Friday, November 2, 2007

Red Garden: And I thought I felt sick


Red Garden is one of those anime that is deucedly hard to categorize. I suppose it's mostly horror, though of a peculiarly Japanese sort. Four girls from an exclusive high school on Roosevelt Island in New York City find themselves entangled in a bizarre and frightening situation. At night, they hunt semi-human monsters, while during the day they try to lead normal lives. The basic plot device has been rattling around in anime at least since Devil Hunter Yohko in 1990, and is perhaps most familiar to Americans in the guise of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.

In at least in the first four episodes, Red Garden forgoes the comic relief of its predecessors. The lives of the girls are shattered; they walk through their day in a distracted haze of anger, denial, and regret. One episode focuses on the excruciating tension of waiting for a midnight call to go out and kill. The camera follows each girl separately, one staring at the clock, another shaking uncontrollably. One akwardly excuses herself from the family table at a restaurant and hurries to the ladies' room to throw up. In a strange and brilliant touch, they all begin to sing the same dark, melancholy song of hopeless resignation and despair as the final minutes tick away. It's an odd, touching scene quite unlike anything I've ever seen.

In the end, the real interest of Red Garden isn't the monsters, or the murderous villains, or the conspiratorial organization that manipulates them to fight. It's the girls themselves, how they react, what they feel, how they are with each other. Japanese horror can be plenty gruesome and scary, but the focus is ever on the psychological trauma that whole human beings suffer when they confront the unwholesome. This is a very promising series.




Thursday, November 1, 2007

Luminous Manga

While recovering from a nasty cold that derailed my plans for a 3 day weekend (hence, no posts of late), Liz sent a Care package of anime and manga. Goodies included the Gall Force OVAs, the first Air DVD, the next DVDs of Full Metal Alchemist, and some other manga. In my groggy state I managed to read Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, and see the first three episodes of Red Garden.

Town of Evening Calm is a pair of sweet, painful stories of people affected, directly and indirectly, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Brief, but incredibly poignant, the stories are jewels of emotion and compassion. Unlike the more famous Barefoot Gen, the one volume work by Fumiyo Kono takes place years after the blast. But the effects, physical and psychological, linger on.

At heart, the Japanese aesthetic is poetic, in the sense that a work of art is often crystallized into a spare, deceptively simple frame of astonishing power and meaning. The art work here is clean and pure of line, yet captures the details of life with astonishing clarity. The dialogue seems almost mundane, yet sparkles with life and depth. So much compressed into two little stories! It would take a novel hundreds of pages to clumsily do as much.
An amazing, beautiful manga that you should read. Kudos to Last Gasp Press for bringing this award winner to America. http://www.lastgasp.com/