Unfortunately, I have made the mistake of reading a Daiya no Ace fanfic and I am once again in baseball hell. Luckily, I couldn't make it through even two episodes of a rewatch, so y'all won't have to suffer through a review.
Earlier this month, the Japan Information & Culture Center in DC hosted The Legacy of Satoshi Kon. The virtual event served as a career retrospective, including screenings of his four feature films, a documentary exploring his legacy, and a Zoom lecture that happened two weeks before the event even opened (cool!). Kon is my favorite director, but I'd never watched Millennium Actress before because I am a fake fan™, so I took the opportunity to fix that.
Kon was the writer/director for 4 movies and one season of anime, each one in a different genre, and somehow every single one of them is an absolute banger. The man could not miss. You can see the same themes and ideas reappear throughout his work, each time getting closer to what he was trying to say. It's devastating that he died at 46, and more upsetting that he remained relatively obscure and unsuccessful in comparison to those who paid homage to his work.
Millennium Actress is about a reclusive actress near the end of her life who grants one incredible final interview. We see scenes from Chiyoko's life bleeding into the scenes she played as an actress, moving seamlessly across time and space. The thread tying each of the parts together is her lifelong search for a political dissident she helped escape when she was a schoolgirl; her desire to become an actress is so she can become famous enough for the man to find her again. It's a movie about how movies impact us, and how we write ourselves into them. It's also beautiful and the editing is something else.
Out of Kon's filmography, Millennium Actress is an interesting one to leave for last, and to see for the first time after Kon's death. Chiyoko is able to reflect on the complete arc of her career at the end of her life, something that Kon wasn't able to do. He's the detective's dead friend in Paprika, begging us to finish the movie.
This movie is fantastic and you should watch it even if you don't give a shit about anime. Even your parents will love it.
It was fine. In the weeks since I've seen it, I've barely thought about it. It's nice that it's a prequel to the events of the anime, rather than a non-canonical side story. The main character of the movie has had some good chapters in the manga lately, so good timing on the movie release I guess.
Katanagatari (Sword Story) is set in an apocryphal Edo-era Japan, and follows a woman seeking revenge (uh oh) and her hired swordsman as they collect Shikizaki Kiki's 12 legendary Deviant Blades. It's a chanbara, but it's based on a light novel series by Nisio Isin, so expect a few curveballs.
For one, the hired swordsman? He's the heir to a style of swordfighting that doesn't use swords. That's one of the reasons Togame, the scheming strategian, hires Shichika to help her on this quest: there's no risk of him stealing the swords she's been assigned by the shogunate to collect. And listen, about these swords? Maybe some of them aren't really swords at all? Like the sword that's 1000 swords, or the sword that's a suit of armor, or the sword that's a mechanical fighting doll, or idk, the sword that's just a fucking gun. And maybe, just maybe, some of the swords are actually the friends we made along the way.
At the beginning, Togame and Shichika are both bad people. Togame's got her obsession with revenge and is pretty selfish in general. Shichika sucks because he's lived his entire life on an uninhabited island with only his sister, and he doesn't understand that other people exist or have feelings worth considering. But from the beginning, you can see that they make each other better, and it's so easy to root for them. The sword stuff is fun, but their relationship is what carries the story. Two antisocial weirdos teaching each other that there's more to life than a single-minded pursuit of the goal that will eventually destroy you.
It's a weird story in a weird format (a dozen double-length episodes). It didn't get much traction when it came out, it's not available to stream, and the blu-rays are out of print. Maybe the license holders are trying to suppress it from anime history because it's too good. You should watch it anyway.
okay see you next month bye