"Watch out cuz he's bout to—"
This mousepad predates my site button by a few years. One day I was excitedly told "There's a special deal and custom mousepads are only $1.00! What do you want?" and naturally this is what I came up with. I don't know why, but it ended up turning hard and brittle after five or six years of daily use. I sadly had to retire Bikini Atoll Frederica. I had hoped to make a new one, but the source files for the image are now lost... Maybe one of these days I'll recreate the scene, but the button will never quite be the same if I do so. Alas.
Now you know the nonsensical backstory of my site button and header.
"Watch out cuz he's bout to—"review some anime.
The reading muscle is slowly coming back to me but I still can't engage as deeply as I'd like to, so I've been watching a few shows as mental PT. After Millennium Actress I decided to visit (and revisit) some other standalone anime films. Live updates and brief impressions follow.
07.27 – Perfect Blue
There's an all-too-common attitude that reduces all ambiguity in media to "bro shits so confusing lol its kinda poastmodarn and everything is relative u know so nothing ackshually means anything kinda crazy if u think about it". I was never victim to this dead-end antithought, but I did used to be susceptible to "this is surreal and creepy and it is therefore deep". Neither position is constructive.
Luckily, more than a decade after my first watch, Perfect Blue still earns its screentime. Countless pseudo-deep anime claim to cover dark themes while actually being shallow and exploitative, but this movie succeeds because it doesn't aestheticize psychological trauma.
Mima is trying hard to get a firm footing in her shifted identity. All of the tension in the movie flows from this, combined with interference by bad faith actors (i.e., her psychotic manager). I may not be a pop idol or an actress, but everyone knows how exhausting it can be to present one side of themselves against the expectations of others.
Ambiguity in the film's narrative is taken too far but the experience benefits from focusing on the shapes beneath the mist instead of trying to make logical sense of everything. The tension isn't built on washy noncomittment like "did Mima actually suffer or was it all in her head?" She suffered. It was not all in her head. The ambiguity is in Mima's experience and it transforms directly into the audience's anxiety. Her crisis isn't portrayed to be merely "shocking" or gawked at.
That's what the Madokas of the world never get right: the darkness in Perfect Blue is never satisfied in being reduced to pure suffering porn. Mima will have to live with unresolved phantoms from those days but she chose to keep moving forward regardless. We should all aspire to do the same.
Highlight: the climax shot where Mima sees herself in the mirror. She's running from a gaslighting doppelgänger and she turns a corner and RECOGNIZES HERSELF. From that moment on she's still in danger but never in doubt; her victimhood is over, and that's precisely when Rumi's undistorted and grotesque reflection appears behind her. This scene, conveyed with no dialogue and through animation, is the payload of the film.
07.29 – Tokyo Godfathers
I saw Tokyo Godfathers with some people in late 2014 and until this morning I didn't remember any of it.
Now I understand why. I probably drank heavily through the movie and wish I had this time too. I have nothing good to say about it. Not thematically, not visually, and especially not the writing. It's stupefying that this is the same director as the last two movies.
Next.
08.01 — "It's the logical next step for you"
"I feel discouraged, hungry and malnourished,
living in this house with no furnace, unfurnished"
I watched Millennium Actress, Perfect Blue, and Tokyo Godfathers, so of course the next film for me is Grave of the Fireflies. Somehow I've managed to go couhghgoguh years without seeing this, and today my long streak ends.
Right off the bat, I appreciate the "ghost kids" framing. The viewer knows from the first moments of the movie that both children are going to die, and that goes a long way towards reducing the potential for melodrama. War is nasty and there's no getting around civilians having died in air raids, and depicting this in any medium is an unenviable task. Pre-empting the accusation of manipulating the audience's emotions is a surprising, and I think good, move.
I don't really get why Seita doesn't work. Maybe he needs to take care of his sister? It's not that he's caught in an odd age between childhood and adulthood, because it's explicitly established that he previously had work but that the facility was destroyed. So perhaps all he needs is a nudge and a pep-talk from an adult that isn't making him feel like a parasite. The aunt's curt and dismissive attitude is a big problem here, but it's hard to say where the line is.
Wait, two children are packing up to move out and the aunt says "You don't know where yer goin'? Hmm. Well, take care." She has a daughter, so it's not like she's incapable of parenting, she chose not to. This is an inflection point where someone should have initiated a conversation... but no one did.
Lots of energetic kids ran by their hobo camp. Kids the average of Seita's and Setsuko's ages, who are apparently eating much better than them. How are they getting by? Are they being slipped genki pills? What happened to Seita's wartime rations? Is his aunt still cashing in on them? The questions can't be answered, but the audience is shown the group of youths for a reason. Other roads for the siblings must have existed, and they have fallen off the ride.
Maybe this screenshot is the point (and a wiki skim supports the view). Germany dropped out of the war, Japan kept going, and marched its citizens through a few more months of firebombing. "Apologize", "surrender", and so on... Seita's attitude is the country's in microcosm. Swallow your pride, the 1988 film says. Only he's a child, so I object to the allegory.
There's another inflection point when Seita comes out of the police office, battered and discouraged. He's hit Rock Bottom, he knows Setsuko is sick, and he still doesn't go back to his aunt. NOW he's being stubborn. Fourteen is old enough to realize some things.
It's unquestionably melancholic to watch a little girl get cremated but the film's framing and circumstances shield us from feeling it too deeply. Seita himself is already numb. Meanwhile we're shown fashionable girls in sun hats and colorful dresses, images of hope and youth, full of natsukashiis for their school's Victrola and wax. These are healthy, vibrant girls ready to resume their lives after a cadence; they've been shown for deliberate contrast with Seita and Setsuko's decline. Was this path available for the children? For Setsuko, certainly. It's unthinkable that no one would have helped her. The fourteen year old male, not so clear... Ending the movie with her death was a smart move.
Ultimately, I'm not sure what to feel. Seita made mistakes under the fog of war but... they were children. They could have used guidance. Shit sucks. War is terrible. Girls should wear sun hats and skirts.
Props to the writer(s) for not mentioning the atomic bomb. There's enough in the world about that aspect of the war, and plenty of other things happened that warrant depiction. I'd rather watch this than read the last fifty pages of Richard Rhodes' Oppenheimer brick again.
2026.07.29 –
