Quirky_analysis

Note: this is from a (longer) anime/game video review, look for links on my profile page.

Some were critical of Devil Kings due to the name changes, but it seems more deficient to have barely any narrative at all, just some one-liners that characters are programmed with, and despite being able to play everyone available in all the different domains, they barely make much difference in terms of changes to the script. This situation was improved somewhat in future games, but there is still a noticeable aspect of shallowness, and even when major characters go against each other, e.g. Ieyasu and Ishida, their programming only allows them a few novel lines, the rest being in common with the remaining characters.

Note: this is from a video review, look for links on my profile page.

TG aims to overwhelm with symbolic metaphors, complexly dense in so little time, it is akin to a puzzle that runs like clockwork. This very ending is a representation of how the mind can categorize, how one tatami mat goes into the next to form the shell of a larger structure, a macrocosm of the final story, each square correlated with the narrative of interconnected characters prior in time.

Even though they are relatively simple geometry it questions concepts; lyrically, why does it seem to reference the symbol of a (kami) god? Is it just internal monologue, done in a softer tone than the haste of its counterpart in the series? Note the inversion between the normal ending and the one at the opening of the last episode, from a multitude of colours to a solitary blue, reality ends up upside-down (just as Ozu switches roles at the end) and the potentialities of history are conjured up like the flourishing infinities that lay before empty time. Higuchi at one point urges seeking out a circle among all the angled shapes, but none is found until the episodic prophetic opportunity is taken. And so it becomes one.

A robot, symbolic not of heroism as in Masaaki's Ping Pong anime, but a shell that protects an introvert, that defends against the possibility of failure. The yellow carpet is present but so is the armour, the red sky indicative of an anguished subjectivity, but do automatons cry? Out of frustration time rewinds as the internal psyche of the protagonist clasps at a mental solution. At the beginning, tatami mats were the logical equivalent of disorderly rocks scattered among prehistoric imagination. How do societies evolve despite strife? Light contrasts darkness. How does a limited individual fit in?

Real objects and a shadowed environment, stand in for their drawn counterparts to possibly convey the physicality of sensation, as the representation of geometry's sharper shapes. A subjectively interminable number of days are intertwined with past exploratory fictions. Mundane universality. A farrago of hallucinatory experiences reveal to oneself... the ideal other, which is sunnily yellow and as chimerical as his own individual attempts at impression. Purple is a state in between.

Hanuki's pink may be her weird humour, his hypothetical allies relive illusory lives, green may represent youth just as Akashi is showered in the colour later on, but Higuchi is stereotypically wiser than that; fishing for words, randomly instinctive, calm as trees, his gut not withstanding.

Jougasaki, Masaki may be representative of the director of a similar name, in reality an overgrown Ozu, fanning strife if possible. And so they go. These relationships tumble and rumble, but what is a social construct? How does a self interact with the other? How can a distance be closed and can they hear each other?

What fortuity lay in cupboards? What a fluky ceiling. Metabolism, is it involved in rumination? An unveiling of a physical transformation, protein manifest, a palate of animated imagination. Hallowed ramen, feline oddities. A grey background.

Ozu, is he indeed a multicoloured disruptor of dichromatic tennis courts, a drunk (?), an astronomical film splicer, a verdant dyer of shirts, or a nebulous component of some surreptitious institution. Chronicler of society, fountainhead of pyrotechnics, the Grinch? Enabler of perversity, an overcoated yokai hybrid (perhaps like Inuyasha?) who merely kindles the fiery passions of dalliances (or not).

What is that which is forlorn? How could portals be pulverized? A flaxen contraption in a monochrome universe, this is an art of contrasts. An ashen, vacant firmament looms, but could Ozu be figurative of anthropoid romance? His phantasmic whistling may hint towards it, just doesn't help that it's with his friend's conjured up ideal.

Where could a yellow (same make as the phone?) airship take us, the completion of an 'ultimate' fantasy? The green valleys of some ritualistic gates reveal Ozu's quixotic tour de force. But what shade of colour do both result in? The airship emoji could certainly be useful. Who is this onion-shaped Ozu, and what have they done to his grin? Well, he could try serenading his own literary creation. But who are these foolhardy mercenaries who meddle in affairs of the heart? And so, as batteries always do, right at that exact moment.

Despair takes hold of the beard in this sphere of vacuity, but pasta it could relish along with quite an artistic alluvion, striding into a backwards movie, and finally the squid hybrid! Forty winks, of course, and a rave theoretically! An equine fictive binding, readying for a flick, and symbolic social engineering.

This and more he invoked from a hypothetical time loop. Could one truly have such infinite space (despite the holes)? But how could this shell devoid of colour be remedied, how could hue be interposed between the self and the exterior?

The canopy of an abode, moths someone fears, the hand flowed, nimble conceits, a spider's thread, material books' frontier, a Maromi symbol? A leafy, lush reality, this dreamy rhythm, the drawn and not so intermingling; a clear sight of what one forgot, an opportunity missed, carpe diem wrought, an airy figment, an alluring utopia.

Might this be that orb of chance, this omnipresent express out of solipsism? Might this trance have been but a prance through fecund flights of fancy? This carriage ever-heading, an existential swaying; this marriage of planes, an engine of Lepidoptera. And I am out.

TG excels not just at the little details, nor merely the amalgamation of reality and fantasy, not just with animation, but narratively too, that it is hard to fathom how both were created separately. How is it that mundane life, a monologue usually reserved for dreams, is given such a climactic adaptation? A breath of fresh air, a transition between realms, a kaleidoscopic vision. This series does so much in so few hours. It is a walking painting, an animated chameleon, it begs us to wonder at the spectacle, what could be if the arrow of time shifts, how does perception interact with the world? Is art ethereal? What cadence is surprise? Is language formless, and is life but a dream?

Note: this is from a video review, look for links on my profile page.

Haibane Renmei is an incomplete, limited world, and so are its characters. This is not due to any deficient omission, but merely symbolic of the outside world. Stairs can represent an elevation of a mental state, halos solely an indicator of a norm and disruption thereof. The darkness is a device used as a horror trope, but unlike most such media this series recounts an internal sort of dread, a psychological possibility, an unknown within the universe, an existential uncertainty that could plague the mind.

Light, the sole localized potency, easily extinguished like life, also has a limited cover. Wings are a vestige of an obscure past, like fragments from within a dream. Why must they only utilize forsaken objects? Is there a radiance that could overpower the innermost gloom? Could a door open the path out of a nightmare? What lay beyond a sleeping consciousness? What is art but interior warfare? How is a dream expressed through a scream? What is it that we forget, how do we reflect upon that midnight stream, why does reason retain it not?

This mechanical world also has an upside, though, one where light takes the role darkness had inside a room, one where space is boundless (except for abstract limits of such symbolic darkness), one which is a norm, despite the margins of possibility, but is communicating with crows a standard? Is flight liberating, what lay beyond? Does it shelter us from ourselves? What do social bonds imply in the grand scheme of things? Does this melody keep track of erstwhile seconds?

This story harbours darkness along with natural casualness, it glides to the future like time's inevitable arrow; how does life become one second and then the next? Could a fortress have a sunny disposition? Do we have any sway over the inexorable momentum? What psychological processes are rekindled while in a state of sleep?

Myths are symbolic of an abstract need, a usually cathartic release of fantasy, a hyperbolic bridge between subjective understanding and the possible. In this series they may remain ununderstandable, but that is not the narrative's purpose, despite that it is too a testing ground of what may be likely and not so. How personal is an archetype, or could it merely be the result of an illusion? What makes an object representative of a series of inter-linked connections? Could anime, from Latin for 'soul', have the ultimate potential for such figurative art? Wings may be seen as explicitly religious, but here specifically they are but vestigial props, something that works only in the imagination as in the 'day of flight'. How different are conventional humans from the haibane? Why do they seem to pity them through charity? Perhaps because they are neither 'superior' beings, nor part of the majority within the town. How does, though, anyone come into existence? A plant that forms a cocoon is this story's premise, but how did they figure out any optimal methods before they had their traditions? A cycle of mythologized lives take this form, but most of the abstract notions, like 'coming to life' apply generally. The universe itself tumbled out of chaos, and seems destined to fizzle out in a similar manner. So, why does the mind attempt to confer symbols to randomness?

Why does, rain for example, seem to indicate a negative atmosphere? When does a melancholic green turn into a demonic frolic? Is the world naturally dark, with the sun so easily blocked? What really separates life from death? How is a psyche able to handle a sudden halt in the subjective narrative? Are catecholamines involved? The anime's narrative could be regarded as specific to it, but it could also be abstracted to a sort of archetype. There are many unexplained things, like what is beyond the village, but the characters do not mostly attempt to tackle such issues unless in a desperate situation, kind of like how most of life operates, with potential, far-away problems given less priority than immediate ones. But what nestles in the darkness of one's mind? Is everyone truly an individual, and is the alternative a sociological illusion?

This story, ultimately, is a mostly quiet attempt at emulating the essence of what existence could be about underneath. It is an alley that nature takes to form, coincidentally, a path sustaining that which is random, yet constitutes a thread illuminating everlasting, omnipresent darkness. It is about that case in a million that, while infinitesimal, is still imaginatively logical. It is a question, not an answer; realistic, but immersed in fantasy. It is about the cycle of life and death, and a combination too. It projects fleeting feelings onto a purported, snowy reality, creates storms of electrical sight, paints a landscape, and sends them away with a thought.