow since Shana and several of the other key characters are not open about their feelings.)

But this got me interested in the whole question of “angst”. Practically everyone who writes about anime (or at least every male who writes about anime) agrees that this is a bad thing. But what is it exactly, and what is so bad about it?
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This is an earnest, heartfelt and well-intentioned movie, and I really wish that I liked it more than I do. It’s basically about some immigrants from India who name their son “Gogol” after the Russian writer, and when he grows up he isn’t happy about that.

More specifically, it’s about an upper-middle class couple from India who move to the United States, work hard and prosper. They send their children to elite universities. The children are a little bit rebellious, but not very. The children seem a bit shallow, but probably they will outgrow that. They all seem pretty well-adjusted. Sometimes they are unhappy but mostly they are happy. Nothing particularly unusual seems to happen to any of them.

This is all very admirable but it doesn’t make much of a movie. A movie needs to show us something dramatic, or something absurd or something exotic; something that we haven’t seen before. There are a few nice scenes set in India that give us a glimpse of the culture, but there isn’t very much of this. For the most part these people don’t seem very different from people whose ancestors have lived in America for a dozen generations. I suppose that might be an interesting insight in itself, but the filmmakers themselves don’t seem to be aware of it, and even if they were I’m not sure that it would be enough to sustain a two-hour movie.

There have been countless movies made about the American immigrant experience. Unfortunately almost all of them have been more interesting than this one.

Important consumer alert: If you want to buy a poodle, make sure that you aren’t actually getting a sheep with a funny haircut!

(If anyone has pictures of this, let me know.)

UPDATE: Snopes identifies this as an urban legend. Just one of those stories that is “too good to check.”

In 1970 Clifford Irving, a minor writer best known for a biography of a notorious art forger, approached McGraw-Hill with an astonishing proposal: he had made a deal with reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes to collaborate on Hughes’ autobiography. He produced handwritten letters from Hughes which experts declared to be genuine. Based on this evidence McGraw-Hill and Life Magazine came up with an unprecedented advance of $765,000.

It was actually one of the most audacious scams in history. Selling a fake autobiography of a living person required unbelievable chutzpah, but Irving and his researcher Richard Suskind believed that since Hughes never appeared in public he would not come out to deny it.

This movie provides an entertaining and semi-reliable depiction of the fraud.
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Once upon a time there was a poor college student, a decent young man, but awkward and unlucky. One evening a beautiful goddess appeared before him and offered to grant him a single wish. He could have anything he wished for, no matter how outrageous, but he must choose carefully because he would not be given a second chance.

Impulsively and incautiously, he wished that she would stay with him…
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A while ago I praised the quality of the subtitle translation on the Shakugan no Shana DVDs. Given that this seems to be a particularly difficult story to translate they seemed to be doing a pretty good job.

Unfortunately with the fourth DVD the translation seems to have taken a turn for the worse. And my main complaint isn’t even about the difficult poetic stuff; it’s something that should be really simple and straightforward: they’re spelling Wilhelmina’s name as “Wirhelmina”. I know that you could romanize the katakana that way, but why on Earth would you do that? Are the translators unfamiliar with European names? Are they relying on how Shana (Rie Kugimiya) pronounces it? (If so it’s a bad idea since we’ve already established that Shana speaks English with a heavy Japanese accent.)
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This movie managed to surprise me: it is the first computer-generated 3-D animation that I have seen in which at least some of the human characters did not seem either grotesque or scary.

This is no small matter. You have probably noticed that 3-D animation is the only kind that American movie studios are willing to produce these days. (Computers are cheaper than human artists, or something like that.) You may also have noticed that these films are almost always about animals, monsters, robots, cars, or anything but people.

There is a good reason for this: it is really hard to do acceptable human characters this way. Any competent cartoonist can draw a 2-dimensional human face and make it look appealing, even when including all sorts of distortions (e.g. enormous eyes and no nose at all). The human brain is just very forgiving is interpreting 2-D images of people. On the other hand with a 3-dimensional image of a face, any significant distortions will make it look ugly and disturbing. And if you try to make the computer generate and animate a realistic human image it will seem creepy, like a walking corpse.
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