[twelve – Arcane] why don’t you love who I am?

I would’ve liked for 12 Days of Anime to focus on a different animated work per post. But the truth is, I can’t do a roundup of this year without going back to the single moment that defined it for me. Once Sting belted out that line – “Why don’t you love who I am?” – I was in love. I mean, just the delivery of it alone. He sings it with all this raw, overwhelming pain, and makes me wish I could sing. Arcane is as much a love letter to the vocal arts as it is a love letter to the visual arts. Its music is so textured and diverse, and I wish I had the vocabulary to talk about it meaningfully. But I can at least recognise the power in Sting’s vocals – his delivery of that line is itself a performance and a half.

Of course, the whole thing works because of its context. Jinx has just killed Silco, her one father figure, and has realised that Vi loves Powder, the cute dependent little sister that Jinx isn’t. There’s something very pitiable about the situation, mostly Vi’s lack of agency. She’s punched around every time she and Jinx try to have a conversation. And the finale, where Jinx holds Caitlyn at gunpoint while demanding Vi love her, is anathema to affection. Why don’t you love who I am? Well, sweetheart, you didn’t give her a chance.

Someone on Tumblr (yes, I know, cringe, but I love it) mentioned that Jinx wants to Vi to love her the way Silco loved her – which was an indulgent love. I disagree. Silco loved Jinx the way Vi loved Jinx (Vi, who constantly uplifts Powder even when she messes up); it just so happens that that love was given when Vi seemed to have given up on her. Vi isn’t Jinx’s foil, she’s Silco’s. Both are politically extreme, are deeply passionate about Zaun’s deprivation under Piltover’s tyranny and both have a deep familial relationship with Vander, and then later Jinx. The difference between the two is that Silco’s love was what Jinx needed to detach herself from clumsy, stupid Powder. His love seemed to be endless, without condition. Jinx isn’t perfect. She’s very mentally unwell. And Silco gave her the space to mess up. And I have no doubt Vi would have done the same (she defends Powder from Mylo all the time), but she’s a victim of circumstance. Unlike Jinx, who is an agent of her own destruction, Vi is swept up in the machinations of those around her.

One thing Arcane does especially skillfully is the blending of the public and the private. Major political events are motivated by personal drama between the characters. Act 1 is triggered by a scrap of orphans stealing from the wrong apartment. And Act 3 ends with an act of political terrorism because, in an over-heated room full of people who love and hate each other, the wrong man dies.

[eleven – Genius Loci] disjunction/dysfunction

Adrien Merigeau loves space. Out of all the animators I’ve referred to this month – Koji Morimoto, Robert Valley, Nobuteru Yuki – he stands out as an artist who brings a multi-medial dynamism to his representations of space. This dynamism can be seen in his old works, like Old Fangs and Cecilia and Her Selfhood, but Genius Loci takes it to a new level. Here, space is an ever-evolving beast. Sometimes there’s perspective, sometimes it’s just pure isometry – other times, the lines bleed into watercolour strokes that radically alter your perception of the objects on the screen. Huge parts of the screen vanish into chunks of white negative space. One cut has three different types of perspective, all forming the background.

The instability of the film’s visual landscape creates a sense of disjointedness. It is truly out-of-body, and effectively conveys how unreliable our senses can be as translators of reality. What is “real”, or what is “present”, extends as far as they can take us, which is really not far. And as Reine, our heroine, wanders the city at night, the landscape warps to reflect her own limited grasp on the world around her. This comes to a head when she runs into her friend, Rosie, whom she implicitly has a crush on. At first, the conversation between the two flows like water – their chemistry is clear through both the acting and the vocal performances. The animation is also at its most stable: the character designs are “on-model” and the colours are rich and deep and warm. But then Rosie mentions a concert – and like a switch, the lines start to dissassociate. The drawings start to disassemble. The colours become cooler and sporadic. The blank white space returns. There is a disconnect between Reine and Rosie. Reine just wants more time with her friend, but Rosie has obligations. She has a world that she must fit Reine into. The two love each other, but misunderstand each other. Communication breaks down and Reine flees.

This sequence in the film is far and away its most evocative – which is impressive, in a film absolutely leaden with riveting imagery. For me, it taps into my personal anxieties about connection. Specifically, that off-kilter sensation I sometimes have when I’m with people I’m not close to – the sense that I’m talking across a gulf and that they can hear me, but can’t hear me. And the sense that I am also not hearing them. The sequence perfectly captures the way conversations rupture – not through huge dramatic shifts, but subtle inflections and implications. The fragility of those rare moments of intimacy.

Adrien Merigeau is one of my favourite directors working today. His films are so ambitious, relishing in the variety of mediums available at their disposal. I can’t overstate how impressive this film’s execution is, and how it emotionally guts you with the simplest fears. This isn’t the last you’ll hear of Genius Loci on this blog, or of its director. Merigeau and his team have carved out a truly fascinating niche for themselves and I am giddily looking forward to what they do next.

[ten – X1999] cruel beauty

Cherry blossoms. A pale hand reaches out to catch a petal. A young man runs towards the screen. The hand belongs to his mother, whose clothes are suddenly burned away in a blaze of fire. Horrified, the boy watches her rip a sword out of her womb viscerally – before her body explodes, covering him and the screen in blood. Cherry blossoms fall. This is X/1999.

X/1999 is an adaptation of a CLAMP manga that has been on hiatus for a very long time. Watching this movie won’t help you understand the plot, as it drops you straight into the action with no warning. But it will give you an ending – a bloody ending, the natural culmination of the film’s destruction. Nobuteru Yuki returns, making this my fourth encounter with him this year. He would adapt CLAMP’s designs for animation again with the CLOVER short film, and I can see why; Yuki is both a delicate and weighty draftsman, which means he can imbue CLAMP’s designs with gravitas. And X/1999 has gravitas to spare. It’s a heavy movie – even the abruptness of the plot doesn’t weaken its emotionality. Interestingly, the emotionality lies less in the character animation and moreso in the effects animation. The splintering-apart of a concrete block feels more tragic in its spectacle. The characters, by contrast, look beautiful and move beautifully, but the acting in itself is cool and aloof. But I think it still works. There is something mesmerising about watching these doll-like characters glide through a world so determined on violence.

X/1999‘s plot begins ominously and ends disastrously, almost nihilistically. Watching it, I felt like I was dreaming. Partly because the narrative itself revolves around prophetic visions – giving us two in the opening sequence – but also because of the dissonance between watching elegant people enact such brutality on each other. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed the film otherwise. I can’t say that I much cared about the story or its themes – I don’t even remember most of the characters’ names. But that didn’t bother me. The violence was its own subject. It held enough sadness, enough joy and rage. And, visualised through spectacular effects animation, it became poetic. X/1999 finds beauty in all things – blossoms tossed in the wind are beautiful, and the beheading of a man is also beautiful.

[nine – Fairy Tail] a love letter to Lucy

Fairy Tail is not a series most people, including its fans, take seriously and for good reason – it’s big-hearted and dumb and self-indulgent. And I love it for those reasons, and I love it more because out of its cast of superhuman wizards, it chose to center Lucy Heartfilia, the noncombatant heroine, as the series’ emotional core.

The joy that Lucy gives me mostly stems from her range as a character. In the first chapter, she meets Natsu while hunting for new keys and while he’s searching for Igneel. We’re immediately told that she’s vain and kinda silly, trying to use her sex appeal to get a discount (“Is my sex appeal only worth 1,000 jewels!!?”). But then she figures out the famous mage Salamander is using love charms to manipulate women, so she’s smart and also kind. She wants to join Fairy Tail because it’s the most powerful guild around – so she’s ambitious and passionate about magic. So passionate that Salamander uses that to lure her to his ship. She figures out that it’s a trap – almost too late – and proves that she’s passionate about magic not just for its power, but its integrity as a discipline. And when she finally gets to Fairy Tail, she loves it all its insane glory. She’s the everyman, the straight-man…but she’s also a goofball, capable of being part of the manga’s absurd humour. I love that she’s as much of a book nerd as she is fashionable. Lucy Heartfilia is a darling and a star and I love her.

Lucy stands out to me because I read Fairy Tail around the same time I read Naruto and Bleach. These latter manga are very different to Fairy Tail, thematically, artistically etc. But let’s be honest – you know where this is headed: Naruto and Bleach (the former moreso than the latter) struggle with writing their women well. Now, it’s Christmas season – I’m not here to start fights. For me, well-written female characters are not a matter of politics (politics is part of it – politics is a part of everything – but now and here is not the place), but simply respect. I like these stories and I would like to think that they have a place for someone who looks like me. I respect these artists and I would like to think they respect someone who looks like me.

Sakura, Hinata and Orihime don’t frustrate me because they’re weak, or noncombatant. I’m weak. I’m the biggest coward I know. They frustrate me because their writers can’t figure out how to give them worth if they aren’t fighters. They frustrate me because so much of their identity is wrapped up in their feelings for the male leads (as if male power-fantasies and respectable female characters can’t co-exist). I love Lucy because she’s fully-formed before she meets Natsu. She’s Lucy and Natsu is Natsu and their individual lives intersect as they’re chasing their dreams. Fairy Tail is not as smart as its peers, or as well executed as its peers. But it loves its characters, pulls you into the depths of their friendships, and lets them stand as equals.

[eight – Encanto] you can’t live with ’em, you can’t kick ’em out

I wrote this review of Encanto on Christmas Day, surrounded by family. There’s my sister, my parents, my grandmother and my uncle and his family. And we all came together in a rare moment of stillness to watch Encanto. Encanto was my first Disney movie in a long time, and watching it, I was reminded of why Disney Animation persists in the cultural imagination. For all their recycling of cliches, their best movies use music as a conduit for emotion in a way that strikes some deep, inexplicable chord in you. People have really strong emotions about Disney movies, and even my cynicism couldn’t stop my heart from breaking when I saw that Bruno, the family’s black sheep, had a little peep-hole where he could watch the family dinners and pretend he was a part of it. I’m over Disney, but they are the best at what they do, annoyingly.

Family mess you up. Whenever I talk with friends, the conversation always steers back to family members and how they hurt us, disappoint us, make obviously stupid decisions whilst refusing to listen to sense. We’ve all come to conclusion that families are inherently unhealthy. Families are vampiric. A group of people tied to each other by blood, knocking heads, scrambling for slivers of privacy. We all thank God everyday that we no longer live at home. So whilst Encanto tickled some starry-eyed part of me that’s always yearned for a large communal family, it was also very claustrophobic. Abuela’s character was especially frustrating. If there’s one thing this movie has over Coco, it’s that it actually explores the matriarch and her complicated relationship with her offspring. Abuela isn’t a verbose figure. Rather, it’s what she doesn’t say – her quiet sternness and her inability to properly communicate with everyone in the family. Why, you want to scream at her, why didn’t you hold Mirabel in your arms when she looked up at you with all the hurt in her eyes over not having a gift? How could you do that to a child? But the obvious thing is sometimes not the natural thing, and to Abuela, what was natural to her was to investigate this “failure” rather than reassuring Mirabel. When parents assume that their love is a given, this gives them blind-spots. And Abuela, hardening herself for the survival of her family, had every blind-spot imaginable.

Spending time away from home has given me some perspective. My parents were far, far from perfect – and still are – but I’m so lucky to have them. I’m glad I could watch a Disney movie with them this Christmas. That’s a blessing in itself. I hope that my dear readers got to spend Christmas with the people they consider family this year. I hope that you guys ate a lot this Christmas! And sang a lot, and laughed a lot! It’s been a long year, and we all deserve some love. This isn’t the last you’ll see of me this month (I still have four more posts to write, ‘cos I’m a dumbass who can’t schedule…), but for now: Merry Christmas! Wishing you all the best!

[seven – Rahxephon] the garden of everything

Spotify Wrapped was a thing that happened. And whilst everyone seemed to agree that it was kinda dumb and pointless, it was still really fun to do, especially since I just got Spotify this year. And my top song surprised me. I’d expected it to be Ore no Kanojo by Utada Hikaru, which grabbed me by the throat and didn’t let go. Instead, it was The Garden of Everything by Steve Conte and Maaya Sakamoto. Which…was certainly unexpected. I mean, I liked the song, but more than Ore no Kanojo…hmmm, well, I don’t know. I listened to it because I loved Maaya Sakamoto’s work in Escaflowne. I mean, I’ve not even watched Rahxephon.

But I’ve been listening to it more, and it really is sublime. It’s gentle. I’ve tried to contextualize it, but it’s neither Rahxephon’s opening theme nor the ending theme. Where would you put a song like this? I’m curious, but not curious enough to watch the show. Anyways, I don’t need to do that to enjoy the song. But then I read the lyrics and I think, what on earth is going on in the story to inspire these words?

The mirror melts
I’m somewhere else
Inside eternity
Where you on
Outstretched wings
Sing within
The Garden of Everything
Where memories
Call to me
Backward dreams?
Or phantom reality?

It’s poetry. Conte sings these words and Sakamoto accents them, but in the chorus, facing each other, they meet across the distance of language to sing together.

And so here we are
Lovers of Lost Dimensions
Burning supernovas of all sound and sight
Every touch, a temptation
And for every sense, a sensation

歌は 今風に乗って
遥か遠い あなたのもとへ
いつか空は ひとつに繋がら
渡っていける あなたのもとへ

And working a cleaning shift in the evenings, alone with my music, these words stuck in me, for some reason:

As rivers reach the sea
You’ll reach me
With songs of your symmetry

“Songs of your symmetry”. Symmetry. An unexpected choice, but what other word is there to describe finding the half that makes you whole? Who is singing this song? What roles are Conte and Sakamoto playing? What does it have to do with the waif in the orange dress, and the winged knight?

Oh, this is just pretentious and silly. But then again, I am pretentious and silly. Maybe I’ll watch Rahxephon one day, if only to find the mystery of these words.