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| courtesy of shizen22 from Flickr |
Nice comfortable summer day, but of course that will not last long. Toronto will start heading into the 3H weather pattern from tomorrow with the supposed climax being this Friday when any resemblance between the city and a furnace will be purely coincidental.
In any case, I have been continuing my ironic education in the latest anime, thanks to my good friend, The Anime King. I say ironic since I'm only learning about the genre in any significant amounts here in Toronto, compared with learning next to bupkiss during my entire 17 years in Japan. The King didn't seem too surprised at all. He remarked that anime is still considered a subgenre for geeks and weirdos by the majority of Japanese society so that it would've been difficult for me to knowingly pierce through the barrier.
In the past 7 months I've been back home, The King has lent me a couple of flash drives to peruse. So I've gone through the entire run of the existential sci-fi "Mawaru Penguindrum"and the down-to-earth "Usagi Drops". Currently I'm going through the dark, angst-ridden "Madoka Magica".
I'll be honest. Despite my long residence in Japan, my still-horribly lacking Japanese language was made clear by trying to decipher what these girls/witches were talking about. I needed Cliff Notes and I got them via Wikipedia. OK, anime mini-skirted junior high school students get a wish answered in return for a metamorphosis into witches...check. But that is the mere backbone of the plot which seems to absorb elements of "Evangelion", "Star Wars" and "Highlander". I've had to squint my eyes and ears (yep, ears too) at the screen to get what has been going on. But I've liked the contrast in drawing styles. Whereas the characters are drawn in the usual style of huge eyes and small bodies, the nightmarish scenes are drawn in a very garish but artistic way. And the determination of each individual witch's power based on the original girl's wish is a clever idea.
I'm currently going onto Episode 10, so I'm in the homestretch now. Should be interesting talking with the King on Sunday. Definitely not a "Sailor Moon"episode.
