Top 10 TV Shows of 2018

The title's a bit of a lie. The rest of these lists are going to be genuine top 10s. This one is a bit fudged. Because, well, I watched ten TV shows this year. And a lot of Pretty Little Liars, but that's not from this year. So this is less a best of and more a year in review for me. That's why, for instance, GLOW made it on here. You'll see what I mean. Anyway, enjoy!

#10 GLOW (s2)

The first season of GLOW had a slow ramp-up and a pretty wonderful ending. By the last two or three episodes, it became a show that seemed to genuinely appreciate professional wrestling not just as a spectacle, but as a storytelling medium. As someone who has been a fan of the actual stuff, it felt like something that was incredibly obvious finally being done for the first time. A scripted show that respects wrestling! That realizes it for the multi-faceted art form it is, despite its many problems! And it's about women! I cheered.

GLOW's second season said: what about fuck all of that. What if we just reduced wrestling to a spectacle again. Take everything out that even hints that it might be telling a story on its own; revert all of that back to the control of the shitty scenes between the blonde lady and the brunette. Except: pull back on that story too, even though it's way less interesting than anything else going on with any of the wrestlers. Why don't we pull back on the whole ladies thing, too.

GLOW's second season is a brutally boring ten hour long attempt to make Marc Maron's shitty dad character relatable. Fuck this show.

#9 The Haunting of Hill House (s1)

Here are two reviews. The first is me having watched through the whole series. The second is me halfway through the series.

First. I'm sorry to all my friends who I love and respect that y'all loved this show. I'm sorry that y'all got tricked into watching a ten hour Wes Anderson movie that has a couple of shitty ghosts in it. And then second:

The Haunting of Hill House has two things.

One of the two is: every flashback is motivated in the most annoying way possible. A clock turns into a watch in the past. A low-angle shot of someone walking in heels transitions into that same person walking down a hallway from the same angle. A ghost turns into a ghost.

The second is: the laziest Freud. Everything that happens to you at seven is entirely who you will become in the future. All the seeds are there, and there's nothing that happens between your preteen years and your late-20s/late-30s that can change that.

On the positive end: despite looking terrible (Netflix is worse than HBO in terms of house style at this point) and being shot in the most condescending way possible, it does sometimes have a genuine rhythm of addiction that works. And it's nice to see parents being genuine with their children.

Here's the secret third review: I adore haunted houses that are actually about the house, because 2008 happened. Houses fucking eat people. This show takes three of the central pieces of fiction in that genre (Jackson's original, the '63 The Haunting and the '99 The Haunting, all of which I adore) and fucks them into a mess about how to properly set up a match cut and how to revolve a camera in a way to strike a set for scares and how to dissolve the systemic issues with houses into a story of a petit-bourgeois family who goes through strife in order to reproduce families. Fucking oh my god fuck this show.

#8 Devilman Crybaby (s1)

I think I can fairly confidently say that Devilman Crybaby is the worst thing Masaaki Yuasa has ever made. Mind Game is one of my favorite films of all time; Lu Over the Wall and The Night is Short, Walk on Girl both made my top ten movies list last year. Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong are both excellent, and I know I liked Kaiba well enough, despite not remembering many specifics. He's easily one of my favorite working directors. And that's despite having real issues with a lot of his work. Specifically with his main characters, and how they're often one month on the wrong forum away from becoming MRAs. Which is what I expected to continue to have a problem with here, and instead got the opposite.

Devilman Crybaby is Evangelion with a Netflix budget, which means it's Eva without any of the loose ends that make that show so compelling. On top of that, it's Eva with entirely too much credulous use of Christianity. It's even an Eva that trades "I mustn't run away" with "I must run a relay."

The way that it's the most Eva, though, is the way that Eva is the worst; it's a show that has collectivity boiling underneath its surface, and which instead sides with its most individualist impulses. It's so boring. And it doesn't even look that good.

#7 Aggretsuko (s1)

Sanrio - and all purveyors of corporate kawaii - has always been in the business of commodifying minor movements of revolt. Which is why it makes sense that they would team up with Netflix, a company that seems hell bent on doing for television (and, to a lesser extent nowadays, movies) what streaming services like Spotify have done for music: providing a simple, legal alternative to the internet's grey market in such a way as to fuck artists over just as bad, but make huge amounts of money for a major corporation. Our beautiful technological present is reterritorialization, the same way that kawaii aesthetics were born out of the writing of school girls that was done in such a way as to obfuscate messages from their teachers and other administrators. More about kawaii later, however!

Aggretsuko, as a character and a TV show, is basically the distillation of that commodification. Which is why she's great. As a character, she's the feminist invocation to speak out, and the subcultural aesthetics of death metal coupled cleanly with lean-in corporate culture. As a TV show she's feminist Office Space, when at least the elements of care work are still relevant to a generation lost in the gig economy. It's all capital capture all the way down, and that's one of the reasons I like Sanrio so much.

On the other hand, it's a nice show about solidarity between working women - though not to the point of disrupting the flow of capital, of course. It's about where that solidarity breaks down as well, as embodied in the chatty, gossip-spreading co-worker, the fly-by-the-seat-of-her-pants friend who promises a job and doesn't deliver, and the surveillance of search history by the boss.

More than anything it's about what kinds of solidarity you'll seek out and be drawn to when doing reproductive labor. Who will help you pick up the pieces after an exhausting day so that you can make it back. And who, like Retsuko's short-lived boyfriend, won't. They get dumped. Work goes on, you pay the man at the karaoke place for a private place to scream, and you get drunk and do it all again. The pig boss keeps being sexist, HR gives him the slightest talking to, and nothing happens, because capital's got to keep flowing.

It's pretty fun, but not super impactful, honestly. The Christmas episode is kinda lame too.

#6 The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (s1)

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is at its best when it's most reminiscent of Xena: Warrior Princess. It doesn't have enough meat in the central cast - or a desire to explore their friendships in serious ways that don't center Sabrina - to live up to the best moments of Riverdale. It's also entirely too Netflix-produced to be fun and willing to abandon itself to its whims to live up to Xena. Which puts it in a bit of a weird spot; some great tossed-off episodes, barely any character development that amounts to anything, and the fact that nearly every character is assigned a motivation that doesn't at all, well, motivate their actions.

Take the demon that takes over the teacher early on in the season, who we learn at the end (spoilers I guess) is Lilith, Adam's first wife and mother of all demons. It's established fairly early on that her entire purpose is to get Sabrina to sign the book of the devil, and that she is doing so on Satan's command. We also establish, through scenes with the Satanist priest, that she wants to do so by "womenly wiles" or whatever. In other words, through social and emotional manipulation rather than force. In secret rather than out in the open. If I liked this show enough to watch it a second time, I'd have straight-up GIFs here, because the vast majority of this stuff is said explicitly. Here's what she does in the show: saves Sabrina and her family from a nightmare demon; maybe show Sabrina's friends visions?; help Sabrina start a feminist reading group; and summon 13 witches to burn down Greendale so that Sabrina is forced to sign the book to stop them.

You might think to yourself: that doesn't seem so much like an escalating plan as it does one thing that works after a bunch of things that clearly wouldn't work. And I might agree with you. Because, like most of the other people in this show, she definitely doesn't do anything according to the motivations that are loudly proclaimed about her throughout the show's run time. This isn't a thing I hate. It's just really weird how consistent it is. Or, more specifically, if there's anything about it I hate it's how long the show spends proclaiming what each character is doing, when it could have been a much tighter thing that plays in a darker, witchier space and worked well because of it.

On the other hand: the show does some really interesting stuff with the Weird Sisters, especially. Ambrose Spellman works surprisingly well. I'm curious enough about Susie and Roz to be a little worried. All of which is to say that despite having bogus ass motivations, the interpersonal character work is fairly strong, and that's mostly what I want from something like this.

#5 Channel Zero: The Dream Door

The second of two seasons of SyFy's creepypasta adaptation show in 2018 is probably better than the other one that was released, but it didn't do quite as much for me. The basic premise: a newly-married couple move into the man's house, only to find a door in the basement where there wasn't one prior. Opened, it leads to another door, behind which is the woman's childhood imaginary friend. The clown-faced contortionist Pretzel Jack is her protector, in a way that can be a little overprotective. A little less than the back half of the six episode season is dedicated to a new neighbor who turns out to have similar powers, and the creepy obsession he develops with her.

I think the discussion on this episode of Waypoints does more justice to the show than I can, so if you want a (mostly non-spoilery, as I recall) explanation, head there. For my part, I think the themes that resonated with Danielle Riendeau hit me in a similar way, but not as hard. It's a mostly smart look at the way trauma, internalized, plays out in relationships. That podcast also makes a good case for the ways in which the racial politics succeed and don't.

One thing that sticks with me is the chemistry between the three leads. They did a pretty great job with the casting, and developing those sparks in weird, uncomfortable ways.

#4 Laid Back Camp

The things that Laid Back Camp do well seem, on their face, to be fairly easy. This 12-episode anime about a group of high school girls who go camping during one winter season has sprezzatura, you might say. One girl loves solo camping, and runs into another who biked a long way to see Mt. Fuji only to fall asleep before she got there. This girl has just moved and entered the same girl as the first, where she finds a couple more girls who have an Outdoor Activities Club. A drunk lady who subs in for a teacher on maternity leave and a friend of the first girl rounds out the main cast, when they all end up going camping on Christmas. How could you fuck that up?

The answer, of course, is: in a million different ways. Kitsch walks a thin line. And a show that runs twelve episodes with just over twenty minutes of content (skipping the opening and closing songs) is still going to run you over four hours, which is longer than most very long movies. It needs to have something compelling to hold that length. Especially when three quarters of the "action" is basically watching characters cook and eat things outdoors. The other quarter keeps that action compelling, though.

Shima Rin is the girl who likes solo camping in winter, and Nadeshiko Kagamihara is the girl who wants to see Mt. Fuji. Their friendship is incredibly sweet, based on respecting each other's boundaries but also pushing each other to try new things. It gives Shima an arc that's pretty comfortable; she goes from being someone who only wants to camp alone, to being someone who loves camping alone but is okay with camping with her friends sometimes too. She doesn't have to obliterate herself for the social, but she doesn't have to alienate herself from it either. It's just nice.

#3 Riverdale (s2)

I burned through the first two seasons of Riverdale in less than a week, and that was pretty early on in the year, so my memory of precisely what took place is a bit rough. I definitely wrote about two thousand words on it, but as far as I can tell those are lost forever. Back your shit up in a place you can find it, friends. I also haven't seen any of season three yet.

My main memory of my initial impressions, at this far of a remove, are basically that the first season of the show did an incredible job of threading the main characters' relationships together. It knew when to pull out of Archie's storyline and weave in Veronica's, or Betty, or Jughead's. And it did so in a way that lead to genuinely great interactions between women; Veronica and Betty specifically, but secondary characters as well. The second season - the one under consideration here, I guess - did a much worse job at this. It blew the scope way up, and in doing so lost some of that ability to characterize and develop interpersonal relationships. On the other hand, it did give us the brilliant version of Cheryl Blossom that now exists, so it wasn't all a loss on that front.

To quickly go over that difference in scale: Season one of Riverdale was more or less the first season of Twin Peaks, with a little less mysticism and empathy. A small town suffers a death, and the season revolves around resolving the who and the why. Along the way some people hook up or break up, some come and go, and mostly we're interested in the texture of the town. Season 2 is what the second season of Twin Peaks was probably trying to do; with the central mystery resolved, it's all about how that central trauma warps that kind of small town. Instead of pageants and camping trips, though, it's all histories of genocide and betrayal and present-day local governmental manipulations and riots.

The stuff of season two is, frankly, way better than the first season. People aren't just individuals, they're players in a social space, fighting collectively for what they want and need. Tensions among groups bubble and explode and are manipulated in particular directions by the rich to meet their own ends. Shameful secrets produce generational consequences. It's a show with one eye staring hard at how real life works. The individual components, and the interpersonal relationships that worked so well in the first season, are backdropped for the best possible reason. It's still kind of a bummer, though.

Especially because when it does get personal again, as with the reveal of the Black Hood stuff that plagues the first half of the season, it's simply not as good. Season one is so incredibly adept at not just pacing the character growth, but literally cutting between it. The relatively few episodes are cut together so well that I almost never felt like I was getting too much of any one plot line or character. Everyone felt represented, not because the show needed them to be, but because it was worked best at every moment. The second season feels way more uneven; Archie's little fascist neighborhood watch is overwhelming one moment and forgotten the next. Jughead's investigative journalism then itself becomes overwhelming. The worst thing, though, is how little time Betty and Veronica are given together. They have incredible chemistry in the first season, and how they get along drives so much interest. Second go around, they're basically strangers to each other. It's a goddamn shame.

But then, even with that issue. And for a show whose racial politics are pretty busted. And all the other bits and pieces. It's a show that ends in a beautiful, comprehensive riot and that gave us Cheryl Blossom, and that's pretty sweet.

#2 Sanrio Boys

Like most things Sanrio, Sanrio Boys is a stilted, awkward attempt to suss out the nicest story of consumptive production, specifically in regards to gender. This time around, we follow a boy who has a deep love of Pompompurin, based around its association with his grandmother, which is buried under the dual traumas of his being bullied over that love as a kid and his grandmother passing away soon after, which didn't allow him to grow past his transference (in the psychoanalytic sense) of that bullying into anger at her. The show itself follows his induction into a group of self-described Sanrio Boys, and the trials and tribulations that result.

The very basic breakdown: Sanrio Boys is basically two six-episode seasons of television mashed into one. The first introduces Kouta as the protagonist, and revolves around the assembly of the five boys. A soccer player, a flirt, a class president, and a young English boy who is often mistaken for a girl are the friends. The second half of the season sees them assembled and walks through the creation of a theatrical play they put together, which also serves as a framing device for the show. Which is weird in a way I'll get into in a moment.

The first half of the season works surprisingly well. The boys have fairly reasonable conflicts and resolutions, and it moves along. What it's doing, more or less, is positing the possibility of homosocial reproduction through kawaii aesthetics. Boys can be produced through their gendered consumption of Sanrio characters, albeit in ways distinct from how girls are. They have to overcome stereotypes of perversity, instrumentalized femininity, and arrested development, for instance. None of these things are dealt with in any robust way, though, because the goal is to show that overcoming these obstacles is a way to cement the homosocial even more firmly.

This isn't going to be an essay by the way. It's basically bullet points in paragraph form. Call it 7 theses on Sanrio Boys.

The two-seasons-in-one structure is most pronounced, and kind of at its worst, in the character arc of Kouta. In the first half he's a troubled kid, incredibly fixated on that Freudian moment of losing his toy and his grandma, but he's fundamentally about being the glue. The boys assemblage is possible because he is able to see past their various masculine performances, assess what's actually eating at them, and say the things that will help them move past it. His traumatic moment grounds him and makes him good with people. The second half unmoors this character. Kouta no longer has to make impromptu speeches about trusting others. So the second half of the show basically devolves into his psyche, and not in a "final two episodes of Evangelion" kind of way. He simply shifts from someone who gets other people to someone who is in his own head about why he's the only one who doesn't "sparkle." It's boring.

Ryo, the underclassman, is basically a genderswapped version of Mana Fujisaki from Onegai My Melody (which is a much better show than either of the Sanrio anime from this year). More importantly, he's the season's focal point as far as gendered production is concerned. His character goes from a mysterious hanger-on who ogles the class president (Seiichiro) at archery practice to a boy-who-is-mistaken-as-a-girl and who hates being pampered with cute things to a, well, basically the same but a little more accepting of himself, by the end. Ryo's more "unstable" gender is allowed to persist more or less unchanged throughout, which on its face is a fairly good thing. This show being what it is, though, it's a little more complicated than that. Because this show is about friendship.

Sanrio's marketing materials have always heavily implicated the idea that their primary function is to facilitate friendship. Small gift, big smile has been their tagline for ages; for further information, check their corporate about page. Their success as a company is almost entirely reliant on their ability to insert themselves into social situations that require exchanging low-price items. They brand them in order to produce that "big smile;" from recognition or from appreciating cuteness. The more friendship exists, in other words, the bigger the market for Sanrio goods (as long as there exists in those friendships the need to exchange gifts. Which there always is). That means Ryo's not being forced into one or another gendered position has less to do, at the base level, with him learning to accept himself, and more to do with the production of the market of the goods being sold. It's about the consumptive production of gender, in other words.

There's not a lot to say about the play, really, but I did want to return to it. Because it's just such a weird framing device, in that the play is basically a recap of the show (but mostly the first half) that runs over the first episode's opening credits and the last episode's closing credits. Or, it's a three-act version of the three-act structure of the show. It's an artifice that doesn't so much expose the artifice of what preceded as it does smile blankly back at it. I kinda loved it.

#1 Channel Zero: Butcher's Block

It's been long enough since I watched Butcher's Block, the third season of Channel Zero (discussed earlier) and the first that came out in 2018, that I don't know that I can do justice to this weird neat thing. Or rather, the way I want to do it justice is to say: maaaan. Maaaaaan. This fucking thing. This Fucking Thing. And repeat variations on that until people who like the weird, particular shit that I like watch it. I don't know those people though.

Butcher's Block is based on a series of (quite good) creepypasta about forest services individuals, most of which are unified by a few threads of strangeness that they encounter. Most famously, there are the stairs leading up out of the woods, and ending in a door. This season takes that image - one among a handful in the original stories - and runs with it. The protagonists aren't rangers, but two young women who move to a new town to start a new life. They find out what's at the top of those staircases. They are tempted by what's up their to fix their brain chemistry - specifically their genetic predisposition to schizophrenia - at a terrible cost.

It's full of big open shots of fields with a plantation in the background, of painfully literalized psychoses, of angry old gods. It's a season about eating; people eating people, gods eating people, people eating things, society eating people. It's all so on the nose and such a joy. I feel like I should go rewatch it? I'm probably not going to. But I kind of want to.

Top Tens of 2017: #4s

Here are the fourth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#4 Podcast: The Solecast

I've been listening to Sole's podcast, on and off, for the last couple of years. In the beginning it was, I'll be honest, out of a mixture of lurid interest and solidarity; I do consider him a comrade and a friend (he also came on my podcast this year, full disclosure I guess?) but the early bits were fairly rough. This year in particular has seen him take what he's doing with the podcast and take it to the next level.

As far as leftist podcasts go, he is hitting a sweet spot that a lot of others that I've listened to absolutely don't. I straight up have no interest in the pure comedy stylings of a Chapo, and while I appreciate the interview-heavy, soundbite-producing style of Revolutionary Left Radio, it can be kind of exhausting. Sole also focuses on interviews, but is significantly more invested in a conversational style that stays on track with (what I assume are) prepared questions.

I appreciate the tack Sole takes with getting guests, sort of alternating between "bigger name" guests like Mackenzie Wark or Sage Francis with folks doing art or on the ground organizing, which provides for an interesting experience of hearing stories and theories in a sort of holistic way. Plus he talks to folks who are into permaculture and shit, which I super don't care about but he clearly does, and that's what makes it interesting.

Among my favorites are his interview with rapper Mic Crenshaw who was involved in creating the anti-racist action network and rapper POS who doesn't do much political organizing, with rapper & disabled rights activist Kalyn Heffernan, and the episode with a J20 defendant. Making that list genuinely surprised me with how many musicians there are on it, since I tend to not think of this podcast that way at all, but hey, what do you know.

#4 Film: mother!

I don't think mother! is necessarily a hard movie to talk about, but I am fairly certain I am not going to do a good job of it. It might be a movie that portrays a horrifying empathy for the abuser. It also might be a secret sequel to The Others that doesn't want to commit. It also might be (and, if you've read me in the past, you'll probably figure out that this is my preferred reading whether or not it is the most supported) a story of a man in love with the embodiment of his house.

The first 45 minutes or so of this movie look like Stoker shot on a GoPro. Jennifer Lawrence is constantly framed dead center in close up, with the camera movements primarily following her and occasionally swinging around from front to back or vice versa. It's a very weird choice that gives a lot of weight to the very early scene in which she walks to her front door and then encircles the foyer by walking through each of the rooms in a tight circle. If she's the house, that sequence is also in some sense her as the camera. The technique in general recalls specific sequences from Requiem For a Dream, or the shot of Becky (Amanda Seyfreid) in season 3 of Twin Peaks being high in her husband's thunderbird.

Because of this, the movie itself is able to be signposted by the only two exterior shots in the whole thing. The first happens at about that 45 minute mark, and signals a slight release of the camera from Lawrence's character. It still tracks her closely, but sometimes is allowed to come to rest at an entryway, allowing her to wander around a room. It also marks the introduction of the first outsiders, a man played by Ed Harris and, later, his wife, Michelle Pfeiffer. Their kids show up, an altercation occurs, and the beating heart of the house is made more material when some of the resultant blood cannot be mopped up. The blood or the house show Lawrence's character to a secret room in the house in a scene that is somewhat similar to certain moments in Silent House, which I still maintain is pretty good, okay.

The second exterior shot happens somewhat later, and marks the point at which the husband (Javier Bardem, who is a poet afflicted by writer's block until Harris & Pfeiffer's characters show up) begins to invite into the house a whole society of people. Just before that, though, Lawrence's character has a vision of renewal in a wide overhead pan out, showing the home and the woods blooming with life. She is also pregnant. It should be said: this is a movie which doesn't do subtlety, in the same way that Aronofsky never has. As she's in the last stages of pregnancy, the house is overrun with Bardem's character's fans who eventually go from admirer's to an entire society that progresses from riots to religious societies to cults and full a brief, full-scale war film. That last bit is maybe the only part of the movie that super didn't work for me.

So yeah! I did, as expected, a bad job of talking about that. Sorry about my book report? It's a really interestingly-shot thing that wears its allegory on its sleeve in a way that is more fun to watch than to reminisce on. Aronofsky made a weird movie about a woman who is a house and I fuck with that pretty hard okay.

#4 Album: T-Wayne by T-Pain & Lil Wayne

Any other year this would have been my favorite thing ever. And in a lot of ways it still is. It's the long-held collaboration between the two titans who completely altered the musical landscape just about a decade ago, and it is kind of clear why it was held back. There's a ton of joy and play in it, but hardly any memorable hooks or exciting production. But that play alone makes it lovely and delightful.

#4 TV Show: The Shannara Chronicles (season 2)

The first season of MTV's (now Spike's) The Shannara Chronicles was one of my favorite experiences of watching something in 2016. It was a delightful little thing that got a surprising amount right, even if it failed in many other ways. That is, in many ways, the story of this second season as well, if slightly more muted. The big change (aside from the channel) is that it leans a little more into the Diversity aspect and doesn't do quite as good a job with the source material.

A big pet peeve: it is made clear in the novels that the Sword of Shannara is capable of being wielded by a Shannara not because of something inherent in the bloodline, but because of a mistaken belief among the public that that is the case. This season explicitly goes back on that, which is kind of a major bummer.

Otherwise, it is a lovely little thing, a genuinely enjoyable experience that has a number of flaws and falls apart at the end.

#4 Videogame: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I never quite got out of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild what many others did. I'm barely interested in open worlds and I have very little patience for emergent gameplay. I do love weird systems clashing, but in the actual act of play I'm significantly more likely to wander to the invisible edge of the world and run alongside than try to combine inventory items and environmental hazards to form a unique way of dispatching an enemy. Despite the fact that it is very much not my playstyle, enjoyed my time with the game a ton. Which is to say that it was a chill time that I appreciated in 2017.

Top Tens of 2017: #10s

Here are the tenth best podcast, film, album, TV show, and videogame of 2017:

#10 Podcast: Don't Zap the Geek

There are some things about Don't Zap the Geek that are a bit rough: the audio quality can take Skype-induced dips, the hosts' familiarity with each other can sometimes obfuscate what's actually going on in an episode, that familiarity can lead to tangents that are often great but also can take away from discussions of other aspects of a particular episode, and the lack of a wrap-up episode is kind of a bummer. Despite all that, it's my favorite of the podcasts dedicated to recapping & discussing the third season of Twin Peaks (honorable mentions to Idle Thumbs' Twin Peaks Rewatch (which I appreciate for the discussion of cinematography especially) & Entertainment Weekly's A Twin Peaks Podcast, which has the opposite problems of this).

An example of why: at one point, the hosts talk about how David Lynch is a director who doesn't do antiheroes. He doesn't ask you to root for someone who is fundamentally doing bad. This is meant positively, and is contrasted with nearly all contemporary prestige television. As someone who is super not sold on Dale Cooper as the sweetheart of the century, it's something I don't know that I fully agree with. But it's also a strong theory of the work and the show that influenced my understanding of it in a way that more straightforward recap shows didn't manage.

Plus it has good jokes about John Justice Wheeler and serious reckonings with the show's violence and a totally baffling appreciation of Bobby Briggs that I absolutely can't get behind.

#10 Film: The Night is Short, Walk on Girl

I have what you might call a general rule. It is a bad one, but it is formed in reaction to many things, and it often serves me well (shouts out to Grant). Boiled down, it amounts to: the end of a movie (or narrative generally) is worthless. Endings suck. They pander or they tie together or they introduce useless obfuscation. They moralize or they idealize. There is no good or useful message to take from them, except that they turn the strange into the comprehensible, and render a product.

Given that criteria, The Night is Short, Walk on Girl might have been one of my favorite films of the year. It is, basically, a film pseudo-sequel to the 2010 anime series The Tatami Galaxy. They share a staff, and the same director - Masaaki Yuasa, who is almost certainly my favorite anime director - directed it. That series followed a high school boy as he attempted to choose a club that would suit him. Each episode, roughly speaking, saw him choose a club, live through it, fail, and revert back to the beginning. Yuasa is also the director of one of my favorite films of all time, also animated: Mind Game. In the past I've highly recommended it with the caveat that it opens with an upsetting scene of sexual assault.

The thing is that the bulk of The Night is Short does everything I love in his movies and shows. It combines the beautiful animation of Ping Pong with the delirious asides of Mind Game, the externalized politics of Kaiba, and the respect for spectacle of Kick-Heart. And, of course, the serious and ludicrous focus on character that defined The Tatami Galaxy. It tells the story of an endless night in which The Girl With Black Hair drinks, performs in a play, shops for a used book, visits ill friends, and diverts multiple kinds of divine judgment. There is also a dude who is convinced he's in love with her, despite the fact that all he has done is literally stalk her.

Which, I suppose, brings us to the issue. Our ostensible protagonist - literally Senpai - is some asshole who is real broken up about his inability to talk to this girl who he likes. And again, there is a lot there that, in the watching, seems fruitful; he is friends with a weirdly fascistic school events coordinator who is super queer coded; he is himself basically an MRA in waiting ready to be told off by this pretty great woman who should clearly be the lead of this film; there is a villain established early that is clearly paralleled to the dude in a way that seems like it is leading to a reckoning; and so on. You may have guessed that it isn't just the ending that disappoints, by now.

The movie takes a turn when The Girl With The Black Hair confronts Ri Haku, the capitalist, and lets him know that he is Connected with everyone, and is in some sense responsible for the brilliant night she has had. This is true in the most saccharine way possible. It is also a clear betrayal of any exciting possibility, a capitulation to capital, and a boring fucking story. From then it only gets worse.

Here's the thing: it's much harder to simply ignore the ending when it turns into what more or less (more) amounts to MRA propaganda. Because there are versions of this movie that last another minute, or a minute less, that are entirely different in meaning. It's fucking frustrating. These versions leave it unclear whether a relationship begins, or cut to a month into it when things fall apart. They, in other words, give context to the ways in which this movie tells the story of a dude who is shitty in ways that aren't necessarily his fault, but which he does nothing to effect.

Is it clear that my frustration with this movie has made me incapable of talking about it in a coherent way? Because that's more or less how I feel. It comes so close to being something unbelievable, and fails in ways that it sets itself up to avoid. And those failures resonate back through to color everything else, and fill this wonderful thing with poison.

#10 Album: I Believe In You by Dolly Parton

Last year, Dolly Parton released an album that was genuinely challenging, exciting, and playful all in the same measure. I can't overstate how good Pure & Simple is. This year, she released another album.

I Believe In You is her first children's album, and that's a weird thing to say. There are so many awkward moments throughout it, and so many exciting ones as well. The main problem, though, is that it is very slight. Which isn't to say in a way that kids might find appealing. Though that could be true. In the end, it's just not the kind of album that makes a huge impression, whether melodically or thematically.

#10 TV Show: American Gods (season 1)

American Gods is a show obsessed with its style that desperately wants to have something to say. It doesn't. Sometimes the style works, though.

#10 Videogame: Doki Doki Literature Club

I came into Doki Doki Literature Club expecting to hate it. The particular virality reminded me a lot of a muted version of Undertale, particularly in how it was made clear that there was a spoilable turn and a metafictional element. Consider those warnings for this free game you may want to play.

Those elements are, in my opinion at least, the weakest parts of this game. What's more, they actively undermine the strongest elements, which is the part that takes the dating sim genre very seriously in a way that interrogates its tropes. They're also, of course, what gained this game its virality, and are entirely at fault for things like my own awareness of its existence. I'm somewhat plugged in to the Smash community, but certainly not enough to hear about a new free game that a creator of the 20XX Tournament mod or "one of the best Melee Links in Jersey" had created.

The basic pitch is that you play a guy who joins a literature club in high school, only to find out it is entirely attended by a variety of attractive girls. They are each drawn in broad strokes, and your player character is internally fairly straightforward with the fact that he's mostly trying to get laid by becoming a member. The central mechanical interaction (aside from clicking to advance text) is fairly neat: every night you are tasked with writing a poem, which you can (and are advised to) game towards the tastes of a particular club member. You do this by picking a word from a list; the cute young girl, Natsuki, enjoys words like "marshmallow" and "fluffy;" the more mature, literary girl, Yuri, prefers lengthy, uncommon, or imagistic words like "aura," "anxiety," or "raindrops;" and your long-suffering friend and people-pleaser, Sayori, prefers more emotional descriptions like "tears" or "sad." It manages to break up the flow of the game while simultaneously developing these girls' characters and testing your own knowledge and assumptions about who they are supposed to be. Plus, it leaves you with the possibility of a poem, rather than awkwardly trying to force you into generatively writing one, which is super smart.

Saying that the horror/metafictional elements detract is not as clean as all that. Without them I wouldn't have just missed the game entirely; it is incredibly unlikely that some of the choices that work so well wouldn't have been made at all. For instance: part of the dawning horror is the drip feed of (which isn't to say particularly nuanced) information that you get which indicates that each of these datable girls has very specific trauma or mental illness. I'm not qualified to speak on the specifics of anything particular about that in terms of representation, but it is all written in a way that feels intentional and sensitive. Which isn't to say unproblematic. (Speaking of which: the thing that kept me playing as I was flagging early on was the fact that the game's discussion of literature is actually pretty solid. It largely consists of fairly basic craft discussions and questions around the purpose or embededness of style, but done in a way that feels not dismissive and useful for the presumed ages of the characters.)

The problems that these characters are dealing with are the basis for its horror, but they're also genuinely interesting critiques of the tropes of the dating sim genre. Your bubbly, people-pleasing best friend, for instance, confesses her depression to you. She is fairly straightforward in saying that her ability to bring people together is related to how much self-loathing drives her away from close relationships and how much it simultaneously brings her joy to help bring other people together because she can then fade into the background. Like I said, I can't say, but it doesn't feel wrong.

All of which is to say: while I came in expecting to feel negative, what I'm left with is mostly a sort of ambivalence that leans positive. Because the metafictional elements don't work in an especially literary way, despite the game's relative intelligence in those matters. Briefly(ish): the fourth girl in the club, Monika, is the president. She doesn't have a route. She ends up manipulating the game files. In the ordinary ending, she reveals that she has tried to subtly enhance the issues present in the other girls. After this goes bad, she ultimately deletes them and brings you to a room in a liminal space where she declares her love, happy that you - the player, not the player character - can exist together with her, alone and in love, forever. She does this because she has become self-aware as an entity within a game.

I say it doesn't work because it uses the metafiction as another kind of narrative abstraction, rather than a real break. The kindly friend being someone who suffers makes sense, and actively makes the player rethink the assumptions of the genre; the ignored character who undermines the game does the same thing, except with significantly less impact. In context, it kind of just doesn't work.

Some of my feelings about this game would be different if I didn't know games like We Know The Devil existed. Or Anatomy or Dust City, both by Kitty Horrorshow, which do the strategic restarts and 'local files' better, respectively. Or even Liz Ryerson's Problem Attic, which shares very little with this game except the way in which it integrates the horror of play into an interrogation of traumas much more holistically. But even without those, there's something deeply compelling about Doki Doki Literature Club, and there's also so many ways in which it doesn't quite get there.

2014 in Shit: The Wind Rises

I had dreams of writing a big defense of The Wind Rises, Hayao Miyazaki's maybe-it's-real-this-time retirement film about the designer of the Zero fighter aircraft that Imperial Japan employed extensively throughout the Pacific War. I thought I would have the time to dedicate and the energy to follow through in a way that didn't end up coming off as an apology for Japanese imperialism. I don't have either. I'll try, to a certain extent, but the best takeaway I can give is this: The Wind Rises is one of Miyazaki's most gorgeous films, and is significantly more complicated and ambivalent than even its greatest defenders have given it credit for.

Here's the thing: it isn't untrue that The Wind Rises is ultimately difficult to disentangle from mainstream right wing rhetoric and political action in contemporary Japan. There is a reason that Miyazaki had to write an Op Ed decrying the prime minister (and many others) plans to revise Article 9, the piece of the Japanese Constitution that forbids the country from having a standing military. There's nothing directly in the movie that condemns the consequences of the actions of its hero. There is, in fact, a number of arguments made that are clearly attempts to dissociate those consequences from the story being told. Which, at least as long as we're here, I don't think is entirely unfair, given how many of the condemnations of the valorization of Jiro Horikoshi seem like they border on the sort of tactical ahistoricity that they are accusing the film of*. Horikoshi's actions contributed to many horrific things, but saying that the movie is bad because of that is ignoring the conditions that lead to the rise of Japanese Imperialism and allowed for his work in the first place. Which is all to say, I suppose, in a roundabout way: what has been completely absent from the various discourses around The Wind Rises is that Horikoshi couldn't have done what he did without the material conditions permitting it, and those material conditions were ascendant imperialism and military dominance in a then-recently industrialized nation that was undergoing all the social upheaval that goes with those things, and that this all happened at a historical moment coinciding with the rapid development of the technology of airflight. So Miyazaki's "he didn't really mean to/he was a genius used for evil" tack is bullshit because a "genius" for aircraft design is only recognized when the conditions are there for it to be used (and created).

The point, though, is that talking about the designer of these planes should allow us to talk about the conditions under which he designed them, whether or not the dialogue in the movie is amenable to that conversation. Perhaps especially if not. The Western conversation around Japanese Imperialism in the 20th century is still so nasty and useless; so much of it reads like a "but yes look over here," an implicit denial of white supremacy, yet another way to frame the nation as Weird Japan without doing so quite so explicitly. Any discussion of Japanese Imperialism without a discussion of the resistance to it is fetishizing.

And yeah, I think that means The Wind Rises is a fetishizing movie as well. The other evidence for that: the real big narrative about it was that Miyazaki was retiring after this one. It's hard to tell whether that's stuck, but there is a lot about the movie that makes it feel like it is meant to be a retirement film. Not the least of that is how much the narrative of Horikoshi is transformed into a "noble artist working in a compromised medium, but still forging ahead." It's hard not to see the parallel to the man who still insists on the hand drawn animation technique that has been dead or dying for decades in the industry which he leads. So much of the film is an elegy for artistry, and, as gross as that sounds, it can be incredibly touching. There are moments where it feels like Miyazaki knew he had to pull out all the stops, and others where it seems like he just always wanted an excuse to animate a particular thing, so he shoehorned it in to be able to. The meet-cute during an earthquake certainly reads this way to me, and it is easily one of the most effective moments of the film.

But then, that's also how I read the film's end, with the Zero planes ascending into the heavens. Others have taken this as evidence that Miyazaki is intentionally turning a blind eye to the real effects of imperialism, seeing it as a valedictory ascendance, a happy ending for the man who designed the deaths and enslavement of many. Maybe I simply remember it wrong, but I have trouble seeing that argument at all. From my memory, it was bittersweet at best; the final refusal of Horikoshi to come to grips with what he had had a hand in. It was a moment of the artist, final giving up the fight, cedes the meaning of his creation to history, knowing -- no matter how strongly he will deny it -- that the verdict will not be in his favor.

Which is what I mean, also, by saying that The Wind Rises is fetishizing. It is a catalogue of absences, a contorting of what's there into an object that can only ever represent what isn't. And it is beautiful, in a way that means something. Someday I will find the words to say what.




*I'm not including any criticism of the film from South Korea, for obvious reasons.

2014 in Shit: Short Peace

I mostly wanted to see Short Peace because I want to play the videogame associated with it. It was written by Suda51. I still haven't played it.

The big hook about Short Peace, an anthology of four anime short films, was that the director of Akira was involved. I thought Akira was pretty cool when I saw it, but it wasn't ever the anime for me in the way it is for a lot of people.

Otomo's contribution to the anthology, Combustible, is a short about firefighters in ancient Japan. It's a weird love story thing with class resentment undertones, and it's very pretty. It ended up relying really heavily on that love story, though, and ultimately paying it off in a kind of boring way. At least I think that was how I felt about it.

I saw Short Peace while it was playing at the Japanese Film Festival of San Francisco, where I also saw Crows : Explode and Why Don't You Play In Hell? The festival is tied to the J-Pop Summit, which I found out about last year when Anne Boyer was visiting and mentioned it. I ended up going last year because there was a Hello Kitty Kawaii Town booth and I thought that would be a funny thing to go to. When it came around this year I found out about the festival and got excited. Since the 2013 summit, every Sanrio store in San Francisco has closed. At Hello Kitty Con, the chairman of Sanrio Inc and Sanrio GmbH, the US & European subsidiaries of Sanrio, was asked about those closures; his response was basically that the company was trying to get a foothold in Wal-Mart and Target stores and that closing their own stores was somehow tied up in this.

Interestingly, the con happened about five months after Sanrio's stock had taken a quick dive based on wonky information from a Goldman Sachs analyst. The analyst claimed that Sanrio's IR presentation suggested the company was moving away from licensing and toward making their store operation central to their business. Despite being obviously bogus, investors jumped ship. Not for very long, of course, but I imagine that experience is now taken into account at any point that the question of operating a store is brought up.

Shuhei Morita's Possessions is a film about hostile objects. A traveler takes refuge from a storm in a hut where the things revolt against his presence. The space itself reorganizes to confound him. I really hated the animation though. The same could probably be said of Hiroaki Ando's Gambo, but that did have a pretty cool fight between like a polar bear and a demon, I think. In terms of how all four pieces functioned as complete short films, Gambo was probably the best. It's all kinda gross-looking CGI though so I dunno.

The final movie in the anthology, which I think was translated as A Farewell to Weapons, for some reason sidestepping the Hemingway reference?, was a bit stickier. Not that I particularly loved it, but I remember walking out thinking that if I gave much of a shit about the whole drone thing as a locus of the political that I might be a lot more interested in it. Which isn't to say that I don't think the conversation about drones isn't an important one; just that I have trouble staying interested when that seems to be the primary lens through which folks talk about the state of politics or the world or whatever. Kind of like how I get it when people talk about videogames as this magical site of new practices or whatever. Even when I am convinced by their point and glad they found a way to make it, there's a weird triumphalism to the whole thing that just puts me off.

I guess it's also kind of funny that Weapons' director worked on a number of the Gundam series, and that he had a hand in designing the mechs for the most obtuse fighting game I've ever played, Virtual On. Getting it on Dreamcast like six years late without knowing anything about it certainly didn't help but goddamn if it wasn't a game that militated against your engaging with it. Really I should be waiting to post about this movie until I another thing I'm working on goes out (if it does), since that's all about Suda51 and mechs, but this whole project this year has been such a goddamn mess and I saw so few movies and cared about such a small fraction of them it's kind of hard to get it together to do that.

Weapons is about a team in a desert/city environment being sent in to disable or destroy some sort of rogue automatic tank thing. It's also CGI I think? but it looks better. Drone stuff maybe. I dunno. The whole anthology was kind of a let down.

2014 in Shit: The Tale of Princess Kaguya

The Tale of Princess Kaguya was my favorite movie this year. So now that that's out of the way.

You probably heard about Princess Kaguya because it was originally slated to be released as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki's The Wind Rises, the first time since the two directors released My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Fireflies together that this would have been done. Production issues happened, or something like that, and Princess Kaguya got pushed back. Both did end up coming out (in the USA at least) this year, though on either side of it. I had long forgotten that Takahata's film was still slated to be released, and only happened to run across it as a trailer for Birdman. Even then, the film looked interesting if not amazing; the clearly ukiyo-e inspired art style was something I wasn't sure would work on the scale of a feature length film (though I very much wanted it to) and the very light premise (as described in the trailer) made it seem that much less likely. And while I'm still within the realm of the confessional, I might as well say it; I'm not the biggest fan of Grave of the Fireflies in the world. It's a gorgeous movie with a strong narrative, but it never grabbed me in the way it did so many others I know. It is also the only other Takahata film I have seen; Pom Poko and My Neighbor the Yamadas never crossed my path.

That all said, Princess Kaguya did for me what I suspect Fireflies did for many others. The story was, in fact, spare, and the art style took some acclimating to -- if only to properly read the flow of action, which is a language that Ghibli's usual style doesn't get enough credit for its fluency in (see: Totoro's Catbus for the perfect example) -- but it also happily accounted for this. There isn't much that happens in Princess Kaguya, but the opening sequences are especially slow; a bamboo cutter finds a tiny princess in a stalk, and brings her home, where she turns into a baby. The peasant couple raises the rapidly-growing, heavenly baby as their own, while taking the hint that she is divinely ordained to become a noble in her time on Earth.

As the movie goes on, the couple succeeds at introducing her into high society, and do so well that she ends up with multiple high society suitors. She retains her working class roots, and isn't super pleased about any of this, though she also reacts like a human being; sometimes her only recourse is to do exactly what is expected of her, other times she forgets her principled opposition to the situation and enjoys herself, and she even, occasionally, gets so overwhelmed she just outright bails on the whole deal. She is, just generally, a really great character.

That isn't exactly the sort of thing that sells me on a movie, though. Luckily, Princess Kaguya knows that having really great characters is just a means to the end of doing cool weird formal shit. Or at least that's how I watch things.

Before getting into the heavier stuff, I would like to say that Princess Kaguya's greatest strength is something that I really don't know how to talk about. I would call it pacing, but that is a little too caught up in the language of narrative to be entirely useful. The other way to frame it would be to say that Princess Kaguya has an incredible pedagogical strategy, to which every aspect of the film -- from cinematography to character development to animation -- is yoked without being subservient. So maybe I do know how to say it, but of particular importance is the way in which it unfolds over time. That is a thing for which I have little language, because I never really thought I would need it. Princess Kaguya makes me wish I had more.

The best I can do in terms of talking about the pacing is to point to two specific moments in the film, both of which involve exceptional use of animation.

The first moment comes when Kaguya abandons the pillowed chamber in which she has spent three days as she is being inducted into the nobility. Outside is a party, where people celebrate her being accepted, that she herself cannot attend. Once she is finally fed up, she tears through the silks separating her from the fray, and bolts. She runs from the chamber, out of the house, out of the city, through the fields along the dirt road that brought her to her new life. Eventually she slows, stumbles, but keeps going.*

The animation of Kaguya running is, first and foremost, stunning. It is very much the kind of thing that could be picked out and worked through on its own merits, whether as an argument for the development of a unique artistic style that can respond to the needs of the story or for the simple lesson of how to draw someone running. Placed within its context, however -- from a standpoint of what I'll just decide now to call pacing, even if I mean something closer to pedagogy -- it is even more powerful.

The fact that the movie taught me how to read its non-traditional animation style is important. The referent I had, as I mentioned above, was the ukiyo-e, or woodblock paintings, based on the beginning of the film and its trailer, so more than anything else Princess Kaguya had to teach me how to watch it move. As mentioned above, it does this beautifully, letting the early scenes linger, giving the viewer ample time to learn to see the hinges and then to see past them well enough to forget they are there. This is all craft stemming from creative decisions; or at least it feels that way. Until the running scene.

Replaced in its context, a scene that could have been remarkable for its stunning visuals becomes at once a joyous realization and a cause for reflection. At some point during the sequence, it strikes you that what Princess Kaguya has taught you up to this point isn't the sum of the potentials of its art style, but only what it wanted you to know. But also that it has given you the tools to appreciate what would regardless be a beautiful sequence in a wholly new way. For lack of better terms, Princess Kaguya has paced itself in such a way as to transform what could very well have been a purely aesthetic, if character-grounded, sequence into something that is truly, expressively climactic. Which isn't to say that it is the peak of anything narratively, but instead that it opens a whole new capacity, in just a few short minutes, to appreciate the style of movement -- which is another way of saying animation as such -- that the movie has developed over the course of something like an hour prior to this. It's fucking unbelievable.

Lingering on this moment for just a bit, before moving on to the next; toward the end of the film, there is a similar sequence, in which Kaguya flies around with the country boy with whom she fell in love from her home town after something like a decade and change apart. It is her joyous farewell, to be followed by her mournful one, and it, too, is striking and beautiful. It lacks that epiphanic quality, though -- or did, at least, for me -- that the running sequence had. It is gorgeous in many other ways, not least among them for letting the characters breathe in a way that is both believable and exquisite, but it is also an acknowledgment that the movie has taught us all it has to teach, as viewers, and that all that is left is to provide some closure on the lives that it has portrayed. In this way, if in no other, the flight sequence reminds me more of Grave of the Fireflies than anything else about Princess Kaguya, and I will say again that if that movie is important to you in a way that it isn't to me, then Princess Kaguya is still incredibly worth watching.

The second moment involves Kaguya being fitted for a dress. Or something like that; I can't very well remember the exact scene, or where it fell in the movie. So we'll just assume "fitting sequence" is a fine shorthand, and get on with it, if that sounds okay with everyone (if it doesn't please close the tab and go watch the movie).

The fitting sequence is much more wrapped up in the use of form to communicate things like social consequences and character traits and affect projections than the running sequence was, but it shares with it above all else an epiphanic joy in the possibilities of the art style.

The particular use of animation in the fitting sequence is something I would probably call inversion, even though there is likely a technical term for it. I say this because I don't think that it is some technical innovation, but it is a technique put to good use. And because I frankly don't know shit about how animation works. What this sequence inverts is the general technique used to differentiate the background from the foreground, or to accentuate activity in a form which generally has a very low frame rate as compared to other types of animation. This is done by retracing a background (and, importantly, secondary characters in the scene) more or less as is, in order to draw the eye to the active character despite their low rate of actual change.** One way to think about this might be in terms of the much-mocked sequences in Dragonball Z where, say, Goku is charging a Spirit Bomb. Because the activity of the foregrounded character is reduced, the relative stasis of the whole thing is exemplified.

In the fitting sequence, however, the terms aren't brought closer together, but are swapped; here, the heroine, who takes up (with the inclusion of her dress) a sizeable portion of the frame is retraced with almost no alterations, while the ancillary characters -- those working on the dress, fitting it or whatever -- move busily. It isn't immediately obvious that this is what is happening (or at least it wasn't to me), so there is a slight transformation of how you view the scene over the course of it; Kaguya's stillness goes from ordinary to uncanny in whatever split second you happen to notice that it is movement altogether that has abandoned her.

Among the things that can be extrapolated from this sequence: at the level of character, it shows how disaffected Kaguya once again is with the whole process of abandoning her working class upbringing for the trappings of nobility. While this theme is pushed throughout the film, specifically in Kaguya's arguments with the tutor her parents have hired, this simple act of retracing rather than minimally animating her is a poignant reminder. It helps, too, that her initial reaction to the dresses she will get to wear is so jubilant; once Kaguya's family has relocated the first thing that takes her out of the funk leaving her friends induced was the wardrobe she was presented with. This is shown, of course, through movement; she sprints around and through the dresses, feeling their fabric kinetically. Now that it is no longer a potential, however, she freezes.

This lends itself to the more sociological reading of the consequences of this move: Princess Kaguya, like Grave of the Fireflies, holds its politics more in its premise than in any individual moment, but the freezing of Kaguya here has obvious implications. This isn't an aimless petulance, or even a disaffection based on a lack of knowledge about the world as it is; Kaguya's freezing up (again, very literally in terms of the animation) in the process of being made proper in the terms of the nobility of the time says as much, if not more, than her various vocal refusals (or subversive embraces) of the feminine norms of the period. This is in part because of that dichotomy; Kaguya is established as presenting her resistance in one of two modes, both of which are characterized by enthusiasm. Either she refuses to blacken her teeth because she likes to smile with her mouth open, or she blackens her teeth in the middle of a long sequence of her abiding by the rules so strictly as to read as mocking them. Here, though, her reaction is not expressed through her actions or reactions as they are established by (and establish) her character, but through the very terms on which she exists in the world. If character, as a category, is a way of providing an epistemological frame through which to view the persistence of certain aspects of a narrative through time, then this sequence is nothing less than the claim that that frame bleeds into the ontological.

Another way of saying this is to replace epistemology with content and ontology with form, I suppose. But those terms lack the sense that what is known, and how it is known, is being confronted with what is, and how it is. Because Kaguya is very much just a drawing, but we know her through the way that drawing can be manipulated through time to represent actions which are characterized by consistency and difference. And the point of this knowing is to obscure that being, so that we are not simply sitting in a darkened room watching lines transform in pure abstractions. But with the fitting sequence, that being is represented directly, after the knowing has been well established, both as a reminder that it is real and as a way of enhancing the depth of that knowing. It is frankly fucking incredible.

At a broader level, and in vaguer terms, Princess Kaguya is a movie that works. I worry, here, that my disinclination to talk about things like character or narrative on textual terms might be misinterpreted as a tacitly claiming that they aren't up to snuff, that the only pleasure to be gained from this movie is in seeing it with a particular set of eyes on. And, to be honest, that is often true of how I write about films, because it is how I most enjoy them and how I most enjoy to write about them. But for Princess Kaguya I think it's worth stating that it is maybe the most human, and affecting, film, whether from start to finish or in almost any particular moment, I have seen in a very long time.




*[Trigger Warning] There are certain things about this scene which lend themselves to a reading that seem to lend themselves to reading it as an episode of disassociation during or following a sexual assault or rape; immediately prior the movie shows a drunken reveler demanding to see her, and it is closed by Kaguya waking up with a piece of broken pottery next to her. This is used to signal that the "dream" wasn't entirely, at least, unreal. I really don't have anything to say about that other than it seems fair to warn people and that it is one of the decisions the movie made that I'm less than enthusiastic about.

**From what I understand, Princess Kaguya is actually a digitally animated film, and so the actual technique used is not the same. Its digital animation is, however, meant very clearly to evoke brushes, and to mimic the form of anime. So take the crafty shit as metaphorical.