It's past time I did a round-up of the TV shows I've been watching. I've been meaning to do one for weeks but every time I get close I start thinking about how much I want to say and it all seems like a lot. Some of the shows I can deal with in a paragraph but others feel like they need a full post to themselves.
I've been trailing the prospect of an in-depth post on Beastars since at least last November, for example, just like I did with Carole and Tuesday. The problem with procrastinating is I only retain enough detail to write those kinds of post for about a week or two after I stop watching the shows. I remember the themes and topics I want to discuss but when I come to articulate them, it's hard to bring illustrative examples to mind.
Instead of having them ready, I have to go back and skip-watch whole episodes, hoping to hit on enough relevant scenes to support the points I'm trying to make. That would be absolutely fine and proper for an academic essay- it's exactly what I would have done when I was at college, except I'd have been skim-reading 19th century novels, not speed-watching anime - but I feel it's wholly inappropriate for a blog post that's not even likely to be of interest to most of the people who are going to see it.
Of course, blog posts aren't always - perhaps not even usually - written
primarily for an audience. They're as much for the benefit of the blogger as
the reader and one of the most consistent factors in my relatively recent
return to watching shows made for TV has been the unexpected degree of
processing I've found myself needing to do. Writing about them helps with
that.
The break I took from watching TV lasted the best part of twenty years. The main reason I took it was that what I was seeing on TV had become so trite and predictable I couldn't find anything in it to merit the time it was taking me to watch the stuff. Then I came back to find just about everything so layered with meaning, so multi- and meta-textual, so self-referential and post-modern and just all-round mentally demanding, even a simple sitcom felt like something deserving of a dissertation all to itself.
The upshot of all this overthinking is a realisation that I need to get on and write about these shows while they're still fresh in my mind. I have to admit to myself that if I don't complete the lengthy, critical pieces buzzing around in my brain within a week or two of coming up with the ideas for them, it's extremely unlikely I ever will. In short, I have to accept it would be better to say something, however slight and inadequate, than keep making vague promises I'm never going to keep to go into everything in the depth it deserves..
That's promises to myself, I should make it clear. I'm not imagining anyone else is sitting there, fuming, thinking "Is he ever going to write that post about Beastars?"
So, with that bout of self-encouragement out of the way (You can do this!) here's a little something about a few shows I've watched in the last couple of months and what I thought about them.
Beastars - Netflix
I guess I had to start with this one. It seems like a long time ago that I watched it. At the time I thought it seemed quite significant and I also thought I had a lot to say about it. Now I'm not even sure I can remember what that might have been.
That said, I do remember a lot more about the show than I often do at such a remove. My memories of it are weirdly sensual, an overriding feeling of wonderment, tinged with utter confusion.
The narrative of Beastars, complex and eliptical in its own right, takes place against the background of a world so strange as to defy rational description, far less explanation. We're all used to seeing anthropomorphic animals, playing the parts humans would take in mainstream fiction, but Beastars takes that conceit to impossible lengths, revealing a world where predators and prey co-exist within a barely comprehensible moral framework.
They live side by side, study and work together, form friendships and even romantic relationships like civilized people, all while craving each others' flesh, trading in and eating each other's meat and fearing for their own and each others' lives, like animals in a jungle and yet nothing like that at all.
Add conflicting subtexts concerning adolescence and adulthood, licit and
illicit acts, personal and collective responsibilty, forbidden love and sexual
desire and you have a disorienting, disturbing, deeply thought-provoking work
that lives long in the mind after the images fade. It's one of those shows I
found myself thinking about over and over, any time my mind began to idle,
long after the closing credits ran.
Every part of the production fits together frictionlessly, even as the narative threads jar, one against another. The extremely strong, if even more strongly extreme, world-building rests safely, despite the shifting conceptual foundation, scaffolded in language, buttressed by image. The art design becomes so much part of the ideation after a while, it becomes impossible not to think of the screen as a window into this strange, other world.
I watched with the English dub and the voice-acting was equal to the challenge set by those words and pictures. The entirety held together as a gestalt throughout the twenty-six episodes of the two seasons, although there were times I was barely afloat in the story. By the end I was no clearer on the motivations of some of the key characters or how they survived in such a world than I had been at the start. I felt I'd been on a long and difficult journey with them. It was one I fervently wished would continue.
And it will, if only for a short while. The third and final season of Beastars is due to air sometime this year. Maybe when it ends I'll have some better understanding of what it was I watched. In a way I hope not. As with all the best fiction, an introduction beats an explanation.
Akuma Kun - Netflix
Let's see how far I get with this one without looking anything up...
It's the story of a teenager who inherits the eponymous title role from his father, a duty that seems to involve solving various supernatural crises, excorcising demons and generally acting as some sort of metaphysical emergency service. Akuma (Is it his title or his name? I forget, or maybe it was never made clear.), who exhibits a disturbing lack of both affect and empathy much of the time, appears to have accepted his role unwillingly, a lack of courtesy he extends to the half-demon sent to help him.
The half-demon, whose name I don't recall, is emotional in a very human way and has supportive mixed-species parents (One human, one demon, obviously.). Akuma, conversely, has an extremely poor relationship with his father, with whom he occasionally is forced to consult for advice, always with very bad grace.
Akuma lives in rented accommodation, for which he's eternally behind with the payments. His landlady is very tolerant; her pre-tween daughter very much less so. She regularly berates, badgers and even attempts to beat up Akuma and a great deal of the business of the show revolves around various people becoming infuriated, angry or disappointed with him, something he rarely and barely seems to notice.
In between dressings-down, arguments and shouting
matches, Akuma and his assistant deal with various demonic plots, infestations and
near-apocalypses, all of which form the action element of the show. There's also a
through-line narrative of some kind of elevated, mystical nature that I seem
to have forgotten almost completely.
The show is funny, sometimes; thrilling, sometimes; dramatic, sometimes. The characters are largely appealing, endearing or amusing. Even Akuma has his good side. Most intriguingly for me, it's yet another anime founded on an assumption that there are demons everywhere. It seems to be an exceptionally common trope, to the point where I feel I should do some research on it.
As usual with these things, being a demon doesn't necessarily mean you're a bad person. There's a vampish, succubus-like demon, who appears as a guest star in numerous episodes and frequently threatens to steal the show. Akuma makes a bargain with her to allow her to eat his heart if she helps him and the series ends with her about to make good on the deal.
I really enjoyed this and the characters, if not their names, have stayed with me. As you can probably tell, though, any memory of the actual plot has all but disappeared. That's fine. I'm increasingly of the opinion that, as with music, anime is all about the feels.
According to Wikipedia, the twelve episode series I watched is the 2023 sequel to the late-80s/early-90s forty episode original. I'd like to see that, some time. Looking ahead, there's no word on a second season. Obviously, I hope there is one.
Good Night World - Netflix
Here's another show so abstruse and abstracted that trying to create a logical framework for it to sit within makes my head hurt. It begins with a comparatively straightforward set-up: four gamers play members of the same family in an online game, without realizing they, the players, are also a family in real life. Cute, eh?
Yeah, not really. Cute is the last thing this show is.
Two of the players are brothers, one a clinically depressed, shut-in gaming addict, the other a glib, corporate apparatchik. The third player is their father, a work-obsessed bully and intellectual snob. The fourth is the estranged wife and mother.
Other in and out of game characters include a girlfriend and a work colleague. There's also a dead younger sister in the mix, somewhere. She died through the father's cold, uncaring neglect, but she may still live on in the game..
Or maybe none of that is true. As the season progresses, it becomes queasily apparent the whole melange is a roiling maelstrom of meta-fictional irreality. Nothing and no-one can be relied upon to be who they say they are, who they think they are or most especially who you think they are. They can't even be trusted to be what they are and neither can either the "real world" or the "game world".
This is not a show for people who fear the breakdown of reality.
Philip K Dick fans ought to enjoy it just for that. I did. The
characters are harder to love and my advice is not to get too emotionally
attached to any of them.
Once again, it's twelve episodes long, only this time it comes complete with an actual ending. There's no second season in prospect and it doesn't need one but apparently there is a prequel, Good Night World End, available on a streaming service called MangaONE, which I can't even find on Google. If it ever turns up on Netflix or even CrunchyRoll, I'll happily watch it there.
At this point I was going to go on to talk about a show I really liked called DoroHeDoro but I think I'll save that for another time. This has been plenty for one post. And at least I've made a start.
That's got to be worth something...
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