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December 30, 2004
Other Innocence Mentions
Just a bit of an addendum here -- Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence also made a couple of indieWIRE contributors' top 10 lists. (The film makes an appearance on Erica Abeel's unranked list and is an honorable mention on Jonny Leahan's list.) Sadly, the film is nowhere to be seen in indieWIRE's foreign-language film wrap-up.
Posted by brianruh at 09:39 AM | Comments (1)
December 29, 2004
More End of the (Year) Innocence
Following up on my previous post on anime making end-of-the-year film critics' lists, Oshii's Innocence has also made the top 10 list of the Village Voice's J. Hoberman. According to Hoberman, "A work of graphic splendor, fluid action, surrealist attitudes, and self-aware cyber-philosophizing, Innocence is the best anime I've ever seen."
Posted by brianruh at 05:09 PM | Comments (0)
December 28, 2004
Manga in the NYT
The New York Times today published an article on the popularity of manga in the US titled "Girl Power Fuels Manga Boom in U.S." It's a fairly solid article, although it doesn't contain any new information. The title is fairly deceptive too, as it's more of a piece about manga in general than about the popularity of manga among female readers. The article mentions that manga's accessibility to a wider readership is one of the elements that's helping manga's sales, although it doesn't have any definite facts or figures to back up the assertion. I've seen a number of articles and news stories that mention how manga appeals to women, but like the Times piece they all seem to rely on anecdotal evidence.
Posted by brianruh at 07:15 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2004
Links and Cleanup
I've cleaned up some of my links on the right there. Mostly I've added new links under the "Friends and/or Regular Reading" heading, but I took down the one to Chanpon.org (I'm not sure if the website is being updated any more).
The first new link is to my wife's webpage. It's not really a blog, but it has some good pictures of her pregnant belly as of a month ago, as well as the ultrasound of our forthcoming firstborn at 19 weeks. Other links are to blogs I read regularly and/or people I know (hence the links appearing under tha "Friends and/or Regular Reading" rubric).
Right now I'm listening to the Beastie Boys / Beatles mashup posted on BoingBoing a little while ago. Earlier this evening I was listening to The Rough Guide to the Music of Okinawa CD.
Posted by brianruh at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)
December 25, 2004
Christmas Present to Anime Fans by the NYT
More evidence that anime is getting (gasp!) somewhat respectible -- Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is on Manohla Dargis's year-end top ten list and Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers is on A.O. Scott's list.
Posted by brianruh at 02:32 PM | Comments (0)
December 18, 2004
Revenge of the Italicized V
I've just been wrapping up this semester. I finished my papers on Monday and spent most of last week grading papers -- and now that it's the weekend I'm going to be grading final exams.
Yesterday I read the first review of my book, Stray Dog of Anime, that actually appeared in print. The review ran in the December 2004 issue of Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, a publication of the American Library Association. Overall it was very positive, calling the book "lucid [and] well-researched" and "an engaging treatment." In the end, the review says that the book is recommended for "[a]ll collections supporting film studies or contemporary Japanese culture." This is the kind of review I like to read!
One of the few downsides to the review revisits something I had thought was behind me; it mentions that "a typesetting glitch results in the glaring omission of about 50 occurrences of the lower-case italicized 'v.'" I've explained this story to many people, but I don't think I ever did so here on my blog. When I got my first copies of the book earlier this summer I was esctatic until I saw that none of the italicized 'v's had printed. I called my editor at Palgrave really quickly and we determined that the printer had messed up somehow. (I'm still trying to figure that one out.) Since it was the printer's fault, they recycled all of the copies that had been printed so far and re-printed the entire run complete with italicized 'v's. I had thought that the only messed-up copies still out there were the ones in my posession.
I had thought that this issue was over, but judging from this review, I guess some of the publicity copies contained the error as well. Sigh.
Posted by brianruh at 08:21 AM | Comments (0)
December 10, 2004
Jean Snow's anime column
As menioned on his blog, Jean Snow's newest anime column is now up. And you can ignore the comments I made on his blog. Sometimes I just can't read.
Posted by brianruh at 07:14 AM | Comments (0)
Nevada (not the state)
I was just reading Warren Ellis's blog entry that linked to this website about suspected killer Nevada. As you may remember (if you keep up with the headlines in Japan), in June of this year an 11-year-old Japanese student killed one of her classmates with a box cutter. In a school photo from earlier in the year, the two girls were pictured next to each other, with the accused killer wearing a sweatshirt that said "Nevada" on it. So the girl has been commonly referred to as Nevada, and it seems like a whole subculture has grown up around her.
I'm not really sure what to make of this. Looking around some websites, I found some really interesting art (much of it highly disturbing) based on the character of Nevada and her crime. Unlike a lot of amateur art that takes a popular TV show or a film as its creative basis, this art is based on a real person and very real, very unfortunate events.
Some less graphic examples of this Nevada art are: hand puppets, Neon Genesis Evangelion parody, Cutie Honey parody (complete with re-worked song lyrics), South Park parody, PlayStation game, a doll, and what appears to be live cosplay of Nevada.
Are the artists glorifying Nevada or are they using their art to critique the media depiction of her crime? I don't know. In the best possible way, I'd like to think that the art is working through some of the issues of this national trauma.
Posted by brianruh at 12:18 AM | Comments (3)
December 08, 2004
Wisconsin State Journal anime article
Articles on the popularity of anime are a dime a dozen these days. Yes, Japanese animation is increasingly in the public eye. Most of these articles try to take a local approach, relating the phenomenon to something going on around the author's city. Today's article in the Wisconsin State Journal is no exception. So why am I linking to it? Well, it's the first news article on anime that's used me as an source.
The article calls me "an anime expert," but it also says that I'm the author of "Stray Dogs of Anime." (It's only a singular dog in my book title. She also spells "Robotech" as "RoboTech." I know, minor details.)
One of the more interesting quotes from me: "I think there's definitely something special about the fan culture," he [that is, me] said. "Anime fan conventions have been showing increasing attendance figures. There were over 20,000 people at the two biggest cons. It's definitely more than a handful of obsessed people now. It's really becoming a social movement." Did I really use the phrase "social movement"? I guess I may have. Perhaps that wasn't the best choice of wording -- to me, a "social movement" works for the betterment of society, which is not how I would necessarily describe anime fandom. I apologize in advance if my inexact phrasing confuses anyone.
Posted by brianruh at 07:24 AM | Comments (1)
December 06, 2004
New Twist to The Matrix
I just read this story about a woman who reportedly was responsible for the original ideas behind the Matrix and Terminator franchises. (I originally got to the story from a post on BoingBoing.) It's very interesting that not much has been made about this story -- it appears to have run in the newspaper of Salt Lake Community College in late October -- as it involves two of the biggest SF film franchises around.
This story throws an interesting twist on the whole "the Wachowski brothers ripped off / were heavily influenced by Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell to make The Matrix" argument. According to the news report, the script on which The Matrix was based, called "The Third Eye," was copyrighted in 1981, fourteen years before Oshii's film. I mean, I'm sure Oshii never saw the script for "The Third Eye," but it would be interesting to read it to see the similarities among it, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix.
Posted by brianruh at 09:57 AM | Comments (0)
Anime in Urban Space
Check out the December 2 entry up at Natsume Maya. It presents a pic of one of the train signs at Akihabara station as an ad for the Genshiken manga. (I've been keeping up with the Genshiken anime -- you know, it's for research -- but I have yet to read the manga.)
The sign is an interesting example of how anime/manga can spill over into "regular" space in Japan. Of course, this is happening in Akihabara, ground zero for all the geeks in Tokyo. I don't know what kind of arrangements the station has with anime production companies, but this isn't the first time I've seen anime invade Akihabara station. When I was in Tokyo in March 2003 I saw the floor of one of the entrances plastered with a giant ad for the new Neon Genesis Evangelion DVDs that were coming out, and I've seen pics of a giant Comic Party ad at what looks like that same entrance.
Posted by brianruh at 08:42 AM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2004
Meta-book
Ask my wife -- I am obsessive about checking on the status of my book. By that, I mean doing things like looking at its sales rank on Amazon (which seems to fluctuate with wild abandon) and seeing what other people have to say about it (which, so far, hasn't been that much.)
But today I did stumble across a couple of things online about the book. In an entry dating back to August 12th in The Progressive Animation Review, neilworms talks about the book in the context of the entry on Oshii in Senses of Cinema, which he says "lacks the fan-tainted rhetoric" of my book. Not that the book is wholly bad in his eyes: "[I]t is a meticulously researched book that is rough only around the edges and as a whole is a solid analysis of Oshii and his films. The fan oriented rhetoric that Brian refers is using the word depth maybe a bit too much without directly qualifying what depth means and a few other ones I can’t think off the top of my head right now…" Well, I guess it does come across in the book that I am a fan of Oshii's films, and this might even make me blind at times to some of their flaws. I'd need to see some specifics on the "depth" thing, though.
A recent review I found on Mangalocity was more laudatory. It calls the book "an excellent work" and says that "The only major flaw I see in the book is the absence of the man himself, Mamoru Oshii. However this isn't Ruh's fault. He did take a flight to Japan to interview Oshii, only to find that he was ill and unable to participate in the interview." This is why I put that bit in there at the beginning about flying to Tokyo to interview Oshii, only to be thwarted by timing and illness -- I knew that I'd be criticized for not talking with the man himself.
I'm hoping that more reviews appear within the next few months -- my publisher should have sent the book out to a bunch of places, so I'll just have to keep my fingers crossed.
Posted by brianruh at 03:21 PM | Comments (1)
December 01, 2004
Beat Crusaders
No updates last week -- Sarah and I were traveling around the state, making the big circuit from Bloomington, to West Lafayette, to Muncie, and back. (And no, we weren't trying to hit all of the Scotty's Brewhouse locations.) I've have a lot of work this week, getting ready for two in-class presentations. But things should be better after this afternoon.
So I've been listening to some tracks by the Beat Crusaders recently. They're a Japanese band (of course) that plays some punky power-pop with great crunchy guitars and very synth-y keyboards. I've been listening to the "Hit in the USA" single, which is how I recently encountered the band -- the song is the opening theme to the Beck anime. (Which has nothing to do with the multitalented former folksinger Beck.) The songs the track is backed with are pretty good too -- I can envision some midwestern punk band I would have seen at a small practice space in the 90s playing a song like "Supercollider" (minus the slick production and keyboards) and "B.A.D." has synths that sound like they're straight out of Van Halen's "Jump." I'll certainly have to track down more of the Beat Crusaders's stuff.
Posted by brianruh at 10:17 AM | Comments (1)