I got bored of animé for a while, but now I like it again, and part of the reason I like it again is that I rewatched Makoto Shinkai’s works She and Her Cat (which you can watch here), Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days (aka. Beyond the Clouds), five, thirty, and ninety minutes long respectively.

There are several aspects common to all of these, such as a relationship between a boy (or a cat) and a girl, a theme of separation and longing and getting on with life in spite of them, and a sort of intangible sentiment along the lines of “I am here / awake / alive” or, rather nicely put at the end of She and Her Cat, “this world… I think we like it.” There is also this incredible purity of vision in each of them that comes from the fact that, the first two at least, were almost exclusively the work of Shinkai who wrote, drew, animated, and voiced She and Her Cat and Voices of a Distant Star himself, with his wife providing additional voices and his friend composing the music.

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Usually I wouldn’t bother going to the cinema for a kids’ film, certainly not one put out by Disney, but I made an exception for Wall-e, partly because IGN gave it a good review, partly because I like some of Pixar’s stuff and mostly because it stars a robot. And I have to admit, I was impressed by the film. (more…)

Lately I’ve been turning cold towards Japanese ‘stuff’. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s suddenly becoming more popular and mainstream, or whether I’m just growing tired of it, but it’s just not as cool as it once was.

Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more. (more…)